Quiet, an Insightful Take on Introversion

Have you ever been told it’s all right if while at a party you like to occupy a quiet corner to avoid socializing; that it’s okay to feel troubled by underrated emotions like doubt and fear; that maybe you were overlooked for a promotion because your colleague had the ‘right personality’ for the role; that there is nothing wrong with you if you feel overwhelmed by some social situations and take time to come to terms with them? Susan Cain argues, in Quiet, all this means you are blessed with the personality syndrome that some of the most creative and revolutionary thinkers have (or had): introversion.

Quiet makes a strong case for introversion (or introverts) by passionately arguing that it’s the introverts who were behind some of the greatest achievements of the human race (like the theory of relativity) and equally acerbically ascribing some of the problems in modern times (like the subprime mortgage issue) to our tendency to overlook introverts and place problems that require deeper insights – which are more likely to come, according to Cain, from introverts - at the service of exTaketroverts.

But is the barrier separating introversion from extroversion so simple? Aren’t we a bit of both? A person who is gregarious while among friends can be reserved among strangers. A person who is generally lighthearted can be surprisingly insightful, in some situations. Haven’t we seen many shy and reserved types excel in professional areas which are considered exclusive domains of extroverts?

Cain doesn’t challenge the theory of Carl Jung who said there is no such person as absolute introvert or extrovert and such a person would have his place only in a mental asylum…She says we share cross traits of introversion and extroversion and your personality type depends on which side of the divide the traits that are intense in you fall. To add nuance to this line of argument, she interviews people belonging to both personality types and also draws from her personal experience as an introvert.

However, Susan doesn’t restrict her research to interviews and personal experience, but delves into the scientific aspect of her subject, too – and establishes beyond doubt that introversion is a biological characteristic we are born with and not something we acquire during our lifetime. Children who are very alive to their environment – high reactive types - turn out to be introverts whereas those with low sensitivity to their environments become extroverts, low reactive types. Although introverts become more outgoing as years go by, they remain introverts at the core.

Courtesy of the high premium we place as a society on extroverted traits, Cain informs, there are many who hide their introversion and masquerade as extroverts only to wake up to their real selves when they meet with a crisis . Not only society at large but even corporations overrate extroverted traits and extroverts are misconstrued as ‘natural leaders’, an error of judgement which caused the subprime crisis where those showing risk taking capabilities (an extroverted trait) where put in positions of leadership and decision making overlooking those less inclined to take risks or prefer taking calculated and thoughtful risks instead of plunging headlong into something they know little about.

Cain interviewed children of migrants coming from eastern cultures and concludes that, unlike in the west, extroversion is not prized so much in the east (especially in Confucian cultures) where silence is considered golden and observation of hierarchies (age-based or social) appreciated. (It reminded me of a Time magazine article which said that one of the reasons democracy doesn’t flourish in Asia is that there is too much insistence on unquestioning respect for people in positions of power - like a teacher, a ruling family or an older person – which runs contrary to the very idea of democracy which bases itself on questioning.)

The introverted children Cain interviewed, in some of the most prestigious American institutions, mostly said they wanted to be extroverts to be more in sync with how their institutes want them to be.

Being an introvert herself and being very proud of being one, Cain sometimes reads a little biased towards introverts. Almost all the introverts she interviewed and mentions in Quiet are either stupendously successful (like Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs etc.) or hold promise for success (like those migrant children) – sometimes reading like a motivational book for introverts rather than an analytical effort on the subject.

Cain looks at cultures other than American but very briefly and broadly – and thus misses a point or two about her subject. For example, in India, as in America, extroverted traits enjoy greater social approval than their introspective counterparts, but the virtues of quiet are not altogether overlooked.

These are the two flaws I found in what is otherwise a spectacular book.

Corruption to stay the issue number one for sometime to come

In the last few years, India has indeed changed. At a very basic level, the retrospective impropriety scandal which hit Vasundhara Raje and Sushma Swaraj as a result of Lalit Modi’s revelations is nothing more than a person misusing his access to a powerful politician. Lalit Modi had access to these ladies which he used to get favours of them – and maybe the ladies received something in return which my or mayn’t be establish-able. In other words, it’s a person misusing his access to power and the powerful obliging.  Isn’t it something we in India have grown up hearing and seeing happen around us?

10 years back no one would have bothered about it. We have always lived with the knowledge that politicians are corrupt, that businessmen bend rules to make it etc. And this general awareness about their impropriety never kicked up a public storm or dented their popularity. In fact, there was admiration for their ability to con and prosper expressed in private quarters. Many said why complain about the means as long as the end is good. No one grudged them their ill-gotten wealth.

Then what has changed us so much in last four to five years? Why are political parties fighting elections with corruption as their central issue? Why are the channels going bonkers over what would have been dismissed as petty corruption issues a few years ago?

Our tolerance about corruption has shrunk in last few years. We have started asking questions about what we had always taken for granted.

Couple of months ago, when BJP’s land bill had just started being discussed in media, one day I saw an elderly man being interviewed on a TV channel. He spoke with the simplicity of a village elder. He blamed the government for forsaking the welfare of the poor. He threatened to start a movement to raise aware around the land bill. It reminded me of the chaos the elderly man had created only four years back.

It’s been some time I saw the interview and nothing of the sort we had witnessed earlier followed. Maybe Anna Hazare held a meeting or two, following that TV interview, but they never created the nation-wide stir his anti-corruption movement had four years ago.

It’s to that movement four years ago, which never reached any conclusion but brought corruption to the center stage of politics, that Congress owes getting an issue which it can firmly wrap its fist around since the formation of the new government. It’s to that movement four years ago that BJP owes its coming to power at the center on the strength of the popular despair it created against Congress’s corrupt rule.

It’s to that movement four years ago that Delhi owes its unpredictable chief minister Arvind Kejriwal. And many more transformative changes that have taken place in India since that anti-corruption movement spearheaded by the bespectacled elderly man on the TV channel – have their origin in that movement four years ago.   

Whether you think that in an atmosphere where tiniest of misdemeanors by public figures can be orchestrated into an over-blown national hysteria, there is always the possibility of the political establishment misleading us into believing that all scams are same. Or you believe, when it comes to corruption, size or type shouldn’t matter. The politics of propriety as an issue has never had it so good. All earlier movements with a social impact dealt with a bouquet of issues; corruption was just one of them.

So maybe Sushma and Vasundhara will still get away with whatever they have done or not. But corruption as a political issue is not going fall out of favour with the political establishment any time soon. When an opposition dislodges dislodges a ruling party on the basis of corruption charges and after staying in power for some time gets bored of taking about corruption, it’s time for the former ruling party to attack the government on corruption.

How Momos Have Come to Rule the Indian Streets

For a few years now, in India, two types of food become popular: those with health benefits and those without health hazards. Momo is a beneficiary of the later. It is not known to offer any health benefit, but the steamed momos containing minced meat or vegetables stuffing hardly can pose any health hazard.

Roughly, momos appeared on mainstream Indian foodscape about 15 to 16 years ago. Since then, they have grown in popularity to become one of the most preferred snacks of urban India. As a result of this phenomenal popularity, today momos are available everywhere, from interesting small joints and street stalls run by guys from the North Eastern states of India (they make the cheapest and best momos) to costly Chinese restaurants.

But what is interesting about this is not so much momos’ success as a restaurant offering but their emergence as a popular street food. Their acceptability as street food is so high that even people who are prude about street foods flock to street momo corners.

There are a few reasons for momos’ success as a street food. Momos are the most transparent food: their simple contents (some meat or vegetables and flour) assure you that there is no scope to adulterate them and get away with it. Momos, at least the steamed ones, are always ready to eat; just pluck them from their pans and serve them with red chili sauce, no preparatory period is involved unless you eat the fried versions. This is a significant advantage as it makes momos something you can eat on the go.  

But the most trust-inspiring thing about momos is that we find it easy to trust anything that is well-heated – and in this respect, momos stand on a very firm ground. They are always being heated in their multi-storey aluminum containers and are served to you piping hot.

So how can you not trust the momos? But are they great to eat?

They can be quite bland without auxiliaries but mop up some sauce and you can’t have enough of them, as with any food with South East Asian provenance.

I bit into momos for the first time in Calcutta where you are served momos with hot soup (the small joints serve chicken stalk even if you order veg momos) and you add sauce separately. But after I moved to Bangalore, I was surprised to find momos served without soup and only with sauce.

It reminded me of what my sister had once told me following a short visit to Gangtok, that, in Gangtok, they couple their momos only with home-made chilli-garlic sauce. The guys running street momo stalls, in Bangalore, mostly come from Darjeeling, which shares cultural similarities with Gangtok.

Driven by an investigative zeal, I quickly went to Wikipedia to find out how momos have changed since they descended from their places of origin and whether ‘what they are served with’ differs from place to place.

I found that momos have traditionally had meat stuffing. Varied animal meats are used depending on local preferences and availability. So the conclusion: veg versions are later attempts at localizations, like Chicken Achari Pizzas.

Wikipedia couldn’t inform me particularly on whether momo accompaniments differ from place to place, but it told that momo is served with soup in Nepal. As for the other places which the momo traces its origin to, there is no consistency of practice.

But frankly, who cares?

Piku - telling a tale with subtlety and grace

There was a time when Bollywood was obsessed with Punjabi culture. Even if a plot was located far off Punjab shores (London, New York etc), it had to have a Punjabi family at its heart. Now, at least this year, that obsession seems to have moved to Bengali culture. Piku is the second big movie this year to have a Bengali setting. But, unlike those Punjabi-oriented movies which were culturally Punjabi but geographically elsewhere (or everywhere), the Bengali-oriented ones are either fully set in Calcutta (Detective Byomkesh Bakshi) or partly but substantially set there.

But that’s not the only thing I liked about Piku. The movie is a refreshing take on a father-daughter relationship. Again, in a departure from filial relationships shown in Hindi movies in earlier decades, the relationship Piku has depicted is realistic with mutual love, concern and respect and without unquestioning reverence. While Piku objects to someone expressing contempt for her father’s senility, she shows understanding and accommodation when someone is genuinely annoyed with Bhaskar Banerji. Sujit Sirkar has skillfully avoided the clichés of parent-child relationship and has caught its nuances beautifully.  

Bhaskar Banerji (Amitabh Bachchan), a widower, stays with his daughter, Piku (Deepika Padukone), in a Bengali neighborhood of Delhi. Bhaskar is old and grumpy and suffers from constipation; the daughter is a working girl who takes care of her father and is a little exasperated by his old-age tantrums, just as everybody else inhabiting the world of Banerjis is, domestic helps, family friends, relatives etc.  Apart from constipation, another old-age affliction keeps Bhaskar occupied: his belief that he has some serious health issue, although for a seventy year old he is quite fit and healthy.

The family travels to Calcutta (Bhaskar’s home town) and there, unbeknown to Piku, Bhaskar goes for an extensive nostalgic cycle ride taking the viewer through the narrow alleyways of North Calcutta and such famous landmarks as Dalhousie. The cycle ride gives Bhaskar more than a nostalgic relief; after the ride, he relieves himself to his heart’s content. The next day Bhaskar dies, his last wish fulfilled.

The performances are masterful. Bachchan is excellent playing different shades of the character, his age and crankiness, to perfection…but where he has particularly scored is in emulating Bengali mannerisms. Deepika is very natural as Piku and Irfan has almost made it a habit to be  excellent movie after movie.

Another notable feature of Piku is it maintains a good pace without too many twists and turns in the tale. With a subject like constipation it was easy to resort to front bench slapstick; instead Sujit Sirkar has dealt with the subject gracefully without missing an opportunity to tickle your funny bone reminiscent of the Basu Chatterjee movies of the 70s. And like those Basu Chatterjee movies, Piku has its share of social commentary, concerning women and relationships, made in an understated manner.  

The Tell Tale Brain - Unlocking the Mysteries of the Mind

That our brain works in a complex way is a grand understatement. The labyrinthine of neuroscience can completely overwhelm the ordinary reader. Even after an understanding has crystallized, the ordinary reader may feel a nuanced appreciation has remained elusive. In The Tell Tale Brain, VS Ramachandran has attempted to explain the intricacies (and sometimes absurdities) of how our brain functions to the uninitiated reader.

And although he may not have completely succeeded in doing so, his attempt has surely resulted in a fascinating read - bringing to the average reader such intellectually stimulating things as how art evolved, why does an autistic child draws better than a French master, why does a person feel the presence of a missing limb, why seeing colour is special and what seeing different colours means – and much more.

Theories in neuro science are always evolving with old theories getting reviewed, changed, challenged and sometimes replaced by new ones. Similarly, there is no single theory on anything – scientists disagree almost on everything leading to the existence of multiple theories on everything. Ramachandran has discussed every contemporary and past stream of thought and argument on every issue he has dealt with in The Tell Tale Brain.

The Tell Tale Brain, a title inspired from Edger Allen Poe’s Tell Tale Heart, also explores every angle of a brain problem – discussing not just the technical aspects (with respect to brain functionalities) but also their evolution, evolutionary purpose and how differently something has evolved for non-humans, and thus arriving at what makes us unique among those we share the planet with.

Ramachandran says the ability to copy, among other things, an ability mirror neurons are responsible for, makes humans unique. This ability is not available in animals or at least at a level as sophisticated as in humans. So while a cub can learn from its mother how to hunt, it can never learn subtler skills, like language, from its parents or from other animals. Ramachandran says this ability to learn from others (or copy) is at the heart of accomplishments that are unique to humans, like culture, language (unless you are among those who believe dolphins have a language) etc. And this ability is also responsible for empathy, which again is among the core abilities required for something which is uniquely human – art.

A survey was conducted where the participants were given two sketches of a running horse, one done by an autistic child and the other by a French master without telling the participants which one is sketched by whom. And the majority found the one done by the autistic child better than the one by the French master!

Ramachandran says there are two parts in our brain (broadly), one of them is responsible for artistic output and the other deals with logic-based activities. Since the autistic child’s other side is completely dysfunctional (since autism causes loss of social or any other skill) all his mental energies flow unconsumed into the part that’s concerned with art, unlike in the case of the French master with whom some of the energy is consumed by the non-artistic part of the brain. Read the book for more such insights on how our brain works.

The Tell Tale Brain reads like a thriller V.V Ramachandran’s erudition notwithstanding.

Thomas Hardy by Claire Tomalin

If you read Thomas Hardy’s life you will know how the prose overshadows verse. Thomas Hardy’s first love was poetry and he had taken to novel writing only to earn a living. But most of us know him as a novelist, existence of several poetry collections to his credit notwithstanding. Of all the biographies of writers I have read or those I know about Thomas Hardy comes from a most unlikely background for a novelist. 

Claire Tomalin’s Thomas Hardy “The Time Torn Man “ traces the life of the famous British Victorian writer his birth onwards going a little further back in time, in fact, for a snapshot of his parents’ life and their circumstances through his finding of literary fame, his love affairs (most of them one-sided) and the trials and tribulations Hardy had to go through to establish himself as a writer.

Thomas Hardy was born to poor parents in English countryside, in Higher Bockhampton near Dorchester. His mother, Jemima, was a domestic maid with literary inclinations. She had access to the libraries of the educated and read some classics.  She had modest ambitions beyond her station but never achieved them. Understandably, Hardy took his first steps towards literature holding his mother’s hand. Hardy’s father was a stonemason and local builder.

Hardy married the woman he loved and it was a steady marriage, although they didn’t have any kids and despite Hardy’s life-long mental philandering where he had romantic feelings for women both older and younger than him and most of them much married even as he remained loyal to his wife avoiding any mutually acknowledged romantic or physical relationship with any other woman, although failing to hide his mental infidelities from his wife, who, understandably, bitterly detested it but also silently suffered it. Hardy married twice; the second time when he was in his 70s and his wife, mid 20s.

Hardy extended this Jackal and Hyde character to his attitude towards religion. He had fallen off Christian faith as a young man but maintained the outwardly signs of devoutness (he visited church regularly), so that upon his death the local cleric told that Hardy had lived life like a true Christian. Several times his beliefs revealed residues of Christian beliefs.   

It was not until slightly later in life, when he was in early 20s, that Hardy started taking interest in writing, unlike those who wake up to their literary call as children. There is no denying the fact that, though, the seeds were sowed much earlier, only that they took time to sprout up and be seen. The sprouting happened when Hardy worked in London as an architect, a profession he was initiated into by his father and a craft he was not too bad at.

His days in London exposed him to a larger world and a wider range of experience and became a canvas to compare his rural life with. He wrote a book based on this experience but didn’t get a publisher. A few publishers showed some interest only to back out later. Thomas Hardy’s first book, serialized like many others’ in his days and before, was Under the Greenwood Tree.

Among his novels, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, much ahead of its time in terms of the values it dealt with, was closest to Hardy’s heart.

Like the other famous writers of his time, Hardy’s novels were serialized. But unlike his contemporaries and they are equally mammoth-like figures in literature, like Henry James, EM Foster (a little junior to Hardy), Rudyard Kipling etc, Thomas Hardy specialized in rural England,  fact which in proximity to Dickens; both dealt with poverty, one with rural, the other with urban.  The people surrounded by whom Hardy grew up became his characters; the rural scene he had grown up amidst became the landscape of his novels.

Gradually fame came to him and he came to be recognized as a great. Claire Tomalin has said Hardy had a melancholic personality (confirmed by many who saw the writer) but hasn’t drawn any connection between his personality and the melancholic nature of his novels.

Who was Luckier - Lee or Singapore?

Recently, Lee Kuan Yew, the person responsible for making Singapore what it is today, died. We in India, particularly those with scant awareness about foreign affairs, were familiar with Singapore as a place of prosperity and aspiration, lights and glitz, long before we woke up to the global significance of China and the vulnerability of America as a super power.  

In India, various political leaders at different times have told us they would be making our cities like Singapore if brought to power but none have.

But the bigger question is why Asian countries aspire to be like Singapore? It is not just Singapore’s economic success but the fact that it combines all the virtues of a desirable place: cleanliness, discipline and great law and order.  Even the great Western democracies fall foul on some of these counts.

Law and order may be different and even cleanliness is achievable in many places but discipline , as many of us know, may not be easy to bring about in a democratic society, which is by nature chaotic. In fact, the existence of such societies depends on absence of discipline. There is little doubt that Singaporeans had to pay a price for the kind of economic success Singapore achieved, for which you have to both thank Lee Kuan Yew and call him lucky.

Thank Lee for Singapore’s success because after its independence from Britain and following its ouster from Malaysia in 1963, he steered his nation in the direction which was unique in those days, the 60s, and also frowned upon by others. Among the countries that won freedom at the time Singapore did, Singapore was the only one to embrace market-economy, in its most unapologetic form.

Call Lee lucky because even with Lee’s sure-handed capitalism, Singapore would not be possible without Singapore’s advantages – a largely homogeneous society, a city state, etc –quite unique to Singapore.  

But many of these attributes were disadvantages to start with. When Singapore had been dispelled by Malaysia because of racial tensions (Lee its premier was in his early 40s then), it didn’t have any army to defend its borders; it didn’t have any economy to speak of. Its small size – and therefore less significance - would have made it vulnerable to a takeover – or at least an invasion - by a bigger power, particularly one from the Soviet bloc. Fearing it, Lee befriended the US.

To make Singapore militarily strong, Lee sought the help of Israel. He created a police-judiciary to eliminate corruption. To the same end, he raised the salaries of officials to the level of those in high positions in private sector – and said, “If you pay pee nuts, you attract monkeys.” He removed political opposition by reducing Singapore to a single-party polity.

He made spitting on road, littering chewing gums on road etc. punishable offenses. 

(Remember, we heard, in our growing up years, that in Singapore you would be punished for throwing chewing gum on road?) He told Singaporeans to speak good English and develop clean habits.

He completely muzzled the press. Singapore Herald’s license was seized because of a critical article it had carried about Lee’s government and three years later the government amended its constitution to make it mandatory for media houses publishing out of Singapore to renew their license yearly. And publications of foreign media houses critical of the Singapore government but without any production base in Singapore were simply banned.

Although Singapore never saw the likes of Tienanmen Square or Capture Wall Street, winds of change are blowing in the island nation. Living costs are very high in Singapore and the gap between poor and rich has grown over the years.

There is a groundswell for more inclusive policies. It led to a slump in Lee’s party’s (People's Action Party of Singapore) popular vote, following which Lee stepped down making way for his son. Any nation, however successful, yearns for change in a passage of 40 to 50 years. Singapore, however different it may be from the rest, should not be an exception. But Singapore will always consider itself lucky to have had Lee in its formative years and not the other way around.