A New Start

FT, Economist etc: Celebrated Indian field marshal with a razor-sharp wit

Manekshaw himself once remarked on the fine line between being a field marshal and being fired. Yet his approach never wavered. "A yes man is a dangerous man," he once said. "He will be despised by his subordinates and used by his superiors."

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Celebrated Indian field marshal with a razor-sharp wit

By Stephen Fidler

Published: July 5 2008 03:00 | Last updated: July 5 2008 03:00

It was February 1942 on the Sittang River in Burma. Sam Manekshaw had already lost half his men as they fought to take Pagoda Hill from the Japanese invaders. He rallied what was left of his company, urging them to continue the advance.

Then, just as they captured the hill, a burst of machinegun fire hit Manekshaw in the stomach. As he lay there he was spotted by Major General David Cowan, who had seen the young captain's bravery but feared his wounds might be mortal. Kneeling beside him, Cowan took off his own Military Cross ribbon and pinned it on Manekshaw's chest, saying: "A dead man cannot be awarded the Military Cross."

[from The Economist: Another story has it that a surgeon was going to give up on his bullet-riddled body, until he asked him what had happened and got the reply, "I was kicked by a donkey." A joker at such a time, the surgeon reckoned, had a chance.]

The general was wrong to doubt the officer's powers of survival but right about his valour. The courage of Sam Manekshaw, who has died a field marshal at the age of 94, was to help make him one of India's most successful military leaders. His seminal victory over Pakistan's forces in 1971 led to the creation of Bangladesh and turned Manekshaw into a national hero. One biographer described him as having "charm and persistence, an irreverence towards red tape, an iron determination, an eye for details plus a strategic mind that embraced all". He also had a razor-sharp wit.

A man with an eye for the ladies, his relationship with one lady in particular, Indira Gandhi, India's prime minister during the 1971 war, defined his career. When she asked him before the conflict if he was prepared, he replied: "I'm always ready, sweetie." Unlike politicians and top bureaucrats, he refused to call her madam, saying it was a term "better suited to a brothel keeper".

He was one of those men whose personality leaps out of his photograph. There is one of him sitting at a military parade in 2004. He is 90 and his back is not as straight as it was, but his eyes look directly at the camera and, beneath the military moustache, there is the hint of a smile. His left breast is bedecked with medals, his feet with shiny black brogues and he holds an elaborately carved swagger stick in his right hand. Manekshaw was fastidious about his appearance but his uniform, typically, did not conform to regulation.

For a man to become a myth in his own lifetime, it helps to live for a long time, not least because many of his rivals will not. It helps if he fosters a reputation for straight talking and to have a sense of humour - not least about himself. Yet Manekshaw never seemed to be consciously managing his own image.

Sam Hormusji Framji Jamshedji Manekshaw was born in 1914 in the age of the Raj. His parents were members of the Parsi community - Zoroastrians who immigrated from Persia 1,000 years ago and who have occupied some of the highest positions in modern India in the military, the law, the arts and business.

The young Sam grew up in Amritsar, capital of the Punjab, and attended the British-style boarding school, Sherwood College. He had wanted to study medicine but instead joined the first ever cohort of officer cadets to attend the new Indian Military College at Dehradun. Commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1934, he was for a time attached to Britain's Royal Scots regiment. In 1939 he married Siloo Bode, and the couple had two daughters.

During the second world war he served twice in Burma. Having recovered from his wounds at Pagoda Hill - the official citation for his MC said the success of the attack was "largely due to the excellent leadership and bearing of Captain Manekshaw" - he was sent back to Burma and was wounded a second time. At the end of the war, he showed his talent for planning and organisation first in rehabilitating 10,000 prisoners of war and then in the run-up to the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947.

In 1971, it was the crisis between east and west Pakistan, created as two unconnected territories at the time of partition, that was to prove Manekshaw's finest moment. The rout of Pakistan's forces under his leadership was a strategic coup for New Delhi. It split east from west Pakistan and led to the creation of the independent state of Bangladesh. This meant that never again would India have to fight its rival on two fronts at the same time. The rapid victory erased memories of the humiliating defeat in a border conflict with the Chinese in 1962 and the stalemate of the 1965 war with Pakistan over Kashmir.

With millions of refugees pouring over the border, some of the politicians had wanted to go to war in April but the key to victory was to wait until December to engage with the Pakistanis. This ensured the monsoon season had passed and the plains of Bengal were drier. By then, too, snow in the Himalayas blocked off any prospect of Chinese intervention. It was Manekshaw who was credited with standing up to the impatient politicians and his resistance made him a hugely popular figure. Some have subsequently questioned his role. General Jacob-Farj-Rafael Jacob, chief of staff for India's eastern command in 1971, became the brunt of fierce criticism last year when he said it was he and not Manekshaw who had refused to attack in April. Moreover, he added that Manekshaw's military plan did not include taking Dhaka, the fall of which was essential to victory. Ramachandra Guha, a leading historian of modern India, has also claimed that the archives suggest that Manekshaw did not play that primary a role.

Whether a revision of Manekshaw's place in history will follow his death is uncertain. But his death is significant perhaps in other respects. It sym-bolises the passing of the generation of officers that served in both the British and Indian armies. Their legacy remains. "Indian generals still feel more comfortable with their British counterparts than with those from the US," says Professor Guha.

Manekshaw himself once remarked on the fine line between being a field marshal and being fired. Yet his approach never wavered. "A yes man is a dangerous man," he once said. "He will be despised by his subordinates and used by his superiors."

Stephen Fidler

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

Sam Manekshaw

Jul 3rd 2008
From The Economist print edition

EPA

Sam Manekshaw, soldier, died on June 27th, aged 94

HIS most famous remark was not, strictly speaking, true. On the eve of the war with Pakistan in December 1971 that led to the creation of Bangladesh, India's prime minister, Indira Gandhi, asked her army chief, Sam Hormusji Framji Jamshedji Manekshaw, if he was ready for the fight. He replied with the gallantry, flirtatiousness and sheer cheek for which he was famous: "I am always ready, sweetie." (He said he could not bring himself to call Mrs Gandhi "Madame", because it reminded him of a bawdy-house.)

Yet General Manekshaw himself recounted a cabinet meeting in Mrs Gandhi's office in April 1971. To forestall secession, the Pakistani government had already cracked down in what was then East Pakistan. Hundreds of thousands of refugees had crossed the border into India. Mrs Gandhi wanted the army to invade Pakistan. General Manekshaw resisted. The monsoon, he pointed out, would soon start in East Pakistan, turning rivers into oceans. His armoured division and two infantry divisions were deployed elsewhere. To shift them would need the entire railway network, so the grain harvest could not be transported and would rot, bringing famine. And of his armoured division's 189 tanks, only 11 were fit to fight.

He was not, in other words, ready. But, as he put it, "There is a very thin line between being dismissed and becoming a field-marshal." Mrs Gandhi rejected the resignation he offered, and acceded to the delay he wanted. His job, he told her, was to fight to win. In December he did, cutting through the Pakistani army like a knife through butter, and taking Dhaka within two weeks. Quibblers later noted that this was not one of his original war aims. He had the most important attribute of any successful general: good luck.

That was not the only time he threatened to quit. Mrs Gandhi once questioned him about rumours that he was plotting a coup. In response, he asked if she wanted his resignation on grounds of mental instability. Yet if she and other politicians were in awe of him as a professional soldier and grateful for his lack of political ambition, his men loved him for his willingness to take on their civilian bosses and stand up for the army's interests.

He had shown this in the Indian army's darkest hour, the abject defeat in 1962 by China. Already a general, he had the previous year quarrelled with India's defence minister, V.K. Krishna Menon, about national security. He was vindicated when the Chinese army swatted aside Indian resistance and briefly occupied what is now the state of Arunachal Pradesh. Mr Menon resigned. General Manekshaw was rushed to the front to rally the demoralised troops. His first order was: "There will be no withdrawal without written orders and these orders shall never be issued."

General Manekshaw was able to demand courage from his soldiers because his own was not in doubt. Known as Sam "Bahadur", or Sam the Brave, an honorific given him by the Indian army's Gurkhas, the first of his five wars was for the British in Burma, where he was seriously wounded. Assuming he would die, an English general pinned his own Military Cross on Captain Manekshaw's chest, since the medal could not be awarded posthumously. Another story has it that a surgeon was going to give up on his bullet-riddled body, until he asked him what had happened and got the reply, "I was kicked by a donkey." A joker at such a time, the surgeon reckoned, had a chance.

Stiff but hairy

There was something of British military tradition in his stiff upper lip, the lavish handlebar moustache in which he cloaked it, the dapper little embellishments to his uniform and his partiality for Scotch whisky. Yet he was born into a very particular and tight-knit community: India' s small and dwindling Parsi minority, which has produced a disproportionate number of leading Indians, such as the members of the Tata and Godrej business dynasties. Sam Manekshaw was another Parsi overachiever. He was the first of only two field-marshals ever created in the army.

Yet his retirement since 1973 was not one long bask in glory. Former deputies felt he had monopolised the credit for various victories. Then last year his name was linked to bizarre allegations, by the son of a former Pakistani president, against an unnamed brigadier who had once sold Indian war plans to Pakistan. All nonsense, said those who knew him. Already in hospital, General Manekshaw was in part shielded from controversy.

After his death, anger at the slur, and at the lack of proper honour for one of India's true heroes, rumbled on. The prime minister, along with the army, navy, and air-force chiefs, all missed his funeral—which was a modest one held in Tamil Nadu in the south, not a grand one in the capital. His friends grumbled that even foreigners such as Lord Mountbatten were afforded greater respect in death. Bangladesh, however, paid grateful tribute to his part in the nation's foundation.

He too might well have been disappointed that his obsequies were not grander. His last words were "I'm OK", though he had rehearsed a better line nearly 37 years earlier. For death at least, the brave soldier had indeed shown himself "always ready".

Copyright © 2008 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

http://www.india-today.com/itoday/millennium/100people/sam.html

BUILDERS & BREAKERS Prophet of Hate Sam Manekshaw By A S Kalkat
1914: Born in Amritsar. 1933: Joins the Indian Military Academy. 1934: Commissioned into the army. 1947: Pakistan invades Kashmir. Is colonel in charge of operations. 1962: Sent to NEFA to check further Chinese intrusion. 1965: Commander, Eastern Command during the Indo-Pak war. 1969: Appointed chief of the army staff. 1971: Indo-Pak war. Steers India to victory. and Bangladesh is created. 1973: Given the rank of Field Marshal.

In 1942 at the height of the World War II a fierce battle was raging in Myanmar, then Burma, at the Sittang Bridge. A company of the Indian Army was engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the invading Japanese forces for the capture of a position, which was critical for the control of the bridge. The young company commander was exhorting his troops when his stomach was riddled by a machine gun burst. Afraid that his company would be left leaderless if he were evacuated, he continued fighting till he collapsed.

His company won the day and the general commanding the Indian forces arrived at the scene to congratulate the soldiers. On seeing the critically wounded commander, he announced the immediate award of the Military Cross -- the young officer was not expected to survive much longer and the Military Cross is not awarded posthumously. Thus began a historic military career that spanned the Indo-Pak wars and the Sino-Indian conflict, the wounded captain surviving to become India's first field marshal.

In 1947 when Pakistan invaded Kashmir, Sam Manekshaw was the colonel in charge of operations at the Army Headquarters. His incisive grasp of the situation and his acumen for planning instantly drew the attention of his superiors and Manekshaw's rise was spectacular, though not without controversy. He was outspoken and stood by his convictions. This, coupled with his sense of humour, often got him into trouble with politicians.

In 1961, for instance, he refused to toe the line of the then defence minister V.K. Krishna Menon and was sidelined. He was vindicated soon after when the Indian army suffered a humiliating defeat in nefa the next year, at the hands of the Chinese, resulting in Menon's resignation. Prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru rushed Manekshaw to nefa to command the retreating Indian forces. This had an electrifying effect on the demoralised officers. In no time, Manekshaw convinced the troops that the Chinese soldier was not "10 ft tall". His first order of the day characteristically said, "There will be no withdrawal without written orders and these orders shall never be issued." The soldiers showed faith in their new commander and successfully checked further ingress by the Chinese.

The Indo-Pak war of 1965 saw Manekshaw as army commander, Eastern Command. When India was forced to launch operations in the west, Manekshaw was against attacking in the east since the main sufferers would be the people of East Pakistan. The wisdom of his advice dawned when the Indian forces fought the Pakistan army in East Pakistan in 1971.

This was Manekshaw's finest hour. As army chief and chairman, Chiefs of Staff Committee, he planned the operation meticulously refusing to be coerced by politicians to act prematurely. His strategic and operational finesse was evident when Indian pincers cut through Pakistani forces like knife through butter, quickly checkmating them.

When the prime minister asked him to go to Dhaka and accept the surrender of the Pakistani forces, he declined, magnanimously saying the honour should go to his army commander in the east. He would only go if it were to accept the surrender of the entire Pakistan Army.

Manekshaw's competence, professional standing and public stature was such that the politician and the bureaucrat alike crossed his path only at their peril. On one occasion, he found that the defence secretary had penned his own observations on a note he had written to the prime minister and defence minister. Infuriated, Manekshaw took the file and walked straight into Mrs Gandhi's office. He told her that if she found the defence secretary more competent than him to advise her on military matters she did not have a need for him. The defence secretary was found a new job.

As a commander, he was a hard taskmaster. He encouraged his officers in the face of adversity but did not tolerate incompetence. That is perhaps Manekshaw's greatest contribution, to instil a sense of duty, efficiency, professionalism in a modern Indian army and to stand up to political masters and bureaucratic interference.

In a way, he was following the path of other army chiefs, K.S. Thimayya K.M. Cariappa. A holy terror, there are many tales of the power of his whiplash. Following Pakistan's surrender in the east, Manekshaw flew into Calcutta to compliment his officers. The ceremonial reception over at Dum Dum airport, he was escorted to a car -- a Mercedes captured from the enemy. Manekshaw refused to sit in it, leaving the officers red-faced.

On another occasion, a general accused of misusing funds was marched up to him. "Sir, do you know what you are saying?" asked the general. "You are accusing a general of being dishonest." Replied Manekshaw: "Your chief is not only accusing you of being dishonest but also calling you a thief. If I were you I would go home and either shoot myself or resign. I am waiting to see what you will do." The general submitted his resignation that evening.

Lt-General A.K. Kalkat is a former army commander and belongs to Manekshaw's regiment, 8 Gorkha Rifles.

Economist: Michelle Obama's America

Lexington

Michelle Obama's America

Jul 3rd 2008
From The Economist print edition

Is Barack Obama's wife his rock or his bitter half?

Illustration by Kevin Kallaugher

THERE are two ways to be a political spouse. You can shun the limelight or you can grab it. Margaret Thatcher’s late husband, Denis, exemplified the former approach. He never upstaged his wife and though intelligent and rich, he was content to be viewed as a golfing, gin-swilling duffer. At the opposite end of the spectrum are the Clintons. Hillary was Bill’s closest adviser when he was president, and he would have done the same for her, had she been elected. Neither approach is right or wrong, but both have predictable consequences. If you keep your mouth shut, you are unlikely to stir up controversy. If you speak up, you may help your spouse, but you risk hurting him or her, too.

John McCain’s wife, Cindy, gazes adoringly at him on the stump but says little. If she has to introduce him, she says she loves him and hopes you will vote for him. She may favour pink skirt-suits over golfing trousers, but in her reluctance to say anything that might conceivably hurt her spouse she is unmistakably a (Denis) Thatcherite. Hostile bloggers half-heartedly accuse her of being a Stepford wife or make snide cracks about the fortune she inherited and her past addiction to painkillers. But she seldom captures the headlines and seems to like it that way.

Michelle Obama falls somewhere between the two poles. Unlike Bill or Hillary, she has never hinted that she expects to be co-president. But unlike Mrs McCain, she criss-crosses the country making fiery speeches on her husband’s behalf. In many ways, she is a huge asset to his campaign. She is clever, driven, beautiful and articulate. Even when he is not there, she draws large, avid crowds. Yet she still finds time to be supermum. She bought two laptops so her husband can see and talk to his daughters when he is on the road. She teases him about his snoring and makes him take out the rubbish. He calls her “my rock”.

Like her husband, she exemplifies the American dream, having risen from humble roots to Princeton, Harvard and a $275,000-a-year job handling “community and external affairs” and “business diversity” for a hospital in Chicago. But her story is otherwise quite different from his. His background is more exotic and chaotic. His mother was white, his father was Kenyan, they broke up when he was two and the young Barack later lived in Hawaii and Indonesia. Michelle’s family, by contrast, was hard-up but intact. It was also all-black, all-American and rooted in the South Side of Chicago. Michelle grew up knowing useful people: she was chummy with Jesse Jackson’s daughter and even baby-sat his son when she was a teenager.

When Barack was starting out as a politician, his rivals dismissed him as inauthentically African-American or even “the white man in blackface”. Having Michelle at his side helped reassure sceptical blacks that he was really one of them. Even the precise shade of her skin colour may have helped him at the polls. Famous black men often pick light-skinned or white wives. Some black women resent this. That Michelle is quite dark may have endeared Barack to black female voters who might otherwise have voted for Hillary Clinton.

Now that the primaries are over, the issues have changed. Blacks are solidly for Mr Obama, but many swing voters are unsure. Some Republicans think his wife’s habit of speaking her mind could prove a problem. For example, in February, as her husband’s campaign was catching fire, she said: “For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country, because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback.” Some Americans bristle at the implication that the only worthwhile thing any of them has done in the past quarter-century is to back Mr Obama.

Mrs Obama’s speeches rarely accentuate the positive. America, to her, is a “downright mean” country where families struggle to buy food, where mothers are terrified of being fired if they get pregnant and where “life for regular folks has gotten worse over the course of my lifetime”. But she was born in 1964, when Americans lived shorter, poorer lives and southern blacks couldn’t vote. Whereas her husband is magically skilled at not giving offence, Mrs Obama can be a blunt instrument. “Don’t go into corporate America,” she urges young people, denigrating what most Americans do for a living and biting the hand that pays for all the public programmes she favours. “Barack Obama will require you to work,” she says. “He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation…Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.” Some people would rather decide for themselves how to live their lives.

The bitter bit

Conservative pundits have savaged her. One acerbic blogger calls her “Obama’s bitter half”. Others mock her occasional gripes about her personal finances and her solipsistic college thesis about the woes of black Princetonians. The National Review says she “embodies a peculiar mix of privilege and victimology, which is not where most Americans live. On the other hand, it does make her a terrific Oprah guest.”

Mr Obama says people should lay off his wife. Laura Bush agrees. And one has to sympathise with Mrs Obama. She was always a reluctant political wife. Her husband’s crazy hours and long absences impose a hefty burden on her and on their children. In dark moments, she fears for his physical safety. And all the while, both she and her husband are subjected to maliciously false gossip online.

But not all criticism is unfair. If Mr Obama is president, his wife will have the ear of the most powerful man on earth. So her political views matter. And if she expresses them forcefully in speech after speech, she can hardly cry foul when not everyone likes what she says. On June 30th she appeared on the front page of USA Today saying: “I don’t want to be a distraction.” For better or for worse, she is.

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FT: 'I feel less afraid of the world'

And there are several more about the Dalai Lama, who, like Palin, is also known to laugh easily. "He came in and shook my hand and then he shook the hands of every member of the [film] crew," says Palin. "People just don't bother, they don't notice [the crew. But] he took each person in and I felt, 'I must remember that.' "

I notice my digital recorder appears not to be working. "Does it switch itself off when it's bored?" he wonders, the comic timing that first made him famous as part of the Monty Python team in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s still in evidence.

"I always bring it down to the personal experience," he replies. "The other thing is to give a voice to people who don't normally have a voice, who would not be interviewed generally and to go to places where people would not normally go."

am worried that this is a bit like telling Paul McCartney you never listened to the Beatles. "I'm immensely relieved," he says to my own relief. "In some people's eyes it makes one totally legendary. I find talking about Python not that exciting because people tend to want to hear about how their favourite sketch was written or some anecdote involving The Life of Brian ."

I laugh out loud but Palin goes on, more seriously, to say: "I'm not pretending there aren't dangers but I think saying, 'These are the places we should not go,' restricts communication and curiosity. I do a lot of talks and people sometimes ask you very earnest questions, 'What do you know about the world now?' And, God, I don't know anything. Whoever said travel is more about questions than answers got it exactly right. I get more confused but the one thing I do feel is less afraid of the world than I would if I didn't travel."

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'I feel less afraid of the world'

By Rahul Jacob

Published: June 28 2008 03:00 | Last updated: June 28 2008 03:00

When Michael Palin met the Dalai Lama a few years ago, the Tibetan leader said he recognised Palin from his television travel programmes. The two quickly discovered that they had shared a passion for geography from an early age. "It's just an assumption but I felt a certain empathy when he was talking about how atlases were his favourite books when he was young and I said they had been mine too," recalls Palin.

Palin met the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala in northern India, where he has lived in exile for nearly 50 years since fleeing China in a dramatic 15-day journey by foot. A few weeks later, Palin found himself in the Dalai Lama's apartments in the Potala Palace in Lhasa while filming a series on the Himalayas. "Looking out over the city and the plains, I thought, 'This is what he was doing growing up in the 1950s and there was me in Sheffield looking at an atlas also.' "

Palin has barely sat down at Wiltons restaurant in St James's before he is telling stories. First there is one about how he was once photographed during lunch and how acutely embarrassing it was. The photographer's enormous lamps had shone a spotlight on him in the middle of the restaurant. It was, he says, "admirable" that everyone else carried on as if this were entirely normal.

There is one about his own failure to show a similar level of restraint when, at a friend's wedding, the registrar read out all the bridegroom's middle names, including one that none of his friends had known before. Everyone was laughing "including his betrothed", Palin recalls, and the only way out was to look as if "we were very moved".

And there are several more about the Dalai Lama, who, like Palin, is also known to laugh easily. "He came in and shook my hand and then he shook the hands of every member of the [film] crew," says Palin. "People just don't bother, they don't notice [the crew. But] he took each person in and I felt, 'I must remember that.' "

I notice my digital recorder appears not to be working. "Does it switch itself off when it's bored?" he wonders, the comic timing that first made him famous as part of the Monty Python team in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s still in evidence.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the filming of Around the World in 80 Days , the BBC programme that marked the launch of Palin's hugely successful second act as a travel journalist. Its success prompted epic television adventures such as Pole to Pole (1992), Sahara with Michael Palin (2002) and Himalaya with Michael Palin (2004).

Aside from the great landscape shots, the charm of watching Palin's shows lies in his ability to put people at ease even when he doesn't share a common language. Watching Michael Palin's New Europe , first aired last year, I chuckled through an episode in Latvia where Palin is made to wear a wreath about the size of a bush and participates in a pagan dance, all of which he goes along with gamely. In Turkey, a young woman tells him she dated a man who participated in the local passion for wrestling in leather pantaloons after olive oil has been poured all over the combatants and Palin sets off to investigate.

In the book that accompanied the series, Palin writes of being on a boat at dawn, making its way along Croatia's coastline. "What I am looking out on now is Dalmatia and I'm not the only one excited by it . . . Shakespeare set part of Twelfth Night here. Dalmatia, homeland of the Illyrians, was settled 5,000 years even before the Greeks and Romans arrived. This is not new Europe, this is very old Europe."

Our first courses arrive remarkably quickly - gazpacho for me and smoked eel for him. Aware from my own experience as the FT's travel editor of the challenges of travel writing in an era when so many of us are frequent flyers, I ask how he keeps his work interesting and relevant. "I always bring it down to the personal experience," he replies. "The other thing is to give a voice to people who don't normally have a voice, who would not be interviewed generally and to go to places where people would not normally go."

The inspiration for New Europe came from his feeling, when waking up on a long-haul flight back to London, that he was flying above places that were just two hours from Heathrow but which he knew little about. I suggest the series resonated partly because so much of the workforce in Britain is from eastern Europe, not least the staff in restaurants. Later I ask the waitress where she is from and this leads to an animated conversation between her and Palin about her native Moldova. His empathy builds bridges with people he meets - and in turn with audiences around the world.

Our main courses - poached halibut for him and grilled salmon for me - have been brought as speedily as the first course and this prompts Palin to remark on how unusually attentive the restaurant's service is by London's standards. Before he came here he had assumed the quintessentially British Wiltons ("since 1742"), complete with green velvet banquettes in separate booths, would be the sort of place that "members of the House of Lords visited with their researchers". On his previous visit, however, he remembers a group of businessmen from Dubai trooped over to his table and asked him to look them up when he was next there. Palin says he picked the restaurant for our meeting today because it is quiet and apologises because it is expensive.

By this point, I am relaxed enough to confess that, having grown up in Calcutta, I never watched Palin in Monty Python's Flying Circus , the TV series that made him and the other Pythons - including Eric Idle and John Cleese - comedy legends, nor in the subsequent Python films. I am worried that this is a bit like telling Paul McCartney you never listened to the Beatles. "I'm immensely relieved," he says to my own relief. "In some people's eyes it makes one totally legendary. I find talking about Python not that exciting because people tend to want to hear about how their favourite sketch was written or some anecdote involving The Life of Brian ."

Palin traces his gift for comedy back to boarding school, where he enjoyed impersonating teachers. As a 10-year-old in 1953, he developed a mini-cabaret based on the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. "I would tell this running story about the coronation and it was about the Duke of Edinburgh being taken short."

I ask whether it was ever performed on stage in school and this leads Palin to reminisce about how his father, an engineer at a steel mill, was wary of his son's interest in acting. "He just saw this as a folly that would lead to a life of dependence on him. I didn't realise until he died quite how little [money] he had. He put about a third of his salary, about £500 a year, into educating me at Shrewsbury."

When he was growing up, Palin had assumed that his father had a particular dislike of theatre. In fact, "it was all to do with his hoping that I would eventually get a good job, probably better than he got."

Returning to travel, Palin recounts how an Ethiopian approached him in London a couple of years ago and thanked him for not showing his country as a victim. "Everybody has a sense of pride about where they live," he says. "I don't think the way to help is to say, 'Help is on its way from the World Bank.' I remember being in Tanzania once and the World Bank representative was in Dar es Salaam to discuss the next five years of Tanzania's economic cycle. They all seemed in terrible awe of him. I am not an interventionist. I really find that when we intervene, we just cock it up."

We discuss a shared concern - the often overly alarmist travel warnings issued by the UK Foreign Office and US State Department against visiting many parts of the developing world - and this produces another rich anecdote. When Palin was filming a few years ago in the admittedly dangerous tribal areas of northern Pakistan, a posse of 10 local policemen was sent to accompany him and the BBC crew. He wandered into a local market "to watch people make guns".

"A man came up and talked quite aggressively about the British and our policy towards Pakistan and Afghanistan and I remember thinking, 'This could get nasty and I'm glad we have 10 security guys with us.' They were nowhere to be seen. It did not turn into a problem at all but I said later, 'Where were the guys?' It turned out that the police were so pleased to be with the BBC, they were having a group photo taken with the camera crew."

I laugh out loud but Palin goes on, more seriously, to say: "I'm not pretending there aren't dangers but I think saying, 'These are the places we should not go,' restricts communication and curiosity. I do a lot of talks and people sometimes ask you very earnest questions, 'What do you know about the world now?' And, God, I don't know anything. Whoever said travel is more about questions than answers got it exactly right. I get more confused but the one thing I do feel is less afraid of the world than I would if I didn't travel."

After decades of travelling, however, Palin, who turned 65 last month, has decided that he wants to stay home with his wife Helen, who once joked that she might have to divorce him because she had tired of answering questions from reporters about what a nice man he was. Being away for several weeks at a time has become a bore for Palin and he wants to enjoy watching his two-year-old grandson grow up.

Then, after allowing me to quiz him obsessively about my favourite actress, Maggie Smith, whom he has worked with, Palin thanks me and rushes off to another appointment. He was right about the bill - it is exorbitant - but, hearing the jollity prompted by Palin's goodbyes to the staff at the front of the restaurant, I think that you can't put a price on that ability to make people laugh.

'New Europe' by Michael Palin is out now in paperback (Orion Books, £7.99)

Rahul Jacob is the FT's travel, food and drink editor

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: Figure of speech

But he always recognises JFK's primacy in both domains: "I never confused which of us was the elected leader and which was the assistant."

The president who appears in Sorensen's stories is rigorous, curious and aware of his own frailties - dissimilar in most respects, then, from the current incumbent. The world's opinion of America's leader was also strikingly different at that time. When a US emissary briefed French President Charles de Gaulle on the Soviet missile sites in Cuba in October 1962, de Gaulle brushed aside an offer to review the CIA's aerial photography. "No," he said, "the word of the President of the United States is good enough for me."

Counselor is a wise and handsomely written memoir which reveals the uncommon attributes of its author. Somehow Sorensen has dodged the pomposity which attaches to so many important men in their advanced years. He recognises his failures and limitations; he cites the charges levelled by his critics, to whom he is generous; he enumerates regrets which he might easily have concealed. He has even forgotten his Secret Service code name, which others display as a badge of honour.

According to this book, John Kennedy was "a good and decent man". My first thought was that this is too sentimental a judgment. But he must have been, to have attracted so fine an associate as Ted Sorensen.

==

Figure of speech

By Michael Fullilove

Published: June 21 2008 03:00 | Last updated: June 21 2008 03:00

I once attended a talk given by President John F Kennedy's speechwriter, adviser and "intellectual blood bank", Ted Sorensen. He was asked who had written the most famous line in Kennedy's inaugural address, "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." Was it JFK's work, or his speechwriter's? Sorensen's answer was magnificent: "Ask not!"

The speechwriter's code of silence requires that a discreet veil be drawn over the drafting process. Adherence to this code is rare these days, however. Speechwriters routinely brief friends and journalists about their authorship of some golden phrase or other. Occasionally they even scrap publicly for credit.

Sorensen is different. For more than four decades, he minimised his role in the drafting of the speeches delivered on the New Frontier. Only now, in this new memoir, with the other parties dead and the archives open, does Sorensen pull back the veil - a little.

Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History throws new light on Sorensen's central role in both the speechwriting and policy processes in the Kennedy White House ("I was too busy ever [?] to smell the flowers in the White House Rose Garden," he notes). But he always recognises JFK's primacy in both domains: "I never confused which of us was the elected leader and which was the assistant."

The president who appears in Sorensen's stories is rigorous, curious and aware of his own frailties - dissimilar in most respects, then, from the current incumbent. The world's opinion of America's leader was also strikingly different at that time. When a US emissary briefed French President Charles de Gaulle on the Soviet missile sites in Cuba in October 1962, de Gaulle brushed aside an offer to review the CIA's aerial photography. "No," he said, "the word of the President of the United States is good enough for me."

Sorensen admits JFK's flaws: his faint-heartedness in ducking a 1954 vote to censure Senator Joe McCarthy, his "blind spot on Cuba" and his "deaf ear on China". And he acknowledges the president's philandering: "He should have known that ultimately the inevitable disclosure of his misconduct could diminish the moral force and credibility of all the good he was doing," Sorensen writes. On the other hand, Sorensen refuses to provide succour to Kennedy's enemies, stating, "I know of no occasion where his private life interfered with the fulfillment of his public duties."

In other words, Sorensen keeps faith with Kennedy. Though a conscientious obj-ector in his youth, Sorensen is a good soldier. Here, too, there is a stark contemporary comparison in the former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan. McClellan would not, I suspect, have even become an intern in Sorensen's day. But the real difference between the two men lies in the measure of their loyalty. Within two years of leaving the Bush administration, McClellan has a book in the stores dumping on the man who made him. Nearly half a century after JFK's assassination, on the other hand, Sorensen still feels what he calls "the obligations of loyalty, which for me outweigh all pressures to cast prudence, privacy, discretion, and the secrets of others aside".

Counselor is a wise and handsomely written memoir which reveals the uncommon attributes of its author. Somehow Sorensen has dodged the pomposity which attaches to so many important men in their advanced years. He recognises his failures and limitations; he cites the charges levelled by his critics, to whom he is generous; he enumerates regrets which he might easily have concealed. He has even forgotten his Secret Service code name, which others display as a badge of honour.

According to this book, John Kennedy was "a good and decent man". My first thought was that this is too sentimental a judgment. But he must have been, to have attracted so fine an associate as Ted Sorensen.

Michael Fullilove is director of the global issues program at the Lowy Institute in Sydney, Australia and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

NY Times: Resistance Is Futile

Source:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/arts/television/25schi.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all

Excerpt:

Through all his games, his designs are marked by an accumulation of care and detail.

Given that its roster of characters includes not only Mario and Donkey Kong but also Princess Peach, Zelda, Bowser and Link, it’s easy to imagine that Mr. Miyamoto designs his games around those characters.

The truth is exactly the opposite. According to Mr. Miyamoto, gameplay systems and mechanics have always come first, while the characters are created and deployed in the service of the overall design. That means a focus on the seemingly prosaic basic elements of game design: movement, setting, goals to accomplish and obstacles to overcome.

“I feel that people like Mario and people like Link and the other characters we’ve created not for the characters themselves, but because the games they appear in are fun,” he said. “And because people enjoy playing those games first, they come to love the characters as well.”

Mr. Miyamoto’s work is evolving from a reliance on invented characters and fanciful, outlandish settings like Mario’s Mushroom Kingdom or Zelda’s mythical Hyrule. With games like Nintendogs (inspired by his pet Shetland sheepdog), Wii Sports, Wii Fit and coming next, Wii Music, Mr. Miyamoto is gravitating toward everyday hobbies: pets, bowling, yoga, Hula-Hoop, music. It is as if an artist who had mastered the abstract had finally moved into realism.

“I would say that over the last five years or so, the types of games I create has changed somewhat,” he said. “Whereas before I could kind of use my own imagination to create these worlds or create these games, I would say that over the last five years I’ve had more of a tendency to take interests or topics in my life and try to draw the entertainment out of that.”

It has proved the perfect strategy as Nintendo reaches out to nongamers who may not care to understand why this frantic plumber keeps jumping on top of turtles, or why that gallant fellow in green has to keep rescuing the same princess over and over. At this moment, when consumers crave the ability to shape and become a part of their entertainment, whether through MySpace or “American Idol,” the latest star in Nintendo’s stable of characters is you — or rather Mii, the whimsical avatar Wii users create of themselves.

“I see the Miis as the most recent character creation from Nintendo,” Mr. Miyamoto said. “What’s interesting is that regardless of the user’s age, if they’re looking at a Mii, it’s their Mii. Before, when you’re playing as another character, it’s more typical of more passive entertainment, and by creating a Mii you’re becoming more a part of the entertainment experience.”

==

Video Games

Resistance Is Futile

Michael Nagle for The New York Times

Shigeru Miyamoto illustrates the Wii Fit system, a new interactive physical fitness device from Nintendo.

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By SETH SCHIESEL

Published: May 25, 2008

IT’S O.K. to liken Shigeru Miyamoto to Walt Disney.

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Fitness for Every Body: O.K., Avatar, Work With Me (May 15, 2008)

Game Theory: New From Wii: Not Much to Get Worked Up About (May 22, 2008)

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An image from Wii Fit.

Mario Super Sluggers for Wii.

Characters and a scene from Donkey Kong.

When Disney died in 1966, Mr. Miyamoto was a 14-year-old schoolteacher’s son living near Kyoto, Japan’s ancient capital. An aspiring cartoonist, he adored the classic Disney characters. When he wasn’t drawing, he made his own toys, carving wooden puppets with his grandfathers’ tools or devising a car race from a spare motor, string and tin cans.

Even as he has become the world’s most famous and influential video-game designer — the father of Donkey Kong, Mario, Zelda and, most recently, the Wii — Mr. Miyamoto still approaches his work like a humble craftsman, not as the celebrity he is to gamers around the world.

Perched on the end of a chair in a hotel suite a few dozen stories above Midtown Manhattan, the preternaturally cherubic 55-year-old Mr. Miyamoto radiated the contentment of someone who has always wanted to make fun. And he has. As the creative mastermind at Nintendo for almost three decades, Mr. Miyamoto has unleashed mass entertainment with a global breadth, cultural endurance and financial success unsurpassed since Disney’s fabled career.

In the West, chances are that Mr. Miyamoto would have started his own company a long time ago. He could have made billions and established himself as a staple of entertainment celebrity. Instead, despite being royalty at Nintendo and a cult figure, he almost comes across as just another salaryman (though a particularly creative and happy one) with a wife and two school-age children at home near Kyoto. He is not tabloid fodder, and he seems to maintain a relatively nondescript lifestyle.

“What’s important is that the people that I work with are also recognized and that it’s the Nintendo brand that goes forward and continues to become strong and popular,” he said by way of comparing Walt Disney’s role in the larger brand with his. “And if people are going to consider the Nintendo brand as being on the same level as the Disney brand, that’s very flattering and makes me happy to hear,” he added, through an interpreter. (He understands spoken English well but does not speak it beyond a few phrases, a twist of considerable amusement to him given that his father taught English.)

Mario, the mustached Italian plumber he created almost 30 years ago, has become by some measures the planet’s most recognized fictional character, rivaled only by Mickey Mouse. As the creator of the Donkey Kong, Mario and Zelda series (which have collectively sold more than 350 million copies) and the person who ultimately oversees every Nintendo game, Mr. Miyamoto may be personally responsible for the consumption of more billions of hours of human time than anyone around. In the Time 100 online poll conducted this spring, Mr. Miyamoto was voted the most influential person in the world.

But it isn’t just traditional gamers who are flocking to Mr. Miyamoto’s latest creation, the Wii. Eighteen months ago, just when video games were in danger of disappearing into the niche world of fetishists, Mr. Miyamoto and Satoru Iwata, Nintendo’s chief executive, practically reinvented the industry. (Mr. Miyamoto’s full title is senior managing director and general manager of Nintendo’s entertainment analysis and development division.) Their idea was revolutionary in its simplicity: rather than create a new generation of games that would titillate hard-core players, they developed the Wii as an easy-to-use, inexpensive diversion for families (with a particular appeal to women, an audience generally immune to the pull of traditional video games). So far the Wii has sold more than 25 million units, besting the competition from Sony and Microsoft.

In an effort to build on this success, last week Nintendo released its new Wii Fit system in North America, a device that hopes to make doing yoga in front of a television screen almost as much fun as driving, throwing, jumping or shooting in a traditional game. Though there were no hard sales figures available as of Tuesday, there were reports of stores across the country selling out of Wii Fit.

In a global media culture dominated by American faces, tastes and brands, video games are Japan’s most successful cultural export. And on the strength of the Wii and the DS hand-held game system, Nintendo has become one of the most valuable companies in Japan. With a net worth of around $8 billion, Nintendo’s former chairman, Hiroshi Yamauchi, is now the richest man in Japan, according to Forbes magazine. (Nintendo does not disclose Mr. Miyamoto’s compensation, but it appears that he has not joined the ranks of the superrich.)

“Without Miyamoto, Nintendo would be back making playing cards,” said Andy McNamara, editor in chief of Game Informer, the No. 1 game magazine, referring to Nintendo’s original business in 1889. “He probably inspires 99 percent of the developers out there today. You can even say there wouldn’t be video games today if it wasn’t for Miyamoto and Nintendo. He’s the granddad of all game developers, but the funny thing is that for all of his legacy, for all of the mainstay iconic characters he’s designed and created, he is still pushing the limits with things like Wii Fit.”

Mr. Miyamoto graduated from the Kanazawa College of Art in 1975 and joined Nintendo two years later as a staff artist. The original Donkey Kong was a prime force in gaming’s early surge of popularity, along with arcade classics like Space Invaders, Asteroids and Pac-Man.

He rose quickly at the company, and his name has been synonymous with Nintendo since the 1980s, when the original Mario Bros. games helped save the industry after the collapse of Atari, maker of the first broadly popular home console. When Atari failed amid a slew of unpopular games, Nintendo rekindled faith in home gaming systems; the Nintendo Entertainment System, released in the West in 1985, became the best-selling console of its era.

Since then Mr. Miyamoto has been directly involved in the production of at least 70 games, including recent hits like Mario Kart Wii, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Super Mario Galaxy and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Mr. Miyamoto supervises about 400 people, including contractors, almost entirely in Japan. The popular new installments in classic game franchises have maintained his credibility among core gamers even as he has reached out to new audiences with mass-market products like the Wii.

Through all his games, his designs are marked by an accumulation of care and detail. There is nothing objective about why a goofy guy in blue overalls like Mario should appeal to so many, just as there is nothing objective in how Disney could have built a company on talking animals. Rather, the reason I stood in line at a pizzeria more than 20 years ago to play Super Mario Bros., the reason Mr. Miyamoto is almost a living god in the game world, is that his games have some ineffable lure that inspires you to drop just one more quarter (or, these days, to stay on the couch just one more hour).

Just as a film is not measured by the quality of its special effects, a game is not measured merely by its graphics. This concept is lost on many designers, but not on Mr. Miyamoto. And just as a film buff might prefer to watch an old black-and-white movie instead of, say, “Iron Man,” even Mr. Miyamoto’s earliest games hold up as worthy diversions. (The story of two men battling for the world record in Donkey Kong was made into a film, “The King of Kong,” last year.)

“There are very few people in the video game industry who have managed to succeed time after time at a world-class level, and Miyamoto-san is one of them,” Graham Hopper, a Disney veteran and executive vice president and general manager of Disney Interactive Studios, said in a telephone interview. “The level of creative success that he has achieved over a sustained period is probably unparalleled.”

Given that its roster of characters includes not only Mario and Donkey Kong but also Princess Peach, Zelda, Bowser and Link, it’s easy to imagine that Mr. Miyamoto designs his games around those characters.

The truth is exactly the opposite. According to Mr. Miyamoto, gameplay systems and mechanics have always come first, while the characters are created and deployed in the service of the overall design. That means a focus on the seemingly prosaic basic elements of game design: movement, setting, goals to accomplish and obstacles to overcome.

“I feel that people like Mario and people like Link and the other characters we’ve created not for the characters themselves, but because the games they appear in are fun,” he said. “And because people enjoy playing those games first, they come to love the characters as well.”

Mr. Miyamoto’s work is evolving from a reliance on invented characters and fanciful, outlandish settings like Mario’s Mushroom Kingdom or Zelda’s mythical Hyrule. With games like Nintendogs (inspired by his pet Shetland sheepdog), Wii Sports, Wii Fit and coming next, Wii Music, Mr. Miyamoto is gravitating toward everyday hobbies: pets, bowling, yoga, Hula-Hoop, music. It is as if an artist who had mastered the abstract had finally moved into realism.

“I would say that over the last five years or so, the types of games I create has changed somewhat,” he said. “Whereas before I could kind of use my own imagination to create these worlds or create these games, I would say that over the last five years I’ve had more of a tendency to take interests or topics in my life and try to draw the entertainment out of that.”

It has proved the perfect strategy as Nintendo reaches out to nongamers who may not care to understand why this frantic plumber keeps jumping on top of turtles, or why that gallant fellow in green has to keep rescuing the same princess over and over. At this moment, when consumers crave the ability to shape and become a part of their entertainment, whether through MySpace or “American Idol,” the latest star in Nintendo’s stable of characters is you — or rather Mii, the whimsical avatar Wii users create of themselves.

“I see the Miis as the most recent character creation from Nintendo,” Mr. Miyamoto said. “What’s interesting is that regardless of the user’s age, if they’re looking at a Mii, it’s their Mii. Before, when you’re playing as another character, it’s more typical of more passive entertainment, and by creating a Mii you’re becoming more a part of the entertainment experience.”

Nintendo is expected to release more details about Wii Music this summer, but the basic concept is that while popular music games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band allow players only to recreate canned tunes, Wii Music will try to enable users to capture the feelings of composition and improvisation.

Mr. Miyamoto grew up on Western music like the Beatles and the Lovin’ Spoonful. He plays piano and banjo and, as a bluegrass aficionado, immediately recognized the name of Ricky Skaggs when told over dinner in Manhattan that Mr. Skaggs was scheduled to perform in town in a few days. Mr. Miyamoto even joked about extending his stay to catch the show. (He didn’t.)

“We’re trying to create an experience where people are very simply able to get the feeling like maybe they’re creating music,” he said.

With a track record like his, it would be foolish to bet against him. When it comes to the Walt Disney of the digital generation, no one knows fun better.

Warren Buffett, Lucky Sperm Club

http://lexidiem.blogspot.com/2006/07/dynastic-wealth-and-lucky-sperm-club.html

One of the best ones came out in the New York Times (June 27, 2006), and there was straight-talking Warren Buffet bluntness, right there in print. To those who thought that he might be giving the lion's share of his billions to his three children, Mr. Buffett was direct as usual. "I don't believe in dynastic wealth," he said, calling those who grow up in affluent circumstances "members of the lucky sperm club."

FT: The man who put a local face on Google

The man who put a local face on Google

By Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson

Published: May 18 2008 17:28 | Last updated: May 18 2008 17:28

The job of running Google’s largest overseas outpost may be the most sought-after position in European technology but, when Nikesh Arora was approached about the role, he was not impressed.

In 2004, Google’s European, Middle Eastern and African operations amounted to fewer than 400 people, 80 of them crammed into a small office in London’s Soho. Mr Arora sat in the conference room and told Omid Kordestani, Google’s worldwide sales boss: “It looks like a great company but, honestly, these offices do not reflect what I’d expect of it.”

Most discussions about Google come round sooner or later to the premises. Like the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, Google’s London workplace these days is all fresh fruit and Italian coffee machines. Soft furnishings in primary colours, bunting and the occasional inflatable tiger make it look more like a kindergarten pre-school than home to a group of high-powered engineers.

Handpicked crowd of powerful friends asked to tap into Zeitgeist

Nikesh Arora will today trade his stylish offices for a country house hotel in Watford as he plays host to one of the more unusual corporate networking events. Google’s Zeitgeist conferences, originally devised in the US, have evolved into something akin to a one-company Davos, which book up months in advance.

Over the next two days, a handpicked crowd of 350 advertisers, broadcasters and politicians from around Europe, the Middle East and Africa, will listen to 40 speakers ranging from Mohamed Ibrahim, the African mobile phone entrepreneur, to Queen Rania of Jordan.

The themes this year range from climate change to copyright battles. Tomorrow, the most popular users of YouTube, StarDoll and Metacafe will be on stage with the chief executives of the three websites to discuss how they might be improved.

The accomplished networker says he personally called 30 of the speakers to persuade them to come. They are not there to talk about Google, he insists. But, in a year in which Google has needed political support for its Doubleclick acquisition in Europe and has been rehearsing its arguments against a Microsoft-Yahoo combination, such powerful opinion formers are increasingly useful friends.

Sprawling in a red leather chair in one of the building’s more restrained offices overlooking Victoria station, Mr Arora describes his achievements largely in property and personnel terms. The nine EMEA offices he inherited are now 33, he says; he spends a third of his time recruiting – staff numbers have swelled to 3,400 – and thinking “how do we make our people happy”?

For Google, he says, this is no cliché. “The only way we can scale a business which has probably grown faster than any other business in the world is to make sure we have the right people and to trust them.”

Another third of his time is spent with partners and advertisers, discussing products with “local flavour” to work beyond California. Logic dictates which products are developed locally, he says, noting that Europe’s mobile telephony strengths have given it a lead over the US in mobile search and that the Dutch like their online maps to include bicycle routes.

Mr Arora spends the rest of his time pursuing longer-term ideas. Top of the list at the moment is the phenomenon of “video when you want it”, he says. As people have more freedom to watch programming at different times, he notes, assumptions about their demographic profile are also having to change. This opens the possibility of customising video advertising not just on websites such as Google’s YouTube platform but also over television set-top boxes.

Already, Mr Arora says, his 11-year-old daughter “doesn’t understand you have to wait in front of a television screen for something to happen at 8pm”.

Her approach of setting the family digital video recorder having researched programmes on YouTube is a far cry from Mr Arora’s own childhood. Growing up in India, he and his family would gather at the house of an aunt who had a TV set. They would arrive before broadcasts started to get a good seat, then, “from 6pm to 6.30pm, I got educated about how to be a better farmer” before the Bollywood music programme he was there to see came on. “That was it. That was entertainment.”

Mr Arora, who has just turned 40, left India 19 years ago, but he credits his upbringing with setting him on the path to Google. One of 100,000 students who sat the same examination in 1985 for 2,000 places in the six best engineering schools in the country, he still remembers his rank – 1,292. When he beat 200,000 people to get one of 250 scholarships the following year, “that’s when I figured out I might be a little smarter than I’d thought”.

Asked why so many of his generation of Indian engineers went on to make their careers in the US rather than at home, he points out that, when he left the Institute of Technology in Varanasi for his first job at Wipro in India, he was paid just £500 a year.

A year later, the 21-year-old Mr Arora moved to the US with two suitcases and $100. “The thing I feel most proud of is that I went to business school for two years in a culture I didn’t understand but I graduated first. That to me was a significant achievement because that tells me I can adapt to different environments,” he says.

An MBA at Northwestern University took him to jobs as an analyst at Fidelity and Putnam, covering the booming telecoms industry. By the end of the decade he was at T-Mobile, where he launched T-motion, a mobile media business, before becoming chief marketing officer.

Despite his ringside seat at the TMT boom, Mr Arora claims the only thing he knew about Google by 2004 was that it had used an unusual Dutch auction process for its initial public offering.

When interviewed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin at the British Museum, however, he clinched the job after a discussion about machine-based translation services spurred by five minutes in the gift shop reading about the Rosetta Stone.

Eric Schmidt, Google chief executive, told him later that his primary role would be to build a sales force. Mr Arora had no direct sales experience – “but that’s what Google’s about. We don’t believe everything we are going to do has been done, so it’s hard for us to hire somebody who’s done everything we want to do”, he says.

Mr Arora dismisses European handwringing about whether the continent has the talent to compete with Silicon Valley, adding that every one of his staff would give their US colleagues a run for their money. “Clearly you don’t have a Google [in Europe] but show me how many Googles exist in the world,” he says.

Europe may have been fertile recruiting ground but it has also been the place where Google has run into the most resistance over copyright and privacy issues. Mr Arora plays down its battles in Brussels as “discussions”, saying that Europe’s multiple states will rarely have as consistent a view on such issues as the US.

The debates are very different in other regions under his wing. The Arab world, eastern Europe and Africa will account for two-thirds of the world’s new internet users over the next decade, Mr Arora estimates, but they have little digital infrastructure at present.

Google’s efforts to build a culture of internet use in such markets has included its giving tailored, local-language versions of its Google Apps applications to education ministries in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. “You have access to the internet, you get access to information and it’s positive for economies, it’s positive for citizens,” he says.

Self-interest also plays a role, however. “We do it right and, in five, six or seven years, we’ll be working towards the same advertising benefits that we have in the developed world,” he says.

While analysts and bloggers hang on every word uttered by Google’s founders and chief executive, it is harder for outsiders to point to Google initiatives that have Mr Arora’s name on them. Asked about his achievements, though, he is clear: just above half of Google’s revenues now come from outside the US, he says, compared with one-third when he joined. Google does not break out regional sales but Europe is the largest of its international hubs.

“When I came here four years ago, the biggest concern partners had was they felt they had to go to California to do anything,” he says. Today, as telecoms companies, advertisers or governments beat a path to the multicoloured offices in Victoria and beyond, “we have put a local face on Google”.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: The Arab comic-book hero

The Arab comic-book hero

By Tobias Buck

Published: May 6 2008 21:08 | Last updated: May 6 2008 21:08

Suleiman Bakhit’s dream of becoming the Walt Disney of the Arab world began in a Minnesota classroom full of American first-grade students.

The young Jordanian student (pictured below) was there in January 2002 to talk about Arabs and Muslims. He wanted to explain to these children that the men behind the attacks on New York and Washington four months earlier were a radical fringe, that their atrocities should not stoke fears of the wider Arab world. We, Mr Bakhit was trying to say, are not so different from you.

“Then one of the boys asked: ‘Do you have Arab superheroes? Is there an Arab Superman?’ And it hit me. There are none. So I asked myself – what would an Arab superhero look like?” Mr Bakhit recalls. “Slowly, I started sketching and thinking. I taught myself how to draw.”

In 2005, Mr Bakhit returned to Jordan. He had studied human resource development in the US, a rare qualification in the Arab world, and job offers poured in. But the question raised by the little boy in Minnesota had not gone away.

Over the next three years, Mr Bakhit not only honed his drawing skills, but he also developed his first story, a tale about a gang of Arab children in the year 2050. He became increasingly convinced there was not only a market for his stories and characters but that there was a real hunger among young Arabs for indigenous content and for home-grown superheroes who would speak to their aspirations and talk in their language.

“It got to the point where I either got started or not. It was time to put up or shut up,” Mr Bakhit says. So in 2005 he used $50,000 – some of which was from his personal savings and some from an outside investor – to set up Aranim Media Factory, the first comic book publisher in Jordan and one of only three in the Arab world.

Mr Bakhit’s business style, too, is visibly out of the ordinary. He never wears a suit and tie; his office is littered with DVDs, plastic toys and a bewildering array of exercise machinery; and he rides a big, gleaming motorbike.

The company is housed on two floors of an unassuming building in Amman, Jordan. The first thing that catches a visitor’s eye is graffiti proclaiming “The Impossible Dream”. Inside, there are huge prints depicting the varied and rapidly growing cast of heroes, villains and lovable rogues that populate Aranim’s comic universe.

There are Mansaf and Ozi, two Jordanians whose single-minded pursuit of the country’s national dishes (which the heroes are named after) plunges them into trouble. There is the square-jawed Jordanian fighter pilot, a real-life figure who died in a legendary battle with the Israeli air force.

And there is the group of spiky-haired kids (see left) who wake up in the year 2050 only to discover that both oil and grown-ups have disappeared for good, setting the stage for a futuristic voyage of discovery.

They, and many more, are the brainchildren of Mr Bakhit. He sketches their figures and draws up the storylines before handing the colouring and detail work to a team of artists located around the world. He keeps five employees in Jordan, but most of the work is done by freelance comic artists in countries from Brazil to Japan (see box).

The choice of characters and plots must give Arab readers heroes and stories they can identify with, he says. “There is no media right now that reflects our aspirations and dreams, or that is simply targeted towards entertaining us. We are hungry for content. There is a lack of indigenous content, and a lack of content that is tailored towards the young.”

As a boy, Mr Bakhit used to devour comics from the US and Japan. But, he says, there was always one problem with imported superheroes: “I was a big fan of Superman and Batman. But I could never see myself in them. We don’t like our heroes to wear their underwear on the outside. The whole Spandex thing just doesn’t resonate in our culture.”

Although the offices of Aranim – an amalgamation of “Arab” and “animation” – seem chaotic, the company is working according to a well-ordered business plan.

Funding is secure, Mr Bakhit says, thanks to grants by the King Abdullah Development Fund, and he expects Aranim to become “seriously profitable” in the next two to three years after an upfront investment of $2m-$3m dollars.

“We have to take it bit by bit. For the next two years, my goal is to establish the intellectual property and the brand,” says Mr Bakhit. “At some point you reach the tipping point – when people really start loving your characters – and that’s when you start capitalising on that through licensing, merchandising and other sales”.

His plan is to win as wide an audience as possible for his characters, including by distributing teasers of Aranim’s comic books for free. The first big launch is scheduled for the middle of this year, when Aranim will publish three of its comic books at the same time.

Mr Bakhit plans to focus on the Jordanian market for the time being, but he believes many of Aranim’s stories will also resonate in other Arab countries, and possibly even in the west.

However, given the region’s low spending power and what he says is a traditional reluctance to spending money on books, let alone comics, Mr Bakhit believes that he cannot rely on direct sales alone to turn a profit.

Instead, he is banking on revenue from merchandising, advertising and spin-offs, such as computer games based on Aranim characters. One such game is already in the works, as is the first line of plastic toys featuring his creations. The prototype – a fearsome Arab warrior on horseback – glowers from a shelf next to his desk. He is also working on an animated television series, production of which is set to be completed in 2010.

While profits are important to the 29-year-old, Mr Bakhit says that his real ambition goes far beyond making money: “I want to become the Walt Disney of the Arab world – the guy who created all these great characters and gave so many kids hope.

“I love what I do. Even if I don’t get rich, I will be fulfilled.”

Global production methods matched with guerilla art tactics

There is virtually no tradition of comic books in the Arab world, explains Suleiman Bakhit. Until a few years ago, the only cartoons that were available came from the US and Japan, and even those failed to win a wider audience.

This meant that among the biggest challenges for Aranim Media Factory was finding artists able to turn Mr Bakhit’s sketches into the finished article. He quickly realised, however, that he would have to look beyond Amman, the Jordanian capital where his company is based, to find the right talent. “One of my first artists was a guy from Brazil,” he recalls. “I was browsing the net and saw his work, so I sent him an e-mail and asked whether he could work for me.”

Since then, he has added collaborators in Britain, Germany, Japan and China to his stable. “We agree a monthly rate, they e-mail their work and then I wire them the money,” Mr Bakhit says. The speed and fl