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Monday 5 January 2015

How I broke my game and then fixed it again


When your feet and hands talk to each other, the runs start to flow © Getty Images
I recently stumbled upon a short but wonderful five-minute video on a camouflaging octopus. Its climax featured it changing its colour and texture to make it look like the surrounding coral.
It provoked thoughts about my own evolution and the impact our environment has on our behaviours. Slowly I started to piece the narrative of my cricket growth together. More specifically, how my own batting had changed and shifted, sometimes subconsciously, other times deliberately, to adapt to various conditions around the country and the world. I realised that what I occasionally thought was right was, in fact, inhibiting my game. Imagine the octopus camouflaged as coral in the middle of the Sahara.
Growing up, I had always tapped my bat in a relaxed and rhythmic manner at the crease. My batting was natural and flowing, and though I had no knowledge of its benefits, my "technique" allowed me to score freely around the ground. Of course I still had deficiencies - some days it felt like I had magnets in my front pad and the ball was made of iron - but I was learning about the game. I enjoyed the feeling of being able to hit the ball where I wanted by simply picking up my bat, moving my foot to where I thought it was going to bounce and swinging. If I wanted to hit the ball a fraction later, on top of the bounce, my hands would allow for a change in bat speed, as they were moving as required and in sync with my feet.
I enjoyed being an aggressive opening batsman with a good defence. I got caught at long-on too often off the spinners in the exuberance of youth, but it always felt like my risk-taking was calculated. My batting lacked consistency, but when it was on, it was on. I thought I understood my game, my limitations, but in hindsight I understood the feeling of rhythmical batting and that the hunger to score runs relied on a clear mind and the reliance on a manageable routine. That was about it. I played the game generally with a smile - scoring runs is fun after all. Writing about it now makes it sound like it was too good to be true.
The first significant evolution came when I entered professional cricket at 21. I had always played the pull shot, but I quickly realised playing the short ball at 140kph was a different proposition. Ducking and weaving became my modus operandi. In the modern era, no one escapes trial by video, and word spread to not let the kid drive. "Push him back, he won't hurt you unless you feed the cut." Run-scoring slowed and my ribs were generally bruised.
 
 
I loved the challenge of opening the batting, but my enjoyment of my own batting started to wane. I found it hard to appreciate the days I did score runs. I always felt like the handbrake was on
 
The following pre-season, I vowed to stay one step ahead of the opposition by finding my pull shot afresh: if played efficiently and selectively, it would force the bowlers to pitch it up and allow me to play my favoured drives. For months I practised facing tennis balls out of a bowling machine at abnormally fast speeds. I found by holding my bat off the ground, as high as the top of my pad, I got a little head start. Time I thought, was what I needed.
The second ball of the season was a bouncer from Andy Bichel, and out of pure instinct I pulled it over square leg. I could see a look of bemusement in his eye as he growled an expletive. With this slight camouflage I had adapted to my new professional environment. Not to say it was perfect. Some days my hands would drift from my back hip and I would slice across the ball, but I told myself you have to give something to get something, and it generally felt like the trade-off had been a fair one.
The second major adaptation in my technique came after spending 12 months in Tasmania. Our home wicket was a seaming monster and driving on it a very risky proposition. Fielders would be loaded behind the wicket, licking their lips, ready to lap up any half-mistake. Batting was hard work but I loved it. You had to grind, play the ball late and cautiously, and be prepared to be in at tea to get a big first-innings score.
With a big red cross against the drive, I started to hold my bat up higher off the ground, like a baseballer at the mound in what proved a highly effective position to cut and pull. It was also a great position to just drop the bat into the line of the ball for a forward defence. The bat would generally come down at one pace. It was certainly repeatable and it felt little could go wrong. It took the variation out of batting. Risk-free almost, but with no risk comes little reward. Ironically, due to the plane of the swing, it also helped my one-day cricket "slog" over cow corner, and with the emergence of the BBL, it felt like a decent technique to apply across formats.
I would hide the deficiency of not being able to drive with any power by practising with a sawed-off bat, ensuring I got low into my drives to compensate for not having a swing at the ball, as well as having an overly wide stance. My footwork relied on a heavy forward commitment that was the only way to create any power down the ground. If in sync it still felt good, but flowing batting was rarely the order of the day. I was hard to get out but rarely dominant. Batting had become mechanical and success relied on the mental strength of resistance: defend, don't get out for long enough and you will walk off with some well-grafted runs. I had found a method that generally worked in my environment and I was going to stick to it.
The first person who alerted me to the dangers of my new technique was Greg Chappell - a natural maestro and modern great of the game. You would think he had decent credentials for me to value his opinion and perhaps heed his advice. I politely declined. I had just scored my first hundred for Australia A and was feeling pretty good about my game. I would prove him wrong, I thought. Despite my bubble being limited, it was comfortably consistent. I kept telling myself, "It's not how but how many." Looking back, I was being stubborn, as though it was just another hurdle to overcome, another challenge to rise to.

Ed Cowan and David Warner walk back for lunch, India v Australia, 3rd Test, Mohali, 2nd day, March 15, 2013
Cowan and Warner's partnership was based on Warner's ability to attack effectively and Cowan's ability to not get out too cheaply © BCCI 
Enlarge
The height of my bat admittedly fluctuated depending on whom I was playing and where and how I was feeling, but slowly and surely I started to resemble a caricature of myself. My stance got wider, my hands slowly slipping further ahead of my back hip. As a job, I loved the challenge of opening the batting, but my enjoyment of my own batting started to wane. I found it hard to appreciate the days I did score runs. I always felt like the handbrake was on. I struggled to watch footage of myself. I wanted to change, but it is either a courageous or incredibly stupid man who would do this in the middle of a series or season. The stakes had become too high.
By this stage, I was acting it all out on the brightly lit stage of international cricket. The game at this level felt largely mental. I knew my limitations and I was prepared to not swim outside the flags, so to speak. I found myself exhausted by the time I had ground my way to 30 or so, and would eventually get out having put little pressure on the bowler. My opening partnership success with David Warner was forged on his innate ability to smack it around and my ability to not get out too cheaply more often than not. I was a ball de-shiner. Or so it felt. His tank was full of premium unleaded to my diesel. Some days we got there just the same, but he would often roar like an F1 to my farm tractor.
An Australian legend of a different kind was the next to try and help, offering the advice that I would find freedom if I narrowed my stance and tapped my bat. This time it was coming from a friend. Justin Langer's words, unlike Chappell's, felt fatherly. He had spent hours with me honing my game and was invested. I went out and batted for him every time I crossed the rope. He mentioned it once in the West Indies during a rain break, but he also knew of the difficulties of changing the recipe on demand. He mentioned it again last season as it became more and more clear that my camouflage had worn off and I was a sitting duck to the predatory bowlers around the country.
And so to the present and the latest adaptation: the winter of 2014 saw my first "off season" in three years. Finally an opportunity to not just fine-tune but rebuild the car from scratch. The game as a travelling professional is now a 12-month gig, which in itself has its drawbacks when you're trying to make improvements to your game. It only feels like you are picking up little gains, and directing more attention towards competing week in, week out. There is little time to step back, take stock and go about putting the parts backs together.
I set about finding my 20-year-old self who had made the game so simple. I started to tap the bat and pick it up only when it was required. Within ten minutes I felt like a bird released from its cage. The ball started to fly purely off the face of the willow as it is meant to - with little effort and an ease that only comes when your feet and hands are talking to each other like loving siblings. That is not to say this guarantees more runs, but I feel like at least I am giving myself the best chance.
 
 
I set about finding my 20-year-old self who had made the game so simple. I started to tap the bat and pick it up only when it was required. Within ten minutes I felt like a bird released from a cage
 
Having made the change, and enjoying the freedom it is providing, it seems that history is also on my side - a shot of the top 15 Australian run scorers in Test and first-class cricket recently appeared on our change-room wall. The photos were taken as the bowler was in his delivery stride. All but one batsman has his bat touching the ground. Admittedly most then move their bat upwards as the ball is leaving the hand, ready to pounce.
Imitation, they say, is the greatest form of flattery. For years Australians would mock English batting techniques as structured and complicated, and yet we have a generation of Australian cricketers replicating their styles. Cricket on television is an important medium for skill development, but also turns the players into imitators. Trying to bat like your favourite player is akin to a teenage girl wanting to dress like Kim Kardashian. Perhaps in their formative years of the mid-2000s - years that saw such English dominance (think Cook, Pietersen and Bell at their best) - youngsters jumped ship on the "Australian way" and imitated those succeeding at the time.
Finding your way as a young professional brings you up against the ultimate paradox. You may try to find consistency to ensure a lengthy career in a tough but financially rewarding environment by minimising risk and simply "surviving", but this will no doubt diminish your ability to put pressure on the bowlers. The more pressure the bowler feels, the more likely they are going to serve up more run-scoring balls and fewer wicket-taking ones. Even in this day and age of travelling batting coaches, analysts, mentors and batting gurus, the journey to find improvement and how you want to play is self-driven. Effective coaching is as much about leading the horse to the trough and allowing self-discovery, as arousing its interest in a drink.
The tide, though, it seems, is turning. I have seen Adam Voges in recent seasons - perhaps at the suggestion of Langer - go back to his natural best, George Bailey and Tim Paine, both fine players and as naturally gifted as they come, too have returned to tapping their bats in recent weeks and months.
Writing about my own batting seems a little self-indulgent, but the motive is simply to illuminate my journey and self-discovery in what has been a ten-year batting evolution. Perhaps if just one young cricketer retains his naturalness then the self-indulgence will be worthwhile.
Ed Cowan is a top-order batsman with Tasmania and Australia.

How Jet Airways acquired monopoly power in privatised Indian civil aviation

Jitender Bhargava in The Business Standard

It is generally agreed that has failed to achieve the potential that the country offers. Whilst most have attributed the industry's lack of robustness to unclear government policies, high operational costs, and so on, few have ever cited the role of private Indian carriers in influencing policies.

Since such instances haven't been tabulated, one is oblivious to the scale of havoc caused. If quantified, the financial loss alone would run into crores of rupees besides the harm it has caused to the industry.

Perhaps the first instance of blatant interference in getting a policy tweaked was when the entry into the sector of the and was blocked in 1997. The revised policy ensured that no foreign airline could invest in an Indian carrier even while and  owned a 20 per cent stake each in Jet Airways. The revised policy also gave Jet Airways time to buy back the stakes.

A couple of years later when submitted a proposal to acquire a 40 per cent stake in Air India, mischief was again in evidence. Singapore Airlines was forced to opt out of the race citing opposition. The intent was clear: an existing airline did not want a strong competitor in a rejuvenated Tata-Singapore Airlines-managed Air India. Imagine: if a Tata-Singapore Airlines-managed Air India had indeed become a reality, taxpayers wouldn't have had to fund the national carrier's bailout at a cost of Rs 30,000 crore. Air India, under the new management, would also have been an airline to contend with and not what it has become today.

In the previous decade, the government, with as the civil aviation minister, saw the introduction of an irrational 5/20 policy. This helped only one private airline at that time and barred others who did not possess five years of domestic flying experience and a fleet of 20 aircraft from taking to international skies. The current aviation minister, Ashok Gajapati Raju, is now seeking to do away with it. For that particular airline, this policy meant a lot. It could for some years reap the advantage of being India's only international airline besides Air India, whose ethnic traffic it could encroach upon to fill up its flights.

If crony capitalism has been beneficial for some, it has also unwittingly taken a toll of at least one airline. The 5/20 policy was a contributing factor in financially crippling Kingfisher. In his quest to fly internationally without waiting to complete the requisite five years, Vijay Mallya bought over Air Deccan, which was soon becoming eligible for international operations, at a price that defied logic. Kingfisher Airlines eventually perished under the weight of debt.

Air India was often "forced" to withdraw flights from certain sectors by citing "economical unviability". It wasn't a coincidence to see a private airline mount flights soon thereafter with market and passengers offered on a platter by the obliging national carrier.

No less intriguing has been studied silence of when seats were being recklessly doled out to foreign airlines though the policy was destined to harm them too, not just Air India. And today, we have the situation of Indian carriers failing to make a mark on the international routes with foreign airlines not only having been given a head-start but also a stranglehold on Indian market. The promoters of Indian carriers simply ignored the question of how their fund-starved carriers would compete on their home turf with mega global carriers bestowed with disproportionate quantum of seats and flights.

The way the Jet Airways-Etihad agreement was facilitated was yet another instance of external factors influencing a decision. The government granted 37,000 additional seats to Abu Dhabi, over and above the existing 13,000 seats, to help Etihad acquire a 24 per cent stake in Jet Airways.

Even though other Indian airlines and airports, notably private-run airports at Delhi and Mumbai, realised how the Jet-Etihad combination and the accompanying huge quantum of seats would take away their business and harm their long-term interests, they did nothing except voicing concerns to the civil aviation ministry.

As if no lessons were needed to be learnt for putting the sector on track, some carriers have, in fact, facilitated their political masters' wrongdoing. When Gulf countries sought additional seats, some Indian carriers at the slightest prodding gave it in writing that they needed additional seats. This helped build a case for doling out seats to foreign carriers while the records showed that the ministry was only acquiescing to the requests of Indian carriers. These carriers haven't used a single additional seat so far.

The mess that we witness today is thus not only a consequence of flawed government policies but also constant meddling and complicit silence of some Indian carriers. Do they deserve sympathy for the poor financial state of their airlines? Perhaps not, given the harm they have caused to the industry.

Sunday 4 January 2015

Robert Vadra - Son in law or Son in lawless?

Shoba De in The Times of India
Oh dear! The year 2015 has not started well for Robert Vadra — once known as the nation’s son-in-law. The income tax department wants a few critical answers about certain land deals. And understandably, Mr Vadra is not amused. In fact, he is said to be rather cross. The poor guy was made to believe he belonged to a breed known as “Super Indians” which is above and beyond scrutiny . They are not to be asked any questions, nor does anybody expect any answers. It’s been this way for decades. And when a young chap gets used to some very special privileges, such as skipping security checks at airports and so on, he naturally gets annoyed when pesky IT officers want to get into his company affairs and conduct the sort of probes ordinary, law-abiding, tax-paying citizens are subjected to.
Nobody has obviously informed Mr Vadra that things have changed in India. There is a new regime in place, in case he hasn’t noticed. New netas are calling the shots in Delhi. His mother-in-law is no longer the all-powerful mataji of old. Her cronies have been cut down to size and old loyalists are looking for fresh pastures. Zamana badal gaya hai. He should ask his sweet brother-in-law-that is, if Rahul baba himself has woken up and discovered there is no chair to sit on.
Some people may call it a witch hunt and say the poor ‘damaad’ is being unfairly targeted. Or that he is being made to pay the price for being Sonia Gandhi’s son-in-law. Even if that is true, there is just one question to ask: are there gross irregularities in his land dealings or not? If he has been unfairly singled out for such scrutiny and his nostrils are clean, then, no worries! Even his most vocal critics will take back their harsh words. But if, as several investigators are claiming, there have been blatant and gross violations, then, sorry bro … it’s payback time. This is the downside of being famousnotorious. When the going is good, everything in life is tickety boo. But when the chips are down, the wheel comes full circle. The very people who once bowed, scraped and grovelled at your feet bring out the knives and dance over your grave. This is how it always goes.
It is not as if India is collectively gloating over Robert Vadra’s fall from grace. It is not just about Mr Vadra and his alleged unaccounted assets. There are other promoters and land owners who have made an even bigger killing. What most citizens are reacting to, has a different narrative. What got everybody’s goat is that Robert Vadra did not hold any official position. Nobody knows what exactly he did for a living. But everybody is aware that he was treated like a VVIP, minus any duties and responsibilities. It was this open flouting of rules that did him in. Had he been more discreet and conducted his business with more caution, had he not been as in your face, perhaps he would have received a slightly more sympathetic public reaction to his current situation.
Now what? India would like to see a logical end to these fresh investigations. People expect Robert Vadra to be treated like any other citizen. If the charges against him are established in a court of law, then he must bear the consequences like anybody else. Skylight Hospitality allegedly made Rs 50 crore in just one transaction. High-profile builders had apparently rushed to offer Vadra hefty loans. Not a single question was raised for years. When a reporter dared to ask Vadra about his business dealings, his reaction was priceless: “Are you serious … are you serious?” he asked, his expression giving away the whole story. Mr Vadra was aghast and incredulous that anybody could have had the temerity to question him.
Let’s hope someone sensible is prepping the son-in-law to face hundreds of even more pointed questions in the near future. For starters, his mother-in-law can give him a crash course in dealing coolly with lesser beings doing their jobs. Once he masters that, without flipping out, he can hire a competent lawyer — he is probably going to need one pretty soon. If Robert Vadra ever goes to jail, thousands of citizens will send up a silent cheer. Not because they are wicked or sadistic. But because they believe the law in India is the same for all!

Saturday 3 January 2015

Johann Hari: ‘I failed badly. When you harm people, you should shut up, go away and reflect on what happened'

When I heard that Johann Hari had written a book about the war on drugs, two immediate concerns sprang to mind. The first was whether anyone would trust a word he wrote.
The author used to be the Independent’s star columnist, a prolific polemicist and darling of the left, until his career imploded in disgrace when it emerged in 2011 that many of his articles contained quotes apparently said to him but in fact lifted from his interviewees’ books, or from previous interviews by other journalists. Worse, he was exposed as a “sockpuppet”, or someone who anonymously furthers his own interests online. Using a false identity, Hari had maliciously amended the Wikipedia pages of journalists he disliked – among them the Telegraph columnist Cristina Odone and the Observer’s Nick Cohen – accusing them of antisemitism, homophobia and other toxic falsehoods. Under the same pseudonym, he had also edited his own Wikipedia page, lavishly flattering his profile to, as he puts it, “big myself up”. The Independent suspended him, four months later he resigned, and no British newspaper has published his journalism since. He has never spoken publicly about the scandal, until now.
My other worry was whether anyone would want to read yet another polemic about drugs. I wouldn’t, and I’m quite interested in the subject. The prohibition-versus-legalisation debate tends to be interminably dreary, chiefly because neither side ever seems to change anybody’s mind.
“I think that’s totally right,” Hari agrees. “I did not want to write a 400-page polemic about the drug war. I didn’t want to have an argument about it, I wanted to understand it.” For that matter, he admits, “It’s struck me that, actually, polemic very rarely changes people’s minds about anything.” He says so as a former columnist? “A recovering former columnist, yes.” He laughs. “It’s not just that polemic doesn’t change people’s minds. It says nothing about the texture of lived experience. People are complex and nuanced, they don’t live polemically.”
Hari’s book turns out to be a page-turner, full of astonishing revelations. I had no idea that the war on drugs was single-handedly invented by a racist ex-prohibition agent, who needed to find a new problem big enough to protect his departmental budget. One of the first victims of his ambition was Billie Holiday, whose heroin addiction enraged him to the point where he hounded her to death. After he’d had the singer jailed for drugs, she was stripped of her performing licence, and as she unravelled into destitution and despair, his agents continued to harass her, even summoning a grand jury to indict her as she lay dying under police guard in a hospital bed.
Hari travelled all over the world meeting other casualties of the drug war: a transsexual former crack dealer in Brooklyn; a homeless junkie in Vancouver who mobilised the local heroin addicts into activists and rewrote the city’s drug laws; a housewife from Ciudad Juárez who marched across Mexico to shame the politicians and cartels protecting her daughter’s murderer.
Woven between the human dramas are Malcolm Gladwell-ish examinations of the surprising science and statistics of drug use, and of the varying success of drug policies. Hari goes to Portugal, where all drug possession was decriminalised 13 years ago, and where even the police chief of the Lisbon drug squad now admits, “The things we were afraid of didn’t happen.” He also visits Tent City, a prison in the Arizona desert where the inmates live in tents in temperatures of 44C, wear T-shirts proclaiming I AM BREAKING THE NEED FOR WEED or I WAS A DRUG ADDICT, and are shackled into a chain gang every day and marched in public while reciting chants of repentance.
I’ve got to know Hari a bit over the past two years, and it’s quite hard to picture him in the badlands of the drug war. He doesn’t look much like an underworld adventurer. He could pass for almost a decade younger than his 35 years, is slightly knock-kneed and prone to giggly yelps, and readily admits he can’t be trusted to make it to the corner shop and back without getting lost. His north London flat, where we meet, is full of books and almost nothing else, its sole concession to domesticity a massive flatscreen TV. Hari puts his general air of unworldly distraction down to his dyspraxia, but it comes across as donnish.
There was nothing academic about his background, growing up in suburban north London in the 80s. His Glaswegian mother worked in a refuge, his Swiss father was a bus driver, and they were pleased but rather puzzled by their son’s obsession with books. “My mum and my dad and my brother all left school when they were 16. I was the first person in my family to go to a fancy university.” After graduating with a double first in social and political sciences from Cambridge, he joined the New Statesman and quickly established his name as a columnist. He was hired by the Independent, where he won Young Journalist of the Year in 2003 and became the youngest ever recipient of the George Orwell prize in recognition of his political reporting.
Johann Hari
Pinterest
 Johann Hari: “I want to make it clear that I’m not in any way attributing anything I did to that drug use. They are totally separate things.” Photograph: Richard Saker
As a journalist, Hari wrote a lot about the war on drugs, and was always a passionate opponent. His book is presented as an objective investigation, but did it really change his mind about anything? “Oh yes. I think the thing that shocked me the most was the stuff about addiction. I thought I knew about addiction. But addiction is not what we’ve been told it is at all.”
When Hari began the book three years ago, he was familiar with the two prevailing theories: people become dependent on drugs either because they lack self-control, or because the chemicals are so inherently addictive that they hijack the brain. Addiction is a moral weakness, or it is a disease, but implicit in either analysis is the theoretical possibility that if we could get rid of the drugs, we would solve the problem.
One of Hari’s earliest memories is of trying to rouse a relative from a drug-induced stupor, and his ex-boyfriend is a crack and heroin addict. “So I’d seen addiction in people I loved, and I could see it wasn’t that they were just selfish, morally flawed people. I never believed that. So I erred towards thinking, well, obviously it must be a disease.” Seminal experiments conducted on rats in the 70s appeared to have proved this. Offered a choice between pure water and water laced with heroin, the rats quickly became addicted to the opiate and kept taking the drug until it killed them.
But something didn’t add up. “Every day, all over the world, hospital patients are given medical heroin, diamorphine, very often for long periods. And virtually none of them afterwards goes out and tries to score on the street. Which made me think, the issue here can’t just be the drug.”
Hari went to Vancouver to meet a psychology professor, Bruce Alexander, who had been similarly puzzled, so had replicated the original experiments. This time, instead of experimenting on solitary rats locked in empty cages, he offered the choice of clean or drugged water to rats kept in what he called Rat Park, a kind of rat heaven full of wheels and coloured balls and delicious food, and other rats to play and mate with. When these rats tried heroin, they weren’t very interested.
“They just didn’t like it. None of them overdosed. Even more strikingly, he then took rats that had become addicted in the isolated cages, and put them into Rat Park. And they almost immediately stopped using. What Alexander had found is that we’ve fundamentally misunderstood what addiction is. It isn’t a moral failing. It isn’t a disease. Addiction is an adaptation to your environment. It’s not you; it’s the cage you live in.”
The book is populated by a compelling cast of meth users, junkies and crack addicts. Other than addiction, what they have in common is heartbreaking early trauma and abuse. Childhood violence and prostitution, abandonment and homelessness, all led their victims to the same remedy: a narcotic anaesthetic for pain and loneliness. “Human beings have an innate need to bond. Healthy, happy people bond with other humans. But if you can’t do that because you’re so traumatised by your childhood that you can’t trust people, you may well bond with a drug instead.” The scientific evidence of the correlation is so overwhelming, Hari writes, that “child abuse is as likely to cause drug addiction as obesity is to cause heart disease”.
“What I learned is that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety,” Hari says. “The opposite of addiction is human connection. And I think that has massive implications for the war on drugs. The treatment of drug addicts almost everywhere in the world is much closer to Tent City than it is to anything in Portugal. Our laws are built around the belief that drug addicts need to be punished to stop them. But if pain and trauma and isolation cause addiction, then inflicting more pain and trauma and isolation is not going to solve that addiction. It’s actually going to deepen it.”
He breaks off, looking anxious. “But I didn’t tell their stories, because I thought they were a better way of persuading people of an argument. It’s a book of stories about people, because I think stories are a fundamentally better way of thinking about the world.”
Nevertheless, these stories build a compelling case for the legalisation and regulation of drugs. If, as the book suggests, 90% of us can take drugs safely without harming ourselves or others, and criminalising the 10% who can’t only turns them into desperate thieves and prostitutes, then the war on drugs is not merely unwinnable, but inherently counterproductive. But one of the stories Hari tells is mentioned so fleetingly that a reader could blink and miss it. In just a few sentences, Hari writes that he himself had been addicted to a drug for several years.
Provigil is an anti-narcolepsy prescription drug, popular among Ivy League students for its reputed power to turbo-charge the brain. When Hari discovered it in 2009, “I thought: great, I’ve maxed out the amount of antidepressants you can use – here’s something that will speed things up even more.” He’d been prescribed the antidepressant Seroxat at 17 and, barring one or two brief breaks, had been taking it ever since. Now, with Provigil, Hari was thrilled to discover, “you can do even more work, and be constantly processing information, and sleep only four hours a night”. He began buying the drug on the internet – and for a while it worked. But when he tried to stop taking it, he failed. “When you’re prone to depression, there can be a strong temptation, or there was for me anyway, to try to accelerate through it – to speed up, to kind of outrun the feelings of depression and I did that for years.
“But this is totally unrelated to the things I did wrong journalistically,” he says quickly. “This is really important. I did those things before and during the use of this drug. So I want to make it clear that I’m not in any way attributing anything I did to that drug use. They are totally separate things.”
This is the last time he says anything quickly. The moment we come to his scandal, all the animation drains from him; he turns still and pale, and speaks in halting sentences prefaced by painful silences. He stopped taking both Provigil and Seroxat one week after leaving the Independent, but can’t be sure what withdrawal was like because, “It’s hard to separate the challenge of stopping those drugs from the wider challenge of what was happening at that time.” I ask if he would place himself in the 10% vulnerable to addiction, and he says, “Probably at that point, yes. Not now, because I’ve changed the way I live so much that I wouldn’t put myself in that category any more.” But when I ask how his susceptibility relates to his childhood, he falls silent.
“Look,” he says eventually, “I can talk to you about why what happened in my life happened. But I just think that’s a way of trying to invite sympathy, and that would be weaselly. If you tell a detailed personal story about yourself, you’re inherently asking people to sympathise with you, and actually I don’t think people should be sympathetic to me. I’m ashamed of what I did. I did some things that were really nasty and cruel.”
Suspicions began circulating online in 2011, when bloggers noticed uncanny similarities between quotes in Hari’s work and previously published interviews and books. The New Statesman began to dig further, and soon the internet was awash with incriminating examples. At the same time, several journalists who’d clashed with Hari in the past, including Nick Cohen and Cristina Odone, began to wonder in public about the identity of a mysteriously vengeful Wikipedia contributor who’d been editing their pages. He called himself “David Rose” and began issuing inventively elaborate online denials of the accusation that he was really Johann Hari. After his IP address was traced back to the Independent’s offices, the deception crumbled. The humiliation must have been toe-curling, but when I ask how he dealt with it, he says, “I just think that would be asking people to see it from my point of view.” Sympathy should be for the people he smeared online, for the Independent and its readers: “Not for me.”
Hari had sounded considerably less remorseful when the plagiarism allegations first surfaced. He found them “bemusing”, he wrote on his website, and justified using quotes interviewees had not said to him because his interviews were “intellectual portraits”. The defence sounded rather grandiosely self-serving – so why should anyone trust his new-found contrition? “I think, when you’re in the middle of being attacked, obviously your defence mechanisms go up and you can’t think clearly. It’s the moment when you most need your good judgment and are the least able to bring it.”
The mystery is why someone so clever could have behaved so stupidly. I ask Hari to explain what he’d been thinking, and he literally winces.
“I’m very reluctant to go into a personal narrative and give the why. Most people restrain their self-aggrandising and cruel impulses, and I failed to. I failed badly. I think when you do that, when you harm people, you should shut up, go away and reflect on what happened. Going on about myself would just be arrogant and actually repeating being nasty, and that’s what I’m trying not to be. When you fuck up, you should privately reckon with the harm you have caused and you should pay a big price.”
When the scandal broke, the George Orwell prize board ordered Hari to return his award. The Independent published a personal apology and sent him off to journalism school in New York on unpaid leave, but in January 2012 he resigned from the paper. Was the price he paid disproportionately high? Hari shakes his head. “It was incredibly humiliating, yes. It was absolutely devastating, and I fell apart. But I would not want to live in a culture where people could be horrible about other people under a pseudonym online, or act as if something someone had written had been said directly to you, and not pay a big price for it.”
For his new book, Hari has posted audio files online of every interview, so he is obviously worried about his credibility. Does he think this elaborate transparency will restore it? “Well, I fucked up and it’s perfectly right for people to be sceptical. I know I’ve got work to do in regaining trust.”
I ask how he thinks his disgrace changed him. “In two really big ways. One was just slowing down; writing much more slowly, living much more slowly, being less work-obsessed.” He is single, and shares his flat with a primary schoolteacher, one of his oldest friends. Most of his friends stood by him through the scandal, and a new one has been Russell Brand, for whom Hari has worked off and on since helping him prepare his 2013 standup tour, Messiah Complex. “We have long political conversations, and sometimes that sparks something useful for him, and then I send him links or books about what we’ve discussed.” He helps produce Brand’s podcast, the Trews, but when I ask about the rumours that he ghost-wrote Revolution, he laughs. “No. I didn’t write a word of it. As I suspect anyone who reads it can tell, those are all Russell’s words.”
It’s a relief, he says, not to be “in a state of mania any more, ripped up into a frenzy of constant opinionating and polemicising in my room”. I’m amazed more columnists don’t lose it, unhinged by the insatiable outrage of the Twittersphere, but when I ask if he thinks the register of public debate is becoming dangerous, he smiles. “Funnily enough, one of the good things about not being a columnist is that I don’t have to have an opinion on things like this. You’re probably right, and it sounds very persuasive to me, but I don’t want to join an angry argument against angry arguments.”
The other big change, he says, is that “I lost my taste for rendering judgment on people. I think now I’m more interested in understanding why people are the way they are.” What does he miss about his former life as a columnist? This time the silence lasts so long that I wonder if he heard the question. “It was the only job I ever wanted to do,” he says finally, and looks ashen. But he is already working on his next book, and says his new life makes him happier and healthier than his old one ever could.
If disgrace turned out to be a release, it still doesn’t feel that way to Hari. “No.” He shakes his head. “I’m not going to present it like a redemptive fable. It was awful, and I wish I hadn’t done it, and I wish I could go back and undo it.”

Friday 2 January 2015

We can’t control how we’ll die. The limits of individual responsibility


It’s important to live healthily, but scientists also tell us that the majority of cancers are down to chance – a good reminder of the limits of individual responsibility
Close-up of two stubbed-out cigarettes
'Most cancers are a random lightning bolt, not something we can avoid by keeping away from tobacco or excessive booze or by going for regular morning runs.' Photograph: Alamy

Our terror of death (happy new year, by the way) surely has much to do with a fear that it is out of our control. The lifetime risk of dying in a road accident is disturbingly high – one in 240 – and yet the freakishly small chance of dying in a plane accident generally provokes far more fear. We dread a final few moments in which we are powerless to do anything except wait for oblivion. So perhaps the news that most cancers are the product of bad luck – rather than, say, our diet or lifestyles – is scant reassurance. Most cancers are a random lightning bolt, not something we can avoid by keeping away from tobacco or excessive booze, or by going for regular morning runs. That’s something we have to live with.
But perhaps the news should be of comfort. It is, of course, crucial to promote healthy lifestyles. Regular exercise, a good diet and the avoidance of excess does save lives. Yet the cult of individualism fuels the idea that we are invariably personally responsible for the situation we are in: whether that be poverty, unemployment or ill health. Cancer is more individualised than most diseases: all that talk of “losing” or “winning” battles. A far wiser approach was summed up by DJ Danny Baker after his own diagnosis. He said he was “just the battlefield, science is doing the fighting and of course the wonderful docs and nurses of the brilliant NHS”. The cancer patient, in other words, was practically a bystander in a collective effort.
One of the heroes of 2014 was Stephen Sutton because of his infectious optimism and cheerfulness in the face of cancer. But his battle was about not letting cancer consume his final few months on earth, rather than a superhuman quest to miraculously defeat the disease himself. What struck me about Stephen was that a situation that seemed nightmarish to most of us became an opportunity for him to take control of his life. It is what struck me, too, about Gordon Aikman, a 29-year-old Scot with a terminal diagnosis of motor neurone disease. There is no right way to die, but he has learned how to live.
So that’s why I have some sympathy with Richard Smith, a doctor who once edited the British Medical Journal. He has upset many by suggesting we are “wasting billions trying to cure cancer”, when it is the “best” way to go. I certainly would not advocate cutting back on cancer research, quite the opposite – even if other fatal diseases don’t receive the same amount of attention – and cancer can be a horrible way to die. But his point was that it provided an opportunity to make peace, to reflect on life, to do all the things you always wanted to do – to finally have control over your own life. Other ways of dying simply do not provide that option, either because they are so sudden or because of the form they take.
We have less of a say over how and when we die than we thought. That may be a cause for anxiety: it may actually frighten us more. I think it’s liberating. If only we learned to live like many of those – like Stephen or Gordon – facing death, taking control of their lives, we would be so much happier than we are.

Easy to sneer at arts graduates. But we’ll need their skills


Creative types have the confidence to take risks. And they understand that money isn’t everything
Illustration by Nate Kitch
'Millions indulge their children in careers they know will yield neither financial reward nor national advantage.' Illustration by Nate Kitch

Anthony Ward Thomas, of Ward Thomas Removals, has a problem that he shares with the public. After a life spent turning a man with a van into a multimillion-pound firm, he finds his children are not interested in taking over. “They have different interests,” he says. He is sad, but agrees “there should be no divine right that they get the business”. They should make their own way in the world. This they are doing. His daughters are country and western singers and his son is an actor. I doubt if they are as rich.
When penal supertaxes were ended in the 1980s, the surplus spending power was expected to go on cars, yachts and houses. Much of it did. But a new form of supertax emerged, no less insistent than the last. It was called children. And not just any children, who might look after their parents in old age, but ones seeking a life of fashionable but impecunious “creativity”.
Statistics say the chief cost of child-rearing occurs in the teens. To get an offspring housed, clothed, fed and educated to the age of 21 takes an average of £225,000, or half a million if privately educated. This has more than doubled over the past decade. But ask most parents, and the expense does not stop at 21. It continues through further education, travel, internship, ongoing board and lodging, even early marriage.
Thousands the world over are returning to live at home after university. Australians have “boomerang” children, Italians bamboccioni (big babies), the Japanese parasaito shinguru (parasite singles) and the Germans “hotel mama”. To the youth psychologist Haim Omer, this “entitled dependency” has become “the new hedonism … an ideology at the parents’ expense, nothing less than a pandemic”. Behind this phenomenon stands the famous “bank of mum and dad”, notably in the matter of housing: its motto is “pay up or we stay”. In Britain this bespoke baby bank reportedly hands out a staggering £27bn annually. The loans have nothing to do with investment. The bank would go swiftly bust if they did. Money is spent, above all, on property. A trivial £600m is reckoned to go on business ventures. The bank is too proud to fail. The Ward Thomas branch of this bank is more specific. I am not privy to the family’s circumstances, but if the bank is like many I know, it existed to fund careers in “something creative”, often what the parents once called a hobby but their children consider a talent in need of full occupational rein. This bank of mum and dad becomes a private arts council, far outstripping the resources available to the real one.
A cultural economist might welcome this. It forces down pay and costs in the arts, making it cheaper to run literary festivals, music venues, provincial rep, galleries and publishing. Children are far more expert at extracting “grants” from parents than is the Treasury; HMRC has no clout to compare with “Edinburgh could be our big break, Dad”.
But the phenomenon has consequences. It biases “subsidy”, and the jobs to which they give access, towards the children of the rich. It also seriously distorts higher education, with a booming demand for courses in drama, dance, fine art, music, film, photography, design and creative writing.
Britain now has 160,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students in “creative arts and design”, with more than 20,000 in drama alone. This is more than in the whole of engineering or in maths and computing combined.
This academic bias is far beyond what the market for such skills can sustain. Just 28% of graduates in performing arts find jobs in the arts or media, while almost the same proportion find their way into retail and catering. Britain’s bursting drama schools are training a better class of waiter.
Does this matter? The lethargy afflicting Japan’s once-tiger economy over the past decade is attributed to precisely this career demotivation of the post-salaryman generation. Young Japanese have been able to afford to turn away from their parents’ grinding labour and its karoshi, or death from overwork. A similar collapse may one day afflict Chinese entrepreneurialism. Even the continued vitality of the US and Germany is attributed not to natives but to migrant talent drawn from less favoured countries.
National Theatre Wales students in rehearsal.
‘The bank of mum and dad becomes a private arts council, far outstripping the resources available to the real one.’ National Theatre Wales students. Photograph: D Legakis Photography/Athena
Europe is in the economic doldrums. It may produce the best opera singers and write the best novels, but its cars and computers are rubbish. Its bankers can hedge markets and its tour operators can market hedges, but the funds come from Asian enterprise. Either it will discourage its young from dancing, film-making and creative writing and galvanise it to risk-taking innovation, or it will slither into becoming a gigantic Bournemouth, living off the dwindling fat of its past.
So says the economist. Or should we put more faith in the dynamic of a humanistic education? Graduates in the performing arts are actually high achievers in finding work outside their skill group, probably through enhanced confidence and articulacy. They take chances and do not regard money as everything. They seem better equipped to use their imagination and challenge conventional wisdom.
The pop science bestseller Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari, suggests that humans “are now beginning to break the laws of natural selection, replacing them with the laws of intelligent design”. Human advance through natural selection has reached its limit. Strides forward will now be technological rather than biological.
For Harari the question for our species is not “what do we want to become?”, but the far harder question, “what do we want to want?”. Who makes the choices? The answer will not lie in the brave new world of cyborgs and robots. It can only lie in what are rightly called the humanities, the history and imagination of human beings. Alexander Pope was always right: “The proper study of mankind is man.”
Most British adults now believe their offspring will be poorer than themselves. Yet millions indulge their children in careers they know will yield neither financial reward nor national advantage. I am not convinced the world they are creating will really be worse off for that. There is plenty for the robots to do, like running removal firms.