In Praise of Cathy Newman

I had not heard of Dr. Jordan B. Peterson until this morning.  But when both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal carry opinion pieces about him (from David Brooks and Peggy Noonan, respectively), one sits up and pays attention. It seems the video of last week’s interview of him by Cathy Newman on Britain’s Channel 4 News channel had gone viral on YouTube, with over 4.2 million views.

So I watched the 30-minute interview a little while ago. And it indeed a tour de force of an performance, bringing back memories of Firing Line in reverse (imagine — if you can — Buckley as the one being interviewed rather than being the interviewer). And comparison of Dr. Peterson’s performance to that of Bill Buckley is apt — he even leaned back in Buckley’s characteristic pose several times! But this piece is not about him, but about the interviewer, Cathy Newman.



The overwhelming response about Ms. Newman’s performance has been negative. Here’s Noonan:

It was also in­ter­est­ing be­cause she, the fiery, flame-haired ag­gres­sor, was so bor­ing—her think­ing re­flected all the pre­dictable, force-fed as­sump­tions—while he, say­ing noth­ing rev­o­lu­tion­ary or even par­tic­u­larly fiery, was so in­ter­est­ing. When it was over, you wanted to hear more from him and less from her.

And here’s Brooks:

Newman sensed that there was something disruptive to progressive orthodoxy in Peterson’s worldview, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. So, [...] she did what a lot of people do in argument these days. Instead of actually listening to Peterson, she just distorted, simplified and restated his views to make them appear offensive and cartoonish. 

Peterson calmly and comprehensibly corrected and rebutted her. It is the most devastatingly one-sided media confrontation you will ever see.

Let’s not even get into the invective on social media.

I happen to feel very differently.

Ms. Peterson had clearly done her homework. She had read his book that they were discussing. She was ready to challenge him with her “feminist” point of view. Was she up against a superior intellect? Absolutely! Was she perhaps a little misguided and naïve representing the “identity politics” that Peterson abhors? Undoubtedly. Did she miss a few opportunities where she could have gone for the jugular? Most certainly.

But she stuck to her guns in pursuing her line of aggressive questioning (let’s face it, we are far removed from the standards of polite discourse in vogue in the heyday of Firing Line). She had the intellectual honesty to admit that Dr. Peterson’s responses had given her pause for thought (just before the “Gotcha!” moment in the interview). She even caught him off-guard with her segue to “the lobster story”.

But, cheap shots aside, would the interview have been as electrifying if the interviewer had been adulatory or, worse, obsequious? The fact that Dr. Peterson’s message makes this possibility unlikely is beside the point. It takes opposing points of view to debate. It takes two rocks striking against each other to generate a spark. It takes friction to create fire. It takes a thesis and an antithesis to create a dialectic.

So let’s give credit where it’s due, and acknowledge the catalytic role that Ms. Newman played in the interview. As Walter Matthau’s character so eloquently put it in the 1981 movie First Monday in October at his graveside eulogy for a colleague:

Stanley and I were like a pair of flying buttresses. Leaning against the opposite sides of a Gothic cathedral, we helped keep the roof from caving in. If we’d both been on the same side all the time, we might have pushed the building over. You don’t have to agree with a man in order to respect him.

I would like to think that both parties shook hands after the interview and left with a new respect for the other.



I have neither read Dr. Peterson’s book nor viewed his YouTube videos, but I am now curious enough that I will do so. I suspect that I will not totally agree with his views; if he truly believes in individualism, he wouldn’t want me to accept them blindly either, but rather to adapt the framework to my unique situation. We shall see. For now, let that remain the possible topic of a future post.

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

(1 Feb 1933 - 15 Jan 2018)

The end came kindly, I am told. He had woken up in the morning, completed his morning ablutions, and was resting in bed before breakfast, when, like his illustrious namesake, he lay down in mahāparinirvāṇa and breathed his last. He was a fortnight or so shy of his 85th birthday.

I had seen him barely four weeks earlier. We discussed how to use komal niṣād as a nyāsa svara in Jhinjhoti. He told me that he could still sit crosslegged to perform, and pointed me to recordings from his young days available on Youtube. We talked about his health, and he grudgingly accepted my data-driven argument that he was not in excellent health. (He was, after all, an engineer.)

Over the past week, I have been playing his music, looking at everything he gave me, and thinking of him. So many memories ...

1984. The first time I saw him perform. It was at CLT in Calcutta. I was at IIT Kharagpur at the time, and took the bus straight from Howrah station to make it in time for the concert. I remember that he played Haṃsadhvani (the one and only time I have heard him perform it). The only other thing I remember about that concert was that it also featured an Odissi recital by Sanjukta Panigrahi, in which Raghunath Panigrahi sang a wonderful pallavi in Ārabhi. Some three decades later, he taught me that rāga.

1985. His LP with Kāmod, Deś, and Pilu had come out, and I was hooked. I got an introduction to him through Hemen-babu, and asked him whether he would teach me. I was learning Hawaiian guitar at the time. He asked me to play for him. With great trepidation, I played Yaman as he reposed horizontally post-lunch at his house. I don't know what he heard, but he agreed to teach me -- on one condition. I had to get permission from my teacher at the time (which of course was gladly given). The first rāga he taught me was Jhinjhoti.

1985. I went to the US for my PhD, and he came on his first concert tour there as part of the Festival of India. His first program was in Pittsburgh, where I was based. The concert at Synod Hall was on the same day as our department's reception for new graduate students. I went to the concert first before going to the reception. He played Jaijaiwantī.

1997. He was back in the US. I drove from Chapel Hill to Washington D.C., where he was performing at the Smithsonian. The ex-consul-general of the US Consulate General Kolkata (I think his name was Mr. Diamante) and his wife attended the concert and came up at the end to present him a huge bouquet. The next day, I drove him down to North Carolina, where he was to perform a concert at my house and stay with me for a few days. I put on a cassette of Bade Ghulam Ali Khan's Bageśrī. He made me play it several times during the five-hour drive. That night, at my house, he played an inspired Bageśrī that brought tears to my eyes. I think he sensed that this was an unusual performance, even by his standards of excellence. In the middle of the ālāp, he looked at me and said, "I hope you are recording this." "Yes," I said, "but how do I record the emotion?" A few days later, in a letter from LA in his calligraphic hand, he wrote:

Without doubt, the performance at your house has been one of my best performances. [...] This recording also contains practically all I can tell you about Bageshree. Listen to it several times, in total isolation and darkness, with nothing to distract you, and you will get the message of it.

2015. I visited him in Kolkata two weeks before he was going to on his trip to the US and found him in alarmingly poor health. I pleaded with him to cancel the trip, sharing the details of how my father had undertaken a trip in 1999 under similar circumstances and had ended up in the ICU for two weeks. But he had made up his mind. When I saw him on that trip in New York, it was to help take him to the hospital. That was his last trip to the US.

So many memories ...

He was a generous, patient, and exacting teacher. He gave me everything I was able to take, and much more. With him in India and me in the US, he would mail me pages and pages of handwritten talim materials specifically tailored for me: everything from basic pālṭās to an entire package on Lalit. Once, he was with me in the US teaching me Kaunsi Kānāḍa one evening when my son (then three, now in his twenties) started demanding that I had to be the one to put him to bed. By the time I returned from handling this disruption, he had written out a few more pages of materials for me.

He indulged my feeble attempts at composition: telling me off in no uncertain terms when something was unacceptable; making small changes to some where he saw a glimmer of hope; and praising me on a rare handful of occasions (a gat in Bhimpalaśrī -- "how did you think to place the sam on komal niṣād?"; a gat in Rageśrī -- "you've opened up new possibilities with that sam on mandra dhaivat"; and a tān in Tilak Kāmod -- "all I can say is that I wish I had written that tān myself"). When he taught me the eight gats in Bhairavī with sams on all possible notes (a specialty of our gharānā), he left out the one with the sam on komal niṣād -- deliberately, I like to think -- and told me to compose my own. He liked what he saw, helped polish it some, and gave me permission to play it as my own.

He was gentlemanly and large-hearted towards those of his fellow musicians he respected, while being courteously critical of mediocrities. A couple of years ago, I was telling him about forthcoming appearances in Austin by Birju Maharaj and Zakir Hussain. We had been discussing Surdasī Malhār right before that. He suddenly said, "Ask Birju Maharaj to sing something in that rāga. He has an unparalleled stock of bandishes. And please give my regards to Zakir: not only is he a great tabla player, but also a great musician and a great human being."

His gastronomy took some unusual turns with me. On that drive down from DC to Chapel Hill in 1997, we stopped at a Subway for lunch. He was concerned about having a tuna salad sandwich. "Is it safe to eat raw fish?" he wondered. In the end, he did, and was just fine. On another occasion, he asked me whether I travelled to Germany and if I could bring him some sauerkraut from there. I burst out laughing: "Of all the things in German cuisine, you want sauerkraut?"

He had his idiosyncrasies and eccentricities, of course. I never heard him play or teach any composition in drut ektāl, or perform Darbārī Kānāḍa or any Mārwā thāṭ rāga (except possibly Bhatiyār). He loved performing Chāyā (maybe because he cast such a long one of his own?). We fought over his desire to smoke the occasional cigarette, which I flatly told him he couldn't do at my house. He would always tell people afterwards (with a twinkle in his eyes): "This fellow threatened to throw me out of his house for smoking."

I could go on. A lot of memories accumulate over three decades.


With his passing, the last of my three guiding lights has been extinguished. The influences of three very different individuals, who did not know one another, converged to teach me all I know about seeing beauty in mathematics, engineering emotion in music, and rising above the trap of mediocrity.  I am now left to steer by my own compass, which they calibrated.

This is the way of the world. As Vidura tells Dhṛtarāṣṭra after the Great War:

सर्वे क्षयान्ता निचयाः पतनान्ताः समुच्छ्रयाः |
संयोगा विप्रयोगान्ता मरणान्तं हि जीवितम् ||