Greg Chappell on playing fast bowling

Ashes 2013-14: Ian Bell leads way in handling Mitchell Johnson barrage

Mitchell Johnson evoked memories of the West Indian attack of the late Seventies, and England need to learn from Ian Bell's example

England's Ian Bell looks on as he loses another partner to Mitchell Johnson of Australia, this time Graeme Swann. Photograph: Jason O'Brien/Action Images

It is often said by those that experienced it that the toughest most uncompromising cricket ever played came not in official Test matches, but in the no-holds-barred World Series Cricket. And it is further said that the most uncompromising of the uncompromising came not on the drop-in pitches of the Sydney Showground but in 1979 in the Caribbean, when WSC toured and played Super Tests. This was bare-knuckle cricket, jeux very sans frontieres, where the MCC equivalent of the Queensberry Rules, or even the Geneva Convention, were for cissies.

The pitches were hard and fast, there was no restriction on short-pitched bowling and in Michael Holding, Andy Roberts, Colin Croft, Joel Garner and Wayne Daniel, West Indies possessed a fighting machine to rival any in the game's history.

It was in the five matches of this competitive furnace that Greg Chappell, already a giant of the game, forged his greatest batting feats. It began quietly in Jamaica, with 6 and 20. But Bridgetown brought 45 and 90; Trinidad 7 and 150; Guyana 113 in his only innings; and finally Antigua 104 and 85 before Clive Lloyd ran him out. A total of 621 runs in the series at an average of 69. No one, legend has it, has played unrestricted fast bowling with such authority.

While Mitchell Johnson was laying waste the England batting at the Gabba and Adelaide Oval, it was hard to not think of this. I talked to him once about it and beyond the physical courage required, his rationale, the game plan that he employed, was fascinating. Twelve overs an hour, he said, is what you received from the fast bowlers and of those 72 deliveries, two thirds, or four balls of every over, would be going at great velocity past his nose. That left 24 balls an hour of which it was reasonable to assume his batting partner would get half. So twelve deliveries then with scoring potential, of which half he reckoned he would be defending. In other words, there were six deliveries from which he knew he needed to score and which he further rationalised, would be pitched up. "I was looking to come forward," he has said, "to drive. It was the percentage shot." All of which sounds counter-intuitive when placed alongside the more obvious back foot technique to allow more time to play the ball.

Whatever they may say, no one relishes facing extreme pace, and few have bowled faster than Johnson is currently managing. At times already in the series, the England top order batting has coped with him: Michael Carberry has done so twice, by letting the ball go in Brisbane and by lining him up from back in the crease in Adelaide; Alastair Cook was watchful in the second innings in Brisbane; and after his usual frenetic start, Kevin Pietersen just looked comfortable in the second innings at the Gabba until the second of three totally indiscreet shots in as many innings did for him unnecessarily. Johnson's real success, certainly in Adelaide, has come in blowing away the lower order. How would these batsmen cope with an incessant barrage such as Chappell received?

Ian Bell though, now there is a player. Here is a strange thing. Back in the days before helmets, when, say, Tommo and Lillee were terrorising England, and the high velocity short ball was a common currency, the number of batsmen who were actually hit, on the head specifically, was remarkably few, certainly compared with these days when scarcely a day goes by without someone "getting one on the lid" and invariably trotting a gentle leg-bye for their troubles. There is a good reason for this. Short of a crack on the head, little was to be gained by taking eyes from the ball and turning away. Instead there were two options, aside from taking on the short ball and hooking or pulling: either watch the ball and duck under; or drop the hands out of harm's way first and foremost, and then sway back to let the ball pass by. Photographs of the ball passing a batsman's nose show excellent judgment on the part of the player rather than a close call.

Bell plays as if a batsman from a bygone era. In the second innings in Brisbane, he swayed back to avoid the short ball like a reed bending in the wind. He does not attempt the legside cross bat shots, but keeps a square cut in his locker just in case. As with Chappell, he looks to get forward if he can ( there has been more opportunity offered on this pitch than the Gabba, and more, you can bet, than will be going at the Waca next week too). There is an unflustered calmness to him as well, as if he sees the ball in a slow motion dimension unavailable to others.

Just for a period, when Monty Panesar was showing a technique and fortitude that had proved elusive to those better qualified, there was the possibility that he might be able to engineer a remarkable century. He had stormed past his half-century by lofting Ryan Harris down the ground and now square cut him witheringly, clipped him to fine leg for four more and finished the most productive over of the match by lofting him elegantly into the crowd at deep extra cover. When Johnson, brought back for the coup de grace, pitched short, he leaned back and clipped the ball precisely over the slip cordon. These were the strokes of a man in control, a counterpoint to his teammates. An object lesson.

How far can privatisation go? Perhaps government itself could be outsourced

The 'selling of the family silver' that began in earnest under Thatcher is still in train; sometimes I wonder if the entire political class should be put out to tender

• 
• • Ian Jack
  • The Guardian, Friday 6 December 2013 18.30 GMT

Widespread privatisation was a key pledge in Margaret Thatcher’s 1983 election manifesto. Photograph: Chris Capstick/Rex Features

The phrase "selling the family silver" became the most celebrated if not the deepest criticism of Mrs Thatcher's privatisation programme, though Harold Macmillan never used those exact words. At a dinner of the Tory Reform Group – wets, moderates, Europhiles, none of them "one of us" – the former prime minister devised a more extended metaphor that drew on an aristocratic lifestyle that had been failing since its heyday in his Edwardian childhood. When individuals or estates ran into financial trouble, he said, they would commonly sell a few of their assets. "First the Georgian silver goes [laughter, applause]. Then all that nice furniture that used to be in the saloon. Then the Canalettos go [laughter, applause]."

He began to wander a bit. "And then the most tasty morsel, the most productive of all, they got rid of Cable and Wireless, and having got rid of the only part of the railways that paid, and a part of the steel industry that paid, and having sold this and that, the great thing of the monopoly telephone system came on the market. They [sic] were like the two Rembrandts that were still left [laughter] and they went, and now we're promised in the king's speech a further sale of anything that can be scraped up. You can't sell the coalmines, I'm afraid, because nobody will buy them [laughter, prolonged applause]."

When Macmillan made the speech, on 8 November 1985, he was 91 and had just over a year left to live. He still cut an attractive figure – the inverted V of his bow tie matched the weary droop of his moustache and eyebrows – though his reference to the king's speech suggested that a few marbles were coming unstuck in what was once one of the sharpest minds in British politics. The audience loved him. He was the last British prime minister to have served in the first world war, where he was badly wounded, and the last born during Victoria's reign; a "born actor", people said, because he was always so effortlessly droll. His references to oil paintings and precious tableware, his correct but vintage use of the word "saloon": this kind of thing endeared him to the public for much the same reasons as Downton Abbey did 25 years later – as an amusing and slightly camp version of a previous age.

He disavowed the speech only a few days afterwards, telling the House of Lords that he'd been misunderstood. All he was questioning was the government's wisdom in treating the capital raised by privatisation as income; as a Conservative he was "naturally in favour of returning into private ownership … all those means of production and distribution which are now controlled by state capitalism". But the metaphor had made its mark, and the fact is that Macmillan's "family silver" and British Gas's "Tell Sid" slogan are probably the most-remembered phrases from the early years of the war against public ownership. Oddly, given that privatisation was to have such profound effects on British life, both in their different ways raised a smile; did we know what was coming?

At the time of Macmillan's speech, privatisation had hardly begun. British Rail's ferries and hotels were the first to go (how strange it now seems that the best hotels in almost every city outside London were owned and run – usually well – by public servants in the most literal sense). But British Telecom, British Steel, British Airways, British Shipbuilders and Rolls-Royce – all of them listed as targets in the Tories' 1983 manifesto – had still to complete their journey from the public sector, and the big privatisations that that would affect every household had yet to come. Gas, water, electricity: people puzzled as to how the same stuff flowing through the same pipes and wires could be owned by different companies, and yet somehow it became so in the name of competition. Then came the British Airports Authority and British Rail and large chunks of the Ministry of Defence, while many public institutions such as local authorities and the NHS outsourced much of their activity and shrank sometimes to the role of regulator. Nigel Lawson triumphantly announced "the birth of people's capitalism", but many private companies sold out to foreign ownership; others were taken over by private equiteers; others again subsumed into octopus-like businesses such as Serco and G4S, which picked up the contracts for outsourced work ranging from Royal Navy tugboats to nursing assistants.

This landscape is familiar to us, but what would Macmillan have made of it? What kind of country-house metaphor would be equal to the modern situation where the electricity is owned in France, the football clubs by emirs and the publishing houses (including Macmillan's own) in Germany and the US? Or a state that has recently sold off the Royal Mail too cheaply (a habit that began with British Rail's hotels 30 years ago), that has privatised its blood plasma service and is about to sell its profitable stake in cross-Channel trains, and which has its eye on all kinds of small treasures (air traffic control, Ordnance Survey, the Royal Mint) that in future may raise a few bob and enable a tax cut? Comparisons with the sale of silver sugar tongs and Canalettos hardly seem adequate. Surely the crumbling house itself has a For Sale sign nailed to it at a crazy angle, with stickers attached to the inhabitants – the dowager, the servants, even the dogs – for they too have a value as the consumers of the stuff their new owner will sell them.

The words of the novelist and reporter James Meek ring ever truer. "The commodity that makes water and roads and airports valuable to an investor, foreign or otherwise, is the people who have no choice but to use them," Meek wrote last year in the London Review of Books. "We have no choice but to pay the price the toll keepers charge. We are a human revenue stream; we are being made tenants in our own land, defined by the string of private fees we pay to exist here."

But why not take it further and outsource the air force, the army and the navy? Mercenaries from poorer countries would be cheaper, accepting even worse rates of pay than the average British infantryman. Why not outsource the police, given that prison warders are already privatised? Why not outsource the government? It has cut so many parts from itself that it does no more than bleed on its stumps. Finally, why not outsource the political class that without interruption since 1979 has promoted the denigration of public service while upholding the idea of private profit, or at best done nothing to stop it. How interesting it would be to oversee the tendering process for the last – to weigh up the rival claims of political teams from, say, Finland, Germany and Iceland to transform the House of Commons into a more intelligent and courteous debating chamber that had outgrown the Oxford Union. How good it would be if the shouters and petty point-scorers could be replaced, on the male side at least, with grave pipe-smokers who spoke in charming English and wanted only the best for the country they had come to supervise – a colony almost, deserving enlightened rule.

The ultimate cricket librarian

Rob Moody's obsession with recording matches in Australia and collecting archive footage has led to him becoming a folk hero to cricket lovers across the world

Russell Jackson in Cricinfo

December 6, 2013

 

	Rob Moody: a Melbournian with a famous interest in sport but also a "massive footy hater" © Rob Moody  Enlarge

At the start I'll assume that the reason you are reading this is that you're a cricket fan and you have an internet connection. Therefore it's also not a stretch to assume that if you don't know a man named Rob Moody by his full name, you probably know him by his Youtube moniker, Robelinda2.

I couldn't name every member of the ICC board from memory but I know who Rob Moody is, and among cricket fans that puts me in the majority. Moody is a kind of cricket historian, an archivist, a DIY publisher, a superfan and a superfreak. By any measurement he's one of the unsung heroes of the game.

The Melbourne-based cricket lover draws upon thousands and thousands of hours of lovingly recorded cricket footage to edit and publish Youtube clips of fantastic and forgotten moments of cricket history; thousands of videos with millions of views.

Certain reoccurring themes tend to permeate the Moody oeuvre and give a small indication of his likes and dislikes as a connoisseur of the game. His obsession with Inzamam-ul-Haq's travails has resulted in works like "72 funniest Inzamam Ul Haq LBW's" and "23 funniest Inzamam run outs". One of his most-watched clips, 2,096,051 views and counting, is of a viciously rearing David Saker bouncer to the head of South Australia's Jeff Vaughan on a lively Bellerive wicket. That moment was broadcast on a long forgotten Australian cable channel and didn't even rate a mention in Wisden, typifying the type of fascinating marginalia that makes Moody's channel so enticing to cricket's millions of trainspotters.

There are no geographical borders in Moody's search for cricket videos, with one fan taking to the comments section to leave an apt compliment: "if cricket was played on Mars, I bet this guy would have videos from there too."

For those who love and write about the game, Moody's archive has become a portable library, and the exhaustive amount of game footage is augmented by a number of fascinating old documentaries that would be lost to most of us without Moody's guiding hand.

On the morning of the Adelaide Test I discussed Moody's remarkable hobby with him and got an insight into the love for the game that drives his efforts. He says he has footage of virtually every game played in Australia for the last 30 years. They've been transferred onto CDs that are stored in around 25 folders in his Melbourne home. Each folder contains 1000 discs, and together they make up a near-complete archive of Australian cricket in his lifetime.

The earliest home-recorded VHS that Moody still has is footage from the 1982-83 season. "It was recorded after my dad recorded a John Wayne movie. The highlights came on after," he says. "I managed to keep the video." Plenty of similar discoveries have come from unlabelled VHS tapes he bought in bulk lots at garage sales and on eBay.

Sometime around the mid-1980s, Moody's hobby escalated and by his late teens he was recording every ball of every game that his video-buying budget could cover. In a detail that would be familiar to any child of the '80s, he recalls often hitting the pause button between overs to avoid wasting tape on the commercials; the problem was he'd often forget to resume recording and would miss a couple of overs. The other hazard was the threat of unlabelled tapes being wiped to make way for episodes of Punky Brewster, which his sister would record.

Moody's cricket video archive has been both helped and hindered by the emergence of decidedly more sophisticated recording technologies than were available when his hobby started. His first digital recorder, purchased in 2004, cost A$4000 (approximately US$3600). It only had a 10GB hard drive, and at that point the cost of blank discs to transfer his recordings to was prohibitively expensive (up to $10 each).

"Then the problem came that they were too cheap and they were rubbish, "he says. Fortunately he was in the habit of backing up his digital conversions, as hundreds of the newer, cheaper discs proved to be of such poor quality they didn't last even a decade. Ironically enough, the VHS tapes he stopped using in early 2004 have proven indestructible and still play at the same quality even 30 years after the initial recording. By contrast he says he throws out 500 DVDs per year that have simply stopped working. "It's a massive effort to keep everything from just fading away, because the technology is unreliable. Even with hard drives they just die, he laments."

Moody played club cricket as an opening batsman for five years in the '90s before finger injuries started to endanger his burgeoning career gigging in various bands around Melbourne. Now he teaches guitar.

So far his biggest hurdle in maintaining his Youtube channel has not been the stiff arm of authority but moderating long and unwieldy comment threads that veer into bizarre and legally problematic tangents. "Every day there is close to a thousand comments to go through. Heaps of them are abuse and threats," he says. He's remarkably calm about this imposition, which he calls "par for the course".

"In that first year it definitely was pretty insane. I actually couldn't believe the absolute torrent of abuse and pretty crazy threats." He received abusive messages by email and phone, and to his horror, one unhappy viewer even showed up at his work to issue a threat. "He can't have been much over 18 and he ended up happy to speak to me. That was kind of weird," Moody says with remarkably good humour.

Contrary to my own impressions, he says the worst of the threats came not from Indian fans of Sachin Tendulkar, who Moody often jokes over and ribs, but his own countrymen. "Initially there were a lot of angry Aussies, believe it or not."

	Moody has footage of virtually every game played in Australia for the last 30 years. They've been transferred onto CDs that are stored in around 25 folders in his home. Each folder contains 1000 discs

That the Robelinda2 channel still exists is down to caution, and good luck. Moody says the key to its survival is tending towards older material when making new uploads. He has a precise and nuanced understanding of the various rights holders of more recent footage, and is keenly aware of what he is and isn't likely to get away with.

Youtube's copyright detection system is automated, so Moody's reputation amongst fans would count for nothing if he transgressed. The threat of three strikes and the complete termination of his channel remains, and such an eventuality would take with it his entire archive of material. Friends of Moody's have not been as lucky, and he says thousands of videos that didn't breach any of the site's regulations have been lost as collateral damage.

"When it goes I'm certainly not going to put it up again, because it would be way too much work to do it all over again," he says with a shrug of resignation. Moody is pragmatic about the right of cricket boards and broadcasters to enforce copyright regulations and focuses more of his energies on the content he can provide to fellow fans.

Right now his children are too young to understand their dad's remarkable hobby, but when he mentions that his wife had "always known" about the obsession, he says it with a hearty laugh, as if it could be construed as a dark secret to some.

When asked about his flair for editing compilation videos, it's surprising to learn that most of them were made long before he converted to digital formats. At a young age he took note of the way Channel Nine's highlight packages were edited and used his own homespun production techniques to create similar reels for himself. Much of what Moody has uploaded was created not on modern digital editing software, but through a laborious manual process, using two VCRs. It also pays to bear in mind that he never foresaw a time or technology that would allow for the end product to be viewed on any screen other than the one in his own living room.

Moody says these self-created highlights packages include every half-century and century televised in Australia in the time he has been recording games. He estimates that he owns every commercially produced VHS cricket video ever released in England and Australia, including obscure subscription-only titles like Cover Point, which were advertised in cricket magazines in the '80s and '90s. The latter cost around $100 per video, an almost laughable sum in hindsight, but many yielded gems he never would have seen otherwise.

Moody says some of those titles now sell in online auctions for four-figure sums. For instance, not even Cricket South Africa has copies of a collection of rare videos he has from the South African rebel tours, which remain a lost world of cricket history. He says that copies have sold on eBay for up to $4000, and he has even fielded requests from players who featured in the games to provide them with footage from the tours. Want to see Sylvester Clarke hit Peter Kirsten with a bouncer in 1983-84? Thanks to Moody, you now can.

	Moody says he throws out 500 DVDs per year that have simply stopped working © Rob Moody  Enlarge

Moody still talks with a boyish enthusiasm of the days when rain delays in Australian internationals saw Channel Nine delve into its archives to show some old gold. He bemoans the current trend in which Nine will "return to normal programming, which of course means an Elvis movie we've all seen a million times. I don't understand how that is normal programming."

Moody's views on the game are trenchant and often surprising. His decision to record the ever-expanding schedule of T20 games in a lower-quality format than he uses for Tests and one-day cricket is as much a philosophical one as to do with practicalities. He says the newest format is "mildly entertaining when it's on but there's obviously a different vibe about it… I certainly don't dislike it to any great extent but it's clearly an inferior type of cricket."

Unusually for a Melbournian with such a famous interest in sport, Moody calls himself a "massive footy hater" and takes no interest in any other sport ("and thank god, because I don't have any time"). His early interest in cricket was kindled by the sight of Australia's mid-'80s one-day international clashes against West Indies. The passion in his voice is clear when he enters any discussion about West Indies cricket, and he retains a deep knowledge of their golden era.

There are few gaps in his collection other than some games from Australia's 1994 tour of South Africa, but he is always on the look-out for overseas tour footage from before the advent of Australian cable TV in the mid-1990s. He also makes the valid point that between the 1991 and 1999 Indian tours of Australia, the only ways for fans like him to fully appreciate the talents of Sachin Tendulkar was through those early wonder years of Australian cable TV.

Moody is philosophically opposed to claiming advertising revenue from his videos, adding that he dislikes watching advertisements on videos uploaded by other users, and so would feel hypocritical putting them on his own. "It just seems really dodgy," he says. "It would also be extra hassles with legal matters."

With the sheer volume of video footage in his collection, Moody doesn't have a lot of room for cricket books but says he owns a hundred or so. He narrows his focus on historical tomes and particularly enjoys the work of Christian Ryan, Gideon Haigh ("clearly the best"), Mike Atherton and Mike Coward. He laughs heartily recalling an incident where he sat in a Melbourne cinema watching Max Walker deal admirably with heckling from a series of fellow patrons on account of the former Australian fast bowler's literary output.

One room of Moody's house dedicated to both music and his cricket DVDs, and - this would be familiar to collectors everywhere - the overflow ends up in "the other room". Soon enough his children will outgrow their shared bedroom and claim the space.

For fans like me, Moody's videos have filled the gaps on half-remembered events and resulted in remarkable journeys down digital rabbit holes, sometimes for hours on end. They are full of greatness, happiness, badness and madness, and his enthusiasm for the game is infectious. I don't doubt that his willingness to share his collection has encouraged others to adopt some of his passion and selflessness and upload their own forgotten gems. For that we should all be thankful.

Brushing aside the suggestion that he is a kind of folk hero in the world of cricket, Moody says, "It's just a Youtube channel. It's one amongst millions. I don't think it's as big a deal as people think."

On that point alone, he couldn't be more wrong.

Sexual favours at work: A menace nobody talks about

Tanuj Khosla in the Times of India

The topic of sexual harassment at work has again come to fore in recent times thanks to Tarun Tejpal. Flick to any news channel, you are likely to come across a panel discussion on the same (only displaced by one on elections). Reams have been written on the subject and how the guilty gets away more often than not while the victim lives with trauma and stigma for years to come not to mention damage to her career.

However there is another workplace menace that never gets the same print space or even mind space for that matter – use of sexual favours to rise up the career ladder.

Before I proceed any further, let me clarify that this topic has nothing do with the incident at Tehelka. I am as disgusted by Tejpal as everybody else and I hope that he pays for his deeds.

With that ‘disclaimer’ out of the way, let us come back to this phenomenon that happens often but is seldom discussed.

Pick any industry, media, banking, education etc., all of them have their version of ‘casting couch’.

Unfortunately there are no laws against this as the relationship is ‘consensual’. No one talks about the trauma and frustration faced by deserving employees whose career growth is unfairly stalled because they chose to keep their pants on. They suffer dual humiliation from the boss and his ‘pet’ and are saddled with HR mumbo jumbo in the name of explanation for denial of promotion/opportunities. I am sure that most readers would know at least one person who has suffered this fate.

What compounds this problem is that the existence of these clandestine relationships can’t be proved and organizations are only too happy to look to other way as long as results are being delivered. Employees treated badly have little recourse and it is not uncommon for them to lose their drive and motivation.

However this weapon of ‘sleep your way to the top’ is not only used by women alone. There is no dearth of young men willing to be ‘toy boys’ in the hands of their female bosses. Even providing ‘spouses’ to bosses is something that is not completely unheard of, as sick as that is. 

The first move towards initiation can be made by either party. In some cases, a senior manager with a ‘roving eye’ is all the invitation an aspiring junior needs. Conversely in many organizations, top bosses choose management trainees to serve on their team based on how the level of flirtations and accidental ‘free-shows’ they received during the orientation program. In cases of lateral movement or inter-department transfers, necessary ‘feedback’ is taken from fellow partners in crime.

In conclusion, corporate world is far from fair and many idealistic individuals get a rude reality check once they enter it. While I don’t have any statistics to back my claim, I am certain that the menace of using sexual favours for career advancement is as if not more rampant as sexual harassment at workplace. Unfortunately for many, it doesn’t get the attention that it deserves.

------

Pritish Nandy in the Times of India

The tosh men speak when accused of sexual misconduct always makes for funny reading. The reason is simple: Most men think it’s their birthright to sexually prey on women. They are brought up to believe that’s what all men, if they are real men, do. It has been said in a million ways, in books, songs, popular movies and yes, repeatedly in advertising, the most persuasive foreplay of our times, that when a woman says No, what she actually means is Yes.  

Not only men say this. Women do too. That there’s no woman ever unwilling for sex; all they need is a little persuasion. Perhaps Mae West was just being her usual witty self. But men, I suspect, have largely taken the advice to heart. Different men ofcourse look at persuasion differently. So while someone may clobber a woman on the head with a baseball bat and drag her to his bedroom, another will drop a 4 carat solitaire in a champagne flute. It’s just a difference of technique, not intent.

There’s no real difference between the guy who sneaks flunitrazepam into his date’s Bloody Mary when she goes for a quick loo break and the one who clumsily gropes an unwilling woman in an empty lift in the hope it may lead to something more exciting. It rarely does. A grope remains a grope. A groper, just a groper. He never quite graduates beyond that. But the most tragic figure of all is the pigtailed Romeo in the corner office flaunting his authority all day long and then, when the sun drops, tries to lunge at his juniors. That’s not seduction. It’s crass power play.

If our flamboyant editor has done what he is accused of, his crime would list in the last and most despicable category. But my intent here is not to tar him. There are enough people around to do it. My concern is that at some stage an actual trial must begin. It must assess the evidence coherently and come to a just conclusion. Currently we are putting the cart before the horse. While the truth may look obvious, facts have a curious habit of flipping themselves. So till the case is heard and justice dispensed with, it may be a good idea to stop playing a lynching mob. 

Discussing and dissecting every salacious detail of the alleged crime also rarely helps the victim. She has been brave enough to come out and seek justice. Probity now demands she gets it quickly. Without the BJP or the Congress trying to muscle in.  

As for Tejpal, he has shot himself in the foot. His journalistic career, always overhung with too many unanswered questions about his ethics, is as good as over. So is his life, as he has known it till now. Charges of rape, even when unproved, are not easy to live with. They are neither forgiven nor forgotten easily and even in jail, such convicts are often welcomed with a sound thrashing and flick knives.

Much of this, I believe, could have been averted if Tejpal had simply apologized to the victim and offered himself for trial. His flamboyant letter, where he claimed to be lacerated by guilt and offered to recuse himself from office for six months was so offensive in its tone that it enraged even those who were ready to give him some room for doubt. The florid language and cheeky tenor of the letter set everyone off. Purple prose from a rape accused is the last thing one expects. But no, he didn’t stop at that. He kept bombarding the hapless victim with more such messages. Without the slightest hint of remorse.

Tejpal may think he’s Christian Gray. That’s what he tries to sound like as he seeks recourse to every ridiculous subterfuge to hide the simple truth from himself, that the girl just did not want him. His messages, laced with arsenic and delivered with the flamboyance of a local pizza boy denied his tip, killed the possibility of any sympathy that may have come his way. Slighted stalkers are known to do stupid things. But nothing can be stupider than his attempts at correspondence. They were not just inapt. They are inept.

The 88-year-old Narayan Dutt Tiwari, caught in an equally embarrassing situation, that too in the Raj Bhavan, got away by simply lowering his head and keeping his silence. No explanations. No purple prose. No stupid heroics. The man may not know when to zip his dhoti. But he sure knew when to zip his mouth. Tejpal could have taken a lesson from him.

'Do you love your country?' is a trick question

Alan Rusbridger was asked by the home affairs select commitee if he loved his country, but national pride is a slippery concept

• 
• • Anne Perkins
  • theguardian.com, Wednesday 4 December 2013 11.42 GMT

'Nationalism depends on a kind of exceptionalism.' Photograph: Murad Sezer/Reuters

Do you love your country? When Keith Vaz, the MP who chairs the home affairs committee put the question to the Guardian's editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, midway through yesterday's evidence session on the NSA leaks, it was, almost certainly, meant helpfully. It was that lawyerly thing of getting out into the open the answer to the opposition's charge (the rather hefty one of treason) before the opposition had a chance to put it themselves. Cue unqualified affirmation!

But do you love your country? Well do you? Quite right, it's a trick question. The answer's not what you say, or even the way that you say it. The answer is in the pause between the end of the question and the start of the answer. If you need to stop and think about it, then you might just as well say no. You almost certainly don't love your country in the way that the person who asked the question meant.

All the same, it's a question that needs answering. Because the more nebulous the idea of country becomes – the more multi-layered national identity and the less certain national boundaries – the more important it is to understand how you identify yourself, if only to see off the people who want the answer to be an unqualified yes, delivered with all the plausibility of a besotted suitor. Just see the Mail's attack on Ed Miliband's father to see how potent it can be. The question can't be avoided, so it has to be reframed.

People have been making communities probably at least since they discovered two people could hunt down a bison better than one. That's what got us where we are. But all sorts of things happen once you begin creating communities. For a start, it has some implication of exclusion. Probably early hunting tribes weren't all that kind to people who were a bit rubbish with a bow and arrow. Recognising people we think are like us is not just about self-definition, it's about self-protection.

In time, an evolutionary convenience developed, the way these things do, into a handy way of keeping people in line. That's why Samuel Johnson declared patriotism the last refuge of the scoundrel (leaving Boswell to explain that he meant the kind of patriotism that was really a mask for self-interest). But Johnson had already spotted its capacity to be a lethal political idea. Sure enough it became the deadly force that moulded 19th and 20th-century Europe into warring factions, the glue to empire and a straitjacket for the social order. Feel free to add in your own particular grudge. Patriotism has a long history as the weapon of the establishment against the challenger.

But it has also, from time to time, been a way of defending what matters against an establishment with other ideas. When John of Gaunt first defined England as a sceptred isle, he was despairing of Richard II who was going to leave it "bound in with shame". Alex Salmond is running the referendum campaign on similar lines. He's framing it in the context of how the union is stopping Scotland being the country that destiny intended. He's suggesting it's impossible to be truly Scottish if you also think of yourself as British.

For nationalism depends on a kind of exceptionalism. National pride means imagining that your country has something unique and irreplaceable about it. It becomes all too easily an intolerant concept. I love my country, in so far as I love inanimate objects at all. But I love my country, and quite likely it's different from yours.

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Patriotism is not the same as spineless adoration of the Establishment

Owen Jones in The Independent

I would want to honour courageous, often faceless Brits who stood up to power

“Do you love your country?” The smirking phantom of the pinko-hunting Senator Joe McCarthy hovered over Labour’s Keith Vaz as he uttered those words. Who knows if they were intended to menace or support the Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, who was being interrogated by the home affairs committee over the Edward Snowden leaks. But the phrase is creepy nonetheless, not least in the febrile atmosphere over the National Security Agency revelations. Newspapers that have wailed over Leveson as a mortal threat to press freedom have indulged Government threats over the leaks. There is talk of journalists being locked away: and indeed, if the state begins prosecuting those who hold power to account, Britons interested in protecting our freedoms must surely take to the streets.

But patriotism is often subverted and manipulated by those with wealth and power. Loving your country means being subservient to the Establishment, or so goes their logic. Make the ruling class and the country interchangeable concepts, then those challenging the powerful can simply be swept aside as near-treasonous fifth columnists. To engage in a debate with those who question the ruling elite means legitimising their criticisms, treating them as reasonable criticisms, however wrong they may be. Far easier to discredit them instead, as those who despise the nation and whose motives are to do it harm.

The “Do you love your country” card is probably most notoriously used at times of war. It is patriotic to send young men and women to foreign countries to be slaughtered and maimed, but it is unpatriotic to bring them home to safety. It is used to strip civil liberties away, too, in the name of national security. Stripping away freedoms that our ancestors fought for becomes patriotic; defending our hard-won liberties becomes unpatriotic. It is used to oppress minorities. The rights of gay Britons becomes an insult to British “family values”. Immigrants may have helped build this country, but they are posed as a threat to national identity.

Questioning patriotism is a long-standing technique to crush dissent, not least from the left. Margaret Thatcher smeared the miners and their allies as “the enemy within” who, she claimed, were more of a threat than “the enemy without”. The Daily Mail recently, and infamously, smeared the socialist Ralph Miliband as “the man who hated Britain”. The absurdity of a newspaper that backed Hitler’s genocidal regime smearing a Jewish immigrant who fought the Nazis has been widely ridiculed. But actually the entire episode underlined how the very concept of patriotism is like a Rorschach inkblot test, where we all look at “the nation” and see what we want to see: we love aspects, and dislike, or even loathe, other features of it.

When defending the Mail’s smear that Miliband despised his country, the paper’s deputy editor reeled off a list of “great British institutions” that the left-wing academic had criticised: the likes of the Royal Family, the Church, the military and “our great newspapers” (don’t all choke at once). But of course, it is possible to reel off “great British institutions” that those on the right froth about: like the NHS (once described by the Tory Nigel Lawson as “the closest the English have to a religion”), the BBC, the public sector, and trade unions (once championed by Winston Churchill as “pillars of our British Society”).

Our history inspires pride and regret in different people, too. Some might champion monarchs and governments of centuries gone by, where I would want to honour courageous, often faceless Brits who stood up to power and injustice: like the Chartists, the suffragettes or anti-racist activists who were ridiculed, attacked and persecuted in their time. Some may relish the traditions of Empire, out of jingoism or ignorance or a combination of both, while I would regard it as a shameful and murderous stain on our nation’s past.

I love living in London partly because of its diversity, a feature of modern British life that others despise. Some prefer the tranquility of the open English countryside; others find it dull and claustrophobic, opting for the chaotic excitement of urban life instead. There are those of us who spend Sundays in Church, while others regard all incarnations of religion as a toxic blight on humanity. Some, like myself, hold that free-market capitalism is the engine of a profoundly unjust distribution of wealth and power; others devoutly believe that it is the catalyst for growth, prosperity and progress.

Not a single living Brit can honestly claim to love everything about something as complex and contradictory as Britain. But whatever Britain is, it certainly is not synonymous with those who rule it. And those who attempt to hold power to account as somehow un-British need to be faced down. We owe it our British ancestors who, in the teeth of opposition of other privileged and often tyrannical Brits, built this democracy, at such cost and with such sacrifice.

Tarek Fatah on India, Muslims, Mughals, Muhammad and Hindutwa

Shri Tarek Fatah, well known author and activist speaks on Islamism, history, Modi and the Mughals!

Part 2 of the interview. 

A UK driving license is basically a PhD in driving

An American tribute to British drivers

I have newfound respect for all the motorists I encounter on British roads. 

• 
• • Judd Birdsall
  • theguardian.com, Monday 2 December 2013 12.30 GMT

An experienced driving instructor can earn £35,000 a year. Photograph: Christopher Thomond

The United States and the United Kingdom have many important similarities, but a rigorous driving test is not one of them. As an American who recently passed the UK driving theory and practical tests, I have newfound respect for all the motorists I encounter on British roads.

To get my American license when I was 16 years old, I had to take a very short multiple choice theory test. Having not studied and never driven, I passed easily. Then I took a practical test that consisted of a 15-minute amble through a flat rural area. I performed poorly, and at the end of my test the examiner turned to me and said, "You really don't know what you're doin', do ya?" And he passed me.

I initially assumed the UK test was comparable to the one across the pond. But then I read that the large majority of UK motorists fail their first driving exam. And I heard horror stories of Americans and other foreigners failing multiple times. I began to study (or "revise" as you Brits say) in earnest.

I'm a doctoral student at Cambridge, and I'm quite sure I prepared much more for my driving tests than I will for my PhD viva next year.

A UK license is basically a PhD in driving.

I read the Highway Code. I read the entire 528-page AA Complete Test book, reviewing all of its 948 multiple-choice questions. I bought the Driving Test Success DVD, watching hours of slightly awkward inside-the-car footage of UK driving lessons. I watched countless "hazard perception" videos on YouTube.

The night before my practical test I fell asleep around 2am on my sofa with my laptop on my stomach as I watched "show me, tell me" vehicle safety tutorials. Had I not watched those videos, my answer to every vehicle safety question during the real test would have been "I would call my dad and then call AA."

(Note to American readers: AA is the British equivalent of AAA, but for some reason they don't call it the "American Automobile Association" in the UK.)

In the course of my studies I had to learn all those charming British motoring terms. To me, many of the terms sounded more like names for rock and folk bands. You know, when I was a teenager I loved heavy metal bands like Kerb, Slip Road, and MOT, and punk bands like The Rising Bollards. Now that I'm older, I prefer the gentler acoustic sound of bands like Soft Verge, Central Reservation, Pelican Crossing, Gantry Sign, and Urban Clearway, though I can still dig the pop-punk energy of Double Mini Roundabout.

I also had to create mnemonic devices to remember the differences between Britain's bird-name road crossings. A toucan crossing is where "two can" cross – both pedestrians and cyclists. At a puffin crossing, a pedestrian may be "huffin' and puffin' to get across" because there is no flashing amber light. Oh, apparently "amber" means "yellow" in English English. I've taken to calling Britain's other traffic lights ruby and emerald.

Thanks to my preparation, I passed the theory test, though my hazard perception score was hazardously low.

When the moment of my practical test arrived, I was a nervous wreck – though thankfully not a literal wreck. I tried to endear myself to my stiff-upper-lipped examiner by noting that the driving tests in America are "a bit different". He chuckled and said, "they're a joke".

To be fair to Americans, we drive big automatic cars on wide, open, straight roads, and most of our country is farmland and wilderness. Most of our towns and cities were laid out after the invention of the automobile. America is a car-based civilization. A Declaration of Independence from public transportation is part of our national psyche. A burdensome license test would be seen as an infringement on our fundamental human right to drive.

Things are "a bit different" in Britain. You have eight times the population density of the United States and many of your narrow, windy roads were developed before the invention of even the horse-drawn coach.

My American compatriots are shocked when I tell them that to earn a UK license I had to take a lengthy theory test, computerized hazard perception test, eye sight test, vehicle safety test, and a 40-minute driving test with a meticulous examiner jotting down each of my "faults" in real time.

As my faults mounted during the test, I prayed that we would turn back toward the test centre before I surpassed the maximum level of acceptable faultiness. I'm a married homeowner who drives an MPV with two toddlers in car seats; I'm hardly a risk-taker on the road. But I am an American. The examiner perceived my hazardousness and marked me down for not looking in my mirrors before I signalled – seven times.

Now I'm always conscious of looking in the mirrors before I signal and manoeuvre. Thanks to the rigors of the UK driving test, I'm a much safer driver, and I'm glad that I share the road with a nation of drivers who had to pass the same demanding test.

The people of Great Britain can be rightfully proud of their great driving skills. Whereas the easy US tests make me wary of American drivers, here in the UK, I've embraced the mantra Keep Calm and Drive On.