Indians and Human Genome project
Yesterday I was travelling from Mumbai to Bangalore on Air Deccan and was rudely shocked when i heard the air hostess telling us over the Publc Address that they have been experiencing some life vest thefts (those that are "kept under your seats and are to be inflated in case of an aquatic landing").
That got me thinking....Wat is it about us Indians that we somehow manage to things which are tottally wacky??? C'mon u can understand ppl taking away bulbs from railway compartments, manhole covers from open roads.....hell even electric fans (size 3ft radius) from trams in Calcutta but stealing life vests???
U can at least try to explain the other thefts on the basis of bad economic conditions, huge unemployment etc etc (actually i was travelling with a foreign tourist group who were totally taken aback...some even tried checking if Air Deccan had re-stocked them......one even went as far as accusing his wife of stinginess which would get them killed, for making him travel in an Indian Low Cost Airline) but you really have nothing to fall back on when u r trying to explain the theft of Life Vests.
So I thought "offence is the best form of defence" and tried inudating him in statistics about how American Kleptomaniacs are ruining the American Retail Industry and how Amnesty International found that one in every three Americans has polished something off or intends to do so and that somehow managed to calm him down (surprising how tolerable ppl can be towards others' follies once they realize that they themselves are not very different).
But that still left this questions hanging in the air.....Why would anyone wanna steal a life vest??? Having had an exposure to marketing theory in my 1st yr ofMBA i understand that ppl who travel in Air Deccan are not from the most affluent customer group however even then theft of a life vest reamins tottaly inexplicable.
That made me think that we have some gene that is tottaly our own...i mean it is an Indian speciality.....the gene i mean........it makes us do somethings that not many races in the world even contemplate......so herez a research hypothesis for Human Genome Group....is there somedistinclty indian gene........i mean there has to be....how else can it be........