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.

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.

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.

What I am reading now!

Two books, but actually just one- "The New Paradigm of Financial Markets" by George Soros. Why Soros? Well, first of all this is my first introduction to the famous investor beyond his sound bites on business television. Second, He doesn't write bad at all and last (after I read in the book itself) that he too in a way is a WWII Jewish victim and I am quite interested in the period's history and that of the holocaust. But lest I suggest anything, Soros is certainly not a holocaust victim. Coming back to the book, its a short piece about how the current international financial order begets creating a new paradigm to understand it better and to prevent any future financial apocalypses!

Soros talks about his "life's work"-his "Theory of Reflexivity" that is the impact of human behavior on social situations, like the financial markets for instance. His chief hypothesis being that humans tend to imbibe knowledge from their environment (Cognitive function) and attempt to use it to their advantage (Manipulative function) but in the process end up injecting their biases and beliefs in to their intended actions. The final result is that the expected outcome deviates from the actual outcome and this results in a feedback loop which as usually is the case in human affairs turns out to be vicious. I will come back to this after I finish the book.

And the second book! Leo Tolstoy's collections of short stories. Why? Simply because I have to narrate a new story (repetitions are rarely permitted) to Priya every night and LT's stories have just the right amount of emotion and drama to satisfy her and induce sleep.

Amitava Ghosh-Sea of Poppies

First of all, the new blog picture belongs to Amitava Ghosh, one of India's foremost contemporary writers and certainly destined to be included in the list of all time greats who write in English. His latest work, "Sea of Poppies" a novel set in the 1830s-1840s is something I would recommend to all.

Mediterranean Blue