Too smart for our own good

Games Indians Play
V Raghunathan

Some time in 1931, Gandhi, then in London for a conference on the future of India, was asked by a journalist what he thought of Western civilisation. His tart reply: “I think it would be a good idea.” This much-quoted observation, often used in India to tom-tom the superiority of our “ancient” civilisation, is really a joke on us. Today, any Indian with even an iota of conscience must agree that we are, by and large, an uncivilised people.

We are the only people who can commit a crime and blame others for it. We can board a flight, ignore instructions to switch off mobile phones, and then yell “racism” when alarmed sky-marshalls turn the flight back to the closest airport suspecting terrorism.

One can go on and on, but it’s time to bring the author in. V Raghunathan, a former IIM (Ahmedabad) professor and currently director on the board of an infrastructure company, has written a saddening yet delightful book called Games Indians Play, reminding us that we are not God’s gift to the world, but narrow-minded, self-absorbed blisters who cannot be trusted to act in the public interest. Using game theory to analyse Indian public behaviour patterns, the author comes to the conclusion that “there is something indeed wrong with us…”

Though his book promises to explain “why we are the way we are”, it doesn’t do it too well. Rather, it shows how highly intelligent Indians opt for collectively dumb behaviour through the games they play with one another. That’s where game theory comes in, where different players are expected to choose various options in order to maximise their collective benefits. In the famous prisoner’s dilemma puzzle, two suspects are grilled separately and offered a deal where, if one squeals on the other, he gets off and the other goes to jail; the catch is that the other prisoner is also offered the same deal. If both squeal, both end up in jail since they would have damned each other. The best option usually is one where neither squeals, and both spend a small time behind bars since nothing can be proved against them. But this is an option they can arrive at only by thinking win-win, not win-lose.

The key to mutual gain in such a game is that players must instinctively cooperate with one another, and not “defect” by trying to outsmart the other. Raghunathan’s experiments suggest that Indians are pretty bad at optimising collective gains, given low levels of trust. Most people are willing to pull the rug on others in the hope of making greater personal gains. At any traffic intersection, if the lights aren’t working, everybody makes a dash to clear the crossing first. The net result is usually gridlock, where everybody suffers a frustrating wait till a policeman wades in. The win-win solution is self-regulation, where, after every few cars pass, the other side is given a chance to do the same.

We can see win-lose behaviour all the time in politics, where two parties develop opposing views on a policy depending on circumstances, not logic. Raghunathan discovered this kind of win-lose behaviour among his own IIM students. At a time when course fees were practically nothing compared to the huge salaries they were being offered at campus recruitments, many students failed to repay their education loans to banks even when they were not economically challenged. Net result: banks started winding down the loan scheme, affecting the interests of all future borrowers.

Raghunathan lists 12 canons of Indianness, all negative traits. These include: a low sense of trust between people (hence a tendency to nepotism); being privately smart and publicly dumb (keep your home spotlessly clean, but dump garbage on the street); a fatalistic outlook (we will not help someone in distress for fear of wasting our time subsequently at hospitals and police stations); lack of a sense of fairness and reluctance to penalise wrongdoing (we don’t want a Sukh Ram to go to jail despite finding crores under his bed since he is a hero in his own constituency); and mistaking talk for action (Amartya Sen’s argumentative Indian is not really someone who debates issues in public, but someone who believes bombastic talk is a substitute for action.).

But the worst thing about us is our unwillingness to accept any rule/system that we don’t like. A case in point is the Supreme Court judgment on laws that violate the basic structure of the Constitution. The immediate response of the Tamil Nadu chief minister is that we must rewrite the Constitution to protect the state’s 69 per cent quota regime. Fundamental rights be blowed.  When such self-defeating behaviour comes from those who make the law, how can lesser people accept that any law is for real?