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I must admit to a sense of perverse happiness when a book like Outliers is trashed. I haven't read Malcolm Gladwell but any one who writes a book, nay a title like Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking deserves not to be read. So one's eye is immediately drawn to criticism in the hope that it corks the Gladwell genie so its never seen again. Alas, in the real world, the genie is out and about and prospering.

I can imagine Outliers being popular in India. I once worked for a corporate organisation in India and I can see it's young managers lugging it from airport to airport. The book will likely appear in those banal courses thought up by HR (leadership skills, creavitivity for middle managers, finance for dummies). Just like the cheese book, the seven habits book, the monk who once owned a Ferrari book, the de Bono books and anything Tom Friedman writes. Americans seem particularly adept at writing this kind of book and Indians particularly good at consuming them.

I can't entirely define why it is that I dislike motivational books aimed at the corporate world and books that propose some grand unifying theory and are quasi scientific but in reality lack any kind of rigour (Gladwell, Friedman) given that I can ignore them. In part my dislike stems from the depressing courses tailored around these books that one was forced to attend. Depressing not just in content but depressing in how seriously these courses are taken (or at least appeared to be taken, it cannot be said that organisations appreciate anarchists and dissenters). The odd innocent also believed that the books and the courses lit the path to senior management and unimaginable wealth. It was all enough to sedate oneself with alcohol to wipe out the awfulness of the whole thing.

Even people you knew as students who aimlessly lounged around discussing philosophy or feminism or a novel late into the night morphed into terrifyingly focussed individuals who made busy, incomprehensible power point charts. In this they dropped in whatever it was that Erica, Tom or Malcolm had opined and continued to think themselves well-read.

When people realise that corporate life is not all that it is cracked up to be or just reach a mid-career slump, its time for an altogether different genre of books. These stress the "positive life" and at no point is melancholia and cynicism ever allowed even if experience suggests otherwise. These quasi-philosophical offerings are so pervasive that at least in India anyone over 35 appears to automatically attach themselves to some spurious spiritual enterprise.

In all cases, self improvement is the goal. In a way, there's something vaguely disturbing about all that sweating and striving to get to an ideal which does not exist. There is no greater testament to idiocy than those performance appraisals which rely on increasingly absurd indicators to map your progress, nothing more stupid than the belief that constant striving is achievement, nothing more delusional than 24/7 happiness and bliss. Existence with its eddies, whorls, its going nowhere is simply not allowed. In reality, there is no greater improvement to life than lying back and watching the world sweat and hurry by, preferably mint tea and someone else's labours (a book) in hand. Somehow I can't see myself being invited by anyone to give a powerpoint lecture on it.