The Workers' party? That's us, say Tories in bid to rebrand

'Workers' party' will be used to describe Conservatives as David Cameron tries to rid Tories of their image as guardians of rich

• Nicholas Watt, chief political correspondent
• The Guardian, Tuesday 25 February 2014

Conservative party chairman Grant Shapps will say: "The Conservatives are the Workers’ party and we are on your side.” Photograph: Christopher Thomond

They are two words David Cameron's ancestors would more often have put together to describe a summer shindig for the employees on their estates.

But the words "Workers' party" will now be used to describe the Conservatives as Cameron tries to rid the Tories of their image as the guardians of the rich.

Grant Shapps, the party chairman, will stand alongside Sir John Major, the former champion of the "classless society", to announce that the Tories are now determined to show they want to spread – and not defend – privilege.

Speaking at the new Conservative campaign headquarters, the Tory chairman will say: "The Conservatives are the Workers' party and we are on your side."

The name of the Workers' party has a long, if less than noble, history. It was the moniker taken by former supporters of the Official IRA, which split from the Provisional IRA in 1969, when they broke from paramilitarism in the 1970s. Provisionals refer to the Officials as "stickies".

There is also the Trotskyist Socialist Workers' party, which rails against capitalism in the west and used to campaign against the "state capitalism" of the USSR.

The Tories are depicting themselves as the Workers' Party as they try to reach out to blue collar workers. Tory strategists believe that the only way to win a majority, by increasing the party's vote in the north of England and in the Midlands, is by reaching out to voters who may see the Conservatives as the party of the rich – hence the repositioning exercise.

Shapps has decided to go some way to accepting a proposal by the campaigning backbench MP Robert Halfon for the Tories to rename themselves the Workers' party. In a Sun article, Halfon said the party should replace its green oak tree logo with a ladder.

The Tory chairman will keep the party's name but will then describe the Conservatives in the next breath as the "Workers' party".

In his speech, extracts of which were released to the Daily Mail, Shapps will say: "Sir John Major campaigned for what he called a 'classless society, and I would argue this is the society we are fighting for in government today: a Britain where it doesn't matter who your parents are, where you can go as far as your talents and hard work will take you, and where work – rather than benefits – is what pays."

In a sign of the impact of the Tories' general election campaign chief Lynton Crosby, Shapps will release a five point pledge card modelled on the New Labour pledge card of 1997 which sets out the ideas for Britain's "long term economic plan".

The pledges, released to the Daily Mail, are: reducing the deficit, cutting income tax and freezing fuel duty, backing small business to create more jobs, capping welfare and reducing immigration; and delivering the best schools.

Shapps will say of Major: "Imagine a young kid growing up in inner city London – just a few miles from here. His mum and dad are working, but not very rich, trying to pay the bills.

"This young man was not particularly academic. He quit school at 16 and struggled to get on. So let me ask you something: what did the Conservative Party have to offer someone like that? I'll tell you. That young man's name is John Major, and the Conservative Party made him Prime Minister … His life is a symbol of our party. It shows whose side we are on."

The remarks by the Tory chair came as Downing Street did little to distance itself from a report in the Daily Telegraph that Cameron will give an undertaking during the general election campaign not to enter into another coalition even if he falls short of an overall majority. A No 10 source said: "The prime minister has made clear he is going all out for a Conservative majority."

This is no recovery, this is a bubble – and it will burst

Stock market bubbles of historic proportions are developing in the US and UK markets. With policymakers unwilling to introduce tough regulation, we're heading for trouble

• 
• • Ha-Joon Chang
  • The Guardian, Monday 24 February 2014 18.00 GMT

'Share prices are high mainly thanks to quantitative easing not because of the strength of the underlying real economy.' Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

According to the stock market, the UK economy is in a boom. Not just any old boom, but a historic one. On 28 October 2013, the FTSE 100 index hit 6,734, breaching the level achieved at the height of the economic boom before the 2008 global financial crisis (that was 6,730, recorded in October 2007).

Since then, it has had ups and downs, but on 21 February 2014 the FTSE 100 climbed to a new height of 6,838. At this rate, it may soon surpass the highest ever level reached since the index began in 1984 – that was 6,930, recorded in December 1999, during the heady days of the dotcom bubble.

The current levels of share prices are extraordinary considering the UK economy has not yet recovered the ground lost since the 2008 crash; per capita income in the UK today is still lower than it was in 2007. And let us not forget that share prices back in 2007 were themselves definitely in bubble territory of the first order.

The situation is even more worrying in the US. In March 2013, the Standard & Poor 500 stock market index reached the highest ever level, surpassing the 2007 peak (which was higher than the peak during the dotcom boom), despite the fact that the country's per capita income had not yet recovered to its 2007 level. Since then, the index has risen about 20%, although the US per capita income has not increased even by 2% during the same period. This is definitely the biggest stock market bubble in modern history.

Even more extraordinary than the inflated prices is that, unlike in the two previous share price booms, no one is offering a plausible narrative explaining why the evidently unsustainable levels of share prices are actually justified.

During the dotcom bubble, the predominant view was that the new information technology was about to completely revolutionise our economies for good. Given this, it was argued, stock markets would keep rising (possibly forever) and reach unprecedented levels. The title of the book, Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting from the Coming Rise in the Stock Market, published in the autumn of 1999 when the Dow Jones index was not even 10,000, very well sums up the spirit of the time.

Similarly, in the runup to the 2008 crisis, inflated asset prices were justified in terms of the supposed progresses in financial innovation and in the techniques of economic policy.

It was argued that financial innovation – manifested in the alphabet soup of derivatives and structured financial assets, such as MBS, CDO, and CDS – had vastly improved the ability of financial markets to "price" risk correctly, eliminating the possibility of irrational bubbles. On this belief, at the height of the US housing market bubble in 2005, both Alan Greenspan (the then chairman of the Federal Reserve Board) and Ben Bernanke (the then chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President and later Greenspan's successor) publicly denied the existence of a housing market bubble – perhaps except for some "froth" in a few localities, according to Greenspan.

At the same time, better economic theory – and thus better techniques of economic policy – was argued to have allowed policymakers to iron out those few wrinkles that markets themselves cannot eliminate. Robert Lucas, the leading free-market economist and winner of the 1995 Nobel prize in economics, proudly declared in 2003 that "the problem of depression prevention has been solved". In 2004, Ben Bernanke (yes, it's him again) argued that, probably thanks to better theory of monetary policy, the world had entered the era of "great moderation", in which the volatility of prices and outputs is minimised.

This time around, no one is offering a new narrative justifying the new bubbles because, well, there isn't any plausible story. Those stories that are generated to encourage the share price to climb to the next level have been decidedly unambitious in scale and ephemeral in nature: higher-than-expected growth rates or number of new jobs created; brighter-than-expected outlook in Japan, China, or wherever; the arrival of the "super-dove" Janet Yellen as the new chair of the Fed; or, indeed, anything else that may suggest the world is not going to end tomorrow.

Few stock market investors really believe in these stories. Most investors know that current levels of share prices are unsustainable; it is said that George Soros has already started betting against the US stock market. They are aware that share prices are high mainly because of the huge amount of money sloshing around thanks to quantitative easing (QE), not because of the strength of the underlying real economy. This is why they react so nervously to any slight sign that QE may be wound down on a significant scale.

However, stock market investors pretend to believe – or even have to pretend to believe – in those feeble and ephemeral stories because they need those stories to justify (to themselves and their clients) staying in the stock market, given the low returns everywhere else.

The result, unfortunately, is that stock market bubbles of historic proportion are developing in the US and the UK, the two most important stock markets in the world, threatening to create yet another financial crash. One obvious way of dealing with these bubbles is to take the excessive liquidity that is inflating them out of the system through a combination of tighter monetary policy and better financial regulation against stock market speculation (such as a ban on shorting or restrictions on high-frequency trading). Of course, the danger here is that these policies may prick the bubble and create a mess.

In the longer run, however, the best way to deal with these bubbles is to revive the real economy; after all, "bubble" is a relative concept and even a very high price can be justified if it is based on a strong economy. This will require a more sustainable increase in consumption based on rising wages rather than debts, greater productive investments that will expand the economy's ability to produce, and the introduction of financial regulation that will make banks lend more to productive enterprises than to consumers. Unfortunately, these are exactly the things that the current policymakers in the US and the UK don't want to do.

We are heading for trouble.

Why we write books

ANANYA VAJPEYI in the hindu

Who becomes a scholar in order to insult and injure others? It is the bigots, propagandists, trolls and fundamentalists of the world who trade in insult and injury

Penguin India’s decision to withdraw Wendy Doniger’s book, The Hindus: An Alternative History, from publication — as a result of legal and possibly extralegal pressure from a right-wing organisation — has thrown up a series of questions in the public sphere. These include questions around the ethics of corporate action and the limits of corporate responsibility in supporting and protecting authors; the prevalence of two sets of laws in India — those governing freedom of expression and those governing insult and injury to groups defined around different vectors of identity, including religion and caste — and how these laws might constrain or override one another; and looming questions about the kinds of effects that a neo-nationalist and majoritarian political regime is likely to have on the spectrum of civil liberties and citizens’ rights in the coming months.

Together with five senior historians and Indologists of repute, I co-authored a public petition to our Parliamentarians and the Law Minister about the Doniger issue — (“Signing for freedom,” Comment page, The Hindu, February 15, 2014). Within a week of being up on the website Change.org, this petition garnered nearly 3,500 signatures worldwide. Whatever the actions of the book’s publisher, and whatever our judgment of those actions, I believe that a public conversation leading up to the review and reform of colonial-era laws dealing with hate speech and the incitement of communal passions is absolutely vital to expanding and strengthening freedom of expression in democratic India. But I write today as a scholar and an author, rather than as an expert on the law, or as an advocate of legal reform.

Section 295(A) of the Indian Penal Code, when pressed into service in a dispute of the kind involving Penguin India and the Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti, requires that the plaintiffs prove malicious intent — the intention to hurt and slander a community — on the part of the author. (It was not in fact pressed into service beyond a point in this particular case because the parties settled out of court, so let us not say this case but rather this type of case.) As a historian, I would like to examine this business of authorial intention more closely. When reframed as a problem of deciphering intent, the question really becomes: Why did the author write this book? (The implied answer being: In order to injure a given community, as assumption that, per IPC 295(A), the plaintiff must then prove by providing a corresponding interpretation of the text.) But if prima facie we reject this notion, that the author wrote with the intention of causing harm, then we must answer the next logical question: Why did the author write the book? More broadly, as scholars, why do we write?

A scholar’s journey

Writing is a deeply solitary and, at the same time, radically intersubjective exercise. One writes to engage with ideas, with language and with texts, but one writes also to communicate the outcome of that engagement to others. Most human beings think about things; writers take the further step of arranging those thoughts to convey them to a readership. A scholar’s labour is immense. One undergoes long and rigorous training; one tolerates poverty and material hardships; and one faces the very real prospect of never getting a big audience. One deals with the indifference, ignorance, contempt, misunderstanding, ridicule or sometimes outright hostility of others towards one’s work. Scholarship requires a belief in the meaningfulness of the human condition, a moral commitment to the idea of human flourishing, a desire to share in, understand and, if possible, alleviate the suffering surrounding us. Often, a scholar’s life is also a teacher and researcher’s life, spent educating hundreds of young people over several decades (like Wendy Doniger), and exploring the immense archives of human knowledge available in the different civilizations of the world. One plumbs the depths of the past to imagine a better future. One learns unfamiliar languages in order to enter, imaginatively, cultural worlds that can be jarringly unfamiliar, sometimes close to incomprehensible. One attends closely to what people say and how they say it, to the complex ways in which words generate reference, implication, connotation, and in certain sublime moments, an intimation of truth. Like artists, scholars too can tell you about the joy that comes from solving an intellectual problem — the “Eureka!” moment when everything falls into place. The perfection of certain sentences after hours of struggle to arrange the words just so. The sudden opening of a vista in the mind where immense swathes of jumbled, disparate human experience fall into a pattern, like the undulations in a landscape seen from a great height.

Indic traditions provide several concepts that begin to approach the inner processes of scholarship: sadhana, consistent practice which leads to perfection; tapas, a fiery determination to endure all the tests that truth demands; karuna, compassion for all sentient beings who suffer the ravages of time;maitri, the conviviality and goodwill without which no learning or teaching is possible; rasa, what it means to be human, to possess a consciousness shot through with impressions, passions and insights that can be recorded in language to outlast our mortal frames; samvad, the exchange and circulation of ideas in an intellectual community, the architecture of dialogue; chintan-manan, contemplation and reflection, turning things over in one’s mind, meditating on fragments so they may cohere into a whole, figuring out the effects of one’s statements on others. Every responsible scholar must cogitate deeply, to untangle the knots of meaning, to assess the flow of words, and to project the future entailments of whatever is claimed to be the case. Two of our greatest contemporary philosophers, Daya Krishna and Ramchandra Gandhi, even added swaraj to this list of what scholarship is about: the complete and final mastery over the self — self-knowledge, self-rule. In such knowledge alone, of and about the self, is there freedom.

Who becomes a scholar in order to insult and injure others? Apart from the Nazi academy, I am not aware of any other example in history of such a perversion of scholarship. If my agenda is harm, I will adopt the methods of himsa, intentional violence, not the laborious and fundamentally humane protocols of scholarly writing. I will go out and do politics, fight wars, extort the poor and crush the weak, not dedicate my entire existence to the love of language and the pursuit of truth. Whoever claims that scholars are power-hungry, money-grubbing, exploitative, aggressive, greedy, self-serving hate-mongers has no inkling what a scholar’s temperament, practice or life is like.

Wendy Doniger — like most of those who have signed our petition to revise the law and keep her book in print — is a practitioner of humanistic inquiry. So many of us work in the disciplines of philology, philosophy, history, literature, classics and the study of religious and cultural systems. Like her, we — Indians and foreigners, men and women, Hindus and non-Hindus, secular and pious — have devoted our lives to engaging the languages, texts, traditions, histories and knowledge systems of the vast universe we call India. What we do is, and cannot be other than, a labour of love. We do what we do because we are committed to our work, not because we expect great success, fame or riches.

As scholars we write because we want to share the knowledge we painstakingly discover and amass; we want our claims to be tested against the experience of others; we want to educate our readership, to enliven public life, to participate as best we can in the decisions that shape our collective future, and to improve the overall condition of our societies. We are in the business of comprehension and communication. It is the bigots, propagandists, trolls and fundamentalists of the world who trade in insult and injury. We reject their methods and condemn their motivations.

Rudeness is off the menu at WONG KEI's - Will it then retain its authentic dining experience?

If you Google "rudest restaurant in London" every result on the first page directs you to the same venue – the notorious Wong Kei. But now the Chinatown eatery that has earned cult status for its snarling waiters is under new ownership – and is pledging to improve the quality of its service.

The news may come as a disappointment to generations of diners who have grown accustomed to the grumpy insults dished out by serving staff to customers who resist being told to share tables or go upstairs.

Wong Kei shut its doors earlier this month, sparking fears among "Wonkees" that it might be closing for good. One loyal diner, archaeologist Brenna Hassett, 33, said: "This is deeply tragic. Wong Kei's is a student favourite of mine and a crew of friends. The order to 'go upstairs' rings for ever in my mind."

But manager Daniel Luc said that the restaurant in Wardour Street would reopen on 10 March after refurbishment, albeit with a slightly different approach. "Maybe there was an issue with rude staff 20 to 30 years ago, but I don't think so any more. I don't know whether that's a good thing or not!" he said.

"But, in my opinion, the things we will be improving are the service and the quality of food. We'll still have the same menu, so customers can look forward to their favourite things."

The Yoga Delusion

Part 2 


Part 3/5

Part 4

The Joy of Six: Kevin Pietersen

JFK innings, maestro moments and swaggering slogs, the batsman who made you think: is something brilliant happening?

Kevin Pietersen practices his indie-frontman pose for Observer Sport Monthly in 2005. Photograph: Karen Robinson for the Observer

1) The KP moment

There is a delightful scene in the final episode of Nathan Barley, Charlie Brooker's documentary about life at the Guardian. A TV executive has a pint poured over him in the pub and, after reacting with anger, suddenly thinks all might not be what it seems. "Are you guys the crew?" he says, looking round the pub. "Are we all in this? Is something brilliant happening?"

That scene came to mind every time Kevin Pietersen batted. Pietersen was a consistent provider of one of sport's greatest thrills: the sense that something brilliant might be about to happen. Sport is an intrinsically underwhelming experience, such is the chasm between fantasy and reality. Yet Pietersen's Ashes-winning 158, which came so early in his career, established the parameters of his talent – or rather that there were hardly any parameters. The reality of Pietersen did not just match the fantasy; it exceeded it. Not even Walter Mitty could have imagined some of those shots he played.

Every time he was at the crease it was legitimate to think we might be about to witness something epic. And when he got going, it was impossible to contain your excitement. Nobody else made you want to text a friend or rush to the nearest public social-networking house and say excitedly to the nearest person: "Are you watching the cricket? Pietersen's on one here." That's how special Pietersen was: he made you want to talk to strangers.

The excitement of what he might achieve was only half the story. There have been umpteen batsmen with the capacity to dramatically change the population of a bar – emptying them at the ground, filling them in town centres – yet few had Pietersen's combination of omnipotence and fragility. With the obvious exception of Brian Lara, it is hard to think of a batsman with a bigger gap between his top and bottom level of performance. Pietersen could look like Donald Bradman and Phil Tufnell, often in the same innings, sometimes in the same over. He was notoriously nervous at the start of his innings, hence one of his most memorably quirks: the Red Bull single to get off the mark.

With Pietersen, nobody knew anything. You would think you could spot the tell-tale signs that he was going to make a hundred; you'd think you'd visibly see him enter the zone, and two minutes later he'd hook to deep square leg or smack one against the breeze to long-on. Or you'd comment how scratchy he was looking and in the blink of an eye he would be 80 not out and batting like a lord. This, coupled with his mixed popularity and the consequently exaggerated drama of his success and failure, made him the most unputdownable book in sport.

Most of Pietersen's great knocks came after or even during a dodgy spell of form: his Man of the Series performance in England's World T20 win in 2010 was a brief, stratospheric high in the most traumatic year of his career. During the tour of Bangladesh two months earlier, he says he had basically forgotten how to bat and thought his career was in serious jeopardy.

In 2012 he played 17 Test innings in Asia, averaging a modest 39.43. A mediocre year then? Not quite. His scores were 2, 0, 14, 1, 32, 18, 3, 30, 151, 42*, 17, 2, 186, 54, 0, 73, 6 and the two centuries – at Colombo and Mumbai – are the two greatest innings played by an Englishman in Asia. There was a moment in both those centuries when you knew, or you thought you knew, that it was on.

In this age of constant newsflashes, previously reserved for JFK moments, Sky Sports News' yellow ticker should simply have said: BREAKING NEWS: KEVIN PIETERSEN IS BATTING whenever he was at the crease. In sport, JFK moments are supposed to relate to off-field events. We think we know what to expect with the context of the actual sport, so nothing should be so mind-blowing as to become a JFK moment. Yet Pietersen's ability to play with otherworldly genius was such that he became a specialist in JFK innings. Where were you for the 158, the 151, the 149 or the 186?

Within every JFK innings lurked a KP moment, when he did something – a booming drive, a look in his eye, even an ultra-certain defensive stroke – that made you wonder: is something brilliant happening? Whether he succeeded or failed, the answer was usually yes. Pietersen was the point at which sport's three greatest pleasures – partisanship, unpredictability and unimaginable genius – were perfectly in sync.

2) The match-winner

 Kevin Pietersen plays a reverse sweep on the third day of the second cricket Test match against Sri Lanka in 2012 Photograph: Eranga Jayawardena/AP

There are lies, bald-faced lies and this statistic: Ian Bell has scored more hundreds in Test victories than any other England batsman, including Kevin Pietersen. Bell is an exquisite talent, whose batting in last summer's Ashes was the finest we have ever seen by an England batsman over an entire series. But to compare him with Pietersen in this sphere is daft. Pietersen did not make hundreds in England victories; he made match-winning hundreds.

At his best, Pietersen's runs were so resounding and symbolic as to make the rest of the game an apparent formality. He was a master of mental disintegration. There was the brutal 227 at Adelaide – without which England would have been 1-0 down going into the final two Tests of the series. There was the six-laden 151 in Colombo in 2012 , the most spectacular catharsis after moments of DRS torment. In that match at Colombo he scored 193 off 193 balls, including eight sixes, and was out once. So an average of 193 and a strike rate of 100. The other 21 players averaged 29 and scored at a strike rate of 40.

It was not just that Pietersen did things mere mortals could not; he did things that were beyond his fellow immortals. Very few batsmen in history could have played Pietersen's true masterpiece, the reintegration 186 at Mumbai. That was deemed the fourth-best Test innings of all time in the book Masterly Batting, the most forensic study of the greatest Test innings that we have come across. (Yes we did write an essay for the book but that's not the point.)

Pietersen had three innings in the top 100 of that book; only Don Bradman, Brian Lara, Graham Gooch and Gordon Greenidge had more. Since Lara retired, nobody has played as many epics as Pietersen. There is also the weirdly underrated 142 in a low-scoring match at Edgbaston in 2006 (nobody else scored more than 30 in the first innings), when he switch-hit Muttiah Muralitharan for six. There was the Ashes 158, which did not win a match but did win a mildly important series, and our personal favourite, the 149 against South Africa at Headingley on Super Saturday of the Olympics. Trust Pietersen to rise to the big occasion.

In the last couple of years we have seen the development of a dubious, almost smug cliché that Pietersen is a player of great innings rather than a great player. Pietersen's overall record stands up extremely well – his Test average of 47.28 is the highest by an England batsman since Geoff Boycott retired in 1982 – but far more significant are two things not recorded in Wisden: the number of neck hairs he had made stand to attention, and the impact his runs have had.

Let's be clear about this. Without Pietersen, England would not have won the Ashes in 2005 and might not have won them in 2010-11; they would not have won their first Test in Sri Lanka for 11 years; they probably would not have won in India in 2012-13 or triumphed in the World T20 in 2010. Pietersen played a series of exceptional innings that won things for his team and took out a lease in the memory bank. If that's not greatness, then we're not sure what is.

3) The skunk punk

 Kevin Pietersen acknowledges the applause of the Oval crowd as he walks off having scored 158 runs during the final day of the fifth test of the 2005 Ashes series. Photograph: Kieran Doherty / Reuters/Reuters

The legend of Kevin Pietersen's life-changing innings is told thus: the greatest Ashes series of all time was at stake, England needed to bat for a draw, and this daft bugger went on a demented joyride! That is how we will remember his Ashes-winning 158 at The Oval on 12 September 2005. There was actually a little more to it than that. Pietersen played four innings in one day, two of them at the same time. Before lunch he was nervous and unsure of how to play; he was a punchbag for Brett Lee and fortunate to survive two dropped chances. Between lunch and tea, he marmalised Lee and Shaun Tait while blocking Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne. And after tea, with the Ashes won, he let his skunk down and had some fun against all-comers.

At lunch England were 127 for five, a lead of 133 with a possible 64 overs remaining. There wasn't a dry nail in the house. It's still a little chilling to reflect how close England were to not winning the Ashes. Pietersen was 35 from 60 balls. He had played scratchily apart from two defiant slog-swept sixes in one Warne over. The story goes that, after a chat with his captain Michael Vaughan, he simply decided "To hell with it" and went after everything that moved. In fact the innings was far subtler.

Warne and Lee continued after lunch. Pietersen launched into Lee, flogging him for a staggering 35 from 13 balls, including two hooked sixes and four fours. Lee's bowling peaked at 96.7mph – notably faster than Mitchell Johnson right now – yet Pietersen took on almost every delivery.

All the while, at the other end, he milked Warne clear-headedly. When Lee was replaced by McGrath, Pietersen pressed the stop button. England scored 19 from the next 11 overs, all bowled by the two champions, before Ricky Ponting replaced McGrath with Tait. The first two balls were flogged for four and in the next half an hour Pietersen savaged Tait for 22 from 12 balls. By tea, the Ashes were all but won. In that decisive session, Pietersen took Lee and Tait for 57 off 25 balls at a strike-rate of 228 runs per 100 balls. Off Warne and McGrath he scored 13 from 41 balls at a strike rate of 32. He had a first gear, a tenth gear and nothing in between. Not bad for someone who can only play one way.

This is not to say Pietersen could not give McGrath and Warne tap. In his first Test innings at Lord's he carted McGrath back over his head for an absurd six born of the most magnificent disrespect, and he spent the summer slog-sweeping his mate Warne into the crowd at midwicket (as well as being dismissed by him on a few occasions). Those slog sweeps are perhaps the most memorable feature of Pietersen's first summer as a Test cricketer, not least because it was a shot he eschewed as time went on. (It made a brief and wonderful comeback during his Mumbai maestropiece in 2012.)

Pietersen became a far better batsman than he was in 2005: technically tighter, more complete, more mature, a lot more accomplished on the off side. He even managed to overcome the nervous 158s. Yet though he remained one of the most entertaining batsman around, he never had quite the same exhilarating skunk punk edge of his first year in international cricket. In that time he also made those three one-day hundreds in South Africa and hammered Jason Gillespie into the knackers' yard in an ODI at Bristol, after which his captain Vaughan became the first significant person to use the G-word. Andrew Flintoff recalls Pietersen sitting in the dressing-room saying "Not bad am I?"

Not bad at all for a man who five years earlier was a tail-end slogger called Pieterson. After 10 ODI innings in 2004-05, his average was 162.25. As with the Prodigy's Experience, Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets and Michael van Gerwen in the second half of 2012, this was a raw, visceral introduction that would eventually become only a small part of a complete body of work. But that subsequent maturity partially obscures just how incredibly fresh and exciting he was in his first year. Pietersen, for richer and poorer, was never the same batsman after 2005. And although he played better innings than the 158, it was his career-defining performance.

4) The pace batsman

 Kevin Pietersen mauls South Africa during the World Twenty20 tournament in 2010. Photograph: Julian Herbert/Getty Images

Kevin Pietersen was a pace batsman. Not in the sense that he scored his runs quickly, but that he thrillingly reversed the traditional relationship between fast bowler and batsman, hunter and hunted, intimidating opponents with his size and aggression. He followed in the swaggering footsteps of Viv Richards, Matthew Hayden and others by playing the batsman as physical bully. Sometimes he even gave the fast bowlers some chin music of their own, belabouring life-threatening straight drives.

Three particular innings stand out. At the Oval in 2005 he drowned Brett Lee and Shaun Tait in their own adrenaline; he played Tarzan cricket against Morne Morkel and Dale Steyn at the World T20, mauling Steyn for 23 from 8 balls – including a flamingo shot to the offside - and sent an unprecedented shiver down Mike Selvey's spine; and at Headingley in 2012 he played the most otherworldly innings the Joy of Six has ever seen, when he was obviously in the zone that he should have had a forcefield around him.

Pietersen loved taking on the spinners, he loved to prove his technical class with off- and on-drives. But nothing stimulated him quite like the chance to assert his alpha-male status via the medium of pummelling 95mph deliveries all round the park. And nothing stimulated us the same way either.

5) The dumbslog millionaire

 A dejected Kevin Pietersen leaves the field after being dimissed on 97 during the first day of the first Test match against West Indies at Sabina Park. Photograph: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images

Kevin Pietersen took 183 Test wickets. Ten with the ball, and 173 with his own bat. To explain: it is hard to recall a batsman whose dismissals brought such focus – not just because they were an event, but because they were always his fault. Pietersen never got a good ball in his career. He was never got out. He always got himself out.

It's true that there were plenty of notorious shots. The dumbslog millionaire incident in Jamaica 2009, and a similar dismissal against South Africa at Edgbaston a year earlier. (Both times he was trying to reach a hundred with a six. Pietersen often could not resist going to a hundred on his terms: he did so with a reverse sweep in the 2012 epics at Colombo and Mumbai.) There was the lap sweep off Nathan Hauritz at Cardiff in 2009, and plenty of flat-footed wafts or pulls straight to long leg or deep-square leg.

Sometimes his confidence could backfire comically. In 2006 he said there was simply no way he could be bowled round his legs by Shane Warne; guess what dismissal catalysed the miracle of Adelaide. The same winter, Pietersen treated an ageing Glenn McGrath with disdain, walking down the wicket repeatedly during the one-dayers. McGrath broke his ribs with a bouncer.

It does nonetheless feel that Pietersen dismissals invited disproportionate opprobrium. While he found many weird and wonderful ways to get out in Australia last winter, for example, so did Ian Bell. Bell dragged a full toss from a part-time spinner to midwicket; he drove his first ball straight to mid-off; he played a late cut straight to gully. Hardly a word was said.

The idea that Pietersen couldn't care less about the team was not fair. For one thing he knew, from the moment he made that 158 against Australia, that individual glory was multiplied tenfold when it facilitated team glory. And he often knuckled down. In that 158 at The Oval he played like Chris Tavare and Viv Richards at the same time, while his tone-setting double-century against India at Lord's 2011 – an innings whose brilliance has been obscured by the 4-0 mauling that it set up - was a masterpiece of moving through the gears as conditions get easier: his four fifties respectively took 134 balls, then 82,85 and 25.

There's no question that Pietersen was occasionally driven to excessive stubborn, hiding behind the catch-all phrase "That's the way I play". Yet there was an essential truth in that. The poor strokes were inextricably linked to the outrageous shots; both came from the instinctive, often flawed shot selection that also allowed him to play innings of staggering genius. It borders on infantile to celebrate the audacious shots and chastise the cheap dismissals. Dolly Parton and David Brent would have understood Pietersen.

Pietersen had to do things on his terms; without that he was nothing. To criticise him for a poor shot is like moaning about an ecstasy comedown or a broken heart at the end of the best relationship of your life. It may be a simple case of English suspicion of unusual talent, the same that manifested itself when David Gower wafted lazily to slip. In this country, certain types of dismissals are morally acceptable. This is not to absolve Pietersen of all blame. No man can bat with impunity. Yet as with Gower there seemed to be a damaging desire to mould Pietersen into something he could never be. He had to play it as he saw it. And he saw cricket through different eyes to normal human beings.

Those eyes allowed him to conceive and play some of the most extraordinary strokes. He took advantage of the possibilities afforded Test batsmen first by Steve Waugh and then by Twenty20. The established norms and mores of five-day cricket have been shattered, as has the coaching manual. Just as language has never been more flexible and exciting, nor has Test batting. Pietersen developed his own urban coaching manual, full of unique and totally modern shots.

The most celebrated, the switch hit, never really got the Joy of Six going: it was brilliant and audacious but not unique. Far more spine-tingling were the established, conventional shots that Pietersen remixed. The flick through midwicket, with added flamingo; the straight drive played wristily and on the run; and our favourite, this dreamy slow-motion pull off Dale Steyn.

In an interview with All Out Cricket last year, Pietersen picked out that and anotherdreamy swipe off Pragyan Ojha at Mumbai as his favourite shots. "The slowness of my bat speed through those balls is what stands out to me," he said. "I look at those two shots – and I don't normally like to talk about my shots – but I do occasionally look at those and go, 'How the hell did you do that?' I don't know …"

Some things are best left unexplained.

6a) The dressing-room influence

 England's Alastair Cook and Kevin Pietersen look-on from the dressing room balcony during day four of the third Test at the WACA on 16 December, 2013. Photograph: Anthony Devlin/PA

In 2012, the sarcastic air violins came out when Kevin Pietersen said: "It's not easy being me in that dressing-room." In fact it's the most undeniable thing he's ever said. For much of his nine-and-a-bit years in international cricket It was clearly not easy being Pietersen in the England dressing-room; the only thing worthy of debate is whose fault that was.

There have been tedious assumptions about who did what to prompt Pietersen's sacking. The principal emotion should be sadness, not anger. It is wrong to assume that England need to give a specific example of Pietersen's behaviour, or even that there is a specific example; often it's an accumulation of incidents that create a sense that is not easy to articulate. Pick the person you most dislike at work and then try to explain to an outsider why that is so. It doesn't look nearly as powerful on the page as it is in your head. The same is probably true of England's intractable conviction that Pietersen was a damaging dressing-room influence.

It's insulting to suggest that this was a decision taken on a whim, because Alastair Cook, Paul Downton and the rest didn't fancy the hassle. The fact we have seen this storyline played out so many times before suggests Pietersen cannot be entirely innocent. It is probably a failure of management to some extent, but then there is always a point at which something becomes unmanageable. There is always something beyond the pale.

That doesn't mean the decision was necessarily fair on Pietersen. He will argue that his problems on the recent Ashes tour, and with Peter Moores, came from nothing more than a desire for excellence and an abhorrence of mediocrity that was too much for weak minds. It would be extremely unwise to assume that just because Pietersen is in a minority, he is intrinsically wrong; there are umpteen historical examples, in far more important walks of life of sport, that remind us of that.

In an age of passive-aggressive manipulation, there is something refreshing about Pietersen apparently wanting to have things out in the open with his team-mates (even if, when it comes to briefing and PR, he is as disappointingly snide as the rest). He might also argue that England had no problems with him when they were winning and he was scoring monstrous centuries. It's legitimate to wonder how this England team might have coped with Sir Ian Botham and Shane Warne. The key point is that we simply don't know; at best we are making uneducated guesses.

The relationship between the England team and Pietersen was often described as a marriage of convenience yet in a sense they were more like acquaintances with benefits. We should have known it was going to end like this.

6b) The conversation-starter

 Kevin Pietersen acknowledges the crowd during England's 2005 Ashes celebrations. Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian

Never mind the dressing-room; it was not easy being Pietersen out in the middle. Sometimes it was his sanctuary, other times he batted under unimaginable pressure. Sachin Tendulkar batted with the hopes of millions of India on his shoulders – but at least they all wanted him to succeed. Pietersen batted knowing that 50% of Englishmen were desperate for him to succeed and 50% even more desperate for him to fail. Sometimes he even had to play against two teams, as during his astonishing 149 against South Africa and England at Headingley in 2012.

It's often said that Pietersen batted for himself; as his career went on, he had little choice but to do that, so isolated did he become. Which is the chicken and which is the egg in this situation will be forever debated. Either way, he had to bat knowing that, whatever happened, he would be the watercooler's hottest topic afterwards.

He had a unique burden. He had to hit sixes but not get out trying to hit sixes. He had to counter-attack but not get out counter-attacking. In the 2007 World Cup, England needed him to be pinch-hitter, anchor and death-hitter all in one. It was an absurd burden.

That, coupled with his perpetual sense – fair or not – of being misunderstood and unloved, makes you wonder just what he would have achieved with unconditional love. Sometimes the awkwardness made him bat better. Unpopularity can be the most powerful fuel of all, but only in the short-term, unless you are a WWF wrestler. Over time it will have weighed heavily both on his conscious and unconscious.

The phrase "We need to talk about Kevin" quickly became a boring cliché. It arguably missed the point. We didn't just need to talk about Kevin because of what Kevin did, as in the film; we needed to talk about Kevin whether he did anything or not, because he enlivened our grubby, boring lives. He brought out the village gossip in us all. He was so charismatic that we became addicted to him, so we discussed things that we would not with other players. Our lives will be significantly duller without him.

DONIGER - In defence of the offensive

VASUNDHARA SIRNATE in the hindu

The right to free speech and expression also includes the right for people to be exposed to differing points of view. Book purges have been a staple of regimes trying to establish authority by ensuring that there can be no criticism against them

In Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, the main protagonist, Guy Montag, is a “fireman” whose task is to burn all books. Set in a fictional town in the American Mid-West, Fahrenheit 451 is about a society where “firemen” hunt people who hide books, raze their houses and burn all literature. Out of curiosity, one day Montag steals a copy of the Bible from the house of an old woman, who chooses to set herself aflame along with her books in an act of defiance. Shocked by the incident, Montag begins to read, eventually joining a group of drifters that memorise books for a futuristic time when society will need books again.

Responses to literature

Mr. Bradbury’s inspiration for Fahrenheit 451 came from three diverse political phenomena that preceded the novel. The first occurred on May 10, 1933 when members of the German Students Union burned a reported 25,000 books written by Jewish, French and American authors that were considered subversive, anti-National Socialism and un-German. The second phenomena was the Great Purge conducted by the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union when many anti-communist thinkers, writers and philosophers were arrested and executed along with thousands of peasants in an attempt to consolidate the communist regime. The third was the formation of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1938 that blacklisted the Hollywood Ten — a group of scriptwriters and directors thought to be sympathetic to communism.

I invoke Mr. Bradbury’s book precisely because the incidents that inspired him crossed the boundaries of political ideologies suggesting that many varying regime types have the capacity to censor free speech and expression. By caving in to Dinanath Batra’s call to ban Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: An Alternative History, it has become ‘reasonable’ for a group of individuals to hold metaphorical knives to the necks of established academics engaged in research. By effectively banning this book, Mr. Batra and Penguin India are encroaching on the Freedom of Speech and Expression because the right to free speech also includes a right for people to be exposed to differing points of view. To quote the Indian Supreme Court’s judgment in Union of India vs. Association for Democratic Reforms, “One sided information, disinformation, misinformation and non-information, all equally create an uninformed citizenry which makes democracy a farce. Freedom of speech and expression includes the right to impart and receive information which includes freedom to hold opinions.”

Book purges and burnings have been a staple of regimes trying to establish authority and legitimacy by ensuring that there can be no criticism against them. Salman Rushdie, another proscribed author, writes about becoming Joseph Anton — borrowed from Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov — in his memoir. He says that an Iranian man on his deathbed, Ayatollah Khomeini, who hadn’t even read his book, banned The Satanic Verses. A fatwa was issued and Rushdie lived his life under the constant threat of being murdered for writing some brilliant prose and upsetting Muslims.

A call for action

The pulping of Dr. Doniger’s book is the latest in a steady stream of books that have been similarly treated because, it is claimed, such books offend communities. I offer here a slightly different argument in defence of her book. Dr. Doniger’s book does not do Hinduism a disservice. It is a call for action against the historical priestly expurgations that have accompanied the evolution of Hindu epics and history. She re-injects the lost narratives of Dalits, women and other lower castes — narratives that were removed by design by some male Hindu priests who sanitised the books to suit their agendas. In order to dislike a book one first has to read it. Mr. Batra’s petition has encouraged mob behaviour where Hindus, who don’t even know what’s in the book, are now participating in the rising Indian Cult of the Offended.

At its foundation, religion is mostly about trusting the unknown. It is about handing one’s resolve to some being that may or may not exist, to accept individual fate as something decided by powers outside one’s control and by regaining that control over one’s life through meditation, prayer and charitable deeds. Nowhere does Hinduism say that to reinforce and express one’s faith Hindus must destroy books that are deemed offensive. Nowhere does Hinduism say that one cannot use Freudian analysis as a theoretical frame to comment on the structure and history of Hinduism. In fact, the very basis of Hinduism, and what has made it persist, is its ability to incorporate varying critical arguments that have broadened the scope of the religion.

The objections to Dr. Doniger’s book come because she injects sex and lust into Hinduism by reclaiming desire as an important, yet hidden, story arc in Hindu texts. Anyone who knows Dr. Doniger or has attended her lectures will know that she has a witty style of writing and presentation. She often uses modern metaphors to explain her point about Hinduism and sees humour and meaning even in incidents where she has been attacked, one notably where an audience member threw an egg at her. Much of her writing uses anachronisms to describe epic characters and storylines.

There is nothing wrong or offensive about this. Other critics have also argued against Dr. Doniger’s books because they don’t agree with her point of view. This is called academic debate. Debate and discourse is how societies try to push thinking about issues and circumstances to other levels. The truth is Hinduism does have a rich transcript of desire. Hindus are free to argue against it and say it is embarrassing or they can take pride in it for having such an openly sexual past. Either way, one can pulp a few books, but it is virtually impossible to suppress a book in the digital age, and second, one cannot really brush a temple like Khajuraho under the carpet in the vain hope that no one will notice the naughty bits carved into the walls.

Rise of the right wing

Dinanath Batra, a former school principal and the founder of the Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti, is offended by the book. He also asks if Muslims can ban books that offend them, why not Hindus? Most Hindus he claims to speak for have not read the book because it is written in English and is over 600 pages long. If we square this away with our literacy rates, it seems unlikely that more than a fraction of the very diverse Hindu community has been able to access the book. From this set, many have spoken out against the book but have done so through the written word, not by a call to ban the text. Mr. Batra has chosen to speak for a very diverse set of people counting on the fact that they will not look at the book themselves and make up their minds. His organisation attacked Dr. Doniger, by saying that she is driven by “Christian Missionary Zeal and hidden agenda to denigrate Hindus and show their religion in poor light.” On the contrary, Dr. Doniger wants to show that Hinduism was and is much more than a written record of priestly literature. She shows how the forgotten people, the oppressed and the women whose voices were silenced under an overarching control by male priests and their translations were in fact crucial to the formation of modern Hinduism. She gives these voices a place of respect and dignity in the existing Hindu narratives.

Mr. Batra stated in one interview that he wanted “Indianness” in the field of education and was on a mission to purify the minds of the youth and keep them free from “corruption” (read Westernisation). For all his rhetoric, he seems to have missed one central point – in a country as diverse and as rich in divergent cultures as India, he barely has the right to speak for his own neighbourhood let alone all Hindus across the world. What is most disconcerting is that Penguin India has kowtowed to this act of bullying citing that it has a responsibility to protect its employees from threats.

These threats do not come from a court order or a fatwa, as Arundhati Roy crucially has pointed out. These threats come from groups in society that want to advance a carefully constructed purist vision of a Hindu nation, knowing full well that their hand will be strengthened by the possible and perhaps pre-eminent electoral emergence of a right-wing party. It is these same groups that beat up couples on Valentine’s Day, attack women in nightclubs, and impose dress codes on women for no good reason, except that a woman’s knees or armpits somehow offend them. The problem, from my perspective, is that the capturing of the corridors of power by a right-wing party strengthens groups in society with a narrow vision of modernity, a deep dislike of intellectual freedom, a commitment to sanitise Hindu history, and to persist in an unabashed encroachment on the rights of others.