Sense and Sensibility: 1.2 String Puppet

On a cold morning, sitting in the new classroom in TISS, bleary eyed, trying to catch up some sleep in the class, I was awakened by a passionate speech by Prakhar Tripathi (????? ????????) . I can still feel the emotion but the exact words elude me, but for one thing that he said, as a matter of fact, “you would understand things only when you are a victim”

It stood with me, till date. You can read something many times, hear it quite often. But between knowing and understanding, there is an abyss that can be filled only with experience, as a victim, being in the receiving end.

As I drove into the car park in IKEA store, it was half past twelve, close to our lunch time. “Lets have lunch and then decide on the wall décor” Reva declared. Hitha and I, voted unanimously to the plan.

We walked into the restaurant and took two trollies for placing the food. The first in the counter were pastries (you heard it right. Pastries) Hitha took a chocolate pastry and I took a mango pastry. Then we decided on curd and then a bowl of dal makhani and then a bowl of paneer makhani. Then we came to the healthy counter, picked up boiled peas and corn and then.. hope you are getting the drift.

When I started unpacking the food and placed it on the table, I was asking myself “What? We took this much food? Seriously?”

There were quite a lot of occasions when Reva and I struggled to finish the food we ordered and those were times we did not know the portion size and mostly it would be Dal Kichdi and we’d pack it back home. This one was different. We knew the portion size and we brought ourselves a quantity that equaled our breakfast, lunch and dinner (combined).

“The pastries are extra” I said and added “we could have been frugal with the pastry”. She smiled and said “we could have been frugal with the food we took”.

Looking around, we realized, we were not alone. Everyone, in every table had a mango or a chocolate pastry and the tables with kids had both. That’s around 12 to 15 families. What a relief to know we are not alone. This feeling could be bettered only by the realization that it is a power cut for the whole housing complex and not just in your house. You can relax. Someone eventually would call the electricity board ??

Was it by chance that the pastries were kept first and the healthy foods at the slightly farther end? Was it by chance that the food cart had two trays, one above and one below? People filled in the top tray first and then shuffled those items to the tray below to accommodate more food. If there was only one tray, would they have restricted taking more? would the inertia of standing in the line for 10 minutes for a small portion of food, eclipse the thought “I will take a little and come back for more”

While I examined the situation, I told myself that the big corporates must be employing psychologists to nudge human behavior to maximize their profits. But there was something, rather someone very important missing in the story, that’s me. While a nerdy psychologist directing my action in a controlled environment and me falling for it, was a savior to describe my irrational behavior, I had to come to terms with the fact that I played a part in the whole drama.

It was I who picked the food like so many other people. Seeing the quantity of food wasted, I think a lot of those people would be comfortable with the idea of a nerdy psychologist nudging them to take the food ?? and that too only when they realize that something of this sort happened. But on a serious note, if I believed the nerdy psychologist's existence, it meant that She/ he has discovered something exciting. Our neural pathway to making choice and can predict our actions. That is the only way they can position themselves to gain.

That made me take a closer look at how I decide most often (if I do) and then the “Aha” moment occurred. All of them, well mostly all of them are POLeaR Decisions.?