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NATHANIEL POPPER ANDPETER LATTMAN

T

he Winklevoss twins, Cam-

eron and Tyler Olympicrowers, nemeses of Mark

Zuckerberg are laying

claim to a new title: bitcoinmoguls. The Winklevii, as they

are known, have amassed since last summerwhat appears to be one of the single largest

portfolios of the digital money, whose wild gy-rations have Silicon Valley and Wall Street

talking. The twins, the first prominent figures

in the largely anonymous bitcoin world topublicly disclose a big stake, say they own

nearly $11 million worth.Or at least $11 million as of Thursday

morning when trading was temporarily sus-

pended after the latest and largest flash crashleft a single bitcoin worth about $120 and the

whole market worth $1.3 billion. At one point,the price had plummeted 60 per cent.

To sceptics, the frenzy over the bitcoin

network created by anonymous program-mers in 2009 looks more like the mania for

Dutch tulip bulbs in the 1600s than the be-ginnings of an actual currency. To say high-

ly speculative would be the understatement

of the century, said Steve Hanke, a professorspecialising in alternative currencies at

Johns Hopkins University.Whatever else it is, bitcoin has become the

financial phenomenon of the moment. In ad-dition to the identical twins, Silicon Valley in-vestment firms, while not holding bitcoins,

are starting to show interest in the technolo-gy. On Thursday, a group of venture capital-

ists, including Andreessen Horowitz, an-

nounced that they were financing a bitcoin-related company, OpenCoin.

The Winklevosses say this weeks tumult isjust growing pains for a digital currency that

they believe will become a sort of gold for the

technorati. People say its a Ponzi scheme, itsa bubble, said Cameron Winklevoss. People

really dont want to take it seriously. At somepoint that narrative will shift to virtual curren-

cies are here to stay. Were in the early days.

While little is known about the creatorof bitcoin, or if it even was a single person,

the work involved serious programming

chops, building a system that could live on

borrowed computer space around the

world. It was determined that only a finitenumber of bitcoins could be created the

count is currently around 11 million. Newcoins are mined by programmers who

solve mathematic riddles and can sell their

coins on upstart exchanges.For now, there are few places where bit-

coins can be used. One marketplace is an on-line bazaar, Silk Road, where narcotics are re-

portedly the main wares for sale. But bitcoin

believers imagine a future where the ecashcan be used at their local Starbucks. The Win-

klevosses have paid in bitcoin for the servicesof a Ukrainian computer programmer who

has worked on their website. We have elected

to put our money and faith in a mathematicalframework that is free of politics and human

error, Tyler Winklevoss said.This is not the brothers first gamble on an

unproved technology. As students at Harvard,

the twins founded a social networking site,ConnectU, and enlisted their schoolmate, Mark

Zuckerberg, to help them build the company.After Zuckerberg went off to start Facebook,

the brothers sued him, accusing him of steal-

ing their idea a story that was dramatised inthe movie The Social Network. The case was

settled with the brothers being given $20 mil-lion in cash and Facebook shares that are now

worth more than $200 million.

They have parlayed that fortune into Win-klevoss Capital. Their first two investments

were in Hukkster, a start-up shopping website

and SumZero, an online community for pro-fessional money managers.

The brothers began dabbling in bitcoin

last summer when the dollar value of a singlecoin was still in the single digits. To keep their

holdings secure from hackers, they have tak-en the complex codes that represent their

holdings off networked computers and saved

them on small flash drives, putting the drives,in turn, in safe deposit boxes at banks in three

different cities.Its hard to verify how the Winklevoss

holdings compare with other bitcoin players,

given the anonymity of accounts, and thetwins say they believe that some early users of

the system probably have holdings that are atleast as large. A Maltese company, Exante,

started a hedge fund that the company says

has bought up about 82,000 bitcoins orabout $10 million as of Thursday with

money from wealthy investors.NYT NEWS SERVICE

History, someone said, should beherstory too. Sexism and gender

bias began at the birth of human

civilisation, from before the timechroniclers manipulated language and be-

gan referring to mankind. Gods were typi-cally imagined to be male in most religions.

Even in polytheistic religions, male deities

invariably had the prominent, dominantrole; goddesses were accommodated. But in

monotheistic religions, god was a He.One can understand men taking over

hunter-gatherer duties while women han-

dled nurturing and nourishing, but the deft,bloodless coup that men staged to grab

priestly duties was a masterstroke, givingthem the power to shape narrative and dis-

course for all times. This is where men could

invent any old b.s. (usually received on top ofa mountain with no witnesses, and certainly

no women around). They wrote the laws andthey invented the

stories. There-

fore, He and His-tory, although et-

ymologically, theword history

comes from

Greek historia,meaning inquiry,

knowledgeacquired by

investigation.

Modern mansspirit of inquiry

has not really extended to acquiring anygreat knowledge about what women want,

how they would like to be treated, and why

things are changing rapidly. This extends to

societies across the world. How else can youexplain US president Barack Obama makingthe same mistake as the Uttar Pradesh min-

ister for cottage industry, Raja Ram Pandey?

Some weeks back, Pandey reportedly praisedthe good looks of K Dhanalaxmi, district

magistrate of Sultanpur, comparing it fa-vourably with the beauty of her predecessor,

also a female. Last week, President Obama

similarly raved about the good looks of Cali-fornias attorney gener-

al Kamala Harris.Both episodes led to

plenty of heated com-

mentary so let us exam-ine them. Obviously,

there are differences. InObamas case, he knew

Harris personally and

they were good friends.The remarks were in the form of good-natured

banter, and the recipient herself did not seemto mind. Besides, Obama prefaced the remark

with laudatory references to her professional

work, saying "she is brilliant and she is dedicat-ed and she is tough, and she is exactly what

you'd want in anybody who is administeringthe law, and making sure that everybody is get-

ting a fair shake," before adding, almost as an

aside, "She also happens to be, by far, the bestlooking attorney general in the country."

From accounts in the media, Pandey-jiwas reportedly lacking in such finesse, al-

though our press is not famous for capturing

nuances either. He is said to have first ravedabout the DMs good looks, then compounded

his folly by comparing it with the beauty ofher predecessor, and added, perhaps as an af-

terthought, that she is also a good administra-

tor. Well may someone argue that the good

Pandey-ji may not have the eloquence and

charisma of Obama-ji, but from media ac-counts, the women concerned were not

standing up and taking a bow.Then there is the difference in the fallout.

Despite the broad acceptance that Obama

who has a spotless marital record and getshigh marks for treating women respectfully

did not intend to be sexist, pressure fromthe gender police, political correctness lobby,

and his own conscience, led him to phoning

Kamala Harris the next day to apologise. Itwas an immensely graceful move that be-

spoke introspection and proof that his self-critical faculties were alive and ticking (and,

said someone, Michelle Obama was kicking).

It will also make his daughters proud.No such introspection is evident in the desi

discourse. If anything, our pols have becomemore brazen in their approach to women as

evident in the remarks during the anti-rape

legislation, fromSharad Yadavs

Who among ushave not followed

girls? and You are

also beautiful, to afemale journalist,

to Vayalar Raviscoarse, lecherous

repartee to another

woman reporter.Some may feel

hyper-feministPC police are

making too much of stray comments and

etiquette gendarmes, and should quit be-ing supersensitive and take the compli-

ments in their stride. If Kamala Harris said

Obama was the handsomest president,would that have amounted to sexism?

Ah! And there precisely is the catch. Wom-en seldom make personal references to mens

look (maybe because there isnt much to thoselooks). Whereas even women refer to other the

looks of other women looks in public. Is this

because female beauty has more resonancethan male good looks? In which case, Adonis

may have something to say about this.In a recent study

aimed at examining the

impact of media refer-ences to the appearance

of female candidates ontheir electoral prospect,

participants read and

heard about two femalecandidates, Jane Smith

and Dan Jones, withplenty of references to their personal appear-

ance. In one report, Smith was described asfit and attractive and looks even youngerthan her age and smartly turned out in a

ruffled jacket, pencil skirt, and fashionablehigh heels." In another story, Smith was re-

ported as unfortunately sporting a heavy lay-

er of foundation and powder that had settledinto her forehead lines, creating an unflatter-

ing look for an otherwise pretty woman, alongwith her famous fake, tacky nails. There were

no such physical descriptions of Dan Jones. In

stories where Smith was described negatively,her poll numbers tanked. What the survey

concluded was that including physical andpersonal descriptions diminished the serious-

ness of the womens candidacy.

Incidentally, all the descriptions weretaken from real-life coverage of female

candidates who stood for elections.

Whatever else it is, bitcoinhas become the financial

phenomenon of themoment. In addition to the

identical twins, SiliconValley investment firms,

while not holding bitcoins,are starting to show

interest in the technology

TWINS RULE IN

DIGITAL MONEY

Not so close,

and personal

Musings on life, politics andeconomics from

TOIs Washingtoncorrespondent

CHIDANANDRAJGHATTA

RUMINATIONS

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who accused Mark Zuckerberg of stealing theiridea for Facebook, have gone on to amass one of the largest portfolios of bitcoin

RUDOLF C HEREDIA

On their 450th anniversary, a Jesuit historian, John

Padberg, wrote:"To some they have been a suspect band of in-

novators (in todays version a group of flaming

revolutionaries); to others a welcome group of religious wellaware of the world and the Church; to yet others a bulwark

of a retrograde papacy or, to those with a martial streak,

militant soldiers of Christ, to many quite frankly a puzzle-ment " (The Tablet, September 22, 1990)

The Jesuits see themselves as friends in the Lord andcompanions on mission inspired by their founder St Igna-

tius of LoyolasSpiritual Exercises and The Constitutions of

the Society of Jesus. Jesuits seek to live the threemargas

karma, jnana, bhakti in one comprehensiveseva marga;

men of action, learning and prayer, seeking God in all

things and all things in God, for the more universal good,guided by discerning love (charitas discrete) and rational

obedience (obsequium rationabile).Whether it was the Chinese Rites initiated by Mateo Ricci

or the Malabar Rites introduced by Robert de Nobil, or the

Paraguay Reductions for the indigenous Amerindians(dramatised in the British film, The Mission), bold Jesuit in-

novations have been controversial in ecclesiastical circles.Their special vow of obedience to the pope in regard to mis-

sion was considered disloyalty by national leaders, demand-

ing Church subordination to their State. Eventually, Clem-ent XIV was forced to suppress the Jesuits in 1773.

In aftermath of post-Napoleonic Europe, Pius VII restoredthe Society in 1814. The Jesuits were once again at the fron-

tiers of the Church in obedience to the pope on new ventures

in faraway places, at first more cautiously; but after the Second

Vatican Council, more daringly in cutting-edge theology, litur-gical movements, dialogue across Christian denominations andreligious traditions; and after their 32nd General Congregation,

1974-75, call to the service of faith and the promotion of jus-

tice, very courageously in social involvements inspired by liber-ation theology and its option for the poor.

This precipitated a churning, amanthan, of the statusquo in both Church and society. After a cardiac stroke inca-

pacitated Father General Arrupe, John Paul II imposed hisdelegate on the order, 1981-1983, suspending its normal ad-

ministration. Now, three decades after that suspension, twocenturies after their restoration, and five after its founda-

tion, the cardinal electors have given the Church its first

Jesuit pope. After 52 years as a Jesuit surely Ignatian spiritu-

ality is embedded in Jorge Mario Bergoglios religious DNA.On March 15, the phone rang at the Jesuit curia: This is

Pope Francis. May I speak to Father General? After a stunned

silence: This is not a joke. I am Pope Francis. Who are you?

Pope Francis had to calm a stuttering Brother Andrea, the re-ceptionist, before he was put though to Brother Wobeto, the

Generals personal secretary, who managed: Holy Father, weare praying much for you. Praying for what? asked the pope.

To go ahead or to go back? Finally, a disoriented Father Adol-fo Nicols came on the line calling him: Pope, Your Holiness,Monsignor ....The pope thanked him for his personal letter of

congratulations and support and wanted to meet soon. Was the

pope anticipating the traditional meeting of the Superior Gen-eral of the Jesuits with a newly elected pope to renew the vow

of obedience in the name of the whole order?But before that meeting, on March 17, Father General

went at the personal invitation of the Pope Francis to

meet him at Santa Marta House, which housed the cardinalelectors. Pope Francis greeted him at the entrance with a

Jesuit embrace and insisted on being addressed with the fa-miliar tu, not the formal "Holiness" or "Holy Father". Fa-

ther Generals report is movingly revealing. I quote in full:

"I offered him all our Jesuit resources ... He showed grat-itude for this and at the invitation to visit us for lunch at the

Curia he said he would oblige. There was full commonalityof feeling on several issues that we discussed and I remained

with the conviction that we will work very well together for

the service of the Church in the name of the Gospel. Therewas calm, humour and mutual understanding about past,

present and future. I left the place with the conviction thatit will be worth cooperating fully with Him in the Vineyard

of the Lord. At the end he helped me with my coat and ac-

companied me to the door ... A Jesuit embrace, again, is agood way to meet and send off a friend."

These two incidents help lift the veil on what the Jesuitconnection with a Jesuit pope might presage for an interna-

tional religious order in a globalised Church.

A JESUITINTHEVINEYARDIgnatian spirituality is part of PopeFrancis's religious DNA. What does thismean for an order of priests described asa band of flaming revolutionaries?

FOOT IN MOUTH: BothUP minister RajaRamPandey and Obama complimented womencolleagues, kicking up a controversy

LONG WAIT: Five centuries after the religious order wasestablished, there is finally a Jesuit pope

13 GLOBALSATURDAY, APR 13, 2013 ACROSS BOUNDARIES