reply: nobody gets the girls

I am enthused that my dearest anglophile friend, a new addition to blogworld, has started off with game theory. I am reading it currently, and i wish i also had read the book he suggested about Indians and game theory. I do not feel qualified to answer him without atleast glancing through the book, but i still feel answerable to him.

Dearest dude,
I have never been to Bangalore and hence, I cannot comment on the road rage or cultural situation there. But i will bring to your notice a place that we both share our links with. what you wrote about Bangalore, i found largely true for Ahmedabad, with ONE noticeable difference.

During my thesis, I & a friend were printing the final sheets, and the roads outside the print shops were simply non-existent. As a result, trying to juggle 4 feet long prints with bike & road rage traffic, i slipped in the gravel. And, within a span of the next 2 minutes (starting at 15 seconds), there was a crowd of atleast 10 people, including a rickshaw wallah offering his rickshaw as a seating to my friend who was bleeding from the nose. And, others on two-wheelers, in cars, in autos and even a bus, stopped to ask if there was anything that could be done. All this, inspite of this being just a regular road slip, that happens everyday on that road.

So my dearest friend, the application of game theory can not be universal. While I find myself disagreeing with my own statement, I have come to realize it may be true. Recently, a school friend of ours found another school friend, Gullu, trying to direct traffic in the middle of an intersection that was jammed.

The point i am trying to make is, game theory is true, and its applications may be universal, but the focus matters. When we are at an intersection, letting the person beside us pass may not be in our best interests, forget that, this train of thought may not even be needed. I agree we lack basic road sense, which is a huge problem and the reason due to which we face such issues. Some education on this will go a long way for all of us.

The desire to get ahead of others on roads, I believe, comes mainly from the fact that most of us are lacking in road sense and road rules. More that that, even if we do know them, we do not want to apply them, since we feel others definitely don't have an inkling. So we ask ourselves: why speak chinese when others are wont to ignore it....

Indians, I beleive, come with a JUGAAD in their genes, and hence, every rule has its TOOD (break) and every law has its slip-out. I have not yet come to conclude whether this inheritance is beneficial or degrading, whether it holds us together or fragments us, whether it really IS the game theory we talk about or selfish greed.

Sometimes, i ask myself, are we such animals, that only rules can keep us flocking together?