For the avoidance of doubt and as a matter of record, the official address of Barack Obama, president of the United States of America, who happens to be black, is: The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington DC 20500, United States of America. Wherever and whenever there is trouble anywhere in the world, he is the go-to guy – as the most powerful man in the world. There is no dispute about that. However, unknown to the rest of the world, the White House habours probably the best sporting facilities and garden in any private/official residence in the world (only the Vatican is a close second and Buckingham Palace would at best be third). As for the first lady, Michele, she has become adept at avoiding the banana skins by dodging any direct participation in the political arena other than in a supportive role to her husband. She has scrupulously steered well away from any controversies. Instead, she has concentrated on advertising a healthy lifestyle for her family – plenty of exercise and no junk food. The president works out regularly and vigorously in the gym and the basketball court.
I am not entirely sure how the spirited discussion between Barack Obama, Ban Ki-moon, (secretary-general of the United Nations), Jim Yong Kim (president of the World Bank), and Christine Lagarde (MD of the International Monetary Fund) drifted off course into sports, but it may have had something to do with the declaration by the Republican Party that following the mid-term elections and the appalling performance of the Democratic Party to which Obama belongs, Barack Obama had become a “lame duck” president. The Republicans would now have majority in the Senate (led by Senator George J. Mitchell) and the House of Representatives (led by John Andrew Boehner). The Senior Elder Citizens promptly volunteered the unsolicited information that “a duck” in cricket means “zero runs”. To be “out for a duck” means the batsman did not score even a single run! It was entirely lost on Barack, Ban, Jim and Christine. It was to no avail that we carefully explained to them what cricket is all about and how the game is played. In India, Pakistan, Sri-Lanka, Australia and South Africa, cricket is a religion at par with American football (soccer) or baseball and the “beautiful game of football” in Brazil, Argentina, Italy, Britain, Germany, Spain, etc.
By way of digression, when Bill Shankly, manager of Liverpool Football Club, was asked whether football was a matter of life and death, without batting an eyelid, his reply was: “Much more than life and death!” Actually, there are two versions of Bill Shankly’s deposition on “Life, Death and Football”: (i) “Football (soccer) is a matter of life and death, except more important.” (ii) “Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it’s much more serious than that.”
Anyway, there we were with four of the most cerebral and vastly intelligent human beings, yet they knew nothing about the famous names in cricket, such as Sachin Tendulkar, Wasim Akram, Shahid Afridi, Shoaib Akhtar, MS Dhoni, Brian Lara, Chris Gayle, Donald Bradman, Garfield Sobers, Dennis Compton, Ricky Ponting, Shaun Pollock, Andrew Flintoff, Lasith Malinga, Muralidaran, Brett Lee, Imran Khan, Kumar Sangakkara, and Muttiah Muralitharan. We drew a complete blank. Anyway, we decided to give it another try – starting with the cricket kit, the rules of the game followed by explanation of the role of the wicket-keeper as well as the two umpires. No progress whatever.
In walked Bill Gates, the richest man in the world and unquestionably a super brain. He was very quietly spoken, very shy and humble. Ironically, he stammers and he once disclosed that he is dyslexic. Regardless of these handicaps, he has become a combination of maestro and supremo. We had to start all over again but all these “super brains” were entirely lost. They had no clue regarding what we were talking about! They just could not figure it out. What kind of game drags on for five days and you end up with a draw?
It turned out that Christine Lagarde is not only a legal icon and financial expert; she also has outstanding sporting credentials. In her previous life she was a member of the French synchronised swimming national team and even made it to the Olympics. I am not at liberty to disclose which of the men proceeded to blow kiss at the blushing Christine! As for Jim Yong Kim, perhaps the reason he had so much difficulty in grasping the intricacies of cricket was on account of his being distracted or even unsettled by the following report in BusinessDay and Financial Times of Friday, 21 November, 2014: ‘The World Bank risks sliding into irrelevance’. The story partly reads:
“A few years ago, turmoil at the world’s main development bank would have generated headlines across the globe. Today it barely causes a ripple. The World Bank is in the throes of an organisational restructuring unleashed by Jim Yong Kim, its president. The end product remains as murky as ever. As it copes with the fallout from the first employee ‘work stoppage’ in its history – and the threat of more to come – the rest of the world is moving on. Both in terms of the cost of development loans and the conditions attached, the bank is increasingly undercut by others, most notably China. More than halfway through his term, Kim has a narrowing window to articulate a vision for the bank that he leads. Failure to do so will only hasten its journey to the sidelines.”
Matters were deteriorating rapidly. Hence, the Senior Elder Citizens were compelled to give up proselytising about cricket in the hope of winning new converts – Barack, Jim, Ban, Christine and Bill. Thankfully, Christine brought up the subject of the latest book she has read. She waxed lyrical about what she has learnt from China, largely on account of her reading ‘Les Trente Glorieuses Chinoises’ by Caroline Puel, a book which delves into the country’s transformation in the last thirty years.
Absolutely fascinating to observe at close range how discussions went back and forth between these super brains trying to dig into the entrails of China’s astonishing success in reversing poverty and creating vast wealth while holding on tenaciously to its communist/socialist principles and dogmatic adherence to strict central control of power. This prompted Kim to disclose that he was currently reading a hefty book about the ‘Beijing Consensus’. The Beijing Consensus is a term that refers to the political and especially economic policies of the People’s Republic of China that began after the death of Mao Zedong and the rehabilitation of Deng Xiaoping and are thought to have contributed to China’s eightfold growth in gross national product over two decades. We were sufficiently intrigued to delve into Wikipedia to learn that the phrase ‘Beijing Consensus’ was coined by Joshua Cooper Ramo to pose China’s economic development model as an alternative – especially for developing countries – to the Washington Consensus of market-friendly policies being promoted by the IMF, World Bank and the USA.
What followed thereafter is a little fuzzy, but I think it was Bill Gates who brought up the issue of ‘Chaos Theory’. He took the trouble to explain for the benefit of the Senior Elder Citizens that Chaos Theory studies the behaviour of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions – a response popularly referred to as the butterfly effect. Basically, while most traditional science deals with supposedly predictable phenomena like gravity, electricity or chemical reactions, Chaos Theory deals with nonlinear dynamics whereby seemingly random events are actually predictable from simple deterministic equations.
Honestly, keeping up with these super-humans is no easy task. We can only marvel at the ease with which they switched from the propagation of a profound apotheosis to an even more complex issue. I believe it was Obama who rattled us with his postulation on ‘Elite Capture’ as the driving force behind his determination to protect his “legacy” – liberalisation of healthcare (“Obamacare”). The president of the USA proceeded to explain that ‘Elite Capture’ is best illustrated when and where resources transferred (and) designated for the benefit of the larger population are usurped (hijacked) by a few individuals of superior status – be it economic, political, educational, ethnic or otherwise.
J.K Randle
