Winner’s Curse and the IPL Auction

So, as January nearly comes to an end, I have found my new year resolution – I resolve to blog at least once a week more frequently this year. As you will notice, my previous blogging attempts have come in spurts interspersed by long periods of hibernation. I’ve decided to set the record straight, partly due to peer pressure (some of my friends, Kevin,Andrew, Ali, Dan and Rohit are extremely prolific bloggers) but mostly because of selfish reasons – blogging crystallizes my own random observations into more random theorizing about how the world works. Or doesn’t.

To kick things off, I’m going to write about this week’s player auction in the IPL. For the uninitiated and Americans, that’s the Indian Premier League, the biggest, bestest sporting extravaganza on the planet. Okay, I exaggerate. It is a professional cricket league started in India in 2008 which revolutionized the sport from being a somewhat indulgent, five day (Test Matches) or eight-hour affair (One-Day Cricket) to a glitzy three hour entertainment package, with city based franchises owned by corporate honchos and Bollywood stars.

Much ink and cyberspace has been devoted to dissecting the IPL’s commercializing, corrupting effect on cricket. That is NOT the subject of this post. What struck me this year was the auction for players, specifically Kieron Pollard. Now, the way this year’s auction was set up, all teams were allowed to spend a maximum of $750,000 to buy players. If they spent it all on a single player and more than one team bid their maximum for that player, there would be a tie breaker. The tie breaker would be a single-price, sealed bid auction, where teams would write their secret bids on a sheet of paper. The highest bid would win the player and the amount would remain undisclosed. The above scenario played out for Pollard, who was then snapped up by Mumbai.

Now, the question which immediately comes to mind is, why keep the final bid amount ($750,000 + X) secret? My guess is a phenomenon known as winner’s curse. Winner’s curse is the idea that in auctions like the single-price, sealed bid auction and the English auction, the winner ends up paying more than the actual value of the asset. Essentially, the asset has the same value for all teams, but their estimates are different, because of uncertainty about the value of the asset. This uncertainty leads to different bids, but the highest bid is always higher than the common value of the asset.

I believe Kieron Pollard is a winner’s curse for Mumbai. And the uncertainty around his value wasn’t because any team had privileged information about him, but because they had so little information about him. This is a man who has played 20 international innings (ODIs and T20s combined) and faced 235 balls in total. To give you some perspective, that’s 1% of the number of balls Sachin Tendulkar has faced, and Sachin's “icon value” to Mumbai was $1.035 million. All that Pollard had going for him was one explosive 18 ball 54 in the T20 Champions League in October 2009. Incidentally, that match was played in India, which raises an interesting point about the disproportionate value of good performances in India for foreign players.

If this post leads you to think winner’s curse is a just an academic curiosity which has no real insight for the real world, think again. After the grand financial collapse in the US in 2008, the Treasury’s “Bank Plan” was to auction toxic assets to private investors, and get them off banks’ books. Of course, the problem was private investors did not know what the toxic assets were worth and were likely to suffer the winners’ curse if they made the winning bid. And that is why the Administration had to offer to subsidize the purchases.

Mumbai had no such subsidies. And that’s why I think they will regret winning the bid for Pollard.

Dollar Reserve System: Too Much of a Good Thing

Last week, Chicago Policy Review, whose editorial team I'm on, unveiled its brand new blog. Happily, I posted one of the first few articles on one of my old bugbears - the Dollar Reserve System. Enjoy!

Chak De India

"A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a cricket team, long suppressed, finds utterance."

I can almost feel Nehru turning in his grave after my shameless use of his historic 1947 speech to describe a cricket win, but there are times when lofty prose is needed to aptly describe monumental achievements, and this is one of them. India won the Pataudi trophy, defeating England in England, 1-0. For the cricket dabblers, statistically minded and perennial cynics, it is a result which merits little attention - India had just about pipped an opposition that wasn't the evil hegemon Australia or the old enemy Pakistan (even though no one had given India a ghost of a hope before the series). Yet for the acculuturated cricket lover, a test cricket romantic, and an Indian team follower, the magnitude of this victory cannot be dimmed. To understand these layered feelings, one has to have lived the hopes, some successes and many failures of the Indian teams of the 1990s and 2000s.

My love affair with cricket began with the '92 World Cup, all of which I watched snuggled up in blankets during a chilly winter vacation spent in Patna (like all of my vacations, really). It was a forgettable world cup for India, who lost to everyone except Zimbabwe and eventual winners, Pakistan. Yet it was also the arrival of a short, scrawny and curly haired Sachin on the One Day stage - the sight of a little 19 year old boy taking on and dominating tall, strapping, fast bowlers, beamed into millions of TV viewing homes, pan dukans, restaurants and villages brought him instant fame and celebrity. It was the simultaneous birth of the television fuelled One Day cricket as we know it (colored clothing, white balls et al) and the cult of Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar. As the great man once modestly said, "I'm the child of the one day game".

In all this razzmatazz, what was lost was India's love for Test cricket. The wham-bam-thank you-ma'am kind of instant entertainment that one day cricket provided had captured the imagination of a generation (my generation) but had also made the coquettish joys of the Test cricket format appear quaint and an anachronism. Where Pa would rave about the crease occupation prowess of Gavaskar and Vishwanath, I would sing praises of the stylish Azhar and the maverick Jadeja's hitting. Even though the rise of One-dayers are identified as cause and decline of Tests as effect, there is another mechanism at work encapsulated by an inversion of the Latin saying, "'Quod me nutrit me destruit" (What nourishes me also destroys me). One-Day cricket hasnt just destroyed Test cricket as it was known, it has also nourished Test cricket. Apart from subsidizing Tests with the millions that it rakes in (check out the difference in stadium crowds in the two forms) , it has also created a more result oriented Test match culture where 400 runs in a day has moved from the realm of the impossible to eminently probable (incidentally, one of the reasons why Dravid chose to play safe at Oval).

Adapting the framework that I have laid out to the specific case of India, certain observations about this victory come to mind. The young architects of India's win, Karthik, Dhoni, RP Singh, Sreesanth are all between 21-25 years old, about my age or older. They must have watched the '92 World Cup sunggled in their own blankets, whether in Bangalore, Ranchi, Lucknow or Kothamanglam. Their imagination must have been fired by the same SRT, whose images must have been beamed from the same Doordarshan. This, in itself, was the biggest contribution of the TV fuelled One Day game - the democratisation and spread of a sport dominated by the Bombay Boys and Delhi Dons to cricketing backwaters of Jharkhand, Kerala and Uttar Pradesh. If you include current discards Sehwag, Pathan, Raina and Kaif to this lot, what you get is a demographically more dispersed Indian team. And the long term success of Indian cricket will be built on this wide platform.

Now, coming to the second significance of this win: As a part of a long farewell year or two for the Galacticos of Sachin, Dravid, Ganguly and Kumble, this win on English soil after 21 years is a culmination of a golden generation who have been part of many almost there moments together. There have been the memorable ODI successes like the 93 Hero Cup, 97 Titan Cup, 98 Sharjah Coca Cola Cup, Mini World Cup win in Dhaka, reaching the finals of 2003 WC but the disappointments are too many: 12 ODI tournament finals without a win, 96 WC semi-final, 03 WC final whitewash and the biggest of them all, the 07 WC disaster. If the ODI record is chequered, the Test record has recently become better, without the success that should have accompanied it. On nearly every occasion when India were poised on the brink of an overseas Test win in the 1990s, they were thwarted - by the weather (Wanderers '97 against South Africa), or by their own tendency to crumble (Barbados '97, chasing 120), winning a solitary Test against Sri Lanka in the 39 Tests they played. In the 2000s, this trend was reversed, with India's wins abroad being only second to Australia yet they caught an even worse affliction: of losing the next Test after a win (against England, Australia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, South Africa and even West Indies) resulting in the only outside the subcontinent win last year in West Indies.

Even though India's golden generation has achieved a lot - a WC final, stopping the Aussie juggernaut in Tests and nearly beating them at home, defeating Pakistan in Pakistan, what it has finally done is convincingly beat a good non-Asian team in foreign conditions. The nation had achieved Independence from the foreign domination 60 years back. The cricket team has taken its time.

P.S. Check out Sachin's pic to know what I mean.

Globalization and the 'New Bollywood'

My new fangled tendency to theorize about Bollywood seems to have finally caught some attention as I realised when asked to write an article on it for The Beaver, LSE's student newspaper (if you can call the back page trash that regularly appears in it, 'news'). The occasion is India Week, an annual event on the LSE itinerary when everyone who ever had a brown ancestor suddenly discovers their Indianness (okay, maybe the other occasion is when Shilpa is called "Shilpa poppadum" on Big Brother). I guess I'm being unfair to the whole jamboree - it does have after all have sessions like 'How to wear a Sari'.... Anyway, not to digress further, The Beaver decided to have an India specific issue and yours truly wrote an article for it. Here it is:



“I don’t like the term Bollywood. We are the only surviving industry to Hollywood.….If you’re the only survivor to say Goliath, its nicer to be called David instead of lets say Boliath”
- Shah Rukh Khan

The adjective ‘arrogant’ is often used for Shah Rukh Khan. Yet, as Baadshah of Bollywood, he often finds himself in an ambassadorial role and tends to be more measured in his responses when they are representative of Bollywood or India. The comment in question, apart from being inaccurate (Latin American, Hong Kong and Chinese film industries are still flourishing) is, in many ways emblematic of the new confidence that a bold, young, consumerist, middle class India now possesses. In fact, if anything is a barometer of this confidence, it is the changing character of Bombay films from 2000 onwards.
It has been a longstanding criticism of Bombay films that they are genre ambiguous ‘masala’ films which are a potpourri of action, romance, drama, comedy. To see the character of a hoodlum involved in a street fight break out into song in the next scene may appear jarring to a new watcher of Bollywood films but is normal for a viewer acculturated to these movies. Add to the mix unnecessary songs and litany of characters and Bombay films begin to appear positively bewildering for a recent convert. When questioned about this aspect of Indian cinema, famous script writer, Sutanu Gupta said:

“(Indian) audiences have a very set belief in the kind of entertainment provided by cinema – they should see part of family life, romance, songs; they want everything. At the same time, they hate hodge podge films. They want to know whether it is an action film, a thriller, revenge or a ghost story or love story. It’s amazing!”

Despite this strong sense of what Indian audiences want, there has been a noticeable evolution in every aspect of Bombay films in the past decade or so. Where this trend has been the most noticeable is with the themes of recent movies. The run-of-the-mill boy meets girl, dances around trees and bashes up the bad guys routine has given way to more mature and thought provoking subject matter. Symbolic of this change was Rang De Basanti (2006), with its unsettling story about the political awakening and radicalization of jaded urban youth. Another lesser known 2006 film, Being Cyrus, completely in English and boasting of an A list star cast was a bizarre black comedy which defied convention and shocked audiences bred on morality tales. Ab Tak Chappan (2004), armed with the tagline “Doctors cure, engineers build, I kill” was a songless (yes, the unthinkable has happened!) film inspired by a real life Mumbai cop who, as an ‘encounter’ specialist shot dead 56 criminals. Omkara (2006), an adaptation of Othello to Uttar Pradesh’s rural milieu continued the process set in place by the same director in his equally brilliant Maqbool (2003), which adapted Macbeth to the setting of a Muslim gangster’s home. Raincoat (2005), inspired by O. Henry’s short story Gift of the Magi broke down the doors of screenplay structure in Bombay films by limiting the action of the whole movie to just one room of a dilapidated house where the two protagonists, once lovers, discuss the trajectory of their separate married lives.

It can be safely said that Bollywood is undergoing a period of experimentation when its filmstars, directors and musicians are no longer afraid of their own audiences. The cause for this new found boldness is pure economics. The purchasing power of young, urban, middle class Indians has increased quite dramatically in the last decade. This is the class which seeks to wear the same clothes, own the same gadgets and demands entertainment in the same manner as their counterparts anywhere else in the world. Cashing in on this phenomenon are sprawling urban multi-screen theatres with ticket prices starting at five – ten times their single-screen country cousins. This has meant that films no longer need to have universal appeal to recover costs of filmmaking or even make profits. Add to that the even higher spending capacity of the burgeoning Indian diaspora and its willingness to lap up all that Bollywood has to offer and then one begins to understand why Bombay films are changing. To put it simply, Bollywood no longer needs the India which cannot pay for it. It has 2 billion viewers from Morocco to Malaysia who more than make up for that.

Perhaps it is inaccurate to say that Bollywood has changed. To say that it has globalized is closer to the truth. And with this globalization, have come stories which are localized. It is a strange dichotomy which needs to be preserved if David has any chance of slaying Goliath.

Umrao Jaan Ada

Bollywood movies have a way of creating mass hysteria among the Indian media. Some would claim even 'international' media pointing to Aishwarya's appearance on Oprah and 60 minutes - its another matter that questions asked of her ranged from 'Why cant you kiss in Bollywood movies?' to 'Do you have a boyfriend?', all of which were responded to with the practised coy giggle (no words mind you) which won Ash the Miss World crown and many hearts. Having said that my sympathies are with her because of the ambassadorial role she inevitably finds herself in - often criticised for whatever replies she gives because of the way it doesnt represent the true India. Whatever that is.

Anyway, this mindless ramble was meant to be a prelude to this piece I had written two years back about Mirza Hadi Ruswa's beautifully nostalgic novel, Umrao Jaan Ada which is the subject of the new movie which is coming out in December. The trailors show a bemused Ash prancing about in a swimming pool (thankfully not in a bikini), a jarring image somewhat different to what I had in my mind after I read the book. Penning them down so you and I can later compare the movie.

Umrao Jaan Ada is the memoirs of a courtesan of the same name who, in the sunset of her life, takes a poignant look back on her extraordinary life gone by and the characters who played their parts in it. Suitably, the author adopts the same romantic style of narration, with a flavor of longing for the past seeping into the story. Bitter-sweet memories are filtered through the sepia tinted lens of nostalgia, glorifying and almost a pining for the golden epoch of Lucknow.The story begins with the abduction of the nine year old Umrao by arogue, Dilawar Khan and then her being sold to a woman, Khanum who buys her and begins the long process of refining and sophistication interms of academic, musical and cultural education required to mould her into a courtesan. Inculcated with these qualities, Umrao soonbecomes the most sought after courtesan, starting a journey on whichher paths cross with Bandits, Maulvis, Nawabs, Kings and even her mother and brother, each association being temporary but seminal.I n the midst of it all, the Mutiny of 1857 against the East IndiaCompany takes place and disrupts the idyllic and hedonistic world surrounding the courtesans, bringing the stark force of history into the narrative.

After the mutiny, when Umrao returns to her beloved Lucknow, a sea change has taken place, encompassing everything from society to culture to her own profession itself. In fact, the author describes physical changes in the urban landscape etc to convey the metaphor of change in the social landscape. This paper endeavors totake a look at each of those changes and explore their meanings in the historical context.The most prominent effect of the Mutiny was a complete loss of livelihood for the courtesans. It is not difficult to understand thecause for this development because the institution of courtesanshipwas funded by the social elites, the creme de la creme of Indian society.

This phenomenon has to be seen in light of the fact that thiswas the era when the Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar was just anominal figurehead and the dynasty itself existed in an extremely attenuated form. Due to the lack of a strong, centralized rule, small regional princely states had come into their own and local rulers who had neither the finances nor the military strength to defendthemselves from other small states depended on the British for'protection' and legitimacy. Nawabs or Rajahs were adopted titles to signify their status even though their power itself was contingent upon British power. Before and after the mutiny, when the British used policies like Doctrine of Lapse and annexed Awadh and Jhansi, thepower of such rulers eroded to a great extent. The financial wherewithal of these and other small rulers also decreased drastically due to the confiscation and in effect, the last remaining vestige oftheir power also crumbled. Once the sentinels of high culture, these patrons of courtesans now found themselves leading an existence in abject penury. Numerous such instances (Nawab Chabban being disinherited from his uncle's will) arementioned in the story, giving an idea of the strong hierarchy present in Indian society. Even though there is a great degree of fluctuation in the persons occupying rungs of the pecking order, the order remains intact. This fluidity in social mobility also gives the character ofthe courtesan a paradox; she, who is supposed to be just a slave to the affluence of a patron, manages to have affections for the fallen individuals who lose their economic and social standing.

After the Mutiny, this class falls by the wayside. Once this clientele was lost,courtesanship degenerated into a form of prostitution, similar to the sex workers of today, far removed from the paraphernalia of education and high culture which courtesans ironically were provided with. The practice moved to seedy basement of society in search of patrons and existence, albeit a wretched one.Another class of patrons which never had the social standing of Nawabsbut nevertheless were frequent visitors of courtesans was bandits (asenunciated by the character Faiz Ali, who facilitates Umrao's escapefrom her apartment). These bandits, who often looted passengers,British and Indian, found themselves at the receiving end of a major crackdown on thuggee post 1857 by a rejuvenated British administration. This ensured the loss of their livelihood and as aconsequence, loss of patronage for the courtesans. Combined with the loss in clientele among the elites, this acted as one of the primaryreasons for the decline of the institution. In spite of the loss ofthis section of clientele, there were those Indian patrons who werepart of the British administration, yet had sympathies with the subject of their affections.
This fact throws light upon the emotional churning that would have taken place in the minds of the Indian servants of the Raj in carrying out the repressive measures of the Company. The tussle between the dual identities of a British servantor soldier and an Indian 'nationality' is not restricted to thisparticular instance. At many points during the Raj, they had to arrive at temporary compromises regarding their conceptions of Self and Other. As proved by the Mutiny itself, sometimes these conclusions were even unfavorable for the British.

Umrao Jaan, inspite of being a book whose protagonist is a courtesan,does not fall prey to victimization of it's character and there is no overt sympathy or effort to justify Umrao. It is here that it achieves a different purpose: the one of humanizing a 'barbaric' institution's participants. The British had sought to do exactly the opposite. To justify the colonization of a land, a colonizer always needs todemonize and dehumanize the natives as a lower form of civilization. The British had sought to do this with their amplification of marginal customs and phenomena like Sati, Banditry and Coutesanship as symbols of India and its people. Combined with theories of racial superiority and application of classical dichotomies of the East and West, they had come up with a rationale for their actions. The abolition of Sati,crackdown on banditry and legalization of prostitution were portrayed as the acts required to rid a lower society of it's evils. What was conveniently forgotten was that these practices were never of the magnitude of 'epidemics' that they were made out to be. All in all,Umrao Jaan serves to give a panoramic view of a society and aninstitution in transition and deserves its place in the highestechelons of Urdu literature.

For those who got to the end of this monograph, here's a bonus...a clip of Umaro Jaan's 'grave' in Lucknow

http://www.ibnlive.com/videos/25182/mystery-of-the-real-umrao-jaan.html

Diwali and My Sweet Lord

Its been a fortnight since Diwali and even by Indian standards of punctuality, I'm fashionably late in writing about it. Yet I will do it in a bid to satisfy the insatiable demand of my enthralled readers. After the 'White Diwalis' in Connecticut in the last two years, I was determined to make this one in London count. Before I could place my shameless self-invitation phone calls to the relatives I had unearthed, manna dropped from the heaven above. Pradeep Uncle and Meera Aunty requested the pleasure of my august company for the festival. It is noteworthy that Pradeep Uncle is a doctor by profession but because of his interdisciplinary knowledge and his constant claims to lack of recognition, has been gifted a car with the number plate VIDWAN (Knowledgable one) by his gracious wife. Of couse, she herself can make a legitimate claim to the car itself, being a professor of Development Economics at University of London.

After long discussions ranging from the distinction between spirituality and religiosity, Amartya Sen and Meghnad Desai's views (thats the kind of exciting stuff Development Economists' discuss!), the differences between US and UK, we got down to the business of the day - thanking Goddess Laxmi for her magnamity (American Express giving me a credit definitely counts). With divinity satisfied, it was time for us mortals to feed ourselved. Apart from the scrumptious dinner on the table, what I was looking forward to were the roshogollas. Now these were the authentic ones which I had 'fished out' - from Brick Lane (subject of the the Monica Ali novel by the same name), a street famous for its Bangladeshi restaurants and fortutiously located 2 blocks from my residence. A Bihari belch later, we got to my favourite bit of the evening - lighting the rockets and bombs after 3 years. Of course, so much as uttering those words would probably land you at Guantanamo Bay if you're in the US, explaining why yours truly was deprived of 'having a blast' during those Diwalis. For the environmentalists out there, it would be comforting to know that these fireworks were remarkably less polluting than our Indian variety. Before you ask, they were Chinese.

After a contended nights' sleep, and a round of garden cricket with the other Apratim (son of Pradeep Uncle and Meera Aunty), we went to this ISKON temple called Bhaktivedanta Manor today morning. The bizzare juxtaposition in its name is explained by the fact that this was a manor owned by George Harrison of the Beatles' fame. After his dabblings with the Sitar, Pt Ravi Shankar, Krishna and everything Indian, he decided to donate this sprawling property to the ISKON group. The fields on either side of the pathway leading to the temple is populated by cows idly grazing about without a care in the world. In a true homage to Krishna and the Yadav clan, the same cows are milked for the prashad given out at the temple. The temple itself is a well organised affair with many Gujarati women voluntarily contributing their cooking skills in the preparation of food given to everyone. I'm not a man given to hyperbole in matters related to food, yet I have to recommend this food to any hungry college students out there. Like all good blog entries end, I found myself resolutely hitting the road to home after the hearty meal. Or wait, there is an epilogue to the story: I found this George Harrison song dedicated to Krishna called 'My Sweet Lord' with pretty corny lyrics - Give it a hear if you can...

http://www.krishnatemple.com/manor/harrison.shtm

Sack Parliament Protest

Sunday night, my flatmate and I were cleaning dishes when I suddenly noticed a red cup with Karl Marx's visage printed on it. "Brendan, are you a Marxist?", I quizzed him. Brendan, wearing a Rage Against the Machine t-shirt replied, "No mate, but I am sort of radical - interested in the revolution, you know. In fact, if you are as well, come by ... there is this huge protest outside the Parliament tomorrow." Now, being the sort who labels his political views on Facebook as Left-liberal, I decided it was my primary duty to protest. But protest what, I quietly asked him. "The War, old chap, what else?" pat came Brendan's reply.

So there I was, protesting outside the British Parliament the next day, well attired for the occasion in a Che Guevara t-shirt (Lets not get into the irony of commodification of the poor guy as part of capitalist production) with Brendan in tow. Correction, we were watching the protest because we arrived late and this whole demonstration was already encircled by the police. Now, I must mention here that there seemed to be five times the number of fluorescent jacket wearing policemen than punks with fluorescent colored hair engaging in the protest. The situation's seriousness was done no favours by Chinese tourists who were merrily clicking away pictures on their mobile phones, digital cameras and whatever new Chinese device which takes pictures. Yet, in the midst of all this absurdity which would have done Beckett and Camus proud, was some startling imagery. Baby clothes with blood stains on them hung on a line. A black man covered in a black sheet, with his duct tape sealing his mouth. A huge banner which said, "100,000 Iraqis murdered by us" (or US, if you're virulently anti-American). And an Iraqi man speaking to those who cared to listen about how his country had been devastated.

Yes, this was laughable compared to the crowd of a million which took to the London streets on 16 February, 2003 with slogans like 'Make Tea, Not War'. But this was also a sheer indictment of how run-of-the-mill, mundane and normal the War has become. The death toll in Iraq, Darfur and Lebanon competes (and often loses out) for inch and eyeball space with stock market indices on TV news channels. But who cares - leave it to seminars on World Peace in Washington to solve our problems. Maybe the 40 odd teenagers protesting outside the British parliament would not solve the world's protracted conflicts, but at least they remind us that there is something drastically wronf with it. While the rest of us stand outside the circle (literally and metaphorically) and write blog entries about them.

Photographs: http://www.flickr.com/photos/james_2005/265301770/in/set-72157594320314605/

Sunday Bazaar at Liverpool Street

So this Sunday morning, I was taking a random stroll down Bishopsgate. I would love to call it a morning jog, but self deception has its limits and in this particular activity, very precisely mathematical speed limits within which my locomotion did not qualify. Not to digress further (slightly ironic - that phrase - since I am about to describe its exact opposite), I spotted what looked like a motley cluster of stalls in the normally staid and dignified Middlesex Street. Strolling towards the stalls, my ears began to detect the intoxicating strains of regga combining with boisterous beats of Bhangra (I wonder if the mix has been tried at any nightclub yet). Intrigued, I delved further into a concentration of humanity (that motley cluster bit was just my foggy morning vision I suppose) comparable to the stifling crowds in the bylanes of Chandni Chowk. The cause for such dhakkam - dhukki soon became obvious - a temporary Sunday haat had magically sprouted on the same street which was the preserve of bored investment bankers in dark suits, downing pints in bars which lined the street, every other day of the week.

Strangely enough, the same dark suits were being sold for the price of those same pints in front of the same bars today! Okay, the bit about the same price as pints was my imagination - but you get the idea. Salesmen advertising consisted of nuggets like, "Suits for 10 pounds, suits for 10 pounds...This is not the stuff you get from India and China. This is designer stuff, straight from Bangladesh!". Moving further, I realised there were shirts, jeans, kurtis, skirts, shoes, belts, football jerseys, London memorabilia, jewellery, electronics, mobile phones, bed sheets - all up for sale at a small fraction of the loot which is branded 'Sale' at Marks & Spencer. Not to mention the atmosphere of this global marketplace - Rastafarian types exhibiting their eponymous hats under a huge cannabis poster, Egyptian movie DVDs being sold under the watchful gaze of a stern looking Nasser portrait, Jodhpuri chappals being haggled for alongside Italian shoes, Gujarati lehengas being sold cheek to jowl with bohemian skirts. If anything deserves that hackneyed term, 'free market', this was it. And I was loving it! (contrary to what perceptive readers might believe, that last bit is not an example of subliminal advertising for a certain food corporation which I will henceforth refer to as McShit).

At the end of a good two hours and 2 pounds spent in the Bazaar (for those wondering, I bought a shirt which said "When I read about the evils of drinking, I stopped ... reading!"). Realising that morning had glided into noon, I decided that it was high time I started my assignment from the spectacularly hair-raising subject of Econometrics. Bidding good-bye (a temporary one, that is - I'm sure I'll be there next week), I trudged off towards my Hall thinking about a potential correlation between jogging and shopping...

London Diaries

Bumming around has an uncanny knack of popping existentialist questions in your head - After wading in the sublime, Who am I? Does my Life have any meaning? I soon found myself gasping for breath with the inane, Will I get into grad school? Do I know if I want to go to grad school? Do I know what I do know is not incorrect information? I decided there have to be better time-killing methods than this. Then it flashed across my mind - my BLOG!!! It has been a while since I satiated the desires of its readers - at last count, it consisted of a bored yours truly - with my profound insights on life, the universe and everything else. So here it is, a revamped avtar which shall document my meaningless meanderings through the streets of London...

Krishna's divinity in the Gita

At the end of an era (kalpa) all creatures disintegrate into my nature and at the beginning of another era I manifest them again. Such it is my nature (prakriti) to follow again and again the pattern of the Infinite manifestations and disintegrations (9,7-8).

The Bhagavad Gita can be, and has often been, summarized as God Krishna’s spiritual sermon to the reluctant warrior Arjuna to resolve the ethical dilemma of killing his relatives. Like all summaries, this too conceals more than it reveals about the text and cannot be blamed for this deficiency. It is only on closer scrutiny of the text that deeper questions begin to surface; why does an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent God take human form to bring order to the world? If he is Time, who has killed all those that are killed ultimately in battle, why does he need Arjuna as an instrument? This paper seeks to analyze the nature of Krishna’s divinity, and hence prove that despite the deterministic nature of Gita’s doctrine, His intervention is necessary to grant humans any moral responsibility.

A useful beginning point for the analysis of Krishna’s actions is Chapter 3 of the Gita when its most famous message, “Act without attachment to its fruits” is expounded. Krishna explains this doctrine to Arjuna by citing his own example. Being the Creator of the universe and as he later claims, the universe itself, Krishna has no reason to act like most humans motivated by desire to gain something. Yet, he chooses to act, this choice born out of his own duty as Preserver of the Universe. As God, Krishna is above human law, nevertheless subject to his own law; Preservation of order in the world of humans is their duty, but human failure wrests this responsibility on him. The equilibrium that Krishna has to achieve is not just between good and evil, order and chaos; it is between His action and human action, determinism and free will.
Later in the chapter, Krishna explains to Arjuna how actions are caused by ‘forces of Nature’ and humans are not the agents of their choices. Assuming that nature of a human in indicated by caste, which in itself is determined through past karma, the Gita seems to degenerate into a kind of fatalism which is salvaged only by the qualifier which grants humans the choice of their attitude while acting. This is the balance between human action and God’s actions which Krishna sets out to define by prescribing the motivations of right action. Demanding intense devotion, he tells Arjuna that all actions, if committed as an offering to Him, lead one to God (4,24). The immediate, worldly results of the action are irrelevant, and as propounded earlier, should not be the motivation for the action. At surface value, it seems that this ethical system distances the performer of actions from the positive or negative effects of his actions, effectively making him immune from judgment. Yet, the essence of the ethic lies in the assumption that Krishna too acts; and when He acts, no one escapes judgment.

Krishna provides the reason for his incarnations in Chapter 4 Verse 12 when he says “When righteousness is weak and unrighteousness exults in pride, then my Spirit arises on Earth.” Keeping this context in mind, Chapter 2 of the Gita seems like an exercise in futility. After all, if it is Krishna himself who has to vanquish Adharma, why does he provide arguments for Arjuna to fight the war? In fact, Krishna’s prophetic command (“Through the fate of their karma I have already doomed them to die: be thou merely the means of his work”) in Chapter 11 complicates the question further with the introduction of Karma. The natural question which arises is about the relationship between Krishna and the Karmic law: Does the law of Karma take its own course, independent of Krishna or does he control the forces of destiny? The Gita does not answer the question and any reading between the lines would be more in the realm of speculation rather than analysis. What can be safely asserted is that the question is irrelevant to Krishna’s sermon to Arjuna. Even if the law of karma decided the fate of Arjuna’s enemies, he wasn’t aware of it and needed divine intervention to know his purpose in human history. It is to be understood that Krishna’s objective is not merely the killing of the Kauravas but to make Arjuna conscious of his duty’s importance in the restoration of Dharma. Krishna’s deliberate refusal to be the dispenser of justice despite Arjuna’s reluctance to fight is an indicator of the self-imposed limits of his duty as an avatar. Krishna’s duty is to slay the doubts in the battleground of Arjuna’s soul and not to deprive him of his duty to fight for righteousness on the actual battleground of Kurukshetra. Even though Krishna is God, He has defined his role merely as a facilitator, placing the onus of acting on human Arjuna.

It is in Chapters 7,8 and 9 of the Gita that Krishna’s characterization undergoes a great change. The failure of his arguments as charioteer, friend and guide force him to reveal to Arjuna his true nature and form. His slow elevation from a fellow human being to God whose scope of action is nothing short of the spectacular and serves to create the feelings of intimidation, love and devotion in Arjuna. The numerous qualities ascribed to Krishna in these three chapters only serve to highlight the severe constraints that language creates for the kind of entity that the Gita tries to describe. Krishna is portrayed as a God that subsumes and defies all other ontological conceptions of God. The doctrines of Monism, Dualism and Pantheism seem to dissolve in the all-encompassing nature of Krishna’s divinity. The neat categories of Self and Other begin to hold no meaning in Krishna’s presence. All pervasive, he becomes the Observer, the Observed as well as the frame of reference.

In Chapter 11, the verbal imagery of the previous three chapters culminates into a stunning darshan of Krishna’s virat form for Arjuna. The dazzling view of the Infinite Divinity that Arjun saw was a confirmation of everything that Krishna had been telling him from the beginning. Apart from the numerous Gods and forces of nature that resided in Krishna’s body, Arjuna saw one sight which completely changed his mindset. Seeing Krishna’s bloody fangs which had the Kauravas trapped between them, Arjuna, for one moment, became privy to the future and the past (“I have already killed them’). The change in perspective from linear to circular time made him realize his own insignificance as well as importance in carrying out what was pre-ordained. Expanding the sphere of his choice and action to centuries forward and backward, Krishna struck a double blow. It emphasized not just his own greatness, but also gave Arjuna an assured place in his infinite divine form, giving his future actions a new meaning. The vision of Chapter 11 is as much about Krishna’s divinity as it is about Arjuna’s. Ultimately, this vision serves to motivate Arjuna much more than Krishna’s arguments, even though the vision corroborates them quite nicely. In fact, such an expansive view of divinity lends itself particularly well to the initial argument that Krishna had made to Arjuna about killing, (2,19) according to which the Eternal in man cannot kill or die.

In the light of the earlier paragraphs observations about Arjuna’s divine role, it is interesting to note his comment when Krishna reverts back to his human form. Arjuna says, “When I see thy gentle human face, Krishna, I return to my own nature, and my heart has peace.” (11, 51) Arjuna, in the beginning of the Gita, was a conflicted character whose behavior was anomalous to his position in the karma-dharma system. He is a character who rebels against the dictates of his ‘nature’ as a warrior, because of the attachments to his kin. His rebellion is the first signs of a revolution that Krishna seeks to quell through his discourse in the Gita. As preserver of the existing order, Krishna rises to the occasion to defend the structures created by Him. Yet, Krishna chooses not to intrude into the circumscribed sphere of Arjuna’s actions. This is because Arjuna carries out Krishna’s duty on Earth. As a defender of righteousness, Arjuna is Krishna’s first line of defense against evil in the world of human beings. Aware that a conflict within him was a precursor to much larger conflicts, Krishna chooses to focus on Arjuna’s enlightenment rather than obliterate the forces of adharma. Restoration of peace within him after Krishna’s vision made the restoration of order in the world an inevitable byproduct.

It is to be understood that Krishna’s reliance on Arjuna is not because He himself is incapable of achieving the task of destroying evil. His exhortation to Arjuna to act is born out of a much deeper reason, that of granting humans the right to chart the course of their lives, however misdirected they may be. Krishna is not a God who revels in self-inflicted human miseries and waits for an opportune moment to eradicate them; He is a God who prods and urges his imperfect creations to follow their duty. Like a parent, He allows his human children to make mistakes because the essence of their existence depends on their perceived ability to choose. The veil of Maya which envelops human memories is but a useful device to grant ‘free will’. When the system is on the verge of breaking down because of the materialism and hedonism resulting from Maya, Krishna lifts the veil off agents like Arjuna who display a predisposition to faith in God. Later, as these memories fade away, the system moves inexorably towards the state of disequilibrium. Krishna’s intervention through Arjuna is not a sign of the failure of the cyclical system. It is how the system works – providing at each step, room for humans to choose, not their actions, but the attitude with which they act. In conclusion, it can then be claimed that the doctrine of the Gita does reconcile determinism and free will, but a faith in Krishna’s intercession is critical to its particular solution.