Given the background, and how nearly I didn’t run, I’m very happy with how yesterday’s marathon went, even though my finishing time (over 5 hours) is more than half an hour outside what I expected.

The first thirteen miles were incredible: my knee (which I was trying to protect by running on the outside edges of my feet) didn’t twinge even once, my lungs felt strong and I was hitting or bettering my pace at every mile. Bizarrely, I started getting blisters about 9 miles in but even though I did stop for a breath at mile 12, after that I didn’t really have any problems till mile 17. That’s when both quads cramped so hard that I could barely lift my legs. I started over-compensating with my calves, which soon tightened up too. The end result was that between miles 17 and 23 I had to stop no less than 3 times to stretch and massage my legs (more on that later), which altogether totalled about 20 minutes of wasted time. By mile 21, my knee started to give too, with the muscles tightening up to the point that I couldn’t bend my leg (no sharp pain like before, though). Needless to say, I was doing a lot of walking at this point. Just after mile 23, though, excitement got the better of me and, with the adrenalin flowing, I managed to start running again. My lungs still felt strong, so the only thing that was holding me back were my legs. And even they couldn’t stop me from making a dash for it when we turned on to The Mall for the final stretch :)

Around mile 19, I pulled up to stretch my quads. One of the St. John’s Hospice workers saw me and told me there was a massage spot a little further down so I stumbled down and had my calves massaged for five minutes. That made my legs feel so much better that when I saw another massage spot around mile 21, I decided to stop there too. This one was different though: they made me lie down on the grass and insisted on starting near my shoulders even though I had clearly explained the pain was around my knee. And when the lady started, instead of really kneading the muscle, she just lightly passed her hands over my shoulders and back. I had no clue what she thought she was doing but lying down felt so wonderful I let her do whatever she thought she was doing for a good 10 minutes! When I finally got up (no better for the ‘massage’), I asked what organisation they were with. That’s when the lady reached into her pocket and pulled out a card that said ‘Scientology Volunteer Minister’. Umm, OK that explains a lot.

I have to say, the event was brilliant. The logistics of just providing adequate security and water is mind-boggling in itself, but on top of that the masseuses, the energy gel stations, the vaseline (note: being hirsute means not having to worry about chafing – ’nuff said!), and everything else was available in abundance and arranged perfectly. The only gripe I have is that Lucozade ran out of energy gels at their last station, which is what led to me finally giving in and taking whatever sweets and jelly beans the crowd was offering.

Oh yeah, the crowd. I honestly remember only one 100-yard stretch where the sidelines weren’t absolutely packed with people. It was remarkable, and their support was invaluable. And by support I don’t just mean the constant ‘Come on, Spinal Research, mate!’ but also the orange slices, jelly beans and sweets many of them offered. And the live bands all the way along were great for morale too.

Oh, something cool occurred to me while I was running: if the most you’ve ever run before is 11 miles (as I had), then by running 26.2 miles you’ve effectively established uncountably infinite personal bests! The proof follows from a simple application of Cantor’s diagonal argument. Yay!

In conclusion, I’m very happy with how things went: despite injuring my knee and not being able to run at all for the month before the marathon, and despite being stranded in continental Europe the week before the actual run, I finished. I think I’m going to run another one — soon — but for now, I’m going back to bed to nurse my aching legs and the inch-long blisters on my feet.

I might have mentioned this before, but the biggest reason I don’t blog is because I decide I want to edit something before I publish it; a few days later, I’ve lost my train of thought and the draft never makes it to the blog. There’s certainly a lot of stuff to blog about (including: I joined the Tehreek-e-Insaaf recently, and I’ve almost finished my petition to start a library in Islamabad), but I get too caught up in trying to get my writing just right…

That said, I’ve noticed that it doesn’t really matter how much editing I put into a post: I inevitably read it several times after publishing and tinker with it then. So, I’m trying something new right now: I’ve posted a 80%-complete draft on the Nairaing Foundation blog about shadow cabinets. It’s not quite as well-digested as I would like and I think I want to simplify the wording a little and add a proper conclusion, but now that it’s out there, I think I’ll have more of an incentive to fix it.

Let’s see.

Kamen … said every entrepreneurial innovator he’s ever seen shares a few characteristics.

“It’s not that they’re brilliant or well-educated,” Kamen said. “They work all the time. They don’t let failure demoralize or destroy them. They pick themselves up and keep going and eventually, every once in a while, one of your ideas actually breaks through and works, and it makes all that stuff seem worthwhile.”

In other words, Mr. Kamen agrees with Ammi :)

The reason for that is probably the extreme complexity of the issue under examination — simply taking a handful of countries and establishing some relationship between their respective levels of corruption and growth doesn’t make sense because there are too many other factors at play. Economists always try to take a ‘partial derivative’, linearised view of the world (ie, all else equal, find a single driving variable), since that’s the most obvious way to decompose a complex issue into aspects that can be studied individually, but there are inevitable limitations to how effective this approach can be at the macro level, where there are dozens of significant variables, with unknown cross-effects that are likely deserving of separate study.

It’s clear that corruption impedes growth and development, indirectly through economically suboptimal allocation of resources and directly through the increased costs it imposes. Beyond that, it’s pretty hard to make any substantial, justifiable statement. Perhaps rather than drilling until some tenuous relationship is established, the focus should be to establish how corruption becomes systemic and what measures can be taken to prevent this from happening. In places like Pakistan where corruption is an everyday occurrence, people simply assume it will continue unimpeded and price it in as a cost of business. We know there it is exacerbated by extreme social inequality, exceptionally poor pay for officials, and a bizarre mindset (particularly in communities like the Memons) that considers bribes a mark of respect and an essential element in building necessary relationships with officials. In short, there’s a significant cultural component to corruption that must not be obscured by the economic aspect.

Of course, once corruption becomes so commonplace that society’s perception of it vacillates between necessary evil and competitive advantage, obvious steps like making examples of a few chosen offenders become useless, and even attempts to tackle the root issues — such as the double-salary schemes offered by the Federal Board of Revenue under reforms agreed with the World Bank — are only marginally effective. Certainly, gimmicky (the National Accountability Bureau is a massive sham) and/or highly focussed measures (the double-salary scheme was only offered to key officials) are a waste of time and not deserving of discussion. Bold steps, applied with commitment and consistency and monitored actively, are needed in order to remove the root causes and steadily (if slowly) rub out corruption. And of course, these steps would need to address each facet of the problem.

One bold step might be to draw the problem out into daylight by legitimising and regularising the bribes officials are already taking in the form of some minimal extra fee; this would be additional remuneration for providing a service. This immediately circumvents the problem of burdening the government with higher payroll and actually encourages efficiency in directing the remuneration to those who have earned it. In an indirect way, it might also go some way in addressing the cultural issues (continuing to pick on Memons — assuming they don’t pay doctors more than their quoted fee, I don’t see why they would feel obliged to push further bribes on officials). Doing this would likely create issues of nepotism in the allocation of official duties and potentially harmful competition between colleagues, but these are straightforward problems with more obvious solutions. The government would simultaneously have to empower citizens to report negligence or incompetence or — more tricky — officials charging in excess of the permitted fee. With sufficient political will and clout to aggressively prosecute citizens and officials who continue to flout the law, maybe we would have a workable system.

(Holy never-ending-sentence-alert, Batman! My brain isn’t working these days…)

Dekhiye paate hain usshaq buton se kya faiz,
Ek brahman ne kaha hai keh yeh saal accha hai.

Hum ko maaloom hai jannat ki haqeeqat laikin,
Dil kay khush rakhnay ko Ghalib yeh khayal accha hai.

And here’s the wonderful Jagjit Singh version from the Mirza Ghalib soundtrack. His voice is superlative: mellifluous like no other and with an emotional depth that draws the listener in. Absolutely delightful.

The second misra is confusing to me; the literal translation is ‘what benefit is to be gained from gazing upon a loved one’, but there’s an undertone there that I don’t understand, since ‘buton’ (statues) suggests coldness or aloofness. Or maybe Ghalib is just pointing to the impotence of the situation, since that’s the general direction of the third misra too.

It’s interesting that each shair stands very well on its own, almost inviting other interpretations.