Desicritics Author: Itinerant Indian

Book Review: Games Indians Play by V.Raghunathan

Itinerant Indian — Wed, 4 Jul 2007 00:15:28 EDT

Mr. Raghunathan was a professor of finance at IIM Ahmedabad and crossed over from academia to industry, which is a much-needed cross-pollination. Behavioral Finance is an area close to his heart and his flirtation with industry means that he is exposed to the ‘ways of the world’.

However, the subject-matter of this book, Games Indian Play, - the state of our society and our own role in that outcome - is such that you need no particular qualification other than to have lived in (or indeed experienced) India to be able to make the observations about our society that he has made in this book. The rot is so wide-spread that merely living in the confines of a campus is not enough to have insulated him from these issues, anyway.

That indeed is the appeal of this book; the issues and situations he recounts are those which you and I can relate to.

The brilliance of the book is in linking concepts from finance (game theory and behavioral finance, in particular) to these problems and more importantly, offering solutions. I was delighted with the strategy recommended to handle people who try to cheat you, if you are being gentlemanly.

Mr. Raghunathan presents financial, business and some very selfish reasons why we as individuals in a society need to behave better.

That however, is the paradox of behavioral finance. People behave contrary to what cold logic suggests. Mr. Raghunathan does a splendid job of helping us working out the math behind most situations we encounter: from the cussedness of not paying building society charges to the shamelessness of exporting brick powder in lieu of chilli powder.

The non-obvious insight which the book offers is that being selfish unto yourself is counter-productive. Common good is the best way to further your own selfish goals. The problem with this of course, is the paradox noted in behavioral finance: financial logic is not immediately apparent to people faced with such decision making situations.

The book then, appeals to us to behave better and build a better society, if for no other reason than enlightened self-interest.

The professor’s casual and tongue-in-cheek style (or was it just me laughing nervously at the home truths?) makes the book an easy read. And that is why the book grabs you.

The mechanics of game theory and such-like do require you to avoid having a mental block against thinking about numbers. This is even though the professor has used simple layperson language. Many of us will argue that this makes the book too technical for the rest of the 1.1 billion who need to read it.

However, our country’s problems are more attributable to us, the literate than to the unlettered. Witness the (only) two instances of glory that the author refers to: the dabbawallahs and Amul- both are largely powered by those who are not particularly educated.

And finally, the book blends in some philosophy. The professor points out how game theory is implicit in the Bhagavad Gita, with the unitended consequence that it puts the professor in exalted company.

So, can we get our act together and change, instead of cribbing that one of me cannot make a difference?

For starters, read the book. It is worth the investment.

If the publishers have any altruism in the publishing of such a book, they should release it in paperback making it more affordable for the 150-odd pages that it runs. Affordability is important, considering the mass of people who need to read this book.

Do Indians Smile At Other Indians?

Itinerant Indian — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 06:23:10 EDT

The Itinerant Indian has been in London, off and on, over the last year trying to establish a beach head for his own consulting firm. Its been tough, very tough.

Toughest of them all is deciphering fellow Indians.

London is a nice, friendly city. People are civil and considerate, even if they starve you for business. (They stonewall you with a smile, don't let you take it personally and will share a drink - but not the tab- to show you that its nothing personal;and thereby help you imagine how their conquest of the sub-continent might have been!)

Doors are held for people not met before or after, "sorry"s and "excuse me"s fly in abundance. And people smile, at least when they meet in the confines of a lift, or a lonely street or any such place where the number of faces encountered is manageable.

But not Indians. Indians don't smile at Indians.

For a few weeks I made a policy of it; to smile at every Indian I supposed. I was determined to do this even if the other guy made me feel stupid by grimly not reciprocating. I hung in there for a few weeks.

Moody as I am, I abandoned the policy one day when I was in a blue funk.

We still all smile at each other, just so long as both the smiler and the smilee (Negotiable Instruments Act, anyone?) are not Indian.

A Refill in India and the Complexity of Food

Itinerant Indian — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 04:56:12 EDT

I am headed home! Six days in India after two months of trench-warfare in London. Of course I am excited! In all probability, will live for a good part of these six days at the pani-puri wallah's place.

Nothing like a visit to India to feel re-energised. With all that chaos, madness and sights and smells, comes energy. I am told it is raining heavily in amchi Mumbai so I can expect some thing more than just the routine dose of chaos.

But I am also looking forward to standing in a rain that does not mean a chill - With my daughter and my dog!

I wont be blogging for that period. I will be busy doing stuff that will yield "blogware". That in itself speaks volumes for why I blog I suppose.

Yesterday I discovered one more reason why I continue to add weight, rather than losing any. (Did you notice how many reasons there are for not losing weight and that none of them have anything to do with how I am?)

I subsist largely on packaged food. Yesterday I looked at food labels a little more closely and found that calories per gram of food here are seriously higher than in India. This of course assumes we are talking of traditional ghar ka khana of dal-subzi-roti. Gulab Jamuns are after all exceptions reserved for festive occassions.

Stores are required to prominently display all nutritional information so that poor souls like me can navigate through the maze to find health. The labels prominently display calories in the range of 100 to 300. Naturally if I ate five such packs I would be eating upto 1500 cals a day and therefore I should be losing weight.

Yesterday I noticed that the calories displayed are not for the entire pack but for some random part of the pack. For example, "Calories mentioned relate to half of this container" "The nutritional value on this pack refers to a serving of half a naan".

Half a naan? Who eats half a naan! I ate both of them under the impression it had 120 calories. Turns out the naans alone were 480 calories.

I reworked the averages I had been eating over the last couple of months, indiscretions like chocolate, icecream and fried cashews included. My estimate is I have been consuming between 2700 to 3500 calories, give or take a few hundred. (Missing the moon by 10 miles or 10K miles what difference does it make?)

The solution it would appear is to eat pitifully small quantities which is completely self defeating. So I went looking for things which were volume-wise significant but calorie-wise low, which is what the nutritionist prescribes. Turns out those are hard to come by in pre-packaged foods.

Unless you are willing to buy kilos of salad vegetables and make your own salad you cannot get there. But for a single guy to buy kilos of stuff and use it within expiry date is an impossibility. So you end up wasting tons of food. As a consequence, the food in your mouth turns to ash when the news programme you are watching while eating, goes onto show Africa starving, or how all the stuff you are chucking because it has expired has led to Greenland melting.

Food turning to ash in your mouth is bad for nutrition and digestion. (So also is watching television while eating.) So its back to packaged eating, but more careful working out of the labelling and nutritional values. I have since then discovered calorie-count.com which very helpfully tells you nutritional information on everything on this planet.

It is better than the Readers Digest book my Dad used to have which only told you calorie values of each and every ingredient on this planet. I suspect the next generation wouldn't recognise a cauliflower if it hit them on the head. They can only recognise cauliflower florets, which in any case are not to be found Burger Kings' Chicken Fillets or any of the Colonel's finger smackin' recipes.

Calorie-count.com is better because when you type in "latte" it tells you nutritional values for Starbucks' offering and so you now have a resource that tells you the story at branded packaged product level. The problem now shifts to knowing the exact technical name of what it is that you sipped so you know which of the long list of lattes listed to look up.

The task is endlessly complex to the point where I am likely to spend twelve hours a day figuring out what I eat in those 90 minutes when all eating happens. I would consider that an inappropriate use of time when one is engaged in trench-warfare and hand-to-hand combat on the business front, which is what one is here for in the first place.

Perhaps the solution is to STOP EATING. I am told being hungry is good for a salesman. This solves a number of issues in one go. There is one risk to consider, though: who would award business to a guy who looks emaciated and is from some Elbonia? Doesn't looking prosperous imply the business is doing well and therefore must have referenceable customers?

We find ourselves in a closed loop. Thus, the Itinerant Indian, instead of completing his agenda and going home, continues to remain itinerant.

None of this applies to the next 6 days. The last time I was there, my pani-puri-wallah had no nutritional information to offer on his offering; I haven't even considerd hygiene issues. When one is in India for a refill, one refills with gusto!

See you in a bit!