Saeed Ajmal and the art of the pause

Why Pakistan's lead bowler is like an Argentinian football midfielder

SB Tang in Cricinfo

March 10, 2013

	Ajmal: master of the hook © Getty Images  Enlarge
Related Links Players/Officials: Saeed Ajmal Matches: South Africa v Pakistan at Cape Town Teams: Pakistan

In Argentina, they often speak of the importance of"the pause" both to their music and their football. On the football pitch, "the pause" is the moment when the designated playmaker, positioned between the lines of midfield and attack, places his foot on the ball, looks up, and pauses - in that moment, everything stops in the eye of the playmaker's mind. Out in the physical world, the expectant crowd holds their breath, waiting for the playmaker to pick out a pass.

In that instant, all futures are possible. The playmaker - one man in a team of 11 - chooses the pass to play, the path to take. He and he alone authors the team's collective fate. Like a Jedi Knight, a good playmaker must be capable of seeing things before they happen - the angled run the centre-forward is about to make behind his marking defender, the surge down the touchline that the full-back wants to make to create the overload, and perhaps even which of his own advancing attackers the opposition's spare defender intends to cover.

Thus, one man carries the weight of his team's destiny on his shoulders. That is why, in Argentinian football, the designated playmaker, the wearer of the No. 10 shirt, occupies such a special cultural place - he performs a duty that is almost sacred in its importance.

Watching Saeed Ajmal run through the world's best batting line-up in the second Test at Newlands last month, my mind turned to a different kind of pause - that in Ajmal's bowling action. Like most spinners, he approaches the crease at a smooth, comfortable canter, but unlike most spinners, just before he releases the ball, he pauses for a fraction of a second - like a claymation character in a Wallace & Gromit film - instead of driving his non-pivoting leg through the crease in one fluid motion, as the coaching manuals recommend.

However, there is a purpose behind this pause, a method to the seeming madness: the pause strips the batsman of one of his primary tools of attack and defence - his feet. Ordinarily a batsman using his feet to come down the pitch to a spinner will start his move just before or after the spinner releases the ball. By pausing just before the point of release, Ajmal makes it more likely that he will be able to see the batsman start to move before he releases the ball (thereby enabling him to change his delivery accordingly) and, more importantly, makes the batsman believe that Ajmal will be able to see him coming and adjust his delivery accordingly. This in turn causes the batsman to decide not to advance down the wicket at all, thereby removing a crucial weapon from his armoury.

In many ways phenomena like the pause are as characteristic of Pakistan's cricket culture as of Argentina's football culture. If Ajmal had suffered the misfortune of being English, there can be little doubt that the distinctive pause in his bowling action, not to mention his doosra, would have been coached out of him. As Maurice Holmes, the English mystery spinner unjustly hounded out of the English professional game at the age of 22, explained: "There will always be the English view, that something different is not necessarily something good. There are people who tend to take the traditional view that things can and should only be done in one way."

By contrast, in Australia and on the subcontinent, the finest cricketers are largely self-taught and allowed, if not encouraged, by their coaches to do what comes naturally to them, to trust their homespun techniques, to express their unique and abundant god-given talents. As Muttiah Muralitharan explained to the Cricketerrecently: "In Sri Lanka we find so many unique bowlers because we bowl naturally and are not over-coached." In Australia, Shane Warne had in Terry Jenner a coach and mentor who gave him the freedom to bowl naturally, even when that involved a substantial deviation from technical orthodoxy.

	Ajmal simultaneously functions as both strike bowler and workhorse, artist and blue-collar labourer

At this moment Ajmal is 35 years of age and at the very peak of his powers. At Newlands he produced match figures of 10 for 147. The number and identity of the wickets were impressive in themselves, the exquisite manner of their extraction even more so. During South Africa's successful final-innings chase, Jacques Kallis, arguably the finest allrounder in history, and Faf du Plessis, among the form batsmen in world cricket, were left pinioned to their crease, like the hapless, scripted victims of a WWE cage match, after being trapped plumb in front by flat, fast offbreaks. Indeed, such was the thrall in which Ajmal held the South African batsmen, we were treated to the sight of AB de Villiers doing a decent Mesut Özil impersonation, his eyes nearly popping out of his skull as he tried to decipher one of Ajmal's deliveries from the non-striker's end.

The comparison of the pause in Ajmal's bowling with the pause in Argentinian football is apposite in several respects, not least of which is the nomenclature: in Argentina, the designated playmaker is known as theenganche - literally, "the hook". How apt. For Ajmal, like all masters of the art of spin bowling, doesn't just reel in his hooked catch - no, he personally baits the hook, dangles it before his intended catch, induces the bite and then gleefully reels in his victim.

There is no better example of this than his dismissal of Hashim Amla in the second innings at Newlands. Amla was well set and cruising serenely on 54 not out, having helped steer South Africa to 146 for 3, within touching distance of their victory target of 182. Ajmal tossed one up, wide of off, nice and high above Amla's eyeline, giving him the false comfort of off-driving him for four - and the crowd the opportunity to derive aesthetic pleasure from the shot. Ajmal's next ball was just a tad higher and a fraction slower. Not even a batsman of Amla's class could resist such a delectable temptation. He unfurled his gorgeous, trademark, flourishing cover drive… and connected with nothing but air. The ball, a conventional offbreak dropping steeply, sailed through Amla's wide open gate and clipped the bails over middle and off. Amla, as good a batsman as there is right now, was left floundering and grasping for something just out of his reach, like a child straining on tiptoe to reach a jar of lollies stored on the high shelf in the kitchen.

Much like the enganche, in the moment of the pause, Ajmal carries the enormous weight of his team's fate, if not on his shoulders then certainly in his long, supple sculptor's fingers. Ajmal is not quite the sole wicket-taker in the way that the enganche is the sole creator, but there is no doubt that in the current Pakistan Test XI he is far and away the primary wicket-taker. Ajmal took took ten of the 16 South African wickets that fell in the Cape Town Test match. When Pakistan beat the world's then No. 1 Test team in the UAE in 2012, he took 24 of the 60 English wickets that fell. At Newlands, the only bowling support that Pakistan could muster for Ajmal came in the form of a 34-year-old "fast-medium" opening bowler who bowls slower than Australia's current wicketkeeper; a raw, no-ball prone, seven-foot-one-inch giant making his Test debut, and a solid one-day bowler whose Test bowling average, after nearly 50 Tests, remains stuck in the mid-30s.

Thus the comparison of Ajmal with the enganche is inapposite in one crucial respect. The enganche in the classic Argentinian 4-3-1-2 formation is neither a leader nor a hard labourer; rather, as Hugo Asch put it, he "is an artist", "a romantic hero, a poet, a misunderstood genius with the destiny of a myth" who "only works under shelter, with a court in his thrall and an environment that protects him from the evils of this world". Indeed, that is the very purpose of the 4-3-1-2 formation - to protect the enganche. The bank of three behind him performs the hard physical labour of tackling, running, chasing and harrying for him, so that he is free to create art. Leadership is provided not by the enganche, but by hard-running, hard-tackling holding midfielders, such as Javier Mascherano in Argentina's 2010 World Cup team, or robust defenders, such as Roberto Perfumo in Argentina's 1966 World Cup team.

Ajmal, by contrast, is the very definition of a leader and a hard labourer. There are no other world-class bowlers in the current Pakistan Test XI to carry his water for him. He simultaneously functions as both strike bowler and workhorse, artist and blue-collar labourer.

When he claimed his sixth South African first-innings wicket at Newlands Test with a classic offspinner's delivery - a slower, flighted offbreak pitching well outside the left-hander Dean Elgar's off stump, which invited the drive and duly drew the edge to slip - Ramiz Raja said on commentary: "He's a champion, Saeed Ajmal."

That he is.

Sebastian Faulks to introduce PG Wodehouse to a new generation

 

There never was a more self-deprecating natural-born genius than Pelham Grenville Wodehouse Photo: Getty Images

By Matthew Norman

8:06PM GMT 08 Mar 2013

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Were there such a medal as the Literary Victoria Cross, awarded to writers who show valour far beyond the call of duty in the face of the enemy, Sebastian Faulks would be nipping to Moss Bros this morning for the tails and topper preparatory to an appointment at the Palace.

Faulks has taken the single most courageous decision the world of letters has ever known, and the enemy is on the march. Dissident writers in the Soviet Union who risked their freedom and lives clearly deserve the admiration of history. Compared with the brutality that awaits the author of Birdsong for agreeing to write a Jeeves and Wooster novel at the behest of the PG Wodehouse estate, however, 17 years on the cabbage and maggot soup diet in Siberia’s least well-appointed salt mine shrinks into the equivalent of a minor train delay on a branch line near Truro.

One literary critic has already described Faulks as hubristic, and an avalanche of outrage awaits as countless Wodehouse addicts metaphorically flash him one of those Aunt Agatha glares that can open an oyster at a dozen paces. If not today, the space above this column may before long host one or two angry thoughts on the matter, and any of you whose missives appear on this page should take satisfaction from that. “Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers,” as Plum himself once observed. “Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.”

There never was a more self-deprecating natural born genius than Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, whose appreciation of his own oeuvre lay in direct inverse proportion to the rapture enjoyed by its readers. He would probably be flattered that so gifted a novelist is to publish Jeeves and The Wedding Bells in November, though if he was peeved he would be infinitely too polite to let on.

Others will be less constrained by courtesy over what, given the godly status accorded him by right-thinking people, will strike them as outright sacrilege. There might be less resistance if Faulks, thinking better of the project, decided instead to pastiche the King James Bible in the style of Irvine Welsh. 

One understands the distress. It was one thing for Faulks to write a James Bond novel. No one ever described Ian Fleming, for all his story-telling gifts, as the most influential novelist in the language, as Auberon Waugh and others said of Wodehouse. Faulks himself refers to him as “inimitable”, though that barely hints at the peerlessness of Wodehouse’s limitless capacity for intricate plotting, vibrant characterisation and, above all, producing vast quantities of the most elegant, exquisite and consistently hilarious English prose.

One understands why many will be less than gruntled at the news. On reading it, to thieve from the master again, I examined my mind. It boggled. But on reflection I think that this is a good thing.

Back in the Seventies, when my early adolescent self fell insanely in love with Psmith, Ukridge, Mr Mulliner, The Oldest Member, Blandings Castle and especially Jeeves and Wooster, his Edwardian phraseology, sensibilities and the distant world he romanticises were faintly familiar from contact with elderly relatives, and even from Brian Johnston wittering wonderfully away on Test Match Special like a superannuated Wooster.

Today, Wodehouse is literally a closed book to the young. Book sales are heart-rendingly minute, presumably because his magically self-contained universe is 

off-puttingly remote to those who cannot imagine this country in the hands of a bunch of public schoolboys whose idea of ultimate merriment is throwing bread rolls at one another in a private dining club.

Once anyone of taste so much as dips into a novel, they will instantly be hooked. The difficult bit is getting them to open a book in the first place, and if as popular and well regarded a contemporary writer as Faulks can break that ice for those to whom Wodehouse’s escapist innocence seems irrelevant in the comedic era of Frankie Boyle, perhaps the flame will be reignited.

Reinterpreting wildly adored fictional characters is a colossal challenge, but it can be done. Admittedly on telly rather than in print, Steven Moffat has managed it astoundingly well with Sherlock Holmes, transplanting him into the Baker Street of today while cleaving absolutely to the spirit of Conan Doyle and the core of the character. Whether Faulks can come close to replicating that miraculous reinvention we will learn in the autumn, but he should be congratulated for having the guts to have a crack.

The influence of Wodehouse on our popular culture cannot be exaggerated. At the more recognisable end of the Wodehousian spectrum, you hear echoes in the plummy tones of Stephen Fry. “Without Wodehouse, I am not sure that I would be a tenth of what I am today – whatever that may be,” wrote the definitive television Jeeves. But he is equally audible in the Deptford brogue of the glorious Danny Baker on Radio 5 Live football shows. “It changed my life finding Wodehouse,” as Baker put it, “and gave me the language and a licence to be ludicrous. Someone who was the smartest man around and chose to write the dumbest books around – that was the key that unlocked the door.”

“Dumbest” is hardly a superlative to please every Wodehouse fan, yet the point is sound. Everybody deserves access to arguably the greatest, and surely the most joyous, English prose stylist of all time. If Sebastian Faulks is the locksmith who opens that door to a new generation, regardless of his own efforts, he will have earned more than that Literary VC.

Hugo Chávez knew that his revolution depended on women

And he wasn't the only one. Presidents of Tanzania and Haiti have both benefited from making women central to progress

• Selma James and Nina López
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 8 March 2013 19.15 GMT

Hugo Chavez with his supporters in 2009. Photograph: Prensa PSUV/EPA

The funeral of President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela took place on International Women's Day – a fitting day of departure for "the president of the poor" who was loved by millions, especially by women, the poorest.

When Chávez was elected in 1998, the grassroots movement took a leap in power, and women in particular were empowered. Women were the first into the streets against the 2002 US-backed coup; their mobilisation saved the revolution. When asked why, woman after woman said: "Chávez is us, he is our son." He was an extension of who they were as strugglers for survival.

Chávez soon learnt that the revolution he led depended on women, and said so: "Only women have the passion and the love to make the revolution." He acknowledged that the "missions" – the new social services which were at the heart of his popularity and which the state funded but did not run – were mainly created and run by grassroots neighbourhood women.

In 2006, when announcing the partial implementation of Article 88 of the new constitution recognising caring work as productive – a breakthrough worldwide – Chávez said: "[Women] work so hard raising their children, ironing, washing, preparing food … giving [their children] an orientation … This was never recognised as work yet it is such hard work! ... Now the revolution puts you first, you too are workers, you housewives, workers in the home."

Chávez was not the first movement leader who went on to head the government, to have understood women's centrality to creating the new society they were striving to build.

Half a century ago, Julius Nyerere, leader of Tanzania's independence struggle and its first president, aimed his programme for development at the elimination of two ills: women's inequality and poverty. He said: "Women who live in villages work harder than anyone in Tanzania," working "in the fields and in the homes".

"The truth is that in the villages the women work very hard. At times they work for 12 or 14 hours a day. They even work on Sundays and public holidays." Whereas the village men "are on leave half their lives".

Nyerere's ujaama or "African socialism" – self-reliance and co-operation – was to keep Tanzania independent, by enabling it to refuse foreign loans. He insisted men must do their share. Equity was a question not only of justice but of economic necessity and political independence.

Encouraged by Nyerere, in one region 17, ujamaa villages created a communal society based on equity among women and men, children and adults – all contributed what they could and all shared equally in the wealth produced. Their extraordinary society was destroyed by Nyerere's power-hungry colleagues against his will, but it showed us what is possible.

Closer to Venezuela, women gained recognition under Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti's first democratically elected president (1990 and 2000). Determined to tackle extreme poverty and injustice, Aristide created a Ministry of Women's Affairs, appointed women to ministerial posts, supported girl domestic workers, and survivors of military rape. As in Venezuela, women were the main organisers and beneficiaries of literacy and health programmes; the rise in the minimum wage benefited them especially – sweatshop workers are mainly women.

Young people's love for Aristide is legendary, but women's devotion has been as constant. Two months after the devastating 2010 earthquake, women collected 20,000 signatures in three days demanding President Aristide's return from exile – they needed him for reconstruction. A year later he was back, not as president but as educator, reopening the medical school he had founded for poor students, which the coup had closed.

In Bolivia, indigenous women were recognised as central to the mass mobilisations which propelled Evo Morales into the presidency. These included the "water wars" which drove the multinational Bechtel out of Bolivia (they privatised the water and criminalised people who collected rain water). In 2008 the women were prominent in surrounding Congress for several days while the new constitution was debated; the white parliamentary elite intended to absent themselves to prevent a vote. The blockade forced them to sleep in the building till the vote was taken. That constitution heralded a new level of power for women – from pay equity to recognition for the economic value of caring work.

As the president of the poor is laid to rest, the historic Operation Condor trial opens in Argentina, tackling the co-ordinated campaign of state terror of former Latin American dictatorships. We must recall a little-known aspect of Chávez's legacy. Venezuela's oil revenue supported Argentina's Presidents Nestor and Cristina Kirchner, enabling them to pass laws removing the military's immunity from prosecution. The Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who led the 1983 overthrow of the dictatorship, and who had long campaigned for justice for the thousands the dictatorships raped, murdered and disappeared, have long paid tribute to Chávez – a most unusual military man.

They, like women all over South America and beyond, will be watching anxiously to see that the gains of the Bolivarian revolution are not undermined.

Britain: a nation in decay

The UK's problems go far deeper than the cuts agenda. It simply can't produce enough to revive its ailing economy

• 
• • Ha-Joon Chang
  • The Guardian, Friday 8 March 2013 21.00 GMT

‘Despite the huge incentive to export created by a devalued pound, Britain is still running trade deficits because it has lost the productive capacity to respond.’ Photograph: Alamy

David Cameron's speech on the economy this week, and the reactions to it, have again confirmed that the British debate on economic policy is getting nowhere. The coalition government keeps repeating that it has to cut spending in order to cut deficits, no matter what. The opposition has been at pains to explain – as a teacher may do to a particularly slow or obstinate child – that trying to cut deficits by cutting spending in a stagnant economy is a largely self-defeating exercise, as it reduces growth and thus tax revenue. And Friday's astonishing letter from Robert Chote, chairman of the non-partisan Office for Budget Responsibility, contradicting the prime minister and reminding him of the ambiguous impact of spending cuts on deficits, has lent further weight to the opposition argument.

In reality, though, the coalition government isn't as stupid or stubborn as it appears. It is sticking to its plan A because spending cuts are not about deficits but about rolling back the welfare state. So no amount of evidence is going to change its position on cuts.

Lost in this cross-wired debate is the issue of the long-term future of the economy. Britain has been finding it difficult to recover from the financial crisis not just because of its austerity policy but also because of its eroding ability to engage in high-productivity activities. This problem is most tellingly manifested in the country's inability to generate a trade surplus despite the huge devaluation of sterling since 2008.

Compared with its height in 2007, the pound has been devalued about 30% against the dollar, 50% against the yen, and 20% against the struggling euro. Yet despite the huge incentive to export created by such devaluation, Britain is still running trade deficits because it has lost the productive capacity to respond.

Despite the devaluation, Britain's service exports have fallen – average annual service exports for 2008-11 were 8% lower than for 2005-07. This may be understandable, given the poor state of its financial sector – rocked by one scandal after another and hemmed in by a slow tightening of global financial regulation.

However, manufacturing exports, which were supposed to make up the shortfall created by the services sector, also fell by 8% after the devaluation. This is highly unusual. For example, back when South Korea had a devaluation of similar scale after its 1997 financial crisis (the won, its currency, was devalued by 35% against the dollar), the country's manufacturing exports were 15% higher (comparing the 1998-2001 average to 1995-97).

The only reason the British balance of payments situation has not been worse is the large increase in primary commodity exports – oil, minerals and food. These were on average 22% higher in 2008-11 than in 2005-07. In other words, since the crisis the British economy has been moving backwards in terms of its sophistication as a producer.

All of this means that, without addressing the underlying decay in productive capabilities, Britain cannot fix its ailing economy. To deal with this problem, it urgently needs to develop a long-term productive strategy through a broad-based public consultation involving not just the government and private sector firms, but trade unions, educational institutions and research institutes.

The strategy should first carefully identify the industries, and the underlying technologies, that will be the future motor of the economy and then provide them with the necessary support. This could be in the form of subsidies for R&D, loan guarantees for small firms, or preferences in government procurement, and should be targeted at "strategic" industries, although they could also be in the form of policies that are apparently not industry-specific.

For example, infrastructural investment needs to be co-ordinated with the broader industrial strategy. Infrastructure is by definition location-specific, so depending on the industries you want to promote, you will have to build different types of it in different places. Similarly with education and skills. Without there being some national strategy, it is difficult for educators to know what kinds of engineers or technicians to produce, and for potential students to know what professions to study for.

John Maynard Keynes once famously said that in the long run we are all dead. But a lot of us have to live for a while yet. A series of short-run policies, whether based on the coalition policy of spending cuts and loose monetary policy or on the opposition policy of increased government spending, isn't going to address the challenges facing the British economy. It is time to think for the long term.

Tariq Ali: Hugo Chávez and me

The late president of Venezuela, who I have met many times, will be remembered by his supporters as a lover of literature, a fiery speaker and a man who fought for his people and won

• 
• • Tariq Ali
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 6 March 2013 17.07 GMT

Chávez, director Oliver Stone and Tariq Ali at the Venice film festival in 2009. Photograph: Damien Meyer/AFP/Getty Images

Once I asked whether he preferred enemies who hated him because they knew what he was doing or those who frothed and foamed out of ignorance. He laughed. The former was preferable, he explained, because they made him feel that he was on the right track. Hugo Chávez's death did not come as a surprise, but that does not make it easier to accept. We have lost one of the political giants of the post-communist era. Venezuela, its elites mired in corruption on a huge scale, had been considered a secure outpost of Washington and, at the other extreme, the Socialist International. Few thought of the country before his victories. After 1999, every major media outlet of the west felt obliged to send a correspondent. Since they all said the same thing (the country was supposedly on the verge of a communist-style dictatorship) they would have been better advised to pool their resources.

I first met him in 2002, soon after the military coup instigated by Washington and Madrid had failed and subsequently on numerous occasions. He had asked to see me during the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. He inquired: "Why haven't you been to Venezuela? Come soon." I did. What appealed was his bluntness and courage. What often appeared as sheer impulsiveness had been carefully thought out and then, depending on the response, enlarged by spontaneous eruptions on his part. At a time when the world had fallen silent, when centre-left and centre-right had to struggle hard to find some differences and their politicians had become desiccated machine men obsessed with making money, Chávez lit up the political landscape.

He appeared as an indestructible ox, speaking for hours to his people in a warm, sonorous voice, a fiery eloquence that made it impossible to remain indifferent. His words had a stunning resonance. His speeches were littered with homilies, continental and national history, quotes from the 19th-century revolutionary leader and president of VenezuelaSimón Bolívar, pronouncements on the state of the world and songs. "Our bourgeoisie are embarrassed that I sing in public. Do you mind?" he would ask the audience. The response was a resounding "No". He would then ask them to join in the singing and mutter, "Louder, so they can hear us in the eastern part of the city." Once before just such a rally he looked at me and said: "You look tired today. Will you last out the evening?" I replied: "It depends on how long you're going to speak." It would be a short speech, he promised. Under three hours.

The Bolívarians, as Chávez's supporters were known, offered a political programme that challenged the Washington consensus: neo-liberalism at home and wars abroad. This was the prime reason for the vilification of Chávez that is sure to continue long after his death.

Politicians like him had become unacceptable. What he loathed most was the contemptuous indifference of mainstream politicians in South America towards their own people. The Venezuelan elite is notoriously racist. They regarded the elected president of their country as uncouth and uncivilised, a zambo of mixed African and indigenous blood who could not be trusted. His supporters were portrayed on private TV networks as monkeys. Colin Powell had to publicly reprimand the US embassy in Caracas for hosting a party where Chávez was portrayed as a gorilla.

Was he surprised? "No," he told me with a grim look on his face. "I live here. I know them well. One reason so many of us join the army is because all other avenues are sealed." No longer. He had few illusions. He knew that local enemies did not seethe and plot in a vacuum. Behind them was the world's most powerful state. For a few moments he thought Obama might be different. The military coup in Honduras disabused him of all such notions.

He had a punctilious sense of duty to his people. He was one of them. Unlike European social democrats he never believed that any improvement in humankind would come from the corporations and the bankers and said so long before the Wall Street crash of 2008. If I had to pin a label on him, I would say that he was a socialist democrat, far removed from any sectarian impulses and repulsed by the self-obsessed behaviour of various far-left sects and the blindness of their routines. He said as much when we first met.

 Chávez greets supporters during a political gathering in 2006. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

The following year in Caracas I questioned him further on the Bolívarian project. What could be accomplished? He was very clear; much more so than some of his over-enthusiastic supporters: ''I don't believe in the dogmatic postulates of Marxist revolution. I don't accept that we are living in a period of proletarian revolutions. All that must be revised. Reality is telling us that every day. Are we aiming in Venezuela today for the abolition of private property or a classless society? I don't think so. But if I'm told that because of that reality you can't do anything to help the poor, the people who have made this country rich through their labour – and never forget that some of it was slave labour – then I say: 'We part company.' I will never accept that there can be no redistribution of wealth in society. Our upper classes don't even like paying taxes. That's one reason they hate me. We said: 'You must pay your taxes.' I believe it's better to die in battle, rather than hold aloft a very revolutionary and very pure banner, and do nothing … That position often strikes me as very convenient, a good excuse … Try and make your revolution, go into combat, advance a little, even if it's only a millimetre, in the right direction, instead of dreaming about utopias."

I remember sitting next to an elderly, modestly attired woman at one of his public rallies. She questioned me about him. What did I think? Was he doing well? Did he not speak too much? Was he not too rash at times? I defended him. She was relieved. It was his mother, worried that perhaps she had not brought him up as well as she should have done: "We always made sure that he read books as a child." This passion for reading stayed with him. History, fiction and poetry were the loves of his life: "Like me, Fidel is an insomniac. Sometimes we're reading the same novel. He rings at 3am and asks: 'Well, have you finished? What did you think?' And we argue for another hour.'"

It was the spell of literature that in 2005 led him to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Cervantes's great novel in a unique fashion. The ministry of culture reprinted a million copies of Don Quixote and distributed them free to a million poor, but now literate, households. A quixotic gesture? No. The magic of art can't transform the universe, but it can open up a mind. Chávez was confident that the book would be read now or later.

The closeness to Castro has been portrayed as a father-son relationship. This is only partially the case. Last year a huge crowd had gathered outside the hospital in Caracas, where Chávez was meant to be recuperating from cancer treatment, and their chants got louder and louder. Chávez ordered a loudspeaker system on the rooftop. He then addressed the crowd. Watching this scene on Telesur in Havana, Castro was shocked. He rang the director of the hospital: "This is Fidel Castro. You should be sacked. Get him back into bed and tell him I said so."

Above the friendship, Chávez saw Castro and Che Guevara in a historical frame. They were the 20th-century heirs of Bolívar and his friend Antonio José de Sucre. They tried to unite the continent, but it was like ploughing the sea. Chávez got closer to that ideal than the quartet he admired so much. His successes in Venezuela triggered a continental reaction: Bolivia and Ecuador saw victories. Brazil under Lula and Dilma did not follow the social model but refused to allow the west to pit them against each other. It was a favoured trope of western journalists: Lula is better than Chávez. Only last year Lula publicly declared that he supported Chávez, whose importance for "our continent" should never be underestimated.

The image of Chávez most popular in the west was that of an oppressive caudillo. Had this been true I would wish for more of them. The Bolívarian constitution, opposed by the Venezuelan opposition, its newspapers and TV channels and the local CNN, plus western supporters, was approved by a large majority of the population. It is the only constitution in the world that affords the possibility of removing an elected president from office via a referendum based on collecting sufficient signatures. Consistent only in their hatred for Chávez, the opposition tried to use this mechanism in 2004 to remove him. Regardless of the fact that many of the signatures were those of dead people, the Venezuelan government decided to accept the challenge.

I was in Caracas a week before the vote. When I met Chávez at the Miraflores palace he was poring over the opinion polls in great detail. It might be close. "And if you lose?" I asked. "Then I will resign," he replied without hesitation. He won.

 Chávez on the streets of Cabimas in September last year. Photograph: Juan Barreto/AFP/Getty Images

Did he ever tire? Get depressed? Lose confidence? "Yes," he replied. But it was not the coup attempt or the referendum. It was the strike organised by the corrupted oil unions and backed by the middle-classes that worried him because it would affect the entire population, especially the poor: "Two factors helped sustain my morale. The first was the support we retained throughout the country. I got fed up sitting in my office. So with one security guard and two comrades I drove out to listen to people and breathe better air. The response moved me greatly. A woman came up to me and said: 'Chávez follow me, I want to show you something.' I followed her into her tiny dwelling. Inside, her husband and children were waiting for the soup to be cooked. 'Look at what I'm using for fuel … the back of our bed. Tomorrow I'll burn the legs, the day after the table, then the chairs and doors. We will survive, but don't give up now.' On my way out the kids from the gangs came and shook hands. 'We can live without beer. You make sure you screw these motherfuckers.'"

What was the inner reality of his life? For anyone with a certain level of intelligence, of character and culture, his or her natural leanings, emotional and intellectual, hang together, constitute a whole not always visible to everyone. He was a divorcee, but affection for his children and grandchildren was never in doubt. Most of the women he loved, and there were a few, described him as a generous lover, and this was long after they had parted.

What of the country he leaves behind? A paradise? Certainly not. How could it be, given the scale of the problems? But he leaves behind a very changed society in which the poor felt they had an important stake in the government. There is no other explanation for his popularity. Venezuela is divided between his partisans and detractors. He died undefeated, but the big tests lie ahead. The system he created, a social democracy based on mass mobilisations, needs to progress further. Will his successors be up to the task? In a sense, that is the ultimate test of the Bolívarian experiment.

Of one thing we can be sure. His enemies will not let him rest in peace. And his supporters? His supporters, the poor throughout the continent and elsewhere, will see him as a political leader who promised and delivered social rights against heavy odds; as someone who fought for them and won.

Google Glass: is it a threat to our privacy?

The tech giant's 'wearable computing' project is now being tested by volunteers, meaning you might already have been surreptitiously filmed and uploaded on to Google's servers. How worried should you be?

• 
• • Charles Arthur
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 6 March 2013 15.08 GMT

Google's Sergey Brin wearing Google Glass at New York fashion week. Photograph: AP

If you haven't heard about the excitement around Google Glass – the head-mounted glasses that can shoot video, take pictures, and broadcast what you're seeing to the world – then here's an idea of the interest in them. Last week, someone claiming to be testing Glass for Google auctioned their $1,500 (£995) device on eBay. Bidding had reached $16,000 before eBay stopped it on the basis that the person couldn't prove they had the glasses. (They weren't due to get them until last Friday.)

Google Glass is the most hotly anticipated new arrival in "wearable computing" – which experts predict will become pervasive. In the past 50 years we have moved from "mainframe" computers that needed their own rooms to ones that fit in a pocket; any smartphone nowadays has as much raw computing power as a top-of-the-line laptop from 10 years ago.

The next stage is computers that fit on to your body, and Google's idea is that you need only speak to operate it. The videos that the company has put online – and the demonstrations by Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder, who has been driving these imaginative leaps – suggest you can whirl your child around by their arms, say: "OK, Glass, take video!" and capture the moment. (To activate Glass you need to tilt your head, or touch the side, and then say, "OK Glass, record a video" or "OK Glass take a picture".) The only other way to get that point of view is to strap a camera to your head. Brin has already appeared on stage at a TED conference wearing his Glass glasses (will we call them Glasses?) and looking vaguely like a space pirate. He has described ordinary smartphones as "emasculating" (invoking quite a lot of puzzlement and dictionary-checking: yup, it still means what you thought). And yet people are already beginning to fret about the social implications of Glass (as it's quickly becoming known). The first, and most obvious, is the question of privacy. The second is: how will we behave in groups when the distraction of the internet is only an eye movement away?

David Yee, the chief technology officer at a company called Editorially, tweeted on this point the other day: "There's a young man wearing Google Glasses at this restaurant, which, until just now, used to be my favourite spot."

Yee's worry was that the young person might be filming everything and uploading it to Google's servers (and a Google+ page). Which just feels creepy. It's not a trivial concern. Joshua Topolsky, an American technology journalist who is one of the few to have tried out Google Glass – at Google's invitation – discovered this directly. He wore them to Starbucks, accompanied by a film crew. The film crew were asked to stop filming. "But I kept the Glass's video recorder going, all the way through."

Still, you might think, where's the harm? The thing is, though: this is Google, not Fred's Amazing Spectacles Company. This is the company that has repeatedly breached the boundaries of what we think is "private". From Google Buzz (where it created a "social network" from peoples' email lists, forgetting that sometimes deadly enemies have mutual friends; it was bound over for 20 years by the US's Federal Trade Commission) and the rows over Street View pictures, to the intentional snaffling of wi-fi data while collecting those pictures (a $25,000 fine from the US Federal Communications Commission for obstructing its investigation there).

And that's before you get to criticism in Europe over its attitude to data protection (information commissioners grumbled last October that its unification of its separate privacy policies meant "uncontrolled" use of personal data without an individual's clear consent.

For Google, "privacy" means "what you've agreed to", and that is slightly different from the privacy we've become used to over time. So how comfortable – or uneasy – should we feel about the possibility that what we're doing in a public or semi-public place (or even somewhere private) might get slurped up and assimilated by Google? You can guess what would happen the first time you put on Glass: there would be a huge scroll of legal boilerplate with "Agree" at the end. And, impatient and uncaring as ever, you would click on it with little regard for what you were getting yourself, and others, in to. Can a child properly consent to filming or being filmed? Is an adult, who happens to be visible in a camera's peripheral vision in a bar, consenting? And who owns – and what happens to – that data?

Oliver Stokes, principal design innovator at PDD, which helps clients such as LG, Vodafone and Fujitsu design products, says Yee's restaurant scenario is "concerning". "The idea that you could inadvertently become part of somebody else's data collection – that could be quite alarming. And Google has become the company which knows where you are and what you're looking for. Now it's going to be able to compute what it is you're looking at."

That, he points out, could be hugely useful. "Supermarkets and packaging companies spend lots of money trying to work out which packages you look at first on a shelf. Potentially, through Google Glass, they would be capturing that data as standard. That would be quite powerful – to be able to say why people buy things."

Of course, the benefits wouldn't accrue to the wearer. Google would sell the data (suitably anonymised, of course). And your smartphone already provides a huge amount of detail about you. Song Chaoming, a researcher at Northeastern University in Boston, has been analysing mobile phone records (including which base stations the phone connects to) and has developed an algorithm that can predict – with, he says, 93% accuracy – where its owner is at any time of the day (by triangulating from the strengths of the base station signals; that's part of how your smartphone is able to show where you are on an onscreen map). He analysed the records of 50,000 people; the accuracy was never below 80%.

When you consider that Chaoming was only doing this in his spare time, and that Google has teams of people whose only task is to develop better algorithms to work out where a phone's owner is, and what they're going to do based on their past activity and searches, you realise that if you're using an Android phone, Google probably knows what you're going to do before you do.

 A model with Google Glass at New York fashion week. Photograph: Andrew Kelly / Reuters

The obvious objection to these concerns is that we're used to being filmed; CCTV is part of life. Yee's response: "Not 5,000 cameras a city – five million. Not 5,000 monitors – one." Where the five million are the wearers of Glass – and the one monitor is Google, aggregating, sifting, profiting.

Yet we already live in a world where the boundaries of what's private and what's public are melting. The other day my Twitter timeline came alive with someone tweeting about watching a couple having a furious row in a cafe; the man had had multiple affairs, the woman had had a breakdown. Their unhappiness was being played out in public, though the cafe wasn't strictly a public space. If either used Twitter, they might have found themselves (or friends might have recognised them). And Twitter's content is retained and searchable through plenty of web services.

Social media such as Twitter, and the ubiquity since 2003 of cameraphones (and now of smartphones that not only have still and video cameras, but can also upload their content immediately) means we're more used to the snatched photo or video that tells a story. Without it, we wouldn't know the true circumstances surrounding the death at the G20 protest of the newspaper seller Ian Tomlinson.

What if everyone who had been there had been wearing Google Glass (or similar) and beaming it to the web? Would the police have behaved differently?

Google doesn't want to discuss these issues. "We are not making any comment," says a company spokesperson. But other sources suggest that Google's chiefs know that this is a live issue, and they're watching it develop. That's part of the plan behind the "Glass Explorer" scheme, which aims to get the devices into the hands – or rather, on to the faces – of ordinary people (and which enabled one member of the trial to putatively auction their Glass).

"It may be that new social norms develop with Glass, where people develop an informal way of showing that they're not using it – say, wearing it around their neck to signal they aren't using it or being distracted by it," said one person who has spoken to Google staff on this, but who has to stay anonymous. "One of the reasons they're doing Explorers is to get feedback on these things, as well as the devices."

The other big question about Glass is: how will we behave with each other? My own experience with a Glass-like system, of wearable ski goggles, suggests that distraction will happen quite easily. That system, from Recon, has a lens in the top right that shows data such as your speed, altitude, and even ski-resort maps (useful in whiteouts). It was very easy, while standing and talking to someone, to glance up and read something off the screen. Being present and not-present became almost reflexive, and that was with only one week of use. Yet at the same time, the display wasn't overwhelming. Concentrating on what was in front of me wasn't hard, when required.

Carolina Milanesi, smartphones and tablets analyst at the research company Gartner, says: "Interestingly this [distraction element] is the first thing I thought of – not that Glass was giving you something that phones cannot give you, in terms of sharing or accessing content, but that they do it without letting others realise you are doing anything. In other words, with the phone, if I am taking a picture, the person I am focusing on will likely notice me; with Glass they do not."

Despite her line of work, Milanesi is concerned about whether we get too deeply involved with our technology, to the exclusion of the real people around us. She has a different restaurant concern from Yee's. In June 2011, she pointed out how smartphones change us: "Look around a restaurant or coffee bar at how many people, couples even, are sitting across from each other and they're both looking down at their mobiles."

Glass might change that for the better – though would you appear to be looking at each other, while really intent on your email or a video? Topolsky, who used Glass for some days, said: "It brought something new into view (both literally and figuratively) that has tremendous value and potential … the more I used Glass the more it made sense to me; the more I wanted it."

He loved how text messages or phone calls would just appear as alerts, and he could deal with them without taking his phone out of his pocket to see who was calling. Walking and need directions? They're in view. "In the city, Glass makes you feel more powerful, better equipped, and definitely less diverted," he said. But, he added, "It might not be that great at a dinner party, or on a date, or watching a movie."

Hurst comments, "Your one-on-one conversation with someone wearing Google Glass is likely to be annoying, because you'll suspect that you don't have their undivided attention. And you can't comfortably ask them to take off the glasses (especially when, as it inevitably will be, the device is integrated into prescription lenses). Finally – and here's where the problems really start – you don't know if they're taking a video of you."

Stokes points out that we're already seeing body language change as smartphones – with their glowing screens – become more pervasive: the hunched walk that 10 years ago marked out a financial whiz with a BlackBerry is now seen on every pavement.

"I think there will be a pushback," Stokes says. "Maybe you'll have to have a lens cover to show you're not filming." He points out though that the present model seems to require voice control – "OK, Glass, shoot video" – and that this might discourage some users in public. "I've been watching for people using Siri [Apple's voice-driven iPhone control]. I just don't see people using it in public places. Maybe it's too gadgety."

"People will have to work out what the new normal is," says Stokes. "I do wonder whether speaking and gesturing might be essentially banned in public."

"At home my husband already jokes about me checking into [location service] Foursquare from the piece of carpet I am standing on," Milanesi says. "How much more will we have of this now that it is made so simple for us? And the other side of the coin: how much are we going to share with others, and at what point will we have a backlash? When will it all be too much?"

Chavez a true Democrat - termed Dictator by the American Right

If you want to learn about human rights in Venezuela before Hugo Chavez, type “Caracazo” into Google, and do so with a strong stomach. Back in 1989, then-President Carlos Andrés Pérez won an election on a fiery platform of resisting free-market dogma: the IMF was “a neutron bomb that killed people, but left buildings standing,” he proclaimed. But after safely making it to the presidential palace, he dramatically u-turned, unleashing a programme of privatisation and neo-liberal shock therapy. With gas subsidies removed, petrol prices soared, and impoverished Venezuelans took to the streets. Soldiers mowed protesters down with gunfire. Up to 3,000 perished, a horrifying death toll up there with the Tienanmen Square Massacre – in a country with a population 43 times smaller.

It was his abortive coup attempt against Pérez's murderous, rampantly corrupt government in 1992 that launched Chavez to prominence. Though locked away, Chavez became an icon for Venezuela's long-suffering poor. By the time he won a landslide victory in 1998 on a promise to use the country's vast oil wealth to help the poor, Venezuela was a mess. Per capita income had collapsed to where it had been in the early 1960s. One in three Venezuelans lived on less than $2 a day. Oil revenues were squandered.

Over the coming days, you will be repeatedly told that Hugo Chavez was a dictator. A funny sort of dictator: there have been 17 elections and referenda since 1998. Perhaps you think they were rigged. When he won by a huge margin in 2006, former US President Jimmy Carter was among those declaring he had won “fairly and squarely”. At the last election in October 2012, Carter declared that, “of the 92 elections that we've monitored, I would say the election process in Venezuela is the best in the world.” I was there: perhaps you think I was like those hopelessly naïve Western leftists who visited Potemkin villages in Stalinist Russia. I was with a genuinely independent election commission, staffed with both pro-Chavez and anti-Chavez sympathisers, who had previously been invited by the opposition to run their own internal elections. We met with senior opposition figures who railed against Chavez, but acknowledged that they lived in a democracy. When they lost the election, they accepted it.

Social justice

Indeed, Chavez himself has had to accept defeat before: back in 2007, he lost a referendum campaign, and did not quibble with the results. Until he came to power, millions of poor Venezuelans were not even registered to vote: but dramatic registration drives have nearly doubled the electorate. There are 6,000 more polling stations than there were in the pre-Chavez era.

On the other hand, the democratic credentials of many of his opponents can certainly be questioned. In 2002, a Pinochet-style coup was launched against Chavez, and was only reversed by a popular uprising. Much of the privately owned media openly incited and supported the coup: imagine Cameron was kicked out of No 10 by British generals, with the support and incitement of rolling 24-hour news stations. But Venezuela's media is dominated by private broadcasters, some of whom make Fox News look like cuddly lefties. State television could rightly be accused of bias towards the government, which is perhaps why it has a measly 5.4 per cent audience share. Of seven major national newspapers, five support the opposition, and only one is sympathetic to the government.

The truth is that Chavez won democratic election after democratic election, despite the often vicious hostility of the media, because his policies transformed the lives of millions of previously ignored Venezuelans. Poverty has fallen from nearly half to 27.8 per cent, while absolute poverty has been more than halved. Six million children receive free meals a day; near-universal free health care has been established; and education spending has doubled as a proportion of GDP. A housing programme launched in 2011 built over 350,000 homes, bringing hundreds of thousands of families out of sub-standard housing in thebarrios. Some of his smug foreign critics suggest Chavez effectively bought the votes of the poor – as though winning elections by delivering social justice is somehow bribery.

Alliances

That does not mean Chavez is beyond criticism. Venezuela was already a country with rampant crime when he came to power, but the situation has deteriorated since. Around 20,000 Venezuelans died at the hands of violent crime in 2011: an unacceptable death toll. As well as drugs, near-universal gun ownership and the destabilising impact of neighbouring Colombia, a weak (and often corrupt) police force is to blame. Although the government is beginning to roll out a national police force, endemic crime is a genuine crisis. When I spoke to Venezuelans in Caracas, the sometimes frightening lack of law-and-order was brought up by pro-Chavistas and opponents alike.

And then there is the matter of some of Chavez's unpleasant foreign associations. Although his closest allies were his fellow democratically elected left-of-centre governments in Latin America – nearly all of whom passionately defended Chavez from foreign criticism – he also supported brutal dictators in Iran, Libya and Syria. It has certainly sullied his reputation. Of course, we in the West can hardly single out Chavez for unsavoury alliances. We support and arm dictatorships such as Saudi Arabia; Britain's former Prime Minister Tony Blair is paid $13 million a year to work for Kazakhstan's dictatorship. But our own hypocrisy does not absolve Chavez of criticism.

The so-called Bolivarian Revolution was overly dependent on Chavez's own reputation, and inevitably his death raises questions about its future direction. But have no doubt: Chavez was a democratically elected champion of the poor. His policies lifted millions out of abject poverty and misery. He represented a break from years of corrupt regimes with often dire human rights records. His achievements were won in the face of an attempted military coup, an aggressively hostile media, and bitter foreign critics. He demonstrated that it is possible to resist the neo-liberal dogma that holds sway over much of humanity. He will be mourned by millions of Venezuelans – and understandably so.