PROVOCATION

Tigers are known to pounce on their prey in such a way that the prey does not have any chance of escaping their claws. It is pretty understandable for them to do that as it is their way of surviving and getting their food.

The problem starts when similar behavior starts getting displayed by human beings. In their case, the one pouncing is also a person and the one being pounced is also another person. Now when cannibals do something like this, it is perfectly justified as this hunt will give them their food but when non-cannibalistic people get into this act of pouncing, it is a little difficult to fathom.

So what is it that makes people behave in this manner? What is the trigger point to this? The simple answer to this is ‘Provocation’. When people get provoked, they tend to get aggressive and irritated and the only way for them to retaliate is by hitting back at the other person.

Provocation as a tool has been used by market researchers for years in getting ideas and making people reach a level where they have to think of new solutions or options. I have personally used provocation techniques in idea workshops for new product ideas and have got tremendous results.

I completely understand the positive aspect of provocation as illustrated in the paragraph above but in most positive cases, the provocative attack involves the person himself in some way or the other directly. Anything said or mentioned is impacting that person and for them to react in such situations is as expected in normal human behavior.

In recent times, I am witnessing a new form of provocation where people get provoked even with statements or things that have got nothing to do with them directly but yet they lash out or rather become quasi spokesperson for the person or issue that is being hit at.

I can cite a number of examples from the online world:

1. When Narayana Murthy criticized the quality of students at IIT, Chetan Bhagat got provoked and tweeted a few bad things about Infosys. In return, present and ex Infoscions got provoked and hit back.

       2. When a girl wrote an open letter to a Delhi boy on her own private blog site, a huge number of people(men and women) got offended and provoked and wrote a response to that letter, logged onto the girl’s site and gave harsh comments and left abuses. Once again, if you were to sit back and notice, you will see that it was one girl’s angst after having gone through some bad experiences (probably), which she wrote on her own blog site. But people who wrote back also commented about the South Indian community at large and extolled the virtues of North Indians, thereby showing how provocation works.

People who understand human behavior and how it reacts to provocation use it for their own benefit:

•  Sidin Vadukut, a writer for MINT and a popular author understands this concept of provocation nicely and he purposely tweets statements that will provoke people and elicit a response from them. Some recent tweets of his go like this ‘Sholay is a boring movie’, ‘Paneer is for losers’, etc., which he is tweeting purposely and he mentions also that controversies sell books so I might as well create some by tweeting such things.
• Shoaib Akhtar came up with few extremely controversial statements on Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid when he launched his book ‘Controversially Yours’. In his case, the provocation was so high that it bothered the entire country  and may have not got him sales of his books but got him enough buzz and publicity.

With the convergence of the digital world, where everyone is connected to each other and people are out with knives, any provocative statement is bound to get huge reactions from people and sometimes it is intended to be that ways and sometimes it just leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

I hope this article does not provoke anyone of you because that is definitely not the intention.