‘Bombay’ wedding according to Garp

‘Bombay’ wedding episode from The World According to Garp  by John Irving

Then Garp got some hate mail of his own. He was addressed in a lively letter by someone who took offense at Second Wind of the Cuckold. It was not a blind, stuttering, spastic farter – as you might imagine – either. It was just what Garp needed to get himself out of his slump.

Dear Shithead,

[wrote the offended party]

I have read your novel. You seem to find other people’s problems very funny. I have seen your pictures. With your fat head of hair I suppose you can laugh at bald persons. And in your cruel book you laugh at people who can’t have orgasms, and people who aren’t blessed with happy marriages, and people whose wives and husbands are unfaithful to each other. You ought to know that persons who have these problems do not think everything is so funny. Look at the world, shithead – it is a bed of pain, people suffering and nobody believing in God or bringing their children up right. You shithead, you don’t have any problems so you can make fun of the poor people who do!

Yours sincerely,

(Mrs.) I. B. Poole

Findlay, Ohio

That letter stung Garp like a slap; rarely had he felt so importantly misunderstood. Why did people insist that if you were “comic” you couldn’t also be “serious”? Garp felt most people confused being profound with being sober, being earnest with being deep. Apparently, if you sounded serious, you were. Presumably, other animals could not laugh at themselves, and Garp believed that laughter was related to sympathy, which we were always needing more of. He had been, after all, a humorless child – and never religious – so perhaps he now took comedy more seriously than others.

But for Garp to see his vision interpreted as making fun of people was painful to him; and to realize that his art had made him appear cruel gave Garp a keen sense of failure. Very carefully, as if he were speaking to a potential suicide high up in a foreign and unfamiliar hotel, Garp wrote to his reader in Findlay, Ohio

Dear Mrs. Poole:
The world is a bed of pain, people suffer terribly, few of us believe in God or bring up our children very well; you’re right about that. It is also true that people who have problems do not, as a rule, think their problems are “funny”.

Horace Walpole once said that the world is comic to those who think and tragic to those who feel. I hope you’ll agree with me that Horace Walpole somewhat simplifies the world by saying this. Surely both of us think and feel; in regard to what’s comic and what’s tragic, Mrs. Poole, the world is all mixed up. For this reason I have never understood why “serious” and “funny” are thought to be opposites. It is simply a truthful contradiction to me that people’s problems are often funny and that the people are often and nonetheless sad.

I am ashamed, however, that you think I am laughing at people, or making fun of them. I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave – and nothing but laughter to console them.

Laughter is my religion, Mrs. Poole. In the manner of most religions, I admit that my laughter is pretty desperate. I want to tell you a little story to illustrate what I mean. The story takes place in Bombay, India, where many people starve to death every day; but not all the people in Bombay are starving.

And among the non starring population of Bombay, India, there was a wedding, and a party was thrown in honor of the bride and groom. Some of the wedding guests brought elephants to the party. They weren’t really conscious of showing off, they were just using the elephants for transportation. Although it might strike us as a big-shot way to travel around, I don’t think these wedding guests saw themselves that way. Most of the were probably not directly responsible for the vast numbers of their fellow Indians who were starving all around them; most of them were just calling “time out” from their own problems, and the problems of the world, to celebrate the wedding of a friend. But if you were a member of the starving Indians, and you hobbled past that wedding party and saw all those elephants parked outside, you probably would have felt some disgruntlement.

Furthermore, some of the revelers at the wedding got drunk and began feeding beer to their elephant. They emptied an ice bucket and filled it with beer, and they went tittering out to the parking lot and fed their hot elephant the whole bucket. The elephant liked it. So the revelers gave him several more buckets of beer.

Who knows how beer will affect an elephant? These people meant no harm, they were just having fun – and chances are fairly good that the rest of their lives weren’t one hundred percent fun. They probably needed this party. But the people were also being stupid and irresponsible.

If one of those many starving Indians had dragged himself through the parking lot and seen these drunken wedding guests filling up an elephant with beer, I’ll bet he would have felt resentful. But I hope you see I am not making fun of anyone.

What happens next is that the drunken revelers are asked to leave the party because their behavior with their elephant is obnoxious to the other wedding guests. No one can blame the other guests for feeling this way; some of them may have actually thought they were preventing things from getting “out of hand,” although people have never been very successful at preventing this.

Huffy and brave with beer, the revelers struggled up on their elephant and veered away from the parking lot – a large exhibition of happiness, surely – bumping into a few other elephants and things because the revelers’ elephant plowed from side to side in a lumbering wooze, bleary and bloated with buckets of beer. His trunk lashed back and forth like a badly fastened artificial limb. The great beast was so unsteady that he struck an electric utility pole, shearing it cleanly and bringing down the live wires on his massive head – which killed him, and the wedding guests who were riding him, instantly.

Mrs. Poole, please believe me: I don’t think that’s “funny.” But along comes one of those starving Indians. He sees all the wedding guests mourning the death of their friends, and their friends’ elephant; much wailing, rending of fine clothes, spilling of good food and drink. The first thing he does is to take the opportunity to slip into the wedding while the guests are distracted and steal a little good food and drink for his starving family. The second thing he does is start to laugh himself sick about the manner in which the revelers disposed of themselves and their elephant. Alongside death by starvation, this method of enormous dying must seem very funny, or at least quick, to the undernourished Indian. But the wedding guests don’t see it that way. It is already a tragedy to them; they are already talking about “this tragic event,” and although they could perhaps forgive the presence of a “mangy beggar” at their party – and even have tolerated his stealing their food – they cannot forgive him for laughing at their dead friends’ elephant.

The wedding guests – outraged at the beggar’s behavior (at his laughter, not his thievery and not his rags) – drown him in one of the beer buckets that the late revelers used to water their elephant. They construed this to represent “justice”. We see that the story is about the class struggle – and, of course, “serious”, after all. But I like to consider it a comedy about a natural disaster: they are just people rather foolishly attempting to “take charge” of a situation whose complexity is beyond them – a situation composed of eternal and trivial parts. After all, with something as large as an elephant, it could have been much worse.

I hope, Mrs. Poole, that I have made what I mean clearer to you. In any case, I thank you for taking the time to write to me, because I appreciate hearing from my audience – even critically.

Yours truly,

“Shithead”

Garp was an expressive man. He made everything baroque, he believed in exaggeration; his fiction was also extremist. Garp never forgot his failure with Mrs. Poole; she worried him, often, and her reply to his pompous letter must have upset him even further.

Dear Mr. Garp,

[Mrs. Poole replied]

I never thought you would take the trouble to write me a letter. You must be a sick man. I can see by your letter that you believe in yourself, and I guess that’s good. But the things you say are mostly garbage and nonsense to me, and I don’t want you to try to explain anything to me again, because it is boring and insulting to my intelligence.
Yours,
Irene Poole

Garp was, like his beliefs, self-contradictory. He was very generous with other people, but he was horribly impatient. He set his own standards for how much of his time and patience everyone deserved. He could be painstakingly sweet, until he decided he’d been sweet enough. Then he turned and came roaring back the other way.

Dear Irene,
[Garp wrote to Mrs. Poole]

You should either stop trying to read books, or you should try a lot harder.

Dear Shithead,

[wrote Irene Poole]

My husband says that if you write to me again, he’ll beat your brains into pulp.

Very sincerely,
Mrs. Fitz Poole

Dear Fitzy and Irene,

[Garp shot right back]

Fuck you.

Supreme Court to Review Money Laundering Act Verdict

First published in late August 2022.

Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), the core amendments to which were upheld by the Supreme Court on July 27, will be up for review again Thursday, with the apex court agreeing to hear a petition that has challenged the judgment.

The review petition was orally mentioned before a Bench led by Chief Justice of India (CJI) N.V. Ramana.

On July 27 this year the court upheld the Enforcement Directorate’s extensive powers to search, seize and arrest, which were challenged in multiple petitions. The contention of the petitioners was that these powers were mostly misused, especially in cases involving opposition leaders.

The 250-odd petitioners had also made the point that handing an agency unbridled powers of arrest where the accused may not be informed about reason or evidence, is unconstitutional. They also said that the use of statements in court recorded during questioning should not be allowed, since they can also be obtained under duress.

“The Supreme Court on Wednesday allowed open court hearing in the review petition filed against the judgment upholding the provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act. The order allowed oral hearing in the review petition filed by 250-odd petitioners. Review petitions are ordinarily considered in chambers and oral hearing in open court is allowed only in exceptional cases,” Supreme Court lawyer Ajay Brahme told Opoyi.

The key contentions at stake are the amendments introduced to the 2002 Act by way of a Finance Act in 2019. The three-judge Bench said the method of introducing the amendments through a Money Bill would be separately examined by a larger Bench of the apex court.

“The judgment under review leaves much scope at the hands of the executives for arbitrary application of the discretionary powers, for instance, it allows ED to take possession of the property even before trial (although in exceptional circumstances),” Brahme added.

The introduction of electoral bonds for political funding announced by the late finance minister Arun Jaitley in his February 1, 2017 budget speech is also pending with CJI Ramana.

End April this year CJI Ramana assured petitioners that the Supreme Court will take up a pending plea challenging the Electoral Bond Scheme, 2018. Two NGOs — Common Cause and Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR)—have challenged the scheme, alleging that it is “distorting democracy”. The CJI has not specified any date for the hearing.

The passing of amendments under the Money Bill by the Lok Sabha (Lower House) means that they can go ahead without going to the Rajya Sabha (Upper House). It is open to interpretation if amendments that fall under the intersection of politics and finance were passed under the Money Bill as the BJP-led NDA at that point did not have a majority in the Rajya Sabha.

In the PMLA judgment last month, the court held that the Enforcement Directorate is “not required to share the ECIR (Enforcement Case Information Report) copy” with the accused. This document, the court said, cannot be equated with an FIR (First Information Report).

“It is enough if the Enforcement Directorate, at time of arrest, discloses grounds of such arrest,” the judges had said.

The SC judgment was challenged by Congress’s Karti Chidambaram, the son of former Union minister P Chidambaram, who has sought a stay on it. The ED is investigating an alleged money laundering case in which Karti Chidambaram has been named.

A verdict reversal is likely to bring relief to many opposition leaders, including Congress’s Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi, former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah and Trinamool Congress’s Partha Chatterjee, who are in the crosshairs of the Enforcement Directorate. The opposition has repeatedly accused the Centre of misusing Central agencies to fulfill a political vendetta.

The apex court had called the PMLA a law against the “scourge of money laundering” and not a hatchet wielded against rival politicians and dissenters.

Life, death, and the gastronomic exploration of Ulysses

“Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.” That’s how James Joyce introduced his protagonist for Ulysses in the second chapter of the novel. A novel where you have a prospective prediction and the retrospective view meeting: T.S. Eliot famously told Virginia Woolf sometime in the 1920s that with the 1922 publication of Ulysses Joyce destroyed the whole of the 20th Century. It’s widely regarded as the number one novel of the 20th Century.

The Modern Library put it at number 1 in the list of 100 top novels decided by a Board. Anthony Burgess of The Clockwork Orange fame said in the Observer, “Everybody knows now that Ulysses is the greatest novel of the Century.” Ulysses like life is about everything and nothing. Put simply it is the story of a day. That simple reduction aside, it is an odyssey with chapter-to-chapter parallels to Homer’s The Odyssey, it is an epic about two races (Jews and Irish), it is about the cycles of a body, it is a cornucopia of personalities, it is exploration and inventiveness of language, and above all, it is an endlessly open book of utopian epiphanies.

It holds up a mirror to the colonial capital that was Dublin on June 16, 1904, but it also offers redemptive glimpses of a future world that might be made over in terms of those utopian moments. The action unfolds in the early morning of June 16, 1904, and ends deep into the night (say 16 hours, 8 am to 2 pm). Joyce had met his future wife Nora Barnacle on that day and that was his way of dedicating something to her and June 16 is celebrated every year as Bloomsday. Every possible angle of Ulysses has been explored over the decades, especially the chapter-wise waltz with The Odyssey. Vladimir Nabokov mapped out the route that Stephen Dedalus, the hero from the previous novel The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, and Leopold Bloom take on that day while missing each other till the evening on the streets of Dublin. The pubs in Dublin are aplenty. It doesn’t then come as a surprise that a gastronomic tour of Ulysses was always there and a death might have informed many people about it. 

Scott Byrne wrote last Friday in The Guardian: “My father, David Byrne, who has died aged 78, was a restaurateur and hotelier who pioneered Bloomsday – the annual celebration of the life of James Joyce – as an epicurean festival. David was a man ahead of his time. In his approach to food, as to so much else in life, he followed the mantra to ‘keep it simple’. Whether his recipes were for lobster or offal, or a fresh green salad, they were always demonstrations of simple food, perfectly executed.”

David Byrne trained at the Shannon School of Hotel Management, a first-of-its-kind school in Ireland that also had a formative period of study in Zurich, Switzerland. His son remembers him as a natural and gifted host.

Ulysses has 18 chapters (episodes) and they are in accordance with the ones in Homer’s Odyssey. Starting with Telemachus and ending with Penelope.

The fourth chapter of Ulysses begins with Leopold Bloom making breakfast in the kitchen of the Blooms’ home at 7 Eccles Street. Bloom feeds the cat some milk, walks to Dlugacz’s butcher shop to buy a kidney for his breakfast. He returns home to Molly, who is still in bed; he eats his breakfast, then brings Molly’s breakfast to her (she is still in bed). The motif of food in the episode suggests a strong parallel between Bloom of “Calypso” and Stephen of “Telemachus,” the two episodes taking place at the same time.

 “In the 70s David married Deirdre Igoe, a tourist guide. After a brief stint in Hastings, East Sussex, they returned to Ireland with their young family and ran an outdoor catering business. Then in 1988, in the basement of our family home at 1 Martello Terrace in Sandycove, Co Dublin, they founded the South Bank restaurant. The restaurant commands a panoramic view of the Martello tower in which Joyce stayed for a few days in 1904 with his friend Oliver St John Gogarty. It is this Martello tower, now home to a James Joyce museum, that is immortalised as the early morning starting point for Leopold Bloom’s celebrated perambulation of Dublin in Joyce’s novel Ulysses.”

David and Deirdre saw a chance for the South Bank to be turned into a gastronomic event around Bloomsday. David got down to collating culinary references in Ulysses and came up with a Joycean breakfast menu of “nutty gizzards, urine-soaked kidneys and snot-green soup” to be relished as an alternative to sausage, bacon and eggs “by guests who were sewn up in Joycean costume and treated to readings from the novel, with Molly Bloom’s erotic soliloquy a memorable standout”.

Joyce once said that with me the thought is always simple but sometimes to get to the thought can be quite a journey. In Chapter 12, the action moves to a tavern where a new narrator appears talking about a man referred to as The Citizen. Anti-semitism comes out in the open and it is a very political chapter. However: the whole thing is told in the voice of someone else – saying to his friends at the pub later that night: “So let me told you what I saw today!!” He has a very distinctive voice, too – one of his phrases is “says I” – whenever he has spoken. Because he was part of the conversation with The Citizen and Bloom, he uses “says I” in almost every line of his story.

The writing of this episode is actually totally clear – it’s in a slang vernacular, Irish, but also very everyday language – not “literary”. What is Joyce up to? That’s not clear. Unless someone is handholding you, or you see. Little vertical slash marks all across the pages … I I I I I I I I I (eye eye eye eye eye eye eye eye) Cyclops’ eye is built into the text itself. You know it’s a new section because of how the text breaks up, and the change in style … but you have to figure out where you are in Homer’s epic. The episode is the parallel to the monstrous Cyclops episode. And so – the episode in Joyce’s book is filled with ‘I’. Also: that’s the reason it’s written in the first-person. In The Odyssey – Odysseus and the men escape. Odysseus got the Cyclops drunk – and then blinded him by shoving a hot stake through the Cyclops’ one eye. 

Simplicity and complexity: going hand in hand.

The Shiela Variations, an excellent blog with a robust Joyce section, does a Bloomsday post every June 16 and this is the back story.

On June 15, 1904, young James Joyce sent a note to Nora Barnacle, who was a waitress at Finn’s Hotel. Barnacle was from Galway and had moved to Dublin. The two had had a chance encounter on the street, where she had wondered aloud if he was Swedish, because of his blue eyes. When she told him her name, he said something about Ibsen (his inspiration and guiding star as an artist). Nora did not know who Ibsen was but she knew she liked this Jimmy with the blue eyes. He had asked her “out” – which, in Dublin, in those days, meant going for a walk. But on the appointed day, she didn’t show up. So on June 15, 1904, he sent her this note:

“60 Shelbourne Road

I may be blind. I looked for a long time at a head of reddish-brown hair and decided it was not yours. I went home quite dejected. I would like to make an appointment but it might not suit you. I hope you will be kind enough to make one with me — if you have not forgotten me!

James A. Joyce 15 June 1904”

The next day they met. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Joyce opens the novel in that tower with these words: “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

–Introibo ad altare Dei.”

It ends with a 60-odd page—in the Penguin Modern Classics Edition—run-on sentence of Molly Bloom lying in bed. “…and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andulasian used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

This piece was first published for a dot-com that has, after my departure in a strange mix of thuggery and incompetence [Hard to call it plagiarism], removed my byline and given it to someone else. There are many such pieces [Mostly Spot Enterprise Stories] in the same boat, and I am going to preserve them in my own blog over the next few days.

Francis Bacon’s never exhibited first Screaming Pope on show at London’s Gagosian gallery

“Very few people have a natural feeling for painting, and so, of course they naturally think that painting is an expression of the artist’s mood. But it rarely is. Very often he may be in greatest despair and be painting his happiest paintings.“
Bacon, Francis.

British painter Francis Bacon’s first image of a screaming Pope—never been exhibited publicly—is due to go on show next week at Gagosian gallery in London. The papal image, known as Landscape with Pope/Dictator, will be displayed at Davies Street gallery in Mayfair from 15 March to 23 April.

The work, made in Monaco in 1946, depicts a figure in a traditional Catholic clergy cap and a shirt and tie, combining religious elements and sinister aspects from the artist’s fascination with Fascist dictators.

Francis Bacon’s Landscape with Pope/Dictator (around 1946)

On 19 October 1946, Bacon wrote to Duncan MacDonald, a director of the Lefevre Gallery in London: “I am working on three studies of Velázquez’s portrait of Innocent II [sic]. I have almost finished one. I find them exciting to do.” Bacon was fascinated by Velázquez, the leading 17th-century artist in the court of King Philip IV of Spain.

According to the Sunday Times, the work was discovered by Martin Harrison as he compiled Bacon’s catalogue raisonné in 2016. Gagosian gallery says that Landscape with Pope/Dictator is not for sale.

Bacon’s inspirations and discoveries

The best commentaries on Bacon’s work are by Bacon himself in two series of interviews: with David Sylvester between 1962 and published in the later year, and with Archimbaud between October 1991 and April 1992. In both he speaks admiringly of Picasso, especially of the 1926-1932 period, the only one to which he feels truly close; he saw “an area there… which in a way has been unexplored, of organic form that relates to the human image but is a complete distortion of it.” With this very precise remark, he defines the realm whose exploration is actually his alone.

Bacon never worked with the subject of the portrait sitting in his studio and he rarely painted strangers. He was fascinated by photography and by X-rays. “I’ve had photographs taken for portraits because I very much prefer working from the photographs than from models… I couldn’t attempt to do a portrait from photographs of somebody I didn’t know…” What is Bacon trying to tell us, what is he doing, and how is he able to achieve that. He gives another clue, “If my people look as if they’re in a dreadful fix, it’s because I can’t get them out of a technical dilemma.” He can’t paint strangers, he can do self-portraits and portraits of his friends or those he regularly drinks with. In the broader sense he says about his art, “I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail leaving its trail of the human presence… as a snail leaves its slime.” He paints people he knows as he understands them as human beings, so even if the brutal hand of the painter botches up the face the diamond lying underneath is still recognisable, the precious nugget, the self of the subject.

The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera said while talking about Bacon’s portraits: “Looking at Bacon’s portraits, I am amazed that, despite their ‘distortion’, they all look like their subject. But how can an image look like a subject of which it is consciously, programmatically, a distortion? And yet it does look like the subject; photos of the persons portrayed bear that out; and even if I did not know those photos, it is clear that in all the triptychs, the various deformations of the face resemble one another, so that one recognises in them the same person. However ‘distorted’, these portraits are faithful. That is what I find miraculous.”

The former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once called him “that man who paints those dreadful pictures.” But Bacon maintained that he was simply a realist and did not aim to shock. “You can’t be more horrific than life itself,” he was fond of saying.

“In painting, we always leave in too much that is habit, we never eliminate enough…’ . Too much that is habit, which is to say: everything in painting that is not the painter’s own discovery, his fresh contribution, his originality; everything that is inherited, routine, fill up, elaboration considered to be technical necessity. Almost all great modern artists mean to do away with ‘filler’, do away with whatever comes from habit, from technical routine, whatever keeps them from getting directly and exclusively at the essential (the essential: the thing the artist himself, and only he, is able to say).”

So it is with Bacon: the backgrounds of his paintings are super-simple, flat colour; but: in the foreground, the bodies are treated with the richness of colours and form that is all the denser. Now, that (Shakespearean) richness is what matters to him. For without that richness (richness contrasting with the flat colour background), the beauty would be ascetic, as if ‘put on a diet’, as if diminished, and for Bacon the issue always and above all is beauty, the explosion of beauty, because even if the word seems nowadays to be hackneyed, out of date, it is what links him to Shakespeare.

And that is why he is irritated by the word ‘horror’ that is persistently applied to his painting. Tolstoy said to Leonid Andreyev and of his tales of terror: ‘He is trying to frighten me, but I’m not scared’. Nowadays there are too many paintings trying to frighten us, and they annoy us instead. Terror is not an aesthetic sensation, and the horror found in Tolstoy’s novels is never there to frighten us; the harrowing scene in which they operate on the mortally wounded Andrei Bolkonsky without anaesthesia is not lacking in beauty; as no scene in Shakespeare lacks it; as no picture by Bacon lacks it. Butcher shops are horrible, but speaking of them, Bacon does not neglect to remark that, “for a painter, there is this great beauty of the colour of meat.”

When Archimbaud asks Bacon which contemporary artists are important to him, he says: “After Picasso I don’t really know. There’s an exhibition of pop art at the Royal academy at the moment… [But] when you see all those pictures collected together, you do not see anything. To me there is nothing in it, it’s empty, completely empty’. And Warhol. He isn’t important to me.’ And abstract art? Oh no, he doesn’t like it.

Three Studies of Lucian Freud

Bacon commands a very high price. His Three Studies of Lucian Freud sold at Christie’s New York in 2013 for $142.4 million—the highest auction prize of a work of art at that time. Bacon, a devout atheist, made more than 40 portraits of popes over a 20-year period.

That is why even the great subject of the Crucifixion, which in past times concentrated within itself the whole ethics, the whole religion, indeed the whole history of the West, becomes in Bacon’s hands a mere physiological scandal. “I’ve always been very moved by pictures about slaughterhouses and meat, and to me they belong very much to the whole thing of the crucifixion. There’ve been extraordinary photographs of animals just being taken up before they were slaughtered; and the smell of death…’

To link Jesus nailed to the cross with slaughterhouses and an animal’s fear might seem sacrilegious. But Bacon is a non-believer, and the notion of sacrilege has no place in his way of thinking; according to him, “Man now realises that he is an accident, that he is a completely futile being, that he has to play out the game without reason.” Seen from the angle, Jesus is that accident who, without reason, played out the game. The cross: the final point of the game played out to the end without reason.

No, not sacrilege; rather a clearsighted, sorrowing, thoughtful gaze that tries to penetrate to the essential. And what essential thing is revealed when all the social dreams have evaporated and man sees “religious possibilities… completely cancelled out for him”? The body. Only ecce homo, visible, touching, concrete. For “Certainly we are meat, we are potential carcasses. If I go into a butcher’s shop I always think it’s surprising that I wasn’t there instead of the animal.”

This is neither pessimism nor despair, it is only obvious fact, but a fact that is veiled by our membership in a collectivity that blinds us with its dreams, its excitements, its projects, its illusions, its struggles, its causes, its religions, its ideologies, its passions. And then one day the veil falls and we are left stranded with the body, at the mercy of the body.

Sources: Encounter by Milan Kundera and Interviews with Francis Bacon by David Sylvester

The WTC Loss And The England Tour

You look at where you’re going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you’ve been and a pattern seems to emerge—Robert M Pirsig

The impact player Rahane

The anecdote for this extremely late piece on the World Test Championship final goes back over 5 years and sets the foundation on which the argument is based. The batsmen in a settled side generally select themselves and the cricketing intelligence is tested in picking the bowling attack for the conditions and Kane Williamson excels in this and the player in the current Indian XI who is the closest in this respect is Ajinkya Rahane.

The 2016 World T20 in India: The hosts against the Kiwis on March 15 and you have to admire Williamson for his bravery—to be fair to Kohli the captain for this marvellous match was the seasoned M S Dhoni.

The wicket in Nagpur was a rank turner and Kane—a relatively new captain benched his two best bowlers in Southee and Boult—went ahead with three frontline spinners. The Kiwis made 127 and our two-frontline spinners and one part-timer went for 72 runs for a wicket each.

What unfolded when India came out to bat was surreal. Santner, Ish Sodhi, and Nathan McCullam bowled 11 overs for 44 runs and took 9 wickets—the top 9. Santner was phenomenal and picked 4 wickets for 11 runs in his 4 overs. To lose a low-scoring T20 match in your backyard by 47 runs when most of your players are accustomed to the format is a brutal humbling hammering.

Selections must or should be based on the conditions and Williamson must have searched his country to find the three or four spinners to bring to India. And to beat India in a battle of spin was an amazing sight.

We are now playing England with a 4-pronged pace attack despite the fact that the conditions in Southampton—the venue for the WTC final—were way more conducive to pick a fourth fast bowler than in Lord’s or Trent Bridge. That is a correction that comes directly from what unfolded in Southampton. The press conference for the WTC that we are going to play it as just another game could have been avoided and naming the XI a day before the match was hubris plus showing all your cards. The combination for the WTC final should have been picked by first picking four seamers and then seeing the balance of the side.

Shardul, Bumrah, Shami, and Siraj would have been my pick for the WTC final. The attack has variety as Shardul would have exploited the swing on offer and Siraj’s natural length is a bit fuller than Bumrah and Shami and he has the knack of picking wickets.

We were sitting pretty at 146 for 3 with Kohli on 44 and Rahane on 29 after the first day. Kohli fell without adding to his overnight score and India surrendered the advantage when they lost the last 7 wickets for 68 runs and folded for 217. That is where half the battle was lost.  

We still had the Kiwis in all kinds of trouble when after good contributions at the top we ripped opened the NZ innings from 117 for 2 to 162 for 6. That is where we needed a fourth fast bowler in tandem with another to land the killer blow to the tail. It was Jamieson’s quick fire 21 and Southee’s 30 that took them to a 32-run lead when we had the chance to pick up a 30 to 40 run lead. Williamson was on 28 in 148 balls when the batting all rounder Grandhomme departed and NZ’s Number 8 joined him.

If I really had to go for the kill, I would have played Jadeja ahead of Pant as a proper batsman—he’s shown enough to suggest that unlike Pant he can play as a batsman especially in conditions where the ball is swinging and seaming. That would have meant benching Ashwin and having Pant come at number 7 and Shardul at 8. I would not have expected any wickets from Jadeja but just to hold an end for a few overs to keep the fast bowlers fresh if it came to that—for the Kiwis Grandhomme bowled just 12 overs in the entire match.

For Ashwin to play in England, it is the batting order that has to be considered as also the support cast. I am positive that India got the combination wrong in the WTC final and Kohli and Shastri are overcompensating for that massive loss where somehow we didn’t look like the side with belief and the ability to bounce back.

The case for Ashwin is simple as even when England had the most enviable fast bowling resources in 2011, Swann’s place as a world class off-spinner ensured that he played with the four fast bowlers. That is the problem for India in England and was in the WTC final. You have to play four fast bowlers and pick Ashwin and that deprives India batting depth. Despite the exploits of Pant, I would be hesitant to call him a batsman in these conditions. The conditions in England are very different than those in Australia or India.

Kohli’s own form is a big concern, especially his batting away from home since the start of 2019. In 16 innings he hasn’t got a three figure score and has gone past 50 just thrice. More than the dismissals it is the manner of his dismissals in the last three Tests in English conditions that is a greater cause of worry. He seems unaware of what the bowler is trying to do and unsure of his off-stump. The last dismissal in the second innings at Lord’s sums it up nicely. Sam Curran had been the most ineffective bowler in the England attack in the one inning India had at Trent Bridge and the first innings at Lord’s, going for plenty and nothing to show in the wickets column. Kohli was batting on 20 and Curran who was bowling round the wicket went over the wicket for the last ball of his fourth over and curled it into the front pad. The change of angle made Kohli shuffle and play across the line; England reviewed after about 8 seconds and lost it as it was too high. The first ball of the next over and Curran just floated it out wide and it keeps going on further with the angle and Kohli chased it to nick it to the wicketkeeper. Was he playing for the one that comes back having been beaten previously? It was too far for it to have come back and he played it away from his body, just followed it and fiddled with it and had he been worried about it coming back in his bat should have been closer to the pads and the body. Expertly set-up just like Jamieson set him up and had him fiddling with a short away moving ball in the second innings in Southampton after giving him several incoming deliveries. That is the only wicket that Curran has got in three full innings against India and he has leaked runs and been completely ineffective with his mid-130s speed.

Rahane is fine and he got into some form with his 61 in Lord’s and he has a shrewd cricketing brain with several impact innings overseas. In the same period as Kohli from January 2019, he has scored two hundreds and three fifties, one of them being 81 and another an unbeaten 64. The highlight has been the hundred in Melbourne in the first innings and the 27 not out in the second to seal the deal. When he had a soft dismissal in Southampton in the first innings at 49, a commentary team remarked that it is a tame end to what has been an excellent innings. There is no merit in talking extensively about his spot and it is possible that his twin failures in England before the 61 were a bit of the chatter about intent getting to him.

The openers are in very good form and it would not take too much out of Kohli if he backs himself to bat at Number 3. My XI for Headingley would be Rohit Sharma, KL Rahul, Virat Kohli, Ajinkya Rahane, R Jadeja, Rishabh Pant, R Ashwin, Shardul Thakur, Bumrah, Shami, and Siraj.

Journalism’s Ethical Paradox: The Canker at the Heart of the Rose

 “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of non-fiction learns—when the article or book appears—his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and ‘the public’s right to know’; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.”― Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer.

The long shadow looming over The Journalist and the Murderer was from Malcolm’s previous work ‘In the Freud Archives’ for which she was sued by psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson—the defamation suit dragged on for years before a jury finally found against Masson in 1994. Malcolm’s pieces were first published as two-part essays in The New Yorker and later as non-fiction books by Knopf. The reportage is classic Malcolm, facts and characteristically rich observations, a classic yet unique style where reportage of the subject-matter is also rooted in the specificity of the clock, dates, and the atmosphere—Malcolm makes it a point to describe whether an interview, a double check, or a chance encounter leading to a new discovery takes place in a dimly lit, dingy basement office or in a snowed under New York park.

The press response to The Journalist and the Murderer was split between puzzled indignation and defensive fury. The indignation was encapsulated by John Taylor in a New York magazine broadside headlined ‘Houlier Than Thou’. The defensive fury was completely off-centre as in dozens of pieces for various publications writers enumerated names of journalists they knew who had excellent ethics and a New York Times editorial writer took umbrage at Malcolm’s “sweeping indictment of all journalists.” Fred Friendly, the renowned broadcaster, took up this theme the next year [1990] in his review of the book. Convinced that Malcolm was trying to put her finger on “what ails journalism,” he complained that her conclusion that “all journalists are guilty” was “distorted by a crabbed vision of the profession and her own place in it.” Of course not. The Journalist and the Murderer is not an attack on the ethics of journalists it engages with the central problem of the profession—the fraught relationship between the subject and the journalist. The journalist-subject relationship, like the analyst-patient relationship, is fraught with “abnormality, contradictoriness, and strain,” but—in a further paradox—these disquieting qualities are what give it its value. Just as therapeutic progress is predicated on the mutual miseries of the transference, “the tension between the subject’s blind self-absorption and the journalist’s skepticism” is what, in Malcolm’s view, “gives journalism its authenticity and vitality.” And she capped her argument with a zinger: “Journalists who swallow the subject’s account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists.”

“Malcolm is hard on her subjects. Why is she so hard on these people? I think it has something to do with a blurring of the line between reportage and criticism… Malcolm loves purists. Her heroes, Freud not least among them, rigidly refuse compromise, sometimes badly to their own detriment. She nods approvingly, in a review of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” at Milan Kundera’s observation that “none among us is superhuman enough to escape kitsch completely. No matter how we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.” Yet she has remorseless radar for the kitsch in her subjects’ lives, and she uses it against them.“

The elusiveness of truth, the paucity of the means [therapeutic, journalistic, biographical] we pursue it with, and the unreliability of narrative—the stories we tell to pin it down, which are always incomplete and [consciously or otherwise] self-serving—underlie nearly all of Malcolm’s writing. The psychoanalytic books pose the narrativising consciousness against the Aleph of the unconscious; “The Journalist and the Murderer” and “The Silent Woman” are about conflicting narratives. Having explored the therapeutic, journalistic and biographical avenues by which we try, however futilely, to make our muddled way to truth, with the 1999 published “The Crime of Sheila McGough” she took up the even more inadequate legal one.

But Sheila is a recalcitrant heroine. Unlike Jeffrey Masson, a fountain of eloquence before whom all a journalist needed to do was park herself and turn on the tape, Sheila spoke in the “guileless and incontinent” drone of the bore who has to recount every last detail of an excruciatingly tangled story:

“I don’t know if I’ve ever had a more irritating subject. I know I have never before behaved so badly to a subject. I have never before interrupted, lost patience with, spoken so unpleasantly to a subject as I have to Sheila–to my shame and vexation afterward. I have never before dreaded calling a subject on the telephone as I have dreaded calling Sheila. To my simplest question she would give an answer of such relentless length and tediousness and uncomprehending irrelevance that I could almost have wept with impatience. I took notes of these phone calls, and among them I have found little cries of despair. One of them was: “Help, help! I’m trapped talking to Sheila. She won’t stop. Save me.”

What she sees when she looks at her heroine is “the impossible purity of her position,” and it makes Sheila “rather magnificent.” At last — an honest woman! A lunatic, granted, but a truthful one.

And not only that. I don’t think there can be any doubt that Malcolm’s affection for Sheila owes a great deal to her identification with a fellow purist who bollixed her career while acting under the delusion that she was sticking to the straight and narrow. Of Sheila’s trial she writes, “It was like one of those nightmares of guilt, where everyone you have ever known has gathered to accuse you of wrongdoing.” Notice the universalizing second person; she might as well have used the first, having suffered this nightmare herself, not just in her humiliating trial but, more bewilderingly, in the press crusade against her that left her in the minds of many, as she wryly phrased it, “a kind of fallen woman of journalism.” This been-there empathy lies behind her bitter observation, in “Sheila McGough,” that

in a sense, everyone who is brought to trial, criminal or civil, is framed. For while the law speaks of a presumption of innocence, it knows full well that the accused is weighed down under a burden extremely difficult to get out from under. The deck is stacked against the accused. An accusation has enormous psychological clout. Once someone is accused of a crime or misdeed, he begins to burn with a kind of radioactivity. The story of wrongdoing that the prosecutor or the plaintiff’s lawyer tells the jury is a fleshing out of the jury’s preconception. The task of the defense is not to clear the accused [that is impossible; it is too late for that] but to attack the accusers — to show that the plaintiff or the government’s witnesses are even worse than the accused.

“Judging from the outcome of the libel trial and from their later careers, it seems safe to say [but “safe” is dicey — you have to take account of my own bias, which should be clear by now] that the plaintiff in Masson v. Malcolm came out looking worse than the defendant,” writer Craig Seligman wrote in a long piece covering Malcolm’s work and the conflicts she got embroiled in till end-February 2000.

Decades later, all that has changed and The Journalist and the Murderer is for many years now in a standard reading list if not in the course for American journalism students. Her 10-plus provocative books, including The Journalist and the Murderer, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, In the Freud Archives, Iphigenia in Forest Hills, and Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, are ­simultaneously beloved, demanding, scholarly, flashy, careful, bold, high­brow, and controversial. Many people have pointed out that her writing, which is often called journalism, is in fact some other wholly original form of art, some singular admixture of reporting, biography, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, and the nineteenth-century novel—English and Russian both. 

Malcolm was born in prewar Prague in 1934 and the family of secular Jews got out of Europe just in time in 1939. Her father was, not surprisingly, a psychiatrist. She met her first husband Donald Malcolm in the University of Michigan. He contributed to The New Yorker on theater and book criticisms–with whom she eventually separated–from the late 1950s to his early death in 1975. In the 1960s she began writing for The New Yorker on interior decoration, Christmas shopping, and what was then considered to be ‘the woman’s space’. In the mid-1970s, she married her editor at the magazine Gardner Botsford—a legend in his own right at The New Yorker and belonging to a wealthy family that had funded Harold Ross’ original New Yorker. By then she had found her mature voice and was writing about photography. She devoted two of the 12 articles collected in her first book, “Diana and Nikon: Essays on the Aesthetic of Photography” (1980), to the portrait master Richard Avedon. “Avedon does not try to make people look bad,” she writes; “he simply doesn’t do anything to make them look good … Avedon’s pictures of men without props present an unpalatable truth. They show us that we are ugly creatures.” If that passage weren’t dated 1975–several years before Malcolm began her own series of great, cruel portraits–she might have been writing about herself.

Iphigenia in Forest Hills came out on April 26, 2011 in The New Yorker with the small strap saying Anatomy of a Murder Trial. The stellar work of Malcolm began when she is in her late forties and she would have been 76 or 77 when Iphigenia in Forest Hills was published. Unlike the book on Shiela where the narrative falters as the ins and outs of the case are impossible to capture by someone who relates too much, this one is a taut exceptional account of a trial where a woman is accused of hiring an assassin to kill her husband—a long ongoing divorce was the backdrop and the custody of a baby girl Michelle was a thorny subject with charged in-laws from both sides. Malcolm pursued even after the case and did two pieces for the New York Review of Books on Michelle [The child was removed from the grandparents’ house and sent to foster care] in November and December of 2012—What happened to Michelle in Forest Hills? and Michelle: Surviving in a Fixed World.

The start, like all good writers, is what Malcolm has expressed is the most important and difficult part. “If you don’t have a start, you don’t have anything.” Once that is there, everything falls in place. Alluding to Jorge Luis Borges’ story “The Aleph,” in which the storyteller goes down into a cellar where he experiences a vision of everything in the world, Malcolm comments, “Writer’s block derives from the mad ambition to enter that cellar; the fluent writer is content to stay in the close attic of partial expression, to say what is ‘running through his mind,’ and to accept that it may not—cannot—be wholly true, to risk that it will be misunderstood.” The problem, she goes on, is narrative itself, for narrative, in being of necessity selective, is always incomplete and thus never wholly true.

She starts the complicated murder trial in the most simple manner: “At around three in the afternoon on March 3, 2009, in the fifth week of the trial of Mazoltuv Borukhova—a thirty-five-year-old physician accused of murdering her husband—the judge turned to Borukhova’s attorney, Stephen Scaring, and asked a pro-forma question. “Do you have anything else, Mr. Scaring?” The trial was winding down. Two defense witnesses had just testified to Borukhova’s good character, and Scaring was expected to rest his case with their modest, believable testimony. Scaring replied, without any special emphasis, “Yes, Your Honor. I think Dr. Borukhova will testify in her own defense.

There was no immediate reaction in the half-filled courtroom on the third floor of Queens Supreme Court, in Kew Gardens. Only after Borukhova had walked to the witness stand and taken the oath did the shock of Scaring’s announcement register. The mouth of one of the spectators—that of the victim’s younger brother—fell open, as if to mime the astonishment that ran through the room.”

There is such brilliance in Malcolm’s writing and reportage that part of a paragraph, a metaphor, an observation or some essence stays with the reader even years after reading any of her works. I was searching for an essence that had stayed with me some eight years after reading the long-form piece but I remembered no special word or phrase to search for it in the document before I stumbled upon it. It was at the end of a conversation and I intend to give the details that Malcolm recorded before coming to it.

“As time went on, though, when lunchtime came I found myself gravitating toward a bench in a corridor off the courthouse lobby, where I waited for a woman named Alla Lupyan-Grafman. She was the Russian-speaker who sat at the defense table throughout the trial as a court-appointed interpreter for the defendants. Both defendants spoke English—Borukhova in particular had no need of an interpreter—but the court had made the appointment to be on the safe side, to insure that no issue of language interfered with the smooth whirring of the wheels of justice. Alla was a slender, stylishly dressed, exceptionally friendly woman in her late forties, with a mane of curly platinum-blond hair, with whom, by the end of the trial, every lawyer, court officer, journalist, and even some spectators were on ecstatic hugging terms. She, too, was an immigrant from the former Soviet Union, but not a Bukharan; she was an Ashkenazi Jew from Minsk.

…….Alla had a complaint of her own about the Bukharans—a linguistic one. She said that the older generation had never learned proper Russian, even though it was an official language under the Soviets. When Khaika Malakov testified—with an interpreter simultaneously translating—she was highly critical of his Russian. She was uncritical of Borukhova’s Russian—and she was sympathetic to Borukhova herself. She and I offered each other tastes of the sandwiches and fruit we had brought from home, and struggled with the enigma of the case: she couldn’t have done it and she must have done it.

Katie Roiphe in her interview of Malcolm for The Paris Review, perhaps the only journalist to be interviewed by the nonpareil literary quarterly, says: “No living writer has narrated the drama of turning the messy and meaningless world into words as brilliantly, precisely, and analytically as Janet Malcolm. Whether she is writing about biography or a trial or psychoanalysis or Gertrude Stein, her story is the construction of the story, and her ­influence is so vast that much of the writing world has begun to think in the charged, analytic terms of a Janet Malcolm passage. She takes apart the official line, the accepted story, the court transcript like a mechanic takes apart a car engine, and shows us how it works; she narrates how the stories we tell ourselves are made from the vanities and jealousies and weaknesses of their players. This is her obsession, and no one can do it on her level. Personally, though, she exhibits none of the flamboyance of her prose.”

Someone who likes to stay in the background would hardly write an autobiography although Malcolm gave it a wonderful try with a small piece called Thoughts on Autobiography from an Abandoned Autobiography. I quote the last paragraph of the four-paragraph piece:

Another obstacle in the way of the journalist turned autobiographer is the pose of objectivity into which journalists habitually, almost mechanically, fall when they write. The “I” of journalism is a kind of ultra-reliable narrator and impossibly rational and disinterested person, whose relationship to the subject more often than not resembles the relationship of a judge pronouncing sentence on a guilty defendent. This “I” is unsuited to autobiography. Autobiography is an exercise in self-forgiveness. The observing “I” of autobiography tells the story of the observed “I” not as a journalist tells the story of his subject, but as a mother might. The older narrator looks back at his younger self with tenderness and pity, empathizing with its sorrows and allowing for its sins. I see that my journalist’s habits have inhibited my self-love. Not only have I failed to make my young self as interesting as the strangers I have written about, but I have withheld my affection. In what follows I will try to see myself less coldly, be less fearful of writing a puff piece. But it may be too late to change my spots.

Seligman was, as it has proved subsequently, on the mark when he wrote that: “As much as Malcolm may think she hates the spotlight—she almost never gives interviews [The rare exceptions are rare]—on the page she is helplessly forthcoming, a peculiarity that goes some way toward explaining why the issue of privacy [“life’s most precious possession,” she calls it in her New Yorker essay on Chekhov] runs through her work like a nerve.”  

It was a different time, a different game, and a different manner of upholding journalistic ethics. These days the time in front of the camera and causing a flutter on Twitter everyday seems more important for journalism’s ‘big guns‘ than their hopelessly non-forthcoming work on the page.

[Based largely on a 2000 essay on Janet Malcolm by Craig Seligman and the Spring 2011 issue of The Paris Review plus my inputs from having been her reader for over over a decade]

Fyodor Dostoevsky: philosopher of freedom

One of the freedom that comes with a free blog is to post articles by other people that are illuminating and entertaining. This is one such piece on the 19th Century master Fyodor Dostoevsky. While working on Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky said: “I’m convinced that not one of our writers, past or living, wrote under the conditions in which I constantly write. Turgenev would die from the very thought. But if you only knew how distressing it is to spoil an idea that has been born in you, made you enthusiastic, of which you know that it’s good–and to be forced to spoil it consciously!”—–[Letters II, pp. 200-1]

In his Introduction for Wordsworth Classics Keith Carbine said: “Dostoevsky’s boastful lament in June 1866 as he struggled to keep up with the serialisation of Crime and Punishment in the Russian Herald, is, I think, both understated and inaccurate: no writer in the history of literature composed such a great book under such appalling ‘conditions’. That summer, as he explains in the same letter, he was in a terrible state because the previous year, desperate for ready cash in order to ward off the ever-present threat of debtor’s prison, he had accepted three thousand roubles from an unscrupulous publisher, Stellovsky, on conditions that he wrote ‘a novel of no fewer than than twelve signatures to be published by him, and if I don’t deliver it by November 1, 1866 [the last deadline] he, Stellovsky, is allowed to publish, free, as he pleases, anything I write, without any remuneration for me at all’ [Letters II, p 200]. He escaped this ugly deal by a hair’s breadth because of a wonderful stroke of luck–on October 4 he hired a 17-year-old stenographer, Anna Grigoryevna, to whom he dictated The Gambler [for Stellovsky] and the last episodes of Crime and Punishment and who soon became his loyal and devoted wife.

Gary Saul Morson

On the political and moral lessons of Fyodor Dostoevsky.

On December 22, 1849, a group of political radicals were taken from their prison cells in Petersburg’s Peter and Paul Fortress, where they had been interrogated for eight months. Led to the Semenovsky Square, they heard a sentence of death by firing squad. They were given long white peasant blouses and nightcaps—their funeral shrouds—and offered last rites. The first three prisoners were seized by the arms and tied to the stake. One prisoner refused a blindfold and stared defiantly into the guns trained on them. At the last possible moment, the guns were lowered as a courier galloped up with an imperial decree reducing death sentences to imprisonment in a Siberian prison camp followed by service as a private in the army. The last-minute rescue was in fact planned in advance as part of the punishment, an aspect of social life that Russians understand especially well.

Accounts affirm: of the young men who endured this terrible ordeal, one had his hair turn white; a second went mad and never recovered his sanity; a third, whose two-hundredth birthday we celebrate in 2021, went on to write Crime and Punishment.

The mock-execution and the years in Siberian prison—thinly fictionalized in his novel Notes from the House of the Dead (1860)—changed Dostoevsky forever. His naive, hopeful romanticism disappeared. His religious faith deepened. The sadism of both prisoners and guards taught him that the sunny view of human nature presumed by utilitarianism, liberalism, and socialism were preposterous. Real human beings differed fundamentally from what these philosophies presumed.

At the last possible moment, the guns were lowered as a courier galloped up.

People do not live by bread—or, what philosophers called the maximalization of “advantage”—alone. All utopian ideologies presuppose that human nature is fundamentally good and simple: evil and apparent complexity result from a corrupt social order. Eliminate want and you eliminate crime. For many intellectuals, science itself had proven these contentions and indicated the way to the best of all possible worlds. Dostoevsky rejected all these ideas as pernicious nonsense. “It is clear and intelligible to the point of obviousness,” he wrote in a review of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, “that evil lies deeper in human beings than our social-physicians suppose; that no social structure will eliminate evil; that the human soul will remain as it always has been . . . and, finally, that the laws of the human soul are still so little known, so obscure to science, so undefined, and so mysterious, that there are not and cannot be either physicians or final judges” except God Himself.

Dostoevsky’s characters astonish by their complexity. Their unpredictable but believable behaviour reminds us of experiences beyond the reach of “scientific” theories. We appreciate that people, far from maximizing their own advantage, sometimes deliberately make victims of themselves in order, for example, to feel morally superior. In The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Father Zosima observes that it can be very pleasant to take offense, and Fyodor Pavlovich replies that it can even be positively distinguished.

People are not just material objects, and will do anything, no matter how self-destructive, to prove they are not.

In fact, people harm themselves for many reasons. They tear at their own wounds and derive a peculiar pleasure from doing so. They deliberately humiliate themselves. To their own surprise, they experience impulses stemming from resentments long suppressed and, as a result, create scandalous scenes or commit horrible crimes. Freud particularly appreciated Dostoevsky’s exploration of the dynamics of guilt. But neither Freud nor most Western readers have grasped that Dostoevsky intended his descriptions of human complexity to convey political lessons. If people are so surprising, so “undefined and mysterious,” then social engineers are bound to cause more harm than good.

The narrator of The House of the Dead describes how prisoners sometimes, for no apparent reason, suddenly do something highly self-destructive. They may attack a guard, even though the punishment—running a gauntlet of thousands of blows—usually proves fatal. Why? The answer is that the essence of humanness lies in the possibility of surprise. The behavior of material objects can be fully explained by natural laws, and for materialists the same is true of people, if not yet, then in the near future. But people are not just material objects, and will do anything, no matter how self-destructive, to prove they are not.

The whole point of prison, as Dostoevsky experienced it, is to restrict people’s ability to make their own choices. But choice is what makes us human. Those prisoners lash out because of their ineradicable craving to have a will of their own, and that craving is ultimately more important than their own well-being and, indeed, than life itself.

The nameless narrator of Dostoevsky’s 1864 novella Notes from Underground [usually called “the underground man”] insists that the aspiration of social sciences to discover the iron laws of human behaviour threatens to reduce people to “piano keys or organ stops.” If such laws exist, if “some day they truly discover a formula for all our desires and caprices,” he reasons, then each person will realize that “everything is done by itself according to the laws of nature.” As soon as those laws are discovered, people will no longer be responsible for their actions. What’s more,

All human actions will then, of course, be tabulated according to these laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms up to 108,000. . . . there would be published certain edifying works like the present encyclopedia lexicons, in which everything will be so clearly calculated and designated that there will be no more . . . adventures in the world. . . . Then the crystal palace [utopia] will be built.

There will be no more adventures because adventures involve suspense, and suspense entails moments that are truly momentous: depending on what one does, more than one outcome is possible. But for a determinist, the laws of nature ensure that at any given moment only one thing can happen. Suspense is just an illusion resulting from ignorance of what must be.

If so, then all agonies of choice are pointless. So are guilt and regret, since both emotions depend on the possibility that we could have done something else. We experience what we must, but we accomplish nothing. As Tolstoy expressed the point in War and Peace, “If we concede that human life can be [exhaustively] governed by reason, then the possibility of life is destroyed.”

“They call me a psychologist; this is not true,” Dostoevsky wrote. “I am merely a realist in the higher sense.”

The supposedly “scientific” view of humanity turns people into objects—literally dehumanizes them—and there can be no greater insult. “All my life I have been offended by the laws of nature,” the underground man wryly observes, and concludes that people will rebel against any denial of their humanness. They will engage in what he calls “spite,” action undertaken “just because,” for no reason except to show they can act against their own advantage and contrary to whatever so-called laws of human psychology predict.

“They call me a psychologist; this is not true,” Dostoevsky wrote. “I am merely a realist in the higher sense, that is, I portray all the depths of the human soul.” Dostoevsky denied being a psychologist because he, unlike practitioners of this science, acknowledged that people are truly agents, who make real choices for which they can properly be held responsible. No matter how thoroughly one describes the psychological or sociological forces that act on a person, there is always something left over—some “surplus of humanness,” as the philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin paraphrased Dostoevsky’s idea. We cherish that surplus, “the man in man” as Dostoevsky called it, and will defend it at all costs.

A passage in Notes from Underground looks forward to modern dystopian novels, works like Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1920–21) or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), where heroes rebel against guaranteed happiness. They want their lives to be their own. Put man in utopia, the underground man observes, and he will devise “destruction and chaos,” do something perverse, and, if given the chance, return to the world of suffering. In short, “the whole work of man seems really to consist in nothing but proving to himself continually that he is a man and not an organ stop. It may be at the cost of his skin; but he has proved it.”

In an essay ostensibly devoted to the Russian craze for séances and communication with demons, Dostoevsky addresses the skeptical objection that since these devils could easily prove their existence by giving us some fabulous inventions, they couldn’t exist. They are just a fraud perpetrated on the gullible. With tongue in cheek, Dostoevsky replies that this argument fails because devils (that is, if there are devils) would foresee the hatred people would eventually feel towards the resulting utopia and the devils who enabled it.

To be sure, people would at first be ecstatic that, “as our socialists dream,” all needs were satisfied, the “corrupting [social] environment, once the source of all flaws,” had vanished, and there was nothing more to wish for. But within a generation,

People would suddenly see that they had no more life left, that they had no freedom of spirit, no will, no personality. . . . they would see that their human image had disappeared . . . that their lives had been taken away for the sake of bread, for “stones turned into bread.” People would realize that there is no happiness in inactivity, that the mind which does not labor will wither, that it is not possible to love one’s neighbor without sacrificing something to him of one’s labor . . . and that happiness lies not in happiness but only in the attempt to achieve it.

Or as the underground man observes, social engineers imagine a world that is “completed,” a perfect finished product. In fact, “an amazing edifice of that type” already exists: “the anthill.” The anthill became Dostoevsky’s favorite image of socialism.

Humanness, as opposed to formicness, requires not just product but process. Effort has value only when it can fail, while choices matter only if the world is vulnerable and depends in part on our doing one thing rather than another. Ants do not make choices. “With the anthill, the respectable race of ants began and with the anthill they will probably end, which does the greatest credit to their perseverance and staidness. But man is a frivolous creature, and perhaps, like a chessplayer, loves only the process of the game, not the end itself.”

When you multiply two by two the result is always the same: there is no suspense, no uncertainty, no surprise. 

Perhaps, the underground man reasons, “the only goal on earth to which mankind is striving lies in the incessant process of attaining, or in other words, in life itself, and not particularly in the goal which, of course, must always be ‘twice two makes four,’ that is, a formula, and after all, twice two makes four is no longer life, gentlemen, but is the beginning of death.” When you multiply two by two the result is always the same: there is no suspense, no uncertainty, no surprise. You don’t have to wait and see what those multiplying digits will come up with this time. If life is like that, it is senseless. In a paroxysm of angry wit, the underground man famously concludes:

Twice two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence. Twice two makes four is a fop standing with arms akimbo barring your path and spitting. I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes also a very charming little thing.

In the same spirit, a character in Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot (1869) remarks: “Oh, you may be sure that Columbus was not happy when he had discovered America, but while he was discovering it. It’s life that matters, nothing but life—the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, and not the discovery itself.”

People are always in the making or, as Bakhtin expressed the point, they are “unfinalizable.” They retain the capacity “to render untrue any externalizing and finalizing definition of them. As long as a person is alive he lives by the fact that he is not yet finalized, that he has not yet uttered his ultimate word.”

Ethics demands that we treat people as people, not as objects, and that means we must treat them as endowed with “surprisingness.” One must never be too certain about others, collectively or individually. In The Brothers Karamazov, Alyosha explains to Lise that the impoverished and humiliated Captain Snegiryov, who in his pride has refused a large sum of money offered him, will certainly take it if offered again. Having saved his human dignity, he will surely accept the gift he so badly needs. Lise replies:

Listen, Alexey Fyodorovich. Isn’t there in all our analysis . . . aren’t we showing contempt for him, for that poor man—in analyzing his soul like this, as it were, from above, eh? In being so certain that he will take the money?

Dostoevsky understood not only our need for freedom but also our desire to rid ourselves of it. Freedom comes with a terrible cost, and social movements that promise to relieve us of it will always command a following. That is the theme of the most famous pages Dostoevsky ever wrote, “The Grand Inquisitor,” a chapter in Karamazov. The intellectual Ivan narrates his unwritten “poem” in prose to his saintly brother Alyosha to explain his deepest anxieties.

Set in Spain during the Inquisition, the story opens with the Grand Inquisitor burning heretics in an auto-da-fé. As the flames scent air already rich with laurel and lemon, the people, like sheep, witness the terrifying spectacle with cowed reverence. It has been fifteen centuries since Jesus promised to return quickly, and they yearn for some sign from Him. With His infinite pity, He decides to show Himself to them. Softly, silently, He moves among them, and they recognize Him at once. “That might be one of the best passages in the poem, I mean, how they recognized Him,” Ivan remarks with wry self-deprecation. How do they know he is not an imposter? The answer is that when you see divine goodness, it is so beautiful that one cannot doubt.

The Inquisitor also knows who the stranger is—and promptly orders his arrest! Christ’s vicar arrests Him! Why? And why do the guards obey and the people not resist? We learn the answer to these questions when the Inquisitor visits the Prisoner in His cell and unburdens his heart to him.

Dmitri remarks: “Man is broad, too broad; I’d have him narrower!”

Throughout human history, the Inquisitor explains, two views of life and human nature have contended with each other. Each changes its name and specific dogmas to suit time and place, but remains the same in essence. One view, which the Inquisitor rejects, is Jesus’s: human beings are free and goodness has meaning only when freely chosen. The other view, maintained by the Inquisitor, is that freedom is an insufferable burden because it leads to endless guilt, regret, anxiety, and unresolvable doubts. The goal of life is not freedom, but happiness, and to be happy people must rid themselves of freedom and adopt some philosophy claiming to have all the answers. The third Karamazov brother, Dmitri, has remarked: “Man is broad, too broad; I’d have him narrower!,” and the Inquisitor would ensure human happiness by “narrowing” human nature.

Medieval Catholicism speaks in the name of Christ, but in fact it represents the Inquisitor’s philosophy. That is why the Inquisitor has arrested Jesus and intends to burn him as the greatest of heretics. In our time, Dostoevsky makes clear, the Inquisitor’s view of life takes the form of socialism. As with medieval Catholicism, people surrender freedom for security and trade the agonies of choice for the contentment of certainty. In so doing, they give up their humanness, but the bargain is well worth it.

To explain his position, the Inquisitor retells the Biblical story of Jesus’s three temptations, a story that, in his view, expresses the essential problems of human existence as only a divine intelligence could. Could you imagine, he asks rhetorically, that if those questions had been lost, any group of sages could have re-created them?

In the Inquisitor’s paraphrase, the devil first demands:

Thou wouldst go into the world . . . with some promise of freedom which men in their simplicity . . . cannot even understand, which they fear and dread—for nothing has even been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom. But seest Thou these stones in this parched and barren wilderness? Turn them into bread, and mankind will run after Thee like a flock of sheep.

Jesus answers: “man does not live by bread alone.” Just so, the Inquisitor replies, but that is why Jesus should have accepted the devil’s temptation. People do indeed crave the meaningful, but they can never be sure they distinguish the truly meaningful from its counterfeits. That is why they persecute nonbelievers and try to convert or conquer nations of a different faith, as if universal agreement were itself a proof. There is only one thing that no one can doubt: material power. When we suffer great pain, that, at least, is indubitable. In other words, the appeal of materialism is spiritual! People accept it because it is certain.

“Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering.”

Instead of making people happy by taking away the burden of freedom, the Inquisitor reproaches Jesus, You increased it! “Didst Thou forget that man prefers peace, and even death, to freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil? Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering.” People want to call themselves free, not to be free, and so, the Inquisitor reasons, the right course is to call unfreedom freedom of a higher kind, as socialists, of course, usually do.

To make people happy, one must banish all doubt. People do not want to be presented with information that, as we would say today, contradicts their “narrative.” They will do anything to preclude unwanted facts from coming to their attention. The plot of Karamazov, in fact, turns on Ivan’s desire not to admit to himself that he desires his father’s death. Without allowing himself to realize it, he makes the wished-for murder possible. One cannot begin to understand either individual people or society unless one grasps the many forms of what might be called preventive epistemology.

The devil next tempts Jesus to prove His divinity by casting Himself down from a high place so God will save him by a miracle, but Jesus refuses. The reason, according to the Inquisitor, is to show that faith must not be based on miracles. Once one witnesses a miracle, one is so overawed that doubt is impossible, and that means faith is impossible. Properly understood, faith does not resemble scientific knowledge or mathematical proof, and it is nothing like accepting Newton’s laws or the Pythagorean theorem. It is possible only in a world of uncertainty, because only then can it be freely chosen.

For the same reason, one should behave morally not to be rewarded, whether in this world or the next, but simply because it is the right thing to do. Behaving morally to earn a heavenly reward transforms goodness into prudence, like saving for retirement. To be sure, Jesus performed miracles, but if you believe because of them, then—despite what many churches say—you are not a Christian.

Finally the devil offers Jesus the empire of the world, which He rejects, but, according to the Inquisitor, should have accepted. The only way to keep people from doubt, he tells Jesus, is by miracle, mystery (just believe us, we know), and authority, which universal empire would ensure. Only a few strong people are capable of freedom, the Inquisitor explains, so your philosophy condemns the overwhelming portion of humanity to misery. And so, the Inquisitor chillingly concludes, we “have corrected Thy work.”

In The Possessed (1871), Dostoevsky predicts with astonishing accuracy what totalitarianism would be in practice. In Karamazov he asks whether the socialist idea is good even in theory. The revolutionaries in The Possessed are despicable, but the Inquisitor, on the contrary, is entirely selfless. He knows that he will go to hell for corrupting Jesus’s teaching, but he is willing to do so out of love for humanity. In short, he betrays Christ for Christian reasons! Indeed, he outdoes Christ, who gave his earthly life, by sacrificing his eternal life. Dostoevsky sharpens these paradoxes as much as possible. With his unmatched intellectual integrity, he portrays the best possible socialist while elucidating arguments for socialism more profoundly than real socialists ever did.

Would you choose to surrender all choice in exchange for a guarantee of happiness?

Alyosha at last exclaims: “your poem is in praise of Jesus, not in blame of him, as you meant it to be!” Since all the arguments have come from the Inquisitor, and Jesus has uttered not a word in response, how can that be? Ask yourself: having heard the Inquisitor’s arguments, would you choose to surrender all choice in exchange for a guarantee of happiness? Would you have everything decided for you by some wise substitute for parents and remain a perpetual child? Or is there something higher than mere contentment? I have asked my students this question for years, and none has agreed to accept the Inquisitor’s bargain.

We live in a world where the Inquisitor’s way of thinking grows increasingly attractive. Social scientists and philosophers assume that people are simply complicated material objects, no more capable of genuine surprise than the laws of nature are capable of suspending themselves. Intellectuals, ever more certain that they know how to achieve justice and make people happy, find the freedom of others an obstacle to human well-being. For Dostoevsky, by contrast, freedom, responsibility, and the potential for surprise define the human essence. That essence makes possible everything of value. The human soul is “so little known, so obscure to science, and so mysterious, that there are not and cannot be either physicians or final judges,” only unfinalizable people under the God who made them free.

[Link to the original piece in The New Criterion]

A Tale of Captaincy—Prospective and Retrospective

“Paradoxically, to be fun, cricket must be serious.”—Christopher Martin-Jenkins

“Captaincy is 10 per cent skill and 90 per cent luck, but don’t try it without the 10 per cent.”—Richie Benaud 

The Boxing Day Test at the MCG to some extent validated my previous piece which had this ending: “Rahane is a wonderful captain and he now has the opportunity to show what he did in securing a win against Australia in Dhramshala. If he can retain the Border-Gavaskar trophy, then apart from removing Shastri the selectors will also have a pleasant headache in terms of choices for the Indian captain.”

This was a prospective statement as it was made around 3 pm the day before the Boxing Day Test—even after the debacle of 36 not out, there was no problem saying this about Rahane’s captaincy as the one evidence in Dhramshala to win a hard-fought series against Australia was enough. The idea has been with me since then and there just wasn’t a window to address it in writing. The 36 at Adelaide and Kohli’s return to India on paternity leave gave me the opportunity.    

I ended the piece saying that this is a great opportunity for Rahane to retain the Border-Gavaskar trophy and of course that is not news as who am I? The news was that “spin legend Shane Warne believes Australia will ‘blow away’ India in the Boxing Day Test as the visitors are still a ‘bit shocked’ by the Adelaide humiliation.”  The expert problem. We are shown by a class of expert-busting researchers such as Paul Meehl and Robyn Dawes that the “expert” is the closest thing to a fraud, performing no better than a computer using a single metric, their intuition getting in the way and blinding them. [As an example of a computer using a single metric, the ratio of liquid assets to debt fares better than the majority of credit analysts.] On the other hand, there is abundant literature showing that many people can beat computers thanks to their intuition. Which one is correct?

One can always go wrong in sporting predictions, the only area where I think forecasting is not a problem as there is no skin in the game—it leads to no damaging problems unlike the ones in many social areas where the problem of forecasting is endemic.

We cannot truly plan, because we do not understand the future—but this is not necessarily a bad news. We could plan while bearing in mind such limitations. It just takes guts. That is the 10% that Rahane has and the luck follows as we saw with the catches going to the fielders, none of them being dropped in contrast to the first game, the bowling changes working, and all the replacements contributing. 

Ian Chappell didn’t waste a day to say that India is lucky to have Rahane when India won the match and the Test series 2-1 in Dhramshala. The momentum after the brilliant fightback in Ranchi, for which a lot of Kohli’s decisions on the last day were critisised, was with the Australians and the series was 1-1 and Rahane had his first match as a captain with Kohli injured. He picked five bowlers and the unconventional selection turned the match in India’s favour.     

A first innings fight ensured that both sides were in the game and then India made quick work of Australia and had to chase just 106 for a series win. Murali Vijay and Pujara fell for 8 and 0 with India at 46 for 2 when Rahane walked in at the end of the 14^th over and that was the moment to show intent and he walked the talk. The remaining 60 runs came in 59 balls with Rahane blasting 38 of 27 balls with four fours and two sixes.   Ranchi led to criticism of Kohli and Dhramshala led to heaps of praise for Rahane but the mass media misses nuance and more so these days when whatever trends on Twitter is news. How netizens respond is going to be a major big beat in journalism if it isn’t already.

His decision to pick the XI for MCG was also criticised as former players argued that after 36 all out the thinking should have been to bolster the batting rather than having one more bowler. Selection decisions are extremely complicated even in normal circumstances and imagine how difficult they would be when the best batsman in the world in Virat Kohli [Kane Williamson at par] is unavailable and your nose has been rubbed to the ground. The elements that inform the choice in selection are not obvious, you need a subliminal intelligence that is working in the background. And the rules governing the choice are extremely delicate and they have to be felt rather than formulated. All the replacements worked and India were on the attack from the moment they went in to field after losing the toss.

I have been discussing [although I haven’t written] with my friends for a few years now that Rahane is a much better captain than Kohli but the decision to make him the Test captain is extremely complicated because of the personality of Virat Kohli. It wasn’t that much of an issue with Tendulkar. Tendulkar was the captain of the Indian Test team for just 25 matches in two distinct stints out of the 200 Tests he played. The batting average is almost the same—just a little bit more when he has not been the captain. The devil lies in the details as a large majority of the spectacular performances, the big hundreds, the dominating hundreds, the crucial bowling spells have come when he was not the captain. The fielding was always as safe as you can get—and he was versatile and could field in the slips, at long-off or long-on, and I haven’t seen a better pair of hands at third-man. The comforting factor for him was that whether he was the captain or not the captain he was always special and was viewed as one and he was always in on the decision-making with the team looking up to him for the better part of his career.                   

Kohli is by far the best batsman in the team—and by far I mean really by far—and he’s got the skills for all formats and he loves the challenge as a batsman. The problem is that Kohli feeds on himself and from his aggression and if a change in captaincy leads to a dip in his performance as a batsman or in his confidence as a cricketer then it defeats the purpose and the decision should not even be contemplated. There is no doubt that Rahane has a more astute cricketing brain in getting performances out of his teammates. A calm captain leads to the players giving their best and it shows a lot in fielding as your nerves are calm. Under too much aggression the nerves get frayed and players are worried about dropping a catch rather than being eager and confident of contributing more than they are capable of. Kohli is also brilliant as a fielder and I have no idea about the inner dynamics of how the players feel or respond under him. On selection I can say that he and Shastri have got it wrong a lot of times. In January 2018 in South Africa, we had to chase 208 to win in Cape Town. We conceded a lead of 77 runs when we were bowled out for 209 in the first innings [SA: 286]. We bowled them out for 130 with Bumrah removing Faf du Plessis and de Kock in successive overs and claiming de Villiers as the last wicket in his debut match. India’s best overseas batsman Rahane was warming the bench. We collapsed for 130. We lost at Centurion as well and brought Rahane for the final Test. On a minefield of a wicket, Rahane made an attacking 48 in the second innings and took India past 200 with the bowlers as companions and we set them 241 to win and got them for 177. The selection issues in the England tour can be addressed some other time.   

I stayed away from commenting on Kohli’s decision to come back from Australia although in my view he should have stayed. My reasons though are completely different from the one given by former cricketer Dilip Doshi, who said that he should have stayed as it is national duty and nothing comes before national duty. That for me is bollocks. The reason is what former South African cricketer Mark Boucher once said about himself: “I play for my mates in the dressing room.” Your teammates travel, practice, lose, win, and go through the ups and downs of the game with you and if you have any obligation then it is to them.             

Sydney is going to be a very engaging contest as the Australians have their brilliant attack intact. Starc, Cummins, and Hazelwood are exceptional and very different from each other and Lyon is a good spinner. David Warner is back and would open with the highly anticipated debutant Will Pucovski. Matthew Wade would return to his preferred position in the middle order. If that is the line-up, the batting unit looks a bit less fragile.

India would be concerned about their bowling attack. Their first choice attack had one man in Ishant Sharma down before the series, they lost the second man in the first choice attack in Shami after the first Test and they have now lost an experienced first replacement in Umesh Yadav after the second. So Bumrah would be accompanied by two bowlers who have the experience of 1 Test between them—Saini is most likely going to play his debut Test. Marshaling one debutant in the pace attack is tough but marshaling two is going to be a massive challenge for Rahane. Fingers crossed on how this goes. There is good news on the batting front as Rohit Sharma comes in for Agarwal. The problem is that Sharma doesn’t have a good overseas record and whatever he has is not as an opener. He has never opened away from home. Would Rahane take the gamble to open with Pujara? Or will it be as he said that they have a Plan A, a Plan B, and a Plan C? Can he spring a surprise to begin with a Plan D? He’s not lost a Test as a captain as yet and it would take some doing to keep it that way.

The Adelaide Madness in Test Cricket’s History

“In other sports, people have no time to think; a cricket match is a storehouse of thought, of thought occasioned by the game itself, by the beauty, wit, or intelligence of one’s companion, or simply a private unravelling of problems, personal, political, moral.”—Writer and journalist Alan Ross

A scrutiny of the history of Test cricket starting with the first Test played between England and Australia starting on March 15, 1877, in Melbourne to the recently concluded Test No. 2396 between India and Australia in Adelaide belies all the statements made by India’s captain Virat Kohli in his detailed post match press conference.

I know that all of you know but still pause and think that a Test on most occasions has two innings for each side [Excluding follow-ons and other elemental problems] and yet in the 143-odd years [A very loose linear calculation as years have been lost during the two World Wars and perhaps due to pandemics like the one we are witnessing now, political problems, and all the other problems of the world] of the game’s history only 22 times before this disaster has a Test team been dismissed for less than 50 runs. If I assume that 1500 Tests would have gone the distance—not in terms of results but with both sides getting a crack at two innings—then it is 23 times in 6000 Test innings in which a side has been bowled out for less than 50. It is a very unlikely likelihood [0.38%] going by the history of the game. The significance of this low cannot be overstated especially after the explanations given by the Indian captain and the rediculous statements made over a period of time by Coach Ravi Shastri that this is the best Indian team in terms of overseas performance and results. It could be close statistically as we routed Sri Lanka—literally overseas—in ODIs, T-20s, and Tests and won every game in that tour.  

India had a pretty good standing in that 22 as the 42 in 1974 in Lord’s against England was not only the team’s lowest score but also its sole under 50 collapse in its entire cricketing history. South Africa heads the list with seven scores of under 50 but all of them are from before 1932 when it wasn’t 10 per cent of the team that reentered Test cricket in 1991 or 1% of the one that was isolated in 1970 when they had become a fearsome force and demolished Australia 4-0 in a 4-Test series at home. New Zealand is there four times and tops the list with 26 all out against England in Auckland in 1955.

That 42 of India doesn’t appear to be that much of an embarrassment. England had put 629 on the board and in the first essay India responded with 302 and were asked to follow on. The runs, the pressure, the fatigue and distress of having to go in again, and perhaps the deteriorating wicket all played a part. They were chasing the game from Day 1.

Australia has been dismissed under 50 four times with the most significant one [by recency, as most of the low scores are in the early decades of cricket] being the first Test of the 2011 series against South Africa in Cape Town. It bears resemblence to what happened to India here. Australia put 284 on the board with an attacking 151 by Michael Clarke and a 44 by Shaun Marsh in an otherwise bedragged scorecard. They got South Africa for 96. And began the second essay with a 188-run lead. They were reduced to 21 for 9 with Philander, Steyn, and Morkel making the top order look like rabbits and it had names like Hughes, Watson, Ponting, Clarke, Hussey, and Haddin. It could have been the lowest score ever to the relief of the Kiwis but Nathan Lyon and Peter Siddle added 26 for the last wicket—exactly what the Kiwis had managed as a team. England is there in the list twice, Pakistan with 49 once in 2013 against South Africa which gave Shoaib Akhtar the ammunition to say that the best batting side going down for 36 is an embarassment but I am happy that at least our record is broken—perhaps he meant the last team to score less than 50.                 

Kohli’s press conference is a compelling study of contradictions and a better specimen of bullshit would be difficult to find. I quote the operative part.

“A bit of lead can always be tricky because as a batting unit you can go into a headspace where you feel like we are just 50 or 60 ahead and you don’t want to lose early wickets and allow [sic: the] opposition back into the game. So you always have to be positive and you can’t think like that. Hence I said we lacked intent because we should have just seen where the game has to go rather than where it has come to till now and move the game forward, which we were not able to do. I think the way we batted allowed them to look more potent than they were in the morning to be honest. They bowled similarly in the first innings and we batted way, way better.”

That’s such a brilliant explanation. It has never occurred to me in my over 35 years of watching Test cricket that a bit of a lead in the first innings can be a problem for the team that has the lead. And on a surface like this in a low scoring game the captain thought of 53 as a problem. And if there was no problem with the wicket and they bowled almost the same as they did in the first innings then why were all the Indian batsmen shitting bricks in the middle. They went back on the second day with 62 for 1 effectively and were ambushed. The highest partnership in the Indian innings was actually the one where intent was the last thing that could be exercised as there was a tailender in the middle. Agarwal and Buhrah added 8 runs in 29 balls for the first wicket and the next best were two partnerships of 7 runs: the opening one of 7 in 19 balls and the 7 between Saha and Vihari in 30 balls when we were 19 for 6.   

Let’s check how the wickets fell and what could have been done differently. 

There is no point discussing how Prithvi Shaw fell as there was no point why he should have been there in the first place. It is the selectors and the team management that failed and not Shaw. Jasprit Bumrah had come in as a nightwatchman after 3.1 overs the previous evening and hung around till the last ball of the eighth over. He kept some very good balls out in the 17 he faced and had an avoidable dismassal. He pushed at the ball rather than allowing it to just come to him and gave a simple caught and bowled. By all means he had done his job very well but this was a significant blow and had he stayed for another 30 minutes even if he scored just a couple of runs in it the momentum would have been with India. With India at 15 for 2, three maidens followed. Two by Starc that Agarwal negotiated and one from Cummins by Pujara. And then began the madness. A ripper from Cummins in the 12^th over ended Pujara’s eigth ball vigil. He went for a duck with the score reading 15 for 3. And 15 has a very good chance for being the number that will haunt India for years. It was a brilliant ball but it wasn’t unplayable. Wonderful length, angling into off and middle and straighening. Pujara had to play and he was foxed as he played the angle and the ball straigttned ever so slightly to take the edge rather than beating him comprehensively. Pujara played close to the body and full marks for that but his feet went nowhere and the bat face was slightly closed as he played for the initial angle. And in this case Kohli’s critism was correct, as Pujara was Pujara, not trying at all to move the game forward but hanging in trusting his defence. Could he have done something different? Perhaps not. But in light of coach Shastri and captain Kohli calling this unit as one that never gives up, it could have been played. Many sports give the impression that it is the hands or the hand-eye coordination that is the primary skill. Nothing could be further from the truth as it is the feet and the foot movement that is the key skill. In Tennis, Cricket, Boxing, Basketball, Table Tennis, and Formula 1 where it appears that the action is above the torso the fact is that you can’t hit a great ball in tennis unless you have your feet in a good position. Balance is the key in almost all sports and that springs from your feet. Watching a Mohammad Ali bout is a delight both in terms of how he executes his punches and how well he moves with his feet. Football should not even be mentioned as the feet are used for the execution and balance while the upper body and hands play a bit more of a role of keeping the player in balance.

The 13^th over, the first of the second innings by Josh Hazelwood pushed India to the edge of the cliff. The first ball from Josh Hazelwood was unplayable. It was the ball of the innings. Great length, extra bounce, coming inward and straightening with Mayank squared up. Luck could have been the only way anyone could have survived that ball. 15 for 4. And a double wicket over with Rahane nicking a very full ball made it 15 for 5. Terrible dismassal at that stage to a decent ball. An intelligent batting unit should have processed the fact by this time that Australia was keeping it full and relying on the fact that the movement was not too much and any ball that started by coming in and straightened or moved away was causing the blood loss. Rahane is an extremely intelligent Test cricketer who is capable of shifting the momentum. Alas he could not process the fact that when things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself. The Australians did not even allow the Indian batsmen to have the luxury of two batsmen having a chat in the middle, discussing the situation, the bowling, and seperating by a solid punch with each others gloves. I don’t know if they discussed the fact that standing a bit outside the crease and playing with a good stride and being alert enough to go all the way back from that position if need be would have given scoring opportunities as well as avoided a complete slide. Rahane did nothing other than edging the ball with a half hearted foot movement and a poke. If one awful dismissal has to be picked then it has to be that of Rahane and if two are to be picked then the next is Kohli.       

India lost four wickets without adding a run and went from 15-1 to 15-5 in 24 balls, and after having faced six balls Kohli hit a boundary and perished going after a wide one from Cummins the very next ball to be caught at gully leaving India at 19 for 6.

If 15 for 5 was the moment when Kohli decided to show intent then it was daft timing as at that scoreline you don’t need too much intent, you need to keep the good ones out, punish the odd bad one and get a partnership going. No matter how positive or how strong is your intent, you cannot score runs in the dressing room. A surfeit of ODIs and T-20s has led to players forgetting that the key skill to to protect your wicket. And forgetting that the defination of a specialist batsman at any level [Especially at the highest] is someone who can win or save the game single-handedly. This team is way short of being the best to travel overseas, its not even in the list. Look at these players in one unit: Sehwag, Dravid, Tendulkar, Laxman, and Ganguly. I am not talking of capability but the fact that all of them have on numerous occasions bailed the team out single-handedly or played a gem in the rubble of a collapse. They have won from unwinnable positions and avoided a certain defeat on many others.   

Kohli hit a boundary and the 15 was crossed and he then went for a wide one without full conviction and perished to Cummins. 19 for 6. A good shot is sometimes more dangerous than a solid defensive shot. Kohli had Vihari, Saha, and Ashwin to follow and the strategy should have been to ride the storm and get as many as possible. Three overs accounted for four wickets: Pujara, Agarwal, Rahane, and Kohli. That killed India. Going for a wide one wasn’t a bad idea but at that stage you had to play strokes that went along the carpet as unlike the Indian team the Australians don’t grass too many. The number of catches India dropped is how good viewers don’t like their Test cricket and the ones India dropped were not screamers but catches you would expect to be taken 100 out of 100 times. It could have meant a lead of over a hundred unless Kohli though that too would have been a problem. This team has failed to chase an easy under 200 score in England and lost from a winning position in South Africa that would have given us the series. They allow the tail to wag more often than not and they have formed a habit of losing from winning positions. If nothing else, the least that should be done is to get a coach like Gary Kirsten. I have my contrarian views on Kohli returning home but it is a very personal and important decision and so I am not going to make a meal of it. Rahane is a wonderful captain and he now has the opportunity to show what he did in securing a win against Australia in Dhramshala. If he can ratain the Border-Gavaskar trophy, apart from removing Shastri the selectors will also have a pleasant headache in terms of choices for the captain.              

Roland Vernon on Krishnamurti at Brockwood Park

It was Roland Vernon’s biography that was the backbone for my two-part essay on Jiddu Krishnamurti for The Times of India. Star in the East was Vernon’s first non-fiction biography for adults and it is an amazing achievement keeping in mind that there were several biographies on Krishnamurti before his came out. His three subsequent novels are A Dark Enchantment, The Maestro’s Voice, and The Good Wife’s Castle and the plots are fascinating. This talk at the Krishnamurti Centre in Brockwood Park was sent just for my interest recently by Vernon and I thought it would be great to have it online for people who have a more than passing interest in the life of Krishnamurti.

Brockwood Park School

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Founded by educator philosopher, Jiddu Krishnamurti, in 1969, Brockwood Park School is an international boarding school for 14-19 year olds, in the heart of the Hampshire countryside. It provides an holistic education for around 75 students and is the only school of its kind in Europe.

Brockwood Park talk for 2^nd June 2019

I’m here today to talk about Krishnamurti in a historical context, because it was the story above anything else that attracted me to the subject. When I decided to write my book, I had no intention of offering a commentary on his teachings, because a book like that would be a pale shadow beside the teachings themselves; but the story – its huge timespan, its canvas of characters and territories, its bridging of a sepia-tinted old world with the modern, computer-driven age, its scent of mystery, its leaps of faith, its whispered hints of supernatural entities at work, its saints and occasional villains; and its narrative pull, centred on a man who dedicated his long life, without respite, to what was a consistently articulated mission to bring about radical change in the world and save mankind – this was romance, I thought, of a breath-taking nature.

And I had to do something different to what had been done before. Previous biographers (with one notable exception) had been personal friends or sworn devotees, and it became clear that in order to contribute something original and impartial I might have to risk stepping on a few toes. There were certain individuals, including some of my sources, whose blinkered defence of Krishnamurti’s memory bordered on the kind of discipleship that he spent his life rejecting. Not that I had any intention of doing a hatchet job, but I sought to allow clear daylight and fresh air into some rooms that had been boarded up too long. Most particularly, I wanted to do justice to the remarkable events and machinations that underpinned his early years, which, I believed, most certainly did affect the rest of his life, even though he later claimed to have forgotten them and that they were an irrelevance. He had good reason to do this because that early life was so dazzling and sensational, it would inevitably interfere with a modern audience’s ability to focus on the important things he had to say, here and now. Yet, a detached and historical perspective of the story showed that, despite the passage of time, the changes in the cast of characters and the transformation of the world in which he lived, Krishnamurti departed the public stage in 1986, not so very different in message or profile to the man he had been sixty years earlier – as a teacher of the world, or, dare I use the term, the World Teacher, one who, to quote words of those who first presented him to the public, when just a boy, would ‘be able to work for the good of humanity, and to pour out at these levels influence which otherwise could not descend thereto.’ What attracted me to Krishnamurti’s story was not the saintly end product, but the tenacity and consistency that he displayed over such an extraordinarily long period of time. And I maintain that this single mission, to which he dedicated his entire life, evolved out of, through, and beyond the circumstances of his early life. None of it would have been achieved without the exposure established for him in his early years and which remained intact to the end. I am talking principally about the platform, the mechanics of distributing the teachings, which was created by certain individuals who in turn were propelled by a number of converging circumstantial, historical, and cultural influences. I feel that an understanding of these influences, including the religious and philosophical currents that gave rise to the messianic adventure of his early life, is not irrelevant but throws light on and enriches the story of the man he would later become.

Roland’s three novels are A Dark Enchantment, The Maestro’s Voice, and The Good Wife’s Castle and the plots are fascinating and dark.

In support of this approach, let me offer a musical analogy. Anyone like me, who is enthralled by the music of Mozart, will feel something unique when they hear his work. Nothing else has the same magic, nothing quite raises the goose bumps in the same way. But, leaving aside his inspiration, Mozart was very much the product of his past and his times. He composed within a very particular set of constraints: he inherited a prescribed system of notation, he used a small range of musical instruments, which were built to conventional specifications, and he could not venture beyond a musical vocabulary that was palatable to his patrons, his audiences, the period and the culture in which he operated. And of course, we do not neglect his early work just because his later was richer and more sophisticated. Had he lived a couple of centuries earlier or later, or on the other side of the world, his music would have sounded wholly different, or may not even have sounded at all. See how important the historical context and circumstantial platform were in his case. Why then should we ignore those of Krishnamurti?

I first came across Krishnamurti in early adulthood when some slightly alternative friends of my parents lent me a copy of his book, The Flight of the Eagle. The text rather baffled me, but I was intrigued with its plain-speaking logic, its authority, absence of literary ornamentation or pretence. I was also captivated by the photograph on the cover, which showed the author in profile, after he had begun to lose his hair but before he attempted to conceal it with that sweep-over. It was a noble, erudite face, with a neat beak of a nose and an intensity of concentration in its features. Not unlike – in fact incredibly similar to – a bust of Julius Caesar, I thought. After that, I barely thought about Krishnamurti again for a decade, until I stumbled across the story of Annie Besant, the grande dame of nineteenth century secularism, socialism, and women’s rights. I was seriously thinking about writing a book on her, and read that in later life she moved to India, championed the cause of Indian nationalism, became head of pseudo-religious organisation called the Theosophical Society, and dedicated herself to promoting a Brahmin boy called Jiddu Krishnamurti as nothing less than the new messiah. I read of the so-called discovery of this boy on a beach at Adyar, near Madras in 1909; how a group of cavorting English Theosophist gentleman were bathing in the sea late one afternoon, when one of their number, a former Anglican clergyman called Charles Leadbeater, now a self-professed clairvoyant spiritual authority, was entranced by the sight the boy, captivated by what he described as an etheric substance of gorgeous luminescence surrounding him. The body of this child, he claimed, housed an ancient soul, the result of multiple reincarnations, one for whom human desires and feelings were but petty abstractions in comparison to the great spiritual work he was destined to undertake. Leaving off for a moment these extraordinary claims, I turned a page and saw that famous 1910 photograph of the boy, long-haired, beautiful beyond words, with a fathomless ocean calm in his eyes, and after a moment or two I realized that, yes, this was the very same person who would later turn into the Julius Caesar on the cover of my now tatty Flight of the Eagle. From that moment I was swept away by the tale.

As everyone familiar with Krishnamurti knows, Besant, Leadbeater, and the Theosophical Society provided the immediate catalyst that served to propel him, as a young man, into public life. But they were pawns carried on a tide of several coexistent historical trends, such as the rise of orientalism in the west, the birth of the Bohemian movement, popularist challenges to the Established Church, extraordinarily rapid advances of science, a revolution in printing and publishing, the rise of political radicalism, the birth of an avante garde in the arts, and the diplomatic mess that ultimately led to the First World War. All these interlinking historical circumstances prepared the soil for Theosophy’s increasingly outrageous claims to take root. Central to these claims was a proposition that the Lord Maitreya, a divine avatar, was soon to become incarnate within a human vehicle, as he had been in the person of Jesus, and that mankind would behold a new saviour. Excitement bordering on hysteria was rife in certain Theosophical circles, and had been, even before the discovery of Krishnamurti; but once the leaders had settled on a candidate (and it should be said that Krishnamurti was not actually the first) it became known as the World Teacher project. And a public stage was born.

So what was this Theosophical Society that whipped up such fervour in the early years of the twentieth century, and where did it spring from?

Theosophy literally means divine wisdom, and although the term is nowadays associated with the organisation founded in 1875, it has been connected to philosophical schools dating back to antiquity. At the root of it lies the conviction that everything, manifested and unmanifested, created and uncreated, divine or material, emanates from a state of unity, immeasurable, incomprehensible to the intellect, yet all pervasive. This transcendent reality, or godhead, can be accessed by man through a process of mystical realisation or union; furthermore, it is only within the experience of this unity that true wisdom is to be found, primordial wisdom, the ground upon which all the religions of the world have been modelled, and in pursuit of this, Theosophists through the centuries were led into experimentating with the occult and supernatural.

Theosophical thought blossomed and declined throughout the course of western history, according to the level of threat it posed to the ecclesiastical establishment, but by the 18^th century we begin to see a cultural climate within which it could flourish, usually at the expense of Christian orthodoxy. Corruption within the monstrously powerful Roman Catholic Church became a target of particular derision, and there began a movement to seek spiritual truths in cultures beyond the reach of Christianity, both historically and geographically. At the same time, the rise of Freemasonary around Europe encouraged a pursuit of esoteric philosophy, unfettered by loyalty to any organised religion.

Meanwhile, esoteric traditions, incorporating the recognizably Theosophical ideas of Pythagoras, Plato, Jakob Boehme, Immanuel Swedenborg and the Austrian physician Anton Mesmer, were practised within secret societies, such as the Rosicrucians. They caught the British public’s imagination through the occult fiction of statesman and hugely popular mid-century novelist, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who became one of the key forerunners of modern Theosophy, and whose direct descendants – Emily Lutyens, née Lytton, and her daughter, Mary, were to have such important roles in the life of Krishnamurti.

Breakthroughs in science and technology were beginning to light up some of the dimmer recesses of cultural mythology, particularly with regard to the creation story. Darwin and the geologist Charles Lyell undermined the literal interpretations of Genesis and belief in an anthropomorphic God who was directing the affairs of the world for the benefit of mankind. Mounting nonconformism, together with this new tide of scientific scepticism, was paving the way for a secularist revival. Atheist organisations were formed, some of them like parodies of the contemporary chapel movements, with fund-raising fetes and banners, with zealous members assembling in halls on Sundays, singing secular hymns, and listening to heretical sermons denying the existence of God.

The fall of Napoleon marked a return to more conservative values, but the unstopped bottle of political reform and popular unrest now led to the birth of alternative, experimental denominations, often nominally within the embrace of the mother church, but occasionally so far removed as to be labelled blasphemous. A broader range of religious choice became available. Established seats of theological authority, which in Britain resided at the universities, were challenged to defend the supremacy of the single, older church, while rapidly changing social conditions undermined their credibility. Nonconformism was in the air, and excitable congregations were easily led by tub-thumping tirades from the pulpit. The age of religious opportunists was commencing.

But it was the work of one individual in particular that put modern Theosophy firmly on the map, a woman whose magnetic personality, exoticism and learning made her one of the most controversial spiritual adventurers to have challenged the authority of mainstream religion: Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Foul-mouthed, volatile, grotesquely fat and reeking of the cigarettes she smoked incessantly, Madame Blavatsky was seminal to the development of New Age thinking, and her influence runs deep. Her claim, in the 1870s was that she had rediscovered a primordial wisdom, the key to life and divinity, which predated and superseded all religions. Her revelation of what she called this ‘secret doctrine’ (which was also the title of her most famous book) she maintained would transform religious consciousness in the west and signal a new era in the history of humanity. But it was her breathtaking demonstrations of spiritualist phenomena that gave spice to her public appearances. She was the archetypal occultist, swathed in black shawls, bulbous-eyed, gravel-voiced, sporting a thick eastern-European accent, part witch, part priestess, with a dash of the eccentric academic, a woman who combined showmanship with scholarship, and although swamped by scandal and accusations of fraudulence, possessed the force of personality to silence would-be critics face-to-face. No stranger to coarse manners, she enjoyed the challenge of confrontation, obliterating her opponents, lashing them with her intellect, which, unlike the virtually immobile hulk of her body, was agile and lucid.

In September 1875, Blavatsky, along with her American collaborator, Henry Steel Olcott, officially founded the Theosophical Society, tapping the nineteenth century spirit of adventurism while bringing together several strands of religious and intellectual enquiry, much of it rooted in ancient philosophy and modern advances in science. The Society was a melting pot and its catchment was wide, encompassing spiritualists, dissenting Christians, atheists, agnostics, political liberals, freemasons and occultists. Their common ground was millenarian, a shared belief that the old order was passing and that human consciousness was on the cusp of a golden new age, whose principal concern would be to create a universal brotherhood of mankind. Although four decades were to pass before the rise of the World Teacher Movement, which propelled the young Krishnamurti to fame, it was these tenets, upheld by Blavatsky and rooted in earlier movements, that underpinned it. More esoteric, was her belief in a semi-metaphysical occult brotherhood of ‘Masters’, ancient spiritual adepts, who resided in the Himalayas and appeared astrally to her and an increasing number of disciples. A defining point in the Theosophical movement, and one which was to create divisions in the Society, came with Blavatsky’s insistence that her Masters’ philosophy was fundamentally that of the east, and that members who sought true wisdom should turn their attention to the teachings of Hinduism and Buddhism. To this end, in 1882, Blavatsky and Olcott moved the international headquarters of their Society to an estate that they acquired at Adyar, a suburb of Madras. This was later to become Krishnamurti’s home and where he was schooled in Theosophy, complete with its bedrock dogma of the Masters. Throughout his life he would mention the sense of encountering metaphysical entities – whom he early-on called Masters, because that was the terminology he inherited, but would later be less distinct about identifying.

Blavatsky’s heirs, Krishnamurti’s direct sponsors, were to develop her tenets into a new, more complex, in some ways more rigid and narrow system of belief, but the core ambition to achieve universal brotherhood through spreading the word of an enlightening wisdom, based on eastern philosophy, and spear-headed by a god-incarnate figure, personally chosen by the Masters, would remain central to everything.

And then spiritualism burst onto the scene, first in America, and then quickly taking root in Britain. The public, members of the aristocracy and even royalty, were intoxicated with the prospect of communicating with dead spirits, not least because it might provide the answer to one of the oldest curiosities at the core of religious enquiry: is there life after death? A fuse had been lit, leading people to question how humankind, the natural world and all material creation might be interwoven with a spiritually, perhaps scientifically, accessible, previously hidden super-power. It would not have been inconceivable in those heady times to have speculated about the day when newspapers might even pronounce a plausible theory for the universe, one that proclaimed empirical proof for the existence of angels, spirits, the afterlife and even God; and this would not necessarily conflict with Christianity but might remodel humanity’s approach to it for the long term good of all. This spirit of scientific confidence, occult curiosity, political choice and challenging of the establishment, opened the gates for exciting new religious and philosophical alternatives and directly contributed to the rise of Theosophy.

The intent may have been beneficent, even noble, but unfortunately, one of the principal individuals who set himself up to achieve it was less so. And so we come to the person of Charles Webster Leadbeater.

When I wrote my book, I tried to give both sides of the Charles Leadbeater debate. I probably painted a picture of him as a slippery manipulator and spinner of tall tales, as well as being someone who got up to some questionable things with young boys, and who possessed a number of other unattractive personality traits, such as being dismissive of women in general, but particularly unkind to the many elderly ladies who travelled to India to join his organisation with the best intentions. But at the same time, in a spirit of fairness, I gave mention of the high regard in which he was held by many of his colleagues, not least the magnificent Annie Besant, and he has supporters to this day who keep his work in print and defend his reputation. My book, however, was written at a time when the benefit of the doubt was too often given to predators of this sort, many of whom have fallen from grace with a force that has left us all rather more hardened and with a readjusted perspective on such matters. Since the revelations about Jimmy Saville, Michael Jackson, a whole string of senior clergymen and others, and seeing how they managed to cover their tracks for so long, dupe even the people closest to them and die with their reputations still more or less intact, I have reevaluated the level of tolerance that should be allowed Charles Leadbeater. We do not have evidence of the very worst that we can imagine – how could we, because whatever happened took place a century ago and behind closed bedroom doors, and, when given the opportunity to testify against him to the police, Krishnamurti denied any impropriety. He was certainly under pressure from his mentors to quell the scandal, and a denunciation of Leadbeater would have spelt the end of the World Teacher movement and disillusionment for hundreds of thousands of devotees. But we should not necessarily doubt the truth of his testimony. However, in the case of several other Leadbeater boys we read of investigations, first-hand reports and confessions enough to be confident that he was a serial paedophile of the most heinous kind, a self-obsessed monster who used spiritual teaching as a means of gaining access to and sharing beds with children for decades, who never acknowledged the harm he was causing, and who in today’s climate would never be allowed close to minors, let alone set himself up as their religious, intellectual and physical mentor. He would in all likelihood be behind bars. He was lucky to have escaped major prosecutions, first in England, then India and ultimately Australia. This was the man to whom the boy Krishnamurti was entrusted at the age of fourteen and who would be his guiding influence for much of the next twenty years. Can it be any wonder that Krishnamurti wanted to jettison his past?

Charles Webster Leadbeater was born in 1854, the son of a railway bookkeeper in Stockport, though he later fabricated a far more romantic childhood, claiming to have been born in 1847 – so as to make him equal in age to Annie Besant – to have been brought up in South America and to have been involved in all sorts of swashbuckling adventures, which included being held captive by Indians in the jungle, being roasted over a fire, watching his brother being executed, diving under water to a stockpile of hidden Inca treasure, stabbing a werewolf, etc etc. All lies. He later claimed to have attended Queens College Cambridge but in fact never went to any university. He became a curate in the small village of Bramshott (close to here, actually) in 1878, and it was here that he first began to organize clubs and holidays with young boys. It only took 5 years for him to start doubting traditional Anglicanism and in 1883 he joined the Theosophical Society, falling under Madame Blavatsky’s spell. He travelled to India and Ceylon as a footsoldier for the Society and lived there for 4 years, consolidating his belief in the Masters, his own clairvoyant abilities and sharpening what he considered his unique astral consciousness. He then returned to Britain with the first of many young boys who were to become his inseparable proteges, and there became a close collaborator with Annie Besant, the well-known social reformer, once religious fundamentalist now turned secularist, and hero of workers’ and women’s rights. After Blavatsky’s death, Besant became her successor as leader of the Theosophical Society and was fired by the idea of bringing about universal brotherhood. While Leadbeater provided the supernatural speculations and spiritual authority, Besant possessed the confidence, passion, social connections and oratorical skills to turn their joint concept into a serious mission with concrete international goals. She had found a new purpose and grew determined to change the world in her own lifetime, by whatever means. As her close friend Bernard Shaw said of her, ‘She was a born actress. She was successively a Puseyite Evangelical, an Atheist bible-smasher, a Darwinian secularist, a Fabian socialist, a Strike leader and finally a Theosophist, exactly as Mrs Siddons was a Lady Macbeth, Lady Randolph, Beatrice, Rosalind, and Volumnia. She saw herself as a priestess above all. That was how Theosophy held her to the end.’

In retrospect, it is astonishing how so tremendous a force for social good as Annie Besant could have been so taken in by Charles Leadbeater and the system he proposed; and she never wavered in her defence of him personally, despite the far-fetched nature of the visions that only he experienced, together with the multiple scandals and recurrent evidence of paedophilia. Yet join forces she did, and in the closing years of the nineteenth century they forged together the structural matrix of a new religion that claimed knowledge of the solar system, the subatomic and chemical make-up of creation,  the spirit world, the far reaches of history and the unveiled mysteries of the future. They created and preached a dogma that proposed the evolution of a new, superior and enlightened master race, the emergence of great land masses from out of the sea, which would be colonized by the new race, and above everything else, the realisation that eastern philosophy and India were the cradle of the new world religion, to be led, as I’ve mentioned, by a new saviour. An affiliated organisation was formed around the person of Krishnamurti to spread the word: the Order of the Star in the East, later abbreviated to just Order of the Star. This was too much for many Theosophists, including Rudolf Steiner and those who adhered to a more conservative interpretation of Blavatsky, and many of them resigned or formed other societies. But for tens of thousands of others it was thrilling, and a fitting culmination to many years of cultural readjustment in the west. They signed up in their legions. A footnote illustration of this came home to me recently when I was writing a history of my own family. My great great grandfather, Sir William Vernon, an industrialist in Liverpool, who was the son of Primitive Methodist preachers and a devout Christian, wrote in his diaries of travelling large distances to see Annie Besant giving lectures, and in 1895 coincidentally shared a journey with her, by land and sea all the way from Charing Cross to Bombay, and got to know her quite well. Indefatigable, she gave several lectures at sea, which he of course attended, and was so taken that he arranged his travelling schedule in India so as to go to her talks there, once or twice sitting beside her on the speaker’s platform.

To my mind, a crucial milestone in the creation of the platform which Krishnamurti climbed as a young man and never lost, was the 1914 court decision to make him and his brother Nitya the legal wards of Annie Besant. Their father – fearing the worst about Leadbeater – had fought tooth and nail to have the boys separated from the Theosophists. Besant reveals a degree of duplicity in assuring him that the boys would be kept apart from Leadbeater and persuading him to sign a document giving his permission for them to go to England purely for their education. Once out of India, however, she gave orders for the father to be banished from the Theosophical estate at Adyar and made immediate arrangements for the boys to be reunited with Leadbeater in Sicily. A huge and widely publicized legal battle for custody now erupted, which the father won at every stage, even after appeal, until Besant, who would never accept defeat, took the case to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London, the most powerful legal body in the British Empire. Some of the senior Law Lords present at the hearing, including the Lord Chancellor, Lord Haldane, were old personal friends from her political days, and the informal proceedings at Downing Street were over almost before they began. Custody of the boys was given to Annie.

Again, by today’s standards we may think that justice was not served, especially given Leadbeater’s record of child abuse and the history of falsehoods fed to the boys’ father. Nevertheless, had Krishnamurti been returned to his family at this stage, aged 19, he would probably have disappeared into obscurity. Instead, he was educated, cultivated, allowed to tap whatever extraordinary resource he was beginning to discover within himself (albeit shrouded, at this stage, in Theosophical terminology), and presented to audiences around the world, both on the speaker’s platform and through a huge number of published magazines, pamphlets and books produced and distributed by the Society. The decidedly dodgy custody settlement made all this possible. There were ups and downs in his later relationship with Leadbeater, who was to emigrate to Australia, find new favourites, and to some extent lose interest in the increasingly rebellious Krishnamurti, but Annie Besant was a genuinely loving adoptive mother, and his bond with her remained strong until the end.

As the 1920s progressed, something very interesting happened. True, his platform had been established by the Theosophical Society – their organisation, their funding, their publishing house. And their public relations machinery had established his audience on three continents, Europe, America, and India. But the more entrenched and exclusive the Societies and organisations around him became, the more they seemed alien both to Krishnamurti and to the young, idealistic post-World War 1 crowds that were beginning to flock to him. Other movements and cultural influences were now coalescing which did not necessarily concur with Theosophy’s complex pantheons of astral masters, its racist pedagogy, esoteric rituals, exclusive secret societies, and its reliance on the occult testimony of an old spiritual martinet well past his prime, with a shady reputation.

Krishnamurti’s public platform therefore underwent a metamorphosis and his profile shifted away from traditional Theosophy and more towards what could be described as an alternative, philosophically liberal culture which in some ways foreshadowed the hippy movement of the 1960s. There were summer camp meetings with gatherings around great campfires, there were sandal-wearing men with long hair, trousered women with short, there were vegetarians, pacifists, nature lovers, young intellectuals, artists. A romantic scent of optimism was in the air, of rebirth after the horror of the war, and following the disillusionment with the ruling establishment that had led the world into that catastrophe. Krishnamurti was a young man of this generation and he answered its call. Already famous as a potential saviour of mankind, whose appearances as a young adult had never been short of theatricals, and imbued with the fashionable mystery of the orient, he was now feted by the young and by a sophisticated, experimental avante garde, who were feeling their way into a new system of values. They included inheritors of the Bohemian and ‘Back to Nature’ movements of northern Europe, which had been a reaction against the devastation of industrialisation and urban living. Baden-Powell’s Scout Movement was part of this new interest in retrieving a lost closeness to nature. A sense of practical teamwork and recreational pioneering infused Krishnamurti’s camp gatherings. Then, there was the spirit of humanitarian compassion, epitomised at that time by the birth of the League of Nations and the liberal diplomacy of Nobel Peace Prize winner, Fridtjof Nansen. This was the World Teacher’s message of Universal Brotherhood being put into practice, and the new generation wanted more. Political reformers joined the movement. The future Labour Party Leader and campaigner for disarmament, George Lansbury, a spokesman for new liberal values, became a prominent member of the Order of the Star, sitting with Krishnamurti on the speaker’s platform; and other distinguished advocates of democratic values and international cooperation joined his circle, like the philosopher, Hermann Keyserling.

Krishnamurti was, of course going through a remarkable awakening of his own, instigated by, what has become known as, his mysterious spiritual ‘process’ of 1922, which increasingly breathed something new, original and authoritative into his public statements. Although he did not formerly abandon Theosophy and dissolve the Order of the Star until 1929, I believe he achieved maturity in his teaching and formed the message which was to be at the core of his teachings for the remainder of his life as early as 1926 or 1927. So that, crucially, when he did declare his independence of the Society that had nurtured him, he took his audience and his platform with him. The sixteen thousand people who went to hear him at the Hollywood Bowl in 1927 were fully aware of his status as Theosophy’s messiah for the new age, but they were not going to abandon him two years later just because he distanced himself from an anachronistic organisation. ‘If the water tastes good,’ he would say, ‘drink it.’ They drank their fill, but found it difficult to abandon the personality cult that was already in place. Quite aside from his message, of course, the young teacher was by now extremely handsome, especially with his Savile Row clothes and Rudolf Valentino haircut. He himself recognised that the glamour of his profile was a distraction, and spent the remainder of his life trying to deflect an audience’s worship away from ‘the speaker’, but in the 1930s it was part of the package.

The style of delivery and a lot of the terminology were to change over the next six decades, but the core of the message was the same, because he had realized something pure and immutable, and that was that. There were, of course, practical considerations to be faced after his dissolution of the Order of the Star, and a constant flow of talks and publications was needed to ensure a continuance of the stage so well-established by 1929. This was largely handled by Krishnamurti’s associate – another former Leadbeater boy – Rajagopal. The future relationship between these two men opens up another whole story that we cannot enter into today, but suffice to say that Rajagopal possessed the practical know-how and business acumen to ensure the continued distribution of Krishnamurti’s work and the generation of funds to support his and his immediate circle’s lifestyle. The gatherings in Europe, California and India went on as before, the publications flourished, and the teachings, if anything, began to reach an even wider audience than they had in the days when they were restricted to members of the Order of the Star.

The World Teacher project certainly did not disappear after 1929, and although the term was tactfully withdrawn, much messianic speculation continued to be centred on the figure of Krishnamurti well beyond the 1930s. The Great Depression and the dark political times that followed, fuelled people’s hopes for a saviour. At the same time, in the cultural climate of the 30s, with the rise of Abstract and Expressionist art, when previously revered laws of form and harmony were tossed aside in the name of experimentalism, Krishnamurti’s nihilistic stance and his denials of authority were fashionably modern. And so his stage continued to prosper until the Second World War, when travel became impossible, communication restricted, and he spent these years holed up in California.

He burst back on to the scene in 1947 with a long trip to India, where he was received as if he had never been away, the reputation of his remarkable Theosophical past and connections with the now legendary Annie Besant still intact, ensuring that people flocked to his talks and revered him as a spiritual master. For some, it was not the words he spoke that were as important as the invigoration that came from beholding and sharing the presence of the master, which is the Indian concept of darshan.

His reemergence as an eminent speaker in the west had less to do with his Theosophical past, but was very much connected to cultural circumstances of the 1950s and 60s, many of which were a recapitulation and thus an inheritance of what had occurred in the 20s and 30s. A younger generation was attracted to non-conformism and religious alternatives, it was fashionable to deny authority, to doubt received opinion and to question orthodoxy. Patriotism and war had been stripped of glamour and it seemed more urgent to debate issues of racial equality and the brotherhood of man. Secularisation and social emancipation were in the air. The stage was set, once again for a world teacher with a message that would liberate mankind. Krishnamurti was again the man of the moment and became a key player in the 1960s spiritual upheaval. Nothing had changed in what he had to say, except the occasional term and a slight difference in delivery style.

Astonishingly, the remainder of Krishnamurt’s life saw him fulfil his role as a world teacher – not, perhaps, in the way his Theosophical sponsors had prophesied, but in effect, not so very different. Did this come about because Leadbeater’s visions and speculative ramblings were right all along? Or was it a role he achieved through the acquisition of skills learnt early in life and riding a wave of cultural circumstances that continually propelled him into the spotlight? Without wanting to evade the question, I believe there that both may be true. Which brings us to the most intriguing question: what was the source of Krishnamurti’s inspiration, who or what was the entity or entities to which he alluded repeatedly, as being ‘present,’ sometimes purging him in the so-called ‘processes’, at others just there, immanent, like a scent in the room, an immeasurable sacredness that imbues everything it touches with benediction? He refused to label it because he knew that people would leap on the concept of a spiritual agency and enslave themselves to it. He naturally also rejected Theosophy’s system of Masters, but did say in later life that, ‘there is a force which the Theosophists touched but then tried to translate into their own symbols and vocabulary and so lost it.’ So, again, a hint of a mysterious ‘force’ operating in some manner upon the material world. Shortly before his death he said that while his body was alive he was still the World Teacher. That term. He also recorded his famous statement about the immense energy, the intelligence that had been using his body for 70 years and which would not return to another body for many hundreds of years. This notion of a human being touching the source of enlightenment and thus embodying something which some would label divine, is close to Steiner’s principle of the Second Coming, which was not a physical reincarnation of Christ, but the potential in any one of us for mystical union with the Christ-principle. This is what orthodox Theosophy had been proposing for centuries. I do not wish to dwell on all this more than to say that the mystery of Krishnamurti’s source, in a historical sense, over a period of more than 60 years, was something others continually  longed to put a contextual label on, and wanted to attach themselves to – Besant and Leadbeater as much as their successors in Ojai, Ommen and perhaps even here, too. His Theosophical sponsors cannot be blamed for interpreting his gift in the light of their own immediate history and the context of their intellectual speculations. Had he lived on a mountain in some remote corner of India, who knows, he may never have travelled west, but might have become one in a long line of Eastern holy men, the inheritor of an age-old wisdom tradition. As it was, and despite some negative influences and coercive treatment, he was given a voice, presented with a public and educated in such a way as to articulate himself to them with concision and eloquence. Which he continued to do with extraordinary consistency and passion for a lifetime.