nazia du bois

Another Sao Paulo summer day, another thunderstorm. Every day through the high-summer months of February and March as the hour approaches late afternoon something Biblical and majestic starts to happen in the sky. The whole world slowly darkens as the sky closes down, drawing a blanket of graphite over everything you can see. The air, already heavy, gets musky with the smell of the leaves about to be drenched. You can almost see the insects scurrying for shelter as the first droplets plop fatly onto the ground, through the vines on the trees. I am of course no stranger to thunderstorms, having grown up in the land of the kalboishakhis. Memories of dancing on the roof under the sheer weight of the monsoon rains are still fresh in my mind, as is the vision of my grandmother’s garden in Dhaka’s Cantonment, bright wet green after the rains and strewn with the little unripe mangoes we would then make  into deliciously spicy kacha aam bhorta. But this rain here in Brazil is different. It’s somehow less welcoming, it’s not the kind of rain you’d play and dance with. It’s deeper, darker, heavier. Amazonian. It reminds you, with every drop and splatter, that you’re living in the middle of a jungle. On borrowed land. Perhaps even on borrowed time. It’s incessant, for one. It’s not the quick refreshing downpour of the Asian afternoon that we’re used to, and can plan nashta and shopping around. It lives on its own time, the sky heaving and pouring until you think there can’t possibly be any wet left, and yet still it falls. The world lights up in a startling electric white with every bolt of lightning, followed by the kind of ear-shattering thunderclap that grabs hold of your heart in a strange, primordial fear. I have screamed out loud involuntarily more than once at these bolts of thunder, and am always struck by how here even the most piercing scream would be completely drowned out by the sheer volume of the noise of nature.  The trees sag under the weight of the water, drooping to protect themselves, and the gutters in this hilly city rush like small rivers, meeting at the bottoms of the hills to flood and soak the cars and even the living rooms of the poor souls who don’t live on higher ground. Every day there is news of more destruction from the rain, and as we drive around afterwards, we see images with a kind of brutal poetry – roadside trees upturned with such force that their surrounding concrete lies jagged, pointing in shards into the air, walls too waterlogged to stand, crumbling onto pavements. I’ve been reading two of my favourite authors recently – The Architecture of Happiness by Alain De Botton and The Tell-tale Mind by V.S. Ramachandran. De Botton’s thinking, about how the very shapes and colours and weights and textures that surround us evoke in us emotions that we are hard-wired to experience, feels very real to me here. Our house is on a quiet residential street, on thankfully relatively high ground. There is a large, purple flower-laden tibouchina tree out front, and in the back, there is a small but verdant garden, with a guava tree, a pitanga tree, and many bushes and plants I don’t know. There is an unmistakeably jungly quality about the garden – so much so that garden almost seems the wrong word to describe it. It’s as far from the kind of gentle English garden, laid out with a nice vegetable plot, creeping roses and sun loungers, that I imagine when I hear the word garden, as its possible to be. The green here is dark and bright all at once, assaultingly deep. The sun, which shines all morning, divides the garden into patches of scorching white heat and areas of dark, hot shade. The wildlife, from insects to worms to birds, is absolutely everywhere. And the overwhelming sense I get, whether I am lying on the white cotton hammock that I bought back in Recife last year, or whether I’m inside, by the window, watching the storm with a soothing cup of tea – the overwhelming sense I get is that if we were all to leave, all the residents of Sao Paulo, to leave, tomorrow, it would take mere moments, days,  for this great city to be consumed back into its natural state of jungle. It’s that primitive feeling of living on borrowed time (in an existential sense of course) that I am thinking about today, as I wonder why my heart and brain react so differently to the rains in different parts of the world.

I’ve just finished reading Quiet by Susan Cain, a passionate paean to all the introverts of our world, who, says Cain, number anywhere between a third and half of the human population. Not knowing much about the genetic basis of introversion (there is one) and only ever having considered it from the ‘outside’, if at all, (I self-identify as an extrovert on every personality test I’ve ever taken) I was hooked. The book’s subtitle is ‘the power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking’ and I believe, having finished reading it, that this is exactly what I have learned from it, and what I’d be comfortable telling someone else about.

The first very valuable assumption Cain lays out is that in our world today we worship extroversion. You’ve got to remember she’s writing primarily about and for an American audience, but in this, I believe she has a point that does resonate globally, not least because of the spread of the ‘extrovert ideal’ by American media and popular culture all over the world. Cain skilfully outlines this ideal as being “the omnipresent belief that the ideal self is gregarious, alpha and comfortable in the spotlight. The archetypal extrovert prefers action to contemplation, risk-taking to heed-taking, certainty to doubt. He favours quick decision making, even at the risk of being wrong. He works well in teams and excels in groups… Sure, we allow technically gifted loners who launch companies in their garages to have any personality they please. But they are the exceptions, not the rule, and our tolerance extends mainly to those who get fabulously wealthy or hold the promise of doing so.”

Introverts, by contrast, have been relegated to the ‘second class’ of desirable personality types in modern society, ‘somewhere between disappointment and a pathology’, writes Cain. The main problem being, that apart from half the world potentially being maligned and misunderstood, the significant, specific talents of the introvert population of the world are also going unnoticed and grotesquely under-utilised. Extroversion may be an enormously appealing personality style, writes Cain, but we’ve turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform. And that’s not good news for us. Hurtling, as we all are, towards the glimmering prize of a socially able, gregarious, extroverted ideal in the ‘people searches’ we undertake daily – from finding the perfect partner to hiring the right employee  - might actually be leading us down the wrong path completely, a path of disappointment, and, if the numbers are to believed, an endlessly frustrating lifetime of fitting square pegs into round holes, or what Cain calls the self-imposed life of the ‘pseudo-extrovert’.

There are a number of different things that this book got me thinking about. The first was the cult of ‘personality’ that we see everywhere around us today. Cain quotes the famous American cultural historian Walter Susman’s assessment when she says that around the turn of the twentieth century, America shifted from a Culture of Character to a Culture of Personality. “In the Culture of Character, the ideal self was serious, disciplined and honourable. What counted was not so much the impression one made in in public as how one behaved in private. The word ‘personality’ didn’t exist in English until the eighteenth century, and the idea of having a good personality was not widespread until the twentieth. But when they embraced the Culture of Personality, Americans started to focus on how others perceived them. They became captivated by people who were bold and entertaining. ‘The social role demanded of all in the new Culture of Personality was that of a performer’ Susman famously wrote. Every American was to become a performing self.”

I find this fascinating on a number of levels. First, it explains to me the roots of the particularly American predilection with the self as an individual entity to always be showcased, celebrated and flaunted. This is, after all, the only culture from which Facebook, which is really just one ginormous celebration of The Performing Self, could have emerged so naturally. But all this celebration of the performative self is surely as far as it’s possible to get from the (East but also pan) Asian ideal of the subjugation/erasure of the self in the quest to maintain social harmony. Think about countries like Japan, where famously ‘the nail that sticks out gets hammered down’ – surely these are cultures in which the introvert, not the extrovert ideal is prized most highly? (Hector Garcia writes well about Japanese introversion in his award-winning blog). So of course this led me to wonder what happens when one ideal takes over in mainstream and popular culture at least, as being the superior one. How do naturally more introverted cultures, like most if not all of Asia, square their traditional ideals/preferences with that of ‘global culture’, if there is such a thing?

Cain touches on this a tiny bit, though to be fair, not very exhaustively, and only within the context of the ethnic sub-groups within America. A fuller study on the topic would be fascinating (actually it probably exists, just not yet popularised into airport-book format, maybe I should go and do that). Apparently, according to some psychologists, extroversion is literally in our DNA, and Asians have less of it. “The trait has been found to be less prevalent in Asia and Africa than in Europe and America, whose populations depend largely from the migrants of the world. It makes sense, say these researchers, that world travelers were more extroverted than those who stayed at home – and that they passed on these traits to their children and their children’s children.’ As personality traits are genetically transmitted’, writes the psychologist Kenneth Olson, ‘each succeeding wave of emigrants to a new continent would give rise over time to a population of more engaged individuals than reside in the emigrants’ continent of origin’. ”

Hmm. That immigrants are the greater risk-takers and extroverts, the doers and the go-getters, is of course one of the founding myths of America. I’m not sure if it’s quite fair to call those who stayed behind ‘less engaged’ but this goes back to the nub of Cain’s argument – that engagement in the world can happen in many different ways, and we have predisposed ourselves to only valuing one.

So back to the Cult of Personality in different parts of the world. I was recently in Asia researching a paper on Social Beauty, i.e., the role that beauty plays in the lives of young women who spend as much of their time online as offline, and to whom online personas are as, if not more, important, as offline ones. The word that cropped up time and time again, as a ‘new’ thing to think about in digital Asia, was ‘personality’. Especially in India, where I had people telling me how ‘in the past, it was fine for a girl to be just all the usually things like fair, thin, college-educated but nowadays she also has to have a really good personality, you know?’  And that’s this whole idea that you are more than the sum of your constituent marriage-CV parts, and that extra bit, that ‘X’ factor, is your personality, your charm, your ability to engage, socialise and be interesting, through your own quirky and individual set of interests. This is all really a new consideration, and one I now believe spurred to a great extent by a global obsession with extroversion. In my mothers’ day, it wasn’t uncommon for sisters of the same family to be seen as interchangeable in marriage match-making conversations (personality? I can just see the look on my grandmother’s face now) – but things are changing as every little girl tries to emulate the cult of the performing, charming externally-oriented self from the moment they set up their first social networking account.

Much is made of how America is loud and Asia is quiet – this is simplistic and reductionist of course, but in this context of extroversion/introversion, it’s exactly what I’m talking about. If the loud people set the rules, Cain argues, the quiet people are on an unfair footing from day one. Surely that means the global stage isn’t fairly taking into account, or utilising, the resources of the quiet half of the world? That only the outliers from the quiet cultures, who are willing to sing and dance and self-parade, are the ones who make it on a global stage? I shudder to think that that’s the case – but fear it’s exactly so. Everyone else is just playing along – we all know the ‘pseudo-extroverts’ who have Facebook accounts but hate using them, or who tweet reluctantly when pressed to.

There are other things this book made me think about. One is the whole introversion/extroversion dialectic in relation to creativity (are the ideas that are most engagingly presented really the best ones?) and another is the whole topic in relation to how we work (is all this constant social collaboration really that good an idea?). But those are two separate musings for another day.

A good book, worth reading.

I dropped by my favourite local bookshop yesterday, Daunt, and found myself at the start of a talk by the philosopher Alain de Botton. (It’s for these little surprises that I really do love London, or, I should say, the rarified and well-read environs of Marylebone). The talk was on his latest book, Religion for Atheists.

He had a lot of interesting things to say about the helpful, multi-faceted role that religion can continue to have in the lives of even those who are avowed atheists, like himself. His method is to find the ‘gaps’ in one’s life, and then attempt to fill them by borrowing from religious solutions when they feel right, without worrying too much about the labelling of it all. Being the self-styled philosopher of the modern condition that he is, it all felt very relevant to the way we live our lives today.

One bit that struck me as really interesting was when he compared the big organised religions to large multinational corporations. Of course, there are the obvious parallels – sheer size, structure, authority, rules, a codified system of advancement, rituals and so on. But there are other things too. Religions, as my husband reminds me, were of course the original brands. As such, brands today still have a lot to learn from them, I think. Religions have a clear mission and a set of values, and are generally out to attract as many potential loyalists as possible. They have a clear voice, and know and value the power of skillful rhetoric and oration in persuasion. They’re good at dealing with regular scandal and public outrage. They create communities, ‘hosting parties every week’ in de Botton’s words, to bring lots of otherwise disconnected people together in moments of commonality. All of this sounds rather similar to what our clients are asking for these days.

Perhaps it’s the precise lack of religion as the glue in British society today that’s given rise to brands seeking more and more to define their mission and their values in a way that gives consumers something to ‘really believe in’. Of course, a lot has been written about consumerism replacing religion in the modern world and all that. But when I think about the number of times I’ve had clients ask for brand thoughts that really stand for something that people care about, a system of values they can buy into over and above the product etc, I’m struck by just how quickly this way of thinking has mushroomed in the past few years. (Ogilvy’s own big ideaL comes from a similar vein of thinking).

You could argue that the very best brands in the world are already following the lessons taught by religion’s success. Apple is probably the world’s most  cultish brand – AdAge contributor Martin Lindstrom sets out here the ways in which the company is akin to a religion for its followers. (Interestingly, the semantic correlation of ‘followers’ on FB and in the religious context probably doesn’t come out of nowhere either). Apparently Apple loyalists even use the phrase ‘going to Church’ to refer to trips to their local store. The Apple-as-religion trope has entered general consciousness, sure, but by and large I don’t think most people make a connection between successful brands and successful religions.

It’s funny, when we set up Ogilvy Noor a couple of years ago as a Muslim-marketing consultancy, we had a small backlash from a minority of people who took offence at what they saw as the commercialisation of religion (of course these people had invariably not taken the time to get to grips with our Muslim value driven approach to brand building). De Botton’s talk reminded me that there’s a lot to be learned about the dynamic the other way around.

I’ve just finished reading Pamela Druckerman’s French Children Don’t Throw Food, which has apparently been making the headlines across the pond in the US. An American mother of three in Paris (married to a Brit), Druckerman writes about the wonders of French parenting in a style that’s part exposé/part manifesto.

Through it all she draws a sharp line of distinction between what she refers to as ‘Anglo’ parenting (the majority of parents in the US and the UK) and the way the French do things, which, on most important counts, is very different. From sleeping through the night to breast-feeding, it seems the French all follow a shared set of practices handed down through generations that are now so codified as to not even need referring to – Druckerman calls this system their cadre and refers constantly and enthusiastically to its miraculous results. The first thing, of course, that will strike you is how within the Anglo parenting world, there is no such system. The precise lack of a single system of parenting conventions (the kind that everyone agrees produces results that everyone is happy with)  is exactly the reason why, I think, so many Anglo parents spend much of their waking time worrying about whether the school of parenting they’re following for Susie’s teething or or her piano lessons is the right one. In a client presentation the other day, one of our Ogilvy One planners shared this chart below. It got me thinking.

British mums obviously spend a great deal more time and energy worrying about parenting styles than mums in other parts of the world. But does that mean their parenting is any better? Does it mean that mums who think less about parenting issues are doing a worse job? That’s also the question that French Children implicitly asks, and my answer would be, in a word, no. What struck me repeatedly while reading French Children was simply how hard Druckerman had to dig to get at the hidden rules behind French parenting behaviour (and writing a quasi guidebook she couldn’t very well make them up herself via observational gleaning à la Kate Fox) – French mums she spoke to were either reticent about the cadre they followed, or reluctant to specify their specific rules and patterns, often resorting to a ‘you just know’ or ‘that’s just how we do things’ kind of answer. There are many societies in which the way you raise your kids just follows one mainstream, socially accepted, pattern. I would say that I was raised in one myself, in Muslim Bangladesh. I would argue that all majority-Muslim countries (where most of the population are Muslim and public life generally follows an Islamic pattern) share a parenting cadre of their own that’s very much codified by the rules of good adult behaviour set out in the Qur’an. If you’re going to raise your children to be those good adults, of course you’re going to have to drill these habits in early – habits like good hygiene, respect for adults and the elderly, compassion and charity, and so on. Of course I know that there’s a line between deeper moral behaviour and everyday habitual practices, but in Islam as in all the big religions these lines are blurred. Anyway, my point is that there are many, many countries in the world which hold an invisible framework of shared and codified parenting practices. And unsurprisingly it’s in these countries that parents naturally spend the least amount of time wondering about which style of parenting they should espouse.

Which leads us to the question of whether the decline of religion as a source of lifestyle guidance for the majority of the British population today (I wouldn’t be able to say this for America) is what has led, in some part, towards the obsessive and inconclusive debates over parenting that hold sway. You only need a single visit to Mumsnet or Netmums to be convinced about how big this really is, with millions of British mums logging in to opine, advise, nitpick, troll or just surf popular opinion on every imaginable parenting issue from how to deal with the dreaded MIL (mother-in-law) to what to line your DS’s cot with (that’s Dear Son). Someone said to me yesterday that Justine Roberts, co-founder of Mumsnet, is going to be awarded a CBE – an indication of how important and influential this collective ‘voice of mums’ is that she’s unleashed into the British public sphere. But I’d be really interested in seeing whether British mums are, on the whole, any closer towards acheiving a sense of consensus over what consitututes good parenting, and the relief that goes with that consensus. The general middle-class thing to say is ‘only you know what’s best’ ( as in that grating Aptamil ad that’s so afraid of the breast-feeding brigade it practically unsells its own product) – but I wonder if all this ‘you know best’ only brings with it a mountain of worries and anxieties that even a basic set of normative rules would have quelled?

All this has been swirling around in the recesses of my mind lately and came to a head recently, when at a wedding, I found myself sat at a table with a toddler and her doting (British) parents. Bored between courses (incidentally, Druckerman is enamored by how French children are never ‘bored’ and ‘needing entertainment’ between courses, signalled also in the way French restaurants welcome children but never crayons), this little girl decided she was going to blow ‘raspberries’ into the palms of all the guests at her table, and proceeded to do so with encouraging prods from her parents.  This involved spitting loudly into the other guests’ reluctantly proferred hands and then grinning widely at her doting parents’ coos over her cleverness/cuteness/both. I was, of course, appalled – I can’t fathom how spitting at strangers (however cutely branded) is acceptable public behaviour in a child. I could also sense the general unease felt by more than one other person at the table amidst a growing hope that dessert would arrive soon. Her parents were obviously the least concerned, but what struck me most was how no other adult at the table felt it was their place to lean over and say firmly but kindly to the little girl that yes, it was rather dull to be waiting so long between courses, but that, regrettably, one can’t really spit at strangers to pass the time. This is what would have happened in Bangladesh, and, by the sounds of it, in France. I remember as a child being regularly told off by aunts – of whom I had many and with whom I had the same parent-child dynamic as I did with my parents. These are cultures in which parenting is shouldered as a collective responsibility, and good behaviour is schooled easily by any adult to any child (within bounds) since there is a shared rule-book in the first place.

It strikes me that rather than spend hours taking sides on heated forum debates full of mums in violent disagreement, British parenting would be much better served by a concerted effort to find that shared rule-book, if it ever existed, and figure out what everyone can actually agree on, for a start. Not having even had a child yet, you might say that my tune will change when I do. It may well, but from what I’ve seen so far of both sides, I’m starting to think that parenting by some sort of cadre may be no bad thing.