» Boom boom, not doom doom | The Dawn Blog

BY ASIF NOORANI ON 03 29TH, 2011

 

Cricketers have had several nicknames (sometimes pet names) which are remembered long after they have departed. The first that comes to my mind is that of Fred Truman, who was a fast bowler of epic proportions. His speed could only be matched with his fiery temperament, which was why he was called Fiery Freddie Truman.

We had Merry Max (Maqsood Ahmad), who was born 30 years too early, for he was fond of hitting the ball mercilessly. ‘Hit out or get out’ was his motto and each time he came to the crease, things perked up. Even sleepy radio commentators woke up. He played Tests but he was meant for what was initially called, ‘instant cricket’. No prizes for guessing that the term was used for One Day cricket, somewhat disdainfully by the purists, who thought that only five- or six-day games were real cricket.

Merry Max (not Marry Max) was once out at the score of 99 (his highest) when playing against India in the 1954-55 series. A cricket fan, addicted to radio commentary, got his first and last heart attack. Subhash Gupte, who took five wickets in a deadly spell, including Merry Max’s prize wicket, said that if he had even the slightest inkling about the tragic turn of events, he would have postponed sending his Pakistani friend back to the pavilion, until he completed what would have been his only 100.

Few would remember that pop singer Nazia Hasan’s second (or was it third?) album was titledBoom Boom. But unluckily, its sales and popularity were no patch for her earlier one – Young Tarang.

We then heard of the dual word, ‘Boom Boom’ when Shahid Afridi punished the Indian bowlers with sixes after sixes in New Delhi. He had earlier created record for the fastest century in ODIs in Kenya in the second match that he played (in the first one, he didn’t get a chance to bat).

Afridi has surpassed Sanath Jayasuriya’s what seemed to be an inaccessible record of the highest number of sixes, a few months ago. Statisticians will tell you how many the two scored. All I know is that our flamboyant (read, unpredictable) batsman crossed the Sri Lankan’s record in fewer matches.

The wheel of fortune has completed one full circle. Afridi was selected to play for Pakistan because the leg spinner, Mushtaq Ahmed was unfit. Wasim Akram recalls that when he saw a well-built, fair-looking lad hitting Waqar Younis mercilessly above the ropes during practice, he decided to ball to the mercurial young man himself. I must confess I got the same treatment from him.

But now Afridi is much more invaluable as a bowler than as a batsman. His guile and his variety is amazing. While these lines are being written (on the eve of the semi-final) he has taken the highest number of wickets in the current edition of the World Cup, twenty-one being the current number. He has also proved to be a competent captain in the shorter forms of the game.

Years ago, while  waiting for a flight from San Francisco airport, I ran into three Indian students, who asked me if I was an Indian, to which I said I was from their neighbouring country. “Oh! So you are from the land of Boom Boom Shahid Afridi?”

“Do you like to watch him bat?” I queried.

“Yes, we love to see him bat but not when he is playing against our boys,” was the reply.

Boom Boom was the nickname given to him by none other than Ravi Shastri, while he was commentating on an India-Pakistan ODI. What happens when Afridi doesn’t score? They love him so much that no one says, ‘Doom Doom’.

When I was writing a book on the charismatic cricketer for Liberty Books, Karachi, we racked our brains and finally thought the title of the book should be ‘Boom Boom Shahid Afridi‘. You know what? The book sold very well. There was a slight drop in the sales when he bit the ball but then when he started taking wicket after wicket, its sales have taken an upward swing once again. So, anything that has the tag of Boom Boom is unpredictable but never, I repeat never, dull.

 

 

Asif Noorani, a seasoned journalist, is the writer of three best-selling books including ‘Boom, Boom Shahid Afridi’ which is available at Liberty Books.

 

India and Pakistan’s Cricket Battle: Just What They Need – TIME

Pakistan’s Saeed Anwar takes a swing during a 2003 cricket World Cup game against India. The teams will face off again on Wednesday

Serious sport, wrote George Orwell, amounts to “war minus the shooting.” India and Pakistan have certainly done plenty of shooting in the three wars they’ve fought since being separated in birth by the departing British Empire in 1948. But on Wednesday, they’ll channel their rivalry into another ritual bequeathed by the British, when they face off in an eagerly awaited semifinal of cricket’s Word Cup. Both countries’ leaders will be among the tens of thousands squeezed into the stadium in the Indian city of Mohali, recognizing the sporting showdown as a rare opportunity to ease the geopolitical one.

“This is the mother of all matches,” says Mushahid Hussain, a prominent Pakistani opposition politician. It is difficult to exaggerate the excitement built up on both sides of the border, with anticipation of the match having dominated the news cycle for days now on a subcontinent obsessed with the sport. Hundreds of millions of viewers are expected to watch the match on television, with absenteeism at work likely to reach record highs. Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, who will be at the match, has announced that government offices will close two hours before the opening ball is bowled.Cricket is a rare source of cohesion in an increasingly fractured Pakistani society, in which passion for the game is as widespread and embedded in the national identity as is the embrace of Islam. But whereas religion has proved to be a violent source of division in recent years, cricket unites Pakistanis across the dangerous fissures of ethnicity, sect and social class. But the violent fanaticism that cloaks itself in religion impinged on the sanctity of cricket when, in March 2009, the visiting Sri Lankan team was attacked by terrorists. No foreign team has toured there since. Were it not for the terror threat, Pakistan would be co-hosting the World Cup. Some say that it is better they were spared the embarrassment of hosting matches at Lahore’s Gaddafi Stadium, named in honor of the Libyan dictator for his support of Pakistan’s clandestine nuclear weapons pursuit.

Terrorism has also sabotaged efforts to repair relations between India and Pakistan. After the November 2008 Mumbai massacre, New Delhi severed diplomatic links with Islamabad. The attackers went from Pakistan and were members of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a terrorist outfit that Pakistan had backed as a proxy in the anti-Indian insurgency in Kashmir — and had banned only under pressure from the Bush Administration.The Mumbai attacks brought the nuclear-armed neighbors perilously close to war; now, partly thanks to cricket, the peace process is slowly resuming. On Monday and Tuesday, the interior secretaries of the two countries met for scheduled talks. In a breakthrough, Islamabad agreed to allow Indian investigators probing the Mumbai massacre to visit Pakistan. On Wednesday, the two Prime Ministers will also meet — at the match.

Once the two countries had beaten their quarterfinal opponents to set up the Mohali showdown, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh didn’t hesitate to invite Gilani to the game. “One can call it symbolism,” says politician Hussain, “but in the checkered history of India-Pakistan relations, even symbolism becomes substance.”Cricket diplomacy had proved useful in easing tensions before. In 1987, Pakistan’s General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq unilaterally decided to watch the teams play in Jaipur, India, a move that is said to have defused fears of a cross-border attack. And in 2004 and 2005, leaders from both countries traveled to watch cricket on both sides of the border as hostilities in Kashmir subsided and a back-channel dialogue got under way.

One side will have to lose Wednesday’s match, but the politicians won’t let that cloud a diplomatic opening. “Both leaders have shown wisdom in not letting this opportunity pass,” says Sherry Rehman, a Pakistani lawmaker heavily involved in track-two diplomacy and also a cricket fan on her way to Mohali. “We must not expect major summitry here, as this is not a structured dialogue, but it can become a window for new beginnings, for turning a new corner. God knows both countries could use one.”Pakistan’s security establishment remains obsessed with the idea that the country faces an existential threat from India, seeing Indian support for the Karzai government in Afghanistan as part of a scheme to encircle Pakistan. India complains that Pakistan has done little to crack down effectively on LeT, which despite being banned still holds public rallies to incite jihad against India. So there are limits to what cricket diplomacy can achieve. Prime Minister Gilani, after all, is forced to defer to Pakistan’s powerful military in matters of national strategy, while India’s Prime Minister Singh appears to be in a minority in his own Cabinet.

For many on both sides, part of what makes the political divide so frustrating is also what makes the cricket rivalry so enjoyable: “India and Pakistan are so close in many ways and so far in others,” says H.M. Naqvi, a Pakistani novelist who recently won the award for best South Asian fiction at the Jaipur Literature Festival. “The rivalry is a function of our peculiar relationship. We all watch Bollywood, eat dhal, listen to qawwali [music] and enjoy cricket. And yet, despite all these commonalities, we’ve often been at daggers drawn.The ritual combat of cricket, however, offers a more attractive — and bloodless — avenue of conflict. Even the most enthusiastic peaceniks fail to suppress their nationalism when it comes to the sport. “The competition on the pitch helps let off steam,” adds Naqvi. “All our aspirations and anxieties are played out on the field. The rivalry also makes for a great goddamned match!” The two teams are among the best in the world, with a history of nail-bitingly close finishes. On this occasion, however, India is the favorite — a stronger team on paper with a powerful home-ground advantage.

But Pakistan needs the victory more. The national cricket team has become a metaphor for the national malaise, plagued by instability and a match-fixing scandal that has taken down some of its top players. And while India has keenly burnished a global image as a rising economic power, Pakistan’s headlines are dominated by terrorism, assassinations, floods and deepening economic gloom. A cricket win would certainly lift morale.

Although Wednesday’s game is only a semifinal, few Pakistanis care whether they ultimately win the World Cup. Fans merely dread a humiliation at the hands of the archrival next door. “Lose to any team you want,” Pakistanis often say, “but never lose to India.”

 

Herald exclusive: An interview with Shehryar Fazli | | DAWN.COM

Mahvesh Murad | Herald Exclusive

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“The wonderful thing about Jaipur was that although big names like Coetzee and Pamuk and Diaz were there, you felt that people were in fact just as interested in discovering new writers.” – File Photo

Raised in Paris, Mauritius and Pakistan, Shehryar Fazli now lives in Islamabad where he works at an international think tank. He graduated from McGill University and theUniversity of Massachusetts Amherst. Here he talks to the Herald about his debut novel, Invitation.

Q. Has Invitation been a long time in the making?

A. Yes. I started a novel about 11 years ago. None of what I wrote back then survived except some basic idea of a narrator who returns from the West after a long exile. I had those few pages lying around for years. Finally when I gave it another go, a story developed around that basic premise.

Q. When did you decide to set Invitation in pre-prohibition Karachi?

A. I was discovering more about this very fascinating time in Pakistan’s history — when popular demonstrations helped oust a military regime, democracy was being introduced for the first time, and then it all went wrong. I decided to eventually put my narrator in that mess and see what happened. I liked the results.

Q. The 1970s are almost a mythic time for people of our generation. There was so much happening that we can barely imagine possible now. You weren’t around then but have witnessed some equally tumultuous moments in Pakistan’s history. Why did you not choose to write about what you had experienced, the way other Pakistani writers have with 9/11, for example?

A. Well, let me first talk about what I liked about that period as the setting for this story. Shahbaz, the young narrator, lived his last 19 years in Paris which, in May 1968, went through a major historical convulsion itself. Shahbaz does not feel a part of it. He comes back to Karachi to settle a family property dispute on his father’s behalf. But, more than anything, for an abstract sense of citizenship. That was a time when I think many in Pakistan were acquiring a taste for it. That is, after all, what democracy is supposed to provide. Back then, democracy was just coming to Pakistan. So what better time for Shahbaz to make his entrance? Of course, things do not quite work out for him or many of the people around him. And the title perhaps conveys a sense of that promise.

Q. In many ways, Invitation is about just that — a search for a sense of belonging. It has been described as ‘Karachi noir’. Stylistically, is this how you write? Or is it a tone you developed specifically for this novel because of its setting?

A. I was a little surprised to see it described as ‘noir’. Not that I have an objection to that description but I never thought of it as noir myself. The voice I wanted, which is Shahbaz’s, is one that is on the surface constrained but with something a little reckless underneath that occasionally emerges in bursts. So it did not have much to do with the time of setting but with this particular, strange creature that is Shahbaz.

Q. Initially I found the tone of the narrator distant but as I began to get to know him I realised it was perfect. He is often distant and cold and no hero, as much as he would love to be. It’s not easy to decide to write in the voice of a person who is not likeable and it’s not something most writers would do for fear of alienating most readers who would rather relate to someone ‘nice’. And yet here you are.

A. I do not subscribe to that. I think unlikable narrators are far more compelling. And your description, I think, is absolutely right. His constraint, his inability to act, is what makes him such a nasty piece of work. The voice, I think, reflects that. But it was Evelyn Waugh who said that the job of fiction is to spread sympathy to unexpected places. I do hope readers warm up to Shahbaz eventually, despite everything, in the way they warm to a monster like Nabokov’s Humbert or Ishiguro’s Stevens in Remains of the Day.

Q. Invitation was launched in India where it has been published and you attended the Jaipur Literary Festival. Do you think festivals like that are important for writers to promote their books?

A. Before Jaipur, I attended the Kolkata Literary Festival which was my first event. We then did a launch in Delhi and I had two sessions in Jaipur. The Kolkata Festival, like Jaipur, had this buzz and energy to it because events like these, more so than any single book launch, bring together people who just love books. So it puts a writer, especially a first-timer, into contact with an audience he or she probably would not meet otherwise. The wonderful thing about Jaipur was that although big names like Coetzee and Pamuk and Diaz were there, you felt that people were in fact just as interested in discovering new writers. So, to answer your question, absolutely.

Q. Your novel is a welcome change to what the world has come to accept as Pakistani literature in English. It’s a throwback to a time when Pakistan was not known for what it is now. Do you think you are at a disadvantage, having distanced yourself from the 9/11 stories that are so popular nowadays?

A. Well, I would not like to think that readers are coming to these books because of the topic but because of the writing, the characters, and the human stories. I set my novel in a particular period not to educate but to explore a character’s very personal relationship to the events around him and I hope that it is that personal story that people are attracted to, just as I hope they are approaching a so-called post-9/11 novel not to learn anything new about 9/11 or terrorism, which there is plenty written about in other forms. And if that is the case, then I do not worry too much about being at a disadvantage because somehow my “topic” may be considered outdated.

Q. I know this may be a little early to ask, seeing as your very first book has only just been published, but what’s next?

A. I am somewhere close to midway through a second novel which does indeed take place in Pakistan. I think I will remain engaged as a novelist with this country for a while because there is such rich material here which I have not begun to tap. But yes, I would not want to confine myself to any particular subject or style or perspective. For example, one day I hope I can write a book from a female character’s point of view.

 

This book is available at Liberty Books

‘Moonwalking With Einstein,’ by Joshua Foer – Book Review – NYTimes.com

An epidemic of amnesia, as potent as one of the surreal plagues inGabriel García Márquez’s novels, seems to have hit our culture. It’s not just aging baby boomers who are complaining about their lousy memories. Their kids, too, have forgotten how to remember phone numbers, driving directions and the basic data of daily life. After all, why bother to memorize anything when there are cellphones and Google to do it for you?

Emil Salman/Haaretz

Joshua Foer

 

In his captivating new book, “Moonwalking With Einstein,” the young journalist Joshua Foer tackles the subject of memory the way George Plimpton tackled pro football and boxing. After a year of memory training, this novice not only began competing against the country’s best mental athletes but also unexpectedly found himself in the finals of the U.S.A. Memory Championships. His story shows, he says, that “our memories are indeed improvable” and that there are established techniques — pioneered by the Greeks and Romans — to help train the brain.

“Moonwalking With Einstein,” which grew out of an article for Slate, and which in 2006 reportedly earned its author, then 23, a $1.2 million advance, has a lot in common with Malcolm Gladwell’s best sellers: it popularizes scientific concepts in a breezy, accessible fashion while cheerfully dispensing some practical insights and lots of entertaining anecdotes. But whereas Mr. Gladwell’s 2008 book,“Outliers,” reads like a parody of his own formula, devolving into an unconvincing mash-up of gauzy hypotheses and highly selective illustrations, Mr. Foer writes in these pages with fresh enthusiasm. His narrative is smart and funny and, like the work of Dr. Oliver Sacks, it’s informed by a humanism that enables its author to place the mysteries of the brain within a larger philosophical and cultural context.

In the course of the book (which provided the basis for a recent New York Times Magazine article), we meet Mr. Foer’s memory coach, Ed Cooke, “a young grandmaster” of memory from England, who has learned the bulk of “Paradise Lost” by heart (“at the rate of 200 lines per hour”), and who is now working his way through Shakespeare. Mr. Cooke’s “philosophy of life is that a heroic person should be able to withstand about 10 years in solitary confinement without getting terribly annoyed.” We also meet Ben Pridmore, a world memory champion, who “could memorize the precise order of 1,528 random digits in an hour” and any poem handed to him.

How did Mr. Foer come to join the ranks of these competitive mnemonists? How did he go from being a guy with an average memory — who regularly forgot his friends’ phone numbers and where he left his car keys (or, for that matter, his car) — to being one of those extraterrestrials able to memorize a deck of cards in 1 minute 40 seconds? The chronicle of his metamorphosis forms the spine of this engaging book.

As Mr. Foer works on improving his memory, he learns a lot about how the brain operates, and in doing so he gives us some intriguing asides about things like “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two” (“we can only think about roughly seven things at a time”); the “O.K. plateau”(by which people improve at a skill until they achieve an acceptable level of competence, then hit a seemingly insurmountable wall); “Ribot’s Law” (which suggests that older memories are more stable because the more a memory is revisited in our minds, the more it is consolidated and integrated into a web of other connections); and the “curve of forgetting,” quantified by a German psychologist who found that in the first hour after learning a set of nonsense syllables, more than half of them would be forgotten; after a day, another 10 percent would disappear; and after a month, another 14 percent.

Mr. Foer provides a brief history of memorization and the declining role it plays in modern culture, where books, photographs, museums and digital media have promoted “the externalization of memory” and changed the very notion of erudition and what it means to be an educated person.

Before writing was common, human beings had to use their own brains for information storage, and before books were indexed — making it possible to gain access to them in a nonlinear way — people labored under the “imperative to hold” books’ contents in their own mental hard drives simply to find particular bits of information. Poets in the oral tradition, like Homer, relied on repetition and rhythms and other patterns to recite their work from memory, and in the ancient world, exceptional memories were both exalted and widely known.

“King Cyrus could give the names of all the soldiers in his army,” Mr. Foer writes, citing Pliny the Elder’s report in “Natural History,” a first-century encyclopedia. “Lucius Scipio knew the names of the whole Roman people.”

Mr. Foer adds: “There are plenty of reasons not to take everything Pliny says at face value (he also reported the existence of a race of dog-headed people in India), but the sheer volume of anecdotes about extraordinary memories in the classical world is itself telling.”

In ancient times, Mr. Foer goes on, students were not only taught what to remember but also “how to remember it” — they were instructed in the same techniques that he would learn from his memory coach, Mr. Cooke. Those techniques are based around the notion that the human brain (which developed at a time when our ancestors’ survival depended on remembering “where to find food and resources, and the route home”) is better at remembering images and places than abstract concepts like numbers and words, and that the trick for remembering is, therefore, in Mr. Cooke’s words, “to change whatever boring thing is being imputed into your memory into something that is so colorful, so exciting, and so different from anything you’ve seen before that you can’t possibly forget it.”

As Mr. Foer explains it, this process of “elaborative encoding” involves converting information (like a string of numbers or a shopping list) into a series of “engrossing visual images” — the “funnier, lewder and more bizarre the better.” Those images can then be mentally arranged “within an imagined space” known as a “memory palace,” which doesn’t even have to be a building. They can be routes through a town, station stops along a railway or signs of the zodiac, Mr. Foer adds, as long as “there’s some semblance of order that links one locus to the next, and so long as they are intimately familiar.”

To remember a list, for instance, Mr. Cooke instructed Mr. Foer to imagine each item (pickled garlic, cottage cheese, salmon, six bottles of white wine, and so on) in as vivid and embellished detail as possible, and then mentally distribute them along a route through a familiar edifice (in this case, his childhood home). The exercise, Mr. Cooke explained, would exploit the finely turned spatial memory possessed by human beings to structure and store the information.

First, Mr. Foer was to visualize a large bottle of pickled garlic (whatever that is) standing in his family driveway in place of a car. Next, he was to picture “an enormous wading-pool-size tub of cottage cheese” at the front door and to imagine the model Claudia Schiffer swimming in that tub of curds; and so on down the list, in each case finding as creative and, well, as memorable an image as possible.

If this sounds awfully complicated, it’s even worse when it comes to memorizing numbers (which must be converted into phonetic sounds, which “can then be turned into words, which can in turn become images for a memory palace”).

Why would anyone go to all this trouble to win a memory competition, or show off at a party? Mr. Foer tells us that his excursion into the world of competitive memory taught him “to pay attention to the world around” him and to appreciate the repository of images, ideas and analogies that memorized texts or carefully learned facts can impart.

More important, he says, he learned to appreciate the role that memory plays in shaping our identities and perceptions. “Our ability to find humor in the world, to make connections between previously unconnected notions, to create new ideas, to share in a common culture: all these essentially human acts depend on memory,” he writes near the end of this appealing book. “Now more than ever, as the role of memory in our culture erodes at a faster pace than ever before, we need to cultivate our ability to remember. Our memories make us who we are. They are the seat of our values and source of our character. Competing to see who can memorize more pages of poetry might seem beside the point, but it’s about taking a stand against forgetfulness, and embracing primal capacities from which too many of us have become estranged.”

This book is available at Liberty Books

Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next by John D Kasarda and Greg Lindsay – review | Books | The Guardian

PD Smith gets a worrying glimpse of a frenetic, gas-guzzling future

• The Guardian, Saturday 19 March 2011

The interior of Dubai international airport. Photograph: Massimo Borchi/© Atlantide Phototravel/Corbis

In his dystopian novel The Sleeper Awakes, begun in 1899, HG Wells portrayed a future world in which vast machine-like cities were linked by air travel. Since then, no vision of the urban future has been complete without ubiquitous air transport, from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926), in which gnat-like aircraft soar among the skyscrapers, to the police spinners of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). In 1997 JG Ballard predicted that “the airport will be the true city of the 21st century”. Now John Kasarda, an American management consultant and academic, is jetting around the world showing politicians and business leaders how Ballard’s prediction is about to come true.

1. Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next
2. by John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay
3. 

This “prophet of living our lives aloft” has flown more than 3m miles in the last 25 years and has “jet lag stamped on his face”. Journalist Greg Lindsay, the author of this enthusiastic survey of Kasarda’s ideas, is clearly a believer. As the subtitle proclaims, this is “the way we’ll live next”.

According to Kasarda, the future city will have “an airport at the center and concentric rings of uses radiating outward”. The aerotropolis is designed for the wired, always-on “Instant Age” of smart phones and smart cities, where the only law is the survival of the swiftest. Kasarda argues that this is the next stage in globalisation, a radical rethink of how we live in a world rendered flat by new technology. Just as cities such as Southampton or Singapore grew up around their seaports, so the airport will become the heart of tomorrow’s city.

Dubai is the model. It is “the aerotropolis writ large, a city of hubs designed to lure the world’s wealth to its door”. And as in so many other areas, China has been quick to seize the initiative. It will build 100 new airports by 2020, when it aims to have 82% of its population living within 90 minutes’ drive of one. This investment will enable the iPods and other high-value goods manufactured there to travel via Hong Kong to America within 48 hours. In contrast, the west views airports as “nuisances or toxic threats”. Kasarda warns: “If we don’t change our minds, the game will be over. In some ways, we’ve already surrendered.”

There is no doubt that transport – whether on four legs or four wheels – has shaped cities throughout history. But to be successful, cities have to offer so much more than docks or terminals. In a revealing phrase, Lindsay describes Kasarda’s aerotropolis as “an urban machine not for living but for competition”. HG Wells would have feared for the people who lived in such a place. Kasarda’s overblown rhetoric cries out to be challenged, something Lindsay fails to do. But in its account of the rapidly evolving nature of work – from high-tech Chinese factories to the computerised fulfilment centres springing up around runways across America – this pacey but over-long book is at once fascinating and chilling.

Lindsay and Kasarda dismiss the idea that air travel should be curtailed due to concerns about greenhouse gas emissions and climate change as fatal for economic growth. Similarly, fears about peak oil are countered by the prospect of synthetic fuels. If the oil really does stop flowing, then they believe electrification of cars will allow reserves to be prioritised for aircraft. This dramatic option is one that Laurence Smith also raises in his book, The New North (322pp, Profile, £20). But Smith does not minimise the challenges facing our oil-addicted societies. He points out, for instance, that to meet the expected demand for oil in 2030 we would need to discover the equivalent of nine Saudi Arabias.

A scientist at UCLA, Smith studies the geophysical impact of climate change, particularly in the far north. In this measured and thoughtful book, he examines what our planet will be like 40 years from now. By 2050, the world’s population will have grown to 9.2 billion, of whom 6.4 billion will live in cities, “forming crowded urban clots around the hot lower latitudes of our planet”. China will be the world’s largest economy, followed by the US and India. People will be wealthier and older – Japan will have 13 people of working age for every 10 retired people.

In 40 years’ time global warming will have transformed the planet. Despite technological advances and a growing diversity of energy sources including renewables and nuclear, the world will still rely heavily on fossil fuels. China is currently building two coal-fired power stations a week, “equivalent to adding the entire UK power grid every year”. Shockingly, coal will become the world’s primary energy resource, with demand tripling by 2050.

Smith’s headline conclusion is that, as global warming thaws the permafrost and frees the Arctic of sea ice, the “New North” will become increasingly important. Although the Arctic proper (north of the Arctic Circle) is very small, the New North – the land and ocean lying above the 45˚ N latitude – is vast, comprising some 29% of the world’s ice-free land. The Northern Rim countries – the northern US, Canada, Russia, Iceland, Greenland, Norway, Sweden and Finland – form a bloc of a quarter of a billion people with a $7tn economy. Their population and power are set to grow dramatically by 2050, Smith predicts.

As global warming takes effect, rainfall will increase here while droughts create water-shortages in the south. Estimates suggest that 30% of the world’s undiscovered natural gas and 13% of its oil lie in the shale-rich sedimentary rocks of the Arctic. Its rich natural resources might make it the next Middle East in terms of its potential for conflict. The high Arctic is destined to become an “economic engine, shovelling gas, oil, minerals and fish into the gaping global maw”.

Although at times it labours under the weight of evidence, The New Northis a more convincing portrayal of the future than Aerotropolis. But both books raise urgent questions about what kind of world we want to live in.

 

This book is available at Liberty Books