Social Clustering

“He has a cross [crucifix] on the chain around his neck but is still a practicing Hindu. When he enters the field he touches the ground in true South Indian style”. I was intrigued to read this kaleidoscopic demographic description in the Times of India recently. It struck me odd how people juxtapose personality traits, especially those that are contrasting, to bring about color in a personality. Obviously there is little fun if a person who wears a crucifix actually goes to Church every Sunday. The description also reminded me of Dr. Amartya Sen, who in his book “Identity and Violence” goes a long way to describe how mindless demographic straitjacketing – especially along religious lines – can lead to serious consequences of mass scale alienation, which in turn can and does lead to identity driven violence. I was also reminded of a delightful article by the late Stephen Jay Gould on how human beings react to being identified at the mean or at the tail of a demographic distribution they may have been fitted to. For example, I may be identified as a resident of Calcutta (incorrect), culturally oriented (correct) Tagore-Ray loving (correct) Bengali intellectual (correct) who is a staunch communist (incorrect) calling for a “bandh” every other month to protest against capitalism (incorrect). The truth is that I do not lie anywhere around the mean. If at all, I would like to consider myself somewhere in the +/- 3 standard deviation region of the distribution. Professor Gould argued that it is this behavior of a cluster that determines how closely knit they are. The closer a clan converges around the mean the more diluted is pluralism in the cluster. “Even at this age he starts his day with Saraswati vandhana on the banks of the Ganges and later goes onto read the Namaaz five times a day” is definitely not a definition of someone who converges to the mean. On the other hand, it is because of such out-of-tail personalities that the world becomes richer – perhaps not in wealth but definitely in enriching human values. David Ricardo, the seventeenth century economist wrote – the produce created by one class is useful only if it is of perceived value to another class producing another set of goods or services. Out of tail personalities extend the Ricardian theory beyond the realms to Economics to Sociology.

Post Script: If you have not figured out the personalities described above – the Hindu chant singing Muslim is the Shehnai Maestro Late Ustad Bismillah Khan. The first personality is more contemporary – Sree Sreesanth, the break dancing entertainer who also plays cricket for the Indian national team.