Secret behind Indian Roads

  This is about the famous Indian road which has a characteristic ability to bring even a Ferrari down to its knees. It doesn’t matter what you drive in, as long as you drive in India, you have to watch your back as it will hurt after a long travel. But why do we maintain our roads in such a pathetic state? Is it because we want to boost ourselves with the ability to challenge even the greatest of cars? Or is it just ignorance?

  Actually in my opinion, it is because of the Indianess in our thinking. We have been called by many analysts that we are privately intelligent and publically dumb. Let just analyse its meaning and ourselves if it is true, shall we?

  Consider a situation; I’m living in a bustling city like Chennai. I use the road ‘A’ for my day today life. There is another road ‘B’ which is near and of no use to me. If the road ‘B’ is damaged and some people are collecting funds to repair the road, I’d reason with them that I’ve never used the road ‘B’ and never will, so I’ll not pay for it. Isn’t that a valid reason? The same thought goes through most of the people in my locality as everyone is an Indian. Hence the fund raiser becomes a disaster and so the road ‘B’ quickly becomes unusable. But now the people who were using the road ‘B’ would now start to use the road ‘A’ as this is better. Hence the traffic in road ‘A’ increases significantly and the damage is also increased. Now the road ‘A’ too becomes unusable. Even if we contribute some money to rebuild the road ‘A’, the traffic is still high and the patch work will wear off quickly. In the end due to our intelligent decision we end up with 2 bad roads.

  What am I trying to imply from this assumption of a decisions?? Well my proposal is not that we are basically defective in our thoughts. We are just selfish. Everyone in the world is selfish and they are required to be selfish in this modern dream of ours. Then what is the problem you may ask? It is a fact that most of the people around the world are intelligently selfish. And there comes the difference. Don’t get my point? Let see an example from game theory – a new and upcoming field in mathematics.

  Consider a PD – Prisoner’s Dilemma. In this situation there are 2 very intelligent, rational and selfish prisoners who were partners in crime, are caught by the police. But there is little proof to convict them. So the investigator (CBI or vijaykanth) separates the prisoners and gives them a proposal. If the prisoner A screams (tells the criminal activities done by prisoner B) then he can walk free and B gets a 5 year jail sentence. Else both get a 3 year sentence. The same is proposed to prisoner B. If B screams about A, then A will get 5 year sentence and B walks free. Else both will get a 3 year sentence. Since they are selfish the objective is to get away with as little jail sentence as possible. Now consider that prisoner A is an Indian. His mind tells him 2 cases

  a) If he screams he may walk free (if B doesn’t scream) or he may get a 5  year sentence (if B screams). In the latter case B also gets a 5 year sentence.

  b) If he doesn’t scream he may get 3 year sentence (if B doesn’t scream)  or a 5 year sentence (if B screams).

So the most reasonable decision is to scream. But if both of them are Indians then B will also scream stating the above reason. So they both end up getting 5 years in jail which is the worst possible result in the PD. But if they were intelligent then they shouldn’t have screamed and both would have gotten away with just 3 years in prison or one of them would have walked free. Thus the prisoners’ selfish goals are satisfied by cooperating.

  Statistics shows that if a group of Indians are confronted with this PD only 20-30% makes the correct decision but people from countries like UK, France, US, almost 40-50% were able to make the correct decision.

  Why has this happened? It is because we think of gains in short term rather than looking at the big picture. We should have thought that the other prisoner is also intelligent and would mostly take the same decision as ourselves. The same could be correlated to the Indian road example too. We saw that donating the money to the road B which was not used my us is a wastage. But we failed to see that our road (road A) would eventually be damaged because of that.

  It has been proved by such game theory situations that cooperation is always the most selfish thing to do. So let us start becoming intelligently selfish rather than selfishly intelligent.

Pathetic Indian Roads