This article first appeared in the July 2012 issue of KINDLE.
A secret history
Sunday, July 01, 2012
Bollywood and the death of Urdu
This article first appeared in the July 2012 issue of KINDLE.
Sunday, April 15, 2012
Book Review: Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer
Hundreds of years ago, human memory was considered a vital part of being, a mirror to civilization, a reflection of erudition, knowledge and learning. This was the time when books were not in existence. Today, however, we'd be hard pressed to remember our home telephone number, or even the license plate of our car. We've successfully externalized our memory to such an extent that we hardly need to remember anything at all. We'd be in big trouble if our cell phone crashed, or our Internet connection went away or our disk drives failed us. How did this happen? Are we getting dumber? Will our children be able to remember anything other than experiences? Washington Post scribe, Joshua Foer, tries his hand at participatory journalism and explores the past, the present and the future of the murky world of human memory. In the process, in an effort to explore if our memories can truly be enhanced through rigorous practice and methodical training, he competes in the US Memory Championships (yes there is such a thing, believe it or not) -- with hilarious results and an edge-of-the-seat finale -- and much of that interesting and mind bending journey forms the bulk of this smashing debut.
Foer’s journey begins when he witnesses ‘mental athletes’ competing for the title of US Memory Champion, as part of science journal story. Here a small group of dedicated individuals try and remember long and convoluted bits of poetry, memorize shuffled packs of cards in under two minutes and remember a gazillion names and faces from a random slide show. He is suitably impressed enough to try and investigate how these competitors train for championships. Are they high IQ individuals? Do they have innate memory skills? Are they somehow different from the average Joe? The answer is clearly no. As Foer digs into scientific literature regarding our brain and our memory, we understand that it is possible you and me to memorize a pack of cards backwards, as long as we know how to. It’s almost like a magic trick. You just need to know the mechanics of the deception. And then practice. The memory techniques used by competition athletes date back to the classical times, and involve converting the object that we wish to remember into a memorable image and then storing that image in a designated area of a mental ‘Memory Palace’. So let’s assume you need to memorize your grocery list. Drop a bag of laughing potatoes on your living room couch, a bottle of sauce spraying its contents on the coffee table and a bunch of high-jumping onions in the kitchen table. Then all you need to do is walk through your house in your mind’s eye recalling these images. This takes practice and a mind innovative enough to keep conjuring memorable images – nothing more. Variations of this technique can be used to remember not only your grocery list, but also thousands of random numbers as well as packs of cards. Interestingly, along his journey from being memory novice to mental champ,Foer gets access to and interacts with people from both spectrums of the memory divide - from the autistic Kim Peek (from whose life 'Rain Man' was inspired and a memory savant who has memorized nine thousand books, but who has an IQ of 87) to the most forgetful man in the world, who cannot remember anything beyond five minutes - and their conversations offer insight into the significance of memory in a time dominated by smart phones and Google. As he delves further, he concludes that contrary to what we normally believe, memory is not a matter of dumb or genius. It is instead like any significant human endeavour, a matter of technique and practice.
But in the end, enjoyable as the book is, does it make a point? Can training our memories for the better make us smarter? Does it open up our brains to some higher level of activity? We might do better in examinations and tests, but do we become better thinkers? These are all questions the book throws up, but answers inadequately. While the art of memorizing can be mastered by all, all things considered, is the ability to memorize anything just a fancy party trick, whose novelty quickly wears off? To become better thinkers, we need the right balance of trained memory and creative thought. An overdose of either skews things. New data can make sense to us only if associated with something we already know. For good reason the modern education system has swung some degree away from focusing on the rote memorizing into the direction of trying to develop people who think creatively, but perhaps somewhere along the way memory has been denigrated in the process. And as the author demonstrates himself, we can easily correct the balance, if we want to.Slowing down
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Being too professional?
A wonderful piece from ex-cricketer turned journalist Ed Smith. It examines the need to enjoy what we do rather than on the need to be excessively professional. I reproduce the article below.
A young nurse, interviewed by John Humphrys recently on BBC Radio 4’s “Today” programme, was asked what she considered the two most important qualities in her job. “Being caring and being compassionate,” she replied.
“Not being professional?” Humphrys countered, emphasising that her answer was very unusual.
“No, not being professional,” she confirmed.
But Hughes was right. I joined Kent and turned fully professional in 1999. I will never forget my first week as a professional sportsman. Our home ground in Canterbury basked in warm and sunny March weather, but we did not use the perfect practice conditions to hone our batting and bowling skills. Instead, we locked ourselves in a room for three days deciding on the precise wording for a team “Core Covenant”.
This was a constitution, intended to revolutionise the team into a slick, professional outfit. We promised to catch 50 extra practice catches every day, no matter how tired we were. We pledged never to say bad luck to each other as luck was just an excuse. Once the covenant’s six main articles (all abstract nouns) and dozens of sub-headings were agreed on, we all had to sign a master document. Individual laminated print-offs were distributed for us to pin inside our kit bags, a reminder of the professional code of conduct that we would live by.
We then turned to cricket practice. But the rest of spring was blighted by persistent rain, and we arrived for our first match chronically under-prepared. The whole team seemed confused, but I was particularly at sea. Where older players had learnt to tune out during lengthy theoretical discussions about how this season would be different, I was young, ambitious and overly determined to do well. I had absorbed too much prescriptive information and lost connection with my intuitive ability. Walking out to bat in that first game, I felt paralysed by a sense of pressure.
Instead of allowing myself to enjoy what I loved most–batting–I was trying to live up to a professional ideal. For the first time in my life, I didn’t enjoy the game. I feared falling short and worried about the consequences. I made an undignified three. But far worse was the manner of my failure. I felt as if I was in a strait-jacket. I had lost my voice. It came back–in time. But I never forgot the experience.
What happened to the intuitive talent of his early days? “When I was 18 cricket was a game. I used to go and try to hit Malcolm Marshall [perhaps the most feared of all fast bowlers] over the top. Then it became a job. Everyone’s so worried about the left elbow–is it in the right place?” The clouds of professionalism descended, and viewing what he did as a job made Ramprakash less good at doing it.
Then came an unexpected invitation to enter the BBC reality show “Strictly Come Dancing”, when he was 37. He was a total amateur at dancing, but he discovered a talent for it, and won. “More recently I’ve been determined to enjoy cricket more,” Ramprakash said. “That would be one massive thing I’ve got from this.” The following year, he averaged 100 for the second season running. Only one other batsman since the second world war had averaged over 100 in two separate seasons–and no one had ever done it in consecutive years. This year, as his 40th birthday loomed, Ramprakash was the leading county batsman again with an average of 90.
Luiz Felipe Scolari, the football coach who led Brazil to the 2002 World Cup, summed up what we might call the Ramprakash paradox. “My priority is to ensure that players feel more amateur than professional,” Scolari explained. “Thirty to forty years ago, the effort was the other way. Now there is so much professionalism, we have to revert to urging players to like the game, love it, do it with joy.”
I never doubted that professionalism had brought some benefits, especially in fitness and fielding. But I questioned the idea that more and more professionalism was the only solution when elite sport had already become so formulaic. It is a question of balance. If, as was often the case 50 years ago, opposing teams were unfit and under-prepared, then the professional mantra of extra planning and more training yielded a competitive advantage. But what if all the teams are training phenomenally hard and planning every minute of every game? In that context, surely the way to get ahead is to make better judgments about people and how to get the best out of them–or, more accurately, how not to mess them up.
Over-professionalism is everywhere. Teachers in England are trained to plan lessons in segments of three minutes, a theory which leaves little room for spontaneity in the classroom. They are also often exhausted before term even starts because of the endemic pressure to plan every lesson weeks in advance. It is all too tempting for teachers to sacrifice freshness–which is impossible to measure or record on paper–in favour of form-filling. But can education ever be mapped out in such prescriptive terms? Anthony Seldon, Master of Wellington College, thinks not: “The erosion of trust in education is sucking the life out of classrooms, teachers and students. You can tick all the boxes under the sun and still be a lousy teacher. You cannot encapsulate the human experience of learning in some mechanistic pedantry.”
In “Stepping Stones”, a series of interviews with Dennis O’Driscoll, the poet Seamus Heaney explores similar territory: “Even in my 50s, in Harvard, if I had a lecture I’d be up early to try to get it squared out in my head–not that I could ever quite manage to do so. Lecturing week after week, as part of the pedagogic routine, is more of a test than people realise. In the end, the most important thing is to be in good physical and mental shape. You can prepare as much as you like and amass material galore, but unless you come in fresh, like an athlete onto the track, you aren’t going to do the job required.”
Measurement is another fetish of professionalism, as if something that cannot be measured isn’t quite real. This was a central criticism by Sir Ivor Roberts, who wrote a stinging valedictory telegram when he retired as the British ambassador in Rome in 2006: “Well-conducted diplomacy cannot properly be measured. We manage or contain disputes; very rarely do we deliver a quantifiable solution. Indeed, we should be sceptical of ‘permanent’ solutions or models.”
Roberts also quoted a remark by Chris Patten, the former Hong Kong governor and European commissioner. It was sad, Patten had said, “to see experienced diplomats trained to draft brief and lucid telegrams…terrorised into filling questionnaires by management consultants by the yard.”
“The Wire”, HBO’s cult television drama series, is based on saturation-level journalistic research about the Baltimore police department. It has captured the imagination of middle England and been hailed the greatest ever TV drama. Why? “The Wire” describes universal problems that we all face in the workplace. When the brilliant but roguish cop Jimmy McNulty tries to bring down the gangs that run Baltimore’s criminal underworld, he is thwarted more by the police department’s chain of command than the criminals. For McNulty’s superiors, the “war on drugs” is not about cleaning up Baltimore’s streets but about procuring the right crime statistics to win promotion. So it’s expedient to solve the easy crimes and ignore the hard ones.
In 1923, the German thinker Eugen Herrigel, hoping to master Zen philosophy, visited Japan and immersed himself in archery. He wrote in his classic study “Zen in the Art of Archery”: “Archery is not practised solely for hitting the target; the swordsman does not wield the sword just for the sake of outdoing his opponent; the dancer does not dance just to perform certain rhythmical movements of the body.” The target may be hit, the opponent outdone, the dance technically perfect–but those outcomes will be merely the happy by-products of a deeper absorption with the activity itself. And that is best achieved, according to Herrigel, by avoiding prescriptive goals and techniques.
That is the theme of John Kay’s forthcoming book “Obliquity”, to be published by the Erasmus Press this month. Kay is an Oxford academic, Financial Times columnist and, as the former director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a leading economist. I visited him at his house in Marylebone, London, the day before he flew off to George Soros’s New York summit on global finance.
It was no surprise to find a donnish, quietly spoken and intensely considered grey-haired man sitting opposite a portrait of Adam Smith. More surprising was Kay’s readiness to make connections between playing Su Doku and the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and between Boeing and David Beckham.
Kay also queries the literal-mindedness and prescribed goals of mission statements–business versions of the Core Covenant. He tells the story of ICI, Britain’s largest and most successful manufacturing company for most of the 20th century. In 1991 the predatory takeover specialist Hanson bought a modest stake in ICI, and although the threat to the company’s independence did not last long, ICI declared a new mission statement: “ICI’s vision is to be the leader in creating value for customers and shareholders through market leadership, technological edge and a world competitive cost base.” The outcome was not successful in any terms, including profit or shareholder value. After peaking in 1997, the share price declined relentlessly. By 2007, ICI ceased to exist as an independent company. So does having a clearly defined goal and a prescriptive method make it more likely that we will misunderstand the real goal and adopt the wrong method?
“There’s a joke about economics,” Kay answers, lightly amused at his own profession. “It’s the only would-be science in which if the world isn’t like the model, then it’s the world’s problem. The odd thing is I am criticising not so much the world as the way people describe the world–and then make the world worse by trying to bash the world into their model.”
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Kahaani - Movie review
Monday, February 20, 2012
Ghost Rider Spirit of Vengeance: Movie review
If you still want to know what this film is about, here goes. Our hero is hiding out in a remote part of Europe when he is found and asked to save a boy who is destined to take over the powers of the Devil unless the ritual is stopped in time. The incentive being the end to the curse of the Rider. So he teams up with the kid's mother, bikes up, kicks some ass and does his job. However, after getting his curse lifted and returning to mortal-dom, Johnny has second thoughts when the boy is yet again kidnapped by the Devil. Quite obviously, our hero still has some good in him and he rushes in despite his lack of any fire power and manages to save the day, sending Beelzebub back to Hell. Oh, along the way the curse is reinstated and he retains his fearsome powers.
Whatever.
I sincerely hope the Ghost never rides again. I do live in fear.
1.5/5
Wednesday, February 01, 2012
Agneepath: Movie review
Revenge is a dish best served cold and debutante director Karan Malhotra serves up an offering straight from the freezer in his reworking of the 90s cult original. Well, at least for the first 90 minutes anyway, wherein the film plays out like a taught gangster film worthy of the RGV stable. You then wish that RGV actually directed the rest of it, because, thereafter, it descends into mindless melodrama and culminates in an extremely poorly etched climax.
While it would be unfair to compare this to the original, one can say with certainty that the KJo redux does hold its own as an independent film, with its heart in the right place. There are many faults that the film carries - the needless length, the caricature like main antagonist Kancha Cheena, the unnecessary song and dance sequences and the rather sub par soundtrack.
Saturday, December 31, 2011
It's a wrap folks... all the very best for 2012
Here's wishing you all a very happy new year ahead. 2011 was a tough year, a year of hope as well as of unfulfilled promises. Here's hoping things start to look up in 2012 (and hopefully the world doesn't come to an end and all...).