Quiet - book review

Susan Cain wrote a remarkable book in 2012 titled Quiet, which I have just read. A lawyer by training, social psychologist by choice, happy family woman and quite a balanced character who writes good English even in this day and age despite being American, she got me hooked from the very first page, so much so that I shoved several other books aside (I am still in the habit of reading multiple books at a time) to finish it from cover to cover, reflecting thoughtfully all the while. The book talks about the value and importance of introverts (‘quiet’ people) in an age when a quite unhealthy (in her opinion and mine) premium is put on extroversion – variously called gregariousness or sociability.

The basic thesis is that there is nothing bad or shameful about being introverted (which, by the way, is not the same thing as shyness, which can and should be cured through assiduous practice with deliberate social interaction), nor can people born that way do very much about it. In any large population, from one-third to half are born introverted. We need both introverts and extroverts to make a healthy and progressive society, but it is bad to force one type to become the other, as it is bad to force naturally left-handed people to become right-handed: which unfortunately, we do too strenuously (at least, in the author’s opinion, the way most children are being brought up in western countries). Each type should be allowed to grow up in its own preferred way, nurturing their best native talents, inclinations and drives, while also learning to know, understand and cope with those who are of the other type: we have everything to gain from doing that everywhere, from the domestic hearth to schools to the business- or political workplace.

It is also to be remembered that there are few people (though indeed there are some) who are ‘pure’ extroverts or introverts; many introverts, especially, learn to become very efficient pseudo-extroverts because they discover early – sometimes through very painful experience – that it helps a lot to get along even with people they don’t really like or vibe with. I was grinning hugely to myself while reading this part, because that is what has helped me most to succeed professionally, though I am a very strong introvert by nature, and that is what I have tried to teach hundreds of otherwise gifted introverts to do while they were my pupils, because it helps to ‘succeed’ in the practical world. But no true introvert ever really becomes an extrovert: because, and I shall underline this much more strongly than the author has, (I don’t have to fear loss of readership), most introverts not only dislike the other type but actually hold them in greater or less contempt for being basically shallow. After all, introverts have always had another name – ‘thinkers’ – and they have always taken pride in it, and felt angry because the majority pretend to scoff at what they are not gifted enough to understand. Remember, as the author has said, from the theory of gravitation to Harry Potter, the world owes almost all works of creative thought to the introverts (‘nerds’), who like to focus and work alone or in small groups of appreciative peers. The best that the extroverts can show are warriors and footballers (some of the very best salespeople and Presidents even, though this might sound paradoxical to many, have been introverts); far, far more commonly, they are of no more consequence than compulsive fashionistas, members of football beer gangs and party animals!

The book is full of memorable lines that you can quote at people. I won’t make it easy for you: read it yourself, and see how many of the things said there click with your knowledge of yourself and people around you. A lot of folks, I am sure, will find reassuring ideas as well as useful self-improvement tips here.  Most importantly, for the likes of my own daughter, if you are otherwise gifted and know that you have many positive qualities but are thin-skinned and easily bored by chatter as introverts usually are, don’t go out of your way to make yourself appear cheerful and superficial and falsely friendly to the riffraff. Wholly wasted energy.

I should also give at least one serious warning, especially to Indian readers, as I guess most of my readers are. All my life I have found Americans to be very blinkered and gullible about a lot of things outside their immediate ken, despite their obvious sincerity and vaunted fondness for meticulous ‘research’. The biggest bloomer that this author has made is the chapter on how ‘Asians’ are by and large more introverted – quiet, thoughtful, humble, disciplined, sensitive to other people’s feelings and needs – and that, apparently, helps them to succeed both at school and in the workplace far beyond the dreams of the average American. Now ever since the Japanese economic ‘miracle’ that began in the 1950s, lately replicated by the Chinese, Americans by the droves have been searching for the ‘right’ explanation for the extraordinary phenomenon, and Ms. Cain believes that this is it. She has drawn such utterly silly and superficial conclusions on the basis of investigations with a few hundred Japanese, Chinese and Koreans studying and working in the US (anybody could have told her that this is too small and too biased a sample to draw such sweeping conclusions from, since Asians who successfully migrate and thrive in the west are by definition very different from the common type in their own countries): all 1.3 billion Indians have been completely ignored. We know what we are like, don’t we? The only Indian she has mentioned is one M. K. Gandhi, and millions of Indians, both among his devotees and those who name him only to spit upon it, will tell you how ‘typical’ an Indian he was anyway. So alas, Ms. Cain, if Asia is rising today, you have to look for explanations elsewhere. And it made me grimace to think that only a hundred or a little more years ago, when we Asians/Indians were poor and supine, these same white people found us disgusting and stupid and venal and hardly human; now that we are giving them frightening competition, they have suddenly ‘discovered’ such wonderful virtues in us! One more reason why I have come to regard all sorts of ‘scientific findings’ with not a grain but a whole bagful of salt. - however, I must hasten to point out that this one rather ludicrous chapter does not detract much from the value of the book.

[Quiet: the power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking, by Susan Cain, Penguin Books 2012, ISBN 978-0-141-02919-1, pp. 333, Rs. 499. You can also hear her TED Talk here.]

P.S.: I am deeply delighted that a girl who is barely 16 read this book and gave it to me to read. Restores my dimming hopes. I know lots of educated people in their 30s and 40s who can’t or won’t read a book like this. Thank you, Anny.

P.P.S., later in the day: How I have dealt with my own introversion, and handled it in my (pretty large -) classes for more than thirty years will be the topic of the next blogpost. Coming up soon.

Phone nightmare

In the 1980s, India had only fixed line telephones, and very few of them (in the early seventies I had read that New York City had more phones than the whole of India, but that was another era); call rates were like one rupee a minute – that would be equivalent to Rs. 20 or more a minute now, or thereabouts? – among the highest in the world.

The telecom ‘revolution’ began around the turn of the century (even 20 years ago, smartphones were toys for the rich to show off – only maidservants’ sons do that today). The business was opened up to the private sector just as worldwide the technology started developing and proliferating at the speed of a nuclear chain reaction. Phone ownership has since crossed 700 million and rising steeply, and there are more than 300 million smartphones in use. Call rates have dropped to near zero – you pay something like Rs. 150 (that’s little more than two US dollars) and get ‘unlimited’ calls for about a month, plus a lot of net surfing thrown in.  Meanwhile there is a dog eat dog fight going on among the service providers: they have already spent tens of thousands of crores to buy bandwith and licences, and as much again on building infrastructure, even as revenues are plummeting. Result: tens of millions of people who can’t afford (or don’t want) a good education or good housing and health care have phones glued to their ears more or less all their waking hours, on foot and in vehicles, at home and on the road, while the massively overstretched infrastructure is creaking and groaning at the joints. As any Indian who needs to talk urgently to someone far away for a few minutes at a stretch can tell you, getting through and finishing an important conversation is a nightmare, or else you must have two or three SIM cards to try with.

Unless I am much mistaken, this is a classic oligopoly in the making. A few gigantic (and ever growing-) firms with bottomless pockets – aided, no doubt by monstrous loans from banks which they have no strong intention of repaying in the foreseeable future – are slugging it out, hoping to remove all small rivals from the market who cannot take losses on that scale for long, so that those three or four gargantuan firms will finally have the whole market to themselves, and then they will in all likelihood carve it up among themselves to create regional monopolies (Only Mio in south India, only Windtel in the North and North West, only Concept in the centre and east, with TSNL to pick up the intermediate crumbs if it survives at all), following which they will at last begin the process of jacking up the tariffs to profitable levels again: and by God, they are going to be hefty jackups indeed, to compensate for the astronomical losses of yesteryear and then make the sort of profits that alone can satisfy those who are racing ahead to become the world’s first trillionaires…

For very, very small fish like me who do not want to use phones as playthings of an idle hour but would like to be able to make calls that get through instantly, always, and without interference and interruption, it couldn’t happen soon enough. At call rates of 20-30 rupees a minute, the lines would at last be clear again. How many would like to bet seriously against me that it wouldn’t happen within the next, say, five years?

P.S.: Oh, and before I leave… I am delighted to see that the blogpost titled To My Daughter in print has made it to the most-read list. As I have said before, it is a good feeling to see that the book keeps selling, and the publishers keep sending little amounts of royalty to the bank. Someday somebody is going to really read the book and write to me about it. Better still, write a review on Amazon or Goodreads.

Just scribbling

I have just been video-chatting with loved ones and old boys, back to back in London, Delhi and Singapore. Now I am at peace at home, having talked happily for a bit after class with a young old boy learning to become a doctor, come back after a vigorous evening walk and listening to raaga jaunpuri on youtube as I write while sipping cold beer. Imagine, I tell myself. See how far you have come, and life is good, getting better by the year! How often I say to the little ones currently under my tutelage that you shouldn’t be too nostalgic about childhood passing by – the best is yet to come.

The posts on Rani Rashmoni and the Mahabharata have at long last been dislodged from the top of the most-read list. Several thousand have read them already. I would so have liked to hear from some of them… but if you cannot otherwise create, keep writing, I tell them, it is one of the few things about you that will endure, or at least might. I was watching King Alfred of the 9th century CE saying in a Netflix series that the written word will carry civilization on its shoulders, and I couldn’t agree more.

To Rajdeep, thank you for the books that you keep sending. I am now deep into Mythos – never knew that Stephen Fry was such a good author! (Can somebody send me that movie of his called General Blackadder?) And thank you vastly more for being there for close to a quarter century now: few can claim as much. I really must make that Japan trip sometime soon. France too, if Nishant stays put for a bit longer…

To Subhadip Dutta and Saikat Chakraborty: are you, too, like so many others, beginning to forget?

To all of the younger  ’uns: don’t confuse Google with knowledge, leave alone wisdom.

A pat on my daughter's back

My daughter recently wrote a review of Chandrahas Choudhury's new novel, Clouds, on her blog. Mr. Choudhury has liked it enough to write glowingly about it on his Facebook page. I am quoting the whole comment below. If you are really interested, you might look up Choudhury's FB page for the actual post, and the comments that have come in. He wrote it last night, meaning August 01 [here is the link:  https://bit.ly/2LJEdgO ]

'Read a wonderful review of Clouds by Urbi Chatterjee, a Young India fellow at Ashoka University -- written in much more elegant prose, and with many more interesting thoughts and much more understanding of narrative and aesthetic motives, than most of the reviews of Clouds in the newspapers. Which newspaper editor on my friends' list wants to give this very bright young writer, formerly a student of history at Jadavpur, some book-review or journalistic work? We need more good reviewers in this country!
Especially loved this bit: "Witnessing Farhad fall in love is also quite a comic treat for the reader – he steps into that same bubble of buoyant optimism and nothing-can-ever-go-wrong-again sense of confidence, and his mind builds the same castles in the air that do people decades younger than him. Love makes a happy, goofy fool out of human beings, and it is comforting to realise that people much older and more experienced than I can end up behaving in the exact same manner when assailed by the arrows of Cupid." '