Games India should play

As I read through the book by V Raghunath on "The games Indians play" I increasingly feel amazed at how the small things in the Indian psyche affect the bigger picture. The act of being rational is just another way of saying how selfish one needs to be in order to get things done is what the author points out.As I read through, there's this bolt of lightening that strikes me when I co relate the same with the movie " A beautiful mind" and what Russell Crowe, essaying the role of John Nash, the famous nobel laureate and a master at game theory, meant.
The setting is thus: A group of guys at a bar, ogling at a group of girls. Of course, there is this 36-21-36 figure among the girls who our stud is after. But then so are the other lads in the group. What Nash quickly points out is how the dead lock can be broken with a win-win situation for all, just if all the guys let go the "Ms. Universe" and go for her friends instead. Everyone gets what he wants and no one affects the libido of the other.

Well, the book does relate a lot to the social dilemmas faced by Indians and how they can be tackled through simple game theory logic.
A simple case, out of personal experience would be the parking lot dilemma. How difficult is it to park in the right way, so as to ease out the ingress and exit of vehicles in a parking lot. But then there has to be that odd creative genius, who presumably has a great sense of orientation and tries to park his vehicle so as to ensure that even Lord Ganesha on a rat would find it hard to get some parking space for his mode of transport. Well, no doubt. it is due to these people who do not give a tiny rat's ass, that others follow suit and we soon have a compounded parking lot chaos at hand. The attitude of "If I cannot succeed, then at least my neighbour needs to fail" is what the author truly points out to be the bane of the Indian society.

We surely are the champions of such games. I guess on a scale of 1-10 on games of deceit and trickery we could rate ourselves well above a billion and and counting....