For starters, I realised that Gladwell’s first book was not using drinking or alcoholism as some kind of convoluted business pre-school metaphor, since it was titled, The Tipping Point, and not The Tippling Point as I had somehow believed all these years. I made this discovery-correction this week after paragliding through his new book, Revenge of the Tipping Point.
RTP wears its data-collation lightly. Dealing as Gladwell does here with ‘overstories, superspreaders and the rise of social engineering’ – an update of The Tipping Point’s subject of ‘How little things can make a big difference’ for the social media, fake news and AI era – he was hunting in my hunting grounds.
Gladwell deals with, well, tipping points, investigating why things don’t stir, or create much of a stir, until they catch fire. He takes case studies and diagnoses why they ‘go viral’. The puzzles Gladwell ‘solves’ include the mysterious revival of the post-WW2 dying art-business of bank robberies; why Harvard really has a women’s rugby team; why gay marriage suddenly gained support in America across demographics.
He explains these seemingly accidental, caught-a-spark cases by dealing with what he calls ‘overstories’. ‘The overstory is made up of things way up in the air, in many cases outside our awareness. We tend to forget about the overstory because we’re so focused on the life going on in front of and around us. But overstories turn out to be really, really powerful,’ writes Gladwell.
Which makes me come to my own overlooked overstory. In the very late 1990s, when arguments could be pleasant and not just downright debaucheries, I once found myself arguing with my then neighbour, former Doordarshan DG Bhaskar Ghose. He was telling me how he was still cut up about giving the green light to Ramanand Sagar’s 1987-88 DD iconic megahit series Ramayan. Ghose told me that he should have known better, that the-then 3-year-old Ram Janmabhoomi movement – which would lead to the demolition of the Babri masjid, nationwide riots, and other unfortunate effects that linger to this day – would be catalysed by the immensely popular TV show. I had argued that the TV show couldn’t be blamed for the Hindutva brigade’s snowballing fervour, which in turn would be picked up by BJP. (Disclosure: my grandma was a big fan of Ramayan, and – not ‘but’ – found religious zealotry silly, so… But I didn’t tell Bhaskar this.) A popular, made-for-TV episodic Ramlila, I had argued then, surely couldn’t be pure agit-prop. In RTP, Gladwell traces the curious case of the Holocaust absent in the public imagination till the late 70s. Not in America, not even in Germany. He uses a chart tracing the number of times ‘holocaust’ and ‘Holocaust’ were used from 1800 to 2000. ‘The lowercase generic version goes from a trickle to a stream. The uppercase version is almost never used until the late 1960s – and even then in modest numbers. But wait. Right around 1978 something dramatic happens… The Holocaust-usage line goes almost vertical.’
So, what happened? It turns out an NBC miniseries, Holocaust. Holocaust survivor and activist Elie Wiesel called it ‘untrue, offensive, cheap… an insult to those who perished and to those who survived.’ But as Gladwell points out, NBC’s 91/2 hr-long miniseries, watched by over 100 mn Americans in 1978 brought Holocaust consciousness, and the very H word, to mainstream America – and after Jan 1979, in West Germany.
So, yes, in hindsight, I now see the point of Gladwellian tipping. 1984: Ram Janmabhoomi movement starts. 1984-86: The movement sputters along. 1987-88: Ramayan is a pan-Indian TV must-see. 1990: LK Advani launches Somnath-Ayodhya rath yatra. 1992: Babri Masjid demolished. Riots break out….
2024: I tip my hat to Bhaskar Ghose, after Malcolm Gladwell tips it for me.