Breezy life skills manual

How to Talk to Anyone — 92 Little Tricks by Leil Lowndes; Tata McGraw-Hill; Price: Rs.195; 341 pp The new society fashioned by post-independence India’s know-all socialist central planners and Left intellectuals — like the country’s Olympiad athletes — is a distant also-ran in the global race for national development. Although the page 3 set may be unaware, in terms of positive attributes such as per capita income, adult literacy, housing stock, access to healthcare, drinking water, sanitation, average teacher-pupil ratio, police and judicial efficiency, shining India lags way down the list of contemporary great societies. However in terms of negative characteristics such as income inequality, administrative corruption, judicial backlog and sheer bad manners of its fast-expanding middle class, the sovereign, socialist, secular and sanctimonious Republic of India is a global front-runner, if not way ahead of the field. Following the somewhat successful economic liberalisation and deregulation initiative of July 1991 which has firmly placed professedly socialist India on the capitalist road, the tide of outward bound tourists from the country has swollen to double the inward flow of foreign visitors into India. And within the travel trade it’s well-known that hoteliers and restaurateurs abroad blanch in terror at the prospect of hosting packs of invariably ill-mannered package tourists from the subcontinent who leave chaos and devastation in their wake. Although the nation’s parliamentarians seem blissfully unaware, manners — or the lack thereof in contemporary Indian society — has emerged as a staple subject of conversation in middle class India, in which there is much finger pointing and fault finding. Somewhat belatedly the media has also become aware of this great national failing. Recently with characteristic simplification, the best-selling Reader’s Digest identified citizens of Mumbai — India’s commercial capital — as the rudest people on planet earth. Even more recently (October 5) the Berlin-based voluntary organisation Transparency International, which measures the prevalence of administrative and business corruption in countries around the world, rated India as the world’s # 1 for the ‘export’ of corruption. And at bottom, corruption is no more than bad business manners. That’s why within a small cerebral minority in Indian industry and academia, the subject of improving manners of the populace is assuming incremental importance. HRD (human resource development) managers within more intelligent corporates are allocating steadily incremental time to inculcating basic good manners and life skills in managers and employees. Moreover within a society in which customers are still regarded a nuisance, self-styled life skills trainers are sprouting by the dozen. That’s also why the 1936 American bestseller, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (sales: 115 million copies and counting) was reviewed recently (EW April ’06) on this very page. However according to US-based Leil Lowndes, described as “an internationally acclaimed communications expert who coaches top executives of Fortune 500 companies” and author of several life skills bestsellers including How to Make Anyone Fall in Love with You and How to be a People Magnet, Carnegie was “great for the twentieth century, but this is the twenty-first”. Moreover while he advised people what to do,…