To Goanet - V. Raghunathan's work "Games Indians Play" (Penguin books, 2006) is an entertaining little book. I read it first during a Delhi-Bangalore flight in 2006. The author looks at the quagmire that is India through the lens of Game Theory, in particular its special case known as Prisoner's Dilemma. The idea is simple - Indians are given to 'defect', not 'cooperate.'
Raghunathan identifies 12 characteristics that he refers to as the "canons of Indianness" - 1. Low trustworthiness. 2. Being privately smart and publicly dumb. 3. Fatalistic outlook. 4. Being too intelligent for our own good. 5. Abysmal sense of public hygiene. 6. Lack of self-regulation and sense of fairness. 7. Reluctance to penalize wrong conduct in others. 8. Mistaking talk for action. 9. Deep-rooted corruption and a flair for free riding. 10. Inability to follow or implement systems. 11. A sense of self-worth that is massaged only if we have the 'authority' to break rules. 12. Propensity of look for loop holes in laws. The book ends with a chapter on "Gita and Game Theory" where the author (he says he is not religious) points out that Krishna's central message - exhortation to action without attachment to it - is a prescription for cooperative collective behavior and is validated by Game Theory. Regards, r