February 6, 2011
 UPDATE (Feb 07, 2011): Thomas Abraham (TA) corrected a number of significant bloopers in my original post and clarified some points. I’ve included his comments below.
India’s Ministry of Human Resources Development (HRD), or Hurdle, as its fondly known, is up to its usual mischief, namely: progress. This time, progress comes in the form of an amendment to Clause (2m) of the Indian Copyright Act.
TA: No, the copyright Act 1957 is being amended, and proviso 2m of the proposed amendment is what’s hitting us.
This clause clarifies the notion of an “infringing copy.” Hurdle decided that it would best serve the interests of desi publishers, authors and reader if the clause were amended to say:
“…a copy of a work published in any country outside India with the permission of the author of the work and imported from that country shall not be deemed to be an infringing copy.”
Right. Riveting stuff. What’s for dinner?
The Indian publishing industry, that’s what. At least, that’s what Thomas Abraham, industry veteran and Managing Director of Hachette, India suggested in his recent article in the Hindustan Times. The article is a must-read. So is the rebuttal by Pranesh Prakash, and the detailed re-rebuttal by Thomas. They are thoughtful and persuasive pieces that force one to take the issue seriously.
I’m wondering if the Ministry of HRD’s sudden enthusiasm for work is due to Obama’s recent trip to India. Terry McGraw of McGraw-Hill was one of the approx 200 CEO delegates to accompany Obama. When President Bush visited India, ostensibly to sign the US-India nuclear treaty, his delegation had included representatives from Monsanto, Dow, Bayer, and Dupont. India signed off on a lot more than just a nuclear treaty (update: TA: McGraw-Hill is also opposing the amendment. Damn it. Nothing like ugly fact to ruin a beautiful conspiracy).
Thomas’ arguments convinced me he was right, and so to be fair, I’ll only present his side of things.
The crux of the matter is captured, I think, in this scenario:
“Consider this scenario: a book by author x is successful in India, but fails in the US. By the fourth month with no legal territorial protection it is dumped into India at lower prices through a distributor. This is a completely ‘legal’ purchase transaction by both seller and buyer, but is against the author’s consent and in violation of a contract that exists between author and Indian publisher. Now add remainders to the mix and multiply this exponentially with the number of new titles every year and try and imagine what the market is going to turn into.”
Thomas discusses many subtleties, and if I’ve understood his arguments correctly, he sees four major consequences:
- Lower prices for the reader on globally distributed books.
TA: No just the opposite actually. There will be short term spoiler pricing as undercutting happens but over the medium and long terms prices will stabilize back to present norms—it’s not really possible to function profitably on lower pricing levels. An imported thriller like Grisham or Archer sell at Rs 195-Rs 250. Remainders can’t bring these levels down any further in the long run. In the short term yes, spoiler distributors will bring in books to get those editions in.
- A small bump in royalty income for the author but only if opportunity costs are discounted (the author could have earned greater royalties on domestic sales).
TA: Quite a big dent actually. Because not only do you get lowered royalty on export edition, you lose your due local royalty.
- Desi publishers will increasingly focus on India-specific books (since this reduces parallel trade).
TA: Yes and No, because even this is not risk free. With squeezed and reduced margins desi publishers—here I include all those functioning in India not just companies of Indian ownership—will have less capital to invest in local authors the way they do now. So publishing programmes will shrink, and the ones you have you will have less money to market/promote. Local Indian authors—who also hope that they will be sold abroad—will have that diminished too, as local publishers won’t want to sell books that will come back to bite them.
- Desi publishers compensate for the increased uncertainty by controlling risk, for e.g. by focusing on relatively sure-bets.
TA: But there will virtually be no sure bet.
There are some similarities between Thomas’ arguments that parallel imports will stifle creativity and the arguments made by US pharmaceuticals that allowing cheap drugs to flood the market will stifle R&D. In both cases, there’s a free rider advantage for the importer. The Indian publisher (US pharma) does all the hard work of developing a native talent (a new drug), and then along comes Mexico or China or India flooding the home market with a cheap substitute. There are a few economists– notably, Horst Raff and Nicholas Schmitt– who think parallel imports could actually raise producer profits for certain industries.
That’s the question. Is the book business like any other? Pranesh doesn’t seem to think the books are any different (or at least, very different) from other consumer goods, whereas Thomas seems convinced– as anyone who’s tried to make a living selling books probably would be– that it’s a total unicorn.
I think there’s some merit to Thomas’ claim of exceptionalism for the industry. The economics of the so-called “creative industries” is strikingly different. As far as I can tell, the book business is a business in the same sense a horse is a car. It’s a business that operates in the “suicide quadrant”, namely, markets governed by high-uncertainty and low-control. Albert Greco, Clara Rodriguez and Bob Wharton remark in their recent opus that:
“Our research indicates that seven out of every ten frontlist hardbound books fail financially (that is, they do not earn enough to cover the author’s advance, and other editorial, marketing and administrative costs), 2 books break even, and 1 is a hit. Coincidentally, this is the same ratio found in the motion picture industry.”
This is true of Indian publishing too (Thomas pegs it at 80/20 rather than 90/10), so Indian publishers also survive on the basis of a few profit-makers. Typically, the foreign rights to these money makers are sold to companies in the US, UK and other English-language markets. Now, if those books find their way back to India, then the publisher’s few profit makers are suddenly not so profitable.
That said, I suspect Indian publishers won’t be quite so affected from the amendment as they think. Publishing is an odd industry partly because readers are such odd consumers. They hoard, they are impulsive, they have nutty interests, they are informed, they are passionate and they are intractable. Western publishers have a hard enough time appeasing their own odd bods.
Perhaps the debate obscures a deeper issue. Thomas mentions that there are some 17,000 registered publishers and also that there are just 450 trade bookshops.
TA: is correct but to clarify: These are 450 ‘trade bookshops’—the kind that keep English language general and consumer books—fiction/non fiction. From the chains to the small indies. The 17,000 publishers are all inclusive figure (language, trade, educational) but the 450 excludes all the educational and ‘janta’ bookshops that sell cribs and railway timetables as also the language bookshops.
That’s a great many fingers around a very small pizza! Good lord, where do we cram all our books? Our distribution bottlenecks already ensure that most readers will mostly see only bestsellers. And when everyone is making a living from a few dozen titles (if at that), then we’re much more vulnerable to small price differentials in those titles.
So the real challenge is not how to make a larger pie– which we must of course– but on how to make making a larger pie easier. Life in the suicide quadrant needs entrepreneurs, not businessmen. And entrepreneurs need more mechanisms for growth, not more ill-considered policies. Perhaps leapfrog tech like POD publishing and digital paper could be helpful here. So too, I suspect, fewer visits by American presidents. But most definitely, it’d be helpful if Hurdle would focus its energies on being a little less helpful.
August 15, 2010
My friend Monideepa Sahu’s debut children’s novel: The Riddle of the Seventh Stone has just been released (Zubaan Books, India). Read it. Buy it. Gift it. Facebook it. Steal it (well, maybe not the last).
May 12, 2010
 I first encountered the Ramayana, perhaps as most Indian kids do these days, in the pages of an Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) “comic” book. The drawings were figurative. Lord Rama was a handsome blue-skinned man, Sita was a fair and beautiful woman, Ravana had a mustache, and so on. I liked the drawings, but I remember not being impressed by the tale. It was weepy. Mushy. The skies seemed perpetually overcast with duty, betrayal, duty, loneliness, duty and bereavement. I didn’t like monkeys and there were far too many of them in the story. I didn’t consider the bow and arrow—Lord Rama’s weapon of choice– to be a hero’s weapon. Maces, swords, Ninja claws, axes and teeth—now, those were weapons. What was heroic about shooting at people from a distance? And where were ACK’s curvy sari-clad women, the one consolation of my otherwise celibate childhood? When I finished the story, I concluded that the Ramayana was one of those tales written solely to punish kids for having time and bloom on their side.
But it’s no one’s fault. The Ramayana is simply not a story suitable for kids. It’s also not a story suitable for most adults either. Else why would south-Asians make and re-make this tale over the long centuries? Discontent is one of the great gifts of this magnificent epic. To read this tale is to be seized with the urge to re-make it. Perhaps it’s because of its deterministic hero, Lord Rama. Deterministic characters, like existential ones, offer no definite purchase, and so we find ourselves, like Sisyphus, shoulder to stone, feet on earth, pushing once more for a resolution we can never attain.
Since the Ramayana is rich in relationships, there are many ways to study Lord Rama from a psychological point of view. One of the best is R. P. Goldman’s analysisR. P. Goldman. “Ramah Sahalaksmanah: Psychological and Literary Aspects of the Composite Hero of Valmiki’s Ramayana.” Indian J. of Philosophy, Vol. 8, 1980, pp. 149-189.† of the relationship between Lord Rama and his brother Lakshmana. I’m going to take a different track. I’m going to look at the god-king’s relationship with dharma.
(more…)
April 23, 2010
Ralph Thomas Hotchkin Griffith was born on May 25, 1826, in Corsley, Wiltshire, to Reverend Robert C. Griffith and Mary E. Adderley. It was a remarkable age. Only three days earlier, the HMS Beagle had set sail from Plymouth on its first voyage. Waterloo was already a decade old memory. Queen Victoria was 7 years old. Charles Dickens was 14. Lord Byron was dead, Charles Babbage was designing the Difference Engine, and speculative fiction had drawn its first gasping breath in the Gothic womb of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In distant India, a word that still denoted an area and not a place, one principality after another was falling to British might and British genius. It was the best of times to be an Englishman. As John Aylmer, Bishop of London, had presciently anticipated in An Harborowe, a year after the English navy crushed the Spanish Armada in 1588: “God is English.”
But conquest had brought with it the conqueror’s burden: administration. No empire has ever had enough qualified citizens to run two countries at the same time. Sooner or later, an empire has to start finding, training and hiring natives. Lord Macaulay’s Minute of 1834 spelled out what the goal should be:
“…a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”
Or less politely, wogs. Coconuts. Salman Rushdie, in his The Moor’s Last Sigh, acknowledges this bitter fruit:
“Bleddy Macaulay’s minutemen!… English-medium misfits… square-peg freaks.”
Macaulay is reviled these days for his racism, but as I see it, he was only being consistent. Hadn’t the Roman empire been a good thing for Britain? Wasn’t Macaulay its living proof? Didn’t he belong to the class of persons, English in blood and color, but Roman in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect? Besides, Macaulay and his carminative Minute were less influential than people suppose. What really got British education started in India was Sir Charles Wood’s Education Dispatch of 1854. It was well reasoned, pragmatic, free of hand-wringing, and based on an idea that would probably still work in places like Afghanistan. The idea was to leave Indian education mostly to the Indians, provide partial government funding, and set up some model educational institutions. In short: self-reliance, support and standards.
However, there was a severe shortage of British instructors. So that might explain why when Ralph T. H. Griffith joined the Indian Education Service in 1853, the twenty-seven year old Sanskrit scholar was almost immediately sentenced to be Professor of English Literature at the venerable Government Sanskrit College in Benares, India. Indeed, six months into the job, they made him headmaster of the associated school, and in 1861, the principal of the college itself. It was a position he was to hold for the next twenty-three years.
It was during this tenure that Griffith finished translating the first six books of Valmiki’s Ramayana from Sanskrit into English. The seventh and final book is a later addition to the canon (so is the first) and this he only abridged. The complete work appeared in 1870, published by E. J. Lazarus & Co. in Benares, and Trubner & Co in London. There had been an earlier effort in 1806 by the missionaries William Carey and Joshua Marshman, but they had only managed to translate the first two volumes. Thus, Griffith had produced the first complete English translation of Valmiki’s Ramayana. Translations are acts of courage. As Victor Hugo noted:
“When you offer a translation to a nation, that nation will almost always look on the translation as an act of violence against itself.”
Hugo was talking about native receptions to translated foreign works, but it applies equally well to native receptions to foreigners translating native works. In the literary magazines of the period, the Griffith Ramayana is often referred to as “a spirited translation,” a compliment to be sure, but for a horse, not a translation. It’s not insignificant that Voltaire mocked “spirited translators”:
“…[their] spirit and ability consist in substituting a modern variety or peculiarity for an ancient one, to the utter confusion of all unity of time, place, and character; leaving the mind of the reader bewildered as in a masquerade, crowded and confused with ancient and modern costumes.”
But Griffith’s achievement should not be underestimated. He’d had to translate some 24,000 slokas. A sloka is a Sanskrit verse and consists of thirty-two syllables, arranged either as a sixteen-syllable couplet or four eight-syllable hemistiches. The Iliad and Odyssey combined have some 27,000 lines, thus making the Ramayana roughly twice as long. Furthermore, a Sanskrit verse can be as gnarly as a one-liner Perl hack. It’s a language that takes a coder’s pride in Oulipo-type exercises. Gorresio‘s Italian translation (1850) and August von Schlegel‘s German translation (1829) could and did act as guides, but when it came to translating the slokas to English, Griffith was on his own.
So how does his work fare? if we think of it as Griffith’s Ramayana, then the work is not much of a success. It is merely an adequate translation of Valmiki’s Ramayana and a fine example of that curious Victorian animal: the past’s head joined to future’s butt. This is the animal that Voltaire mocked. But if we think of the text as the Griffith Ramayana, a member of the class of inspired Ramayanas, then it’s a marvelous thing indeed. Technically, the two texts are one and the same, but the difference in perceptions does makes a difference in our appreciation.
The Griffith Ramayana is a literary work, not a scholarly one. The wonderful Princeton translation (by Robert Goldman, Sally Sutherland Goldman, Sheldon Pollack and Barend van Nooten) is what a scholarly translation looks like. Scholarly works can get dated, literary works only go out of style. Scholars translate so as to ease their epistemological discomfort. Griffith translated so as to ease his aesthetic discomfort. Occasionally, Valmiki’s verses shows a bit too much leg for Griffith, and the translated verses therefore show too little. He also gets some things seriously wrong. For example, he has a section entitled “The Rape of Sita” when it should be “The Abduction of Sita.” What does Griffith say in anticipation of such bloopers? In the preface, he wrote:
“My first object has been to reproduce the original poem as faithfully as circumstances permit me to do. For this purpose I have preferred verse to prose. The translations of the Iliad by Chapman and Worsley– nay, even by translators of far inferior poetical powers– are, I think, much more Homeric than any literal prose rendering can possibly be. In the latter we may find the ‘disjecti membra poetae,’ but all the form and the life are gone, for ‘the interpenetration of matter and manner constitute the very soul of poetry.’ I have but seldom allowed myself to amplify or to condense, or omit apparently needless repetitions, but have attempted rather to give the poet as he is than to represent him as European taste might prefer him to be. Comparisons, therefore, which to English readers will appear vulgar or rediculous [sic] have been left unaltered, and long passages of unutterable tediousness re-appear in my version with, probably, their tediousness enhanced.”
Ignoring Griffith’s low opinion of his own work (not to mention the misreading of its essential nature), I completely agree with his decision to stick with verse. The few prose translations I’ve read lack the emotional savors of the original text. Unfortunately, Griffith decided to use iambic tetrameter, a distressing decision for those scarred by the memory of Gladys Hotchkiss belting out “Hernando’s Hideway.” I kept hearing an “Ole!” after every four lines. The manic insistence on rhyming also leads Griffith to make bad choices. For example:
On the bare earth the lady sank,
And trembling from their presence shrank
Like a strayed fawn, when night is dark,
And hungry wolves around her bark.
Barking wolves? Surely, it should be “howl”? But no, if rhyme needs wolves to bark, so they shall. Incidentally, in the original verse (at least in the Baroda Critical Edition of Valmiki’s Ramayana), a trembling Sita shrinks into herself (5.25.5: “sītā viśantīvā ṅgamā tmanaḥ”), and not onto the bare earth. This would seem to be an error, but Sita is born of the Earth, so Griffith’s translation is correct with respect to myth and metaphor. A poet’s choice, of course, not a scholar’s.
Another problem with iambic tetrameter is pacing. Everything has to fit within the “da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM” scheme, and there’s often a sense that a line could use an extra “da DUM.” Griffith remarks how he has no intention of chopping off a finger to improve the hand, but I wish he’d added a finger every so often. He also reveals a near-compulsive fondness for inversions and possessive nouns (“virtue’s brow,” “kingdom’s bound,” “ascetic’s weed’). After a while it can get on one’s nerves.
But there’s magnificence too. Consider this stanza which describes the death of Ravana at the hands of Lord Rama:
“Upon his string the hero laid
An arrow, like a snake that hissed.
…
‘Twas feathered with the rushing wind;
The glowing sun and fire combined
To the keen point their splendour lent;
The shaft, ethereal element,
By Meru’s hill and Mandar, pride
of mountains, had its weight supplied.
He laid it on the twisted cord,
He turned the point at Lanka’s lord,
And swift the limb-dividing dart
Pierced the huge chest and cleft the heart,
And dead he fell upon the plain
Like Vritra by the Thunderer slain.”
Compare the above with the following one, a description by Tennyson, also a rector’s son, of Mordred’s death at the hand of King Arthur:
…then Modred smote his liege
Hard on that helm which many a heathen sword
Had beaten thin; while Arthur at one blow
Striking the last stroke with Excalibur
Slew him, and all but slain himself, he fell.”
I believe the comparison tilts in Griffith’s favor. Nor is this passage a unique instance. Read with an appreciative frame of mind, the work confirms what Anne Dacier (1647-1720) claimed in her preface to the Illiad: “a translation that tries above all to save the spirit, does not fail to keep the letter, even where it takes the greatest liberties.” Literary critics should take the Griffith Ramayana more seriously.
An Englishman went up a subcontinent and came down an Indian. Ralph Griffith, a lifelong bachelor, a rector’s son from Wiltshire, a harmless aglet on colonialism’s boot, managed to take an ancient Sanskrit love poem and make it his own. Unlike von Schlegel, he was able to avoid the contempt for the Other that so often accompanies familiarity. This is all the more remarkable considering that the Sepoy “Mutiny” of 1857 had drawn a permanent, and perhaps inevitable, line between conqueror and conquered. By the time Griffith was appointed director of public instruction of the North-west provinces in 1878, Charles Wood’s educational guidelines had become policy. But though policy was strong, the flesh was weak. Weather, loneliness, alcoholism, isolation, homesickness, low salaries, language problems, tropical diseases and, if I’ve judged the expressions of just-landed tourists correctly, sheer terror, all wrecked havoc on the men and women who were to implement the policy. However, Griffith seems to have thrived.
Upon retirement in 1885, Griffith moved in with his brother Frank’s family, and spent the next twenty-one years in the cool hills of Niligiri, translating the Vedas. Personally, I consider it a pity he didn’t spend the time on more literary texts. There were a great many other Sanskrit works left to translate– some three thousand years worth– but then again, there comes a time when every pen must be set down. At the age of eighty, some fifty years after he’d first arrived in India, never to return to England, Ralph T. H. Griffith died on November 7, 1906. Only a few weeks earlier, Mahatma Gandhi– then just Mohandas– had launched a non-violence movement in South Africa. In June, the Lusitania had set sail on its maiden voyage. Albert Einstein had published the theory of special relativity, solved the mystery of the photoelectric effect, provided a theoretical explanation for Brownian motion and demonstrated the equivalence of matter and energy. Hitler was 17 years old. In seven years time, Rabindranath Tagore would become the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for literature. There were movies, heavier-than-air flight, phonographs and submarines. It would be a remarkable century. And Ralph T. H. Griffith, one of those suspended human bridges between Us and Them, between Now and Then, between Give and Take, had helped make it happen.
April 14, 2010
I believe in Books. Books is a God with a growing number of temples, aka bookstores, all over the world. In the US alone, according the 2002 census count, there are some 19,725 bookstores. Of course, compared with the roughly 300,000 outlets devoted to Yahweh, Books is strictly a minor deity. Still, minor or not, what’s important for believers is that there be a temple within reach. There are about a dozen where I live, so come Saturday, I shower, crack a coconut, and step out for some face time. It’s a ritual carried over from childhood. My late father was a Books devotee, and just as we inherit our Gods, we inherit the rituals too. My father and I used to browse on Sundays rather than Saturdays, and consumed idlis-and-madras-coffee rather than the bagels-and-coffee I now have, and we used to walk to the bookshops rather than drive, but these are minor differences. When I remember the spring in his step, the reckless disregard for what he could afford, and his delight in the rare find (“Solutions to the 1948 Cochin Board Chemistry Exams!”), I see the origins of my faith.
Lately though, I’ve begun to notice that faith is not enough. I still visit the temples, still stroll the aisles, still probe and prod various books, and still settle in the smelly sofas to sample my stash of possibles. But actually buy a book? God, no! In my last visit to the local B&N, I sampled Nussbaum’s From Disgust to Humanity and was seized with the urge to buy it. Did I? No. Jeff Vandermeer’s gorgeous Steampunk anthology? No. Heileman and Halperin’s Game Change? No. Michael Pollan’s Food Rules? No. Johnson and Kwak’s 13 Bankers? Thirteen times, no. Good books, even great books: still no.
The reason, obviously, is that it no longer makes economic sense to buy books in bookstores. Why the hell would I pay $19.25 for Goldratt’s The Choice when I can get a nice used copy for $7, including S&H, from Bookfinder? So what if it’s used? All books eventually become mulch anyway; used copies merely get there mulch faster. And when Kindle/Apple finally unclasp their DRM legs and allow readers to have their way with content, physical bookstores will make even less economic sense. In a world where you can get a book the minute it’s released (and when quantum clouds become a reality, perhaps even before it is written), Books is everywhere.
Compare this with the traditional model. A book is released. Hooray. A week or so later, it’s sent to distributors. The crates are unloaded, stacked, stashed and carved into smaller cartons to be trucked, along with similar items, to wholesalers/smaller-distributors (~1-2 months). This process repeats until a few copies finally end up in bookstores (~1-5 months). Two weeks to three months later, if the book doesn’t do well, it’ll be sent back, modesty compromised, back to the publisher. Who then pulps it. Camera pullback. The next crateload of books is seen leaving the publisher’s warehouse. Cycle of life, African drums. Brilliant.
It’s a suicidal business model. Johannes Gutenberg died broke, and publishers haven’t had much luck since. So why do they persist in the worship of such a ball-buster God? Eugene Schwartz, in a great numbers-rich article on book distribution, offers one answer:
One might ask what motivates people to keep this complex system going. After all, although a lot of cash may flow through, it usually takes its time and leaves behind relatively modest portions, if any. As to why we’re in this business and why we persist, Miller [one of the experts] explains, ‘To have a bookstore is part of the American Dream. It is a form of self-expression.’
Right. Like makeup, body piercings, and tattoos.
Truth is, physical bookstores have basically become brick & mortar display screens. They have exceptional resolution, cool 3-D features, terrific affordance, and are totally immersive. What you see is what you can get. Unfortunately, the reverse is also true. What you get is what you see. Want that 1948 Chemistry solutions to the Cochin Board Exams? Asimov’s annotated guide to Don Juan? Well, if wishes were horses, then why aren’t you riding the net, Quixote? Bookstores may be one of those in-between inventions. Like Egyptian multiplication. We’re not giving up on multiplication any time soon, but there are better ways now.
If bookstores are to survive, they may need to charge for the service they are really selling: the atmosphere. Bookstores may need to become Lookstores. Talk to any Books worshiper, and you’ll hear the same shiny-eyed theme: “I love browsing in bookstores.” Exactly. Browsing. As in, grazing but not paying for the grass. Because grass is now everywhere, we cows will no longer buy grass from a grass-store. Bookstores might as well get used to it.
Keith Swenson thinks that in the future bookstores might become mini-printing presses; that would handle the problem of what-you-get-is-what-you-see. Maybe. I suppose you could buy books at a Lookstore, but it’ll be expensive, as all unit jobs must be. I see them more as lifestyle places. We’ll hang around lookstores for the same reason people hang around churches and art galleries. It’s an alternative to cock fighting. It’s classy. It’s superior. It’s fun. It’s a great place to take your kid, show them the ropes, stuff them with bagels and madras coffee, and acquaint them with all the troublemakers in history. Most were never able to move more than a few volumes, but that sufficed to move the world. Those who believe in Books take that on faith. And as faiths go, perhaps it’s not an ignoble one.
April 13, 2010
October 19, 2009
In 1973, a time of pitchforks, flaming bras and napalm, the University of Berkeley received a total of 12,763 graduate program applications. 8,442 apps were from men, and the remaining 4,321 apps were from womenLet me forestall impertinent questions by quickly adding that before Al Gore invented the net, gender used to be a simple binary affair: you were either male or female; there were no in-between’s, no undecided’s, no none-of-the-above’s and no you-tell-me’s.†. Of this hopeful lot, Berkeley admitted 3,738 men and 1,494 women. In other words, about 44% of the men were admitted compared with 35% of the women. A nine-percent difference. A woman applying to Berkeley’s grad programs had a 9% less chance of being admitted than a male. That, as statisticians like to joke, smelled of Fisher.
Assuming that women candidates were as qualified as the male candidates, what could explain why the discrepancy in admission rates was so large? Sexism, of course. There was no use pointing out that Berkeley was in effing California, not Louisiana. No use pointing out that 1,494 women had been admitted. Token women didn’t count. Women twice as good as men didn’t count twofold. Men as gentle as temple cows didn’t count. What counted was the 9%.
Eugene Hammel, the male Associate Dean of Graduate Studies, had the bright idea of asking Peter Bickel, a male statistics prof who was on the board of the Grad Council at Berkeley, to analyze the admissions data. The result of that analysis by Bickel, Hammel and O’Connell is now a statistical classic. They showed that on a department by department basis, if there was a bias, it was a slight one in favor of admitting women over men.
How was this possible? How could it be that at a departmental level, women were as likely, if not slightly more likely, to be admitted, but the admission rates for women were 9% lower than that of men? Was it… Could it be… Could it really be just… ARITHMETIC!!!
Yes. While the odds of admission did favor women on a department-by-department basis, the admission standards of different departments were not all the same. Some departments, say, Physics, had notoriously high standards. Other departments, say, Sociology, had notoriously low ones. What Bickel and gang showed was that women were applying in greater proportion to the more difficult programs rather than the easy ones, and so were getting rejected at higher rates. Men, strategically unambitious as always, were much more spread across the departments, and hence their slight disadvantage in odds was offset by the fact that more of them had sent their sweet nothings to the floozy departments. It was a tale with a statistical villain.
The villain’s name is Simpson’s Paradox. It is a statistical paradox that often arises when we calculate averages over aggregates. It sometimes happens that a statement may be true of every mixed subgroup (“Compared with men, women have a slightly higher odds of getting admitted to engineering/humanities/sciences/architecture/…”), but when you aggregate over all the groups, the statement turns false (“women have a significantly lower odds of getting admitted”). Simpson’s Paradox– that is, the potential for the paradox– plagues mixtures, heterogeneity, population studies of all kinds. It is perhaps the closest thing there is to the problem of evil in statistics.
So how is all this relevant to science fiction? Well, say there’s this fantasy world with two groups (genders) of writers (candidates): West and Other. Both groups have more or less the same distribution of talent. There are fewer Other writers than Western ones, and some chaps belong to both groups, but never mind that. Writers send in their stories to SF&F outlets (departments). Each outlet’s acceptance (admission) procedure is decided by an Editor. Not all the outlets are equally easy. Even though most outlets are in the West, the Others have a slightly better chance on a per outlet basis (because editors in this world act to encourage new voices). However, it turns out that the Others mostly apply to the harder-to-get-into outlets. Why? Well, these are the well-known ones, and if you’re in Pune, India, why send a story to the Vampire Gnome Anthology, when for the same time and postal expense and much greater potential benefit, you could send it to the New Yorker? And so it happens that there are great differences between acceptance rates for Westerners as compared to the Others. In this speculative world– hypothetical liberal world– Simpson’s Paradox, not racism, is the villain.
That world may not be our world. In our world, we have editors like William Sanders. But it also has editors who were willing to take chances with my writing, some of it truly godawful. So it’s hard to be sure. I’m going to give it the benefit of the doubt. Besides, I’d take doubt any day over the certainties of pitchforks, flaming bras and napalm.
Ashok Banker’s explosive mofu of an interview in the World SF blog has just gone viral, and anyone who’s detected air going out through his/her two nostrils should give it a dekko.
“In the US and UK publishing industries, particularly in the genre of Science Fiction and Fantasy, it’s like a coloured man trying to exercise his right to vote in an all-white Southern town in the 1950s. Sure, we have the right. But try getting past those guys in the white sheets and hoods holding the burning cross up high.”
Holy white-sheeted mooing cow!
Desi SF– and I know just how much Ashok-bhai hates being considered a part of it, but nonetheless– Desi SF has a Malcolm X. Let the games begin.
August 4, 2009
"You will, I am sure, agree with me that … if page 534 finds us only in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable."
Sherlock Holmes in The Valley Of Fear (1888)
For those who came in sideways: this is a continuation of Part 1 (Getting There).
I’ll admit it. The prognosis is not good. If it took me 3,000 words to cover a distance of three days, then obviously, dear reader, you have clambered onto a slow horse. The only consolation I can offer is that you could have been on Tristram Shandy, who took two-and-half volumes to traverse one day of his life.
But this should be brief. I was all set to narrate the events of the three weeks at IIT-K, when the Brain reminded me that I’d issued some promissory notes at the workshop. One of them was that the workshop would be a safe place. A place where any kind of story could be written. Tears, exultation and civilized screaming were permitted, but there would be no fatwas, retaliations, arsenic or pistols at dawn. Most importantly, what happened in Kanpur would stay in Kanpur.
Which puts me in a bind. Whereof I wish to speak, thereof I cannot. Hereof, I’ll have to be sneaky.
A typical day ran from 9:00 AM to 5:30 PM, with ninety minutes for lunch (1:00-2:30), and two fifteen minutes breaks. About three hours per day were spent on the critiques, which left about four hours at the instructor’s discretion.
Ah, the critique sessions. For me (and regrettably, for the students too), the critiques were the best part of the day. We tried to do three critiques per day. I preferred to do the critiques in the morning, whereas Vandana and Suchitra reserved them for the afternoons.
The participants were serious about the critiques. For me, it’s what made the workshop a success. Their writing changed. It got more ambitious. Experimental. One writer produced a story that was told in the form of schoolbook exercises. Another reached deep into himself and the myth of Holika, reached for the look in a witch’s eyes as she burns, poor helpless bitch, and produced a postmodern rendering: terrifying, unforgettable and unforgiving. There was a story in which guilt turns memory into music, there was a story about unstable threesomes, one about gigolo robots, there were Stories No One Got, stories with a new interpretation of Sita, clueless lesbians, kings with red horns, shoot-outs with centaurs, stories where old Indian myths were used as stirring spoons rather than spice… with three stories per writer, fifteen writers and three weeks, not to mention the daily reading assignments, we were soon awash in stories.
In the third week (Vandana’s week), two of the students proposed that the authors’ names be withheld from the stories. Naturally, the author had to offer a faux-critique of his/her work. I found the results fascinating. The participants were mostly unable to identify who had written which story. The routine gasps of “You wrote that?” undid a lot of smug categories. People simply wouldn’t stay put in their assigned slots: X-is-good-but. Y-writes-stories-that. Z-has-an-unfortunate-fondness-for.
How does critiquing work when it works? Not sure. The Brain has a quantum-mystical theory, accurate to several decimal points. But it’s a digression, and despite what my friend Tristram Shandy says about digressions (“Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine—they are the life, the soul of reading!”), I must resist the impulse and plod on.
(more…)
April 3, 2009
Older Posts » |
UPDATE (Feb 07, 2011): Thomas Abraham (TA) corrected a number of significant bloopers in my original post and clarified some points. I’ve included his comments below.
