Insights on Human Behaviour

Any person worth their salt has a quest in life. King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and the Monty Python troupe quested for the Holy Grail. Keen-eyed detectives of yore and the Powerpuff girls fight crime and the forces of evil. Most business school students have the slightly less high-minded, but nonetheless time-honoured quest of achieving footage while in college through means fair and foul, and making a lot of money after they graduate, again through means fair and foul.

After much consideration, I’ve decided that my immediate quest shall be that of finding out why humans behave the way they do. I will attempt to do this in a thoroughly rational manner, taking three situations that have occurred in my life recently and analyzing people’s responses to them. From this, I shall unreasonably draw conclusions about human behaviour and impose them upon the entire world population. I shall then achieve fame and fortune as a Master of Psychology, and my picture shall appear in the last but one page of Bangalore Times for a week, along with Deepika Padukone’s, as a part of a series of articles celebrating the achievements of Kannadigas everywhere.

Let us begin.

I study in IIM Bangalore. The academic commitments are rigorous and the competition gruelling. If you are a questioning sort of person, if there is a strong spirit of scientific enquiry within you, you will have no doubt questioned the relationship between the two. Are academic commitments rigorous on account of tough taskmasters that the barbed-wire chewing professors are? As a result of which there is intense competition? Or is it the other way round, the urge to go one-up on one’s fellow batchmates extreme enough to cause the entire hard-working spree management students tend to go on in the first place?

This question can be answered very simply. Are the professors at IIMB hard-faced, barbed-wire chewing, grim scholars renowned in their areas of expertise? Not really, atleast not all of them. This obviously leads to the conclusion that, to use a colloquial term popular amongst students everywhere, RG is the source of the rigorous academic commitments.

Drawing conclusions from this brilliant piece of analysis, we come to Lesson 1. The deep-seated desire in all humans to emerge triumphant, to rise above the morass we live in, is really why we live in the morass in the first place.

Allow that startling revelation to sink into your mind. We will move on to Experience number 2.

For the uninitiated, one reason why so many exchange students from numerous colleges, which no one in their right minds would have ever heard of, from France, Italy, Spain and other countries, come to IIM Bangalore, is to cop a feel of Indian Culture. While, most people are hazy about the whole culture thing, they may waver between yoga and kabaddi as true symbols of Indian culture, those at IIM Bangalore are a sight cleverer. They (the unnamed powers who run the institution), know that while the foreigners who come for a dose of India, don’t want too much of it. Just enough to tell their friends back home how wonderful it all is, and secretly vow never to come to India again. So, to relieve the monotony of traditional Indian life, L^2 (read L square) parties are organized at IIM Bangalore.

While this could be a Lesson in itself, my point is a different thing altogether. After long observations of the goings-on at the L^2 parties, one curious phenomenon that occurs is the ring system. Guys and girls form a ring and, to use the term loosely, dance. The life-span of a ring is proportional to the number of girls in the ring. If there are lots of girls, life is good. Once they start slipping away, what’s left is a bunch of guys jumping about together. Not cool at all. So, all that’s left to do is slink away shamefacedly, under the pretext of getting another drink. The ring thus breaks rapidly.

The important takeaway from the ring observations, which is in fact our Lesson number 2, is that humans are a gregarious species. They seek companionship rather desperately. Yet there is something within us, a sense of shyness perhaps, that prevents us from going after what we really want.

And the last, and most important (in my humble opinion) lesson.

Our placement season has just ended. Congratulations, you might say with a puzzled air, but isn’t it rather early for that? Yes, that is true, these are summer placements, for a two month internship next year.

I am not joking when I say that I’ve (had to, Lesson 1) put in more effort for the placements than for most courses. A significant amount of this effort has gone into eliminating white spaces on my resume. White spaces are those annoying things that are located after the end of a sentence. We were repeatedly taught that white spaces are a creation of the Devil, and good, respectable resumes had no place for Creatures of Evil. And hence the cry of war was heard resounding from block to block, and apart from a few exceptions, people took up the fight against white spaces with vigour.

Imagine our collective dismay, when we found that companies could not really care less about white spaces! There was very little one could do, can you imagine one going up to the company representatives and expressing his/her grievances about the company’s policy of indifference towards white spaces?

We had been spoon-fed what was, if not a lie, wasn’t really the truth either. And why did we believe it? Because it was something we wanted to hear, that we could actually do something to an unspectacular resume to make it look attractive. This brings us to Lesson number 3, humans are generally a gullible lot. We may laugh at the village simpleton, but most of us aren’t really much better.

And now my job is finished, the pearls have been scattered before the swine. All I have to wait for is recognition for the ground-breaking theories I have come up with, and my contribution to civilization is done. I shall then retire, happy, and hopefully rich, with a cut-out from a newspaper containing a picture of myself and Deepika as fond souvenir of my brief moment of fame.