I get nostalgic this morning. I go back to school. The wonder years really, when one lived without a worry. I go back to my seventh standard class in good old Bengaluru. The noisiest class a kid can ever belong to, I guess. One is just about into adolescence, discovering life. You are coming into your own. You are noisier than ever before. A bit of letting go, a bit of pain, a bit of discomfort and possibly a whole lot of confusion.
When you are all of 12 years old, you have two lives really. One at home with your parents and siblings and relatives of every kind. The other is the one in school, with your classmates, your teachers and the entire school ecosystem. At times, you are different in each. At home there are masks you wear, and at school too there are masks you wear. And then there are those moments you spend with your class buddies where there is no mask at all. You are you. I go back to those times.
We were all of 42 students in my class. I am in touch with some of them still, and then I remember the names of some more. But that’s where it stops. I do not remember my entire class. I remember the real noisy ones. Maybe eight of them, mostly back-benchers. Each name is attached to a notorious incident. I remember the names of the front-benchers as well. But only some of them. Possibly the first four rankers, because I always looked up to them and competed with passion. I never got ahead of rank 5, you see. A wrong way to remember people, but then let it be. That’s the way it is.
I remember the noisiest ones, and the quietest and the most studious. The middle ones, I do not remember. Noise has a way of creating resonance and memory. Noise is all about being loud and noticed. Noise is a memory-tag as well. We live in a very noisy society, and we should therefore know better. We live amid a lot of noise. Noisy politics. Noisy business voices. Noisy religious debates. Noisy protests. And lots more in the Pandora’s box of noise.
This gets me thinking. How many of us in society are really noisy, and how many silent? Are there numbers that support these sets? I did an audit. An initial dip-stick survey of society the way it is, in urban, rurban, rural and deep-rural India. The overall numbers are glaring. In all of Indian society, across representative sample sizes from the four segments highlighted, 8 percent of society can be categorised to be very loud, 6 percent is loud, 18 percent is in between loud and quiet, and, strikingly, 68 percent of Indian society is quiet. Numbers that make a loud ‘quiet’ statement.
The word to focus on is ‘quiet’. It is possibly the word of the year. The quiet folk in our society outnumber the loud and the very loud by a huge percentage. And yet we seem to focus on the loud. Why?
The loud lead and the quiet follow. Ouch. Is that a paradigm, or is this a reality? The answers are really blowing in the winds of our politics, economics, religious and social behavior. Our politics is very loud. I do not believe there is anyone we can call a quiet politician. That would be an oxymoron. Our businesses and brands are run in a very in-the-face and loud manner. Everyone wants a share of voice and noise equally. Our religious stances are loud as well, as are the societal stances we fight for. The quiet is not quite ours. It belongs only to the majority in our society. And that’s a disparaging statement in itself.
‘Silent majority’ is a phrase we have heard endlessly when we speak of our politics. Something that comes to the fore on the vote-casting and counting days. This silence of the majority, which we believe is important once in 5 years in politics, is really a very important facet in our lives. Noisy society has this dirty habit of ignoring quiet society. This is a loss. If businesses do not understand their quiet customers, they understand but a fringe. A noisy fringe, which is possibly not what real society is all about. The noisy brands of our day need to invest in understanding their quiet customers, existing and more importantly potential ones that are outside the brand basket. There is hidden value to tap out here.
The science to invest in understanding the quiet customer, the quiet voter, the quiet religious being, the quiet social evangelist, the quiet environmental practitioner, and indeed a whole host of quiet people who really matter. The loud have had their say all the time. The loud have been understood to death. The loud have earned a bad name for themselves. Time to go to the quiet. Time to possibly even invest in the creation of a society by the quiet, for the quiet and of the quiet.
I do believe that politics and businesses for a start have a lot to gain in understanding the dynamics of the quiet in society. There is plenty that will help leverage current offerings that seem to have reached a glass-flooring that is hard to crack for politicians and brands alike. I call this a glass-flooring and not a glass-ceiling purposely. Society at the top of the pyramid of noise has had its way for a long while. Politicians and brands are perennially trying to take the more noise down the quiet end of the social pyramid. The glass-flooring is at the level what differentiates the noisy from the quiet parts. There are just two things to do. Quiet-society at the larger end of the pyramid at the bottom can be either made noisy, or noisy society can reduce its decibel to slowly join the ranks of the more philosophical quiet at the bottom.
The first thing to do is to recognise the presence of quiet society. Let’s bring respect back to quiet society. Having done that, every politician and every business must invest in procuring for itself a quiet quotient. Time to bring in a quiet philosophy into everything we do. It is that much more real, respectable and respectful. It packs a lot more integrity in it than the noisy businesses and communication formats we politicians and brands have over-invested in. What say?
Harish Bijoor
Brand Guru and Founder, Harish Bijoor Consults
(harishbijoor@hotmail.com)