Notes on the book and NOT a review. Goodreads has a really low character count for reasons I don't understand.

Prisoners dilemna/squeal rationalisation. Privately smart, publicly dumb. Reward/Temptation/Punishment/Suckers payoff. Fatalism and the Bystander effect. Cooperate/Defect. Best strategy - tit for tat/gentleman's strategy - to get provoked in the face of injustice, to forgive and forget are all gentlemanly traits. D-D behavior. Two chances strategy. Self regulation. Distorted sense of self interest and mistrust in others - coin first/coffee first in rlwy stations. Not punishing unfairness at a self incurred cost. Free riding. Systemic chaos and lack of standardization. Response to false positive/false negative : a. Accept error as one-off and don't change the system. b. Strengthen the system in lieu of the error but letting that error be. c. Disregard the system and 'correct' the error. The IITs and IIMs are robust systems for selection because they never do 'c'. Even if they get bad candidates or reject good ones. ( )

This book is an accurate description of the psychological reflexes a majority of Indians would have given any social or business situation using statistics/mathematics as a tool to simplify understanding. It is sad that the negative character traits that the author talks about in this book are all very true and are so commonly found in India that it is okay for the author to express them as a generalistic view. It is a great attempt at putting forward explicitly and simply the flaws of the modern Indian value system. ( )

had high expectations - but, no insight offered in this book about the Indian psyche. The book lacks depth, sounds hollow and re-uses others quotes analysis liberally for entertainment. ( )

Notes on the book and NOT a review. Goodreads has a really low character count for reasons I don't understand.

Prisoners dilemna/squeal rationalisation. Privately smart, publicly dumb. Reward/Temptation/Punishment/Suckers payoff. Fatalism and the Bystander effect. Cooperate/Defect. Best strategy - tit for tat/gentleman's strategy - to get provoked in the face of injustice, to forgive and forget are all gentlemanly traits. D-D behavior. Two chances strategy. Self regulation. Distorted sense of self interest and mistrust in others - coin first/coffee first in rlwy stations. Not punishing unfairness at a self incurred cost. Free riding. Systemic chaos and lack of standardization. Response to false positive/false negative : a. Accept error as one-off and don't change the system. b. Strengthen the system in lieu of the error but letting that error be. c. Disregard the system and 'correct' the error. The IITs and IIMs are robust systems for selection because they never do 'c'. Even if they get bad candidates or reject good ones. ( )

Written by V Raghunathan (not N), a renowned academician in management, I picked up the book for the cleverly parodied title and the concluding sentence in author’s biography that said To relax, he fixes mechanical clocks.

The book unfortunately wasn’t as wacko; it tries to explain the behaviour and underlying self-interested reasoning of the average Indian psyche ( which is many millions in number) using the tenets of game theory esp. Prisoner’s dilemma ( PD).

But, the book is conflated to an extent by not restricting itself to description of behavioural sciences; often it is unable to resist passing social judgements, which I thought was beyond the purview of the book and diluted its original content. Also, the book overlooks complex social variables which have a huge influence on Indian behaviour, in which the locus of control is external.

It would all be mildly exciting if you are new to game theory and its day to day application and are inclined to know more, if not, it can be hopelessly repetitive and at times boring! ( )