Today I was going through a narrow and crowded road on my motorbike. All my attention was on other vehicles on the road and large number of pedestrians. I have to keep constant watch on their paths, are their paths crossing my path? My brain, eyes and ears were racing to point out any possibility of collision (there were literally thousands of possibilities) and possibilities to avoid them, choosing the best possible path to preserve momentum, reduce braking.
And then there comes a nasty 'Speed Breaker', all I can do is to apply brakes.
I was furious, why did the government installed this speed breaker in the middle of this busy road? There was absolutely no need. Because of the crowd it was almost impossible for an average motorbike rider to go beyond 20km/hr max. Everyone including me was already moving very cautiously.
So as usual my mind got stimulated.
Questions started popping up.
Why do roads get crowded?
Simply because there are more people or vehicles on the road at once.
Why are they on the road?
Because majority of them want to reach some destination.
How can the crowd can be reduced?
By making sure people reach their destinations faster, there would be fewer people on the roads at any time, As their time spent on road will be reduced.
How will they reach their destination faster?
By moving faster or driving faster.
But what do people do in reality?
People slow down when they go through a crowded area. Thereby increasing their time spent on road and also making others to go slow, Like a Choked pipeline. But the people commencing their journey keep adding to the traffic. The situation starts worsening, till the influx of people reduces than the outflux of people(i.e. people reaching their destination).
Our brains are wired to do such crazy things, may be such kind of behaviour was necessary in the ancient days, may be people subconciously like staying in the crowd or subconciously feel safe in the crowd. I do not know the reason, what I do know is this behaviour is causing problems in todays world. We, the Homo-Sepians, the dominant species on earth, have to evolve our thinking as we do not live in the jungle anymore.
But there is a twist.
Have you ever saw how the ants gather their food?
They move in the form of pathways, the pathways are the shortest routs avoidng any obstacles, they move like their are lanes in the pathways, they do not move randomly, where the pathways are broad they move slowly and when the pathway is narrow they move fast.
I do not know whether they know how to act in the traffic in a logical way or not. But their traffic looks definitelt better than ours.
Have you observed it?
The human tendency I observed tells us we are not as logical as we think we are. So watch out from such illogical things we do. And in todays world such human mind's weaknesses are quickly used by marketing people. For example, Their are cute sales girls at the front desks of many showrooms. They know most of the men have weakness, they want to show power and strength whenever a cute girl is watching. So they are going to show it by purchasing what the cute girl is gonna pitch.
So watch out from cute girls.. 'Ouch' it hurts... ;-)
Sumit
The POWER is when,
you use ODDS
to get EVEN..
