The Tipping Point - A 'My World' Perspective Review

Back in 1967, a certain Social Psychologist by the name of Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment titled ‘Small World Experiment’. In where, he tracked the chains of acquaintances in the United States by sending several packages to 160 random people living in Omaha, Nebraska, asking them to forward the package to a friend or acquaintance who they thought would bring the package closer to a set final individual - a stockbroker from Boston, Massachusetts. And, they all had to perform this activity under certain condition: They could only mail the folder to someone they actually knew personally on a first-name basis. At the end of the experiment, Milgram, surprisingly, noted that the very first folder reached the target in just four days and took only two intermediate acquaintances. Overall, Milgram reported that chains varied in length from two to ten intermediate acquaintances, with a median of five intermediate acquaintances between the original sender and the destination recipient thereby, coining a pretty famous phrase -The Six Degrees of Separation. This research had massive after-effects, with many people falling over themselves to either side with or trash down the findings. But of all the things, one peculiar aspect caught the eye of a certain British-born Canadian journalist by the name of Malcolm Gladwell, 22 years after the aforementioned experiment. He detailed out a theory based on his observation. And what was theory called? Right, ‘The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.’ - Which is what this book is all about.

The atypical facet which Gladwell uncovered was the finding that just three friends of the stockbroker provided the final link for half of the letters that arrived successfully. This gave rise to Gladwell's theory that certain types of people are key to the dissemination of information.  And ‘The Tipping Point’ here is that critical, threshold borderline which when breached, translates into making ideas, messages, behaviors and, well, products spread like viruses do. An effect which is perpetuated by these set of key people.

The opening leaves of the book are consumed in Gladwell delineating these set of ‘Key’ people, who, when they get to ‘Disseminating information’, end up jacking up sales of a long forgotten footwear brand or becoming famous American Revolution patriot for alerting colonial militia of approaching British forces before the Battle of Lexington and Concord among other things. Now if that isn’t neat and nifty then I don’t know what else is. These ‘key’ people enter in the garb of being the ‘Connector’ i.e. someone who knows lot of people, the ‘Maven’ i.e. someone who takes the new bit and dumbs it down on all four for the lay person’s consumption and finally, the ‘Salesmen’ i.e. someone who is a charismatic  persuader.

The book also talks about the environment and context the above mentioned people would require to successfully swoosh their wand. That’s when the ‘Stickiness Factor’ and ‘The Power of Context’ concepts kick in. Stickiness is that inexplicable something which makes one ‘stuck’ on something and ‘Power of Context’ is that important milieu on the foreground of which the impact of what a ‘key person’ does becomes twice as impactful.

The book, which was named as one of the best books of the decade by Amazon.com, is pretty engaging in the way it written. When a consummate journalist as Gladwell sells his idea to you, you have to give in. Add with it an interesting central idea and an unrelenting will on the part of the author to connect with the reader. 

But the book does tumble down a slippery slope mid-way through, or so I feel. The examples that are thrown in by the author to back the central premise, sort of seems, how to put this delicately, forced. There’s a part where the reason behind the dipping of once-alarmingly-high crime rates in the New York of the 90s is attributed to – and I am not making this up – Graffiti-less metro wagons. I am not belting away the proposed idea altogether. In fact this reasoning does explain why Delhi Metro stations and trains are so squeaky clean while the adjacent Central Bus-Station is not even though the same sets of people frequent both the places. But when you give credit to the ‘clean and crispy public spaces’ to the conduct curve of people suddenly ‘tipping’ and they becoming well behaved, civil citizen from being raving mad gun-shooters, it kind of feels a bit stretched. And that’s the problem with such a book: an inner alarm, that’s which designed to detect ludicrous conclusion coming in, goes off, every other idea from the book then is forced to be taken in with a pinch of salt or two. The other pricky thorn in a erst-while honestly written prose is its trying-way-too-hard-to-convince undertone. A not-so-counter-intuitive idea such as ‘The Stickiness Factor’ is given many more pages than what the doctor would’ve ordered. Gladwell constantly leans on monkeys, cognitive science, psychological experiments, organizational structure of companies, and obscure concepts, in the hope that, together, they coalesce into something that inspires the reader to ‘buy’ his idea. And one does ‘buy’ it, only that the salesman over-stays his welcome.

All in all, it’s a decently healthy book which would make one analyze their quotidian surroundings more deeply as they go about their day and also, take a leaf from it and apply the presented concept to be better initiators, do-ers and disseminators of ideas.

“Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push — in just the right place — it can be tipped.” – is one of the quotes by Malclom Gladwell himself. The book did ‘tip’ so as to say — I mean Gladwell received a US$ 1.5 million in advance for it and it sold 1.7 million copies by 2006 — only that the ‘slight push’ could have been in a more ‘right’ place as far as the presentation was concerned.

Pick this one up for one of those read-rides when you want to take away something tangible once you are done reading.

Gangs of Wasseypur - Part 1 - A 'My World' Perspective Review

Revenge. Payback. Retribution. Retaliation. Vengeance. This deep entrenched, evolutionary instinct – not just confined to the Homo sapiens – has had its strands examined to the nth degree over the times. More in practice than in literature, actually. It can be of various kinds: Handed out for sustenance of acquired power by one group to another, a want to make one right off two wrongs, an ‘eye-for-eye’ idea served cold, or, as in this case, plainly passed on down hereditarily. Because as one of the taglines of this magnanimous, brave, attention-grabbing outing by Anurag Kashyap – Which has a overall (both parts combined) running time of 5 Hours 20 mins, which sports a cast of around 20, which crones out 14 songs – goes: “In Wasseypur, vengeance is inherited.” 

And, oh boy, inherited it sure is. 

Based on a true story by Zeishan Quadri (the script’s co-written with Akhilesh, Sachin Ladia and Anurag Kashyap), the film is set in Wasseypur, Jharkhand, known for gang war between gangster Faheem Khan and businessman Sabir Alam over Scrap business. Of the two, the newsfeeds mention that, Faheem Khan, despite serving life imprisonment at Hazaribagh jail, still runs his gang, mostly comprising family members, from the jail. And Sabir Alam, though out on bail after spending eight years in jail, rarely stays at home due to the threat to his life. The film, which has fictionalized the characterization and the setup using measured creative license, opens with showcasing the town set in 1941 divided among the powerful Qureshis – butchers by profession - and the others. A certain Qureshi by the fearful name of ‘Sultana Daku’ is the quintessential, ‘unseen’, and feared dacoit who runs his livelihood by staking claim on all and any British freight trains which pass through his ‘area’. Shahid Khan (aptly portrayed by Jaideep Ahlawat) taking the advantage of this situations, milks out his share of freight-train pie by posing as Sultana dacoit and looting the grain stuffed wagons – after a playful banter with the train driver, mind you – before the actual Sultana gets to the scene. After Sultana finds this out, Shahid along with his pregnant wife and friend Farhan (Piyush Mishra, too good) are banished from the town and are caused to settle near Dhanbad where Shahid starts working in the coalmine. The sprawling coalmine saga unfolds here on as one thing leads to another and Shahid Khan enters a three generation long feud with the post-independence coalmine overlord -Ramadheer Singh (Tigmanshu Dhulia in his acting debut. ‘Scoop’ praised him earlier as the director of ‘Paan Singh Tomar’). This feud eventually sees Shahid Khan getting sent to the astral plain. Thereupon, ushers in the second generation. Which sees – wait for it – Manoj Bajpai (portraying Sadar Khan) as the core of the chronicle. The ‘wait for it’ part was a lame attempt at creating the required build-up to introduce this magnificent actor because of what he has done in this film. Sardar Khan is this hyper horny mammal with an insatiable appetite for power. He is a brutal murderer who will kill the other with marked detached indifference all along being sort of an innocent charmer to the ladies. This role tops his ‘Shool’ performance. It tops his ‘Kaun’ performance. Hell, it tops his ‘Satya’ performance.   

It is well established from the very start that this movie contains within a high-on-testosterone, patriarchal-y angled, male dominated narrative. But, that doesn’t take away anything at all from the emboldened female characters played by Richa Chadda (as Nagma Khan) and Reema Sen (as Durga). The former’s a motor-mouthed firebrands who won’t shy away from craziest street slang and latter’s a coy, feminine lady who will show her true colors shall the need be. These two characters re-enforce the convention of an Anurag Khashyap movie: Females are strong in their own ways and that they won’t simply take it lying down. Suffice it to say that William Congreve got it right when he wrote “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” 

Noted performances by Pankaj Tripathi as (Sultan Qureshi), Huma Qureshi (as the riveting Mohsina), Nawazuddin Siddiqui (as Faizal Khan) have enlivened up an already gripping story. These being the ones who will charter into the Part-2 (out on Aug 8, 2012) so more about them, then. 

The film, captured realistically by Rajeev Ravi’s lens, moves through so many important junctures and curves along its way that it takes an average joe like me some time to get used to the style of the narrative. Tons of characters, impersonating the uber-branched family-tree on both sides of the feud border, keeping popping up in quick successions along the timescale of 60 years. The way all these are dealt with, though, deserves to be complimented. The characters are developed with all the time in the world. Their motives, their background, their inspirations, their aspirations, one is treated to all of these personal facets in minutest of the details. Bit by bit and slowly against the milieu of high-on-action plot. ‘Revenge’ might be a case of logical fallacy for some – those like us, who are cocooned safely since birth in an upper-middle class, urbane bubble – But for the ‘Gangs of Wasseypur’, it is something for which they will wait indefinitely for. Wait, to let the situations fruition to required parameters on their own accord so that one will be able to change into action their most cherished phrase, incorrectly transliterated as – “Now I’ll Tell and Take.’’ 

Action Direction by Shyam Kaushal has brought to the fore an all new way of capturing a fight sequence. The scenes are predominantly long, single shots, with vicious albeit elbow-y encounters between the two warring sides. The violence of such kind is not glamorous as it is usually presented on celluloid, but it’s repelling. Repelling maybe to such an extent that it may act as an influence on the general society and get the ‘violence graphs’ treading south. The film’s most visceral, violent scenes are unusually punctuated with transfixing sound tracks. Whether it be G. V. Prakash Kumar’s background score or Sneha Khanwalkar’s landmark Original Sound Track. Both of them seduce you deeper into the storyline. 

Because of the unique way in which she creates tunes, Sneha Khanwalkar’s OST warrants an extra paragraph. Marked by lyrical gems like ‘O Womaniya’, ‘I am a Hunter she Wants to see my Gaun’, ‘Bihar ke La La’ and ‘Keh Ke Loonga’ among the others by various artists, the accompanying music is high-inducing to say the least. I insist you to direct your browsers to the Youtube videos of the making of the songs (‘O Womaniya’ and ‘Bihar Ke Lala’ specifically) and learn for yourself what was so different about the way they were created. And if, say, the songs aren’t already on repeat modes on your players, be guaranteed they soon will be. And while you are at it, listen to other content created by Khanwalkar for MTV’s ‘Sound Trippin’. This Music Director, mark these words, is the next big thing. If she already isn’t one, that is. 

Anurag Kashyap's mode of storytelling, and the way his characters loom over the proceedings without becoming caricatural, is frighteningly original. The blood and gore account has bursts of light moments too – The scene where Sardar courts Durga as she gets some laundry done, or the scene where Nagma asks her husband to eat and bathe well before heading outside to satisfy his carnal needs or the scene towards the end, when Faizal takes Mohsina out on a date are deliciously funny and will bring the house down. That said, please be warned that there’s a devilish sense of dispassion in the way the subject has been dealt with. This one’s not for the lily-livered or the weak-hearted. But if you are up for experimenting with a new kind of cinema with a pinch of viewer’s discretion, this one’s for you. This film is path-breaking in a way that it has blurred the line between alternative and mainstream cinema. It is yet another surprise of the year 2012, where audiences have come of age. 2012 - Where a ‘Kahani’ can co-exist with an ‘Agneepath’, where a ‘Paan Singh Tomar’ can co-exist with a ‘Housefull 2’, where a ‘Shanghai’ can co-exist with a ‘Rowdy Rathore’. And, more importantly, where a ‘Gangs of Wasseypur’ can exist at all. 

Watch it for the ‘real’, for the ‘rustic’, for the ‘raunchy’. Watch it, above all, for the ‘raw’.