The backpacking cricket addict and a cricket widow

Leaving behind a cushy life to go on a whirlwind world cricket tour has so far been a journey of self-discovery and learning. And we are only halfway through

Subash Jayaraman in Cricinfo

October 11, 2014

 

With wife Kathleen and Colin Croft in Trinidad © Subash Jayaraman

It has been nearly three months since my wife Kathleen and I boarded a flight out of Newark International Airport in New Jersey headed for Port-of-Spain, Trinidad & Tobago - the first leg of a cricket journey around the world that is to culminate at the final of the 2015 World Cup in Melbourne, Australia. The objective: 255 days on the road through 12 countries, following as much cricket as we can.

This was a dream trip many years in the making for me as a cricket fan. As such, the decision to leave our cushy lives of comfort and guaranteed salaries to explore the cricket world and come back to start anew wasn't that hard to make. After all, it is cricket we are talking about.

Though I swear by cricket, I actually didn't step inside a cricket stadium to watch an international match until 2007. Growing up in India, cricket was always around me, but I never had the means to actually be at a match. I watched it on TV, read about it in newspapers and magazines, played it in the streets, backyards and terraces, on patches of land and in riverbeds, in hostel corridors and in living rooms, but the fan in me wasn't complete till I watched it in the flesh in Antigua during the 2007 World Cup. And then, I caught the bug.

Since then, I have travelled to Jamaica, Trinidad, England, Bangladesh, India and Australia to watch cricket - sometimes as a fan and other times as a media person. As Kathleen and I took more and more one- and two-week long cricket trips, the idea of a long one around the world began to germinate. We took inspiration from an Australian couple who were backpacking through North America for six months while taking in cricket in the Caribbean.

	Fans went out of their way to help us find accommodation, buy us a few pints, help us with travel and food

As soon as we returned to our home in USA after watching a Test in Trinidad in 2012, we looked up the Future Tours Programme and decided that the 2015 World Cup in Australia and New Zealand was an obvious final destination of our trip. We worked backwards to come up with an itinerary that took us through almost every Test-playing nation, and set off on July 15, 2014. Since we derived our inspiration in Trinidad, it was logical to begin our trip there.

We have met former and current Test cricketers, legends, commentators, famous writers and journalists, who have all enriched the trip in more ways than we could have imagined. More than that, it has been the fans - some friends and some strangers - who went out of their way to help us find accommodation, buy us a few pints, help us with travel and food - who have made this trip possible and thoroughly memorable.

We had the privilege of speaking to Colin Croft about his career and the great West Indian side he was part of, while sitting in the stands of the Queen's Park Oval, the venue of his best bowling figures. We have been within touching of Sir Garfield Sobers at the Kensington Oval. We paid our respects at the final resting places of Sir Frank Worrell and Sir Clyde Walcott. We had the joy of bowling in the Wanderers Cricket Club nets, the oldest club in Barbados. We were given a guided tour of a cricket museum by Malcolm Marshall's son. We sat among the who's who of Indian and English cricket journalists covering the Tests in England. We shared a lunch table with Kapil Dev and Wasim Akram. We rode tubes and elevators with some of the best known voices in the game. We were interviewed on the BBC. We had a feature written about us in an Indian newspaper. We ate dinner in a castle in Ireland that was formerly the summer home of Ranjitsinhji during his last years. We walked into the home of one of the great names in Indian cricket and spent hours talking cricket. We got a private tour of the only cricket museum in India. Many of these instances are each worthy of a piece of its own, and I shall revisit some of them in these pages at a later time.

	Bowling at the Wanderers Cricket Club nets in Barbados © Subash Jayaraman  Enlarge

Many people have asked us: Why make this trip at all? What are our plans once the trip is over? What is it all for?

Well, it is part fun, part self-discovery, and part experimentation. We were leading lives of comfort and security, where we seemed to be almost on autopilot. Putting our regular lives on hold for nine months to see whether we - a cricket addict and a "cricket widow" - could come out the other side is certainly one aspect of it. It is also an opportunity for Kathleen to explore the cricket world, its culture, customs and traditions to better understand the sport her husband is so hopelessly addicted to.

We do not know just yet what we will do when the trip is over. We moved out of the apartment we lived in for years and gave away nearly all of our possessions. In effect, we have forced ourselves to start afresh. The future is wide open and filled with limitless possibilities.

We are currently winding down the (southern) Indian leg of the trip and are headed to the UAE to watch the Pakistan-Australia Tests. Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, India (the north), South Africa, Zimbabwe, Australia and New Zealand await. About 160 days of travel and cricket are still ahead of us, and based on our experiences so far, they promise to be one hell of a ride. Most of all, we look forward to meeting the people who are bound to keep making this trip unforgettable. As we have learned in our time on the road so far, the cricket world is full of friends; only, we haven't met them all yet.

Boycott on L'Affaire Pietersen

Geoffrey Boycott in The Telegraph

This has been a sorry week for English cricket, but the England and Wales Cricket Board started this farce with Kevin Pietersen so it should not try to take the moral high ground.

Kevin is a sinner but he has been sinned against by the ECB. There are rights and wrongs on both sides and whatever Pietersen’s faults, the ECB is not blameless.

For me, it reached its lowest point on Tuesday when a “strictly confidential” ECB document was leaked to the media. The points it contained were pathetic and it was a crass idea to put together such a report to try to trash Kevin. It stinks.

Whoever dreamt that up is not fit to lead English cricket. Kevin has been a fantastic batsman for England. He thrilled millions and helped win matches for the England team that enabled some people at the ECB to bask in reflected glory.

Yes Kevin was awkward, difficult, different and at times his own worst enemy. But his record and his performances do not deserve a character assassination. The ECB should be dignified about it all and not try to belittle him.  

I hope the ECB is investigating how one of its confidential documents reached the public domain. If it discovers someone within the ECB leaked it then they should get the sack. If nobody is sacked then we can only assume that the ECB was happy or even complicit with the document being leaked in order to denigrate Kevin.

Some of the points contained in this document are so trivial it beggars belief. He had rows with the captain and coach about the way the team were performing, that sort of thing has gone on forever. It is OK if it happens within the confines of the dressing room. You are supposed to have open discussion in the dressing room and get things off your chest. In fact, the way we played in Australia, I would have said some far worse things to my team-mates if I was still playing.

Another claim is he took some younger players out for a drink in Adelaide. Give me a break - drinking has always gone on and that should not be dignified with a reply. It was only last year after a drinking session we had England players peeing on the Oval pitch after an Ashes win and the ECB or Andy Flower did nothing about it. We had Andrew Flintoff full of drink and trying to ride a pedalo in the West Indies but it did not finish his career. We had Joe Root drinking in the early hours of the morning when he was attacked by David Warner during the Champions Trophy last year. On the field James Anderson uses personal abuse every Test and nothing has been done about it.

The report also claims Kevin looked at his watch and out the window during team meetings. He was probably bored to death. I am sorry but the ECB is making itself look like a laughing stock.

The Yorkshire committee tried to do the same thing to me when they had an “in-depth investigation” into why we were not winning championships. They tried to blame me for everything. They even got a tea lady at Warwickshire to write a letter of complaint saying I had taken the crusts off my sandwiches which had upset her.

When they sacked me in 1983 the members were horrified and called a special meeting to sack the whole b----- committee. So I would say to the ECB, be careful how you try to manipulate events. Why? Because England cannot lay all the blame for the Ashes whitewash on KP. If everyone in the England team had bowled, batted, captained and managed better we would not have been rock bottom after the Ashes.

We were the worst I have ever seen in Australia. If the ECB, Andy Flower and Alastair Cook cannot see they too were to blame then they are sticking their heads up their a---. It is ridiculous to make one man the scapegoat.

I am not blindly sticking up for Kevin. But most very talented sportsmen are like diamonds. They sparkle and glitter and light up the game. They catch the eye and enchant the public. But all diamonds are flawed. They are not perfect and you have to learn to love and nurture a diamond. They have not done that with Kevin.

Look, I know three captains who would have handled him no problem at all: Michael Vaughan, Mike Brearley and Raymond Illingworth. They would have set boundaries early on in their relationship with Kevin. They would have accepted you have to give a bit of leeway to a rare talent. But they would never humiliate him in public. They would allow lots of dressing-room banter, which is good for team spirit. Taking the mickey out of each other encourages laughter in the work-place. But they would never allow someone to humiliate a team-mate outside the dressing room, which is what happened with this KP Twitter parody account.

While that was going on, there were strong rumours somebody in the dressing room was either involved in it or giving information to the author to embarrass Kevin.

We cannot prove that but I heard at the time it was going on. The ECB should have solved that immediately. If any player is involved in helping to publicly embarrass a team colleague, it is not acceptable. Flower should have dealt with that as coach, or the captain, Andrew Strauss. Any player involved should have been suspended because it was not funny. The problem was that Flower and Kevin did not get on, so Andy probably could not be bothered and Strauss was getting ready to quit as captain, so neither of them wanted the aggravation. Once again the ECB failed in its duty.

This is not a one-eyed support for Kevin from me but a defence of fair play. There is no excuse for some of his stupid shots when England were in trouble. He gave the impression, rightly or wrongly, that he could not care less. There was also no excuse for KP constantly agitating to play a full IPL season to earn his $2 million for eight weeks’ work. England compromised and allowed him half that but told him he had to be back for the first Test of the summer. England were right on that. He had been given an opportunity to play for England and he was contracted to the ECB on good money. Do not forget, his IPL deals only came about because he had been given the chance to showcase his talents by England.

Kevin wanted the penny and the bun. He did not want to give up anything. He could not see this was fair and there was constant bickering going on behind the scenes.

This chasm between Pietersen, Flower and the ECB widened over time. It started in 2008 when KP was captain and he recommended Peter Moores and Flower should be removed from coaching the team. Instead the ECB sacked him as captain over the telephone and eventually promoted Flower to be his boss. Yet again someone from the ECB leaked KP’s sacking to the media . As a result Hugh Morris could not tell him face to face but had to ring him up in South Africa and tell him he had lost his job. Hugh was afraid if he did not forewarn KP he would be met at the airport by a media scrum. Kevin was so upset and to save face resigned. It is hardly surprising the rot set in.

For years, the ECB picked KP in the team under sufferance because he could help win matches.

When he failed to do that during the last two Ashes series they simply decided they could not take any more and he had to go.

Even the ECB could not do that honourably. Both sides agreed not to make any comments until after Oct 1. KP kept his end of the bargain but the new MD, Paul Downton, in trying to justify its decision, broke it by publicly criticising KP. And a red-faced ECB had to apologise on his behalf. What a mess.

Cut benefits? Yes, let’s start with our £85bn corporate welfare handout

Billions of pounds of British public money has gone to business, with Disney getting £170m. They really are taking the Mickey

• 
• • Aditya Chakrabortty
  • The Guardian, Monday 6 October 2014 20.30 BST

‘Politicians and pundits talk about welfare as if it’s solely cash given to people. Hardly ever discussed is corporate welfare.’ Illustration: Daniel Pudles

Last week, as the Tory faithful cheered on George Osborne’s new cuts in benefits for the working-age poor, a little story appeared that blew a big hole in the welfare debate. Tucked away in the Guardian last Wednesday, an article revealed that the British government had since 2007 handed Disney almost £170m to make films here. Last year alone the Californian giant took £50m in tax credits. By way of comparison, in April the government will scrap a £347m crisis fund that provides emergency cash for families on the verge of homelessness or starvation.

Benefits are what we grudgingly hand the poor; the rich are awarded tax breaks. Cut through the euphemisms and the Treasury accounting, however, and you’re left with two forms of welfare. Except that the hundreds given to people sleeping on the street has been deemed unaffordable. Those millions for $150bn Disney, on the other hand, that’s apparently money well spent –whoever coined the phrase “taking the Mickey” must have worked for HM Revenue.

Politicians and pundits talk about welfare as if it’s solely cash given to people. Hardly ever discussed is corporate welfare: the grants and subsidies, the contracts and cut-price loans that government hands over to business. Yet some of our biggest companies and industries operate a business model that depends on them extracting money from the British taxpayer. The operators of our supposedly privatised train services are kept afloat by billions in public money. Or take the firm created by billionaire Jeff Bezos: last year it emerged that Amazon had paid less in corporation tax to the UK than it had received in government grants.

The bill for corporate welfare is huge – and largely hidden. We know a lot about the people who claim social welfare: we know how much each benefit costs the public, the government sets strict rules for eligibility – and we even have detailed estimates for how much cheating goes on. Between them, Whitehall, academia and NGOs have churned out enough surveys on social welfare claimants to fill a wing of the Bodleian library. But corporate welfare? The government has itself acknowledged: “There is no definitive source of data about spending on subsidies to businesses in the UK.” The numbers are scattered across government publications and there is not even any agreement on what counts as a corporate handout.

Instead, what you get on the issue is silence. A very congenial silence for the CBI and other business lobby groups, who can urge ministers to cut benefits for the poor harder and faster, knowing their members are still getting their bungs. An agreeable silence for Osborne and David Cameron, who still argue that the primary problem in Britain is that the public sector “crowds out” private enterprise, without ever acknowledging how much the public subsidises business. Most of all, a silence at the very centre of our democracy.

Kevin Farnsworth, a senior lecturer in social policy at the University of York, has spent the best part of a decade studying corporate welfare – delving through Whitehall spreadsheets and others, and poring over Companies House filings. He’s just produced what is, as far as I know, the first ever comprehensive audit of the British corporate welfare state.

The figures, to be published in a forthcoming report, are astonishing. Farnsworth takes the financial year 2011-12 and tots up the subsidies and grants paid directly to businesses. They amount to over £14bn – that is, almost three times the £5bn paid out that year in income-based jobseeker’s allowance.

Add to that the corporate tax benefits, the value of the cheap credit made available to banks and other business, the insurance schemes run by the government to protect exporters, the marketing for British business laid on by Vince Cable’s ministry, the public procurement from the private sector … Farnsworth calculates that direct corporate welfare costs British taxpayers just shy of £85bn a year.

This, he admits, is a conservative estimate. I would throw in the public subsidy provided to too-big-to-fail banks, or the £25bn taxpayers shelled out that year in tax credits, housing and council tax benefits to people in work but not paid enough by their employers to live on. Nevertheless, Farnsworth has achieved something extraordinary: he has yanked into the open an £85bn subsidy that big business and the government would rather you didn’t know about.

Thinking over this giant corporate bung, two responses immediately suggest themselves. First, it shows up the stupidity of all those newspaper spreads and BBC discussions constantly demanding “What would you cut?”, like some middlebrow ransom note (“Choose now: or the lollipop lady gets it”). It’s a question you’ll be hearing more and more in the run-up to the election. Perhaps next time, as well as mentioning schools, fire services and benefits, some brave Radio 4 presenter will mention the business coaching and marketing and advocacy services provided by the Department for Business (annual cost: nearly £5bn).

The other response you might make is that some business funding is inevitable, even desirable. Perhaps you consider keeping Kenneth Branagh employed in these islands to be a national priority – in which case, roll on those tax reliefs for Disney. I might argue that renewable energy deserves a subsidy. But voters are at least entitled to an informed debate. That is precisely what we’ve not been allowed, through the deliberate obscuring of these sums.

And if taxpayers are to fund corporations, why shouldn’t they demand that those businesses observe certain conditions of basic fairness? The publicly funded train operators should pay their staff living wages, provide decent pensions and sick pay. And all recipients of public money should be banned from using elaborate structures to avoid paying tax.

Our semi-secret system makes no such demands: of the 44 companies that received over £1m in government grants between 2005 and 2011, 13 didn’t pay any corporation tax at all; a further 17 didn’t pay any corporation tax either the year before or the year of receiving their public money. These aren’t two-bit firms, either: Farnsworth’s list includes Tesco Personal Finance, Dell and Plusnet.

And, of course, Amazon – which in 2011 alone took £7.7m from Holyrood for placing a distribution centre in Fife. The Welsh assembly promised it even more: £8.8m, as well as a £3m highway to connect its operations with other road networks. Just finished, it’s called the Ffordd Amazon road, for the avoidance of ambiguity about whose interests it’s meant to serve.

Farnsworth’s research should trigger a public debate about the size and uses of the corporate welfare state. Personally, I’ll believe we’re getting somewhere when Channel 4 puts on Corporate-Benefits Street – with White Dee replaced by Amazon founder and inveterate tax-dodger Jeff Bezos.

Our bullying corporations are the new enemy within

The demands of business dominate our politicians and embed inequality. It’s a full-blown assault on democracy

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 7 October 2014 20.13 BST

The chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

The more power you possess, the more insecure you feel. The paranoia of power drives people towards absolutism. But it doesn’t work. Far from curing them of the conviction that they are threatened and beleaguered, greater control breeds greater paranoia.

On Friday, the chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, claimed that business is under political attack on a scale it has not faced since the fall of the Berlin Wall. He was speaking at the Institute of Directors, where he was introduced with the claim that “we are in a generational struggle to defend the principles of the free market against people who want to undermine it or strip it away”. A few days before, while introducing Osborne at the Conservative party conference, Digby Jones, former head of the Confederation of British Industry, warned that companies are at risk of being killed by “regulation from ‘big government’” and of drowning “in the mire of anti-business mood music encouraged by vote-seekers”. Where is that government and who are these vote-seekers? They are a figment of his imagination.

Where, with the exception of the Greens and Plaid Cymru – who have four MPs between them – are the political parties calling for greater restraints on corporate power? When David Cameron boasts that he is “rolling out the red carpet” for multinational corporations, “cutting their red tape, cutting their taxes”, promising always to set “the most competitive corporate taxes in the G20: lower than Germany, lower than Japan, lower than the United States”, all Labour can say is “us too”.

Its shadow business secretary, Chuka Umunna, once a fierce campaigner against tax avoidance, accepted a donation by a company which delivers “tailored tax solutions to individuals and organisations internationally”. The shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, cannot open his lips without clamping them around the big business boot. There’s no better illustration of the cross-party corporate consensus than the platform the Tories gave to Jones to voice his paranoia. Jones was ennobled by Tony Blair and appointed as a minister in the Labour government. Now he rolls up at the Conservative conference to applaud Osborne as the man who “did what was right for our country. A personal pat on the back for that.” A pat on the head would have been more appropriate – you can see which way power flows.

The corporate consensus is enforced not only by the lack of political choice, but by an assault on democracy itself. Steered by business lobbyists, the EU and the US are negotiating a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. This would suppress the ability of governments to put public interest ahead of profit. It could expose Britain to cases like El Salvador’s, where an Australian company is suing the government before a closed tribunal of corporate lawyers for $300m (nearly half the country’s annual budget) in potential profits foregone. Why? Because El Salvador refused permission for a gold mine that would poison people’s drinking water.

Last month the Commons public accounts committee found that the British government has inserted a remarkable clause into contracts with the companies to whom it is handing the probation service (one of the maddest privatisations of all). If a future government seeks to cancel these contracts (Labour has said it will) it would have to pay the companies the money they would otherwise have made over the next 10 years. Yes, 10 years. The penalty would amount to between £300m and £400m.

Windfalls like this are everywhere: think of the billion pounds the government threw into the air when it sold Royal Mail, or the massive state subsidies quietly being channelled to the private train companies. When Cameron told the Conservative party conference “there’s no reward without effort; no wealth without work; no success without sacrifice”, he was talking cobblers. Thanks to his policies, shareholders and corporate executives become stupendously rich by sitting in the current with their mouths open.

Ours is a toll-booth economy, unchallenged by any major party, in which companies which have captured essential public services – water, energy, trains – charge extraordinary fees we have no choice but to pay. If there is a “generational struggle to defend the principles of the free market”, it’s a struggle against the corporations, which have replaced the market with a state-endorsed oligarchy.

It’s because of the power of corporations that the minimum wage remains so low, while executives cream off millions. It’s because of this power that most people in poverty are in work, and the state must pay billions to supplement their appalling wages. It’s because of this power that, in the midst of a crisis so severe that the world has lost over 50% of its vertebrate wildlife in just 40 years, the government is organising a bonfire of environmental protection. It’s because of this power that instead of innovative taxation (such as a financial transactions tax and land value taxation) we have permanent austerity for the poor. It’s because of this power that billions are still pumped into tax havens. It’s because of this power that Britain is becoming a tax haven in its own right.

And still they want more. Through a lobbying industry and a political funding system, successive governments have failed to reform, corporations select and buy and bully the political class to prevent effective challenge to their hegemony. Any politician brave enough to stand up to them is relentlessly hounded by the corporate media. Corporations are the enemy within.

So it’s depressing to see charities falling over themselves to assure Osborne that they are not, as he alleged last week, putting the counter view to the “business argument”.“We don’t recognise the divide he draws between the concerns of businesses and charities,” says Oxfam. People “should be celebrating not denigrating the relationship between business and charities”, says the National Council for Voluntary Organisations. These are good groups, doing good work. But if, in the face of a full-spectrum assault by corporate power on everything they exist to defend, they cannot stand up and name the problem, you have to wonder what they are for.

There’s a generational struggle taking place all right: a struggle over what remains of our democracy. It’s time we joined it.

Never mind eternal youth - adulthood is a subversive ideal

Empirical evidence confirms what honest introspection suggests: most people are happier after reaching middle age

• 
• • Susan Neiman
  • The Guardian, Sunday 5 October 2014 16.45 BST

‘There is reason to suspect those who tell the young to savour the best years of their lives.’ Photograph: Liv Friis-Larsen /Alamy

Where did we get the idea that youth is the best time of your life? Having failed to create societies that our young want to grow into, we idealise the stages of youth. Growing up has come to be viewed as a matter of renouncing your hopes and dreams, accepting the limits of the reality you’ve been given, and resigning yourself to a life that will be more boring and less significant than you supposed when you began it. Increasingly, grownups appear not merely sad but pathetic.

Consider the difference between JM Barrie’s Peter Pan and Steven Spielberg’s reworking for the movie Hook. Barrie’s grownups are dull but menacing, occasionally wistful; Spielberg’s grownups are ridiculous, not only ill-equipped for the adventures of Neverland but barely fit to live at all. Given the lack of compelling role models of adults in western media, it’s no wonder that Peter Pan is seen as a figure of rebellion, or that a great writer’s fondest wish for his newborn is that the child may stay for ever young.

Outside of fairy tales, no one remains a child for ever. For this reason the time of life most often idealised is the decade between 18 and 28, when young men’s muscles and young women’s skin are at their most blooming. Yet few people who are in or past that decade would choose to repeat it. For most of us, it’s a time of doubt and fear – that every decision is irrevocably fateful, that everyone else is more confident and capable, and above all that we aren’t sufficiently enjoying what we’re told is the best time of our lives.

Empirical evidence confirms what honest introspection knows: most people are happier after reaching middle age. Though there are variations in the global low point – the Swiss reach it at 35, while Ukrainians don’t hit rock bottom until 62 – all report becoming steadily happier after that. Researchers controlled all of the obvious factors, such as income, employment and family status, and found they didn’t matter: from the US to Zimbabwe, the evidence that life is not a downhill path is constant.

What explains the consensus on something so clearly false? An answer can be found where we might least expect it, in the work of Immanuel Kant. His famous essay What is Enlightenment? describes humankind’s exit from its self-imposed immaturity. Growing up isn’t bad, but isn’t easy. Laziness and fear lead us to acquiesce: it’s much easier to let others think for us.

Growing up, like enlightenment, is as much a matter of courage as of knowledge. Kant’s call to have the courage to use your own reason is well known, but few have heeded the warning that comes after it: no government has an interest in cultivating adults. It is far simpler to care for distracted consumers than to satisfy the demands of self-confident citizens.

So most of us spend our working lives making or marketing products developed to divert us. The things that capture our attention are never depicted as toys but as tools that are crucial for being adult. Bewildered by the choice when purchasing a smartphone, we easily forget how many decisions are out of our hands. Or did you choose to live in a world where oil companies can wreck the planet, governments spend more on weapons than on education, and children starve every minute for want of food others throw away?

Grownups take on questions that determine real lives, knowing they will never succeed entirely but refusing to succumb to dogma or despair. Both are surely tempting, and successfully resisting them is key to growing up. Not permanent youth but genuine adulthood is a subversive ideal.

There is reason to suspect those who tell the young to savour the best years of their lives. The tone is cheery, but the message is ominous: everything else will get worse. Thus young people are prepared to expect – and to demand – very little.

No conspiracy theories are necessary: we often collude in our own infantilisation, as we often join in with the curious derision that greets the news that an ageing rock star has reached a round-numbered birthday or opened a concert or gone on tour. Isn’t it time these people accepted their obsolescence and left the stage to others?

This sort of disdain and mockery is all the more puzzling since the recent concerts of Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Leonard Cohen were anything but laughable. Among others, these artists have shown how far and for how long human and creative development can continue, surviving flops and falls and excess and error – thus providing some models of growing up for which we can be grateful.

Cricket - Playing spin well is a state of mind

A batsman should look to dominate, and importantly, not fear the turning delivery

Ian Chappell

October 5, 2014

VVS Laxman was an artist at hitting the legspinner wide of mid-on, against the spin © AFP

I was bemused by Justin Langer's mystifying recent explanation of how Australian batsmen struggle with spin bowling on the subcontinent. "It's almost like Indians have chillies from a very early age, therefore if you eat chilli it doesn't really bother you," Langer said. "But if we eat chilli, it burns our mouth, which is the same while playing spin."

I acquired a taste for spicy food at 19 but learned to play spin bowling from about eight. I retain my enjoyment of spicy food to this day and those lessons I was taught as a youngster stood me in good stead as my career progressed, culminating in a few months at finishing school - a tour of India.

To me, it is at a young age that the real problem lies with modern Australian batsmen, and it is here that the roots of their disconnect with playing good spin bowling lie: the coaches overlook the correct footwork fundamentals.

The first things I was told about playing spin bowling were among the most important:

1) Don't worry about the wicketkeeper when you leave your crease, because if you do it means you are thinking about missing the ball.

2) You might as well be stumped by three yards rather than three inches.

To make a real difference to a spin bowler's length you have to advance a decent distance, whilst coming out of your crease only a little generally improves the delivery.

I remember asking Shane Warne after Australia's 2001 tour of India, where VVS Laxman tamed the legspinner: "How do you think you bowled?"

"I don't think I bowled that badly," was his response.

"You didn't," I assured him, "it's just that when Laxman advances three metres and hits you through mid-on and then the next delivery is a little higher and shorter and he's quickly on the back foot and pulls the ball, it's excellent footwork, not bad bowling."

	If you can walk and chew gum at the same time, then you can eat spicy food and also play spin bowling. The trick is to acquire a taste for the former and be taught the latter correctly at a young age

During that series, Laxman used his feet better than anyone I have seen to hit the ball against the spin through wide mid-on; it was exhilarating stuff.

However, you don't have to leave the crease to be successful at playing good spin bowling. Two of the best batsmen I've seen, Garfield Sobers and Graeme Pollock, both played mostly from the crease, but importantly their footwork was decisive and they weren't fooled in judging length.

Australian batsmen haven't always struggled against good spin bowling. Neil Harvey was acknowledged as a twinkle-toed batsman who was never out stumped in his Test career, and the dashing Doug Walters is the best player of offspin bowling I have seen. There were many others in that period who were extremely efficient when it came to playing good spin.

Playing spin bowling well is a state of mind. To succeed, a batsman has to be decisive, look to dominate, have a plan and not fear the turning delivery. Once I learned on the 1969 tour of India that because of the slower nature of the pitches you had a fraction more time than you first thought, and that when the ball turned a long way it provided opportunities for the batsman as well as the bowler, I never again worried about prodigious spin. I was often dismissed but I never again feared the turning ball; I looked upon it as a challenge to be enjoyed.

If you can walk and chew gum at the same time, then you can eat spicy food and also play spin bowling. The trick is to acquire a taste for the former and be taught the latter correctly at a young age.

What the British Raj can't be blamed for

Written by Khaled Ahmed in The Indian Express| Posted: October 4, 2014 12:00 am

On September 18, the Indo-British Heritage Trust held a discussion in London about “whether the Indian subcontinent benefited more than it lost from the experience of British colonisation”. Speakers who said the subcontinent lost were heavyweights like William Dalrymple and Shashi Tharoor, both of whom I have enjoyed listening to and whose books have given me great pleasure. From Pakistan, the speaker chosen on the other side was my colleague at Newsweek Pakistan, Nilofar Bakhtiar who, before leaving for London, agreed with me that we were better off under the British.

Is that surprising, after half a century of failing to fulfil the promises made twice to the people of India? Once when Muslims and Hindus were united in their struggle for freedom; and second when they fell apart, and Muslims promised to set up a utopian state where they would be “free to practise their religion”.

Under British Raj, we were not free, but we were also not slaves. The British were less brutal than the Belgians to their colonies in Africa. We claimed rightly that we had the right to be free, to decide our own destiny, to have the law we wanted and a government we were able to choose. Morally, we had the right to tell the Raj to go, to resist it and struggle against it. We’d had enough of serving the gora sahib and fighting his imperial wars.

We had a different vision of what kind of state we wanted. We wanted equality instead of inequality practised by exploiters, peace instead of the conflict of a developing bipolar world. After fighting the wars of the Raj, we thought of becoming neutral and nonaligned. We could achieve our visions only after becoming independent.

We have inequality today and we have fought many “just” wars to perpetuate it. And the index of unhappiness keeps on climbing.

By ousting the British we also wanted to purge ourselves of what we diagnosed as a “slave mentality”. We had had enough of local brown sahibs who spoke English and perpetuated the Raj of the mind. After Independence, we would revive our languages and learn to think “free” in them. But today, we are slaves to our narratives of exclusion.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have much to fall back on. The British had wrested India

from a dying ruling elite that didn’t even control it territorially. We had no political system we could emulate, except tyranny of one sort or another. Jawaharlal Nehru honestly thought the past was all rotten.

Keen to be born as a nation-state, we disagreed we were one nation. Under the British, India was united as one state. We should have become a nation, but we didn’t. One side suspected the Raj was dividing what was one nation; the other side thought we were not one nation in the first place.

Democracy, introduced by the British through limited franchise and devolved elections, was new to us and felt good. They forced us to respect democratic principles. We had a struggle ahead with the kind of society we were. To be truly democratic we had to remove the caste system, which the Raj couldn’t extirpate. We agreed to disapprove of it. But in 2014, certain communities in our region still feel left out.

The British enabled us to put the past behind us. But after 1947, becoming free, we revived the past we should have buried and got nothing out of it. Muslims thought faith had made them a nation but soon discovered that language divided more than religion united. Muslims rejected the biggest gift of the Raj: secular governance. The British taught us modern commerce, growing out of stock exchanges we had known nothing about. Bombay converted the mostly Gujarati merchant community into India’s wisest class — Hindu, Parsi, Ismaili, etc — who deserved to rule India and thought, rightly, that it was not yet time for independence. Nobody listened.

The Muslims of India got a raw deal. Religion didn’t bind in 1947; and Bangladesh was created in 1971. Further, rejecting the lessons of the Raj, they set up an Islamic state in Pakistan that immediately led to the reduction of the non-Muslims to second-class citizens. Pakistan as a revisionist state fought wars with India. The Muslims of India too became discriminated against. Today, India is ashamed of its Muslim-killing communal riots. South Asia has suffered ethnic cleansing to shame the Balkans.

If we are bad today, it doesn’t mean the British Raj was bad. The bad in us is a kind of return to being us. If India has communal riots, Pakistan is brutal to Hindus in Sindh, joined with Muslim Sindhis through language. Their daughters are kidnapped and forcibly married to Muslim boys after forced conversion, driving Hindu families into exile in India. In “secular” Bangladesh, Hindus should have fared better, but there too, their “bleeding” back into India is unending.

Under the British Raj, Muslims’ sectarianism was effectively suppressed. The Shia and the Sunni began to feel like one community under secular administration and it was no surprise that Pakistan was created by a Shia leader. Today, he would have been bumped off by a “target-killer” of Karachi. The late Papiya Ghosh — yes, there are such great “colonised” people in the subcontinent — in her classic Partition and the South Asian Diaspora: Extending the Subcontinent (2007) tells us how self-determination went wrong in India.

Biharis were the first workers in a peasant India, after iron ore was discovered in Bihar and the steel industry came up there together with the railways. After 1947, Bihari Muslims were most unfairly driven out of India into East Pakistan, but there the self-determining principle was language, not religion. So they were killed and pushed out again. We are still “self-determining” after 67 years, and most of it is just killing. Did the British teach us to kill to achieve self-determination? What Dalrymple does to the Brits through his books is tonic for them.

There were things done in India that should make them squeal with guilt. But “freedom” shouldn’t make us forget how we have fallen short after 1947. What happened to the good things we learned from the European Enlightenment the British carried with them?

I unabashedly admire Raja Rammohan Roy and Sir Syed Ahmad Khan because they borrowed from the Enlightenment and tried to pull us out of the abyss that still attracts us. In Pakistan, “Khan” is not the password to acceptance you thought he would be. Borrowing values made them “unoriginal” for us.

Tagore actually told the Brits what was really wrong with them. He didn’t want the disease of nationalism creeping into “free” India. But we had strong “single” identity ingredients that “excluded” the manifold “other”. Toxic textbooks distort history today to make us feel proud of unworthy things that would’ve made Tagore wince.

I don’t know about India but in Pakistan, all the infrastructure that serves us today is a Raj bequest — the roads, bridges, railroad and the world’s largest canal system — without which the state of Pakistan couldn’t have survived. After 67 years, all that is now quite rundown. Unkindly, the world calls us a “failing” state. Did the Raj cause us to fail?