Games Indians Play - V. Raghunathan

Why we are the way we are 
In a rare attempt to understand the Indianness of Indians—among the most intelligent people in the world; but also; to a dispassionate eye; perhaps the most baffling—V. Raghunathan uses the props of game theory and behavioural economics to provide an insight into the difficult conundrum of why we are the way we are. 
He puts under the scanner our attitudes towards rationality and irrationality; selflessness and selfishness; competition and cooperation; and collaboration and deception. 
Drawing examples from the way we behave in day-to-day situations; Games Indians Play tries to show how in the long run each one of us—whether businessmen; politicians; bureaucrats; or just plain us—stand to profit more if we were to assume a little self-regulation; give fairness a chance and strive to cooperate and collaborate a little more even if self-interest were to be our main driving force.

[Book Description Source: www.amazon.in ]

India is blessed with many intelligent minds.
Most Indians are more adept at maths and logic than people around the globe.
However, as a nation, we are still falling behind.
Our collective naiveté might be to blame, but how is it that we boast equal parts intelligence and naiveté?
In this book, the writer explains that Indians mistake talk for action. He tries to help readers understand why this happens and how we can change this.
He uses game theory to explain the behaviour of Indians and tries to combine these explanations with concepts of behavioural economics.
The author also presents his twelve points on the fallacies of Indians, explaining that our low trustworthiness, private smartness and public dumbness, fatalist outlook, over-intelligence, lack of public hygiene, self-regulation or a sense of fairness, reluctance to penalize wrong conduct, mistaking talk for action, deep-rooted corruption, inability to follow systems, a sense of self-worth and a propensity to look for loopholes in laws.
He helps readers understand how to break this vicious cycle and how to bring a change in the image Indians have around the world.
This is a definite read for all Indians who are trying to understand what is keeping them one step behind in the rise to success 
[Book Summary Source: Flipkart.com]


Ratings
Goodreads Rating - 3.45 out of 5 ( 507 Ratings , 78 Reviews  - As on September 16 2017)
My Rating:   3 out of 5
My Comments:
Interesting analysis through Game Theory of the typical behaviors observed in the Indian society with a nice touch of humor and food for thought.


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Made to Stick - Chip Heath & Dan Heath

Why Some Ideas Take Hold and Others Come Unstuck 
What is that makes urban myths so persistent but many everyday truths so eminently forgettable? 
How do newspapers set about ensuring that their headlines make you want to read on? 
And why do we remember complicated stories but not complicated facts?
In the course of over ten years of study, Chip and Dan Heath have established what it is that determines whether particular ideas or stories stick in our minds or not, and "Made to Stick" is the fascinating outcome of their painstaking research.
Packed full of case histories and thought-provoking anecdotes, it shows, among other things, how one Australian scientist convinced the world he'd discovered the cause of stomach ulcers by drinking a glass filled with bacteria, how a gifted sports reporter got people to watch a football match by showing them the outside of the stadium, and how high-concept pitches such as 'Jaws on a spaceship' ("Alien") and 'Die Hard on a bus' ("Speed") convince movie executives to invest vast sums of money in a project on the basis of almost no information. 
Entertaining and informative by turns, this is a fascinating and multi-faceted account of a key area of human behavior. 
At the same time, by showing how we can all use such cleverly devised strategies as the 'Velcro Theory of Memory' and 'curiosity gaps', it offers superbly practical insights, setting out principles we all can adopt to make sure that we get our ideas across effectively.

[Book Description Source: www.amazon.com ]


Ratings
Goodreads Rating - 3.97 out of 5 ( 47,747 Ratings , 1954 Reviews  - As on July 18 2017)
My Rating:   3 out of 5
My Comments:Interesting content and narrative that bring awareness regarding what to do to make our ideas and messages stick. But it  falls short of describing how to make them stick through Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional Stories. The book has more of anecdotal content than specific techniques. However it provides a fairly decent launchpad to develop sticky communications.


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Myths and Traditions in India - Prabhakar Patil

A Fusion of the Past and the Present
Far from being mere fairy tales or bed-time stories,myths found in every culture and civilization often have their roots in real-life characters and events,preserved through oral tradition over millennia. 
The cornucopia of Indian mythology and folklore, enshrined as it is in the four Vedas, Upanishads and Puranas, and the two greatest eternal epics of the Ramayana, and the Mahabharata, is probably the richest in the world. 
In the process of retelling many of these timeless classics, the author brings out their contents skillfully, establishing the fusion of past and present.

 [Book Description Source: www.goodreads.com]

Goodreads Rating - 2 out of 5 (1 Rating, 0 Review)

My Rating:  2 out of 5. 

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Rock, Paper, Scissors -Game Theory in Everyday Life

[Author: Len Fisher; Publisher: Hay House; Hardcover: 288 pages ]

Game theory is the study of strategic decision making. 
It has been extensively used to explain many behavioral patterns in 
economics, political science, psychology and biology.
Even in our day to day life game theory can guide us towards effective strategies to use in situations of competition and conflict.

But this book explores the other side of the game theory that concerns  cooperation rather than conflicts, collaboration rather than competition.

Len Fisher, the author discusses how game theory can help us develop 

fresh strategies for cooperation.

The book begins with a chapter that explains Nash equilibrium concepts. 
Nash equilibrium is a situation created during  interaction among two or more parties where at least one party fares worse but from which it can't escape without faring  still worse. This happens when every party acts out of self-interest leading to many serious social dilemmas and problems. 

The next chapter discusses the ways to divide resources fairly using strategies as I Cut and You Choose and shows that we can't rely on external authorities or on our own sense of fairness to produce lasting cooperation. Rather we need to explore how  our own self-interest can be used to make the cooperation self-enforcing.

The third chapter uses game theory to examine how social dilemmas actually arise. Seven social dilemmas are discussed viz;  The Prisoner's Dilemma, The Tragedy of Commons, The Free Rider, Chicken, The Volunteer's Dilemma, The Battle of the Sexes and the Stag Hunt. 

The next four chapters deal with  strategies  for cooperation that include a variant of Rock, Paper, Scissors game, new methods of cooperative bargaining, methods for eliciting trust, and the use of tit-for-tat strategies. The author discusses how such strategies emerge and how to use them to promote cooperation rather than confrontation in the society. 

Then follows a chapter that investigates the possibility of  avoiding  social dilemmas by changing the game itself, either by introducing new players or by applying quantum theory concepts. 

In the last chapter author presents his personal top ten list of tips for effective strategies in different situations which are as follows.

1. Stay if you win, shift if you loose
2. Bring an extra player in
3. Set up some form of reciprocity
4. Restrict your own future options so that you will lose out if you defect on cooperation.
5. Offer trust
6. Create a situation that neither party can independently escape from without loss
7. Use side payments to create and maintain cooperative conditions
8. Be aware of the seven deadly dilemmas, and try to reorganize the benefits and costs to different players so that the dilemma disappears
9. Divide goods, responsibilities, jobs, and penalties so that the result is envy-free
10. Divide large groups into smaller ones 

I really liked the writing style of the author which is easy to understand, humorous and autobiographical (since many game theory examples are drawn from his personal life).

 

Some  alternate titles for this book could be "Game Theory for Dummies" or "Game Theory Without Tears"

 

I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to know the basics of game theory in a quick and interesting manner.

 

 Links 

• Author's Website
• Goodreads Ratings and Reviews -  Average Rating 3.33 / 5;  437 ratings; 73 reviews

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People Analytics - How Social Sensing Technology Will Transform Business and What It Tells Us about the Future of Work

Author:       Ben Waber
Publisher:   FT Press ;
Hardcover: 240 pages.
People Analytics involves measuring, collecting and analyzing the data which characterizes the people's behavioral patterns.
While the traditional methods of collecting such data has been through direct observations or through surveys, the emerging trend is the use of social sensors like company ID badges, cell phones etc.
This has a huge potential to enable an organization to understand in a better manner, how their people work and collaborate. This will provide them with actionable insights for improving the effectiveness and productiveness of the work force.
Ben Waber, an expert on organizational dynamics and social sensing technologies shows in this book how this is possible.
 A very well written and interesting book to read !
Read more details about this book on my business blog..
  

Science - A Four Thousand Year History

[Author: Patricia Fara; Publisher: Oxford University Press; Paperback: 512 pages ]

 
First I will let the author Patricia Fara  to introduce her book.
(Play the embedded video below. In case of any problem view it on the YouTube site)

This book:

• Does not portray scientists and inventors as ideal heroes but as  real people who needed to earn their living, who made mistakes, who trampled down their rivals, or even sometimes got bored and did something else.
• Argues that for a scientific idea to prevail it being right is not always enough. People should accept the fact that the idea is right.
• Challenges the notion of European superiority in science,  by showing how science has been built up from knowledge and skills developed in other parts of the world like China and Islamic world.
• Instead of focusing on  abstract theories proposed and esoteric experiments conducted by scientists , it explains how science belongs to the real world of war, politics, and business.
• Describes the works of many individuals who were not scientists in conventional sense, but who developed a variety of skills - navigating by the stars, smelting ores, preparing herbal medicines, building ships, designing cannon - the contributed to the global scientific enterprises of today.
• Explains why the following questions are important and suggests ways of tackling them:
• Does religion inhibit or encourage science?
• Are alchemy and magic completely divorced from science?
• Were there really so few women or have historians the picture by telling too many exciting adventure stories about intrepid men exploring the female nature of world?
• Is it possible to have different types of science that are all valid?
• If there were indeed different sciences in different places, then how are they related to each other and modern science?
• Investigates the financial interests, imperial ambitions, and academic enterprises that made science global.
• Shows that what counts as a scientific fact depends not only on the natural world but also on who is doing research and where and when.
• Argues that scientific knowledge as it travels from one environment to another, is constantly adapted and absorbed in different ways and such transformation is still continuing.
• Challenges assumptions that appear natural yet have been created artificially - it aims to provoke thought and argument, not just provide information.
• Looks at past in order to find out how we've arrived at the present in order to improve the future.

The book has seven parts each consisting of seven short (8-10 pages) chapters. Discussions are well supported by illustrations, anecdotes. Author's sense of humor and sarcasm.also surfaces at several places.

One drawback in this book is , barring a few stray references here and their the contribution of  India towards the development of science is not given due credit. In fact decimal arithmetic and the concept of zero was  discovered in India before it spread elsewhere.

Though the readers looking for something more technical will be disappointed, overall this book is quite a light and entertaining read on the sociological history of science for a layman.





Key Points from the Book

Part I: Origins
Key Points : Science's origin is traced to ancient Babylonia & Greece. Ideas and discoveries pertained to projects like finding auspicious time for religious festivals, winning wars, vindicating biblical prophecies, divining the future, explaining the cosmos. Science's very foundation lie in techniques and concepts now often designated as magical or pseudo-scientific.
Chapter Titles : Sevens, Babylon, Heroes, Cosmos, Life, Matter, Technology

Part II: Interactions
Key Points: What counts as science depends on where and when you are looking. Information, skills and objects constantly travel from one place to another, gets passed on through generations and get adapted to local needs and taste. Scientific knowledge resulted from many centuries of communications and interactions between different peoples and places especially China, the Islamic world and the mediaeval  Europe.

Chapter Titles: Eurocentrism, China, Islam, Scholarship, Europe, Aristotle, Alchemy

Part III: Experiments

Key Points: Experimental approach towards the world that characterizes modern science developed only gradually and intermittently. Many innovations arose from reformulating traditional expertise rather than from inspired insights. Ancient ideas coexisted with ones now belonging to modern science. For e.g. coexistence of  -  both Aristotle's theory and Copernican theory of the Universe; magic, alchemy and mathematics.

Chapter Titles: Exploration, Magic, Astronomy, Bodies, Machines, Instruments, Gravity

Part IV: Institutions
 Key Points: Science is an integral component of the society, interwoven with industry, business, warfare, government, and medicine. Eighteenth century was the vital transition phase from private experiments of a select few who were wealthy to the public laboratories, state funding of institutions and industrialization. Institutions though lacking the charisma of heroics of individual discoverers and inventors were vital for advertising scientific achievements and for attracting financial backing for research projects.

Chapter Titles: Societies, Systems, Careers, Industries, Revolutions, Rationality, Disciplines

Part V: Laws
 Key Points: The nineteenth-century scientists' proposed  laws governing human as well as physical world  arrived through supposedly objective reasoning and precise recording of  facts as detached observers. But personal biases and subjective assessments of recorded results were not uncommon among these scientists. The viewpoint of German Romantic philosophers of this era who stressed a unified cosmos in which human beings are integrated within natural world resonates more with modern environmental attitudes.

Chapter Titles: Progress, Globalization, Objectivity, God, Evolution, Power, Time

Part VI: Invisibles 
Key Points: Despite development of increasingly precise instruments in the nineteenth and twentieth century it remained impossible for the atomic scientists to know everything about every natural phenomena  both theoretically and practically due to the uncertainty permeating in every aspect of the Universe. Many politically and commercially motivated research programs claiming to further science and improve humanity, launched triggered deep ethical reservations.

Chapter Titles: Life, Disease, Rays, Particles, Genes, Chemicals, Uncertainties

Part VII:
Key Points:  Modern scientists know much, much more than the ancient Babylonians about the structure of the Universe and mechanisms of the living organisms. But they are still unable to answer some of the basic questions about human existence asked by the people several thousand years ago.Massive investments in science, technology, and medicine yielded great achievements. Yet these achievements are like a double-edged sword. Political decisions needs to be made about how to take advantage of scientific discoveries.

Chapter Titles: Warfare, Heredity, Cosmology, Information, Rivalry, Environment, Futures




Links 

• Goodreads Ratings and Reviews -  Average Rating 3.78 / 5;  73 ratings; 15 reviews

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Outliers - The Story of Success

[Author: Malcolm Gladwell,  Publisher: Backbay Books , Paperback:  346 pages ]

People who are extraordinarily smart, accomplished and successful are very few. They are Outliers ! You won't come across them in your normal course of life.
What makes them stand out among the crowd ? In this book the bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell  says that intelligence, ambition , personality traits may be necessary but not sufficient conditions for becoming such extremely  successful  achievers. The circumstances-  like culture, family, time, location, upbringing, luck etc. - in which they are  born and grow up in, play a major role in their achievements.
This book is full of examples and case studies of outliers to substantiate this theory. The reason why a person is an outlier is well researched and described in a very interesting manner.  At the first instance the linkages between the causes and the outstanding success stories are not obvious and even seem bizarre  . But once Gladwell explains it one can see how well they stand the test of logic.
One of the most interesting books I have read so far this year. A must read !
 
Links

• Dan Dascalescu's Wiki  has an  excellent and comprehensive summary of case studies discussed in this book
• Extended Synopsis of Outliers in Wikipedia 
• Malcolm Gladwell's website 
• Goodreads Ratings and Reviews -  Average Rating 4.05 / 5; 143902 ratings.

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Introducing Sociology - A Graphic Guide

Authors:     Richard Osborne & Borin Van Loon
Published:  2009
Publisher:   Icon Books Ltd.
Paperback: 176 pages






This book aims to introduce the subject of Sociology through comic book style narration.
It traces the origins of sociology from Enlightenment thought and the pioneering work of Auguste Comte to subsequent developments by Karl Marx, Herbert Spencer, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber.
It also explores the rapid expansion of sociology in 20th-century America and Britain, the post-Second World War dominance of Talcott Parsons, the Chicago School and the rise of structuralism.

The narrative in spite of being propped up by illustrations is quite dull and I could not  go beyond reading 8-10 pages in a single stretch.
Besides too much stuff is crammed into this pocket size book of 170 odd pages. For subjects as abstract as Sociology, it would have been better if the authors have chosen a few key topics and explained the concepts at length. 
While this book may be OK as a quick brush up on certain concepts and topics, I don't consider it as a good introduction to Sociology. There may be better books in the market.

Links:

• Goodreads Rating - 3.55 out of  5   (58 ratings)
• Browse through a selection of pages from this book
  

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Indianomix - Making Sense of Modern India

Authors:       Vivek Dehejia and Rupa Subramanya

Published:   2012

Publisher:    Random House India

Hardcover:  228 Pages

Economics is not one of my favorite subjects. But this book was  pressed into my hands by a book lover who was sure that I will enjoy it. And she was absolutely right. 
I had never expected that such a dry subject like economics could be applied to understand the behavioral patterns of Indians in various situations. 
In the introductory chapter the authors who are well qualified economists, explain how in India the everyday scenarios like - people not turning up on time for an appointment; an auto driver not willing to go where you want him to go; politicians or bureaucrats  making you wait without rhyme or reason - are actually manifestations of several economic theories in action.

In the remaining six chapters of the book they explore issues like :

• Why the public is indifferent to the plight of an accident victim ?
• Why did Nehru ignore the Chinese threat in the lead-up to the 1962 war ?
• Why people take life-threatening risks while crossing a busy road or a railway track ?
• Do seatbelt laws really save lives in India ?
• Will India be better off under an autocratic rule as compared to a democratic setup ?
• What  was the reason for BJP's defeat in 2004 General Elections ?
• What role does myths and superstitions play in influencing the economics and politics of a country like India ?

This book is not a conventional economics book since it borrows liberally from other disciplines like history, political science, psychology, sociology, anthropology, evolutionary biology, religion etc.to explain these issues. This is because the authors firmly believe that the "richness of India - which to some people may appear as mere messiness - deserves, indeed demands, such an interdisciplinary approach. When you dig below the apparent chaos of India, and get to the deeper mechanisms hidden below the confusing patterns on top, India makes sense after all".

A very entertaining  and enlightening read ! I am glad that I read this book.

Links: 
Goodreads Rating - 3.50  ·  rating details  ·  16 ratings  ·  4 reviews 

•  Excerpts from the following chapters of the book
• What if...?
• Heads or Tails ? 
• Mythical or Modern
   

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