Archives: briefs

I don’t play the guitar. I do however find myself (an ex-carpenter who misses his tools and shop space) strongly drawn to the vast ‘creator’-content genre of guitar making and repair. For eight or so years now, my weekend includes without fail Hamilton Ontario luthier Ted Woodford’s Sunday release, and usually one by New Haven-area’s Tim Sway, at least (though I have cut back). I’ve learned a lot this way.

Writer on comics Zach Rabiroff is in Flaming Hydra last week with a fun interview with Billy Bragg, in youth a fan of comic books American and Brit. The image of Bragg the piece uses (hard to say why) is this two-decade-old photo from Wikimedia:

Though I’ve wound up later in life the kind of person whose political-things ideas you’d associate with Bragg’s, I have no history of listening to him. (For my youthful music-consumption-as-identity, a long time ago — I’m a dozen-plus years Bragg’s junior — there was instead a pretty different working-middleclass-audiences guy with guitar and a two-plus-one-syllable name, born, as it happens, the same year as Bragg.)

Anyway, Rabiroff mentions Bragg’s playing a Tele. The guitar in the pic is Tele-like, of course, but plainly something else. If I knew Bragg, I might have recognized that this is the same guitar he’s always on stage with now. But I don’t. Curiosity led me to dig a little bit. Turns out that this is a guitar by Australian Jim Dyson, a relative rarity. (People who get into this sort of thing may appreciate a short conversation with Dyson recorded about the time he was giving up the business.)

The short item I really mean to advert to (below) in present post is one Bragg participated in the making of last year — one not about him but about a guitar build. Chances are that this is a build video (a Duck Duck Go search return for me on ‘Billy Bragg guitar’) I’d have never stumbled across apart from getting curious about that old photo of him, above, with main live-date axe. The production on this thing is first-rate, but view numbers, for whatever reason, are quite low — a want my posting it here will do little to help, sadly.

What’s lovely about this is the people and place you get a glimpse of, an evidently well-loved, busy community space in small-city UK, in Gloucestershire a little way from Bristol. How fortunate to be part of that scene, to share in the experience of such a group.

I appreciate Matt Duss, in conversation with Jeet Heer on Heer’s podcast last week (before Saturday’s realized eventuality, the U.S. strike against Iran’s more fortified nuke plants), pushing back against Heer’s reproducing casually a tail-wags-dog account of the Israel-U.S. relation:

JH:And I think there might be other indications as well, uhm, that, like, the opposition to this war uh would be coming not just from you know the usual . . . chunk of the United States that, like, is not enthusiastic for war but, like, within the military-industrial, uh, side of things as well. Because, like, in a lot of ways . . . for the United States to get into a war with uh Iran right now, like, makes no sense! — and, like, you know, like, I would have to imagine that there are people, you know, . . . traditionally very, uh, centrist, hawkish type people, uh, who are perhaps less beholden to AIPAC than Chuck Schumer, who are like kind of actually worried, like, you know, like ‘What exactly is the United States doing?’

MD:No, I think that’s exactly right. And for good reason! We, we’ve run this play before! Um and this is part of what’s so baffling about this.

JH:Yeah! Yeah, no no, especially baffling — I mean I think maybe to underscore the you know national security side of things, or the uh American national interest side of things, I mean like, it seems to me that, like, Israel or at least Israel you know as Netanyahu conceives of it, . . . the Israeli government, the Israeli, you know, political point of view, is to get the United States involved with Iran — and like that kind of makes sense, like, if I were a small nation you know in this region . . . like, I would want like you know Big Brother to come in and do my fights for me.

But, like, if I were, like, the Big Brother, I would also think like I actually have like other interests rather than, than Israel. . . . Like I can kind of see like what Israel’s goals here are, and it’s not just stopping Iran’s nuclear program, right? Like because I mean like Netanyahu’s been talking, talking about regime change — and I think one should actually conceive that as uh regime smashing . . . . But they want, they want a, a civil war and a divided Iran . . .

MD:Yeah I mean uh it should go without saying . . . . Yes, he has a very specific vision of what, you know, security means for the state of Israel that is, you know, is inextricably um intertwined with his own political survival, um, and —

You know I would also add this: Even though, clearly, we are in this mess because he was able to convince and manipulate Donald Trump, because Donald Trump is very easily manipulable for people who know how to do it, ’cause he’s an ignorant and deeply emotionally damaged uh person — um, you know Putin was able to do the same thing — um, I do, I, I kind of, I don’t like when people are saying ‘Oh we’re — Israel is controlling U.S. foreign policy.’

No! I mean — we have gotten into this mess ourselves, we have a long history, there are people in this country, um, who believe that the best way to handle the Middle East is for us essentially to empower Israel as our local sheriff. Um, and it makes sense what, what Netanyahu is trying to do, as we see him like, attacking in Yemen, attacking Lebanon, attacking Syria, now attacking Iran, it’s not to you know collapse these states, it’s just to make them weak states that cannot challenge Israel and the U.S. in the region in any meaningful way. And I think the idea that this will lead to durable security and stability is a dangerous fantasy . . . .

I’d wish to see it expressed in rather stronger terms, with recognition of this U.S.-dominance relation’s roots in an earlier — and still quite recent! — condition, when the liberal-imperial center of gravity was with France and, above all, Britain, before Europe’s implosion of the first half of the last century. (Heer and Duss do at least identify Germany in its present European role, a bit further on in their discussion, as key party in the liberal-imperial configuration of our own moment.)

No principal political party of the U.S. as we know it is ever going to be ‘anti-war.’ (A warring world, indeed, is what we came about for in the first place.) But let the title’s fiction of ‘reclamation’ go. It’s a worthwhile listen.

[UPDATE (29 Jun. ’25): Heer’s subsequent episode (link below), David Klion as guest interlocutor, is a sort of round two of the general discussion, U.S. militarism and its domestic politics — likewise well worth listening to in my judgment.]

My interest in appreciating the story of modernity as one of ‘West’-meets-‘East’ persists. A name to connect with Helena Blavatsky’s and Henry Steel Olcott’s is that of contemporary Edwin Arnold, editor-in-chief of the Telegraph in the turn-of-twentieth heyday of newspapers, but celebrated in his time rather for a work whose title a book by U. of Edinburgh historian Christopher Harding, out last year, reprises.

Harding, interviewed in April for New Books:

So you get this I think interesting moment in the early nineteenth century where Europeans who’re interested in Asia pivot from China to India — um, I think we’ve given a flavor of why that is. One more reason I think that is is that the interest in China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is happening against a backdrop in Europe of all these wars of religion. So Europe is a highly unstable place, and the idea that China is a stable country, and has been so for thousands of years — the Jesuits start to dig up all these records that shows just how old China really is — is another reason why Europeans have enormous respect for China. By the time you get to the early nineteenth century, things are changing in Europe. One of the things that Europeans start to idolize instead, in a country or a culture, is not stability but dynamism, and change and growth and progression. Because, whether it’s in the area of science and technology, or perhaps politics as well, some of the, uh, most powerful European countries — like Britain for example, and later Germany — are the ones who are changing rapidly. That starts to be what people are looking for.

And so they think that China, actually, is not so much stable as stagnant. And instead India becomes really interesting because they think of it as a place, at least many centuries before, where there was this kind of pure intuition of reality as it really is, and that some Indians, this is the way Europeans start to think, some Indians, however they do it, they retain this connection with reality at its most fundamental and its purest, perhaps via Nature, perhaps via — some Indian ascetics they encounter, who go through these extraordinary prostrations or diets or whatever it might be to maintain that connection — um, a lot of Europeans are really impressed by that, by what they think, anyway, is going on in India.

And so across the nineteenth into the early twentieth centuries it’s much more India than China that’s thought to be this kind of fount of spiritual wisdom. And Edwin Arnold, uh who you mentioned, I think he’s really — yeah he’s really quite important to that. So he’s writing — he’s a journalist with Britain’s Telegraph newspaper, he’s spent some time out in India, he reads Sanskrit — and he writes this long poem, ‘The Light of Asia’ — as you say, we even borrowed our title from him — which he publishes in the latter part of the nineteenth century in several editions.

But he does something extraordinary: because before Arnold, the general idea about Buddhism in Europe is that it’s this kind of dark and nihilistic religion. People don’t understand it well, but one thing they think they do understand about Buddhism is that the aim of religious practice is to extinguish yourself. And I think the Europeans find that really hard to get hold of, because they have this sense of, that of, you know, a virtuous life in a Christian tradition, crudely, gets you into Heaven, right? . . . The idea that you would spend a life of religious practice only to then not exist afterwards, . . . if that’s the best, as it were, posthumous outcome you can hope for, then this really is a bleak worldview. . . . Edwin Arnold I think manages to give it this kind of makeover — and it’s a makeover that tells you almost everything you need to about how Europeans in, especially educated Europeans, in the second half of the nineteenth century felt about the world, and felt about themselves.

Um, partly, I think, this is about new scientific discoveries in the latter half of the nineteenth century. . . . For all sorts of . . . reasons, Europeans are finding Christianity less plausible. And what Edwin Arnold seems to manage to do is present the life of the Buddha almost as though he were a Victorian gentleman, and kind of a Victorian scientist. So he tells the story of the Buddha as someone who won’t accept the received wisdom of his day, but who sees all this suffering going on around him, and so he goes out and he tries lots of different things — you know, famously the historical Buddha leaves his palace and goes to study with all different, uh, forms of Indian practice of his day, it was quite a rich world when the historical Buddha was alive — and he tries all these different things, as almost, you can almost imagine him with a lab coat on, as a decent scientist would back at home, until he finds the thing which works. . . . So Edwin Arnold presents him as someone who’s really easy to understand for nineteenth-century Europeans — and also someone who’s a little bit Christ-like, as well, in his deep compassion for all who suffer.

What he also does, I think, the last thing he does in that poem — again, the reason why I think it’s so popular — is he actually borrows a little bit from Hinduism. So, rather than say at death you simply cease to exist, he has this lovely line, um, he says, ‘The dew-drop slips into the shining sea’ — so you merge back into this great Consciousness from which you came in the first place, which is much more of a consoling image, I think, than you simply extinguish yourself, um, completely.

So he puts together this long poem presenting Buddhism in this way, . . . and the result is this poem which sells extraordinarily well — it’s on a par with Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn for sales. It goes on to shape how Europeans think about not just Buddhism but about India. It influences people like Gandhi and Tolstoy, operas get made, films get made. . . . Not only does it get really well received amongst critics, but all these rebuttals start to get written by Christian missionaries who’ve actually worked out in Asia. . . . Some of those take-downs of The Light of Asia [laughs] are extraordinary, they’re really powerful. Um, but nevertheless, as you say, he’s a real hinge figure. Because even people who don’t necessarily end up converting to Buddhism nevertheless, uh, are sold on the idea that Buddhism is an elevated philosophy worth exploring — and, more broadly, India, China and Japan are places where you might go to seek out spiritual wisdom.

Earlier in that conversation, Harding mentions to interviewer Matt Fraser that it was in fact Theosophists, the network around Blavatsky and Olcott (whom Arnold evidently knew well, though e.g. Wikipedia won’t tell you that), who introduced the young Gandhi, studying law in London, to the sacred-text tradition of India (a thing you can learn from Wikipedia).

Listen to the whole:

I think that, instinctively, where my head goes in terms of what I study and what I teach, you know, the most kind of obvious and surface-level comparison that I would make immediately is to the actions of Herschel Grynszpan, when he assassinated a Nazi diplomat in Paris in November of 1938 — he was seventeen years old — and that act served as a pretext for the subsequent violence across Germany that has come to be known as Kristallnacht. Now I don’t want to suggest that that’s a perfect historical comparison, but it’s sort of just where my head goes to when I think about political violence against diplomats. . . . And then of course, interestingly, after, there was a whole kind of campaign led by, I think, Dorothy Thompson, a U.S. journalist, to sort of defend him. But I think in that case — again, I don’t think it’s a perfect comparison for many, many reasons, but I think what you do see is how there is a kind of act of almost spontaneous, individualized political violence, right, on the one hand, and then there is a whole kind of apparatus of retaliation that is using that as a pretext.

For my part, I’d say that a far more potent demonstrative act, if Elias Rodriguez felt some mark must be made through targeting of politicians’ subordinates, would’ve been to take down a congressional staffer or something at last summer’s Democratic National Convention, showcase of the U.S. party in power — power at the heart of everything where Israel / Palestine is concerned — during most of the last two years’ obliteration of Gaza, while American advocates for Palestinian lives in attendance were being barred from participation in the proceedings. He need never have left Chicago — though if there’s any significance in what Rodriguez did do, it was that it brought violence in the name of the Palestinian cause home to Washington.

I condemn Rodriguez’s act — not narrowly for the antisemitism in it (which to my mind is neither greatly in doubt nor immaterial) — and don’t otherwise wish to dwell on it. But I think the kind of discussion people ought to be having about it, the Jewish Currents podcast roundtable excerpted with comments by Ben Ratskoff above, playable in full below, is a helpful instance of.

By coincidence, I’ve been giving thought to Dorothy Thompson antecedent Henry David Thoreau recently. The meaning of John Brown’s 1859 Harpers Ferry raid, infinitely better backed and planned but possibly no less ill-conceived as a matter of express aim than whatever Rodriguez imagines he was doing at the Capital Jewish Museum last week, lay afterward, and lies today, in how the thing done came to be received — initially very uncertain in issue even among many of the day’s opponents of our founding national slavery regime. The moment, as we look back on it, is as much Thoreau’s as Brown’s in a way.

Israel is at an apex of global disfavor. A new Trump administration, unprincipled and all too accommodating toward more open forms of antisemitism on the right, is adjusting the U.S.’s approach to ‘special relationship’ with Israel and to relationships with Israel’s regional neighbor-rivals. Understanding well the part the political murder Rodriguez has introduced may play amid all this could take a while, it seems fair to say.

In longer items I post from time to time in the older ongoing blog on this site, I refer pretty often to YouTuber Vlad Vexler, whose ‘high liberalism,’ as I like to shorthand it for myself (here with a more historical and general, less Americanized idea of liberal in mind), increasingly I reject.

Crudely speaking, you’d place me to Vexler’s left on the spectrum. You won’t hear me speak as Vexler does, for instance, of a Western world of democracies losing their democratic way, since with many generations of e.g. anarchists and socialists I see this West’s standard liberal-democratic democracy as sham democracy, largely, to begin with. Separately but not unrelatedly, I’m quite doubtful about Vexler’s talk of a line recently crossed from an alternative-reality to a post-truth form dominant in political messaging, useful though it can be to think in those terms.

That acknowledged, I share the video below because to my mind it’s a very good one. Anybody living with the last decade’s shift in global political conditions precipitated by (among many factors) the Mid-East / Central-Asia wars of (with large supporting cast) the Bush and Obama governments can profitably lend Vexler an ear here.

Note that Vexler sometimes records from bed owing to a severe myalgic encephalomyelitis turn since contracting Covid last summer.

Vexler in quotable mode at about the 10-minute mark:

Repressions, as they extend in a de-politicized society taking authoritarian turns, will be pointillistic. — um, It’s easy to have the effect you want to have by picking up very very very few people, in the contemporary context. That’s very well illustrated in Russia; the number of political prisoners in Russia is in the low thousands. But that’s sufficient — in a modern society — to have a desired asphyxiating effect.

It may be so that, as Vlad Vexler put it a few weeks ago, the ‘antisemitic dispositions’ of the current White House occupant ‘are contingent, they can actually be turned off or turned on depending on the context.’ Even allowing that, though, there really isn’t anything nebulous about the antisemitism the guy displays. (He is of course notoriously the sort of antisemite who keeps ‘his Jews’ close.)

Supporters of the politics now well established under present leadership in Israel, its period of strongly ‘illiberal’ (as a left-identifying U.S. Democrat might characterize it) rightward slide, can be found insisting that troubling though it is, this expression of venerable (if generally non-dominant) Christian-American character in power is nevertheless entirely consonant with what should be understood today as ‘good for Israel.’

How long is this likely to be widely convincing, this idea that Trump represents vis-à-vis his Democrat predecessors a somehow yet indefinitely greater extension of credit for policies of Israeli government in the Netanyahu mold? Perhaps not as long as we’d have supposed as Trump was re-entering office in January, suggests Yousef Munayyer, talking with with Jeet Heer in a podcast conversation published Sunday:

But the point is, here, you know: Maybe we can be — and this is complicated — but maybe we are, are fated to be enemies of one another sort of in praxis, in time, in space, case by case almost. I mean — what do I say? — if you’ll indulge me, I guess I’ll read the little section —

Sure!

‘A commitment to impurity in politics, a commitment I think of as key to anti-fascism, has to walk hand-in-hand with the courage to draw lines and fight people, if necessary, even kin.’ So, ‘in other words, feminists who like me are committed anti-fascists, or anti-fascists who are also feminists, as they must be, . . . need to know the difference between forgiving enemies and giving up the fight against them’ — um, ‘this has to be crystal clear.’ I suppose ‘it’s a question of learning to more confidently oppose people whom we understand,’ or whom we also love, perhaps, or whose other work we use and are indebted to. So ‘a cop is still my enemy when she’s my neighbor’ and, perhaps, you know, we have all kinds of shared history. That’s really hard. But this is sort of more important than ever in this moment where Democrats use the word ‘fascist’ about, um, Donald Trump and then handed over power, you know, peacefully. ‘We can feel compassion for Q-Anon moms and still liquidate their armory. We can forgive,’ or whatever, ‘a “pro-life feminist” and still destroy the forced-birth judiciary.’ I — in a sense, that’s the sort of not personal part of it, or something. I guess that’s aspirational. You know, politics is messy.

What I would say is that the enmity was there before I named it, right? It’s been there. That’s kind of my point.

Something from Sophie Lewis’s conversation with Abby Kluchin and Patrick Blanchfield, on the most recent public episode of their show Ordinary Unhappiness, about new book Enemy Feminisms — which she wanted at one point to call (she says, a little beyond the point I excerpt from above) ‘Feminism of Fools.’ It’s useful to listen to her explain what she’d thought to do, there, by way of allusion, before ultimately dropping the idea.

I actually think that a lot of these technologies, a lot of these systems, that we see as immensely complex, so complex as to ward away anybody from thinking that they can understand how a machine-learning system works or how a . . . deterministic algorithm does its thing, or whatever it might be: I think a lot of that is complex by design, right? It’s not inherently complex in the sense of, like, people can’t grasp it. ‘Complexity,’ there, is a lot of warding people away from it — it’s forbidden knowledge, right, or it’s secret knowledge that you can’t get to unless you’re part of the priesthood or whatever it might be, or unless you have passed the right test and entered the right guilds, or whatever . . .

Unless you’ve ‘learned to code’ and . . .

Unless you’ve learned to code!

And I think the kind of old idea of a guild is actually a lot more appropriate, because part of the guild was as a way to create social protections around specific skills and forms of knowledge. So that you can then, you know, for whatever reason, for good reasons but also for bad reasons, have control over who has access to those skills, who has access to that knowledge — and that might be so that you can be in a better negotiating point with employers or with lords or with whoever it might be, to say, ‘Well you need the skill of a carpenter, but all carpenters are part of the carpentry guild, and we have very hierarchical and formalized systems of what that means, to acquire that skill, to sell that skill,’ and so on, right? But I think part of the guild system, as well, is to ward away . . . . ‘You can’t possibly understand how two pieces of wood are joined together, it’s far too complex for your mind.’

And we see that same kind of thing happening with forms of engineering, forms of programming, and so on. So for me, . . . what I do like about the idea of the mechanic is that it does have in it a bit of a hobbyist idea, that you can . . . be a mechanic who just, like, tinkers on the weekends, right? — acquires these kinds of skills and knowledge through the act of doing it, through . . . being mechanically curious. And I think that is something that has been really robbed from us, is the mechanical curiosity, the idea that we should be curious and interested in how the things around us work, and that that curiosity and interest can actually be fulfilled without having to enter a guild or enter into, you know, the rarified halls of academia or a corporation, or whatever it might be.

One of the reasons why I didn’t call it ‘The Engineer and the Luddite’ is ’cause the engineer already emerges from, as a profession, a highly formalized set of skills and knowledge, which is itself also — as we know from the work by people like David Noble, who’s a historian of engineering and technology, and he has a book, America by Design . . . — the origins of the engineer as a profession come out of industry needing to create certain kinds of knowledge and skills, and people who hold those knowledge and skills who can then contribute to the motivations of industry. And so the engineer is deeply and integrally related to Capital — from its origins up to today. . . .

And it feels like the engineer also comes in to, like, remake these systems in such a way that the mechanic, or the workers who are more involved in this, are having their power over the system, their understanding of how it all works, you know, degraded or reduced, so that Capital has more power.

Jathan Sadowski and Paris Marx, above, mid-way through the most recent episode of Marx’s podcast Tech Won’t Save Us, below, on aspects of being in a position to get how stuff works and also of finding oneself barred from it, things Sadowski considers in new book The Mechanic and the Luddite.

I learned a few things over the weekend about illustrated Turkic-readership journal Molla Nasraddin and Russian-trained Ottoman German illustrator Oskar Schmerling in the era of major European counterparts Le Rire and Simplicissimus (e.g.), and about the long career of Iranian-Russian Soviet poet-bureaucrat Abolqasem Lahouti, among other things previously unknown to me, through the New Books conversation with Yale lit scholar Sam Hodgkin appended below.

Pulled in, I wound up listening as well to Hodgkin in another (quite different) discussion of his book on Ajam Media Collective’s podcast and, then, to a film-oriented lecture given at NYU the previous year, both linked below. A rich vein, promising to add a good deal to the picture I’ve begun to get mainly through the work of Priya Satia and Pankaj Mishra.

No plans to pick up Hodgkin’s book, priced for university library acquisition, anytime soon. I will be (that is, am) listening to more from Ajam Media, though — for the religion content and the political-world content both.

Pankaj Mishra, in the course of tightening up on the large subject of his From the Ruins of Empire (2012), in the book’s last chapter:

For a while at least, the Third World, as a large part of the postcolonial world was inaccurately called, seemed doomed from a Western point-of-view, the site of obscure civil wars and the source of needy immigrants.

The picture is a lot clearer and multifarious after more than half a century of change, when many of the ideological blinkers of the Cold War no longer exist. Moral idealism rather than practicality and effectiveness seems to have defined such broad transnational groupings as the Non-Aligned Movement, which almost all postcolonial Asian nations joined in an attempt to build an alternative to the crude polarities of the Cold War. We can see that the seemingly wholesale adoption of Western ideologies (Chinese communism, Japanese imperialism) did not work. Attempts at syntheses (India’s parliamentary democracy, Muslim Turkey’s secular state, China’s state capitalism) were more successful, and violent rejections of the West in the form of Iran’s Islamic revolution and Islamic movements continue to have an afterlife.

Many new nations, such as Pakistan, never recovered from birthing traumas; their liberationist energies dispersed into political-religious movements of an increasingly militant nature. Others, such as the populous nations of China, India and Indonesia, despite some serious setbacks, managed their economic growth and sovereignty to the point where their cumulative heft now seems to pose a formidable challenge to the West itself.

Recent history tells us that there are more such challenges — political, diplomatic and economic — still to arise from large parts of Asia. More than half a century after decolonization began, we continue to live in what the American writer Irving Howe called ‘a revolutionary age.’ . . .

Replacing Europe’s power with its own, America, Howe wrote, was ‘sincerely convinced that only by the imposition of its will can the world be saved. But the world resists this will; it cannot, even if it would, surrender its own mode of response.’ Written in 1954, these words sound no less convincing a year after the Arab Spring and the collapse of several pro-Western dictatorships. Chaos and uncertainty may loom over a wide swathe of the Arab world for some years. But the spell of Western power has finally been broken. If uprooted Muslims defy it contemptuously, others such as the Chinese have adopted its ‘secrets.’ The sense of humiliation that burdened several generations of Asians has greatly diminished. The rise of Asia, and the assertiveness of Asian peoples, consummates their revolt against the West that began more than a century ago; it is in many ways the revenge of the East.

Yet this success conceals an immense intellectual failure, one that has profound ramifications for the world today and the near future.

It is simply this: no convincingly universalist response exists today to Western ideas of politics and economy, even though these seem increasingly febrile and dangerously unsuitable in large parts of the world.

I’m new to Mishra — learned of him only a couple of weeks ago from a ChiCommons co-worker. From the Ruins is the second of his books I’ve finished (audio, via Everand, where I’m happy in finding a lot of his output available) in the short time since. He’ll turn up in future longer posts here, I expect, soon enough. If I can get to them.

This is material that goes hand-in-hand with that of Priya Satia, historian at Stanford U., of whom I first learned two years ago and whom immediately I found so helpfully provocative. As it happens, I wasn’t to finish her Time’s Monster then, life being what it’s been; this year, a few months ago, I returned to it and made it through to end, at last. That’s primed me well to take up Mishra now.