Books

Brilliant lateral thinking analysis

Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell; Abacus; Price: Rs.231; 279 pp

If ever there was a society which requires several social revolutions simultaneously, it is the socialist, secular, democratic and sanctimonious Republic of India. Almost 60 years after a collective leadership astonishingly superior to the sawdust caesars of contemporary times, wrested India’s freedom from imperial British rule and endowed itself a Constitution which reads like a charter for utopia, this fractured polity has metamorphosed into a republic of chronic social injustice. On several issues of great substance — gender equity, equal education for all, national health service, equitable provision of food, clothing and shelter — free India has consis-tently belied its early promise.

We the people, are least blameworthy for the prevailing mess following half a century of aimless wandering in the barren wilderness of Indian socialism. The people invested governments with comprehensive powers and constantly changed them at the Centre and in the states in the hope of a new, fair deal. But all they received in return were a plethora of excuses for non-performance. The population was too huge, India lacked natural resources, the imperialists had emptied the treasury, there’s an international conspiracy to keep India poor etc.

Yet the root cause of post-independence India’s self-imposed poverty — the adoption of a thoroughly inorganic socialist model of development — was continuously glossed over for over four decades. Finally in July 1991 when this corrupt, unproductive, wasteful development model could no longer be sustained, came a tipping point for the nation: the socialist model was jettisoned and a new beginning was made to release the native entrepreneurial energies of the people. The consequence of this beneficial social revolution is patently obvious. The Indian economy leapt out of its so-called Hindu rate of growth (3.5 percent per year) rut and has averaged over 7 percent for the past decade, transforming into one of the fastest growing worldwide.

In this marvellous mind-bending book, Malcolm Gladwell, a former Washington Post journalist now a writer with New Yorker magazine, analyses causative factors behind mysterious ‘tipping points’, and suggests that they can be deliberately engineered to catalyse ‘social epidemics’. First published in Britain in the millennium year (2000), new editions of Tipping Point have been published twice every year subsequently, except in 2005 when reprints rose to three editions. Unsurprisingly this international bestseller whose message is most relevant for India, has been conspicuously ignored in this country.

Tipping Point begins by examining two curious phenomena. Between late 1994 and early 1995, consistently declining sales of suede shoes marketed in the US and UK under the brand name Hush Puppies, suddenly experienced a sharp and sustained upsurge. On a larger canvas, around the turn of the new millennium, murder and crime in the heavily crime-ridden Brownsville and East New York neighbourhoods of New York experienced a sharp reduction. Suddenly following a mysterious about-turn, murders committed in these suburbs dropped 64.3 percent and other crimes 50 percent. Unwilling to accept standard explanations of sociologists and psychologists for these sudden reversals of deeply entrenched trends and socio-economic norms, Gladwell investigated them and in this seminal book suggests that there is a methodology or pattern behind causative phenomena which precipitate social epidemics.

Drawing deeply on research studies of human behaviour and motivation conducted in American academia, the author suggests that social epidemics with positive outcomes can be deliberately engineered if the ‘laws’ which precipitate them are studied and consciously applied in communities and societies.

The first characteristic of social epidemics, says the author, is the ‘law of the few’ — small minorities can catalyse great social revolutions. This proposition is hardly new. But contrary to popular belief, it’s not sterling qualities such as character determination, commitment and compassion of the few which precipitate social epidemics. Gladwell suggests that it is other commonplace, generally overlooked, qualities of special individuals which start social epidemics.

‘Connectors’ — individuals described by the author as people "who know lots of people" in diverse walks of life — are prime players in the spread of social epidemics. The special quality of connectors is that they have an instinct for passing on important information to ‘mavens’ ("accumulators of knowledge" in Yiddish) — people who value information and can package, embellish and contextualise it so that it acquires a "stickiness factor", i.e it sticks in the minds of their audiences. Typically mavens are well-informed raconteurs with interest in eclectic subjects and an instinctive proclivity to spread information and pass on knowledge, not necessarily for financial advantage.

The author devotes a whole chapter of over 30 pages, citing examples drawn from research studies in America on how mavens and salesmen make messages stick. This chapter is likely to be of particular interest to educationists because it discusses in extenso two path-breaking television programmes — Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues which transformed television into a powerful early (pre-schoolers) education medium. It also describes how and why the highly successful Sesame Street "subject to more academic scrutiny than any television show in history" was bested by Blue’s Clues.

However observance of the laws of the few and message stickiness need to be supplemented by a third factor to successfully catalyse social epidemics — the power of context. Which brings us back full circle to the mystery of why heinous crimes abated so mysteriously in the eastern suburbs of New York in the mid 1990s. Gladwell gives the credit for this beneficial social epidemic to criminologists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling who developed the Broken Windows theory. In essence this theory reasons that if a window on a street is broken and left unrepaired, "people walking by will conclude that no one cares and no one is in charge". This, argued the criminologists, will prompt even otherwise law-abiding citizens to break behavioural rules and indulge in anti-social activities.

This theory was put to the test by managers of the New York Transit System which runs the city’s subway trains and which in the mid 1980s suffered severe issues of ticketless travel, subway crime, vandalisation and the intractable problem of ubiquitous graffiti. Although critics insisted that giving priority to cleaning up graffiti on subway trains was "as pointless as scrubbing the decks of the Titanic as it headed towards the icebergs", a sustained effort to combat subway graffiti, writes Gladwell, proved to be the tipping point of the beneficial crime abatement epidemic which swept New York in the mid 1990s.

This is a brilliant, lateral thinking work of engaging scholarship which should be read by every social reformer, actual and potential. Yet a great sorrow suffused your reviewer as he turned each page of Tipping Point which testifies to the sheer volume and depth of cutting-edge research into human behaviour and motivation which is de rigueur in America’s universities and specialist think tanks. Such a contrast with institutions of higher education in over-hyped India, where shallow superficiality and pretence of learning has become a national epidemic.

Parenting prescription

Moments of Parenting — Ways to involve yourself in your child’s education; Eklavya Education Foundation, Ahmedabad; Price: Rs.100; 137 pp

Amazing but true. Even in this day and age the overwhelming majority of Indian parents believe that their involvement in their children’s education ends with their admission into a ‘good’ school. Thereafter the task of educating children is the responsibility of the school and its teachers.

But post-liberalisation, globalisation and the knowledge revolution, a growing number of parents is becoming aware that there’s more to education than going to school and that perhaps the best education is delivered across the dinner table. That’s why PTAs (Parent Teacher Associations) are making a comeback in private schools, and in government schools School Development Monitoring Committees comprising parents, teachers and members of the local community are assessing the quality of education dispensed.

Moments of Parenting — Ways to involve yourself in your child’s education, published by the Ahmedabad-based Eklavya Education Foundation which runs the co-educational kindergarten-class XII Eklavya School, touches — albeit cursorily — on this all-important subject. The result of "a series of brainstorming sessions on how to directly involve parents in school activities", this illustrated compilation gives 136 pointers or tips to parents — particularly neo-literate parents — on ways and means to supplement their children’s education and extra-curricular activities.

Each tip is followed by a brief how-to-do-it prescription. While most of the guidelines in the section ‘Ways to involve yourself in your child’s education’ are broad motherhood injunctions (e.g inculcate a sense of family pride; reinforce habits and values; have dinner together; watch TV together), there are more pointed suggestions as well. Among them: talk about cause and effect in all walks of life; convert incidents/ anecdotes into stories and invite children to draw their own inferences; discuss children’s fears with them; subscribe to newspapers, magazines and journals; share your own daily work/ home experiences; make time for study field trips; maintain regular contact with your child’s friends and their parents; associate with socially active organisations.

The objectives of this basic — indeed very basic — volume illustrated with rather crude pen-and-ink drawings are modest. As the authors admit in the preface, most (middle class) parents will "discover that they are already implementing some of these tips in the upbringing of their children". Nevertheless the pointers given although simplistic, bear reiteration even for more sophisticated and aware metropolitan parents who might have forgotten the basic rules of child nurturance.

But the missing factor is a strong argument for greater parental participation and supplementary home education which is critical to the development of children, especially in a society where teacher truancy is ubiquitous and minimal learning is dispensed in the great majority of the nation’s schools.

There is plenty of research on this subject and a busload of case studies. It would have been instructive if this book had also contained case studies of children benefiting from parental involvement in their education.