December 16, 2010
Barcelona’s Other Architect, DomènechBy ANDREW FERREN
IT’S sometimes hard to have a conversation about Barcelona that does not include the name Gaudí in it. The world is so gaga for Antoní Gaudí — the genius of Catalan modernisme (the Spanish version of Art Nouveau) whose early 20th-century buildings are virtual emblems of the city — that most of his modernista contemporaries go little noticed by tourists.
But if you’re like me, and don’t much like the structural theatrics and unbridled mannerism of Gaudí’s buildings, check out those of Lluís Domènech i Montaner (1849-1923), an under-sung hero of the movement. A journey to the three places in Catalonia where his buildings made a splash a century ago — including Barcelona — is made easier by following the Barcelona Modernisme Route, which was created in 2005. A guidebook and map of the route can be bought for 18 euros, or $23.50 at $1.31 to the euro, at several kiosks around the city, and can be viewed online at rutadelmodernisme.com.
Domènech is often hailed as the most modern of the modernistas, notably for his mastery of lightweight steel construction. Unesco, at least, doesn’t give him short shrift, having designated his most important buildings in Barcelona a World Heritage Site (just as it did with the works of Gaudí). Multifaceted and astonishingly productive, Domènech wore many hats. Besides being an architect and professor (Gaudí was his student at Barcelona’s School of Architecture), he was also a prominent politician and Catalan nationalist and a pre-eminent scholar of heraldry.
For architects, Barcelona at the turn of the 20th century was the right place at the right time. Nineteenth-century industrialization brought tremendous wealth, and between the Universal Exposition of 1888 (for which Domènech created two of the most noteworthy buildings) and the construction of the Eixample — the vast grid of streets laid out in 1859 to decongest the old city — there was a heady mix of civic pride and social ascension in the air. The rising middle class was eager to make its mark on the rapidly growing city, and the new modernista style seemed perfectly suited to this task, rife as it was with neo-Gothic motifs that linked the newly minted mercantile titans to Barcelona’s rich medieval history.
Robert Lubar, an associate professor at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, points out that, much more so than Gaudí, Domènech was influenced by the English Arts and Crafts movement of Ruskin and Morris. “He believed that ‘the complete interior’ served some kind of ethical purpose,” Professor Lubar said.
Domènech’s most “complete interior” is the 1908 Palau de la Música Catalana, a stunning concert hall miraculously shoehorned into a small lot at the junction of the old city and the new. Often likened to a conductor, Domènech knew how to get the best performance from the sculptors, ceramicists and woodworkers who executed his designs. Indeed, nearly every surface inside the auditorium has been adorned with color, texture and relief and, because the walls and ceiling are made almost entirely of stained glass, colored light.
Atop the balcony’s mosaic-clad columns, bronze chandeliers tilt like sunflowers toward the stained-glass sun that seems to float in midair from the ceiling’s inverted dome. The astonishing expanses of glass were achieved with the use of structural steel — invisible beneath so much decoration.
The other pillar of Domènech’s World Heritage status is the Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau (Hospital of the Holy Cross and Saint Paul), set on 40 park-like acres at the northern edge of the Eixample. Heeding the latest theories of hygiene, Domènech envisioned a complex of 20 pavilions to ensure ventilation and access to sunshine. He ingeniously sunk the corridors and service areas of the hospital underground so that patients and visitors in the pavilions and gardens above would feel as if they were in a village — a fantastical one with myriad domes, spires, finials, sculptures and mosaics. Currently, the 12 pavilions Domènech built (his architect son completed the last eight) are being restored; some will become a museum of Modernisme and others offices for humanitarian organizations like Unesco. Until its scheduled opening in 2016, hard-hat tours are offered daily.
With the Modernisme Route’s map and guidebook in hand, you can lead yourself around Domènech’s residential structures in Barcelona, most of which are clustered between the Passeig de Gracia and Carrer Girona. You can stay in one of the grandest of his palatial homes, Casa Fuster, now a five-star hotel, at the top of Passeig de Gracia. In the street-level Café Vienes, you can sip Champagne and admire a vaulted ceiling and a forest of marble columns.
Near the port is the Hotel España, which, though not built by Domènech, had its restaurant, La Fonda España, renovated by him a century ago. It’s just been spruced up and shines anew with Domènech’s strappy wood and ceramic wainscoting, murals by Ramon Casas and a sculptural fireplace by Eusebi Arnau.
Want to see more? Eighty miles south, in the town of Reus, is Casa Navàs, another “complete interior,” which surrounds you the minute you step into the stair hall — a tiny indoor garden of flowers and vines wrought in mosaic, stained glass and carved stone. Throughout the house, the capital of each column features a different floral motif. Most of the rooms contain their original, exuberant furnishings by master craftsmen like Gaspar Homar.
On the outskirts of Reus, the Pere Mata Institute, a mental health hospital begun by Domènech in 1898, was meant to counter the tradition of keeping the mentally ill out of sight. Today you can visit one of the six pavilions, the one that housed “rich and illustrious men,” as the guide explains on the 90-minute tours. The sumptuously decorated men’s pavilion has a billiard room, grand salon and formal dining room. But lest it be confused with a typical men’s club, the delicate-looking leaded glass windows were reinforced with iron to keep patients in.
Upstairs, the rooms contain many of their original furnishings, including clever armoires with basins (and running water) built into them. There were also suites with office spaces (and secretaries) for those patients who still had empires to run.
About 50 miles northeast of Barcelona in the coastal town of Canet de Mar, one can see three charming structures in the space of about 100 yards. Domènech’s mother was from the region and he also had a home here, which is now a museum that displays his drawings and original furnishings. Across the street is the Ateneu Canetenc, once a cultural and political club and now a library.
Perhaps the most satisfying stop in Canet is Casa Roura, a little fortress of a house that is now a restaurant. The facade’s bravura brickwork creates a lively play of light and is further animated by turrets, parapets and gleaming roof tiles glazed in cobalt blue and canary yellow. The old double-height salon with its baronial fireplace is now the main dining room. On par with the rich architectural surroundings is the amazing lunch menu (13.50 euros) — especially the seafood fideua (like paella, but made with pasta instead of rice).
The tour ends where Domènech’s love of medieval architecture may have begun: at his mother’s house. (One of them anyway — the Castell Santa Florentina in the hills above Canet has been in the Montaner family for centuries.) Around 1909, Domènech expanded the original fortified stone house, deftly mixing his neo-Gothic riffs with authentic Gothic architectural elements like columns, portals and arcades “harvested” from a defunct monastery into a modernista masterpiece, one that quite literally spans the ages.
IF YOU GO
IN BARCELONA
For 18 euros, or $23.50 at $1.31 to the euro, a Modernisme Route pack of two guidebooks with maps and discounts for many sites can be purchased at special Modernisme tourist offices in Plaça de Catalunya, Hospital de Sant Pau and Pavellons Güell. Information: www.rutadelmodernisme.com.
Palau de la Música Catalana, Palau de la Música 4-6, (34-90) 247-5485; www.palaumusica.cat. A tour is 12 euros.
Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau, San Antoní Maria Claret 167, (34-93) 291-9000; www.santpau.es.
Hotel Casa Fuster, Passeig de Gracia 132, (34-93) 255-3000; www.hotelescenter.es.
Hotel España, Sant Pau 9-11, (34-93) 318-1758; www.hotelespanya.com
IN REUS
Tours of both the Pere Mata Institute and Casa Navàs can be arranged on specific days through the Reus tourism office.
Reus Turisme, Plaça del Mercadal 3, (34-97) 701-0670; turisme.reus.cat
IN CANET DE MAR
Casa Museu Lluís Domènech i Montaner, Xamfra Rieres Buscarons i Gavarra, (34-93) 795-4615; www.canetdemar.cat. Entrance fee: 2 euros.
Casa Roura, Riera Sant Domènec 1, (34-93) 794-0375; www.casaroura.com.
Castell Santa Florentina is a private home but tours can be booked some Saturdays and by appointment. Riera del Pinar s/n, (34-609) 813-339; www.santaflorentina.com.
Friday, December 17, 2010
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Hong Kong (November 2010)
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Visting Hong Kong for the first time. As a matter of fact this is first time I have traveled east of India. HK is a quite a charming town, a symbol of what capitalism can do for man and also perhaps that all this prosperity, the infestation of high end brands are about all that it can provide. HK people are extremely friendly and while English speaking is a problem on more than an ocassion when I asked somebody for directions and they either didnt follow me or were not able to tell me ensured that someone who could was brought forward to help me out. I am displaying three pictures here. The first one above is the famed Hong Kong skyline. I took this from atop 'The Peak' and the tall building in the middle is the International Finance Centre 2. I like the way it stands in the middle of the picture, present but almost surreal.
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This picture (or self portrait) was clicked using the self-timer. I am usually averse to uploading my own pictures on the web but the reason I put this one out is that it rather faithfully displays the signs of impending middle age. I feel that this picture captures me the way I think about myself. Appears to be lost and am actually so most of the time!
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This one is that of the Tian Tan Buddha perched atop the hills of Lantau Island of Hong Kong. Again the self-timer came to my aid and did quite a job. I placed the camera on the ground facing the sky and then placed a folded newspaper underneath it so that it tilted towards the statue. I had no idea that this was the best angle possible. Buddha appears to be handing out a pat on my shoulder to thank me for my efforts!!
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Satayajit Das is at it again
Debt shuffling will be a self-defeating exercise
By Satyajit Das
Published: July 12 2010 16:10
Last updated: July 12 2010 16:10
George Bernard Shaw observed that “Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history”. Emerging details of the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) bear testament to this.
The structure echoes the ill-fated collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) and structured investment vehicles (SIVs). The head of the EFSF also had a brief stint at Moore Capital, a macro-hedge fund, entirely consistent with the fact the new body will be placing a historical macro-economic bet.
In order to raise money to lend to finance member countries as needed, the EFSF will seek the highest possible credit rating – triple A. But the EFSF’s structure raises significant doubts about its creditworthiness and funding arrangements. In turn, this creates uncertainty about its support for financially challenged eurozone members with significant implications for markets.
The €440bn ($520bn) rescue package establishes a special purpose vehicle, backed by individual guarantees provided by all 19 member countries. Significantly, the guarantees are not joint and several, reflecting the political necessity, especially for Germany, of avoiding joint liability.
The risk that an individual guarantor fails to supply its share of funds is covered by a surplus “cushion”, requiring countries to guarantee an extra 20 per cent above their ECB contributions. An unspecified cash reserve will provide additional support.
Given the well-publicised financial problems of some eurozone members, the effectiveness of the 20 per cent cushion is crucial. The arrangement is similar to the over-collateralisation used in CDOs to protect investors in higher quality triple A rated senior securities. Investors in subordinated securities, ranking below the senior investors, absorb the first losses up to a specified point (the attachment point). Losses are considered statistically unlikely to reach this attachment point, allowing the senior securities to be rated triple A. The same logic is to be utilised in rating EFSF bonds.
If 16.7 per cent of guarantors (20 per cent divided by 120 per cent) are unable to fund the EFSF, lenders to the structure will be exposed to losses. Coincidentally, Greece, Portugal, Spain and Ireland happened to represent around this proportion of the guaranteed amount. If a larger eurozone member, such as Italy, also encountered financial problems, then the viability of the EFSF would be in serious jeopardy.
There are difficulties in determining the adequacy of the 20 per cent cushion. There is the potential risk that if one peripheral eurozone member has a problem then others will have similar problems. The structure faces a high risk of rating migration (a fall in security ratings). If the cushion is reduced by problems of one eurozone member, the EFSF securities may be downgraded. Any such ratings downgrade would result in mark-to-market losses to investors.
Unfortunately, the global financial crisis illustrated that modelling techniques for rating such structures are imperfect. Rapid changes in market conditions, increases in default risks or changes in default correlations can result in losses to investors in triple A rated structured securities, ostensibly protected from this eventuality. Given the precarious position of some guarantors and their negative ratings outlook, at a minimum, the risk of ratings volatility is significant.
This means that investors may be cautious about investing in EFSF bonds and, at a minimum, may seek a significant yield premium. The ability of the EFSF to raise funds at the assumed low cost is not assured.
Major economies have over the last decades transferred debt from companies to consumers and finally onto public balance sheets. A huge amount of securities and risk now is held by central banks and governments, which are not designed for such long-term ownership of these assets. There are now no more balance sheets that can be leveraged to support the current levels of debt. The effect of the EFSF is that stronger countries’ balance sheets are being contaminated by the bail-out. Like sharing dirty needles, the risk of infection for all has drastically increased.
The reality is that a problem of too much debt is being solved with even more debt. Deeply troubled members of the eurozone cannot bail out each other as the significant levels of existing debt limit the ability to borrow additional amounts and finance any bail-out.
The EFSF is primarily a debt shuffling exercise which may be self defeating and unworkable. The resort to discredited financial engineering highlights the inability to learn from history and the paucity of ideas and willingness to deal with the real issues.
Satyajit Das is the author of the recently released “Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives”
By Satyajit Das
Published: July 12 2010 16:10
Last updated: July 12 2010 16:10
George Bernard Shaw observed that “Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history”. Emerging details of the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) bear testament to this.
The structure echoes the ill-fated collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) and structured investment vehicles (SIVs). The head of the EFSF also had a brief stint at Moore Capital, a macro-hedge fund, entirely consistent with the fact the new body will be placing a historical macro-economic bet.
In order to raise money to lend to finance member countries as needed, the EFSF will seek the highest possible credit rating – triple A. But the EFSF’s structure raises significant doubts about its creditworthiness and funding arrangements. In turn, this creates uncertainty about its support for financially challenged eurozone members with significant implications for markets.
The €440bn ($520bn) rescue package establishes a special purpose vehicle, backed by individual guarantees provided by all 19 member countries. Significantly, the guarantees are not joint and several, reflecting the political necessity, especially for Germany, of avoiding joint liability.
The risk that an individual guarantor fails to supply its share of funds is covered by a surplus “cushion”, requiring countries to guarantee an extra 20 per cent above their ECB contributions. An unspecified cash reserve will provide additional support.
Given the well-publicised financial problems of some eurozone members, the effectiveness of the 20 per cent cushion is crucial. The arrangement is similar to the over-collateralisation used in CDOs to protect investors in higher quality triple A rated senior securities. Investors in subordinated securities, ranking below the senior investors, absorb the first losses up to a specified point (the attachment point). Losses are considered statistically unlikely to reach this attachment point, allowing the senior securities to be rated triple A. The same logic is to be utilised in rating EFSF bonds.
If 16.7 per cent of guarantors (20 per cent divided by 120 per cent) are unable to fund the EFSF, lenders to the structure will be exposed to losses. Coincidentally, Greece, Portugal, Spain and Ireland happened to represent around this proportion of the guaranteed amount. If a larger eurozone member, such as Italy, also encountered financial problems, then the viability of the EFSF would be in serious jeopardy.
There are difficulties in determining the adequacy of the 20 per cent cushion. There is the potential risk that if one peripheral eurozone member has a problem then others will have similar problems. The structure faces a high risk of rating migration (a fall in security ratings). If the cushion is reduced by problems of one eurozone member, the EFSF securities may be downgraded. Any such ratings downgrade would result in mark-to-market losses to investors.
Unfortunately, the global financial crisis illustrated that modelling techniques for rating such structures are imperfect. Rapid changes in market conditions, increases in default risks or changes in default correlations can result in losses to investors in triple A rated structured securities, ostensibly protected from this eventuality. Given the precarious position of some guarantors and their negative ratings outlook, at a minimum, the risk of ratings volatility is significant.
This means that investors may be cautious about investing in EFSF bonds and, at a minimum, may seek a significant yield premium. The ability of the EFSF to raise funds at the assumed low cost is not assured.
Major economies have over the last decades transferred debt from companies to consumers and finally onto public balance sheets. A huge amount of securities and risk now is held by central banks and governments, which are not designed for such long-term ownership of these assets. There are now no more balance sheets that can be leveraged to support the current levels of debt. The effect of the EFSF is that stronger countries’ balance sheets are being contaminated by the bail-out. Like sharing dirty needles, the risk of infection for all has drastically increased.
The reality is that a problem of too much debt is being solved with even more debt. Deeply troubled members of the eurozone cannot bail out each other as the significant levels of existing debt limit the ability to borrow additional amounts and finance any bail-out.
The EFSF is primarily a debt shuffling exercise which may be self defeating and unworkable. The resort to discredited financial engineering highlights the inability to learn from history and the paucity of ideas and willingness to deal with the real issues.
Satyajit Das is the author of the recently released “Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives”
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Bush versus Merkel
The Telegraph
May 26, 2010
It’s Lehman the sequel, with Merkel as Bush
The big lesson of the financial crisis was that no bank must be allowed to fail. The same applies now to Greece. As the Queen’s Speech yesterday was overshadowed by yet another meltdown in global financial markets, I was reminded of Her Majesty’s faux-naif remark to the learned professors of the London School of Economics shortly after the failure of Lehman Brothers in the autumn of 2008: why did no one see this crisis coming?
The economists’ official answer, conveyed after another six months of deep cogitation in a three-page letter to Buckingham Palace, was that the economics profession did, of course, see it coming and had warned all along about global imbalances, excessive borrowing and so on. The problem was that politicians, bankers and overpaid financiers did not pay enough attention to the professional economists’ warnings.
The reason I have disinterred this episode is that the learned professors were wrong in their diagnosis of the disaster. The Queen’s question, taken in the context, was not about long-term issues such as mortgage debts and risk-management models. It was about the failure of politicians and economists to foresee the catastrophic consequences of allowing the failure of this one middle-sized bank.
The question of how the failure of Lehman turned a more-or-less normal boom-bust cycle into the greatest financial crisis of all has still not been satisfactorily answered by politicians, establishment economists and central bankers. And now, almost unbelievably, there is a serious risk that the world’s failure to understand the true lessons of Lehman will precipitate another financial disaster.
The key lesson from the failure of Lehman was that, in the midst of a systemic financial crisis, no significant bank should ever be allowed to fail. When an entire financial system is in peril, the cost of offering unlimited government guarantees and taxpayer bailouts will always be much smaller than the losses from allowing any significant bank to collapse. Such bailouts and guarantees may, in the long run, encourage excessive lending and other irresponsible behaviour, but that is an issue to be addressed by regulation after the crisis is over. In dealing with systemic financial crises, the risks of increasing moral hazard are irrelevant in comparison with the certainty of disaster triggered by the failure of any significant bank.
Today exactly the same analysis has to be applied to the risk of Greece or any other European government defaulting on its debts or dropping out of the eurozone. If any such default were to occur, it could trigger a global financial catastrophe even larger than Lehman. Yet the possibility of a Greek debt default or restructuring is being positively promoted by many of the world’s most respected economic and financial commentators. The German Finance Minister has repeatedly suggested temporary suspension from the eurozone as a punishment for the Greek Government’s transgressions. The German representative on the European Central Bank has stated publicly that he voted against the bank buying Greek government bonds. And the leader column of the Financial Times demanded yesterday that Greece must be made “safe to fail”, by preparing the ground for orderly restructuring. Such a restructuring, the FT went on to argue, would punish the German and French banks that were imprudent enough to lend Greece too much money and “whose governments inexcusably prefer to bail them out on the sly via Greece”.
These were exactly the sort of veiled threats, in some cases from the same authorities, heard before Lehman was allowed to collapse. It is hardly surprising that investors are starting to question the solidity of the guarantees against any kind of default that were supposedly provided two weeks ago by eurozone governments and the European Central Bank.
What is truly alarming about the present situation is that the world has so recently seen the catastrophic consequences of using debt defaults in the midst of a financial crisis to punish imprudent lenders. Yet some of the key policymakers and opinion formers seem, like the Bourbons, to have learnt nothing from the Lehman experience and to have forgotten none of their prejudices.
The fact is that if Greece were allowed to renege on its debts, the foreign banks that held €338 billion of Greek debt at the end of 2009 would immediately move to dump their additional €333 billion of Portuguese debt and probably their €1,500 billion of Spanish debt. And who knows how well over two trillion euros of Italian debt would be treated? The plunging value of Greek and Iberian bonds would immediately threaten several of the main French and German banks with insolvency, requiring government guarantees that would run into trillions of euros.
If Greece or any other member of the eurozone were temporarily suspended, as suggested by the German Finance Minister, the consequences would probably be even more catastrophic. The euro would immediately be revealed not as a genuine single currency but merely as a foreign exchange arrangement of the kind that has frequently collapsed under market pressures, for example in Argentina, Thailand and, not least, in the British experience of the ERM.
The citizens of Southern European countries would quickly understand this and would transfer their savings to banks in Germany and the Netherlands, leading to a collapse of the euro project within weeks and the probable failure of every Southern European bank.
Any such upheavals would dash hopes of global recovery from the 2008 crisis and would cause irreparable damage to public finances already on the brink of catastrophe. It is obvious that such calamities must be avoided, almost regardless of cost or whether it sets a bad example to improvident governments or bankers.
Astonishingly, however, the Greek tragedy in Europe is looking more and more like a revival of the Lehman drama. The €750 billion bailout package announced two weeks ago by EU governments is being hedged about with so many conditions and qualifications that it resembles the original $700 billion Bush bailout plan. The 16 bickering leaders of the eurozone seem to be emulating the confusion of the US political establishment and multiplying it by 16. And the starring role of the ideologically blinkered and incompetent President Bush, out of his depth and flailing helplessly in matters of high finance, is played by Angela Merkel.
Even as a long-time sceptic about the euro project, I find it almost impossible to believe that, just two years after Lehman, Europe would make the same blunders as the Bush Administration. But, as we have learnt again and again in this long period of turmoil, the impossible can become inevitable without even passing through improbable.
May 26, 2010
It’s Lehman the sequel, with Merkel as Bush
The big lesson of the financial crisis was that no bank must be allowed to fail. The same applies now to Greece. As the Queen’s Speech yesterday was overshadowed by yet another meltdown in global financial markets, I was reminded of Her Majesty’s faux-naif remark to the learned professors of the London School of Economics shortly after the failure of Lehman Brothers in the autumn of 2008: why did no one see this crisis coming?
The economists’ official answer, conveyed after another six months of deep cogitation in a three-page letter to Buckingham Palace, was that the economics profession did, of course, see it coming and had warned all along about global imbalances, excessive borrowing and so on. The problem was that politicians, bankers and overpaid financiers did not pay enough attention to the professional economists’ warnings.
The reason I have disinterred this episode is that the learned professors were wrong in their diagnosis of the disaster. The Queen’s question, taken in the context, was not about long-term issues such as mortgage debts and risk-management models. It was about the failure of politicians and economists to foresee the catastrophic consequences of allowing the failure of this one middle-sized bank.
The question of how the failure of Lehman turned a more-or-less normal boom-bust cycle into the greatest financial crisis of all has still not been satisfactorily answered by politicians, establishment economists and central bankers. And now, almost unbelievably, there is a serious risk that the world’s failure to understand the true lessons of Lehman will precipitate another financial disaster.
The key lesson from the failure of Lehman was that, in the midst of a systemic financial crisis, no significant bank should ever be allowed to fail. When an entire financial system is in peril, the cost of offering unlimited government guarantees and taxpayer bailouts will always be much smaller than the losses from allowing any significant bank to collapse. Such bailouts and guarantees may, in the long run, encourage excessive lending and other irresponsible behaviour, but that is an issue to be addressed by regulation after the crisis is over. In dealing with systemic financial crises, the risks of increasing moral hazard are irrelevant in comparison with the certainty of disaster triggered by the failure of any significant bank.
Today exactly the same analysis has to be applied to the risk of Greece or any other European government defaulting on its debts or dropping out of the eurozone. If any such default were to occur, it could trigger a global financial catastrophe even larger than Lehman. Yet the possibility of a Greek debt default or restructuring is being positively promoted by many of the world’s most respected economic and financial commentators. The German Finance Minister has repeatedly suggested temporary suspension from the eurozone as a punishment for the Greek Government’s transgressions. The German representative on the European Central Bank has stated publicly that he voted against the bank buying Greek government bonds. And the leader column of the Financial Times demanded yesterday that Greece must be made “safe to fail”, by preparing the ground for orderly restructuring. Such a restructuring, the FT went on to argue, would punish the German and French banks that were imprudent enough to lend Greece too much money and “whose governments inexcusably prefer to bail them out on the sly via Greece”.
These were exactly the sort of veiled threats, in some cases from the same authorities, heard before Lehman was allowed to collapse. It is hardly surprising that investors are starting to question the solidity of the guarantees against any kind of default that were supposedly provided two weeks ago by eurozone governments and the European Central Bank.
What is truly alarming about the present situation is that the world has so recently seen the catastrophic consequences of using debt defaults in the midst of a financial crisis to punish imprudent lenders. Yet some of the key policymakers and opinion formers seem, like the Bourbons, to have learnt nothing from the Lehman experience and to have forgotten none of their prejudices.
The fact is that if Greece were allowed to renege on its debts, the foreign banks that held €338 billion of Greek debt at the end of 2009 would immediately move to dump their additional €333 billion of Portuguese debt and probably their €1,500 billion of Spanish debt. And who knows how well over two trillion euros of Italian debt would be treated? The plunging value of Greek and Iberian bonds would immediately threaten several of the main French and German banks with insolvency, requiring government guarantees that would run into trillions of euros.
If Greece or any other member of the eurozone were temporarily suspended, as suggested by the German Finance Minister, the consequences would probably be even more catastrophic. The euro would immediately be revealed not as a genuine single currency but merely as a foreign exchange arrangement of the kind that has frequently collapsed under market pressures, for example in Argentina, Thailand and, not least, in the British experience of the ERM.
The citizens of Southern European countries would quickly understand this and would transfer their savings to banks in Germany and the Netherlands, leading to a collapse of the euro project within weeks and the probable failure of every Southern European bank.
Any such upheavals would dash hopes of global recovery from the 2008 crisis and would cause irreparable damage to public finances already on the brink of catastrophe. It is obvious that such calamities must be avoided, almost regardless of cost or whether it sets a bad example to improvident governments or bankers.
Astonishingly, however, the Greek tragedy in Europe is looking more and more like a revival of the Lehman drama. The €750 billion bailout package announced two weeks ago by EU governments is being hedged about with so many conditions and qualifications that it resembles the original $700 billion Bush bailout plan. The 16 bickering leaders of the eurozone seem to be emulating the confusion of the US political establishment and multiplying it by 16. And the starring role of the ideologically blinkered and incompetent President Bush, out of his depth and flailing helplessly in matters of high finance, is played by Angela Merkel.
Even as a long-time sceptic about the euro project, I find it almost impossible to believe that, just two years after Lehman, Europe would make the same blunders as the Bush Administration. But, as we have learnt again and again in this long period of turmoil, the impossible can become inevitable without even passing through improbable.
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
In defence of WORDS
History for Dollars
By DAVID BROOKS
When the going gets tough, the tough take accounting. When the job market worsens, many students figure they can’t indulge in an English or a history major. They have to study something that will lead directly to a job.
So it is almost inevitable that over the next few years, as labor markets struggle, the humanities will continue their long slide. There already has been a nearly 50 percent drop in the portion of liberal arts majors over the past generation, and that trend is bound to accelerate. Once the stars of university life, humanities now play bit roles when prospective students take their college tours. The labs are more glamorous than the libraries.
But allow me to pause for a moment and throw another sandbag on the levy of those trying to resist this tide. Let me stand up for the history, English and art classes, even in the face of today’s economic realities.
Studying the humanities improves your ability to read and write. No matter what you do in life, you will have a huge advantage if you can read a paragraph and discern its meaning (a rarer talent than you might suppose). You will have enormous power if you are the person in the office who can write a clear and concise memo.
Studying the humanities will give you a familiarity with the language of emotion. In an information economy, many people have the ability to produce a technical innovation: a new MP3 player. Very few people have the ability to create a great brand: the iPod. Branding involves the location and arousal of affection, and you can’t do it unless you are conversant in the language of romance.
Studying the humanities will give you a wealth of analogies. People think by comparison — Iraq is either like Vietnam or Bosnia; your boss is like Narcissus or Solon. People who have a wealth of analogies in their minds can think more precisely than those with few analogies. If you go through college without reading Thucydides, Herodotus and Gibbon, you’ll have been cheated out of a great repertoire of comparisons.
Finally, and most importantly, studying the humanities helps you befriend The Big Shaggy.
Let me try to explain. Over the past century or so, people have built various systems to help them understand human behavior: economics, political science, game theory and evolutionary psychology. These systems are useful in many circumstances. But none completely explain behavior because deep down people have passions and drives that don’t lend themselves to systemic modeling. They have yearnings and fears that reside in an inner beast you could call The Big Shaggy.
You can see The Big Shaggy at work when a governor of South Carolina suddenly chucks it all for a love voyage south of the equator, or when a smart, philosophical congressman from Indiana risks everything for an in-office affair.
You can see The Big Shaggy at work when self-destructive overconfidence overtakes oil engineers in the gulf, when go-go enthusiasm intoxicates investment bankers or when bone-chilling distrust grips politics.
Those are the destructive sides of The Big Shaggy. But this tender beast is also responsible for the mysterious but fierce determination that drives Kobe Bryant, the graceful bemusement the Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga showed when his perfect game slipped away, the selfless courage soldiers in Afghanistan show when they risk death for buddies or a family they may never see again.
The observant person goes through life asking: Where did that come from? Why did he or she act that way? The answers are hard to come by because the behavior emanates from somewhere deep inside The Big Shaggy.
Technical knowledge stops at the outer edge. If you spend your life riding the links of the Internet, you probably won’t get too far into The Big Shaggy either, because the fast, effortless prose of blogging (and journalism) lacks the heft to get you deep below.
But over the centuries, there have been rare and strange people who possessed the skill of taking the upheavals of thought that emanate from The Big Shaggy and representing them in the form of story, music, myth, painting, liturgy, architecture, sculpture, landscape and speech. These men and women developed languages that help us understand these yearnings and also educate and mold them. They left rich veins of emotional knowledge that are the subjects of the humanities.
It’s probably dangerous to enter exclusively into this realm and risk being caught in a cloister, removed from the market and its accountability. But doesn’t it make sense to spend some time in the company of these languages — learning to feel different emotions, rehearsing different passions, experiencing different sacred rituals and learning to see in different ways?
Few of us are hewers of wood. We navigate social environments. If you’re dumb about The Big Shaggy, you’ll probably get eaten by it.
By DAVID BROOKS
When the going gets tough, the tough take accounting. When the job market worsens, many students figure they can’t indulge in an English or a history major. They have to study something that will lead directly to a job.
So it is almost inevitable that over the next few years, as labor markets struggle, the humanities will continue their long slide. There already has been a nearly 50 percent drop in the portion of liberal arts majors over the past generation, and that trend is bound to accelerate. Once the stars of university life, humanities now play bit roles when prospective students take their college tours. The labs are more glamorous than the libraries.
But allow me to pause for a moment and throw another sandbag on the levy of those trying to resist this tide. Let me stand up for the history, English and art classes, even in the face of today’s economic realities.
Studying the humanities improves your ability to read and write. No matter what you do in life, you will have a huge advantage if you can read a paragraph and discern its meaning (a rarer talent than you might suppose). You will have enormous power if you are the person in the office who can write a clear and concise memo.
Studying the humanities will give you a familiarity with the language of emotion. In an information economy, many people have the ability to produce a technical innovation: a new MP3 player. Very few people have the ability to create a great brand: the iPod. Branding involves the location and arousal of affection, and you can’t do it unless you are conversant in the language of romance.
Studying the humanities will give you a wealth of analogies. People think by comparison — Iraq is either like Vietnam or Bosnia; your boss is like Narcissus or Solon. People who have a wealth of analogies in their minds can think more precisely than those with few analogies. If you go through college without reading Thucydides, Herodotus and Gibbon, you’ll have been cheated out of a great repertoire of comparisons.
Finally, and most importantly, studying the humanities helps you befriend The Big Shaggy.
Let me try to explain. Over the past century or so, people have built various systems to help them understand human behavior: economics, political science, game theory and evolutionary psychology. These systems are useful in many circumstances. But none completely explain behavior because deep down people have passions and drives that don’t lend themselves to systemic modeling. They have yearnings and fears that reside in an inner beast you could call The Big Shaggy.
You can see The Big Shaggy at work when a governor of South Carolina suddenly chucks it all for a love voyage south of the equator, or when a smart, philosophical congressman from Indiana risks everything for an in-office affair.
You can see The Big Shaggy at work when self-destructive overconfidence overtakes oil engineers in the gulf, when go-go enthusiasm intoxicates investment bankers or when bone-chilling distrust grips politics.
Those are the destructive sides of The Big Shaggy. But this tender beast is also responsible for the mysterious but fierce determination that drives Kobe Bryant, the graceful bemusement the Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga showed when his perfect game slipped away, the selfless courage soldiers in Afghanistan show when they risk death for buddies or a family they may never see again.
The observant person goes through life asking: Where did that come from? Why did he or she act that way? The answers are hard to come by because the behavior emanates from somewhere deep inside The Big Shaggy.
Technical knowledge stops at the outer edge. If you spend your life riding the links of the Internet, you probably won’t get too far into The Big Shaggy either, because the fast, effortless prose of blogging (and journalism) lacks the heft to get you deep below.
But over the centuries, there have been rare and strange people who possessed the skill of taking the upheavals of thought that emanate from The Big Shaggy and representing them in the form of story, music, myth, painting, liturgy, architecture, sculpture, landscape and speech. These men and women developed languages that help us understand these yearnings and also educate and mold them. They left rich veins of emotional knowledge that are the subjects of the humanities.
It’s probably dangerous to enter exclusively into this realm and risk being caught in a cloister, removed from the market and its accountability. But doesn’t it make sense to spend some time in the company of these languages — learning to feel different emotions, rehearsing different passions, experiencing different sacred rituals and learning to see in different ways?
Few of us are hewers of wood. We navigate social environments. If you’re dumb about The Big Shaggy, you’ll probably get eaten by it.
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Family gets back tom
There is no need to provide updates, no need to evaluate life on the basis of some shallow criteria. Just some moments spent in quite contemplation, a mind focused on larger goals in life (which I hope is free of sickness and pain) are for me happiness and joy. There will be episodes of misery, of suffering losses, seeing our loved ones unhappy but at such times I will do all I can to reach out, to help out those who I can help and that's about it. After that when I can once again retreat to my inner courtyard where a comfy chair awaits with me ,so does a good book, I will curl up to experience the joy that only a tranquil solitude can offer.
So the family gets back tomorrow and very productive period of introspection has come to an end. But no problem. I look forward to the shrieks and laughter of my children, the loving and thoughtful caresses of my wife and in the background the dim but uninterrupted humming of the rhythm of my life.
So the family gets back tomorrow and very productive period of introspection has come to an end. But no problem. I look forward to the shrieks and laughter of my children, the loving and thoughtful caresses of my wife and in the background the dim but uninterrupted humming of the rhythm of my life.
Friday, June 4, 2010
Computers taking over everything
JUNE 4, 2010.Fast Traders' New Edge
Investment Firms Grab Stock Data First, and Use It Seconds Before Others.
By SCOTT PATTERSON
Some fast-moving computer-driven investment firms are getting an edge by trading on market data before it gets to other investors, according to market players and researchers who have studied the trading.
The firms gain that advantage by buying data from stock exchanges and feeding it into supercomputers that calculate stock prices a fraction of a second before most other investors see the numbers. That lets these traders shave pennies per share from trades, which when multiplied by thousands of trades can earn the firms big profits.
Critics call the practice the modern day equivalent of looking at share prices listed in tomorrow's newspaper stock tables today.
"It is a rigged game," Sal Arnuk, co-founder of brokerage firm Themis Trading, said Wednesday at a Securities and Exchange Commission roundtable discussion in Washington, D.C., referring to the trading activity, which some call "latency arbitrage."
While legal, the practice pushes the envelope of what is fair, critics say, and raises questions about the advantages some fast-moving traders are gaining in the market.
The SEC roundtable convened executives from trading centers and firms across Wall Street as the agency continues to probe high-frequency trading and the growth of dark pools, trading venues where trades take place away from the main exchanges.
High-frequency trading has come under greater scrutiny since the May 6 "flash crash," when some high-frequency firms along with a number of other active traders withdrew from the market, arguably exacerbating the stocks' swift downdraft that day.
High-speed trading, now estimated to account for about two-thirds of U.S. stock market volume, takes many forms, some entirely proper. Defenders say it reduces trading costs for all investors by adding volume to the market. Latency arbitrage is a type of trading that relies on ultrahigh speeds; it's not clear which firms engage in it or how pervasive it is.
Some firms pay tens of thousands of dollars a year to individual exchanges for premium access to their price feeds, industry players and exchanges say.
The SEC, in a broad review of market structure earlier this year, said information from trading-center data feeds "can reach end-users faster than the consolidated data feeds."
The latency arbitrage trade aims to game the so-called national best bid and offer price on a stock, which sets the price most investors use to trade.
The ability to estimate price moves ahead of the national best bid and offer price, which is consolidated electronically from exchanges, can give traders an advantage of about 100 to 200 milliseconds over investors who use standard market tools, according to a November 2009 report on such trading activities by Jefferies & Co.
An advanced look at exchange data and order flow can provide firms "the ability to forecast future prices" and "make adjustments to their orders in the market or send new orders which are based on this information," the report found.
Some investors are searching for ways to protect themselves. Rich Gates, co-founder of TFS Capital LLC, started becoming concerned about latency arbitrage in early 2009 after a Wall Street bank pitched the trade to his firm.
In hundreds of tests, TFS has found that some of its trades were getting picked off by firms exploiting the time-delay wrinkle. That was costing the firm money.
To learn more, TFS, which manages about $1.1 billion in mutual funds and hedge funds, devised a method to essentially bait firms into engaging in the trade. In effect, TFS proved that some traders were wise to a movement in a stock's price before it happened.
On a March afternoon, a TFS trader sent an order to a broker to buy shares of Nordson Corp., a maker of fluid dispensing equipment. The trader sent an instant message to the broker: "please route to broker pool #2," a request to send the order to a specific dark pool.
The trader told the broker not to pay a price higher than the midpoint between what buyers and sellers were offering, which at the time was $70.49.
Several seconds after the dark pool order was placed, the market price didn't change. Then the TFS trader set a trap: he sent a separate order into the broader market to sell Nordson for a price that pushed the midpoint price down to $70.47.
Almost immediately, TFS was sold Nordson for $70.49—the old, higher midpoint—in broker pool No. 2, which didn't reflect the new sell order. TFS got stuck paying two cents more than it should have, suggesting that some seller knew the higher price was a good deal to nab quickly.
Such trades are "unusually suspicious," said Mr. Gates.
Most dark pool operators say they police investors for improper activities. Liquidnet, which runs a dark pool, had suspended 125 members through 2009 for suspicious trading since its launch in April 2001, the firm says.
Investment Firms Grab Stock Data First, and Use It Seconds Before Others.
By SCOTT PATTERSON
Some fast-moving computer-driven investment firms are getting an edge by trading on market data before it gets to other investors, according to market players and researchers who have studied the trading.
The firms gain that advantage by buying data from stock exchanges and feeding it into supercomputers that calculate stock prices a fraction of a second before most other investors see the numbers. That lets these traders shave pennies per share from trades, which when multiplied by thousands of trades can earn the firms big profits.
Critics call the practice the modern day equivalent of looking at share prices listed in tomorrow's newspaper stock tables today.
"It is a rigged game," Sal Arnuk, co-founder of brokerage firm Themis Trading, said Wednesday at a Securities and Exchange Commission roundtable discussion in Washington, D.C., referring to the trading activity, which some call "latency arbitrage."
While legal, the practice pushes the envelope of what is fair, critics say, and raises questions about the advantages some fast-moving traders are gaining in the market.
The SEC roundtable convened executives from trading centers and firms across Wall Street as the agency continues to probe high-frequency trading and the growth of dark pools, trading venues where trades take place away from the main exchanges.
High-frequency trading has come under greater scrutiny since the May 6 "flash crash," when some high-frequency firms along with a number of other active traders withdrew from the market, arguably exacerbating the stocks' swift downdraft that day.
High-speed trading, now estimated to account for about two-thirds of U.S. stock market volume, takes many forms, some entirely proper. Defenders say it reduces trading costs for all investors by adding volume to the market. Latency arbitrage is a type of trading that relies on ultrahigh speeds; it's not clear which firms engage in it or how pervasive it is.
Some firms pay tens of thousands of dollars a year to individual exchanges for premium access to their price feeds, industry players and exchanges say.
The SEC, in a broad review of market structure earlier this year, said information from trading-center data feeds "can reach end-users faster than the consolidated data feeds."
The latency arbitrage trade aims to game the so-called national best bid and offer price on a stock, which sets the price most investors use to trade.
The ability to estimate price moves ahead of the national best bid and offer price, which is consolidated electronically from exchanges, can give traders an advantage of about 100 to 200 milliseconds over investors who use standard market tools, according to a November 2009 report on such trading activities by Jefferies & Co.
An advanced look at exchange data and order flow can provide firms "the ability to forecast future prices" and "make adjustments to their orders in the market or send new orders which are based on this information," the report found.
Some investors are searching for ways to protect themselves. Rich Gates, co-founder of TFS Capital LLC, started becoming concerned about latency arbitrage in early 2009 after a Wall Street bank pitched the trade to his firm.
In hundreds of tests, TFS has found that some of its trades were getting picked off by firms exploiting the time-delay wrinkle. That was costing the firm money.
To learn more, TFS, which manages about $1.1 billion in mutual funds and hedge funds, devised a method to essentially bait firms into engaging in the trade. In effect, TFS proved that some traders were wise to a movement in a stock's price before it happened.
On a March afternoon, a TFS trader sent an order to a broker to buy shares of Nordson Corp., a maker of fluid dispensing equipment. The trader sent an instant message to the broker: "please route to broker pool #2," a request to send the order to a specific dark pool.
The trader told the broker not to pay a price higher than the midpoint between what buyers and sellers were offering, which at the time was $70.49.
Several seconds after the dark pool order was placed, the market price didn't change. Then the TFS trader set a trap: he sent a separate order into the broader market to sell Nordson for a price that pushed the midpoint price down to $70.47.
Almost immediately, TFS was sold Nordson for $70.49—the old, higher midpoint—in broker pool No. 2, which didn't reflect the new sell order. TFS got stuck paying two cents more than it should have, suggesting that some seller knew the higher price was a good deal to nab quickly.
Such trades are "unusually suspicious," said Mr. Gates.
Most dark pool operators say they police investors for improper activities. Liquidnet, which runs a dark pool, had suspended 125 members through 2009 for suspicious trading since its launch in April 2001, the firm says.
Music, Brain and Language
May 31, 2010
Exploring Music’s Hold on the MindBy CLAUDIA DREIFUS
Three years ago, when Oxford University Press published “Music, Language, and the Brain,” Oliver Sacks described it as “a major synthesis that will be indispensable to neuroscientists.” The author of that volume, Aniruddh D. Patel, a 44-year-old senior fellow at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, was in New York City in May. We spoke over coffee for more than an hour and later by telephone. An edited and condensed version of the conversations follows.
Q. YOU DESCRIBE YOURSELF AS A NEUROSCIENTIST OF MUSIC. THIS HAS TO BE A NEW PROFESSION. HOW DID YOU COME TO IT?
A. I’ve been passionate about two things since childhood — science and music. At graduate school, Harvard, I hoped to combine the two.
But studying with E.O. Wilson, I quite naturally got caught up with ants. In 1990, I found myself in Australia doing fieldwork on ants for a Ph.D. thesis. And there, I had this epiphany: the only thing I really wanted to do was study the biology of how humans make and process music.
I wondered if the drive to make it was innate, a product of our evolution, as Darwin had speculated. Did we have a special neurobiological capacity for music, as we do for language and grammar? So from Australia, I wrote Wilson that there was no way I could continue with ants. Amazingly, he wrote: “You must follow your passion. Come back to Harvard, and we’ll give it a shot.”
Wilson and Evan Balaban, a birdsong biologist who taught me about the neurobiology of auditory communication, mentored me through my thesis, which was called “A Biological Study of the Relationship Between Language and Music.” When I defended it in 1996, this was unusual scholarship. The neurobiology of music wasn’t yet a recognized field.
Q. WHEN DID IT GO MAINSTREAM?
A. Not too long after that. By the late 1990s, all of neuroscience was being transformed by the widespread use of imaging technologies.
Because it became possible to learn how the brain was affected when people engaged in certain activities, it became acceptable to study things previously considered fringy. Today you have the neuroscience of economics, of music, of everything.
I published a paper in 1998 that really surprised people. It was the first imaging study showing what happens when the brain processes musical grammar as compared with what happens when it processes language. From what we learned, this was occurring in an overlapping way within the brain. And this was a clue that the neurobiology of music could give us a new path to access and perhaps even heal some language disabilities.
Q. HOW WOULD THAT WORK?
A. One example. There’s a neurologist in Boston, Gottfried Schlaug, who uses music therapy to return some language to stroke victims. He has them learn simple phrases by singing them. This has proved more effective than having them repeat spoken phrases, the traditional therapy. Schlaug’s work suggests that when the language part of the brain has been damaged, you can sometimes recruit the part that processes music to take over.
Music neuroscience is also helping us understand Alzheimer’s. There are Alzheimer’s patients who cannot remember their spouse. But they can remember every word of a song they learned as a kid. By studying this, we’re learning about how memory works.
Q. RECENTLY, YOU’VE BEEN WORKING WITH A SULFUR-CRESTED COCKATOO NAMED SNOWBALL. WHAT PROMPTED THE COLLABORATION?
A. Before I encountered Snowball, I wondered whether human music had been shaped for our brains by evolution — meaning, it helped us survive at some point. Well, in 2008, a colleague asked me to view a YouTube video of a cockatoo who appeared to be dancing to the beat of “Everybody” by the Backstreet Boys!
My jaw hit the floor. If you saw a video of a dog reading a newspaper out loud, you’d be pretty impressed, right? To people in the music community, a cockatoo dancing to a beat was like that. This was supposed to be, some said, a uniquely human behavior! If this was real, it meant that the bird might have circuits in its brain for processing beat similar to ours.
Q. WHAT DID YOU DO WITH THIS INSIGHT?
A. I phoned up the bird shelter in Indiana where Snowball lived and talked to the director who told me his story. A man had dropped him off with a CD and the comment, “Snowball likes to dance to this.” One day, Irena Schulz, the proprietor, played “Everybody” to amuse the abandoned creature. And Snowball began to move. Irena then made the YouTube video, which immediately went viral. Millions saw it.
“Let’s design an experiment to see if this is real,” I proposed to Irena, who had a science background herself. We took the Backstreet Boys song, sped it up and slowed it down at 11 different tempos, then videoed what Snowball did to each. For 9 out of the 11 variations, the bird moved to the beat, which meant that he’d processed the music in his brain and his muscles had responded. So now we had the first documented case of a nonhuman animal who, without training, could sense a beat out of music and move to it.
Q. YOU SAY THAT SNOWBALL CHANGED YOUR THINKING. HOW?
A. Before Snowball, I wondered if moving to a musical beat was uniquely human. Snowball doesn’t need to dance to survive, and yet, he did. Perhaps, this was true of humans, too?
Since working with Snowball, I’ve come to think we could learn more music neuroscience by studying the behaviors of not just parrots, but perhaps dolphins, seals, songbirds — also vocal learners.
We eventually published the Snowball research in Current Biology. A group at Harvard published a paper right alongside ours in which they surveyed thousands of YouTube videos to see if there were other animals spontaneously moving to a beat. They found about 12 or 13 parrots. No dogs. No cats. No horses.
What do humans have in common with parrots? Both species are vocal learners, with the ability to imitate sounds. We share that rare skill with parrots. In that one respect, our brains are more like those of parrots than chimpanzees. Since vocal learning creates links between the hearing and movement centers of the brain, I hypothesized that this is what you need to be able to move to beat of music.
Q. IS IT DIFFICULT TO FIND MONEY FOR THIS TYPE OF RESEARCH?
A. It easier than it used to be. One of the founders of this field, Dr. Robert Zatorre, before 2000, he never used the word music in a grant application. He knew it would get turned down automatically because people thought this was not scientific. Instead, he used terms like “complex nonlinguistic auditory processing.”
But in recent years, it’s become O.K. to say: I study music and the brain.
Exploring Music’s Hold on the MindBy CLAUDIA DREIFUS
Three years ago, when Oxford University Press published “Music, Language, and the Brain,” Oliver Sacks described it as “a major synthesis that will be indispensable to neuroscientists.” The author of that volume, Aniruddh D. Patel, a 44-year-old senior fellow at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, was in New York City in May. We spoke over coffee for more than an hour and later by telephone. An edited and condensed version of the conversations follows.
Q. YOU DESCRIBE YOURSELF AS A NEUROSCIENTIST OF MUSIC. THIS HAS TO BE A NEW PROFESSION. HOW DID YOU COME TO IT?
A. I’ve been passionate about two things since childhood — science and music. At graduate school, Harvard, I hoped to combine the two.
But studying with E.O. Wilson, I quite naturally got caught up with ants. In 1990, I found myself in Australia doing fieldwork on ants for a Ph.D. thesis. And there, I had this epiphany: the only thing I really wanted to do was study the biology of how humans make and process music.
I wondered if the drive to make it was innate, a product of our evolution, as Darwin had speculated. Did we have a special neurobiological capacity for music, as we do for language and grammar? So from Australia, I wrote Wilson that there was no way I could continue with ants. Amazingly, he wrote: “You must follow your passion. Come back to Harvard, and we’ll give it a shot.”
Wilson and Evan Balaban, a birdsong biologist who taught me about the neurobiology of auditory communication, mentored me through my thesis, which was called “A Biological Study of the Relationship Between Language and Music.” When I defended it in 1996, this was unusual scholarship. The neurobiology of music wasn’t yet a recognized field.
Q. WHEN DID IT GO MAINSTREAM?
A. Not too long after that. By the late 1990s, all of neuroscience was being transformed by the widespread use of imaging technologies.
Because it became possible to learn how the brain was affected when people engaged in certain activities, it became acceptable to study things previously considered fringy. Today you have the neuroscience of economics, of music, of everything.
I published a paper in 1998 that really surprised people. It was the first imaging study showing what happens when the brain processes musical grammar as compared with what happens when it processes language. From what we learned, this was occurring in an overlapping way within the brain. And this was a clue that the neurobiology of music could give us a new path to access and perhaps even heal some language disabilities.
Q. HOW WOULD THAT WORK?
A. One example. There’s a neurologist in Boston, Gottfried Schlaug, who uses music therapy to return some language to stroke victims. He has them learn simple phrases by singing them. This has proved more effective than having them repeat spoken phrases, the traditional therapy. Schlaug’s work suggests that when the language part of the brain has been damaged, you can sometimes recruit the part that processes music to take over.
Music neuroscience is also helping us understand Alzheimer’s. There are Alzheimer’s patients who cannot remember their spouse. But they can remember every word of a song they learned as a kid. By studying this, we’re learning about how memory works.
Q. RECENTLY, YOU’VE BEEN WORKING WITH A SULFUR-CRESTED COCKATOO NAMED SNOWBALL. WHAT PROMPTED THE COLLABORATION?
A. Before I encountered Snowball, I wondered whether human music had been shaped for our brains by evolution — meaning, it helped us survive at some point. Well, in 2008, a colleague asked me to view a YouTube video of a cockatoo who appeared to be dancing to the beat of “Everybody” by the Backstreet Boys!
My jaw hit the floor. If you saw a video of a dog reading a newspaper out loud, you’d be pretty impressed, right? To people in the music community, a cockatoo dancing to a beat was like that. This was supposed to be, some said, a uniquely human behavior! If this was real, it meant that the bird might have circuits in its brain for processing beat similar to ours.
Q. WHAT DID YOU DO WITH THIS INSIGHT?
A. I phoned up the bird shelter in Indiana where Snowball lived and talked to the director who told me his story. A man had dropped him off with a CD and the comment, “Snowball likes to dance to this.” One day, Irena Schulz, the proprietor, played “Everybody” to amuse the abandoned creature. And Snowball began to move. Irena then made the YouTube video, which immediately went viral. Millions saw it.
“Let’s design an experiment to see if this is real,” I proposed to Irena, who had a science background herself. We took the Backstreet Boys song, sped it up and slowed it down at 11 different tempos, then videoed what Snowball did to each. For 9 out of the 11 variations, the bird moved to the beat, which meant that he’d processed the music in his brain and his muscles had responded. So now we had the first documented case of a nonhuman animal who, without training, could sense a beat out of music and move to it.
Q. YOU SAY THAT SNOWBALL CHANGED YOUR THINKING. HOW?
A. Before Snowball, I wondered if moving to a musical beat was uniquely human. Snowball doesn’t need to dance to survive, and yet, he did. Perhaps, this was true of humans, too?
Since working with Snowball, I’ve come to think we could learn more music neuroscience by studying the behaviors of not just parrots, but perhaps dolphins, seals, songbirds — also vocal learners.
We eventually published the Snowball research in Current Biology. A group at Harvard published a paper right alongside ours in which they surveyed thousands of YouTube videos to see if there were other animals spontaneously moving to a beat. They found about 12 or 13 parrots. No dogs. No cats. No horses.
What do humans have in common with parrots? Both species are vocal learners, with the ability to imitate sounds. We share that rare skill with parrots. In that one respect, our brains are more like those of parrots than chimpanzees. Since vocal learning creates links between the hearing and movement centers of the brain, I hypothesized that this is what you need to be able to move to beat of music.
Q. IS IT DIFFICULT TO FIND MONEY FOR THIS TYPE OF RESEARCH?
A. It easier than it used to be. One of the founders of this field, Dr. Robert Zatorre, before 2000, he never used the word music in a grant application. He knew it would get turned down automatically because people thought this was not scientific. Instead, he used terms like “complex nonlinguistic auditory processing.”
But in recent years, it’s become O.K. to say: I study music and the brain.
Monday, May 31, 2010
A productive day
Well finally I did something I had been meaning to do for a long time. First lets evaluate the progress thus far of the goals we had earlier stated as follows:
1. Read the Fixed Income Analysis book: Progress is good but can be better. Target is to complete reading till ch. 8. I am currently in the middle of ch. 6.
2. Figure out forward trading in forex markets: Not done.
(Non professional goals)
1. Complete my office housekeeping issues: Not done but promise to do it tomorrow.
2. Write an article based on V S Ramachandran's "Phantoms of the Brain": Not done as I lent the book to an interested colleague who has family member suffering from some brain ailment.
3. And just for kicks call the Guitar teacher !! Well I had second thoughts about lugging a heavy guitar around.
4. Minimise eating out:-( This was tough but happy to report only two outings so far and one was really necessary. Actually there is one planned tomorrow as well but its with the office crowd.
But the feather in the cap is that I finally translated in my own words and as per my style the first chapter of Vinoba's Geeta. Loved doing it and practically did it in 2 sittings (3000+ words). I like it.
With this last accomplishment I think we can easily award more than 8/10 in terms of progress. Honestly, if I can complete Chapter 2 of Vinoba before family comes back I would be truly elated. Chapter 2 is not just great in terms of its message but pretty long too, 18 pages compared to just 4 in the first chapter.
1. Read the Fixed Income Analysis book: Progress is good but can be better. Target is to complete reading till ch. 8. I am currently in the middle of ch. 6.
2. Figure out forward trading in forex markets: Not done.
(Non professional goals)
1. Complete my office housekeeping issues: Not done but promise to do it tomorrow.
2. Write an article based on V S Ramachandran's "Phantoms of the Brain": Not done as I lent the book to an interested colleague who has family member suffering from some brain ailment.
3. And just for kicks call the Guitar teacher !! Well I had second thoughts about lugging a heavy guitar around.
4. Minimise eating out:-( This was tough but happy to report only two outings so far and one was really necessary. Actually there is one planned tomorrow as well but its with the office crowd.
But the feather in the cap is that I finally translated in my own words and as per my style the first chapter of Vinoba's Geeta. Loved doing it and practically did it in 2 sittings (3000+ words). I like it.
With this last accomplishment I think we can easily award more than 8/10 in terms of progress. Honestly, if I can complete Chapter 2 of Vinoba before family comes back I would be truly elated. Chapter 2 is not just great in terms of its message but pretty long too, 18 pages compared to just 4 in the first chapter.
Geeta Notes (Chapter One)
Introduction
This is a very rough and approximate translation of the sacred and mighty Geeta . Perhaps I could be a little less irreverent and more religious in my language. But then these notes are not an outpouring of an entranced devotee. If anything, I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to be more religious, more devout and more like my parents, sibling, spouse and wider family when it came to matter of religion but I’ve failed miserably. But that is another story and we will revisit it some day.
Here I want to tell how Geeta entered my life (after several failed attempts earlier and which failed entirely due to my shortcomings) and that now it has a permanent place regardless of whether I behave properly or not. I think this smacks of arrogance!
So where did we meet? My place of work is located in South Mumbai and I have about 2 hours of commuting each day. From the terminal station (called Churchgate) I often walk to my office- a walk of some 15 minutes. Enroute is a landmark-Flora Fountain and in the nearby public space some two years back the Gandhi Foundation people had set up a small stall selling Gandhian literature. As is my wont, I stepped in and was casually browsing looking for something about Gandhi, his thoughts and people he knew or something that I had not already read. My eyes fell upon this petite book in Hindi- Geeta Pravachan (tr. Geeta Discourse) by Vinoba Bhave. Till that point my knowledge about Vinoba was confined to the fact that he was a prominent Gandhian and that he led some sort of land donation (Bhoodan) movement. When and how this movement started I had no idea. But the book appeared promising and I bought it for Rupees Eighteen (or less than 50 cents). Part of the promise I saw in the slim volume arose from the fact that buying Geeta was, or so I convinced myself, the right thing to do in terms of my religious doctrine. And of course, the remaining reason and perhaps more compelling one at that was it was slim and so could be read easily during my commute. Thus, I came in to possession of my Geeta which I am proceeding to translate in to English entirely for my own pleasure.
I have no delusions of rendering a faithful or a masterful translation of this ancient masterpiece. There are enough and quite impeccable ones available. What follows now is I reading and discussing Geeta with myself and for myself. I am not going to list reasons for why I feel motivated to do so. Do I see this as my calling? Do I think I have understood the divine message in the Geeta perfectly and this is an attempt to circulate it amongst the heathen? Do I believe that Geeta has transformed me and that I am now what Geeta describes a human being should be? Would I claim this translation as my intellectual copyright and use it for any commercial purpose? Do I intend to send links of this document to people I know and try to impress them? There could be many more similar questions but answer to all the questions is a very unequivocal NO.
So without further ado I start with the First Chapter.
FIRST CHAPTER (PRATHAM ADHYAYE)
ARJUNA’S LAMENTATION
Dear Brothers (as narrated by Vinoba),
My relationship with the Geeta is beyond any logic or reason. As my body has been fed and nourished on my mother’s milk so have my heart and mind been even more nourished by the essence of the Geeta. When it comes to the matters of the heart, logic is not enough. Going beyond reason and relying on the twin wings of faith and practice I seem to fly in the vast skies of the Geeta effortlessly. I live in the environment created by the Geeta and it is my life source. When I speak to people about the Geeta it is akin to going in for a swim in this vast ocean of nectar and when I am alone I plunge in this ocean’s depths and stay there.
Mahabharata and Ramayana are our national epics and the characters described therein have become an integral part of our lives. Rama, Sita, Dharamraja, Draupadi, Bheeshma, Hanumana and other characters in these two grand epics have enthralled us through the centuries. While Ramayana is a wonderful verse describing the path of righteousness, Mahabharata is a gigantic and comprehensive treatise on social living. In the latter, Lord Vyasa has composed hundred thousand chronicles with innumerable images, characters and characterizations all of which merge in to a saga without a parallel in human history. Just like we find perfection only in our Creator, similarly we also realize that all human beings have some trait or the other which redeem them despite their numerous failings. This message is clearly brought forth by Mahabharata. Thus while on one hand we see obvious flaws in the divine characters like Bheeshma and Yudhishtira we are also witness to some lofty and redeeming traits in clearly evil characters like Duryodhana and Karna. To me the Mahabharata is an inexhaustible goldmine which we should all loot to our heart’s content for our own spiritual enrichment.
The intriguing aspect is that Lord Vyasa wrote such a grand epic and yet it is not clear if there’s a direct message from him somewhere in it. Throughout the epic we find scores of references to fundamentals of knowledge and philosophy, numerous lectures on morality but is there any part of the Great epic which literally contains the essence of this entire saga? The secret key to the reason for the existence of Mahabharata, does it lie anywhere in the depths of the Mahabharata? Yes, it does. He has placed the essence of the entire Grand epic in the Sreemadbhagvadgeeta or (for us) the Geeta. Since ancient times, Geeta has been considered as the first among the Upnishadas. In fact, the Lord appears to have captured the essence of all the Upnishadas in the form of the Geeta and presented it to the entire world through the medium of Arjuna. Any conceivable thought that enables us to be better human beings and lead improved lives figures in the Geeta. Many a great observer has referred to the Geeta as a treasure trove of righteous living (Dharamgyana). The Geeta itself might be a small part in the vast body of sacred Hindu scripture but it enjoys a position of unchallenged supremacy.
Everybody knows that Krishna narrated the Geeta to Arjuna. It is said that listening to this Great Teacher Arjuna was completely lost in Him that he became undistinguishable from Him. Lord Vyasa while describing this celestial enthrall himself got lost in the message of the Geeta that he too came to be known as Krishna. Thus, the Teacher, the student and the scribe all of them merged in to a trinity that could only be called Krishna. All three entered the state of Samadhi. The readers and followers of the Geeta need to achieve similar concentration.
Some people mistake Arjuna’s distraction or the sudden awakening of filial love and Krishna’s attempts to shake it off as being the main reason for Krishna revealing the Geeta to him. This is too narrow a reason for the revelation of this supernova of wisdom. Arjuna was an accomplished warrior and no one including Krishna had any doubts regarding his martial capabilities or his certain victory in the battlefield. Nor was any non-violent propensity on part of Arjuna led Krishna to attempt to shake off the former’s sudden contraction of cold feet. In reality, when Arjuna led by his charioteer Krishna finds himself in the center of the battlefield surrounded by four generations of his family members, comrades in arms all willing to cut down each other, he is overcome with a great affection for all these people and in turn starts providing Krishna a critique of war itself in terms of its disastrous consequences for family and society at large.
I am reminded of an anecdote here. There was a very eminent judge who had sentenced scores of criminals to death by hanging. One day his own son was convicted for murder and stood before him for sentencing. All of a sudden the clear and straightforward justice starting citing numerous reasons against death penalty! Hanging is an inhuman form of punishment, such a punishment does not do credit to our society and by executing the convict we summarily eliminate the possibility of improving him and rehabilitating him back in the human society and similar reasons flowed in a torrent from the lips of the learned judge. Not only that, he almost started to defend the convict by suggesting that , “it was a crime of passion” and that, “hanging this man after he has expressed remorse for his deed is a blot on mankind” and so on so forth. Had his son never appeared before him the venerable judge would have continued to mete out the death penalty merrily as before but the moment his son was in the dock he did a 180 degrees turn. This was not based on any noble principles to which the judge was beholden, it was merely his affection for his child that drove him to deliver such polemic against the death penalty and stray from his swadharma.
Arjuna found himself in a similar predicament. Not that the reasons offered by him against war and killing were irrational but at the same time they were not his innermost convictions based on foundations of some core philosophy (darshana). He was merely indulging in dialectics to turn his back on the impending carnage. Krishna was more than aware of this inherent contradiction in Arjuna’s arguments and without reasoning with him point for point he started directly attacking his manifest affection for his family. Had Arjuna turned a complete non violent, he would have not fought despite the revelations but this is one of those ifs which is not answered in the Geeta. Thus we are left with the inescapable conclusion that Arjuna showed signs of irrational filial affection and had he succeeded in warding off the battle he would have only delayed it perhaps with even greater consequences. Krishna’s message and the Geeta is a direct attack on this affectation displayed by men in times of adversity and internal upheavals.
As if it was not enough, Arjuna started talking about renouncing the world and taking to the jungles. But would he have made that transition as easily as he thought? Donning the garb of a sanyasin does not make one and for all we know he would have easily taken to hunting innocent animals in the forest. As a result, Krishna pointed out to him, “Arjuna you are only fooling yourself by saying that you won’t battle. All your life you have fought and won battles without pausing to reflect on the loss of human lives so why today? You are meant to battle and you won’t be able to live without battling. It is your nature and your righteous duty (swadharma).”
In course of his lamentation Arjuna started seeing complete lack of merit in the concept of swadharma. Vinoba states that whether one sees merit in swadharma or not it is in the interest of the individual to still exercise it as it alone is the path to one’s development in a holistic sense. Would such an adherent of swadharma be termed as arrogant? Arrogance in the form of clutching on to some innate idea of swadharma. According to Vinoba, no, such a person is not arrogant. Swadharma is not a good that we may accept it if we see merit in it and discard it if we don’t. In fact, it is as per the person’s size (in terms of his character) . Everyone has their own swadharma. Not only does it change with time, what I perceived as my swadharma ten years ago is not so anymore and ten years later I will have different understanding of my swadharma. Contemplation and experience alter our attitudes and with time we tend to leave behind our older swadharma and acquire new swadharma. Holding on to what I see as my swadharma once and forever is simply being stubborn and is ultimately self defeating.
(Analogy) As a corollary, swadharma is non-transferable. In other words if I perceive someone else’s swadharma as being superior to mine and thus attempt to acquire it I would end up nowhere. Let’s say I admire the Sun. Sunlight is beautiful and empowering. I worship the Sun. Yet if I decide to leave Earth and try to reach the Sun I would soon be vapourised. On the contrary if I continue to inhabit the Earth and try to actualize my swadharma it would lead to my salvation and ennoblement. And of course ensure my survival!
There’s another corollary. If I find another’s swadharma as easier to exercise that too should not tempt me to abandon mine and long for the other. As a householder if I find the burden of raising a family too much I should not seek escape in renunciation of the world. What would happen if I did? I would run away to a forest and there I would start living in a cottage. Soon I would start adding to my comforts there, like a protective fence, a better bed and so on. Thus, I would soon recreate conditions from which I had been meaning to escape all the time. In fact, if I had exercised detachment in my mind in the first place, I would have never felt the need to run away despite all the burdens of domesticity. Ultimately what matters is the attitude, the innate vision with which I see my world around me.
This last illustration begs the question: why did Krishna not lead Arjuna towards the path of renunciation (sanyas) if this is most superior of duties? Of course, the Lord could have done that for what is impossible for Him? Yet he did not simply because such an act would have rendered Arjuna’s human efforts in seeking his kalyana (salvation / ennoblement) defeated. We need to appreciate the fact that Lord has granted us free will. And it is in the interest of each individual to exercise his / her free will and work towards the goals set in this process. Little kids enjoy drawing and painting. They do not like it if a grown up were to draw for them or improve their creations. Similarly, if the teacher were to solve all the problems for the pupils wherefrom would they learn to solve problems, how would they develop their intelligence? Parents and teachers are meant to just offer suggestions and general guidance. And Lord does the same from inside- guide us. That is all he does, nothing more. If like a potter who by heating and tapping the vessel from all sides ensures that it is fit for use, if the Lord too set out to create perfectly intelligent humans then existence would be quite drab. We humans are not earthen vessels, we are sentient beings.
From the above discourse we can safely conclude that the Geeta took birth essentially to vanquish the distractions that we all encounter in the pursuit of our swadharma. Arjuna too suffered from the same malady of refusing to see his swadharma. Thus, after Krishna has concluded his revelations, he asked Arjuna, “Arjuna, have your distractions left you?” Arjuna replies, “Yes my Lord, my affectation has left me and I can clearly see my swadharma.” Whether it is the Geeta’s prologue or its epilogue, the gist is crystal clear- destroy your affectation. And indeed this is the gist of all Mahabharata. Lord Vyasa has indicated in the beginning of the epic, “I am lighting this immortal lamp to vanquish vain distractions and affections from the public sentiment.” What a vision and what stupendous success it has achieved that thousands of years after it was written, imperfect and misguided souls like mine seek and find such clarity and direction in its words.
Arjuna’s role thus becomes very important for us to understand the Geeta. But we have to be grateful to him in more than one way. Arjuna offers us an unique launch pad from which we can seek the Lord’s guidance. Literally translated Arjuna means the possessor of humility (perhaps even naivete). Arjuna did credit to himself by honestly revealing the upheavals in his heart to Krishna. Not a shred of his dilemma (as perceived by himself) he hid from the Lord. This complete surrender actually served to lead him in to Krishna’s sanctuary. To think of it he was already under the Lord’s protection. No sooner had he offered the charioteer-ship of his chariot to the Lord he had in effect handed over the reins of his sensibilities to Him. Lets all too do the same. Let’s not bemoan that Arjuna had Krishna but what about us? Where are we going to find Him? This is not the point. In fact let’s not even debate whether someone called Krishna actually existed or not. This is an infructuous historical discussion. In reality Krishna resides in each and every heart. He is actually closer than we can imagine. He is right here and right now. So let us all stand before Him and humbly declare the filth that is in our minds and hearts and beseech Him – Lord! I am at your mercy; You are my Master and Teacher. Show me the right Path. Whatever Path you show me I shall embark on it and no other. If we were to do this, then that Lord Parthasarathy will become our charioteer too and from his Holy lips he will reveal the Geeta to us and lead us to Victory.
(Vinoba on Sunday, 21st February 1932 & sid on Sunday, 31st May 2010)
***
This is a very rough and approximate translation of the sacred and mighty Geeta . Perhaps I could be a little less irreverent and more religious in my language. But then these notes are not an outpouring of an entranced devotee. If anything, I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to be more religious, more devout and more like my parents, sibling, spouse and wider family when it came to matter of religion but I’ve failed miserably. But that is another story and we will revisit it some day.
Here I want to tell how Geeta entered my life (after several failed attempts earlier and which failed entirely due to my shortcomings) and that now it has a permanent place regardless of whether I behave properly or not. I think this smacks of arrogance!
So where did we meet? My place of work is located in South Mumbai and I have about 2 hours of commuting each day. From the terminal station (called Churchgate) I often walk to my office- a walk of some 15 minutes. Enroute is a landmark-Flora Fountain and in the nearby public space some two years back the Gandhi Foundation people had set up a small stall selling Gandhian literature. As is my wont, I stepped in and was casually browsing looking for something about Gandhi, his thoughts and people he knew or something that I had not already read. My eyes fell upon this petite book in Hindi- Geeta Pravachan (tr. Geeta Discourse) by Vinoba Bhave. Till that point my knowledge about Vinoba was confined to the fact that he was a prominent Gandhian and that he led some sort of land donation (Bhoodan) movement. When and how this movement started I had no idea. But the book appeared promising and I bought it for Rupees Eighteen (or less than 50 cents). Part of the promise I saw in the slim volume arose from the fact that buying Geeta was, or so I convinced myself, the right thing to do in terms of my religious doctrine. And of course, the remaining reason and perhaps more compelling one at that was it was slim and so could be read easily during my commute. Thus, I came in to possession of my Geeta which I am proceeding to translate in to English entirely for my own pleasure.
I have no delusions of rendering a faithful or a masterful translation of this ancient masterpiece. There are enough and quite impeccable ones available. What follows now is I reading and discussing Geeta with myself and for myself. I am not going to list reasons for why I feel motivated to do so. Do I see this as my calling? Do I think I have understood the divine message in the Geeta perfectly and this is an attempt to circulate it amongst the heathen? Do I believe that Geeta has transformed me and that I am now what Geeta describes a human being should be? Would I claim this translation as my intellectual copyright and use it for any commercial purpose? Do I intend to send links of this document to people I know and try to impress them? There could be many more similar questions but answer to all the questions is a very unequivocal NO.
So without further ado I start with the First Chapter.
FIRST CHAPTER (PRATHAM ADHYAYE)
ARJUNA’S LAMENTATION
Dear Brothers (as narrated by Vinoba),
My relationship with the Geeta is beyond any logic or reason. As my body has been fed and nourished on my mother’s milk so have my heart and mind been even more nourished by the essence of the Geeta. When it comes to the matters of the heart, logic is not enough. Going beyond reason and relying on the twin wings of faith and practice I seem to fly in the vast skies of the Geeta effortlessly. I live in the environment created by the Geeta and it is my life source. When I speak to people about the Geeta it is akin to going in for a swim in this vast ocean of nectar and when I am alone I plunge in this ocean’s depths and stay there.
Mahabharata and Ramayana are our national epics and the characters described therein have become an integral part of our lives. Rama, Sita, Dharamraja, Draupadi, Bheeshma, Hanumana and other characters in these two grand epics have enthralled us through the centuries. While Ramayana is a wonderful verse describing the path of righteousness, Mahabharata is a gigantic and comprehensive treatise on social living. In the latter, Lord Vyasa has composed hundred thousand chronicles with innumerable images, characters and characterizations all of which merge in to a saga without a parallel in human history. Just like we find perfection only in our Creator, similarly we also realize that all human beings have some trait or the other which redeem them despite their numerous failings. This message is clearly brought forth by Mahabharata. Thus while on one hand we see obvious flaws in the divine characters like Bheeshma and Yudhishtira we are also witness to some lofty and redeeming traits in clearly evil characters like Duryodhana and Karna. To me the Mahabharata is an inexhaustible goldmine which we should all loot to our heart’s content for our own spiritual enrichment.
The intriguing aspect is that Lord Vyasa wrote such a grand epic and yet it is not clear if there’s a direct message from him somewhere in it. Throughout the epic we find scores of references to fundamentals of knowledge and philosophy, numerous lectures on morality but is there any part of the Great epic which literally contains the essence of this entire saga? The secret key to the reason for the existence of Mahabharata, does it lie anywhere in the depths of the Mahabharata? Yes, it does. He has placed the essence of the entire Grand epic in the Sreemadbhagvadgeeta or (for us) the Geeta. Since ancient times, Geeta has been considered as the first among the Upnishadas. In fact, the Lord appears to have captured the essence of all the Upnishadas in the form of the Geeta and presented it to the entire world through the medium of Arjuna. Any conceivable thought that enables us to be better human beings and lead improved lives figures in the Geeta. Many a great observer has referred to the Geeta as a treasure trove of righteous living (Dharamgyana). The Geeta itself might be a small part in the vast body of sacred Hindu scripture but it enjoys a position of unchallenged supremacy.
Everybody knows that Krishna narrated the Geeta to Arjuna. It is said that listening to this Great Teacher Arjuna was completely lost in Him that he became undistinguishable from Him. Lord Vyasa while describing this celestial enthrall himself got lost in the message of the Geeta that he too came to be known as Krishna. Thus, the Teacher, the student and the scribe all of them merged in to a trinity that could only be called Krishna. All three entered the state of Samadhi. The readers and followers of the Geeta need to achieve similar concentration.
Some people mistake Arjuna’s distraction or the sudden awakening of filial love and Krishna’s attempts to shake it off as being the main reason for Krishna revealing the Geeta to him. This is too narrow a reason for the revelation of this supernova of wisdom. Arjuna was an accomplished warrior and no one including Krishna had any doubts regarding his martial capabilities or his certain victory in the battlefield. Nor was any non-violent propensity on part of Arjuna led Krishna to attempt to shake off the former’s sudden contraction of cold feet. In reality, when Arjuna led by his charioteer Krishna finds himself in the center of the battlefield surrounded by four generations of his family members, comrades in arms all willing to cut down each other, he is overcome with a great affection for all these people and in turn starts providing Krishna a critique of war itself in terms of its disastrous consequences for family and society at large.
I am reminded of an anecdote here. There was a very eminent judge who had sentenced scores of criminals to death by hanging. One day his own son was convicted for murder and stood before him for sentencing. All of a sudden the clear and straightforward justice starting citing numerous reasons against death penalty! Hanging is an inhuman form of punishment, such a punishment does not do credit to our society and by executing the convict we summarily eliminate the possibility of improving him and rehabilitating him back in the human society and similar reasons flowed in a torrent from the lips of the learned judge. Not only that, he almost started to defend the convict by suggesting that , “it was a crime of passion” and that, “hanging this man after he has expressed remorse for his deed is a blot on mankind” and so on so forth. Had his son never appeared before him the venerable judge would have continued to mete out the death penalty merrily as before but the moment his son was in the dock he did a 180 degrees turn. This was not based on any noble principles to which the judge was beholden, it was merely his affection for his child that drove him to deliver such polemic against the death penalty and stray from his swadharma.
Arjuna found himself in a similar predicament. Not that the reasons offered by him against war and killing were irrational but at the same time they were not his innermost convictions based on foundations of some core philosophy (darshana). He was merely indulging in dialectics to turn his back on the impending carnage. Krishna was more than aware of this inherent contradiction in Arjuna’s arguments and without reasoning with him point for point he started directly attacking his manifest affection for his family. Had Arjuna turned a complete non violent, he would have not fought despite the revelations but this is one of those ifs which is not answered in the Geeta. Thus we are left with the inescapable conclusion that Arjuna showed signs of irrational filial affection and had he succeeded in warding off the battle he would have only delayed it perhaps with even greater consequences. Krishna’s message and the Geeta is a direct attack on this affectation displayed by men in times of adversity and internal upheavals.
As if it was not enough, Arjuna started talking about renouncing the world and taking to the jungles. But would he have made that transition as easily as he thought? Donning the garb of a sanyasin does not make one and for all we know he would have easily taken to hunting innocent animals in the forest. As a result, Krishna pointed out to him, “Arjuna you are only fooling yourself by saying that you won’t battle. All your life you have fought and won battles without pausing to reflect on the loss of human lives so why today? You are meant to battle and you won’t be able to live without battling. It is your nature and your righteous duty (swadharma).”
In course of his lamentation Arjuna started seeing complete lack of merit in the concept of swadharma. Vinoba states that whether one sees merit in swadharma or not it is in the interest of the individual to still exercise it as it alone is the path to one’s development in a holistic sense. Would such an adherent of swadharma be termed as arrogant? Arrogance in the form of clutching on to some innate idea of swadharma. According to Vinoba, no, such a person is not arrogant. Swadharma is not a good that we may accept it if we see merit in it and discard it if we don’t. In fact, it is as per the person’s size (in terms of his character) . Everyone has their own swadharma. Not only does it change with time, what I perceived as my swadharma ten years ago is not so anymore and ten years later I will have different understanding of my swadharma. Contemplation and experience alter our attitudes and with time we tend to leave behind our older swadharma and acquire new swadharma. Holding on to what I see as my swadharma once and forever is simply being stubborn and is ultimately self defeating.
(Analogy) As a corollary, swadharma is non-transferable. In other words if I perceive someone else’s swadharma as being superior to mine and thus attempt to acquire it I would end up nowhere. Let’s say I admire the Sun. Sunlight is beautiful and empowering. I worship the Sun. Yet if I decide to leave Earth and try to reach the Sun I would soon be vapourised. On the contrary if I continue to inhabit the Earth and try to actualize my swadharma it would lead to my salvation and ennoblement. And of course ensure my survival!
There’s another corollary. If I find another’s swadharma as easier to exercise that too should not tempt me to abandon mine and long for the other. As a householder if I find the burden of raising a family too much I should not seek escape in renunciation of the world. What would happen if I did? I would run away to a forest and there I would start living in a cottage. Soon I would start adding to my comforts there, like a protective fence, a better bed and so on. Thus, I would soon recreate conditions from which I had been meaning to escape all the time. In fact, if I had exercised detachment in my mind in the first place, I would have never felt the need to run away despite all the burdens of domesticity. Ultimately what matters is the attitude, the innate vision with which I see my world around me.
This last illustration begs the question: why did Krishna not lead Arjuna towards the path of renunciation (sanyas) if this is most superior of duties? Of course, the Lord could have done that for what is impossible for Him? Yet he did not simply because such an act would have rendered Arjuna’s human efforts in seeking his kalyana (salvation / ennoblement) defeated. We need to appreciate the fact that Lord has granted us free will. And it is in the interest of each individual to exercise his / her free will and work towards the goals set in this process. Little kids enjoy drawing and painting. They do not like it if a grown up were to draw for them or improve their creations. Similarly, if the teacher were to solve all the problems for the pupils wherefrom would they learn to solve problems, how would they develop their intelligence? Parents and teachers are meant to just offer suggestions and general guidance. And Lord does the same from inside- guide us. That is all he does, nothing more. If like a potter who by heating and tapping the vessel from all sides ensures that it is fit for use, if the Lord too set out to create perfectly intelligent humans then existence would be quite drab. We humans are not earthen vessels, we are sentient beings.
From the above discourse we can safely conclude that the Geeta took birth essentially to vanquish the distractions that we all encounter in the pursuit of our swadharma. Arjuna too suffered from the same malady of refusing to see his swadharma. Thus, after Krishna has concluded his revelations, he asked Arjuna, “Arjuna, have your distractions left you?” Arjuna replies, “Yes my Lord, my affectation has left me and I can clearly see my swadharma.” Whether it is the Geeta’s prologue or its epilogue, the gist is crystal clear- destroy your affectation. And indeed this is the gist of all Mahabharata. Lord Vyasa has indicated in the beginning of the epic, “I am lighting this immortal lamp to vanquish vain distractions and affections from the public sentiment.” What a vision and what stupendous success it has achieved that thousands of years after it was written, imperfect and misguided souls like mine seek and find such clarity and direction in its words.
Arjuna’s role thus becomes very important for us to understand the Geeta. But we have to be grateful to him in more than one way. Arjuna offers us an unique launch pad from which we can seek the Lord’s guidance. Literally translated Arjuna means the possessor of humility (perhaps even naivete). Arjuna did credit to himself by honestly revealing the upheavals in his heart to Krishna. Not a shred of his dilemma (as perceived by himself) he hid from the Lord. This complete surrender actually served to lead him in to Krishna’s sanctuary. To think of it he was already under the Lord’s protection. No sooner had he offered the charioteer-ship of his chariot to the Lord he had in effect handed over the reins of his sensibilities to Him. Lets all too do the same. Let’s not bemoan that Arjuna had Krishna but what about us? Where are we going to find Him? This is not the point. In fact let’s not even debate whether someone called Krishna actually existed or not. This is an infructuous historical discussion. In reality Krishna resides in each and every heart. He is actually closer than we can imagine. He is right here and right now. So let us all stand before Him and humbly declare the filth that is in our minds and hearts and beseech Him – Lord! I am at your mercy; You are my Master and Teacher. Show me the right Path. Whatever Path you show me I shall embark on it and no other. If we were to do this, then that Lord Parthasarathy will become our charioteer too and from his Holy lips he will reveal the Geeta to us and lead us to Victory.
(Vinoba on Sunday, 21st February 1932 & sid on Sunday, 31st May 2010)
***
Saturday, May 29, 2010
The Colosseum, Rome
A Wonder From Any Angle
By JAMES GARDNER
What does it take to rank as one of the seven wonders of the world? As a species, we delight in making lists, which is what drove Herodotus in the fifth century B.C. and Callimachus of Cyrene a century later to enumerate the seven wonders in the first place. With the single exception of the Great Pyramid at Giza, all of their marvels have been felled by time. But what seems to have united these monuments was a combination of staggering massiveness, inspired engineering and an iconic simplicity that rendered them instantly legible and rich in symbolic resonance.
For many centuries, the Colosseum in Rome has been on everyone's list of seven wonders, and it effortlessly meets the three requirements mentioned above. No matter how big you expect the Colosseum to be, in reality it proves to be even bigger. Shaped like a nearly perfect cylindrical drum, it is one of the very first things to amaze the newcomer to Rome, and it richly supplies one of the greatest delights of modern tourism: physical, touchable propinquity to what, before that instant, we had known our entire lives but only through the mediation of images and words. Seen from some distance along the Via dei Fori Imperiali—which Mussolini created in the 1930s to open up such a vista—it stands before you like an incarnated postcard.
That is how most visitors first experience the Colosseum in person. And usually it is the only way they see it, before they actually enter the site. But there is another way, as I learned by accident last summer. I had roused myself at the crack of dawn to visit a noble and undeservedly neglected ruin at the summit of the Esquiline hill, known as the Nymphaeum or Temple of Minerva Medica. It stands on Via Giolitti, next to the squalid railyards of Stazione Termini, Rome's answer to Penn Station. Today most of the Esquiline is off the tourist track, but it holds sundry charms. From the Nymphaeum, on the ancient site of the Gardens of Licinius, you pass through the Piazza Vittorio into the Gardens of Maecenas on the lower Esquiline, where you see the ruins of the Baths of Titus.
It was at this point, as I began to descend the Esquiline's steep southern spur, the Oppian Hill, that I saw in the distance a flash of marble or, more precisely, travertine. I thought nothing of it at first, since Rome abounds in marble-clad piles, mostly from the 19th and early 20th centuries. But as I continued, this length of bright stone, coming into focus as a catenary of composite pilasters, began to expand laterally, until it assumed an awesome, even monstrous size. For a moment it looked to be scarcely more than one story tall. It was only as I continued my descent in the hazy morning light that the structure gradually acquired additional stories beneath those composite pilasters, until my dawning intuition was triumphantly confirmed: I was standing over the Colosseum, looking down at it from an Olympian height nearly parallel to its summit. I was now seeing the Colosseum in an entirely new way.
Terrible things, surely, once happened here, from gladiatorial slaughter to the persecution of early Christians. But that must not obscure the fact that the Colosseum stands for much of what was best in the Roman state.
The location of the Colosseum, built by the Flavian emperor Vespasian and his sons and successors Titus and Domitian between A.D. 70 and 80, was as polemically important as its size and shape. For it rose over an artificial lake that the unbalanced Nero, their imperial predecessor, had ordered to be built in his private residence, the infamous Domus Aurea. To build it, Nero had seized, in the very center of the city, a parcel of land roughly two-thirds the size of Central Park. And beside the lake he erected an enormous statue of himself, a colossus, from which the new stadium would subsequently take its name. Thus in building the Colosseum, also known as the Flavian Amphitheater, Vespasian gave back to the people of Rome what Nero had taken from them. In the process, a symbol of high-handed autocratic excess under the last of the Julio-Claudians became a monument to Rome itself, built by the new dynasty.
In size, beauty of architectural detail and state of preservation, none of the empire's 250 other amphitheaters, whatever their present or former state, can compare with the Colosseum. Even though, for centuries, it had been plundered and stripped for raw materials; even though it has done duty as a fortress and a church; even though half of it was nearly sheered off by a sequence of earthquakes (largely restored by Raffaele Stern and then Giuseppe Valadier early in the 1800s)—the Colosseum still presents itself to contemporary viewers much as it did to their ancient predecessors.
In addition to much else, the Colosseum is the tallest structure to survive from classical antiquity. At 157 feet, it is roughly the height of an early skyscraper, a fact concealed by its great elliptical girth, ranging between 510 and 615 feet. Despite the fact that the Colosseum served a function as pedestrian as Madison Square Garden's, its external ornamentation is so refined, and yet so restrained, as to reflect credit upon the civilization and the dynasty that created it. The three stacked arcades—which rise from Doric to Ionic and Corinthian before concluding in a walled summit with composite pilasters—unfurl with the greatest delicacy and tact. The Colosseum could have been overbearing, but it is not. It could have been fussy and maladroit, but it is not. It is so perfectly balanced, so definitive, that one risks taking it for granted.
That sense of equipoise, so Roman in its restrained practicality, presages the rationalism and functionalism of modern architecture. But, in the U.S. at least, architectural vision is all too rarely expended on sports arenas. And as for the Colosseum's closest structural parallel in New York, Madison Square Garden, the less said the better.
—Mr. Gardner is a critic based in New York.
By JAMES GARDNER
What does it take to rank as one of the seven wonders of the world? As a species, we delight in making lists, which is what drove Herodotus in the fifth century B.C. and Callimachus of Cyrene a century later to enumerate the seven wonders in the first place. With the single exception of the Great Pyramid at Giza, all of their marvels have been felled by time. But what seems to have united these monuments was a combination of staggering massiveness, inspired engineering and an iconic simplicity that rendered them instantly legible and rich in symbolic resonance.
For many centuries, the Colosseum in Rome has been on everyone's list of seven wonders, and it effortlessly meets the three requirements mentioned above. No matter how big you expect the Colosseum to be, in reality it proves to be even bigger. Shaped like a nearly perfect cylindrical drum, it is one of the very first things to amaze the newcomer to Rome, and it richly supplies one of the greatest delights of modern tourism: physical, touchable propinquity to what, before that instant, we had known our entire lives but only through the mediation of images and words. Seen from some distance along the Via dei Fori Imperiali—which Mussolini created in the 1930s to open up such a vista—it stands before you like an incarnated postcard.
That is how most visitors first experience the Colosseum in person. And usually it is the only way they see it, before they actually enter the site. But there is another way, as I learned by accident last summer. I had roused myself at the crack of dawn to visit a noble and undeservedly neglected ruin at the summit of the Esquiline hill, known as the Nymphaeum or Temple of Minerva Medica. It stands on Via Giolitti, next to the squalid railyards of Stazione Termini, Rome's answer to Penn Station. Today most of the Esquiline is off the tourist track, but it holds sundry charms. From the Nymphaeum, on the ancient site of the Gardens of Licinius, you pass through the Piazza Vittorio into the Gardens of Maecenas on the lower Esquiline, where you see the ruins of the Baths of Titus.
It was at this point, as I began to descend the Esquiline's steep southern spur, the Oppian Hill, that I saw in the distance a flash of marble or, more precisely, travertine. I thought nothing of it at first, since Rome abounds in marble-clad piles, mostly from the 19th and early 20th centuries. But as I continued, this length of bright stone, coming into focus as a catenary of composite pilasters, began to expand laterally, until it assumed an awesome, even monstrous size. For a moment it looked to be scarcely more than one story tall. It was only as I continued my descent in the hazy morning light that the structure gradually acquired additional stories beneath those composite pilasters, until my dawning intuition was triumphantly confirmed: I was standing over the Colosseum, looking down at it from an Olympian height nearly parallel to its summit. I was now seeing the Colosseum in an entirely new way.
Terrible things, surely, once happened here, from gladiatorial slaughter to the persecution of early Christians. But that must not obscure the fact that the Colosseum stands for much of what was best in the Roman state.
The location of the Colosseum, built by the Flavian emperor Vespasian and his sons and successors Titus and Domitian between A.D. 70 and 80, was as polemically important as its size and shape. For it rose over an artificial lake that the unbalanced Nero, their imperial predecessor, had ordered to be built in his private residence, the infamous Domus Aurea. To build it, Nero had seized, in the very center of the city, a parcel of land roughly two-thirds the size of Central Park. And beside the lake he erected an enormous statue of himself, a colossus, from which the new stadium would subsequently take its name. Thus in building the Colosseum, also known as the Flavian Amphitheater, Vespasian gave back to the people of Rome what Nero had taken from them. In the process, a symbol of high-handed autocratic excess under the last of the Julio-Claudians became a monument to Rome itself, built by the new dynasty.
In size, beauty of architectural detail and state of preservation, none of the empire's 250 other amphitheaters, whatever their present or former state, can compare with the Colosseum. Even though, for centuries, it had been plundered and stripped for raw materials; even though it has done duty as a fortress and a church; even though half of it was nearly sheered off by a sequence of earthquakes (largely restored by Raffaele Stern and then Giuseppe Valadier early in the 1800s)—the Colosseum still presents itself to contemporary viewers much as it did to their ancient predecessors.
In addition to much else, the Colosseum is the tallest structure to survive from classical antiquity. At 157 feet, it is roughly the height of an early skyscraper, a fact concealed by its great elliptical girth, ranging between 510 and 615 feet. Despite the fact that the Colosseum served a function as pedestrian as Madison Square Garden's, its external ornamentation is so refined, and yet so restrained, as to reflect credit upon the civilization and the dynasty that created it. The three stacked arcades—which rise from Doric to Ionic and Corinthian before concluding in a walled summit with composite pilasters—unfurl with the greatest delicacy and tact. The Colosseum could have been overbearing, but it is not. It could have been fussy and maladroit, but it is not. It is so perfectly balanced, so definitive, that one risks taking it for granted.
That sense of equipoise, so Roman in its restrained practicality, presages the rationalism and functionalism of modern architecture. But, in the U.S. at least, architectural vision is all too rarely expended on sports arenas. And as for the Colosseum's closest structural parallel in New York, Madison Square Garden, the less said the better.
—Mr. Gardner is a critic based in New York.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Day (?)
Why does it always happen that I promise something on the blog (and eleswhere) and then fail to follow it up. Unpardonable. I mean I had stated that I will report daily progress but I havent. Before I proceed to describe the events since the last week (nothing much) lets look at the progress made so far.
1. Doing some professional reading though the pace can be much better.
2. So far have eaten out only twice and tonight almost ordered pizza but then ate some home cooked food. However, as the quantity was not enough at the moment I am trying my best to not think of food (while I can write about it!)
3. Visited a new bookstore near Lower Parel station. Its called Landmark, I think its the same chain which runs the eponymous bookstore in Madras. Well it was quite well stocked and there was a fair crowd. I liked the collection too though once again the latest releases (books already released in NY and London) were not available. By the way I stumbled upon something which was authored by a neighbour in Delhi. After having gone through some pages it left me a little confused about the ideas of the author, though honestly I was a bit jealous that this guy who I thought was good for nothing should be turning author and all that. Later that night I mentioned the book to my father over phone and next day, lo and behold, the author in question calls me up in office to inquire where I had found the book and raving about the circulation numbers. The funny thing- he probably spoke to me after a gap of 20 years. Before he hung up he asked if I had bought the book to which I had to reply with a no and he got a bit upset. I like that.
4. Nothing else to report. Still wondering when I should change jobs. I will but after having lived in Mumbai for almost 4 years I am not sure if I want to get back to Delhi. I mean one thing is the heat. Will visit this bit again.
5. I just have to mention this- read a few James Herriot stories today, maybe for the 35th time. Boy are they good or what. My safe, simple and 100% guaranteed antidote to feeling sad and lonely.
1. Doing some professional reading though the pace can be much better.
2. So far have eaten out only twice and tonight almost ordered pizza but then ate some home cooked food. However, as the quantity was not enough at the moment I am trying my best to not think of food (while I can write about it!)
3. Visited a new bookstore near Lower Parel station. Its called Landmark, I think its the same chain which runs the eponymous bookstore in Madras. Well it was quite well stocked and there was a fair crowd. I liked the collection too though once again the latest releases (books already released in NY and London) were not available. By the way I stumbled upon something which was authored by a neighbour in Delhi. After having gone through some pages it left me a little confused about the ideas of the author, though honestly I was a bit jealous that this guy who I thought was good for nothing should be turning author and all that. Later that night I mentioned the book to my father over phone and next day, lo and behold, the author in question calls me up in office to inquire where I had found the book and raving about the circulation numbers. The funny thing- he probably spoke to me after a gap of 20 years. Before he hung up he asked if I had bought the book to which I had to reply with a no and he got a bit upset. I like that.
4. Nothing else to report. Still wondering when I should change jobs. I will but after having lived in Mumbai for almost 4 years I am not sure if I want to get back to Delhi. I mean one thing is the heat. Will visit this bit again.
5. I just have to mention this- read a few James Herriot stories today, maybe for the 35th time. Boy are they good or what. My safe, simple and 100% guaranteed antidote to feeling sad and lonely.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Day 3 (Day 2 sorry)
Apologies for not reporting yesterday. Excuse being that was quite busy throughout the day and finally when I returned by 10 pm was just too tired to work on the computer.
Actually I was at the Brand Equity Quiz , Mumbai round held in Bandra. The subdued tone should be eloquently suggesting to you , dear reader that we (with my team mate from the Bank) didnt make it even to the final round. Hindustan Lever won. I knew the very first question in the final which came to the audience but another guy shouted me down in catching Derek o'Brien's (the quiz master) attention and yours truly just watched the rest of show silently seething with anger.
As for the tasks progress, not much but Day 3 appears promising. Have a busy day ahead at the office where I have to prepare a report on the performance of the US economy for the last 6 months for a meeting of our highest decision making committee. The stock markets continue to trek downhill with the sovereign debt crisis still causing aftershocks post the Greek sovereign debt earthquake. Not that it will interest you but the US 10 year was at 3.39 which is a warning sign. Lets see.
Missing family especially the younger one and from the phone calls it appears that he too is missing me. He is just 2 year but displays a lot of boy kind of qualities and I being the only other male in the household (yes we both have checked each other out) he sort of knows that we are on the same side. Delighted at the thought of raising him (and of course his sister too):-) I have to stop now but will certainly attempt to post something later tonight.
Actually I was at the Brand Equity Quiz , Mumbai round held in Bandra. The subdued tone should be eloquently suggesting to you , dear reader that we (with my team mate from the Bank) didnt make it even to the final round. Hindustan Lever won. I knew the very first question in the final which came to the audience but another guy shouted me down in catching Derek o'Brien's (the quiz master) attention and yours truly just watched the rest of show silently seething with anger.
As for the tasks progress, not much but Day 3 appears promising. Have a busy day ahead at the office where I have to prepare a report on the performance of the US economy for the last 6 months for a meeting of our highest decision making committee. The stock markets continue to trek downhill with the sovereign debt crisis still causing aftershocks post the Greek sovereign debt earthquake. Not that it will interest you but the US 10 year was at 3.39 which is a warning sign. Lets see.
Missing family especially the younger one and from the phone calls it appears that he too is missing me. He is just 2 year but displays a lot of boy kind of qualities and I being the only other male in the household (yes we both have checked each other out) he sort of knows that we are on the same side. Delighted at the thought of raising him (and of course his sister too):-) I have to stop now but will certainly attempt to post something later tonight.
Monday, May 17, 2010
Family's away
Day 1 (May 16, 2010)
Dipti and the babies have gone to her parents' place for 3 weeks. So is this a great opportunity to learn something new (say playing the guitar) or learn professionally useful skills or reading some books that I have been planning to read for a long time. Time will tell. The track record is actually quite sad. On such occasions in the past I have ended up watching movies at all hours almost 99% of the time. The first day this time too was no different even though I did some damage control late in the evening by spending an hour at Bandra's Crossword bookstore just browsing. On return (after downing two gulab jamuns at Brijwasi's on Linking Road) flopped down on the couch to watch Goodfellas for about an hour before my conscience yanked the remote from my grip and switched off the T.V. To avoid this catastrophe from occuring again these notes here are intended to monitor my progress regarding the following goals:
1. Read the Fixed Income Analysis book
2. Figure out forward trading in forex markets
(Non professional goals)
1. Complete my office housekeeping issues
2. Write an article based on V S Ramachandran's "Phantoms of the Brain"
3. And just for kicks call the Guitar teacher !!
4. Minimise eating out:-(
Most Important
Post your progress or the lack of it here everyday!
Dipti and the babies have gone to her parents' place for 3 weeks. So is this a great opportunity to learn something new (say playing the guitar) or learn professionally useful skills or reading some books that I have been planning to read for a long time. Time will tell. The track record is actually quite sad. On such occasions in the past I have ended up watching movies at all hours almost 99% of the time. The first day this time too was no different even though I did some damage control late in the evening by spending an hour at Bandra's Crossword bookstore just browsing. On return (after downing two gulab jamuns at Brijwasi's on Linking Road) flopped down on the couch to watch Goodfellas for about an hour before my conscience yanked the remote from my grip and switched off the T.V. To avoid this catastrophe from occuring again these notes here are intended to monitor my progress regarding the following goals:
1. Read the Fixed Income Analysis book
2. Figure out forward trading in forex markets
(Non professional goals)
1. Complete my office housekeeping issues
2. Write an article based on V S Ramachandran's "Phantoms of the Brain"
3. And just for kicks call the Guitar teacher !!
4. Minimise eating out:-(
Most Important
Post your progress or the lack of it here everyday!
Monday, April 12, 2010
Delhi's Food Delights
Stumbled upon this bit about New Delhi's regional cuisines. Here is a list of the more prominent outlets with latest addresses and phone numbers:
Andhra Pradesh Bhavan (1 Ashoka Road, near India Gate; 91-11-2338-7499; aponline.gov.in/apportal/apbhavandotcom/Location.htm) is among the most popular spots. Open daily 7:30 to 10 a.m.; noon to 3 p.m.; 7:30 to 10 p.m. Dinner for two, about 160 rupees, or about $3.65.
Assam Bhavan (1 Sardar Patel Marg, Chanakyapuri; 91-11-2687-7111), in a small basement, serves fish and unusual vegetarian dishes like custard apple curry. Daily 1 to 2:30 p.m.; 8:30 to 10 p.m. Meal for two, about 120 rupees.
Jammu and Kashmir House (9 Kautilya Marg, Chanakyapuri; 91-11-2611-2021) is known for its lamb kebabs. Not to be confused with Jammu and Kashmir Bhavan. Daily 7 to 9 a.m.; noon to 2 p.m.; 7 to 10 p.m. Meal for two, about 180 rupees.
Kerala House (3 Jantar Mantar Road, near Jantar Mantar; 91-11-3041-1411) serves coconut-infused dishes in a peaceful setting. Though it is not officially open to the public, walk-ins are welcome. Daily 8 to 9:30 a.m.; 1 to 2:30 p.m.; 8 to 9:30 p.m. Meal for two, 80 rupees.
Nagaland House (29 Aurangzeb Road, near Delhi Race Course; 91-11-2301-5638) serves unusual pork dishes favored in this remote northeast state. Daily 8:30 to 11 a.m.; noon to 2 p.m.; 7 to 10 p.m. Meal for two, 220 rupees.
Sikkim House (14 Panchsheel Marg; Chanakyapuri; 91-11-2611-5171), across from the United States Embassy, draws the diplomat set. Daily 8:30 to 10:30 a.m.; 12:30 to 11 p.m. Meal for two, about 250 rupees.
Tamil Nadu House (Off Africa Avenue; Chanakyapuri; 91-11-2419-3100) serves South Indian fare in a basic canteen. Daily 8 a.m. to 10:45 p.m. Meal for two, about 150 rupees.
Andhra Pradesh Bhavan (1 Ashoka Road, near India Gate; 91-11-2338-7499; aponline.gov.in/apportal/apbhavandotcom/Location.htm) is among the most popular spots. Open daily 7:30 to 10 a.m.; noon to 3 p.m.; 7:30 to 10 p.m. Dinner for two, about 160 rupees, or about $3.65.
Assam Bhavan (1 Sardar Patel Marg, Chanakyapuri; 91-11-2687-7111), in a small basement, serves fish and unusual vegetarian dishes like custard apple curry. Daily 1 to 2:30 p.m.; 8:30 to 10 p.m. Meal for two, about 120 rupees.
Jammu and Kashmir House (9 Kautilya Marg, Chanakyapuri; 91-11-2611-2021) is known for its lamb kebabs. Not to be confused with Jammu and Kashmir Bhavan. Daily 7 to 9 a.m.; noon to 2 p.m.; 7 to 10 p.m. Meal for two, about 180 rupees.
Kerala House (3 Jantar Mantar Road, near Jantar Mantar; 91-11-3041-1411) serves coconut-infused dishes in a peaceful setting. Though it is not officially open to the public, walk-ins are welcome. Daily 8 to 9:30 a.m.; 1 to 2:30 p.m.; 8 to 9:30 p.m. Meal for two, 80 rupees.
Nagaland House (29 Aurangzeb Road, near Delhi Race Course; 91-11-2301-5638) serves unusual pork dishes favored in this remote northeast state. Daily 8:30 to 11 a.m.; noon to 2 p.m.; 7 to 10 p.m. Meal for two, 220 rupees.
Sikkim House (14 Panchsheel Marg; Chanakyapuri; 91-11-2611-5171), across from the United States Embassy, draws the diplomat set. Daily 8:30 to 10:30 a.m.; 12:30 to 11 p.m. Meal for two, about 250 rupees.
Tamil Nadu House (Off Africa Avenue; Chanakyapuri; 91-11-2419-3100) serves South Indian fare in a basic canteen. Daily 8 a.m. to 10:45 p.m. Meal for two, about 150 rupees.
Sunday, April 4, 2010
WWII Books
Here is again a wishlist of books I want to read. Time will tell. Taken from WSJ, April 2010.
Five Best
Lynne Olson admires these vivid portraits of wartime Britain
1. London War Notes, 1939-1945
By Mollie Panter-Downes
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1971
In 1939, New Yorker editor Harold Ross recruited Mollie Panter-Downes, an English novelist and short-story writer, to contribute a regular feature for the magazine called "Letter From London." Panter-Downes's War II letters, collected in "London War Notes," are gem-like accounts of the everyday life of Britons as they coped with everything from blackouts and German bombing raids to shortages of gin and hot-water bottles. Blessed with a lively wit and an eye for the telling human detail, Panter-Downes brought wartime Britain alive for her American readers. When U.S. troops and supplies flooded into the country shortly before D-Day, she remarked that living in Britain was like taking up residence "on a vast combination of an aircraft carrier, a floating dock jammed with men, and a warehouse stacked to the ceiling with material labeled 'Europe.' "
2. The War Years
By Harold Nicolson
Atheneum, 1967
Harold Nicolson was a member of Parliament, novelist, biographer, journalist, former diplomat, noted gardener—and the husband of writer Vita Sackville-West. But he is best known now for his richly detailed wartime diaries and letters. ("The War Years" is the second volume in a three-volume collection of his wartime papers.) Nicolson composed masterly word portraits of leading political and government figures during the period, including Winston Churchill, Neville Chamberlain and exiled French leader Charles de Gaulle. Equally compelling are his eyewitness accounts of crucial parliamentary debates. For those who want a front-row seat from which to view history in the making, Nicolson's diaries are required reading.
3. The London Journal of General Raymond E. Lee, 1940-1941
Edited by James Leutze
Little, Brown, 1971
As military attaché and head of intelligence in the American embassy in London, Gen. Raymond E. Lee was supposedly a neutral observer of events in Britain in the critical years of 1940 and 1941. The U.S. had not yet entered the war and showed little sign of being eager to do so, despite Lee's urging—much to his consternation, as his brilliantly written journal makes clear. A cultured man who wore Savile Row suits (as a neutral military officer, he could not appear in uniform) and loved good food, wine and conversation, Lee endured the nightly Luftwaffe bombing raids on London with grace and good humor. "If ever there was a time when one should wear life like a loose garment," he noted, "this is it."
4. Here We Are Together
By Robert S. Arbib Jr.
Longmans, Green, 1946
In 1942, hordes of American GIs descended on East Anglia, a sleepy rural area in eastern England, to build a network of Eighth Air Force bases from which to bomb Germany. The resulting clash of cultures between the brash young Americans and the area's residents, most of whom had never met a foreigner before, is marvelously recounted in this delightful little memoir by Robert S. Arbib Jr., a former New York advertising executive who was one of the GIs. "I thought these people were supposed to speak English," complained one U.S. soldier after his first exposure to the East Anglians' impenetrable rural dialect. "Someone should teach them how to speak their own language." Arbib, who grew to love the British, ends his book with one of the most moving and eloquent tributes to wartime Britain and its people that I have ever read.
5. The Siren Years
By Charles Ritchie
Macmillan, 1974
Although low on the diplomatic ladder, Canada's Charles Ritchie was welcomed into the leading social and cultural circles of wartime London. He shared tea with the queen, lunched with writer Nancy Mitford, spent Christmas with the Duchess of Westminster and had a long, intense affair with the Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen. His diaries, compiled in "The Siren Years," are filled with sharp, insightful observations of these experiences, among many others. Just as interesting is his sardonic perspective as a Canadian—and thus an outsider—on the U.S.-British partnership. "How the English hate being rescued by the Americans," he observed. "They know they must swallow it, but, God, how it sticks in their throats."
—Ms. Olson is the author of "Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood With Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour," recently published by Random House.
Five Best
Lynne Olson admires these vivid portraits of wartime Britain
1. London War Notes, 1939-1945
By Mollie Panter-Downes
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1971
In 1939, New Yorker editor Harold Ross recruited Mollie Panter-Downes, an English novelist and short-story writer, to contribute a regular feature for the magazine called "Letter From London." Panter-Downes's War II letters, collected in "London War Notes," are gem-like accounts of the everyday life of Britons as they coped with everything from blackouts and German bombing raids to shortages of gin and hot-water bottles. Blessed with a lively wit and an eye for the telling human detail, Panter-Downes brought wartime Britain alive for her American readers. When U.S. troops and supplies flooded into the country shortly before D-Day, she remarked that living in Britain was like taking up residence "on a vast combination of an aircraft carrier, a floating dock jammed with men, and a warehouse stacked to the ceiling with material labeled 'Europe.' "
2. The War Years
By Harold Nicolson
Atheneum, 1967
Harold Nicolson was a member of Parliament, novelist, biographer, journalist, former diplomat, noted gardener—and the husband of writer Vita Sackville-West. But he is best known now for his richly detailed wartime diaries and letters. ("The War Years" is the second volume in a three-volume collection of his wartime papers.) Nicolson composed masterly word portraits of leading political and government figures during the period, including Winston Churchill, Neville Chamberlain and exiled French leader Charles de Gaulle. Equally compelling are his eyewitness accounts of crucial parliamentary debates. For those who want a front-row seat from which to view history in the making, Nicolson's diaries are required reading.
3. The London Journal of General Raymond E. Lee, 1940-1941
Edited by James Leutze
Little, Brown, 1971
As military attaché and head of intelligence in the American embassy in London, Gen. Raymond E. Lee was supposedly a neutral observer of events in Britain in the critical years of 1940 and 1941. The U.S. had not yet entered the war and showed little sign of being eager to do so, despite Lee's urging—much to his consternation, as his brilliantly written journal makes clear. A cultured man who wore Savile Row suits (as a neutral military officer, he could not appear in uniform) and loved good food, wine and conversation, Lee endured the nightly Luftwaffe bombing raids on London with grace and good humor. "If ever there was a time when one should wear life like a loose garment," he noted, "this is it."
4. Here We Are Together
By Robert S. Arbib Jr.
Longmans, Green, 1946
In 1942, hordes of American GIs descended on East Anglia, a sleepy rural area in eastern England, to build a network of Eighth Air Force bases from which to bomb Germany. The resulting clash of cultures between the brash young Americans and the area's residents, most of whom had never met a foreigner before, is marvelously recounted in this delightful little memoir by Robert S. Arbib Jr., a former New York advertising executive who was one of the GIs. "I thought these people were supposed to speak English," complained one U.S. soldier after his first exposure to the East Anglians' impenetrable rural dialect. "Someone should teach them how to speak their own language." Arbib, who grew to love the British, ends his book with one of the most moving and eloquent tributes to wartime Britain and its people that I have ever read.
5. The Siren Years
By Charles Ritchie
Macmillan, 1974
Although low on the diplomatic ladder, Canada's Charles Ritchie was welcomed into the leading social and cultural circles of wartime London. He shared tea with the queen, lunched with writer Nancy Mitford, spent Christmas with the Duchess of Westminster and had a long, intense affair with the Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen. His diaries, compiled in "The Siren Years," are filled with sharp, insightful observations of these experiences, among many others. Just as interesting is his sardonic perspective as a Canadian—and thus an outsider—on the U.S.-British partnership. "How the English hate being rescued by the Americans," he observed. "They know they must swallow it, but, God, how it sticks in their throats."
—Ms. Olson is the author of "Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood With Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour," recently published by Random House.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
2010 Reads (mostly Crisis stuff)
1. Financial Shock by Mark Zandi in 2009(found very useful for understanding the origins of the housing crisis)
2. When Markets Collide by M El Erian in 2009
3. The Course of my Life by C D Deshmukh (RBI's first Indian Governor)
4. Do they Walk on Water by Leo Santow (Really incisive critique of the last 4 including Bernanke, Fed Governors and Fed moves)
5. Lords of Finance by Liaquat Ahamed (I wish I had written something like this)
6. Madame Bovaury by Gustave Flaubert (this is just to keep my sanity intact)
Well what is the idea behind listing all the names here. First, to brag about my reading habit.
Two, really to document what I have read as (this is the dawn of middle age) often I find something that I might have read sometime but am not sure; and
Three, I have started taking audio notes of stuff I read by dictating to my cellphone. I intend to put the notes here sometime. I attempted this sometime back with a Soros book but I dont think I updated the notes when I finished the book. So hoping to revisit the idea here.
2. When Markets Collide by M El Erian in 2009
3. The Course of my Life by C D Deshmukh (RBI's first Indian Governor)
4. Do they Walk on Water by Leo Santow (Really incisive critique of the last 4 including Bernanke, Fed Governors and Fed moves)
5. Lords of Finance by Liaquat Ahamed (I wish I had written something like this)
6. Madame Bovaury by Gustave Flaubert (this is just to keep my sanity intact)
Well what is the idea behind listing all the names here. First, to brag about my reading habit.
Two, really to document what I have read as (this is the dawn of middle age) often I find something that I might have read sometime but am not sure; and
Three, I have started taking audio notes of stuff I read by dictating to my cellphone. I intend to put the notes here sometime. I attempted this sometime back with a Soros book but I dont think I updated the notes when I finished the book. So hoping to revisit the idea here.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
This is really about BONDS
* FEBRUARY 21, 2010
Bond Bubble? What You Can Do About It.
By BRETT ARENDS
Are bonds in a bubble? And, if so, what can you do to protect yourself?
This is a key question for millions of investors -- especially after the Federal Reserve's surprise move last week to raise one of its interest rates. That's often considered a signal the Fed is about to raise rates more broadly, a move that would be ominous for bonds.
[Lede] Chris Gash
Bonds are IOUs issued by governments and corporations. They are generally deemed more stable than stocks. Today the public has more than $2.2 trillion invested in bonds through mutual funds.
Bond sales have boomed in the past year, as investors have sought more stability in the wake of the stock-market crash.
According to the Investment Company Institute, a trade body for the mutual-fund industry, investors have poured nearly $400 billion into bond funds since the start of 2009.
But booming sales have driven up prices. Corporate bonds have become more and more expensive. And U.S. Treasury bonds look even more so.
These days a seven-to-10 year bond from a top-rated company will pay you only about 4.3%. Even a year ago that was above 6%, and not long ago it was higher still. Meanwhile, a 10-year Treasury bond will pay a paltry 3.8%. During the financial crisis it briefly went lower, but by the standards of recent decades it is near the floor.
Why does this matter? Bondholders may not know it, but they are taking risks. The biggest is from inflation. When consumer prices rise, the fixed interest you get from your bonds is worth less and less in real, purchasing-power terms.
If the bonds' yields are high enough to compensate, this may not matter. But if yields are low, like now, and inflation takes off you can get into trouble. Those who invested in long-term Treasury bonds in the mid-1960s, just before inflation surged, actually lost money in real terms over the following 20 years. (Those who bought bonds in the early 1980s, when yields went as high as 15%, made out like bandits as inflation collapsed.)
When inflation rises the government usually raises short-term interest rates. And that's an additional problem for bondholders. When short-term savings accounts are paying about 1% a year, a piece of paper from a company promising 3.8% a year for 10 years can look quite valuable. But it'll be worth a lot less if short-term rates were to rise to, say, 5%, or even more.
Are we definitely in a bond bubble? Even though prices seem high, it's not certain. Some people argue that they are a reasonable value, and inflation will stay subdued. Indeed one or two bearish strategists argue bonds could go even higher, and yields lower. Only time will tell.
There are very few certainties in the financial markets. For private investors, the key is to make sure you're getting paid for the risks you're taking. In the case of anyone holding long-term bonds, you're probably not.
What can you do about it? Here are three practical steps to take if you are worried:
1 Limit your exposure to very long-term bonds. These are the ones most at risk from rising inflation and interest rates. Most people invest in bonds through mutual funds that have a mix of short-, medium- and long-term bonds.
How does your fund stack up? Just check the duration. That's a technical term that's the best measure of a bond's inflation and interest-rate risk. Longer-term bonds have longer durations. The fund company will post this number, usually on the monthly fact sheet on its Web site.
A short-term fund will usually have a duration of a few years. You will earn less money in short-term bonds, but you will face fewer risks. A fund with a duration beyond about six to seven years is taking on more risk.
2 Move some bond money into TIPS. Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities are bonds with built-in inflation protection. Right now, the 20-year TIPS bond promises to pay about 2% a year on top of inflation. By historic standards it's not steal -- but it's OK.
It offers a much better tradeoff between risk and reward than the regular long-term bonds. And it lets you sleep easy at night. With TIPS, you no longer have to worry about inflation. Bond prices can still move, but rarely by much -- and if you hold the bond for 20 years, it doesn't matter at all.
3 Consider some dividend stocks as well. Too many investors think in simplistic silos -- stocks are risky, bonds are safe, and so on. Yet stocks of many solid, blue-chip companies may prove very safe investments, especially if you buy a basket of them, and you buy them when they are cheap. (Meanwhile, bonds may prove very risky, especially if you buy them when they are expensive.)
Over time, stocks also have typically offered better protection against inflation than bonds.
You can find plenty of decent yields without going near the high-risk financials. Take these exchange-traded funds: The Vanguard Consumer Staples ETF, which invests in such companies as Procter & Gamble, Wal-Mart Stores, Philip Morris International and Kraft, has a dividend yield of 2.6%. The Vanguard Telecommunications Services ETF is yielding 3.8%, and the Vanguard Utilities ETF, 4%.
Do your homework and understand what you're owning, but many blue-chip stocks with good yields can be a good addition to an income portfolio.
Bond Bubble? What You Can Do About It.
By BRETT ARENDS
Are bonds in a bubble? And, if so, what can you do to protect yourself?
This is a key question for millions of investors -- especially after the Federal Reserve's surprise move last week to raise one of its interest rates. That's often considered a signal the Fed is about to raise rates more broadly, a move that would be ominous for bonds.
[Lede] Chris Gash
Bonds are IOUs issued by governments and corporations. They are generally deemed more stable than stocks. Today the public has more than $2.2 trillion invested in bonds through mutual funds.
Bond sales have boomed in the past year, as investors have sought more stability in the wake of the stock-market crash.
According to the Investment Company Institute, a trade body for the mutual-fund industry, investors have poured nearly $400 billion into bond funds since the start of 2009.
But booming sales have driven up prices. Corporate bonds have become more and more expensive. And U.S. Treasury bonds look even more so.
These days a seven-to-10 year bond from a top-rated company will pay you only about 4.3%. Even a year ago that was above 6%, and not long ago it was higher still. Meanwhile, a 10-year Treasury bond will pay a paltry 3.8%. During the financial crisis it briefly went lower, but by the standards of recent decades it is near the floor.
Why does this matter? Bondholders may not know it, but they are taking risks. The biggest is from inflation. When consumer prices rise, the fixed interest you get from your bonds is worth less and less in real, purchasing-power terms.
If the bonds' yields are high enough to compensate, this may not matter. But if yields are low, like now, and inflation takes off you can get into trouble. Those who invested in long-term Treasury bonds in the mid-1960s, just before inflation surged, actually lost money in real terms over the following 20 years. (Those who bought bonds in the early 1980s, when yields went as high as 15%, made out like bandits as inflation collapsed.)
When inflation rises the government usually raises short-term interest rates. And that's an additional problem for bondholders. When short-term savings accounts are paying about 1% a year, a piece of paper from a company promising 3.8% a year for 10 years can look quite valuable. But it'll be worth a lot less if short-term rates were to rise to, say, 5%, or even more.
Are we definitely in a bond bubble? Even though prices seem high, it's not certain. Some people argue that they are a reasonable value, and inflation will stay subdued. Indeed one or two bearish strategists argue bonds could go even higher, and yields lower. Only time will tell.
There are very few certainties in the financial markets. For private investors, the key is to make sure you're getting paid for the risks you're taking. In the case of anyone holding long-term bonds, you're probably not.
What can you do about it? Here are three practical steps to take if you are worried:
1 Limit your exposure to very long-term bonds. These are the ones most at risk from rising inflation and interest rates. Most people invest in bonds through mutual funds that have a mix of short-, medium- and long-term bonds.
How does your fund stack up? Just check the duration. That's a technical term that's the best measure of a bond's inflation and interest-rate risk. Longer-term bonds have longer durations. The fund company will post this number, usually on the monthly fact sheet on its Web site.
A short-term fund will usually have a duration of a few years. You will earn less money in short-term bonds, but you will face fewer risks. A fund with a duration beyond about six to seven years is taking on more risk.
2 Move some bond money into TIPS. Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities are bonds with built-in inflation protection. Right now, the 20-year TIPS bond promises to pay about 2% a year on top of inflation. By historic standards it's not steal -- but it's OK.
It offers a much better tradeoff between risk and reward than the regular long-term bonds. And it lets you sleep easy at night. With TIPS, you no longer have to worry about inflation. Bond prices can still move, but rarely by much -- and if you hold the bond for 20 years, it doesn't matter at all.
3 Consider some dividend stocks as well. Too many investors think in simplistic silos -- stocks are risky, bonds are safe, and so on. Yet stocks of many solid, blue-chip companies may prove very safe investments, especially if you buy a basket of them, and you buy them when they are cheap. (Meanwhile, bonds may prove very risky, especially if you buy them when they are expensive.)
Over time, stocks also have typically offered better protection against inflation than bonds.
You can find plenty of decent yields without going near the high-risk financials. Take these exchange-traded funds: The Vanguard Consumer Staples ETF, which invests in such companies as Procter & Gamble, Wal-Mart Stores, Philip Morris International and Kraft, has a dividend yield of 2.6%. The Vanguard Telecommunications Services ETF is yielding 3.8%, and the Vanguard Utilities ETF, 4%.
Do your homework and understand what you're owning, but many blue-chip stocks with good yields can be a good addition to an income portfolio.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Secret of Successful Marriage
I found this story under the BONDS section of the WSJ!! (while I was looking for Treasury Bonds)
* FEBRUARY 8, 2010
Happy Couples Kiss and Tell
For Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne, it's perseverance. For Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, it's maintaining separate work lives. For Doyle and Louise Brunson, having separate bank accounts helps.
A former first lady, a rock star who's been in and out of rehab, and a professional poker player can all offer considerable insight into the mysterious workings of marriage. After all, their wisdom is gleaned from decades of conjugal bliss.
OK, maybe it wasn't always bliss. But each of them has stayed married—to the same person—for a very long time. And each considers his or her marriage to be happy, strong and mutually supportive.
In other words, they beat the odds.
It is often possible to understand why a marriage fails, as so many do. It is much more difficult, though, to elucidate why one succeeds. Why do some couples thrive, while others fizzle or flame out, despite their best intentions?
When I recently met former first lady Rosalynn Carter, who has been married to former president Jimmy Carter for 63 years, I couldn't resist asking how they made such a perfect union.
Mrs. Carter replied that she and her husband had gone through two periods in their marriage that were tough. "First, well, let me just say: Don't ever write a book with your husband," she said.
She went on to explain that the period after she and Mr. Carter left the White House and returned to their hometown of Plains, Ga., also put a strain on their relationship. Her husband felt adrift after failing to win re-election, she said. He would often interrupt her while she was at work in her home office, asking her to have a cup of coffee with him and chat.
"We learned that it was important to our marriage for each of us to always have our own work, our own projects," said Mrs. Carter, 82.
I asked my parents, who just celebrated their 46th wedding anniversary, why their marriage lasted so long. My dad said he had no idea. "Your mother did all the hard work," he admitted. Mom agreed, and divulged her marital secret: "forgiveness."
Happily married people believe they married their soul mates, and for good reason. Even marrying the right person gets you only part way. Ask the couples themselves, and they'll likely credit some combination of hard work and sheer blind luck.
Journal Community
Discuss: What are your secrets for an enduring marriage?
James Cordova, a psychologist at Clark University, advises couples not to leave it to chance. You should assess your marriage at least once a year, he says. "Imagine going to the dentist only if your tooth actually hurt. At that point something has gone terribly wrong, and the odds of saving it go way down," says Dr. Cordova, author of "The Marriage Checkup." "Marriage is the same."
Of course, no one ever said that every day, or even every year, was going to be rosy. And there are plenty of long marriages that are unhappy. But there are some strategies that happily married couples say work:
• Find the middle ground. "It's all give and take," says Marlene Critch, a retired hospital director in Tucson. She met her husband Bill on a blind date in 1959. He took her on a picnic with a thermos of gin and tonics; they married two months later.
Flash ahead 50 years. The Critches have raised two daughters in Seattle and weathered his severe heart condition. They swim together each morning, and he reads her children's books when she has trouble falling asleep at night.
Compromise, they say, got them through the good and bad times. Mr. Critch, 75, says he compromised by quitting the Air Force early in their marriage, because it bothered her that he was away from home so much. (Press him for more concessions, and he says, "Miso soup.")
Ms. Critch, 74, says she made her own compromise by agreeing to retire to Arizona, where her husband preferred the climate. (She wanted to stay in Seattle to be close to their daughters.)
"If each person can give 75 percent, you've got 150 percent," says Ms. Critch. Her husband agrees. "Many men would call that wussy," he says. "But I don't because I value her more than anything else in the world."
Similarly, Jan and Len Konkel, who have been married for 62 years, long ago made a pact to never argue over anything that wasn't very important, saving their battles for things like how to raise their three children. "Everything else is minor and can be settled in a discussion," says Ms. Konkel, 84.
Her husband agrees. "I say 'Yes ma'am' and 'No ma'am' a lot," says Mr. Konkel, 88.
• Be funny. On the night in 1967 that Jackie and Ken Egan met at a dance club in Boston, he asked her for a kiss. She declined: "I don't know you," she told him. "And my kisses are like Lay's potato chips—you wouldn't be happy with just one."
The Egans, who live in Marshfield, Mass., and have four children, just celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary on Monday. Ms. Egan says laughter helps them deal with issues that would otherwise drive them nuts—such as Mr. Egan's fussy eating habits and forgetfulness about putting the toilet seat down. Or Ms. Egan's inability to let her husband finish a story without interrupting him, or her many knickknacks.
"You need to learn to find the humor in each other's annoying habits. It helps you keep the affection," says Ms. Egan, 69.
• Keep (some) secrets. When poker legend Doyle Brunson met his wife Louise at a country-and-western club in Texas in 1961, he told her he gambled for a living. And she accepted him for who he is. "Love is the most important thing," says Louise Brunson, 78. "You have to love your spouse more than life itself."
The Brunsons, who live in Las Vegas, have stood by each other through some serious trials in their 47 years of marriage, including the death of a daughter and an armed robbery of their home, during which they were tied up at gunpoint.
"You have to go forward, you can't go back," says Mr. Brunson, 76. Even so, the Brunsons don't share everything. He doesn't discuss his business with her. "I have won and lost millions of dollars without her knowing," he says. Ms. Brunson says that's just fine with her. "I have my own bank account," she says.
• Never, ever give up. This tip is really important, so pay attention. Sharon Osbourne says it is how she stayed with husband Ozzy for 28 years and counting.
And she's married to the Prince of Darkness. He bit the head off of a live bat, for God's sake. (Ditto a dove.)
He also spent years strung out on drugs and alcohol. Never mind the groupies and the near-fatal overdoses. This man set fire to his house, passed out on a freeway median, and once tried to strangle his wife.
Ms. Osbourne, for her part, tried to run him over with a car, smashing his gold records with a hammer and taking out a restraining order. "We became like a soap opera," says Ms. Osbourne, 57, who is her husband's manager.
And yet she stuck by her man. Why? Because she felt he was a good person when sober and that he would kick his addictions one day. And she still believes he is her soul mate. ("Twice recently we've had the same dream on the same night," she says.)
"I went into marriage thinking it was forever. So I was stubborn," says Ms. Osbourne who has three children with her husband.
Mr. Osbourne, who was married once before, finally did sober up "six or seven years" ago, he says, and is very glad his wife stuck it out. "You don't throw in the towel at the first sign of trouble," he says.
And so Mr. Osbourne has made a point of telling his wife he loved her every single day—no matter where he was in the world, no matter how drunk or high. "She sometimes said 'Drop dead' or 'F— off,'" he says. "But at least if you are arguing, you are talking. If you stop talking, it's time to call it a day."
• Stay alive. My sister, a doctor, told me about one of her patients, a 92-year-old woman who showed up for her appointment with her husband, who is 94. They said they have been married for almost 70 years.
My sister, highly impressed, asked the couple the secret to their union's longevity. And they looked at each other for a long moment. Then the wife spoke: "Eh, neither of us died." (Wasn't this funny)
* FEBRUARY 8, 2010
Happy Couples Kiss and Tell
For Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne, it's perseverance. For Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, it's maintaining separate work lives. For Doyle and Louise Brunson, having separate bank accounts helps.
A former first lady, a rock star who's been in and out of rehab, and a professional poker player can all offer considerable insight into the mysterious workings of marriage. After all, their wisdom is gleaned from decades of conjugal bliss.
OK, maybe it wasn't always bliss. But each of them has stayed married—to the same person—for a very long time. And each considers his or her marriage to be happy, strong and mutually supportive.
In other words, they beat the odds.
It is often possible to understand why a marriage fails, as so many do. It is much more difficult, though, to elucidate why one succeeds. Why do some couples thrive, while others fizzle or flame out, despite their best intentions?
When I recently met former first lady Rosalynn Carter, who has been married to former president Jimmy Carter for 63 years, I couldn't resist asking how they made such a perfect union.
Mrs. Carter replied that she and her husband had gone through two periods in their marriage that were tough. "First, well, let me just say: Don't ever write a book with your husband," she said.
She went on to explain that the period after she and Mr. Carter left the White House and returned to their hometown of Plains, Ga., also put a strain on their relationship. Her husband felt adrift after failing to win re-election, she said. He would often interrupt her while she was at work in her home office, asking her to have a cup of coffee with him and chat.
"We learned that it was important to our marriage for each of us to always have our own work, our own projects," said Mrs. Carter, 82.
I asked my parents, who just celebrated their 46th wedding anniversary, why their marriage lasted so long. My dad said he had no idea. "Your mother did all the hard work," he admitted. Mom agreed, and divulged her marital secret: "forgiveness."
Happily married people believe they married their soul mates, and for good reason. Even marrying the right person gets you only part way. Ask the couples themselves, and they'll likely credit some combination of hard work and sheer blind luck.
Journal Community
Discuss: What are your secrets for an enduring marriage?
James Cordova, a psychologist at Clark University, advises couples not to leave it to chance. You should assess your marriage at least once a year, he says. "Imagine going to the dentist only if your tooth actually hurt. At that point something has gone terribly wrong, and the odds of saving it go way down," says Dr. Cordova, author of "The Marriage Checkup." "Marriage is the same."
Of course, no one ever said that every day, or even every year, was going to be rosy. And there are plenty of long marriages that are unhappy. But there are some strategies that happily married couples say work:
• Find the middle ground. "It's all give and take," says Marlene Critch, a retired hospital director in Tucson. She met her husband Bill on a blind date in 1959. He took her on a picnic with a thermos of gin and tonics; they married two months later.
Flash ahead 50 years. The Critches have raised two daughters in Seattle and weathered his severe heart condition. They swim together each morning, and he reads her children's books when she has trouble falling asleep at night.
Compromise, they say, got them through the good and bad times. Mr. Critch, 75, says he compromised by quitting the Air Force early in their marriage, because it bothered her that he was away from home so much. (Press him for more concessions, and he says, "Miso soup.")
Ms. Critch, 74, says she made her own compromise by agreeing to retire to Arizona, where her husband preferred the climate. (She wanted to stay in Seattle to be close to their daughters.)
"If each person can give 75 percent, you've got 150 percent," says Ms. Critch. Her husband agrees. "Many men would call that wussy," he says. "But I don't because I value her more than anything else in the world."
Similarly, Jan and Len Konkel, who have been married for 62 years, long ago made a pact to never argue over anything that wasn't very important, saving their battles for things like how to raise their three children. "Everything else is minor and can be settled in a discussion," says Ms. Konkel, 84.
Her husband agrees. "I say 'Yes ma'am' and 'No ma'am' a lot," says Mr. Konkel, 88.
• Be funny. On the night in 1967 that Jackie and Ken Egan met at a dance club in Boston, he asked her for a kiss. She declined: "I don't know you," she told him. "And my kisses are like Lay's potato chips—you wouldn't be happy with just one."
The Egans, who live in Marshfield, Mass., and have four children, just celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary on Monday. Ms. Egan says laughter helps them deal with issues that would otherwise drive them nuts—such as Mr. Egan's fussy eating habits and forgetfulness about putting the toilet seat down. Or Ms. Egan's inability to let her husband finish a story without interrupting him, or her many knickknacks.
"You need to learn to find the humor in each other's annoying habits. It helps you keep the affection," says Ms. Egan, 69.
• Keep (some) secrets. When poker legend Doyle Brunson met his wife Louise at a country-and-western club in Texas in 1961, he told her he gambled for a living. And she accepted him for who he is. "Love is the most important thing," says Louise Brunson, 78. "You have to love your spouse more than life itself."
The Brunsons, who live in Las Vegas, have stood by each other through some serious trials in their 47 years of marriage, including the death of a daughter and an armed robbery of their home, during which they were tied up at gunpoint.
"You have to go forward, you can't go back," says Mr. Brunson, 76. Even so, the Brunsons don't share everything. He doesn't discuss his business with her. "I have won and lost millions of dollars without her knowing," he says. Ms. Brunson says that's just fine with her. "I have my own bank account," she says.
• Never, ever give up. This tip is really important, so pay attention. Sharon Osbourne says it is how she stayed with husband Ozzy for 28 years and counting.
And she's married to the Prince of Darkness. He bit the head off of a live bat, for God's sake. (Ditto a dove.)
He also spent years strung out on drugs and alcohol. Never mind the groupies and the near-fatal overdoses. This man set fire to his house, passed out on a freeway median, and once tried to strangle his wife.
Ms. Osbourne, for her part, tried to run him over with a car, smashing his gold records with a hammer and taking out a restraining order. "We became like a soap opera," says Ms. Osbourne, 57, who is her husband's manager.
And yet she stuck by her man. Why? Because she felt he was a good person when sober and that he would kick his addictions one day. And she still believes he is her soul mate. ("Twice recently we've had the same dream on the same night," she says.)
"I went into marriage thinking it was forever. So I was stubborn," says Ms. Osbourne who has three children with her husband.
Mr. Osbourne, who was married once before, finally did sober up "six or seven years" ago, he says, and is very glad his wife stuck it out. "You don't throw in the towel at the first sign of trouble," he says.
And so Mr. Osbourne has made a point of telling his wife he loved her every single day—no matter where he was in the world, no matter how drunk or high. "She sometimes said 'Drop dead' or 'F— off,'" he says. "But at least if you are arguing, you are talking. If you stop talking, it's time to call it a day."
• Stay alive. My sister, a doctor, told me about one of her patients, a 92-year-old woman who showed up for her appointment with her husband, who is 94. They said they have been married for almost 70 years.
My sister, highly impressed, asked the couple the secret to their union's longevity. And they looked at each other for a long moment. Then the wife spoke: "Eh, neither of us died." (Wasn't this funny)
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Welcome 2010!
I just realized that my last entry was almost a year back. So 'Welcome 2010'. While there is no genuine explanation for not updating the blog all I will submit is that 2009 for me (and more so for Dipti) was the Year of Children. More precisely, their birthday parties. Saumitra (who now has at least a dozen nick names-mickey, mickoo, chicki, chickloo, gobu, betoo and so on) turned One on May 6 last year and this had to be preceded (as per our family customs) by his first tonsuring ceremony at the family shrine for this purpose in Vidhyanchal- a small temple town on the banks of Ganga in UP. And yesterday we celebrated Priya's 7th birthday in Mumbai (or Bombay, cant decide!) in a McDonald's restaurant. The contrast couldn't have been more stark between two locations. But first some pictures form each event.
A Very Happy New Year. Properly translated it means I hope this year is free of the following:
1. Terror attacks
2. Water scarcity
3. Rain affected commuting
4. Sick children
Etcetra
Till next time and hopefully in 2010 itself!
A Very Happy New Year. Properly translated it means I hope this year is free of the following:
1. Terror attacks
2. Water scarcity
3. Rain affected commuting
4. Sick children
Etcetra
Till next time and hopefully in 2010 itself!
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