Book Review: Games Indians Play

Games Indians Play: Why we are the way we are’

By V. Raghunathan

(Forward by N.R. Narayana Murthy)

Penguin Portfolio

Dr. V. Raghunathan is a man of many credits. He has been a professor of finance at IIM Ahmedabad from 1982-2001; then worked as President of ING Vysya Bank and later as MD of GMR Industries. He is author of 9 books, has been on many companies’ boards, and esteemed panels. He is also a popular columnist in newspapers; and is involved in CSR roles as of now. You can check his LinkedIn profile here; or can go to his website. When such a man writes something, readers have better take him seriously. 

The purpose of this book is to analyze and understand why Indians are ‘like this only’. Now what is meant by ‘like this’ has often negative connotations. Dr. Raghunathan says that the root cause is that Indians are one of the most intelligent lots in this world. He says he has visited many places and understood many people – but never has he found such an intelligent population, as we are in India. Yet, he says our intelligence results in us taking rational decisions ‘individually’ in situations, but leading to our ‘collective’ failure. He calls us “Privately smart and publicly dumb”: 

When I jump a queue or a red light, or throw that garbage on the sidewalk, I am taking a rational ‘squeal’ decision, since it seems to get me ahead of others or make life easier for me. Here I am privately smart. But then, as others are no less rational, intelligent and smart, they too start squealing for the same reasons, and before we know it, we have unruly traffic, filthy streets and stinking urinals. So collectively we are all worse off. And then we complain about a dirty country, a polluted city and appalling traffic. In short, publicly we emerge dumb. (P 42)

To show how whatever is in our achievement kitty fails to match up to the best in the world, glance this portion: 

Impressive as the completion of the Konkan Railway or the Delhi Metro Railway have been, they pale in comparison to the Chinese projects, especially where implementation skills and political will are concerned. Consider the statistics. It took seven to ten years to complete the 760 km Konkan Railway. As for the Delhi Metro, between 1950 and 1990, some thirty feasibility studies were carried out by various bodies to evaluate an alternatice transportation system for Delhi. The final go-ahead came in 1990. Delhi Metro Rail Corp Ltd was established in 1995 and first phase of eleven kms was completed in 2004. The eighteen km Calcutta Metro took a good 24 years to complete, from 1971 to 1995. 

China completed the final section of the pan-Himalaya Golmud-Lhasa railway - 1956 kms – at 5072 meters above the sea level. It had 550 km frozen belt, with snow alternately melting and freezing in summer and winter. Workers had to breathe bottled oxygen to cope up with high altitude (no single death due to this though). This stretch of 1142 kms was completed in a mere 4 years. (P13-14)

The best part of the book is the analysis. Dr. Raghunathan uses Game Theory and Behavioral Economics to analyze the situation. Though in the process, he ignores many factors. For example, he discarded the impact of colonization (by foreigners, for a thousand years) on our present behavior, in a one line sentence. Here, I didn’t agree with him. But seeing that history is not his area, and the tools taken up by him for analysis are powerful enough, I didn’t bother much. He explains the Prisoner’s Dilemma in the beginning and by the end he tries to reach a conclusion. Now I found that the Game Theory part could be applied to any case, not only to Indians or India. He worries that in a Prisoner’s dilemma situation, if everyone tries to take best rational decision benefitting oneself, in the end it harms all. So what was the way out? Now this was the most important part. I have typewritten a portion from his last chapters, though this is selective and not exhaustive enough: 

Karmany evadhikaras te ma phalesu kadacana

Ma karma-phala-hetur bur ma te sango‘stv akarmani

(Bhagawat Gita, Chapter II, Verse 47)

Meaning: You have right only to the action and never to the fruit of the action. Fruit of action should not be your motivation, nor should you be driven by attachment to action.

For most of my youth and a little beyond, I always found these words innocuous and naïve. Taking this bit of verse as a random sample of what the Gita is all about, I thought I understood why we weren’t result-driven people. You see, innocence can lead to such quick generalizations.

Meanwhile, a good Samaritan presented me a copy of the Gita, which I did read now and then, though rarely pausing to contemplate seriously on its contents. 

It was only when I started getting interested in game theory and immersed myself in it that the whole import of the Gita hit me like a truck.

In many ways, the Gita, in a quintessential form, lays down what one may call the absolute truth for most aspects of our lives, the dharma. To amplify this statement further: for years, my idea of right and wrong was largely intuitive. Yet somewhere deep down, I could never see any reasonable evidence to believe that there existed absolute truths outside physical sciences which one could ‘measure and prove’.

My argument was: If this is a world of ‘selfish genes’ and therefore selfish people, what makes it ‘wrong’ to shaft somebody, as long as you found it worth your while? Religions may proscribe shafting somebody, pronouncing such action as a sin. But the question is: ‘Why is it a sin?’ Who is to say that a wrong has happened, given that each individual is selfish and each one’s actions are supposed to be in the best interests of oneself? Similarly, the Gita might say that it is wrong to be driven by desires. But why is it wrong? Again, if I see a child begging for alms and risk reinforcing the system, or desist and risk the child going hungry? Which is the lesser evil?

For questions such as these and other social dilemmas, there don’t seem to be answers that are right or wrong. Or so I had believed for a long time. I was enlightened when I found game theory capable of answering many questions such as these unambiguously. But what really captured my imagination was that most answers which a game-theoric situation such as prisoner’s dilemma yielded were consistent with what Krishna had to say to Arjuna in the Bhagawat Gita! I discovered that modern game theory and associated experiments and games seem to validate what Krishna had placed before Arjuna in a nutshell. Clearly, it took thousands of years of management science to validate the Gita (even if unwittingly), much as presend day experiments on the outer reaches of space continue to validate Albert Einstein. 

Consider our simple prisoner’s dilemma situation of Chapter 4. ……. If everyone followed the path of the karmayogi stipulated by the Gita, C-C is the only outcome and that leads to the “highest good”….. 

That is why we must not ‘defect’; that is why those who do not follow the path of dharma ought to be punished; that is why it is one’s dharma to be provoked by the adharmi and retaliate, and yet show compassion and forgiveness in the conduct of one’s actions, just as the Tit for Tat strategy guides us.

This is what game theory tells us, and this is what the Gita tells us as well. It is just that Gita is simplified and made-easy or ready-to-serve version of actions that the game theory plods through to demonstrate. It is interesting that some sage, aeons ago, thought of the right courses of action for humanity at a large in a variety of situations that can stand the test of proof of present-day tools and techniques, including computer simulations. 

My intention in writing this chapter was merely to share my own personal awakening to many aspects of the Gita. What is strange is that we should be witnessing so much of defect-defect behavior in the very land that gave us the Gita. Clearly, while the West, using its cumbersome vehicle of game theory, has covered a lot of ground in collective cooperative behavior, we seem to have made very little headway in that direction, notwithstanding our heritage of the Gita.

(P142-148)

This review won’t be complete if you missed the last two paragraphs in the above quoted text. And any review can’t be replacement for the ultimate joy of reading a book. 

The book is not long, the language used is simple, the scientific inquiry (e.g. game theory) is not too complex to understand, and this book deserves to be read by one and all. I highly recommend it to all my readers. 

- Rahul

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