Thoughts on "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" (**Spoilers abound**)

Two things struck me as I finished the Deathly Hallows:

(1) That, after all that furore, I (and probably a good many other adults) had forgotten that the Harry Potter books are children's books (and I mean that in the most non-pejorative way possible). That Harry's story is a coming-of-age tale, a boy's trial by fire into adulthood; in other words, a bildungsroman. To her great credit, and as Deathly Hallows shows clearly, Rowling kept her head, refused to be a carried away by all the frenzy and wrote a conventional happy ending, an ending that is clearly going to disappoint many (present company included) but which is still true in spirit to the spirit of the series.

(2) And what perhaps distinguishes Harry Potter from other children's books (and here I may be mistaken since my knowledge of children's literature is admittedly sketchy) is that while, like other young protagonists, Harry is always in mortal danger, unlike them, he also grapples constantly with the idea of death and mortality. Rowling's very skillful incorporation of death as a theme into the books is, I think, its best aspect, and responsible for creating the series' most memorable scenes.

Let's take these points in that order.

"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" is a fitting conventional (and again, in a completely non-pejorative sense) climax to a very enjoyable tale. A tale, that perhaps, because of its success, we all had started reading into much more than we should have. Will Harry die or won't he? Is Snape good or bad? All of these questions are answered -- Harry lives, Voldemort dies, and Snape turns out to be a good guy after all (which, for the record, I always wanted him to be), and the final battle against Voldmort takes place at Hogwarts, and all the characters, including, improbably, the pompous Percy Weasley, are reunited -- but these answers were preordained from the start. Why we all went into such a frenzy about them, why we thought they would resolve any differently, is a mystery, now that the saga is finally over.

Perhaps the turning point, the point in the story where Rowling could have taken it any way she wanted, occurs somewhere in the middle of the book. When the news that the Ministry of Magic has been taken over by Death Eaters reaches them, Harry, Ron and Hermione are forced to flee. Over the course of the next 150 pages or so, they tramp from one place to another, bickering, fighting, eating, arguing about where the horcruxes can be, trying to dispose of the one they have. There is a hint of a homage being paid to "The Lord of the Rings" here, since the the friends take turns hanging the horcrux-locket around their necks and it affects their disposition, particularly Ron's. After a furious dispute with Harry and Hermione -- the evil horcrux clearly has a hand in this -- Ron leaves them and Harry and Hermione are alone, and truly afraid. Ron has gone, there is very little possibility of his coming back; even if he wants to, he will not be able to find them.

This is where I experienced my first quickening of the senses. Rowling had already hinted that she was going to have to kill off a couple of major characters. With Ron gone, and the chances of their meeting again looking bleak, I thought it would be Ron. And perhaps, Ron's loss (and even death) would bring Harry and Hermione closer, with them probably even ending up together, since Ginny is pretty much out of the picture. (I thought Harry and Hermione would end up together from the first book, when Ron seemed more like a comic foil to Hermione's Miss know-it-all . Then when Ginny got this crush on Harry in Chamber of Secrets, I knew she was going to have a bigger role to play. I have to say I shouted out aloud when Harry kisses her in Half-Blood Prince. Perhaps I watch too many romantic potboilers.)

Whatever my thoughts at this juncture, Rowling punctured them abruptly. In an unconvincing deus ex machina, Ron returns, saving Harry, getting rid of the horcrux-locket (perhaps the one scene, where Ron's true insecurities come forth) and in the process, also revealing to the three friends that Dumbledore's gifts had a purpose. And Harry admits to Ron that he's missed him and that he thinks of Hermione as his sister (I have to admit I cringed at this). The friends are together again, and at that point I knew that the ending would be conventional -- that it would be Ron and Hermione, Harry and Ginny, with Voldemort dead and all being well (The last words of the books are indeed: "All was well."). What is the point of this interlude? I think Rowling wanted to spend some time (and wanted us to spend some time) with her three main protagonists, perhaps trying to illuminate their friendship, wanting, perhaps, to give us some time with them before the war against Voldemort consumed every theme in the book.

Which brings me to my only quibble with the book. Much has been written about Rowling's descriptions, about her ability to conjure up magical fantasias but I think Stephen King got it right in this review of Goblet of Fire. J. K. Rowling's greatest asset, the best feature of the Harry Potter books is, finally, plot. All the Harry Potter books are at heart, old-fashioned mystery stories, their skeletons similar to those polished whodunits that Agatha Christie or Dorothy L. Sayers wrote. In the beginning of the books, something happens, something very confusing. Harry and his friends investigate, and that something turns out to have been something else, which in turn, was caused by someone else. And so on and on and on. Perhaps because there is so much else in the Harry Potter books -- let's not forget that everyone here is a wizard or a witch -- this aspect of the books tends to be overlooked, sometimes even not noticed. The first four books were explicit whodunits, with the Prisioner of Azkaban having the most elegant ending, and Goblet of Fire the most spectacular one.

But Rowling has something else going for her -- her long-term attention to details. Clearly she has thought about the plot long and hard. Which is why sometimes throwaway details from earlier books turn out to be significant plot developments. This was particularly evident in Half-Blood Prince, where Rowling gradually revealed facets of Lord Voldemort -- I, for one, was delighted when Tom Riddle's diary from Chamber of Secrets -- a book whose plot always seemed out-of-sync with the rest of the books -- turned out to be a horcrux. Tom Riddle, who appeared out of the blue in the second book, became a much more grounded character in Half-Blood Prince and his transformation into Lord Voldemort was the most fascinating part of the sixth book.

I am of the opinion that this attention to details is overdone in the final installment. Far too much depends on recalling minute parts of the sixth book: the location of the final horcrux (although this part is hardly important in the scheme of things; and even its destruction happens off the pages), the revelations of Harry's ancestry, the importance of Godric's Hollow, the machinations about the ownership of Dumbledore's wand. But perhaps the weakest point of the seventh book are its battle scenes. I've always found the wizarding duels way too unconvincing with everyone going around shouting "Expelliramus" or "Crucio" or "Accio". The final Battle of Hogwarts that concludes the series is meant to be epic -- think of Tolkien's Helm's Deep or the Siege of Gondor -- but the descriptions are painfully inadequate: everyone seems to be running around throwing spells, or duelling, although why the wizards should duel mano a mano is beyond me.

But these are quibbles, drops in bucket as big as the ocean (David Edelstein's line). Like all the previous Harry Potter books, "The Deathly Hallows" is tremendously enjoyable. Dumbledore and Snape become more human, and Harry has a touching scene with the wraiths of the people he loves the most, as he is going to his death. In Goblet of Fire, the death of Cedric Diggory was a stunner. A few more people have died since then and while Harry Potter has ended conventionally, with a happy ending, the theme of mortality has always cast its long shadow over the books themselves. This, perhaps, has been Rowling's greatest success: she has written a wonderfully enjoyable series of books about death, magic and friendship.

ASIDE: Incidentally, what's up with Michiko Kakutani's review? The review appeared three days before the book released; Kakutani apparently procured it from a bookshop, read it overnight and contributed a review at 700 words a minute, recyling most of the lines from her reviews of the previous Harry Potter books (understandable, but still ... someone ought to take the judgemental Ms Kakutani to task for that, no?). Don't believe me? Read this. And then read this and this -- what do you think?

Sad news

I just learnt that the great philosopher Richard Rorty died on Friday (see here and here). Rorty is, as some of you may well know, famous (or infamous, depending on which side of the divide you fall on) as an anti-foundationalist or a pragmatist (again, depending on what kind of pragmatist you are). See here.

Strangely enough, I spend yesterday afternoon reading a couple of Rorty's essays in "Philosophy and Social Hope" at the B&N near Lincoln Center. I also spent some time debating whether I should buy Rorty's most famous work "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" (I didn't but that was because I could find it cheaper online).

As my sort of RIP, I"ll link to this autobiographical Rorty essay (from "Philosophy and Social Hope") called "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids" (available here) where Rorty recounts his intellectual odyssey: from being a foundationalist analytic philosopher to his rediscovery of John Dewey's pragmatism and his eventual rejection of Platonism. The essay won't help anyone understand the intricacies of pragmatism (see here for that) but it definitely brings Rorty into focus. Read it.

Email of the day

Some kid mails Richard Chappel, after using one of his papers for a college homework assignmentl:

I made the mistake of copying your "Rousseau and Freedom," paper from your blog [link]. I am sorry. My university is going to charge me with cheating. Can you please do me a big favor and temporarily take down "Rousseau and Freedom,"??? I will owe you forever. Please let me know if you can help! Thank you!

Thanks,
[Name redacted]

Fun, eh?

David Thomson on Lars Von Trier

This kicker of a sentence from David Thomson's magisterial A Biographical Dictionary of Film, on the maverick gadfly Lars Von Trier is perfect:

Von Trier is like a seven-year old serial killer whose bombs and weapons have all gone into his eye.

(!!)

A little crisis about "crisis"

There is nothing new for me in Somini Sengupta's latest piece in the New York Times really; every Indian is intimately -- in every sense of that lovely word -- acquainted with the details of the abyssmal power situation in India.

I have a smaller etymological quibble. Are we correct when we use the term "crisis" to describe India's power situation? Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't "crisis" describe a situation that was all right once but is now in dire straits? Or in other words, for something to be a crisis, doesn't there have to be a sort of a golden past, when everything worked, and which has now degenerated rapidly (or slowly) into the current situation? For instance, to quote an analogous scenario, when one talks of the California Power Crisis -- and I lack an economic understanding of it -- doesn't that mean that there was a time when things were all right in sunny California? And then, whatever the cause, things weren't all right and went from bad to worse to catastrophic (in the mild sense of the word)?

Because if that sense of the word is right, then India just has a problem (magnitude notwithstanding) -- and has always had it. Power cuts and load-shedding were as common before economic liberalization as they are now; it's just that it's more visible now -- the most vivid things for me in Sengupta's piece were her descriptions of high-rise malls with smoke billowing out of them even as they are surrounded by a dark neighborhood.

UPDATE: There does seem to be a way of applying the c-word to India's situation. Here's how Websters defines "crisis":

1 a: the turning point for better or worse in an acute disease or fever b: a paroxysmal attack of pain, distress, or disordered function c: an emotionally significant event or radical change of status in a person's life crisis>
2: the decisive moment (as in a literary plot)
3 a: an unstable or crucial time or state of affairs in which a decisive change is impending; especially : one with the distinct possibility of a highly undesirable outcome crisis> b: a situation that has reached a critical phase crisis>

So even if the word here doesn't exactly connote a golden past, it could theoretically, at least, connote a golden future. As the dictionary says, it could mean that "decisive change" (for the better, one hopes) is impending -- which could then mean that India's present situation is a crisis.

An Amputee Sprinter?

I have read nothing quite so surreal as this. (Idle wonderings of an idle mind: Is this maybe a topic for cyborg-discourse specialists like Katherine Hayles and Paul Edwards?)

Barbara, here I come

I've long been an admirer of Barbara Stanwyck -- despite the fact that I've only watched two of her films. But what films! I consider Preston Sturges' "The Lady Eve" to be one of the best movies I've ever seen, a comedy that transcends comedy -- and despite the great Henry Fonda around, it is Stanwyck's film all the way. ("I need him like the axe needs the turkey", "Lady Eve", played by Stanwyck, remarks at one point). The other film, of course, is the Billy Wilder noir "Double Indemnity", famous for getting into trouble for Stanwyck's expression: as her lover played by Fred MacMurray strangles her husband, Stanwyck's femme fatale, glimpsed in the rearview mirror, watches with an expression that is almost sexually ecstatic. (Oh, and I've seen her in a couple of weepies -- but I can't recall their names -- on TCM).

Still, it's Stanwyck's birth centenary this year and BAM is celebrating by screening several of her movies. (Perhaps because it is so well-known, "The Lady Eve" is not on the list). Of course I want to go but MoMA is screening a festival of Indian movies right this week -- so I was torn between what to do. Anthony Lane's profile of Stanwyck in the latest New Yorker settles it for me: I'm going to the Stanwyck retrospective for sure.

The strange ways of destiny

So the other day -- exactly a week ago, to be precise -- I went out with some friends who were visiting, to the Indian restaurant Yuva. Three of us ordered cocktails whose names were rather fun -- mine, I believe, was called Yuvapolitan. My friend's fiancee ordered one -- and here I forget its name again -- and this was basically jaljeera mixed with vodka. She let us taste it -- it was heavenly! I mean it. It tasted like the paani (of paani-puri) spiced with vodka. Aaaah.

Just today, [via Amardeep] I read about Somini Sengupta's latest for the Times: a piece on chaat, as found on the streets of Delhi. The piece is pretty good but what struck me was this paragraph:

A trendy restaurant chain called Punjabi by Nature offers an inventive cocktail built around the pani puri: Two potato-filled shells are served with a shot of vodka infused with green chili and lime, along with a glass of draft beer as chaser.

Awesome. Now that's what I call inventive food.

A kick in the balls

Jon Chait is probably the funniest political journalist writing today. If you want an example, read his column on Ari Fleischer's (the former Bush administration spokesman) WSJ column on the tax code. I'll only quote his kicker of an ending here (see the two photographs for illustration):

I'll give Fleischer the benefit of the doubt here and assume that this isn't an outright lie, but rather he couldn't read the table correctly. Let me explain it this way, Ari: Suppose that a few years ago, 37 percent of your scalp was covered with hair. Today, only 31 percent is. Would you say that your hair has increased or decreased over that time?

Have they seen the trailer?

So I learn from the New York Times that the movie Jindabyne is based on Raymond Carver's short story "So much water so close to home". This story, which was also filmed by Robert Altman in Short Cuts is about a man who goes on a fishing trip with his buddies, and keeps fishing even after discovering a girl's dead body -- and then reports it to the authorities. His wife, predictably, can't understand how he could have done that.

Have the film-makers seen the trailer for the movie? Well, I've seen it thrice (there's a bombardment going on at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas) and I mistook it for a thriller -- a kind of Wolf Creek really -- with peculiar Australian accents (just listen to Gabriel Bryne!) to boot. Which only goes to prove what I've thought all along: small independent features need to market themselves better and directors need to supervise the making of a trailer rather than leaving it to clueless associates who don't have much information about the movie.

Paragraph of the day

Geoffrey Nunberg begins his blog-post on apologies and their functions with this priceless paragraph:

When I was an undergraduate at Columbia, a bunch of my friends and I spent a lot of long afternoons and evenings at the movie theaters along West 42d Street, where for less than a buck you could see a double or triple feature of gangster movies, war movies or westerns. That was well before the area was sanitized and Disneyfied, and the theaters were--well, "seedy" doesn't really do them justice. The seats and carpeting were shabby and permanently saturated with a mixture of fluids, processed and unprocessed. The balconies were sharply raked, the rows so close together as to make even the economy section of a United Airlines flight seem positively spacious. And the clientele was a mix of movie buffs, lonely guys, and down-and-outers who considered 99 cents a stone bargain for a warm place to sleep off a bender. So it was that a friend and I found ourselves in the balcony of a theater one rainy evening watching an Anthony Mann western when we heard a middle-class male voice behind us saying in a loud, indignant tone: "Sorry? You piss on my date and you're SORRY?"

Just so we are clear: the post is actually on what apologies do -- or are supposed to do -- and the discussion covers both J. L. Austin and Erving Goffmann. Goffmann's take (from Nunberg's post):

The most enlightening discussion of this that I know of comes (not surprisingly) from Erving Goffman, in his books Interaction Ritual and particularly Relations in Public. (Goffman's account has since been built on by others, but his story will do for here.) Apologies, Goffman said, are remediation rituals that

represent a splitting of the self into a blameworthy part and a part that stands back and sympathizes with them, and by implication, is worthy of being brought back into the fold.

As a ritual, Goffman insists, the apology is independent of the substantive penalties that may be attached to an offense:

After an offense has occurred, the job of the offender is to show... that whatever happened before, he now has a right relationship--a pious attitude--to the rule in question, and this is a matter of indicating a relationship, not compensating a loss.

Interesting.

This is an essay worth reading...

I haven't seen Michael Tomasky this angry since his debate with Peter Beinart in Slate (discussing Beinart's book "The Good Fight") and that was nothing compared to this profile of Rudy Giuliani that appears in the recent American Prospect.

Still, this is a strikingly good read. Tomasky's distaste for Giuliani is so palpable that as a result, the piece flows. Vividly. I haven't read a polemic this brilliant since Christopher Hitchens' rant against Michael Moore on the eve of the release of Fahrenheit 9/11 -- and that was nowhere near as smooth and effective as Tomasky's piece is.

Check it out.

The best line?

Bill Clinton may have embarrassed his family, but Rudy Giuliani humiliated his. That previous summer to which Donna referred, when she thought she and her husband were reconciling? He was dashing out to the Hamptons to spend weekends at Judy's condo! This was not mere irresponsibility, the kind of "mistake" we "learn from," as he has taken to saying on the stump. This was sadism. And he didn't act this way only toward his wife and kids, which might render this a private matter. No -- this was how the man dealt with enemies private and public.

Conservatives may think they're supporting the September 11 Rudy. But I covered the man for 15 years, and I can guarantee them they'll be getting the May 10 Rudy as part of the bargain. If they actually nominate him, they will eventually learn this the hard way, just like poor Donna did.

CORRECTION: In the Beinart-Tomasky dialog I linked to above, it's Beinart who seems angry, while Tomasky is merely icy. Still it was the fractious tone of the dialog I remembered.

Headline-construction is an art

As an example, check out this one from the NYT, about the financial services company (student loans) Sallie Mae, which is in talks for a merger:

Sallie Mae Said to Talk to Suitors

After "After the Wedding" (Spoilers)

The interesting thing about failed movies (or even bad movies -- although bad movies aren't fun to watch) is that they tell you more about movies and about how movies work than successful ones do.

According to Heidegger, most of our experience as embodied human beings, embedded in various socio-cultural contexts is "ready-to hand": meaning that one acts in and through the world without really reflecting on it. An example would be me typing this blog-post on my keyboard: when I type, the keyboard doesn't really exist for me except as an extension of my hand, just as the pen doesn't really exist for me when I write long-hand. But if the keyboard was bad or if the one of the keys, the letter "e", say, stopped working (or the pen ran out of ink), I become aware of the keyboard as an object, with its own properties. What was before, for me, just an extension of my fingers, is now an object in its own right, something to be reflected on and fixed. A breakdown has occured and my keyboard has gone from being a ready-to-hand tool to being a present-at-hand object.

Susanne Bier's beautifully shot and acted After the Wedding has a similar effect. The movie doesn't work -- in fact, it falls flat -- but it brings out more about why movies work than anything I've seen. The film begins in Mumbai where we meet Jacob (pronounced Ya-ko-b), who works for a non-profit organization, caring for destitute children. Jacob is asked to come to Dennmark by a shadowy millionaire, Jorgen. Jacob has to meet Jorgen, talk and -- this is almost assured -- if everything goes right, he gets a nice tidy donation for his charity. Neat? Fishy? Yes, but not in the way you'd expect.

In Dennmark, Jorgen invites Jacob to his daughter's wedding; by this time Jacob's one day in Dennmark has already turned into three and Jorgen seems to be delaying. And at the wedding which gives the film its title, Jacob meets Jorgen's wife, who turns out to be the woman who left him twenty years ago. Is this a coincidence? Jorgen says so. The audience is suspicious. But then, Jorgen's twenty-year old daughter Anna lets slip out -- in her wedding toast, no less -- that she was actually fathered by another man, whom she doesn't know (Are Danes prone to casually revealing these things at weddings?) . No prizes for guessing what Jacob thinks.

A man has found a daughter he fathered after twenty years. What does he do? How does he react? At this point, I was ready for the film to turn into a not unpleasurable weepie or a Festen-style drama, with accusations flying back and forth. But After the Wedding is not that kind of movie. In the very next scene, Jacob confronts Jorgen's wife, his former lover: Either you tell our daughter about me or I will. And in the scene after that, she does exactly that. How will the daughter react? Will she bond with her father? Well, we find that out too -- in the very next scene. And so on it goes. After the Wedding, deals with in scenes, the themes and issues, that other, more weepy movies might devote their entire running times to.

So where's the movie going? It turns out -- again, none of this is revelatory -- that the rich, efficient, almost God-like tycoon, Jorgen, is dying and that this is indeed his way of playing God: making sure that his wife and his kids have something to keep, something to live for, somone who can take care of them, after he is dead. That they do and he dies. And that's the movie.

The last two lines would probably qualify as the understatements of the year. The revelations of Jorgen's death, his family's reaction to it, Jacob's decision to leave his orphanage and be with his family, a family that moreover has given him meaning in his life (not to mention, more funds for his orphanage) are all etched out in searching little scenes; scenes, it is true, that come out of a monstrously contrived plot but which seem -- I can't find any word for it -- authentic. The cinema verite style (what Manohla Dargis has called dogme-lite) and it's artful closeups -- a throbbing lip here, a tearful eye there, a hand lying limp, a face taut with pain, a forehead creased with worry -- manage to be both true and emotional, capturing the emotional pulse of a scene with unerring accuracy, and yet at the same time, seamless, never straining for effect. One scene in particular (out of many) stood out for me: a scene where Anna, the daughter, confronts her foster-father, Jorgen, when she learns of his impending death. No textual description could do justice to its poignancy -- and the brilliance of the actors.

And yet, I was dry-eyed throughout the movie. Not one tear. Not a drop. More importantly, I couldn't wait for the movie, with its over-the-top plot, to end. My impatience mounted as scene after emotional scene (all beautifully shot and acted) went past. When the movie ended, I heaved a sigh of relief. After the Wedding, as good as I could see it was, had been an excruciating experience to sit through.

Why? I'll tackle that in the next post (since this one has gone on long enough).

The things that turn people on ...

This gem, from a New York Times piece on sexual desire:

“Listening to Noam Chomsky,” said a psychologist in her 50s, “always turns me on.”

I thought the British sailors looked cute! ...

...but what do I know?

Here is the New York Times, calling the suits shapeless and badly cut:

Yet, even as we allow that the British servicemen were innocent of fashion, and put on the clothes as a matter of course to replace the pajamas they had most recently been kept in, there is something disturbing about their appearance. It is doubtful that the Iranian government went to the trouble of outfitting 14 men in suits and shirts, however unflattering, if they didn’t mean to make some kind of a political statement. Having never been to that part of the Middle East, I am in no position to comment on a double-standard that permits people to wear one kind of fashion in their homes and another in public. But it seems to me that the plain if not poor cut of the suits was meant as a rebuke to flashy Western tastes. An English banker, in his bespoke suit, might react in horror, but couldn’t that be the point?

Hmmmm. I'm not sure what the argument is here, but is this a case of reading too much? To most eyes -- or at least to third-world eyes like mine -- the suits were elegant and the Iranian regime was just trying to show off, what Ahmadinejad might call his magnanimity. If the sharp sartorial Western eyes found them inelegant and frumpy, that was purely unintentional.

UPDATE: Re-reading the post in the light of the comment below, it strikes me that my prose isn't quite clear about what I am talking about. (Or in other words, I f***ed up). My point is: in dressing up the British sailors in suits, was the Iranian government's way of (elegantly) showing the middle finger to the West, the point being approximately, "look how we treat our prisioners, we even give them suits to wear; have you taken a good look at yours". At the same time, it was a way of gaining the good will of the rest of the Islamic world -- a kind of "look at us, we don't give a damn for the West".

If the suits seemed dowdy and badly cut, that wasn't a part of the plan, nor was it the intention. The suits were the point, not their cut or size. When I mentioned my third-world eyes I meant that they looked like perfectly adequate suits to me -- as I would assume, they would seem, to most people from the Islamic/developing world, at whom the gesture was aimed -- although I am perfectly prepared to accept that the suits were frumpy.

So maybe the Iranians miscalculated, after all?

I have company

It's a relief to know that there are people who've seen the utterly gorgeous gorgeous Spring Awakening more than I have (twice, and want more).

Surprising factoid of the week:

Reihan Salam, reviewing, the new Netflix, "Watch Now" mentions this about himself:

I will note here that my Netflix habits are unconventional. During my early days as a Netflix subscriber, I spent anywhere from 1 to 3 hours a night watching DVDs on fast forward with the subtitles on. Because I read fairly quickly, I was able to follow twists and turns at high speed, thus increasing my cultural literacy in record time.

Wha...?? I truly can't find any words...

Elections in Russia

A Russian presidential candidate, not blessed by czar Vladmir Putin, is fighting off smears and allegations, aided by his loyal wife:

A month later he was back visiting Moscow and called a sparsely attended news conference to denounce an intensifying campaign against him. He denied having falsified his diploma and went on to explain, among other things, his interest in “gypsy hypnosis.” Marina Donskaya interrupted him, having lost patience with the pressure. “He’s not gay!” she shouted, referring to slurs that had been appearing in the Arkhangelsk press. “He impregnated me.”

wimbledon makes history

As a long-time tennis fan, I can say that this is truly historic.

UPDATE: Tommy Haas should make up his mind: he has a point (which I don't agree with) but did he have to add the usual mandatory disclaimer?

Reaction from male players was mixed. Federer said it was “a great move,” but Tommy Haas said, “I don’t think it’s really fair.”

...

“I think the depth of men’s tennis is much tougher than the women’s, plus we play best-of-five sets,” Haas, a German, said yesterday in Memphis after a 7-6, 7-6 victory against Amer Delic.

“Not to say that the women don’t deserve it,” he said. “The top players train very hard and are very good tennis players, but in general I don’t agree with it.”

UPDATE: Sheetal below suggests that the women should now start playing best-of-five sets. I disagree. I think the best-of-five format goes on for far too long. Instead the ATP tour might just want to make it best-of-three sets even for the guys (it is so in most ATP tournaments, I think, just not in the Grand Slams).

Besides, I've never thought that the money in tennis is proportional to the amount of work that the players put in. Tennis is entertainment -- if women's tennis is as entertaining as men's tennis, then they deserve equal pay. Simple. The problem of course, is that the men's game has so much more depth. A male player ranked in the hundreds plays tennis at much higher level -- the comparision, of course, is with the top ten -- than a female player in the hundreds. But the depth of a game is unquantifiable. Most spectators come to watch tennis matches only from the quarter-final onwards and at that level, the women's game is as interesting as the men's game. And who knows? Depth can change. Roger Federer dominates men's tennis today in a way that no single woman does on the WTA tour. It's far better to just pay the women and the men at the same rate -- who knows? that may inspire more and more young girls to turn pro and play some scintillating tennis.

Heh

Film Comment Selects is an annual New York City offering from the Lincoln Center's Film Comment magazine. Here's Manohla Dargis, in her primer on the films that'll be shown this year:

The highbrow meets the lowdown and dirty in Jean-Claude Brisseau’s “Exterminating Angels,” which kicks off the series of 18 films tonight. (It opens commercially in three weeks.) Raunch of the most decorous kind, this blush-inducing Valentine’s Day offering concerns a director, François (the game Frédéric van den Driessche), who’s holding auditions for his next project, a thriller. This being an art-house thriller, or at least a French filmmaker’s conceit, the actresses will, ooh-la-la, have to masturbate on camera. There won’t be any men, François assures the startled women, except for those who will presumably line up around the block to see the final results.

Most of the actresses decline François’s offer, but a few agree to abandon propriety and clothes, which leads to several explicit boudoir — and one under-the-restaurant-table — encounters. The film raises fascinating questions about power and sex both in regard to the director-actress relationship and, more generally, men and women. In Mr. Brisseau’s case those questions turn out to be intensely personal since he was convicted in 2005 of sexually harassing two actresses who claimed, yes, that he had forced them to masturbate during screen tests for another film. It remains unclear how Mr. Brisseau, who was apparently unarmed, forced the women to engage in acts of self-pleasure, but this transgression brought him a suspended jail sentence, a fine and, of course, the inspiration for his next film.

Nothing like life-meets-art. I think I'm going to go see this one...

Quote of the day:

“We are tickled pink to be here,” said Dennis D. Cavin, the vice president for international air and missile defense strategic initiatives at Lockheed Martin.

Yes, tickled pink to be in Bangalore hawking fighter aircraft for sale to the Indian Government. Huh. Where do they come up with these expressions?

Paragraph of the day

David Edelstein on Pierce Brosnan:

No one who sees the first fifteen minutes of Seraphim Falls can doubt that Brosnan is the movies’ supreme grunter: He is to acting what poor Monica Seles was to tennis. He added grunts to his feats in his Bond movies, presumably to make 007 seem more human, but they were too jarring in that high-style context. Here, they make for a powerful soundtrack. The movie opens with him taking a bullet in the shoulder (aggghhh!), rolling down an embankment (uggghh arrrr), tumbling into a raging river (raahruuuf!) that dumps him over a falls (yaaaaaaaaah), digging the bullet out of his shoulder (arf%^Sssss$#yyy!) with a big knife and then cauterizing the wound (ayyyeeeeeeeeee!!!). I’m not being facetious: This is very impressive stuff. If his acting career ever stalls, he could make a fortune dubbing kung fu pictures.

Probabalistic Watches, Tim Harford etc (which means I couldn't think of a title)

Henry Farrell writes on Crooked Timber:

Lifehacker links to an invention that I’ve thought for years would be a good idea (I’m sure that plenty of other people have had the same thought). Many people have their clocks running a few minutes fast, to encourage them to leave earlier for appointments to get there on time etc etc. The problem with this is that if you’re half-way rational, you’ll correct for the error, making it useless. So the solution is to have a probabilistic clock, where the clock is fast, but you aren’t sure how fast it is within a given and relatively short time range. Thus, you’re more likely to depart early for your appointments and get there on time (or a few minutes ahead, most probably, in many situations). This is exactly what some bloke has programmed, although it doesn’t appear that it has an alarm feature yet.

This is embarassing to say but I never thought of a probabilistically faster clock, despite my engineering degree and all. And I’ve done the same thing this past month—speeded up my wrist-watch, but ended up being late anyway because I know it’s faster! (My fellow van-poolers haven't been so pleased with my chronic lateness. But I'm trying, guys, I'm trying!)

Still, this brings up another point. My wrist-watch is of the old variety, with hands, and time-marks arranged in a circle, which means that the lowest time-interval you can accurately measure is 5 minutes. When I set it to run fast, I didn’t want to run too fast, thereby resulting in me getting there early (smart, huh?), so I set it to run faster by something less than 5 minutes. What this something is, I can’t recall—and really, no one thinks of measuring minutes except in multiples of 5. Therefore my watch does seem to be running probablistically faster, since I don’t know exactly how fast it is. No?

Has this helped? Well, not really! The rational (or procrastinating) actor proves hard to overcome. Now he simply takes out his cellphone and checks the time!

One more thought: It strikes me that the range of values that one can probabilistically speed up the watch by (1 to 4 minutes) cannot be extended. Because setting the watch faster by 11 to 14 minutes has the same effect as setting it faster by 1 to 4 (since the rational actor will cancel out the 10 minutes because it’s a multiple of 5 and thereby easily taken care of).

Commenter Maria on Henry's post brings up this typical Tim Harford gem:

Last weekend’s FT had a Dear Economist (i.e. Dear Tim Harford letter) from someone who always sets his watch fast and still manages to fool himself into being on time. ‘Mark’ wondered how this was possible, what with him being a rational actor who writes to economists asking for life hacks.

The answer was “you have a split personality, a warped view of time and are too lazy to do simple sums. Now put down this magazine: I suspect you are running late for something.”

Ah, Shilpa...

Well, Shilpa Shetty is having her few moments of fame. I don't blame her, really -- I just hope she enjoys every moment of it. I also hope it gets her better acting assignments -- because she's sadly under-used.

Still I can't resist putting quoting this excerpt from Germaine Greer, the first few paragraphs of her wickedly funny essay.

There are no good reasons for watching Celebrity Big Brother and very good reasons for not. Not watching will spare you the nerve-fraying annoyingness that is Shilpa Shetty. Everything about her is infuriating: her haughty way of stalking about, her indomitable self-confidence, her chandelier earrings, her leaping eyebrows, her mirthless smile, her putty nose and her eternal bray, "Why does everyone hate me?" Not to mention the crying jags. What no one seems to have quite understood is that Shilpa is a very good actress. Everyone hates her because she wants them to. She also knows that if she infuriates people enough, their innate racism will spew forth.

As a Tamil, Shetty has certainly had to deal with discrimination at home in suburban Mumbai. Her only motive for parading in front of the other women in the house with whitener on her face was to show what utter hicks they are, how little they understand of her complex reality or of a billion people in the subcontinent who all want to have wheat-coloured skin. I bet thousands of brown-skinned girls in Southall fell off the sofa laughing when she did that.

Bollywood is no picnic; anyone who makes 51 Bollywood movies in 13 years has to be tough. Shilpa has a black belt in karate. She is just the girl to raise the pit bull in a dizzy little drip like Danielle and keep her frothing at the mouth long enough for her nascent career as a sweet little Wag to disappear down the drain. When Shilpa is finished with Danielle even Teddy Sheringham will know what a small, dark heart beats within her fetching chest. This explains the slightly cannibal air of self-satisfaction that never abandons Shilpa. She knows what she is doing. She will shred the nerves of all the other women in that house until even Cleo pulls back her frozen lips and shows the fangs behind her witless Mona Lisa smile.

I can switch Shilpa off. The people in the house with her haven't got that option. The problem is that most of the housemates are too dim to convey what a pain in the ass Shilpa is without appearing to persecute her. So Danielle, beside herself with rage because Shilpa cooks with onions, calls her a dog. Jack Tweed calls her a cunt. The word was bleeped out, leading many viewers to speculate that she had been racially abused. That is not surprising. This is a racist country; to the vast majority of couch potatoes out there, Shilpa is a "Paki bird".

Does anyone know?

Shamu was published in June 2006 in the New York Times and was the most-emailed article for a long long time after that. Jack Shafer even wrote a sarcasatic column about it.

Does anyone know why Shamu is back as the most-emailed article on the Times web-page? Or has it been there all along?

the Times slips up!

Factoid: About two days ago, the pristine New York Times printed desi equivalents of "sister-fucker" and "mother-fucker", not to mention "dick"! Yes, believe it or not, the New York Times said "bhenchod"!!!

Confused? Hee hee. Here's the background: Vikram Chandra's new novel Sacred Games has been generating much newsprint. It was Paul Gray's review in the Times that prompted siddhartha's mischevious post: apparently, reviewer Gray, in an effort, to give his readers a taste of Chandra's prose -- Chandra writes with a liberal dose of desi, especially Bambaiya, words, Bambaiya being mostly Hindi and Marathi -- had included the words -- hold your breath now! -- nullah,” “ganwars,” “bigha,” “lodu,” “bhenchod,” “tapori,” “maderchod”! Quite a change for the New York Times, don't you think? Particularly since when film critic A. O. Scott reviewed the documentary Fuck, the title of the film was printed as ****, sort of defeating the whole purpose of the film, which was to explore the usage and origins of, well, the word "fuck"! (Scott, in his insightful review, didn't think so, believing that it's only because sainted institutions like the Times eschew use of the word that it retains its capacity to shock. The man has a point. But whatever.)

The story doesn't end here though. I happened to click on the Paul Gray review again today (via this post) and guess what? The words are now gone! Vanished! Here is how it was before:

So it goes here. Those who plunge into the novel soon find themselves thrashing in a sea of words (“nullah,” “ganwars,” “bigha,” “lodu,” “bhenchod,” “tapori,” “maderchod”) and sentences (“On Maganchand Road the thela-wallahs already had their fruit piled high, and the fishsellers were laying out bangda and bombil and paaplet on their slabs”) unencumbered by italics or explication.

And this is how it is now:

So it goes here. Those who plunge into the novel soon find themselves thrashing in a sea of words and sentences (“On Maganchand Road the thela-wallahs already had their fruit piled high, and the fishsellers were laying out bangda and bombil and paaplet on their slabs”) unencumbered by italics or explication.

I have a couple of questions:

1) Where's the retraction? It seem like the standard for any web-publications to acknowledge any changes to its text. The Times, as far as I could tell, doesn't seem to have one. But just suppose if they did, what would it say? "The Editors would like to note that the review by Paul Gray, contained expletives, although in a foreign tongue. The expletives themselves, are too shocking even to be paraphrased. We have exterminated them completely from our website. The error is regretted. Indians and Hindi-speakers, do remember to supervise your childrenl, should they chance upon the said edition of the Book Review."

2) What about the print edition? Is there a print edition of the Review floating around with words like "bhenchod" in it? (the horror!) If there is, does anyone have it? And -- this signals my desperation -- if one got hold of it, would it be worth anything?

why are the germans considered humorless?

This (whole article here) seems like an insightful paragraph:

I think that the British prejudice about Germany’s supposed humour famine stems from the fact that there is no German tradition of daily banter. In London you can hear a dozen wisecracks in a day — at work or on the bus or in the coffee shop. They may be lame, but at least they’re quick. In Germany, humour is stockaded, kept apart from everyday life. In the evenings Harald Schmidt, a genuinely funny talk-show host, will crack their sides. But only after dinner has been eaten, the plates rinsed and the yoghurt pots washed, ready for recycling. In the office next day people will repeat Schmidt’s gags and they will laugh again. However, they will fail to spot the inherent absurdities of their own office life.

heh! this is funny...

New Republic reporter Mike Crowley wrote a profile of Michael Crichton for an issue of TNR in March this year. Apparently, Crichton didn't like it -- and guess how he responded? Well, in his latest novel Next, Crichton has a character, "Mick Crowley", who -- well, I'll simply quote the passage:

Alex Burnet was in the middle of the most difficult trial of her career, a rape case involving the sexual assault of a two-year-old boy in Malibu. The defendant, thirty-year-old Mick Crowley, was a Washington-based political columnist who was visiting his sister-in-law when he experienced an overwhelming urge to have anal sex with her young son, still in diapers. Crowley was a wealthy, spoiled Yale graduate and heir to a pharmaceutical fortune. ...

It turned out Crowley's taste in love objects was well known in Washington, but [his lawyer]--as was his custom--tried the case vigorously in the press months before the trial, repeatedly characterizing Alex and the child's mother as "fantasizing feminist fundamentalists" who had made up the whole thing from "their sick, twisted imaginations." This, despite a well-documented hospital examination of the child. (Crowley's penis was small, but he had still caused significant tears to the toddler's rectum.)

LOL. So not only does Mick Crowley sodomize two-year old boys, he also has a small penis. Isn't that funny? Like a double-sledgehammer? You could imagine Crichton going, ok, what's the worst I can do to Crowley? A child-molester, aah, yes. Of a two-year old. Yessss. But surely, nothing could be more damaging to a man than the size of his penis?

Gawd, I've only read one Crichton novel in my life (Airframe, and it wasn't too bad) but I sure as hell feel like reading him after this. The guy is just awesome!

Janet Maslin's review of Next here.

UPDATE: I read the Crowley profile and I must say, it's not the most flattering. But I was surprised at how nakedly polemical Crichton's books have been. Rising Sun, I'm told, actually played into the paranoia in the US in the early 90s about Japan's evil intentions (I once saw the beginning of that movie, but couldn't watch beyond a few minutes). Airframe, which I have read has caustic comments on the media, Disclosure was a perverse take on feminism and sexual harassment and of course, everyone knows about State of Fear and global warming. Here's Crowley:

You can read these books in search of an ideology, but you won't find a distinct one. Clearly, Crichton is no liberal (although he argues that one of his earliest books, A Case of Need, did have a pro-abortion rights message). But a free-market conservative wouldn't write an essentially protectionist book like Rising Sun, either. What Crichton's worldview really amounts to is a kind of hectoring contrarianism that is increasingly targeted at America's know-it-alls, against the liberal elites, against the very type of expertise that had given him his professional cachet. And that worldview has reached its bitter, frothing apex with State of Fear.

Anti-expert, is what Crichton is. That does make a twisted kind of sense. But more on that, some other time.

grandidose thoughts...

I love the way Daniel Dennett patiently chides Marvin Minsky in this exchange:

Why is the idea of a thinking machine so compelling?
Minsky: I think there is a worldwide survival problem. As the population grows and people live longer, there won't be anybody to do the work. So there is an urgent need to make inexpensive mechanical people that are able to do all the things that moderately unskilled people do now.
Dennett: I don't find that very convincing, Marvin. I think we're interested in it for purely curious, scientific reasons. We want to know how we work.

namesake alert!

Shit! -- after all these years of searching -- I have a namesake!!!!!!!!!

specters of marx

Via Brad Delong's blog:

The Five Karl Marxes:

Communist revolution is necessary and inevitable because...

The Technology Marx: ...capital is not a complement to but a substitute for labor, and so technological progress and capital accumulation that raise average labor productivity also lower the working-class wage. Hence the market system cannot and will be seen to be unable to deliver the good society we all deserve, and it will be overthrown.

The Market Extent Marx: ...businessmen continually extend the domain of captalism, and competition from poor workers in newly-incorporated peripheral regions puts a lid on the wages of labor. Hence inequality grows in the core, and triggers revolution.

The Unveiling Marx: ...previous systems of hierarchy and domination maintained control by hypnotizing the poor into believing that the rich in some sense "deserved" their high seats in the temple of civilization. Capitalism unveils all--replaces masked exploitation by naked exploitation--and without its ideological legitimation, unequal class society cannot survive.

The Ideology Marx: ...although the ruling class could appease the working class by sharing the fruits of economic growth, they will not. They are trapped by their own ideological legitimation--they really do believe that it is in some sense "unjust" for a factor of production to earn more than its marginal product. Hence social democracy will inevitably collapse before an ideologically-based right-wing assault, income inequality will rise, and the system will be overthrown.

The Solidarity Marx: ...factory work--lots of people living in cities living alongside each other working alongside each other develop a sense of their common interest and of class solidarity, hence they will be able to organize, and revolt.

Who is the real Marx? Ah, grasshopper, not until you have learned not to ask that question will you be able to snatch the pebble from my hand...

That strikes me as a nice concise of summary of all the different aspects of Marx's work.

roald dahl is canonized!

The Everyman's Library has added another title: Roald Dahl's Collected Short Stories. (His stories for adults, his stories for children are justly famous).

The New York Times reviews it here.

The strange thing is, I never read Dahl as a child. (Dahl is not especially popular as a young adult writer in urban India; that would be Enid Blyton, yesh!). But his first book that I read was his collection of flying stories: Over to You. After the book had sat on my shelf for weeks, I took it out one day and started reading the first story in the collection. It was called "Death of an Old Old Man" and it starts with:

Oh God, how I am frightened.

From that beginning, Dahl constructs a furious, almost relentless, stream-of-consciousness monologue as a pilot on a dangerous flying mission It's giddy, vertiginous and very very real; it makes you feel breathless but it puts you right there in the cockpit with him, in him, as you worry about whether you yourself will ever make it through this flight.

But you don't have to take my word for it. Amazon.com has the whole monologue (it's about three pages) in its Excerpt of the book: go check it out.

After this, as they say, I was hooked. Well, a bunch of us were pretty fixated with Dahl in my undergrad years -- we analyzed his stories to death.

PS: for the funniest -- well, one is tragic -- stories about sex, check out Dahl's collection: Switch Bitch.

parition again

In this New Yorker piece, George Packer quotes the Democrat John Murtha saying:

Also last week, on National Public Radio, Representative John Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat who was an early supporter of withdrawal, casually offered that, if Iraq were to fall apart in the wake of an American departure, “I don’t think it’ll be any worse” than the partition of the Indian subcontinent.

Hello, Partition claimed more than a million lives. And that's "worse" than what's going to happen in Iraq? If so, anything "better" than it would still be bad indeed. Representative Murtha has strange standards.

But then Packer himself makes another mistake:

A million people are estimated to have died in 1947 during the movement of Muslims and Hindus across the newly drawn India-Pakistan border. Sixty years and several wars later, the two countries confront each other in a nuclear standoff, trade charges of subversion, and periodically exchange fire in the Kashmiri Himalayas.

The deaths apart, this somehow seems to imply that had there not been a partition, we wouldn't be facing these problems. But then what exactly would we be facing? As history makes clear, Partition could only have been avoided by making Simla Agreement-style concessions. An earlier plan proposed by the Cripps Cabinet Mission was that India would remain united but the provinces would have something almost like complete autonomy. The central government would be weak and would only deal with issues of defence and foreign policy. More than that, it suggested that provinces in India be grouped closely on religious lines, particularly the Muslim-majority ones. The poisonous notion of separate electorates was also to stay. Narhar Kurundkar compares this arrangement to the Edict of Nantes : a pact that was so structurally crippled that it could never hold.

This was not a model of India that anyone in the Congress could ever entertain. A weak central government, autonomous religion-based provinces, separate electorates: these would all lead to a state within a state and a sure recipe for a bloody civil war in India. A civil war, that perhaps, would make the humanitarian disaster of Partition seem like nothing. It might make our current conflicts with Pakistan seem like nothing. In 1947 a united India could only mean a country that was seriously crippled by an unworkable political arrangement with a very good possibility of succumbing to chaos. Darfur or Rwanda, anyone?

Partition was ultimately a pragmatic choice. The violence that erupted and the millions that died can't be forgotten but the kind of India that arose, with a strong central government, no separate electorates with no Muslim-majority provinces was something that allowed us to focus on the task at hand: India's development and a decent standard of life for its citizens.

signing off an email

The blogs have been chattering about this article in the Times -- on whether the sign-off at the end of an email ("Best", "Regards", etc) indicates something more. For instance, could "Best" be reasonably interpreted to mean "I'm though with you, go to hell" or something like it? Just for myself, I've always thought "Best" to be rather cold-hearted and stand-offish.

Interesting, no?

Here's my favorite part of the article:

When Kim Bondy, a former CNN executive, e-mailed a suitor after a dinner date, she used one of her preferred closings: “Chat soon.” It was her way of saying, “The date went well, let’s do it again,” she said.

She may have been the only one who thought that. The return message closed with the dreaded “Best.” It left her feeling as though she had misread the evening. “I felt like, ‘Oh, that’s kind of formal. I don’t think he liked me,’ ” she said, laughing. “A chill came with the ‘Best.’ ” They have not gone out since.

Now I've always used "Later" to indicate that I'd like to continue the acquaintance -- but maybe, just maybe, it indicates the opposite?

"Cheers" has always seemed to me to be a nice neutral little word. But it doesn't come up in the New York Times piece at all!

Anyway, more discussion here and here. [Via Cognitive Daily].

i reserve judgement

New York magazine says that Julianne Moore sucks in her Broadway debut Vertical Hour.

I dunno, I'll reserve judgement until I see the play. I'm a big admirer of Moore's performances -- Far from Heaven, The End of the Affair, Vanya on 42nd St, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, A Map of the World -- and I've never watched Far from Heaven or The End of the Affair without a lump in my throat (and I've watched them many times). So yeah, I'll just see the damn play and decide for myself.

The play, from all accounts, seems to be another David Hare screed on Iraq. Oh well.

Ben Brantley of the New York Times says pretty much the same thing.

Well, I still reserve judgement.

jude law

This quote about Jude Law strikes me as pretty accurate:

And Jude Law -- what in God's name has happened to Jude Law? When he burst into movies a decade ago, playing a crippled, furious genetic superman in Gattaca, and then Dickie Greenleaf, the murdered golden boy in The Talented Mr. Ripley, he seemed like a throwback to an earlier era, when Hollywood stardom required an actor to be dazzling and deadly all at once. But the hint of danger he brought to those early roles has evaporated, leaving a callow charm that might seduce a giddy woman, but not an audience.

I watched parts of Gattaca again a few weeks ago and Law and Uma Thurman, between them, manage to literally stamp poor Ethan Hawke out.

discrimination: what it means...

There isn't a doubt in my mind that Muslims in India are under-represented in employment, in higher education, in the organized sector, everything really. Those are facts that cannot be denied. And one doesn't really need statistics to believe them. Simply reporting the situation on the ground helps. For instance, there was only one Muslim man in my graduating class of 2002 and the situation wasn't too different in other elite colleges. So yes, there's a lot of work still to be done.

But what bothers me about this New York Times piece isn't the content (which is true beyond any doubt and indeed may be the fodder for the next round of reservations in India), but the presentation. When Americans hear statistics presented that way, they will immediately compare the situation of Muslims in India to that of Blacks in the United States. And that comparison is false, on almost every level.

African-Americans came to this country as slaves, worked on plantations, were freed, only to encounter Jim Crow laws, and it's only now, in the last forty years that they are at least theoretically equal under the law. In contrast, Muslims came to India as conquerors, settled there, and lived uneasily side-by-side with Hindus. Even during British rule, it must be said, the English made sure that it was never disadvantageous to be a Muslim, in order to keep alive India's already-existing sectarian divisions.

Things changed when they left. Of course, when they left, the four Muslim-majority provinces of India split to form Pakistan which then further split up in 1971.

I suppose one could say, that now after Independence, Muslims who remained in India are discriminated against but I think even here discrimination is the wrong word, if what we mean by it is what African-Americans went through in the US or even what Dalits in India endured for millenia. Some subtle form of discrimination? Possibly. Systematic discrimination? No.

But finally in India it's the scales that matter. The sheer number of people in India -- 1 billion -- is mind-boggling. And even if every single Muslim in India lives in abject poverty, there are at least four times as many non-Muslims, whose condition is no better. When we in India do get down to addressing these issues -- poverty alleviation, a humane standard of living for everyone -- I think our problem will be the sheer scale of people we have to deal with. But if and when we do, and if we formulate some efficient coherent policy to do it, I have no doubt that this so-called Hindu-Muslim "gap" is easily bridgeable. (Indeed what might be harder to bridge would be the caste "gap" since the discrimination that Dalits have faced for more than a thousand years might not be easily alleviated. But then, that's another story, for another time).

UPDATE: You can find the Indian Express' series (based on leaks from the Sachar Committee's Report) here.

how to overcome the achievement gap

I just wanted to recommend this longish Times Magazine essay on how schools can eliminate the race/class gap between students and how much effort we really need to solve this problem. It's a fascinating piece!

But just to throw a couple of points:

1. Why don't we take this as seriously in India? Why is there no equivalent of the No Child Left Behind back home? It seems like the problems we face in this department are so much more in magnitude. And yet, I've hardly read any policy pieces about this in India (but then again, that might be my lack of reading...). Surely we have our own version of the achievement gap: between poor and rich kids for one, and more importantly between the forward and the backward castes. A massive investment in bridging this gap strikes me as more level-headed than the absurd quota system we have currently (my objection is not to the quota, but to the level at which we've put it)

2. Why don't we have some equivalent of Teach for America in India, which recruits students from the best campuses (and I mean engineering campuses too) in the country to teach needy areas? I have no doubt interested people would volunteer (I would). Of course there would be some logistical hurdles especially language since primary and middle-school education is best done in the native language but that shouldn't be a hard problem to surmount.

Anyway, now back to work. Also another factor that might influence the achievement gap: stress.

Dear Economist

I just love the Financial Times!!

Natasha asks:

Dear Economist,

I have been going out with a school friend for nearly a year and I think he’s “the one” - but we are heading off to university at opposite ends of the country. Will the relationship survive? Is there anything I can do to keep it going?

Yours sincerely,

Natasha, Co. Durham

The economist replies:

Dear Natasha,

I understand your concern, but your future looks bright. A long-distance relationship will always put pressure on both of you, but it’s a question of how you use that to your advantage.

Economist Tyler Cowen, a professor at George Mason University, has pointed out that the Alchian-Allen theorem applies to any long-distance relationship.

The theorem, briefly, implies that Australians drink higher-quality Californian wine than Californians, and vice-versa, because it is only worth the transportation costs for the most expensive wine. Similarly, there is no point in travelling to see your boyfriend for a take-away Indian meal and an evening in front of the telly. To justify the trip’s fixed costs, you will require champagne, sparkling conversation and energetic sex. Insist on it.

Meanwhile, optimal- experimentation theory suggests that at this tender stage of life you are highly likely to meet someone even better. Socialise a lot while your boyfriend is not around.

Finally, consider your bargaining strength with potential new boyfriends with regard to, for instance, who pays for dinner. Your best alternative to a negotiated agreement with the new boyfriend is. your old boyfriend, who by your admission is an excellent catch.

This puts you in a sound negotiating position - unless, of course, the boy is maintaining a long-distance relationship of his own.

absurdity cannot...

...exceed this. Nitin Pai is understandably horrified.

am i shallow? or what?

Yours truly isn't a big believer in the "blog-as-private-confessional" theory. So this post is as self-indulgent as I'll get (on the web, that is) -- about a certain tendency of mine that I've been worrying about.

First, though, a graphic, or rather, two graphics:

I was presented with this scenario (well, descriptively speaking) at the Strand, a gorgeous used-book store in New York, about a month ago. There were about four or five copies of A Beautiful Mind, all of which were priced at $2. As a book that I've always wanted to read I decided to buy it. But here was the difficulty: which of the two versions -- or editions -- should I pick? The original one with John Forbes Nash Jr on the cover? Or the one with Russell Crowe playing Nash on the cover?

Now this should hardly even be a problem. The book was the same, and all versions were in reasonably good shape. So I should have just grabbed one of them and gone on. Instead I spent more than ten minutes (well, I exaggerate) deciding which of the two editions to buy. The reason? I didn't want to be seen as someone who came to the book after seeing the movie (which I did, by the way). I vacillated. And finally -- yes, finally -- I chose the old version.

So, to re-iterate two points: (a) I hadn't heard of the book -- or indeed of John Forbes Nash Jr -- before I saw the movie, and (b) I haven't read the book yet.

Anyway, I wouldn't be writing this post if something similar hadn't happened yesterday. I was in the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, browsing, and I chanced upon this:

Aha, same problem. An edition printed after the movie (which I haven't seen, by the way) vs the original paper-back edition. Which to choose? The film version of A Home at the End of the World is not I became aware of Michael Cunningham -- and the film isn't too good, by many accounts. I did however read The Hours sometime when its movie version was about to be released and I've read a few of Cunningham's (beautiful) short stories since then.

So anyway, no prizes for guessing what I bought. Which brings me to the point of this whole meandering post. Either, (a) I have a visceral aversion to buying books which have a picture of the movie on its cover (which I do, I guess) or (b) I am a snob and would rather have people think that I read the book before seeing the movie made out of it (even if I hadn't done anything of the sort). Which is it?.

PS: Oh, it needn't be either-or. And check out A. O. Scott's review of A Beautiful Mind.

oh, tom...

Daphne Merkin's profile of Tom Stoppard in this week's NYT magazine, along with this William Grimes article, convinces me, more than anything else, that A. O. Scott was right after all.

when analogy is taken too far

I don't really have any philosophical objections to the "life is software, not hardware"-type of hypotheses but really, can there be any essay vaguer than this?

BAM has a sense of humor

Love this "student rush" graphic on BAM's web-page.

Daniel Craig, RIP

(No, no, he isn't dead but read on...)

Consider this. There's this obscure and, a not-so-popular one that you think makes great music. You are, in other words, a fan. And then suddenly, this band gets a hit, a chart-topping single and all of a sudden, is the toast of the world. Your friends, who, a day before, wouldn't even have heard of this band are now giddy fans. How would you feel? Happy for the band? Sad? Sad and happy? Bitter-sweet? All of the above?

When it was announced that Ang Lee would direct Brokeback Mountain, most of us who'd read Annie Proulx's short story felt a nice sensation inside: this would be good, we thought. It was better. Commercially, the film did better than anyone expected; best, it became a sensation and Lee won a well-deserved Oscar. Now of course it was everyone's, everyone appreciated it; and it was ours no longer. Overall, not a bad state of affairs too (although I have serious reservations about the way the film was marketed/perceived).

Its deja vu time today as Casino Royale comes out in theaters, with its star attraction, the new James Bond: Daniel Craig. I guess I am one of the few people who've seen many of Craig's films: the harrowing The Mother, the so-so Sylvia, and smashing-good-times Enduring Love and Layer Cake. Plus he was in Spielberg's Munich (proof that his star was rising, I'd say) and the more recent Truman Capote biopic Infamous (which I have yet to see).

What can I say? The man is a brilliant actor, who seems to internalize every character he plays. But more than that, he's an astonishingly feral presence in any movie. Craig is the kind of actor whose sheer physicality -- I was almost going to say animalness -- hits you in the face, even when he's behind the movie screen, enough to make a frission of excitement run down your spine. (The only other actor today who comes close in doing this is Clive Owen -- and to a much lesser extent, Russell Crowe). Craig is like a tightly coiled tiger and his vulnerability (when he shows it) only underscores his lethalness; even when he's down, you only feel sorry for the other guy, because you know that Craig can't be kept down.

If all this resembles how a giddy school-girl might sound, then that just proves how Craig's charms can get though even the most battle-hardened critics (for the record, I consider myself movie-hardened). Most female critics, revewing Casino Royale have outdone themselves -- and I'm not being pejorative -- in describing the Daniel Craig-effect. Here's the relatively restrained Manohla Dargis (who, being what she is, simply cannot take out that note of sweeping dismissal from her voice) talking about Craig in the Times:

attractive bit of blond rough named Daniel Craig ... You see Mr. Craig sweating (and very nice sweat it is too);...

Sarah Lyall's feature in the Times is even more giddy, it comes replete with admiring references to Craig's torso. One would have thought that this kind of reporting was beneath the Times (No, wait, I was joking, of course it isn't -- remember this article?) but that's Daniel Craig for you.

The crowning achievement is Dana Steven's piece in Slate -- it has a starting paragraph that made me gasp, even as I started to laugh, referring to a certain orifice in Craig's body and what it might be capable of holding. But no, read it for yourself; it's worth reading, with an inevitable paragraph or two on Craig's torso (again, what can I say? that's Daniel Craig for you), it also nicely summarizes his other work. You might want to check them out; for all the chemical reactions he seems to arouse in people, Craig really is a darn good actor.

Which finally brings me back to the epitaph I titled this post with. A year ago, Daniel Craig was the property of a few people, who'd seen and admired his other films, now he's ours no longer. As James Bond -- and now an acclaimed one, so more Bond roles will surely follow -- he's well on his way to being a movie star and god only knows, he deserves to be one.

milton friedman

From Brad DeLong's obituary for Milton Friedman (who died yesterday):

Gen. William Westmoreland, testifying before President Nixon's Commission on an All-Volunteer [Military] Force, denounced the idea of phasing out the draft and putting only volunteers in uniform, saying that he did not want to command "an army of mercenaries." Friedman, a member of the 15-person commission, interrupted him. "General," Friedman asked, "would you rather command an army of slaves?" Westmoreland got angry: "I don't like to hear our patriotic draftees referred to as slaves." And Friedman got rolling: "I don't like to hear our patriotic volunteers referred to as mercenaries." And he did not stop: " If they are mercenaries, then I, sir, am a mercenary professor, and you, sir, are a mercenary general. We are served by mercenary physicians, we use a mercenary lawyer, and we get our meat from a mercenary butcher." As George Shultz liked to say: "Everybody loves to argue with Milton, particularly when he isn't there."

Via Indian Economy Blog, two reports that Friedman wrote on India are here and here. The first is a memorandum to the Government of India recommending certain policies, the latter -- particularly prescient -- is Friedman's critique of India's Planning model. He makes, for me, two interesting points. The first is that Planning, especially the Soviet model that India followed, could only have worked in an authoritiarian top-down society, like Russia's or China's, not in a democracy-with-private-property like India. More than that:

Though Indian economic planning is cut to the Russian pattern, it operates in a different economic and political structure. Agricultural land is almost entirely privately owned and operated; so are most trading and industrial enterprises. However, the government does own and operate many important industrial undertakings in a wide variety of fields-from railroads and air transport to steel mils, coal mines, fertilizer factories, machine tool plants, and retail establishments; Parliament has explicitly adopted “the socialist pattern of society” as the objective of economic and social policy; a long list of industries have been explicitly reserved to
the “public sector” for future development, and the successive plans have allocated to public sector investment a wholly disproportionate part of total investment - in the third five-year plan, 60 percent although the public sector accounts at present for not much more that a tenth of total income generated. In addition, the government exercises important controls over the private sector: no substantial enterprise can be established without an “industrial” license from the government, existing firms must get government allocations of foreign exchange and also of domestic products in the public sector; and so on in endless variety.

The difference between India and Russia in political structure is at the moment even sharper that in economic structure. The British left parliamentary democracy and respect for civil rights as a very real heritage to India. Though I very much fear that this heritage is being undermined and weakened, as of the moment it is still very strong indeed. There is tolerance of wide range of opinion, free discussion, open opposition by organized political parties, and judicial protection of individual civil rights-except for recent emergency actions under the Defence of India Act. The kind of centralized economic planning India has adopted can enable a strong authoritarian government to extract a high fraction of the aggregate output the people for governmental purposes - Russia is a prime current example and China, though we know much less about her, may be another; Egypt under the Pharaohs is a more ancient example. This is one way, and I believe almost the only way, in which such a system can foster economic growth-if the resources extracted are indeed used for productive capital investment rather than for arms or governments. But this advantage- if advantage it be - of centralized economic planning, India is not able to obtain precisely because of the difference between its economic and political structure and those of Russia or China.

And then, he hits on what exactly makes a strong state (without any checks and balances) dangerous: the contrast between what he calls (tweaking John Kenneth Galbraith's phrase) public affluence and private squalor.

Whether because of the adoption of the Russian model of economic planning or for other reasons. Russia and India have one feature in common that strongly impresses the casual visitor. In both, if I may pervert a phrase made famous by our present Ambassador to India, there is a striking contrast between public affluence and private squalor. In both countries, whenever one sees a magnificent structure, newly built or well maintained, the odds are heavy that it is governmental. If some activity is luxuriously financed and well provided for, the odds are that is governmentally sponsored. The city in India which showed the most striking improvement since my earlier visit was New Delhi, with impressive new governmental buildings, residence and luxury hotels. I should add that although the public affluence is not notably different in the two countries, the private squalor is much worse in India than in Russia.

This strikes me as true even today, as high-rises and shopping malls in Indian metropolises co-exist side by side with slums and all the combined miseries on this earth. Friedman's critique of India's "mixed" economic model makes a lot of sense, but I'm not sure that we had any alternative in those days after Independence. I interpret his point as one of efficiency: even as the State in India grew and grew and reached monstrous proportions (emplyoying, I believe, more than 50% of the working population), no effort was expended in making it more efficient. Regulation can work, and developing societies need regulation in order that they not make the same mistakes that today's industrialized economies made when they were in the throes of the industrial revolution and unfettered capitalism. But regulation also needs efficient institutions (and an efficient Government) in order to make it work and in order that it can encourage economic growth, which is what any free society needs.

I'll go on and quote Friedman's last sentence, almost eerily prescient, and without fifty years of hindsight:

It will, I fear, take a major political or economic crisis to produce a substantial change in the course on which India is no set in economic policy, and I am not at all optimistic that such a crisis if it occurs, will produce a shift toward greater freedom rather than toward greater authoritarianism.

There was indeed a major economic crisis and it did provoke change (reversal is a better word) in economic policy, but I'm happy to say that so far at least, we seem to have come out of it fine. What happens ahead is, of course, no one really knows.

stephen holden made me laugh

The NYT's Stephen Holden is not normally a movie critic who makes you laugh (unlike, say David Edelstein) so I just wanted to quote this line from his review of "Flannel Pajamas" which had me giggling for about 10 seconds:

The personal issues bedeviling Stuart and Nicole may not be your issues or mine, but the couple’s mild-mannered approach to dealing with them may feel uncomfortably familiar if you belong to the college-educated class of New York professionals that believes in talking things out. You might call it the modern, pragmatic, couples-counseling approach to problem solving, as opposed to, say, primal scream therapy or (God forbid) domestic violence.

Calvin and Hobbes via Robot Chicken

This is amazing!

funny ha-ha

A father signs up on facebook to keep track of his son's online doings. He adds his son to his friends list. Big mistake. He gets friend-bombed. The best part? He is worried about

what parents will think if they discover that I am part of their teenagers’ network of friends. I worry that two terrifying words will come to mind: Mark Foley.

And speaking of inappropriate things, this article in the NYT begins like this:

Every space shuttle flight has its risks, as two catastrophes have made painfully clear, but the one announced last week by NASA to repair and upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope in 2008 is riskier than usual. If the shuttle runs into trouble, it won’t be able to rendezvous with the International Space Station for help. The best it could do is collide with it.

Interesting, ain't it? Makes you wonder about what's coming. Well, read the piece, it's entirely quotidian. But man, that beginning...now that's what I call good writing.