Don’t throw the book at the publisher

Shobha De in The Times of India

Am I offended by Wendy Doniger’s book? Hell, no! Am I surprised by what happened this week? Naaaah! Is it the end of the world? You must be joking. Do I think Hinduism is under threat or that Wendy set out to insult a great religion? Frankly, the answer is ‘no’ to both. Wendy Doniger is a professional scholar. This is her interpretation. She is entitled to it. Those who find the book objectionable need not read it. If you choose to read the material — and react — do it. Go ahead and write your own book. Or write to the scholar/author and refute the thesis. Hold a peaceful meeting and state your perspective. There are ways and ways to respond — passionately and spiritedly — without converting your views into an ugly, self-defeating pitched battle. Which is precisely what has happened with Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History. 

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Also read The Pulping of Thought

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Now, let’s see it from the publisher’s point of view (I have to state here that I am a Penguin author). But this battle does not begin or end with Penguin Books and Wendy Doniger. Nor with those who asked for the book to be withdrawn and pulped — the Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti. The SBAS has been at it for years (remember how 75 paragraphs were removed from several NCERT textbooks?). They will be at it for several more. The thing is, this time their victory appeared easy. Was it really a ‘victory’? And how easy was it? What about the publisher? The rather facile argument is that Penguin should not have buckled under pressure. That in ‘the old days’ publishers were bold enough to stand by authors and books. Well, it’s time to state the bald truth and say it like it is (sorry, intellectuals!). Those old days are over. The world of publishing has changed. Knock off all the romantic notions surrounding the book business and what do you get? A business under financial threat across the world. A business trying to stay afloat in the face of competition from unexpected directions and in entirely unknown forms (come on, who could have anticipated ebooks and free downloads?). Survival itself is at stake given these daunting developments. 

Besides, let’s be candid, at the end of the day, publishing IS a business. And every publisher in the universe is a ‘baniya publisher’ (a term that has been thrown around a lot these days). And hello! Which publisher would actively back a book that has zero sales potential? Which publisher is willing to lose money on a book? Which publisher wants a book/author to get into trouble? Not one. Every book is a gamble. It is published in good faith. Publishers don’t consciously court controversy. They don’t enjoy facing criminal charges (as in this case). And they certainly don’t like losing money! If that makes them ‘baniya publishers’, that’s okay. And yes, in today’s aggressive environment in which everything is potentially a ‘product’ that has to be flogged in the marketplace, there really isn’t that much of a difference left between selling a book and selling a bar of soap. If that sounds awful, it is a reality one has to accept. Authors and public intellectuals taking a lofty view of the publishing industry should smell the coffee. It is likely to get still worse by the ‘old’ standards, as decisions whether or not to publish a book are taken by marketing mavens crunching numbers and not visionary publishers willing to back a tome they believe in. Yes, it’s that grim. Publishers with a book like Wendy’s on their list are particularly vulnerable. It is not about having financial resources to fight it out in court. It is about asking a basic practical question: is it worth it? 

Wendy’s controversial book will do just fine. More people will read it now that it has become a hot potato. The SBAS will no doubt, look for other soft targets, and gloat over this particular win. The ‘scholar dollars’ won’t dry up. So, relax. Hinduism has survived worse. And will continue to thrive — book or no book. Our various freedoms are definitely under threat. Make no mistake about that. It’s just a question of figuring out whose freedom scores in such wars. And whether there is something called absolute freedom in the first place. A difficult decision needed to be taken. And it was taken. It was not ‘fear’ alone (despite the rumoured death threats) that dictated Penguin’s decision, I imagine. It was a question of not hurting public sentiment. There really are no winners here. Least of all the much-loathed SBAS.

The ‘Pulping’ Of Thought

That Penguin has decided to pulp Wendy Doniger's The Hindus should come as no surprise...

ARSHAD ALAM

This article is not about the content of Wendy Doniger’s book, The Hindus: An Alternative History. That debate, I am sure, will happen. This article is about the larger context within which, Penguin, the publisher of the book, decided to call it a day and reach an agreement with the little known Siksha Bachao Samiti which had found the book offensive to Hindu religious sensibilities. That Penguin has decided to pulp The Hindus should come as no surprise. Rather one must praise Penguin for fighting it out for four long years when many others surrendered meekly or were more than happy to oblige the government of the day.

This was waiting to happen. The signs were ominously clear. Remember James Laine’s book on Shivaji and its aftermath when the Sambhaji Brigade hoodlums decided that it reflected badly on their Maratha icon. Or consider the cowardly capitulation of the Symbiosis institute in cancelling the screening of Jashn- e-Azadi, again due to pressures from right wing Hindu groups. Consider again, the VC of Madras University succumbing to threats from a lunatic Muslim fringe and not letting Amina Wadud speak on the campus. In each of these cases, the method has been similar: religious or nationalist groups have approached the state that their ‘feelings’ are hurt, the state through the police or the courts has tried to convince institutions and individuals not to create a ‘law and order’ problem and the institutions have more than obliged. More than being a ‘republic of hurt’, we are in this present mess because the state has abdicated its responsibility to protect freedom and dissent.

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Also read The Silencing of Liberal India
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In the neo-liberal dispensation, the state has taken a managerial turn. It is no longer interested in ideological positioning towards the creation and inculcation of a modern citizenry. Rather, it has become post ideological in the sense that it is only interested in the management of a problem. In this kind of a resolution, ' community sentiments', no matter how dumb they may be, become the defining resolution. There is no creative engagement with the problem, but only postponing of the problem through an appeasement of the worst possible kind. The state has not withered away, but consciously abdicated itself, leaving matters of democracy and dissent to de dealt and debated by communities. In our case, religious communities are hardly amenable to a rational debate. 

Spokespersons of gods, they appropriate for themselves what is good or bad for their respective communities; they define the boundaries of free speech and limits of tolerance. If critique is central to modernity, then our principal critique should be directed towards religion. But the more important question to ask is whether one can do it in a context where the state is arraigned against the critic. We are perhaps looking into a bleak future: a future without criticality, engaged writing, meaningful publishing, ability to talk and think. Some have called this state of affairs as fascism.

What is equally problematic is the academic credibility that this managerial turn of the state gets through fashionable terms like multiculturalism. Acceptance of different faith communities must be promoted, but it should not preclude the right to criticise what one finds retrograde or purely abhorrent in a particular religious or cultural tradition. In the name of promoting and practising multiculturalism, there has emerged a culture of silence around issues which need to be critiqued and roundly condemned. Tolerance (which is itself a problematic word) of different cultural traditions should not mean tolerance of anti- women, anti- gay attitudes present within different cultures. Added to this is also the managerial turn of some activists who claim to have created alternative spaces for articulating dissent, freedom and resistance. Before we knew that Tarun Tejpal was more interested in profits (of different kinds) rather than in making us think through his ‘thinkfest’, there was the Jaipur literary festival. The meek abject surrender by the organisers which we witnessed when Salman Rushdie was not allowed to speak at the festival speaks volumes about their politics and conviction. One is tempted to ask the need for this alternative space when it cannot speak out against religious bigotry.

Freedoms of thought, freedom to hear and be heard are values which must be defended if India is to become a better democracy. And where religious communities are concerned, freedom to critique, provoke and even offend should be understood as an inalienable part of freedom of expression.

The silencing of liberal India

Pratap Bhanu Mehta in The Indian Express

Yet another book withdrawn and pulped by the publisher under pressure. The “pulping” of Wendy Doniger’s book, The Hindus: An Alternative History, is the pulping of liberal India. The agreement by the publisher to withdraw it is like putting a contract out on free expression. In India you publish at your peril. It is in a shockingly long line of books and art withdrawn from free circulation one way or the other, sometimes against the law, sometimes in the garb of law.

India is a democracy, but its reputation as a bastion of liberal values is dimming by the day. The argumentative Indian is being replaced by the offended Indian, the tolerant Indian by the intolerant mob, the reflective citizen by the hurt communal mobiliser, the courageous Indian by the cowardly thug who needs the state to protect it against every argument, the pious Indian by the ultimate blasphemer who thinks he needs to protect the gods rather than the gods being there to protect him. Whether this is a tiny minority or represents the majority is beside the point. The point is that the assault on free expression is winning. How is liberal India being silenced?

Liberal India is being silenced because its joy at exposing hypocrisy is far greater than its commitment to defending freedom. Every time a book is under assault, the same tiresome argument breaks out. “Oh, you did not speak when so and so was banned. You did not speak when Taslima Nasreen was the target, or when Jitender Bhargava was ordered to withdraw his book on Air India.” Or there is the partisan division: you did not object to what the Congress did to Salman Rushdie, or the CPM in West Bengal.

The point is that we spend all our psychic energies in exposing each other, not in defending values. If freedom is to survive, we have to set aside this debate on hypocrisy. It devours all energy. But it also legitimises the disposition that is at the heart of banning books: a fragile ego that takes joy in revenge, rather than taking pride in freedom. Let us get on with the task of defending the core values.

Liberal India has been silenced because it never understood that toleration does not, to use Govind Ranade’s phrase, come in halves. You cannot pick and choose when to be tolerant. You cannot choose to be tolerant along partisan lines. Neither can you choose to be tolerant based on what you think are distinctions between good and bad scholarship, serious and scurrilous books. These distinctions are a good basis for criticism; they are not the best basis for deciding whom the law will protect. And R.V. Bhasin, author of a banned book on Islam, will be protected as much as Wendy Doniger. And so it should be. If you want a hundred flowers to bloom, a few weeds will grow as well.

Liberal India has been silenced because the one institution that needs to protect it constantly fails: the courts. Civil society and politics have a lot to answer for. But the incentives to mobilise around the banning of books have largely been created by the laws and by the convoluted jurisprudence of the courts. A law that signals that it is open to banning books will incite mobilisations to ban books. If the state gives the category of taking easy “offence” such aid and succour, offence will be easily taken.

In the case of Doniger’s book, there seems to have been no threat of the book provoking large-scale violence. Despite protest and criticism, the book has been in circulation. But more importantly, the courts have sown the seeds of further confusion. For example, the Bombay High Court judgment on the Bhasin case upheld the idea that it is “no defence that the writing contains a truthful account of past events or is supported by good authority.” Courts uphold the idea that the criticism of religion must only be “academic”, whatever that means. Lampooing is part of legitimate criticism.

While banning the novel, Dharamkaarana, they showed no regard for the artistic integrity of the work. Courts should be the bully pulpit of constitutional values. They should draw strong lines protecting freedom. No wonder liberals worry that the court will not rescue them. No wonder the mere threat of litigation is a dampener on free expression.

Liberal India has been silenced by professional offence-mongers. Those who now claim to speak on behalf of communities use every trick they can to silence. There is often the threat of violence. The use of law is not, in this instance, an exercise of citizens’ rights. It is the use of law as a tactic of intimidation. Often, these groups have the implicit backing of political parties. No political party in Maharashtra stood up for the rights of scholars. As a result of the James Laine episode, most publishers do not want to even touch books on Shivaji.

The BJP’s relationship with groups that initiate these mobilisations has often been one of plausible deniability. It gives aid and succour to vicious offence mongering, it legitimises this contrived narrative of Hindu hurt. All it needs to do to overcome these suspicions is come clean and emphatically state that it does not support the “withdrawal” of books. We do not need political parties that take on the garb of liberalism by avoiding issues; we need political parties that actually defend liberal values.

Liberal India has been let down by its publishers. If major presses like Oxford University Press (OUP) and Penguin cave in to the threat of litigation so easily and fail to take matters up to the Supreme Court, it will become easier for people to intimidate. Recall OUP’s conduct in the case of the Calcutta High Court banning a scholarly monograph by Hans Dembowski on the judiciary. Indian business is supine because it feels politically vulnerable at so many different levels.

Liberal India has been silenced by its educators. The extraordinary failure of the project of liberal education is manifesting itself in the pathology of liberal institutions. If so many of India’s educated middle classes, which inhabit key institutions like the judiciary, bureaucracy, media, are so confused about basic constitutional values, if they are so content at liberty being abridged, one by one, you have to wonder about liberal education.

The fact that universities themselves did not remain exemplars of criticism, that they banished a healthy engagement with tradition has meant that the most ignorant and violent have now become the custodians of tradition. Wendy Doniger could not have damaged Hindus. But if Liberal India dies, Hinduism will die as well.

Pakistan - The pipe dream of peace

 

Khaled Ahmed | February 12, 2014 

In Pakistan, the Taliban is negotiating in bad faith. Its choice of interlocutors for talks and list of demands confirm this.

The peace pipe Pakistan wished to smoke with the Taliban was turned into  a pipe dream after the banned organisation issued, on February 9, the following “to do” list for Islamabad before it could think of a ceasefire: one, stop drone attacks; two, introduce sharia law in courts; three, introduce Islamic system of education in public and private institutions; four, release Pakistani and foreign Taliban prisoners; five, restore property damaged by drone attacks and pay compensation; six, hand over control of tribal areas to local forces; seven, withdraw the army from tribal areas and close down checkposts; eight, drop all criminal charges against the Taliban; nine, release prisoners from both sides; ten, grant equal rights for all, poor and rich; eleven, offer jobs to the families of drone-attack victims; twelve, end interest-based system; thirteen, end support for the US’s “war on terror”; fourteen, replace democratic system of governance with Islamic system; and fifteen, end all relations with the US.

After deciding to talk peace with the Taliban, Pakistan had nominated a four-member “pro-Taliban” negotiating team. The Taliban responded by naming a five-member, equally “pro-Taliban” team, without consultation with them: Maulana Samiul Haq of the Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam-Samiul Haq (JUI-S), Imran Khan of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), Kifaetullah of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F), Maulana Abdul Aziz of the Red Mosque of Islamabad and Mohammad Ibrahim of the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI). None of them is a member of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which is a banned organisation. The new Taliban leader, a wanted criminal named Mullah Fazlullah, seemed to thumb his nose at the state of Pakistan by choosing his team from the politico-religious mainstream.

The five members represent a Talibanised section of the country, boasting old connections with the Afghan Taliban and the TTP. The irony was crushing — Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s own team contained people with pro-Taliban and anti-American leanings. The idea was to win the confidence of the Taliban, but Mullah Fazlullah didn’t bite. The talks wouldn’t commit the TTP to anything.

Another irony was that Fazlullah named Imran Khan on his panel, thus creating a situation where the PTI would be talking to itself while pretending to talk to the TTP. Mercifully, Khan begged off from this absurd scenario. After that, Kifaetullah of the JUI-F too bowed out. The JUI-F is more vulnerable to the Taliban because of its location close to North Waziristan than Samiul Haq, whose seminary is close to Peshawar. Fazlur Rehman has escaped attacks from the terrorists, which means North Waziristan thinks him soft on the state of Pakistan.

Maulana Abdul Aziz, frontman of al-Qaeda’s policy of Islamic vigilantism in Islamabad, whom the judiciary is perhaps too scared to convict in scores of cases of terrorism, held a separate press conference in the capital with scary-looking armed guards to say that “nothing short of [the] removal of democracy and [the] constitution itself would be acceptable as a condition for peace.”

His Red Mosque was attacked by commando troops in 2007, after he staged a number of vigilante incidents to force Islamabad to become an Islamic city the way the TTP thinks it should be. He symbolises Pakistan’s trajectory of Islamisation since 1947 and causes the Pakistani mind to split over what should be the next phase of state identity. By voting rightwing in 2013 against the ever-dwindling liberal elements, the people of Pakistan have joined the issue on the side of the Taliban. Intimidation plays the part of a persuader more than is often realised.

After Imran Khan and the JUI-F opted out, Fazlullah reiterated his disdain towards Islamabad by proposing two replacements: the chief reporter of a leading English-language newspaper, Ansar Abbasi, whose reports read like sermonising opinion pieces; and a serving senior bureaucrat, Oria Maqbul Jan, whose crazy advocacy of the Taliban has upset all kinds of Pakistanis. Both begged off, although their worldview on TV talk shows has presaged the next mutation of the Islamic state.

A debate is raging on TV about sharia. Almost all religious organisations — most of them with street muscle and some clearly aligned with the TTP — are convinced that sharia is not in force, and therefore the Taliban demand for dismantling the modern state is justified. An important presence on the negotiating panel appointed by the Taliban, the Jamaat-e-Islami, has however decided not to support the Taliban’s rejection of the current constitution.

The Jamaat clerics, however, insist that Pakistan’s Islamic constitution is not acted upon. They have in the past rejected the modern state’s punishment of “bad” conduct (munkirat) under a penal code and neglect of “good” conduct (marufat) as pieties enforceable through punitive legislation. Starting in the post-medieval period in Europe, the modern state stopped punishing the lack of piety and concentrated only on punishing crime. The Muslims of the world, free to choose as in Egypt, want it back. Already, Pakistan is fast losing the distinction between sin and crime.

The drive to get the arrested Taliban out of state custody remains on top of the Taliban agenda. So far, they have broken two big jails under the administered jurisdiction of the state and got their killers out — most of them returning piously to their job of killing innocent people. The Shia remain in their crosshairs and don’t mind lying when it suits them to keep the common Pakistani deluded into thinking that the Shia are, in fact, being killed by America and India. They have denied the killing of Shias in a Peshawar restaurant earlier in February.

One reason the TTP has more credibility than the state is the former’s intimidatory hold over the media. Most opinion-makers in Urdu are already on their side because of Urdu’s more unbuttoned ideological message against the modern state. But the English-language newspapers are actually threatened into censoring themselves by removing the more convincing liberal-secular voices from their opinion pages.

The “popular consensus” is thus against the state and in favour of the terrorists. Of course, peace has to prevail, but will the state accept its death that easily? Sharif will have to intervene and say enough is enough at some stage of this unfolding farce.

In the first week of February, Finance Minister Ishaq Dar had to go to Dubai to meet the IMF team because the multilateral financial institution is unwilling to come to Islamabad after being painted by the media as an enemy of Islam and as an instrument of America’s diabolical plots against Pakistan. Dar was asking the IMF for another loan of a half a billion dollars while the Taliban had made a billion dollars in 2013 from Karachi alone .

One reason the Taliban can’t think of peace is the money it is making in Pakistan with almost zero loss of manpower, setting itself apart from the terror franchises in Yemen, Somalia and Mali — dying states that don’t have the financial lucre to attract terrorists. Pakistanis wonder who is financing the Taliban, often blaming Saudi Arabia, America and India.

The fact is that the Taliban is in the process of emptying Karachi of its cash after leaching the city of Peshawar dry. Out of the four billion dollars the Afghan Taliban makes from heroin, at least one billion falls to the TTP’s share as the “southern funnel”. Moreover, news of shakedowns from Islamabad and Lahore is being suppressed because the well-heeled victims want to keep it hush-hush.

Why is it always about the team?

Insiders consider Kevin Pietersen's lack of "teamliness" his biggest flaw but spectators love to watch him play. So who matters more?

Christian Ryan in Cricinfo

February 12, 2014

 

	KP: often turned spectators into pogo sticks © Getty Images  Enlarge

Cricket is not maths. Also, no wooden ruler exists that can be lined upright beside cricketers and the adjudication handed down to chop this brat, but this other brat's a brat who can bat, so he stays. And the far-sighted correspondents of several nations' newspapers have had their says while trying to convey the gist of the wishes of the England XI, of whom Kevin Pietersen is no longer one. That makes ten. And I get that Pietersen was ego-burdened, money-fixated, ungrateful, unruly, unEnglish and that reflecting ponds were for him a serious life hazard. But they're still only ten. People like me, who like cricket, we number billions.

Not all the billion-odd liked Pietersen. Of those that didn't, many gutturally and vehemently didn't. Few were indifferent to him. The usual blindfolded detective work has since gone into guessing the where, how, why and who of his sacking. Particularly foggy is the "who". Of the "who", we know only this: the billion-odd were not among them. The feelings of the billion-odd went unmentioned in the backroom manoeuvrings and were put on no table for consideration. The ten mattered totally, and none thought to think of the billion. If we twist "who" round to mean who of the ten wished Pietersen out, we are not actually sure it was ten. It could have been seven, and three abstainers; it may, for all that the detective work has so far taught us, have been one. And in a soundproof room, there rails a billion.

To propose that the cricket-watching public's interests should have been taken into account in all of this would be reckoned the zenith of stupidity, were anyone stupid enough to utter such a thing. Call me stupid but is it not striking how neatly this Pietersen business folds into the current governing crisis - the tripartite Indo-Anglo-Bozo hijacking of the International Cricket Council? At the root of that is a scrambling for TV money. And is it not the cricket-watching public's eyeballs that watch the cricket that spurs the ratings that attract the TV dollars that put the fuel inside the cricket administrators' flash cars?

	Pietersen was something stranger and rarer, too, than a player of great innings - a player of great shots. He'd dream up a shot, think wouldn't that be cool?, then try to get away with it

From there it may follow that if this billion-strong public, which brings in the bacon, likes to see a particular batsman bat - perhaps because he is entertaining and takes risks and bats with a certain free spirit - then the matter of them liking him should be a factor in any conversations held before that batsman is gotten rid of. But there are insiders. There are outsiders. The gap is wide. The insiders say the team's interests and team ethic is everything, always has been, which they are wrong about. Cricket for a lot of its existence was chiefly an entertainment. Were a player entertaining to watch, that could help get him a game. Not until much later did the winning and the losing take precedence over the entertaining. And only very recently did the making of money shout down all else, relegating entertainment to a distant third priority, with the entertainees voiceless.

The insiders believe a lack of teamliness in an individual's make-up to be the biggest and least overlookable flaw. I am not sure that's right either. Nor do the fixations alluded to earlier - with money, with self, with tasty biltong - seem so grave, on paper. Being a bully: that has to be worse. And I've read some history books and skimmed some player memoirs, and now my eyes are running down the all-time runs and wickets tables and although the bullies don't quite outnumber the goodies, the bullies are certainly not short of company. Of course, there is only so far one can go in separating these broader principles from the specific individual at hand: Pietersen.

"International cricket is where legacies are made," writes the Telegraph's Derek Pringle, "and Pietersen leaves with his only half realised as a player of great innings but not a great batsman."

Well, I know which kind of great I'd usually rather watch. And I worry that the maths is getting in theTelegraph correspondent's eyes. I don't watch batting averages ticking. I don't even watch cricket hoping a particular team will win. I watch to be moved and entertained. I can think of many a "great batsman" of my home country who moved me not nearly as much as a handful of "players of great innings" did.

Pietersen was something stranger and rarer, too, than a player of great innings - a player of great shots. He'd dream up a shot, think wouldn't that be cool?, then try to get away with it. Such a batsman's a high-value spectator attraction. A by-product is that his value to spectators can run in inverse proportion to the team. But why is it always about the team, never the spectator?

	Pietersen's relationship with South Africa was often a prickly one © PA Photos  Enlarge

Not only that. Pietersen, having hatched this shot out of the blue sky once and escaped, would reattempt it. At Edgbaston in 2006 medium-pacer Farveez Maharoof was bowling to a loaded off-side field. Before the next ball left Maharoof's hand, Pietersen was leaning across, softly wandering, culminating in a giant step forward, and though the ball landed a foot and a half outside off stump, angling further away, Pietersen's hands followed it, his wrists uncoiling, and he dispatched the ball miraculously cross-careening past mid-on to where no fielders were stationed. By then Pietersen was perching lopsided and one-legged, his back foot curled in the air. The shot acquired a name - "the flamingo" - and when he tried something similar off Dwayne Bravo at Headingley a year later he made Mike Atherton splutter into his microphone. "Unbelievable shot. It's the length that enables him to play the stroke. Anything a bit short and it's a more difficult shot to play… " - which rang true of the Bravo ball. But the Maharoof ball pitched barely halfway up. The wrist strength required of Pietersen was verging on uncomputable. He was 70 not out. On 79 he did it again: same bowler and field setting, near-replica delivery, four runs. And this - the reattempting of it - was what tipped the crowd over the edge, turned individual spectators into pogo sticks. That Pietersen passage burns in the memory alongside a 51 he made in Melbourne when I counted how many times he let the ball go, 14, each leave so tumultuous that the bat's stickers were pointing sky-side up.

He had another quality - what Sir Viv Richards was sort of referring to last year when he claimed "the comparison I'm drawing is with Muhammad Ali… you want to see KP get knocked over, but he goes out there and bang, bang, bang!", except an online commentator underneath a Guardian post put it better last week:

Since I started watching cricket as a 10 year old in 1991, I have seen no England batsman so talented and so exciting to watch … You don't really need more than that, but here's why I loved him more: his attitude, his demeanour, his style of play thoroughly pissed off the English cricketing establishment and I bloody loved it. These are the people who dropped Gower … who ruined Hick and Ramprakash.

I make no apology for quoting a member of the public, one of the billion-odd.

I do not want a reality TV-type scenario where people can text-vote "KP In/Out". I'd prefer to trust wise men to make the call and for one of their criteria to be the good that a player gives to cricket - and I'm not confident that happened here or ever does anymore.

And I accept what the journalist Peter Oborne writes of Don Bradman, Frank Worrell, Abdul Hafeez Kardar and a cricket world where "it was axiomatic that the individual should subordinate himself and his talents to the team". I see the nobleness in this, and it was an ingredient always missing in Pietersen, and had it been there he'd have been even better to watch, pure pleasure.

Oborne continues: "In so far as Pietersen has any nationality, he seems to be South African… He emerged as a cricketer in the most wonderful moment in South African history, when apartheid had gone and the country was building a multi-racial national team. Pietersen wanted no part in this new world. He got out as soon as he could, claiming that the positive discrimination necessary to help black cricketers stood in his way."

They are words that damn, as were Rachel Cooke's in an Observer profile of Pietersen years ago - "When he smiles it's only his mouth that softens, not his eyes." I know without meeting him that's right. I've seen the cold-eyes smile. It was even there at Edgbaston, in Melbourne. And when I reread something Pietersen said to Cooke - "I've never once criticised South Africa. I love the country. The people are fantastic. The exchange rate is magnificent" - what I think is: tosshead.

But there are high-stakes questions here, e.g. why does cricket exist? And for who? All I'm sure of is that two plus two is seven, and Pietersen equals the cricketer who cricket could least afford to lose.

Switzerland's immigration 'victory' over the EU is a fairytale sold by the far right

Eurosceptics are lining up in praise of the defiant vote, but the fallout for Swiss people could be devastating

• 
• • Claudia Gnehm-Laubscher
  • theguardian.com, Tuesday 11 February 2014 17.40 GMT

The French National Front party leader Marine Le Pen. Photograph: Nicolas Tucat/AFP/Getty Images

The winners of the Swiss referendum on EU immigration now tell a story that has become ingrained in Swiss lore: that poor, powerless peasants have cast off their evil foreign lords and masters. Not surprising, then, that after engineering the victory, the billionaire member of parliament Christoph Blocher, of the populist rightwing Swiss Peoples Party (SVP), stated: "Now we take power in our own hands again, the government must represent the will of the Swiss people in Brussels – the sooner the better."

The supposed victory of the Swiss David over the EU Goliath has been applauded by Geert Wilders of the Dutch far-right Freedom Party (PVV) and in France by Marine Le Pen's National Front. The Eurosceptic FPÖ in Austria and the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) are also now demanding that voters in their countries should have the same say on EU matters, particularly immigration.

Switzerland, however, is a poor model for these countries to emulate. The Swiss don't need an EU exit because all they have is à la carte bilateral accords with the union. The free movement of citizens was the bitter pill the right had to swallow for goodies such as participation in EU research programmes, transit agreements, or police and asylum co-operation. Thanks to the latter, Switzerland can, for example, repatriate asylum seekers to EU countries.

If Britain, the Netherlands and other countries think they can break away from the EU while cherry-picking the bits they still want, like the Swiss have, they are dreaming. Switzerland could only ever opt for an all-or-nothing agreement – with a guillotine clause. This means that if one bilateral agreement is broken, as far as the EU is concerned all the rest is invalid too, and the fallout is potentially devastating. The Swiss business community, our hospitals, schools and colleges, tourism and the building industry which rely on an EU workforce are appalled. Students who benefit from EU exchange programmes and the energy sector which wants to sell its storage capacity to the EU all now fear that their future is called into question.

To see Switzerland as a role model for autonomy or the repatriation of sovereignty is a misjudgment of the reality. The more bilateral accords Switzerland gathered, the clearer it became that Switzerland was merely enacting EU law in a "self-governed" way. Autonomy was an illusion. In 2012, the council and the commission of the EU made clear to the Swiss that no new bilateral agreements would be possible unless Switzerland took on board all future EU reforms and developments. Since then, Swiss demands for a bilateral agreement on services and energy have stalled – and now there will be no accord anytime soon.

Of course, Blocher and his followers still believe that the EU will give us a helping hand whenever we need it. But what EU governments want from Switzerland is tax on the undeclared money of their citizens deposited in Swiss banks. Blocher's story of the poor peasant who opposes the foreign king is, in the face of Swiss wealth, ridiculous. The Italians whose workers are no longer welcome in Switzerland now say they want the tax being hidden by Italians in Swiss bank accounts – and if necessary they will name and shame tax dodgers like Germany does.

If anything Switzerland should be a bad model for EU countries. It was not only ultra-conservatives in the Swiss-German countryside who voted in favour of ending EU immigration. It was also the many workers, faced with competition from cheaper migrant labour, commuters in overcrowded trains and middle-class families who can no longer afford flats in the cities. Yet these moderate voters – they are estimated to account for 20% of the yes voters – received little to calm their fears. They wanted rent controls, measures to guard against wage dumping and minimum salaries. But there was no clear support from employer associations, the companies that profit most from the free movement of workers, nor the government.

So their perfectly rational concerns were exploited by the fear campaign waged by the rich Pied Pipers of the right. There are many more such Pied Pipers going around Europe with easy, popular solutions, including the scapegoating of immigrants, in an attempt to win the votes of those with justifiable fears. Switzerland has an unemployment rate of 3.5%; there is a lot to lose.

Switzerland is not a model for more wealth with autonomy in the EU. Its competitive advantages such as banking secrecy and low holding taxation are waning, and its most important resource, the brain power of the people, is now curtailed by immigration quotas. Switzerland is a stark warning to those EU companies, organisations and professionals who reap the fruits of the single market and the globalised economy, while giving little or no thought to the millions of ordinary workers who would miss out if the EU project came unstuck.

How internet dating became everyone's route to a perfect love match

The algorithm method: how internet dating became everyone's route to a perfect love match

Six million Britons are looking for their perfect partner online before Valentine's day on Friday, but their chance of success may depend on clever maths rather than charisma

• James Bridle
• The Observer, Sunday 9 February 2014

Six million Britons visit dating sites each month. Photograph: Tom Merton/Getty Images/OJO Images RF

In the Summer of 2012, Chris McKinlay was finishing his maths dissertation at the University of California in Los Angeles. It meant a lot of late nights as he ran complex calculations through a powerful supercomputer in the early hours of the morning, when computing time was cheap. While his work hummed away, he whiled away time ononline dating sites, but he didn't have a lot of luck – until one night, when he noted a connection between the two activities.

One of his favourite sites, OkCupid, sorted people into matches using the answers to thousands of questions posed by other users on the site.

"One night it started to dawn on me the way that people answer questions on OkCupid generates a high dimensional dataset very similar to the one I was studying," says McKinlay, and it transformed his understanding of how the system worked. "It wasn't like I didn't like OkCupid before, it was fine, I just realised that there was an interesting problem there."

McKinlay started by creating fake profiles on OkCupid, and writing programs to answer questions that had also been answered by compatible users – the only way to see their answers, and thus work out how the system matched users. He managed to reduce some 20,000 other users to just seven groups, and figured he was closest to two of them. So he adjusted his real profile to match, and the messages started rolling in.

McKinlay's operation was possible because OkCupid, and so many other sites like it, are much more than just simple social networks, where people post profiles, talk to their friends, and pick up new ones through common interest. Instead, they seek to actively match up users using a range of techniques that have been developing for decades.

Every site now makes its own claims to "intelligent" or "smart" technologies underlying their service. But for McKinlay, these algorithms weren't working well enough for him, so he wrote his own. McKinlay has since written a book Optimal Cupid about his technique, while last year Amy Webb, a technology CEO herself, published Data, a Love Story documenting how she applied her working skills to the tricky business of finding a partner online.

Two people, both unsatisfied by the programmes on offer, wrote their own; but what about the rest of us, less fluent in code? Years of contested research, and moral and philosophical assumptions, have gone into creating today's internet dating sites and their matching algorithms, but are we being well served by them? The idea that technology can make difficult, even painful tasks – including looking for love – is a pervasive and seductive one, but are their matchmaking powers overstated?

 The Kiss, 1901-4, by sculptor Auguste Rodin. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

In the summer of 1965, a Harvard undergraduate named Jeff Tarr decided he was fed up with the university's limited social circle. As a maths student, Tarr had some experience of computers, and although he couldn't program them himself, he was sure they could be used to further his primary interest: meeting girls. With a friend he wrote up a personality quiz for fellow students about their "ideal date" and distributed it to colleges across Boston. Sample questions included: "Is extensive sexual activity [in] preparation for marriage, part of 'growing up?'" and "Do you believe in a God who answers prayer?" The responses flooded in, confirming Tarr's suspicion that there was great demand for such a service among the newly liberated student population. Operation Match was born.

In order to process the answers, Tarr had to rent a five-ton IBM 1401 computer for $100 an hour, and pay another classmate to program it with a special matching operation. Each questionnaire was transferred to a punch-card, fed into the machine, and out popped a list of six potential dates, complete with address, phone number and date of graduation, which was posted back to the applicant. Each of those six numbers got the original number and five others in their response: the program only matched women with their ideal man if they fitted his ideal too.

When Gene Shalit, a reporter from Look magazine, arrived to cover the emerging computer-dating scene in 1966, Operation Match claimed to have had 90,000 applications and taken $270,000 in revenue. Even at the birth of the computer revolution, the machine seemed to have an aura about it, something which made its matches more credible than a blind date or a friend's recommendation. Shalit quoted a freshman at Brown University who had dumped her boyfriend but started going out with him again when Operation Match sent her his number. "Maybe the computer knows something that I don't know," she said. Shalit imbued it with even more weight, calling it "The Great God Computer".

The computer-dating pioneers were happy to play up to the image of the omniscient machine – and were already wary of any potential stigma attached to their businesses. "Some romanticists complain that we're too commercial," Tarr told reporters. "But we're not trying to take the love out of love; we're just trying to make it more efficient. We supply everything but the spark." In turn, the perceived wisdom of the machine opened up new possibilities for competition in the nascent industry, as start-up services touted the innovative nature of their programs over others. Contact, Match's greatest rival, was founded by MIT graduate student David DeWan and ran on a Holywell 200 computer, developed in response to IBM's 1401 and operating two to three times faster. DeWan made the additional claim that Contact's questions were more sophisticated than Match's nationwide efforts, because they were restricted to elite college students. In essence, it was the first niche computer-dating service.

Over the years since Tarr first starting sending out his questionnaires, computer dating has evolved. Most importantly, it has become online dating. And with each of these developments – through the internet, home computing, broadband, smartphones, and location services – the turbulent business and the occasionally dubious science of computer-aided matching has evolved too. Online dating continues to hold up a mirror not only to the mores of society, which it both reflects, and shapes, but to our attitudes to technology itself.

The American National Academy of Sciences reported in 2013 that more than a third of people who married in the US between 2005 and 2012 met their partner online, and half of those met on dating sites. The rest met through chatrooms, online games, and elsewhere. Preliminary studies also showed that people who met online were slightly less likely to divorce and claimed to be happier in their marriages. The latest figures from online analytics company Comscore show that the UK is not far behind, with 5.7 million people visiting dating sites every month, and 49 million across Europe as a whole, or 12% of the total population. Most tellingly for the evolution of online dating is that the biggest growth demographic in 2012 was in the 55+ age range, accounting for 39% of visitors. When online dating moves not only beyond stigma, but beyond the so-called "digital divide" to embrace older web users, it might be said to have truly arrived.

It has taken a while to get there. Match.com, founded in 1993, was the first big player, is still the biggest worldwide, and epitomises the "online classifieds" model of internet dating. Match.com doesn't make any bold claims about who you will meet, it just promises there'll be loads of them. eHarmony, which followed in 2000, was different, promising to guide its users towards long-term relationships – not just dating, but marriage. It believed it could do this thanks to the research of its founder, Neil Clark Warren, a then 76-old psychologist and divinity lecturer from rural Iowa. His three years of research on 5,000 married couples laid the basis for a truly algorithmic approach to matching: the results of a 200-question survey of new members (the "core personality traits"), together with their communication patterns which were revealed while using the site.

Whatever you may think of eHarmony's approach – and many contest whether it is scientifically possible to generalise from married people's experiences to the behaviour of single people – they are very serious about it. Since launch, they have surveyed another 50,000 couples worldwide, according to the current vice-president of matching, Steve Carter. When they launched in the UK, they partnered with Oxford University to research 1,000 British couples "to identify any cultural distinctions between the two markets that should be represented by the compatibility algorithms". And when challenged by lawsuits for refusing to match gay and lesbian people, assumed by many to be a result of Warren's conservative Christian views (his books were previously published in partnership with the conservative pressure group, Focus on the Family), they protested that it wasn't morality, but mathematics: they simply didn't have the data to back up the promise of long-term partnership for same-sex couples. As part of a settlement in one such lawsuit, eHarmony launched Compatible Partners in 2009.

Carter says: "The Compatible Partners system is now based on models developed using data collected from long-term same-sex couples." With the rise of Facebook, Twitter, and celebrity-driven online media, have come more personalised and data-driven sites such as OkCupid, where Chris McKinlay started his operation. These services rely on the user supplying not only explicit information about what they are looking for, but a host of assumed and implicit information as well, based on their morals, values, and actions. What underlies them is a growing reliance not on stated preferences – for example, eHarmony's 200-question surveys result in a detailed profile entitled "The Book of You" – but on actual behaviour; not what people say, but what they do.

In 2007, Gavin Potter made headlines when he competed successfully in the Netflix Prize, a $1m competition run by the online movie giant to improve the recommendations its website offered members. Despite competition from teams composed of researchers from telecoms giants and top maths departments, Potter was consistently in the top 10 of the leaderboard. A retired management consultant with a degree in psychology, Potter believed he could predict more about viewers' tastes from past behaviour than from the contents of the movies they liked, and his maths worked. He was contacted by Nick Tsinonis, the founder of a small UK dating site called yesnomayb, who asked him to see if his approach, called collaborative filtering, would work on people as well as films.

Collaborative filtering works by collecting the preferences of many people, and grouping them into sets of similar users. Because there's so much data, and so many people, what exactly the thing is that these groups might have in common isn't always clear to anyone but the algorithm, but it works. The approach was so successful that Tsinonis and Potter created a new company, RecSys, which now supplies some 10 million recommendations a day to thousands of sites. RecSys adjusts its algorithm for the different requirements of each site – what Potter calls the "business rules" – so for a site such as Lovestruck.com, which is aimed at busy professionals, the business rules push the recommendations towards those with nearby offices who might want to nip out for a coffee, but the powerful underlying maths is Potter's. Likewise, while British firm Global Personals provides the infrastructure for some 12,000 niche sites around the world, letting anyone set up and run their own dating website aimed at anyone from redheads to petrolheads, all 30 million of their users are being matched by RecSys. Potter says that while they started with dating "the technology works for almost anything". RecSys is already powering the recommendations for art discovery site ArtFinder, the similar articles search on research database Nature.com, and the backend to a number of photography websites. Of particular interest to the company is a recommendation system for mental health advice site Big White Wall. Because its users come to the site looking for emotional help, but may well be unsure what exactly it is they are looking for, RecSys might be able to unearth patterns of behaviour new to both patients and doctors, just as it reveals the unspoken and possibly even unconscious proclivities of daters.

 Tinder is a new dating app on smartphones.

Back in Harvard in 1966, Jeff Tarr dreamed of a future version of his Operation Match programme which would operate in real time and real space. He envisioned installing hundreds of typewriters all over campus, each one linked to a central "mother computer". Anyone typing their requirements into such a device would receive "in seconds" the name of a compatible match who was also free that night. Recently, Tarr's vision has started to become a reality with a new generation of dating services, driven by the smartphone.

Suddenly, we don't need the smart algorithms any more, we just want to know who is nearby. But even these new services sit atop a mountain of data; less like Facebook, and a lot more like Google.

Tinder, founded in Los Angeles in 2012, is the fastest-growing dating app on mobile phones but its founders don't like calling it that. According to co-founder and chief marketing officer Justin Mateen, Tinder is "not an online dating app, it's a social network and discovery tool".

He also believes that Tinder's core mechanic, where users swipe through Facebook snapshots of potential matches in the traditional "Hot or Not" format, is not simple, but more sophisticated: "It's the dynamic of the pursuer and the pursued, that's just how humans interact." Tinder, however, is much less interested in the science of matching up couples than its predecessors. When asked what they have learned about people from the data they have gathered, Mateen says the thing he is most looking forward to seeing is "the number of matches that a user needs over a period of time before they're addicted to the product" – a precursor of Tinder's expansion into other areas of ecommerce and business relationships.

Tinder's plans are the logical extension of the fact that the web has really turned out to be a universal dating medium, whatever it says on the surface. There are plenty of sites out there deploying the tactics and metrics of dating sites without actually using the D-word. Whether it's explicit – such as Tastebuds.fm, which matches up "concert buddies" based on their Spotify music tastes – or subtle, the lessons of dating research have been learned by every "social" site on the web. Nearly every Silicon Valley startup video features two photogenic young people being brought together, whatever the product, and the same matching algorithms are at work whether you're looking for love, a jobbing plumber, or a stock photograph.

Over at UCLA, Chris McKinlay's strategy seems to have paid off. After gathering his data and optimising his profile, he started receiving 10-12 unsolicited messages every day: an unheard of figure online, where the preponderance of creeps tends to put most women on the defensive. He went on 87 dates, mostly just a coffee, which "were really wonderful for the most part". The women he met shared his interests, were "really intelligent, creative, funny" and there was almost always some attraction. But on the 88th date, something deeper clicked. A year later, he proposed.

Online dating has always been in part about the allure and convenience of the technology, but it has mostly been about just wanting to find "the one". The success of recommendation systems ,which are just as applicable to products as people, says much about the ability of computers to predict the more fundamental attractions that would have got McKinlay there sooner – his algorithms improved his ability to get dates, but not much on the likelihood of them progressing further.

In the end, the development of online dating tells us more about our relationship with networked technology than with each other: from "the Great God Computer", to a profusion of data that threatens to overwhelm us, to the point where it is integrated, seamlessly and almost invisibly, with every aspect of our daily lives.