Saying the Indian traffic is like advanced rock-paper-scissors like I did in my last post, sounds interesting, but isn’t quite accurate. In rock-paper-scissor like games there is always a circle. You can’t have a cow sitting on top of the pyramid that beats everything. Just bad game design. As a kid a played a lot of stratego, a game totally based on this principle. You have soldiers with different ranks that you can put anywhere on the game board but your opponent can’t see what is what. Then you move them around and the higher rank always beat the lower rank, with the exception that the very highest is beaten by the lowest rank (spy).
This week I saw an incident that made me realize that Indian traffic is exactly like that. There was a cow running away from a … dog. Nobody had told the dog that the cow was holy and both cow and he vaguely realized that the dog descended from a wolf and the cow from, well, another cow.
So the circle is complete after all. Bus beats Car beats Rickshaw beats Bicycle beats Pedestrian. Cow beats all of those and even a Pedestrian will kick a dog. But dog beats cow.
1 comments:
Hi douwe,
interesting posts about india. I was wondering about if rock-paper-scissors is an universal concept if that same thing coulbe applied to the modern society. Beetwen the rock, scissors and paper which are the bank which are the consumers which the goverments? Something like the citizens/consumers are beaten by companies, companies by banks , banks by goverments and goverments by people. Well i thought its not that straightway but kinda. Greets
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