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…
