Just finished reading the review of V. Raghunathan’s book titled, Games Indians Play: Why We Are the Way We Are.
In his book, Raghunathan, a former professor at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, uses game theory — a branch of mathematics — and related concepts such as the prisoner’s dilemma to explore why Indians so often tend to focus on winning immediate gains at the cost of long-term benefits. He further goes on and theorizes that Indians are privately smart and publicly dumb. He also mentions that Indian’s ability to understand the need for cooperation is very low. Indians believe that cooperation and selfishness cannot go together.
Knowledge@Wharton is carrying an interview with the author. It is a pretty good read.
I was dumbfounded initially, but I would second a lot of the “findings.”