Games Indians Play

I recently finished reading this amazing book 'Games Indians Play - Why we are the way we are' by V. Raghunathan. As you have read from my last posts, it has made an attempt at understanding us Indian. No, the purpose is not India bashing, but to show us where we are going wrong. And he has used the tools of Game theory to provide an explanation.

Privately Smart and Publicly Dumb

Has anyone observed this inherent tendency of many of us to keep our rooms sparkling clean but we throw that same dirt outside. We try to maximize our utility (saving time) by not going all the way to the Dustbin, hence we can be termed as logical and rational beings or privately smart. But that does no good for the country, thus publicly dumb.

Tit-for-Tat

And the above mentioned behaviour is a type of prisoner's dilemma where we seek the optimum return, no matter if that means defecting, or stepping on the shoulders of the ones around us. In that respect, we can view the competition here analogous to crabs in a bucket, pulling eachother down the hole. And that is one of the reasons why the government cannot let the autonomous institutions (read IITs and IIMs) flourish beyond a certain point. Thus, comes into picture the iterative prisoner's dilemma. Through this has come the evolution of cooperation. The idea is not to defect first, and if met with a defection, reply it in same terms only in the next round. This is the gentleman's strategy and here, both parties retain optimum profit at the end of rounds.

Biggest free riders

In India, due to the population, people tend to be free riders. And this is visible in the incompetencies of the public sector enterprises which has given rise to babudom and hence corruption, giving rise to Systematic Chaos. According to J. K. Galbraith,

India is a functioning Anarchy.

Game Theory and the Bhagavad Gita

yoga-sthaḥ kuru karmāṇi

sańgaḿ tyaktvā dhanañjaya

siddhy-asiddhyoḥ samo bhūtvā

samatvaḿ yoga ucyate

Bhagavad Gita 2.48

Perform your duty equipoised, O Arjuna, abandoning all attachment to success or failure. Such equanimity is called yoga.

This is one of the examples which states that even the Gita says that one should always cooperate and not think of the result while performing the work. It is sad that the nation which gave the world the Bhagavad Gita has to be in such a state. Am quoting a poem from the book which has been very thoughtfully composed:

62 Summers after Independence

If we can launch rockets but get nowhere,

Fire missiles, but not our passions to excel,

Build aircraft but cannot fly our dreams;

If we can build oil rigs, cyclotrons and atomic plants,

but not our character,

Make heavy machinery and earth-moving equipment,

Yet not move heaven and earth to improve our fate;

If we can grow enough grain, but not care enough

to store them,

Allow half our population to go hungry, with

malnutrition and ill-health still our national visage;

If our population is well over a billion, and

Still doubling every thirty-five years, what we

innocently call our leadership

Turns family planning into a bad phase;

If 400 million and more are still strangers to basic

essentials in life

An equal number effectively illiterate, and

A girl child still an object of rejection;

If our water table is beginning to get lower than oil,

Our rivulets and canals desiccated,

Our seas, rivers and brooks saturated with refuse and effluents;

If open sewage in our midst froths pink, blue and green,

With such blatant chemical pollution a rule rather than exception, and

our reaction to these sights at best phlegmatic;

If half our country still performs its morning ablutions

under the open skies, and

We are blissful being the world's largest open-air lavatory,

with basic hygene and human dignity nobody's concern;

If elephants and rhinos, leopards and tigers are fast disappearing,

Our mountains turning naked and barren with denudation,

Forests disappearing rapidly under the onslaught of deforestation;

If cows, dogs, donkeys, horses, even camels can roam the busiest of streets,

With us incapable of arriving at a collective solution to the problem, and

In the name of compassion, subject the poor animals to worst indignities;

If our national monuments are in a state of abject neglect,

Even a Taj Mahal stands upon a pile of a town's refuse and indeference,

With tourism a mere caricature of its potential;

If our public transport is perennially choking,

Our hospital lobbies resemble railway platforms, and

Our cities, towns, and villages a vast compost heap;

If our railway stations and drainage pipes are dwellings to zillions,

Sidewalks, if there, unavailable to pedestrians, and

Our traffic signals obeyed more in infraction than compliance;

If our children are interviewed and wait listed for nursery admission,

A Class XII child with ninety percent does not make it to the nearest college, and

IITs, et al. brimming with 2,00,000 applications and more for a handful of seats;

If we have to bribe a babu to pay our land taxes, and

We can get a 'RTO licence to Kill' without a driving test, with

Corruption in a government department a rule, no exception;

If our bureaucracy is not a service but power centre,

and the system so corrupt that 85 percent leakage

in intended fundings nationally acceptable, with

Local administration in cities, towns and villages but a mere parody;

If a weak rupee is our best ticket to exports,

Quality, scale and punctuality at best secondary concerns, and

Basic R&D still beyond the horizon;

If it takes three to mow a lawn, and we still

Erect bulidings loading bricks on the heads of our women, with

Our pace of change and productivity among the

slowest and lowest in the world;

If petitions and piled sky-high in every court of the land, with

Justice nearly impossible to find in one's lifetime (if then), and

Our dehumanized jails overflowing even as crime rates continue to soar;

If Shanghai alone surpasses India's total exports three times over, and

India's total port capacity by about the same margin, and

India's total foreign direct investment over ten times;

If, as a people, we have lost ouyr sensitivity to the

misery and mediocrity around us, and

The only value system we can pass on to the next

generation is that of

Cynicism, opportunism, and corruption;

If our standards of satisfaction and excellence lie lower

than the soles of our feet, and

We are not filled with a sense of shame

At the gap between our rightful place in the world and the present one;

Surely it's time to introspect collectively?

And what a way he has abopted to end the book, but by (with an apology to Rabindranath Tagore) rewriting His most inspiring poem, 'Where the mind is withour fear', as 'Where the Neighbour is without filth':

Where the neighbourhood is without filth and the queues short and smooth;

Where civil service is corruption-free;

Where the towns have not broken up into fragments by narrow potholed streets;

Where justice is given out quickly from the profundity of the courts;

where the tireless work force stretches its arms towards perfection;

Where the clear stream from the mountains has not

lost its way into contaminated rivers of dead waters;

Where the economy is led forward by thee into a rate

of growth higher than six percent (real)-

Into that heaven of liberalization, my Father, let my country awake.

I request everyone to read this very insightful book atleast once.