ODE TO A CRICKETER

WITH APOLOGIES TO BOB DYLAN

How many innings must the young man play
Before you call him too old ?
How many tours must the short man sail
Before he sleeps in the pavillion ?
Yes, how many times must the short balls fly
Before he's forever rested ?
The answer my friend is blowin' in the wind
The answer is blowin' in the wind.

Yes, how many years can you call him great
Before knowing he's washed up for good ?
Yes, how many years can some people play
Before they're allowed to be free ?
Yes, how many times can a man fail
Pretending its just a one-off ?
The answer my friend is blowin' in the wind
The answer is blowin' in the wind.

Yes, how many times must a man look up
Before he can see a century on the board?
Yes, how many “lives” must one man have
Before hearing people cheer a hundred ?
Yes, how many defeats will it take till he knows
That too many times he's failed ?
The answer my friend is blowin' in the wind
The answer is blowin' in the wind.

GANDHI'S GHOST

It is good to be Mr. Sanjay Dutt, even great. I envy him greatly.

Is it because his father was the handsome Bollywood matinee idol, Sunil Dutt, who went on to become a Member of Parliament representing the Congress Party (his one mistake in an otherwise blemish-free life) ? Or because his mother was the ravishing Bollywood beauty Nargis Dutt ? Or for the reason that despite his erratic ways, he still gets plum roles ? Or that his movies turn out to be block-busters? Or - my personal favourite - because he gets to play romantic leads opposite the prettiest heroines half his age? Or, is it because despite leading a dissolute life on and off-screen, he still gets a lot of sympathy all around?

In Bollywood  pedigree matters. A lot. How else could you explain the phenomenal success of the Kapoor family (whose youngest female member looks like her grandfather in drag)? One member of the family made a name for himself entirely on the basis of making the most grotesque faces. Talent can be acquired through hard work and training. But pedigree comes by birth. We in India greatly respect inheritances like pedigree much more than the things that people acquire through hard work.

Younger Mr. Dutt inherited neither his mother's good looks nor his father's scruples. He was quite the ladies man which is understandable given Bollywood's predilection to conflate the reel life romance and real life romance. It is as if, in order to succeed on screen, one must have a string of romantic liaisons off-screen too. To Mr Dutt's credit - and the discredit of of the ladies linked to him - there was no lack of willing ladies to partner him off-screen. Good for him.

A biggish man, he also played a number of toughies on screen. At some point his on-screen persona crossed over into real life and as a result he was involved in many a fracas, which became the staple of  Page Three and glossies devoted to movies and movie personalities. His collection of guns would have made him an honorary president of the American NRA if only they had heard of him. Not content with guns that can shoot one bullet at a time, he also started collecting weapons that could shoot hundreds of bullets a minute.

His father was of course distressed, the poor man, for he lived a simple and private life. I am not sure if he collected anything, especially ex-girlfriends, ex-wives or guns.  It is quite understandable therefore that he did not cast an indulgent eye on the goings on in his son's life. Once he went so far as to say that his son had fallen into bad company. Clearly he loved his son, but apparently not enough to smack him across his cheeks and read the riot act. The son in any case had independent means to indulge his fascination with and for guns and gals.

The said bad company, it seems, included certain underworld dons on the run from Indian police and resident in Dubai who supposedly bombed half of Mumbai one day in the early 'nineties, allegedly for a hefty fee from Pakistani intelligence. It is unlikely that junior Mr.Dutt ever went on a Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, but it was later established that he did make many trips to pay obeisance to the underworld dons ensconced in Dubai, out of reach of Indian Law Enforcement. It is natural that at this time that the reader is confused as to the religious affiliations of junior Mr.Dutt. It seems he himself was, and kept switching allegiance depending on which affiliation was advantageous.

This is where it all gets murky, and will probably remain murky for ever. Perhaps due to his feelings of hurt following the destruction of the so-called Babri Masjid by Hindu mobs, or perhaps owing to his love of  assault weapons, he conspired with the underworld dons to land and distribute substantial quantities of  arms and explosives. Clearly the type and quantity of the load were inconsistent with duck-shooting or Diwali fireworks. He is said to have lent his name to the operation  which the police allege resulted in the extra-large consignment getting through and getting distributed as planned by the miscreants.

Thanks to our fascination with all things Bollywood as also our inability to bring any trial to speedy conclusion, it has only taken 20 years since junior Mr. Dutt was first arraigned for having helped miscreants,  (this was full 8 years before 9/11 and therefore the term "terrorists" hadn't been invented, never mind the act itself and the loss of lives) to find him guilty and award punishment. Pedigree also helped. I am not sure if Senior Mr.Dutt actively helped pervert or at least delay the course of justice, but given his popularity and political affiliations this cannot be ruled out. What we do know is that despite the Police's valiant and persistent efforts to lose the case, the courts found  Junior guilty of having helped the "miscreants" ("terrorism" come into being only on 9/11, remember?).

Sentencing has only taken two decades. After all, there are important factors to consider involving ordinary citizens  - they were awaiting the next movie featuring junior Mr. Dutt in a leading role. There were tens of billions of rupees riding on movies featuring Dutt junior. Various governments since then have been loathe to disappoint the people by putting him behind bars. In the interregnum not only was junior free, but he also released two wildly popular movies featuring him in the lead role as a medical school prankster and general do-gooder not to mention stealer of the heart of the fairest. Suffice it to say since then the ambition of every Indian male has been to become in real life the person Mr Dutt's played on screen.

On screen, he cures incurable ailments and deepest sorrow with a hug, fights the medical school establishment at the risk of being "rusticated" (expelled in ordinary English) romances the daughter of the Med-school Dean, finds time to get drunk every day, aces the exams (with some illegal help of course)  and even has a conversation with Mahatma Gandhi's ghost in the library. In between he helps mend broken hearts, students beat the Dean's strict disciplinary regime, a poor girl get married to a well-to-do groom against his family's wishes, a boy express his feelings for a girl, avert a suicide, and performs all manners of miracles. He however does not get sainthood as he does not cure a cancer patient  by placing a blessed medallion on her navel - in any case he was not a Catholic.

In real life he successfully evades jail term for two decades.  Now he enjoys the support of entire Bollywood as well as multi-partisan legislators. They all want he should be let go.

All because he had a conversation with the ghost of Gandhi - Mahatma, not Rajiv.

HOW HP SAVES ME FROM RUINATION

A disclaimer at the very outset is in order. The HP in my post refers to the venerable Indian company, Hindustan Petroleum Corp, not the eponymous computers and printers company which cannot even save itself from ruination let alone saving me.

I get my domestic fuel from the aforementioned HP, a Fortune 500 company, in dirty red steel cylinders. HP does not supply just cooking fuel (LPG) to me. Its services extend to looking after my financial welfare by saving me money, my mental well-being by teaching  me the virtues of patience, my physical well-being by saving me from those delectable but dangerous fried foods, and connects me up with a lot of people. To use a trite management jargon, its services encompass 360 degrees. You might wonder how does a fuel company manage to do all these things. Wonder no more for I shall endeavour to capture their generosity in  the following paragraphs.

True to its origins, HP is socialist to its core. It came into being thanks to socialist fervour in Indian governing circles. Some might suggest that it had more to do with bloody-mindedness of our then Prime Minister and less to do with wealth distribution. Talk of policies facilitating a few to control the markets through License-Permit Raj is mischievous. That the poor were furiously sliding backwards was an unfortunate consequence of the effort to control the rich from getting richer. The poor were just the collateral damage in the war against wealth.

As I said, HP is socialist. It tries to level the field of energy use by all households. No one can use more than any other so it regulates supplies such that everyone gets just the one cylinder in two months. If not controlled thus, the irresponsible middle and upper classes would over use the LPG and make this world a lot less green. This is supposedly driven by government policy.  But HP operates policies far more stringent and redistributive than the government's. This socialist control has some interesting beneficial effects on people like me.

Firstly HP gets us away from our compulsive use of computers and smartphones - You see although you can book your next cylinder on line, you are warned by the friendly HP staff not to do so. Talk of transparency and ease of booking are mischievous and the benefits to consumers are overstated. In order to wean you away from your compulsive web habit, the nice people at HP have made it as hard as possible to use the site. Should you ignore their advice and use the web to book a cylinder, the booking mysteriously evaporates if a) the booking is within 21 days of previous cylinder being delivered, b) a new cylinder is billed but not delivered within 48 hours of billing (which it never is).

By maintaining a gap of minimum two months between cylinders, the nice people at HP ensure that the earth is saved. They are also helping me save money. Where I used to pay for 12 cylinders a year, they are now saving me 6 cylinders worth of money. Given the inexorable rise of fuel prices, this saving is considerable and  would normally go to augment one's pension corpus. The fact that I am already retired is not HP's fault, of course. There are bound to be some unintended collateral damage to all good deeds.

I am also saved from a lot of trans-fats which I would be consuming in considerable quantities if only the  cooking fuel were more plentiful. Having to make each cylinder of gas last full two months, we do not fry papads, chips and stuff like that.  The good people of HP are saving me from hypertension, elevated cholesterol, obesity, clogged arteries, heart attacks and the huge expenses the above conditions entail.

Dealing with HP teaches me to defer gratification. Though initially it was hard, I have gotten used to waiting and to not fretting while I am waiting. I now wait with equanimity bordering on fatalism. This control over the desire for instant gratification and my purchasing impulses has helped me avoid the temptations of new smartphones, tablets, cameras, HDTVs and any number of new-fangled devices,  thus adding considerably to me retirement kitty.

In an errant moment when I do pick up the phone to complain, I am greeted by pleasant music long enough to restore my equanimity. Then and only then, if at all, does a human voice breaks the spell. Once again, the effect on me has been nothing short of miraculous. I have started "accepting". The concept of acceptance is at the core of Indian philosophy of life, but forgotten lately in the mistaken belief that man can overcome anything and everything if only he tried hard enough. My question is, and this wisdom is very recent, must we overcome everything? Isn't it pleasanter to coexist? Isn't there space in our universe for everything, including problems?

The good people of HP realise that human networks and interactions play a key role in healthy living, especially in preventing Alheimer's or at least delaying its onset. When I call with a complaint, the pleasant man on the other side connects me to some equally pleasant friends of his who in turn keep passing me like in a game of "pass the parcel". It would be unpleasant were it not for their solicitousness and their concern that I talk to as many different people as they possibly can make me in order that I forge new relationships and friendships - networks that can potentially delay the onset of Alzheimer's.

Some times HP even fosters direct face to face interactions with the people who constitute, in the modern management parlance,  their entire supply chain. The other day I was referred to their dealer whose unhelpful attitude precipitated my call in the first place. The latter passed me around every employee in his establishment and then to his "delivery boys".  These are the poor sweaty lads that deliver the fully loaded cylinders in their hyper inefficient tricycles, making occasional excursions via local restaurants whose need for fuel they take a sympathetic view of. It was wonderful getting connected and talking to a key link in HP's supply chain. We exchanged pleasant banter with me explaining  my desperate need for fuel and them explaining what their sweaty job was like.

HP thinks of everything, even generating employment. You see, when we run short on fuel, we amble down to the neighbourhood eating joints which employ many young people.

AN EQUINE THEORY

Yesterday I went to a concert.

It .featured the songs of a Hindi film-music composer well- known for his mono-rhythmic style. He kept it simple and all his songs were set to the clip-clop rhythm of a horse on trot. Some of you could and probably would take issues with me on this, but  the distinct equine influence is a matter of fact, not of opinion. The compere, who was a very knowledgeable film buff in general and an expert in film music in particular, called it Horse-carriage music ("godha-gaadi music") at the very outset, perhaps to dampen down expectations. It was  at the same venue where I had decades ago seen Peter Shaffer's Equus, a play about the love of a young man for horses. An ironic coincidence.

Equine coincidences apart, the evening of music was eye-opening. The audience was mostly over sixty with the exception of a young man from Europe (if you were that dandy-bordering-on-gay you have to be European, most likely German) who was probably in his twenties. He had, it seems, come along for the ride with his hosts who looked well into their sixties. The audience was mostly Guajarathis and Sindhis. Well known for their astute financial acumen,  these communities are generally not credited with finer sensibilities associated with appreciation of fine arts.

The "oldies", as my 66 year old friend  kept referring to them, were evidently enjoying themselves, leading the hand-clapping which is easy when the beat is an equine clip-clop. Even the young European fop was was seen moving to the beat which was presumably the only thing he could relate to. The strange melodies and incomprehensible language did not seem to bother him overly. I liked that spirit. He took what he could and did not moan about the rest.

I recalled a performance at this venue of Viennese waltzes by a chamber orchestra many summers ago. It was memorable as much for the orchestra's valiant efforts as for their music. Dressed formally, the Austrian orchestra was trying to do its best in the sweltering conditions. Some in the audience drifted in and out at will. Some were trying to joke audibly about how much "fiddling" was going on. Yesterday too people were drifting in as late as an hour after the concert began. The Indian film music may have attracted a bigger audience than Viennese waltzes, but it didn't improve audience's respect for the performers.

The oldies were on fire. It was music from their youth, perhaps when they were in college, vying for the attention of the pretty girls. The popular stratagem in such instances was to fashion themselves after  popular matinee idols, complete with drain pipe trousers and puffed out hairstyles. Smoking was considered uber-cool. The West had Elvis and we had our Dev Anand, Dilip Kumar, Raaj Kumar and the likes. Singing popular songs within earshot of the objects of one's desires was the preferred  means of communicating one's amorous intentions. This is where the old film music still finds strong echoes in the hearts of that generation. Perhaps they found their love thus and even married them. If they were not successful in their amorous endeavours, there were even songs for such  sad outcomes, accompanied by piano-playing and much scotch drinking.

The music last evening was, well, equestrian. The singers were not even born when these pieces were originally performed. But they gave it a good shot and in my view did an acceptable job. All that did not matter for the oldies. For them it was not just about the music. It was a long-forgotten time of their lives being brought back. It was time-travel to a period in their lives without responsibilities, sales, loans, profits taxes or losses or any of those myriad concerns that occupy their days now. The music hall was a a time-travel capsule which took them back, albeit for only two hours, to a happier time in their lives. The audience  didn't care who saw them swaying, clapping or singing along. It was 1950's and it was their time!

 The most appreciated aspect of the concert was the fidelity to the originals from all those years ago. After all we are a culture that prefers faithful reproductions to original interpretations, be it music or art or even examinations.

AN ASININE THEORY

Long ago I believed that there was a golden  theory of Management which would help us motivate people without using money, motivate the general public to buy our goods or services without diluting our profits, pay huge dividends without tanking the stock prices, and generally make every stakeholder happy. A sort of free lunch for all. Did I mention huge bonuses for the Management? That too. Such a golden theory just needed to be discovered or invented. With Harvard and Wharton spending enormous sums in search of such a silver bullet I had no doubt that it would be found. Just a matter of time and serendipity. Golden theory or silver bullet - I am not sure which is better, but  am sure HBR will come up with an erudite paper on that subject.

Then two non-Harvardians, Henry Mintzberg and Harry Levinson  pricked my  balloon. By way of introduction, Mr Mintzberg was neither from Harvard nor Wharton and was in fact critical of both as to their excessive focus on numbers-driven management. Sort of Management By Numbers which at one time was also known as Management By Objectives or MBO. Mintzberg was an academic in Canada. Canada is widely considered to be the backwaters when it comes to cutting edge research in management or anything else, for that matter, except maple syrup in which Canadians have an unassailable lead, not to mention 90% of global reserves.

Levinson questioned this approach, asking "management by whose objectives?" That was a bit silly because the only objectives that matter in the real world are those of the owners and in the case of large corporations the Management is as good as the owners. He was not educated at Harvard (not everyone is, some are lucky) and was not even an MBA but a psychologist from Kansas U. His paper "Management by whose Objectives?" was sub-titled: "Asinine Theory of Management". To make the point abundantly clear to those a bit slow on the uptake (most of the management community),  there was even a cartoon of a donkey - the "asinine" in the title. The donkey had a pole tied to its back and had a carrot dangling  tantalizingly close to the its mouth from the pole. To make matters even clearer he called the approach the Jackass Fallacy. In a final irony, it was published in Harvard Business Review.

The whole idea propounded by the MBO-ists was that if you gave clear objectives to people and rewarded them for achieving them and punished them for not not achieving them - a sort of carrot and stick approach -  things got done. In a further elaboration they felt that aligning the Individual Objectives with the Corporate ones helped matters along. The latter was easier said than done: for example, insurance is best sold to a dying man (good for the dying man as well as the agent who earns the commission, and the selling is easy) but bad for the insurance company (they pay the claim which is many times the premium received). Going to Harvard, it is said, helped you resolve such conflicts. Since the intake at Harvard is limited, there is plenty of conflicts still to be resolved which is good for the Management community as well as Harvard.

In my experience this theory - I mean the theory that Levinson called asinine - does not work. The only way for the corporation to benefit is for it to keep moving the goal posts or, as the cartoon had it, keep the carrot tantalizingly close to, but out of reach of, the asinine mouth. The downside is of the donkey getting wise to the trick and not trying at all, for even donkeys get clever some times. They are also prone to violently rolling around in the dust and scratching their backs against walls in order to get rid of fleas and ticks, in which case what happens to the pole tied to its back, not to mention the carrot? Back-scratching, though, is known to help in organizations. The thought of two grown men topless at work and scratching each other's back is disturbing, even without the presence of carrots.

The Indian variant of MBO is known as Management By Objections and is widely practised in the Public sector. In the public sector knowledge of and adherence to procedures are far more important than achieving results and the pursuit of results is attributed to "vested interest". In this environment carrot is conspicuous by its absence. Stick is present, but there are numerous ways of evading its arc - the obsession with "proper procedure" ensures that. The right approach, as any seasoned public sector employee would tell you, is to raise objections to any proposal, ad nauseum, and let time and the courts do the rest. The reward-punishment asymmetry encourages going by the book.

Increasingly the discipline of economics is being viewed from the perspective of  human behaviour under incentives; that is, to say, how humans behave with a carrot in front of them and a stick ready to make violent contact with their rear ends. In my experience free TV sets, laptops, fuel, housing,  etc have failed to make positive impact. The stick just might. Without any risk of a backlash: whereas the donkeys pack a powerful kick backwards, humans can only kick in the forward direction and thus there is no danger to the wielder of the stick. Humans can also not undo the last election, only defeat you in the next.

Where carrots have manifestly failed, alcohol seems to work. The government that makes it easier to access alcohol has been successful at the hustings in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. The government of this state reportedly earns 4 billion dollars a year from alcohol for which it is the sole distributor. There is a  saying in Tamil that cash from selling a dog does not bark. But cash from the sale of alcohol intoxicates. So much so successive governments have been intoxicated with, and are unable to kick, the alcohol habit.

We thus might have to modify the Levinsonian cartoon somewhat:  a Donkey with a stick attached to its back from which dangles  a glass of alcohol tantalizingly close to but out of reach of its mouth. Should the donkey wise up to the fact that it can never actually access that alcohol, it is Game Over. If it gets drunk on the alcohol there is a further downside of it  forgetting why the inducement was offered in the first place. The trick, to paraphrase Mark Twain, is to tank up enough to increase the desire but not enough to distract from the performance.

 It is a fine line that the government has to walk.

Governing is not as easy as writing management papers, especially when it involves donkeys.

BUDGET BROUHAHA

Today the Indian Finance Minister presented the Budget in the Parliament. Predictably his own party members thumped their tables in support (in feigned comprehension for they hadn't read the document). The opposition booed in derision and schadenfreude(real, not feigned). The Budget was the most futile exercise or the best thing that happened since sliced bread, depending on which side you listen to.

The fun part was not the rowdy goings on in the House for we have come to expect of our politicians nothing better than chicanery, double speak, pandering to vote-banks, financial frauds and outright  lies. The fun was in the various so called "panel discussions" on TV. If you watched these discussions you will come away wondering why India is such a mess when it has so many wise, articulate, knowledgeable, incisive, educated persons. Predictably the incoherent political "heavy weights" ( literally, as much as figuratively)  and movers and shakers mostly from the ruling party are kept locked up lest they open their mouths in a moment of stupid enthusiasm. You see, with elections coming up next year it is important to make a good impression on the TV-watching middle classes with their misguided concerns for law and order, women' issues, the environment, economic progress, governance and corruption.

The TV discussions are anchored mostly by vividly painted women. They are not always dented contrary to what the President's son believes.  Nothing dents their breathless enthusiasm for the most mundane news which they present as if it was the most exciting in the world.  These women have a tendency to speak without punctuation marks and  in the shrilliest of  voices imaginable. Each sentence elides over a full stop into the next, in what they imagine to be the best BBC style, such that only the imminent total breathlessness stops them.  Immaculately coiffed, shampooed and blow-dried they still manage to convey a  "seen it all" world-weariness in their demeanour. Some go so far as to affix and maintain a plastic smile throughout the show. 

The men anchors are fewer and are different in many ways. For one, they speak in complete sentences which do end. They do not wear brightly-coloured lipstick - at least on air.  Their hair is mostly gelled and slicked back. They do tend to out-shout their guests such that the guests often appear answer-less. Triumphantly looking straight at the camera, the anchor proceeds to grind to a pulp the finely chopped guest. They affect a look of stern earnestness and  talk down to the guests and viewers like a teacher to a kindergarten kid. Listening to them you will be forgiven for believing that the world consists entirely of tricksters and frauds and all that's standing between you and utter ruin are the anchors. 

Their panel tends to be predictable. Most are politicians. Others are celebrity economists. An occasional lame businessman or woman; lamer the better. There are some professional idiots who are permanent fixtures in these discussions - they speak in long sentences, affect a clipped accent, use obscure hyphenated words, have fashionably unkempt hair,  and generally pretend to be serious intellectuals  which they are not. One of his fellow panellists called one such celebrity an "idiot" in the now infamous tapes of the hacking of a lobbyist's cell phone. He is. Totally. 

Today was no exception. Whether male or female, the anchors were living their dream - hauling the political class over hot coals in public and make them squirm. But the latter proved more than a match for the anchors: prevaricating, saying their set pieces no matter what the question was,  etc etc. They had been despatched by their High Command to defend their ranks and the poor blighters did not have a clue as to what the facts were. One young scion of an erstwhile royal family looked as if he had fortified himself with rather a lot of liquid courage and conveniently dodged a tricky question claiming he could neither hear the beginning nor the end of his co-panellists. But he was able to recall an obscure point from the middle of a lot of chaff that flew.

The anchors raved, the anchors ranted. On and on about the state of the government's finances. The panellists tried to look earnest and bandied figures in order to appear confident. One went so far as to quote an absurd number which was off by a magnitude of 100 times the correct figure. 

But all that did not matter. What mattered was that the anchor was shrill, she had on bright lipstick, spoke without a full stop and was neatly plucked and well-coiffed. And she made the participants all look like bumbling idiots without a clue. The Left was loony as only clueless Left can be. The right had no clues but was resolute in its opposition. The rulers played  to every conceivable gallery: the poor, the not-so-poor, the middle, and the top end; they played to the makers and to the takers; to the producers and to the evil  traders. The industry representatives bent over backwards not to sound critical of the government, praising the budget up front and damning it with caveats (it is a good budget, but......etc etc).  A celebrity economist famous for his shock of white hair was thoroughly lost in the rough and tumble world where politics and media collided; where shrillness overcame truth if there was such a thing.

It did not matter who they were; the anchor chopped them all up into bits and fed them to the meat grinder. Without getting a hair out of place or breaking sweat.

And the Budget? Who the hell cares about the Budget anyway?