The road, marked on either side by the wooded campus of the Theosophical Society in Chennai, resembles more a clearing in a dense forest rather than one cleaving its way past a prosperous section of the city, towards the sea.

It will be at least an hour before the road starts to fill out with young men on their motorbikes zipping down the road to the beach. If the Elliots Beach is not attraction enough, that of girl friends riding pillion with them and locked in an embrace so tight that that Fevicol could have used it for a television commercial to advertise the adhesive properties of their latest brand of glue, is certain to be value for money.

The early evening atmosphere and the near absence of traffic on the road has a soporific effect on your senses. You begin to believe that the road practically belongs to you and are, therefore, mildly irritated, when a three-wheeler, laden with cargo twice the size of what the RTO had certified it for, makes slow progress, just ahead of you. Do you ignore the 90-degree bend on the road which blinds you to the traffic in the opposite direction and try to overtake it from the side?

Abysmal assessment

You would and, more often than not, find that what you took to be an empty lane actually has a dumper truck rushing to empty the municipal waste at the nearest collection centre. You would then have no choice but to take some desperate evasive action, and that would necessarily find your car unable to climb over an 18-inch embankment erected in the middle of the road, precisely to ward off such adventurous motoring, leaving it perched on the road divider with all four wheels dangling in the air like puppet on a chain.

So it was for the young man driving a brand new Volkswagen Polo last Sunday evening. He had guessed wrong at the 90 degree bend in the road and promptly ended up on the embankment. A crowd of curious onlookers had gathered by, and there was even a television camera man who had sprouted from nowhere. The driver was sheepishly calling out to someone on his mobile. It would be at least some time before a tow vehicle would arrive at the scene to clear the road off a car and a driver; the latter looking more foolish by the minute.

You are left pondering over whether the 30-odd seconds that he was hoping to save by trying his manoeuvre was worth the trouble of putting his job at some serious risk. I can’t see the owner of a car, a brand new one at that, wanting to retain in his employ someone who has given such an abysmal exhibition of assessing risks and rewards.

He is not unique in that respect. So many others have shown to be such poor judges of risks and rewards. Ram Singh and the five others, who are languishing in a jail for the brutal assault and rape of a young woman in Delhi, is another case in point. Why did they do it?

Path of self-destruction

The explanations offered in the press and television talk shows are, while credible in themselves, not convincing enough. Take the argument that it is all Delhi Police’s fault. We grant that they are not the most efficient of law enforcement forces in the country.

But many other police forces must be running it close. But residents in other parts of the country are not getting into buses with tinted glasses and going about hunting on city roads for young women with male acquaintances.

It cannot also be that alcohol aroused the beastly instinct in him to a level that he was intent on embarking on a path of assured self-destruction. Men are known to do despicable things when under the influence. But I am yet to know of any alcoholic with such suicidal instincts as to want to take on the Delhi-Agra Shatabdi Express in an arm-wrestling contest. Let it be said, what they were trying to accomplish was nothing short of suicidal. We can also rule out such explanations as laws not being a sufficient deterrent, slow criminal justice system, Bollywood’s portrayal of women, or even Honey Singh in this context.

Rewards vs risks

So the question remains: Why did Ram Singh do what he did? Ask him, in one of his sober moments, to weigh the pay off (the coital act) against the various costs associated with it. I can think of the following.

The pain caused by violent resistance by the victim (granted that it would be nowhere near what the victim herself would experience. But that is not the point), the humiliation of being watched by five others while engaged in the act, the near certainty of being caught after the event, loss of income and the misery of a long life spent in jail (if ever there was a case of flight risk during pendency of a trial, this must surely be it), subjected to violent assaults by fellow jail inmates and wardens alike and, above all, the very real possibility of being executed for the crime. Against such costs, the pay off would have appeared to him as almost worthless and would have rejected it as a bum deal and walk away.

Positive ‘net present value’

Yet, the fact remains that when the opportunity presented itself for such a pay off with associated costs that would make it so prohibitively expensive, he and his accomplices embraced the bargain without a moment’s thought. No surprises, here.

It is in human nature to discount excessively, the future outcomes over those of nearer terms. In the jargon of financial economics this is a case of ‘hyperbolic discounting’. So much so, the values of future outcomes appear practically zero.

Ram Singh was effectively pricing the outcome of being apprehended and convicted of rape and murder, loss of income, imprisonment, nay, even death, so hyperbolically as to make them seem worth practically nothing. The momentary pleasure thus presented itself as possessing a positive ‘net present value’.

Adam Smith spoke of the usefulness of acquiring a reasoning ability to discern remote consequences of our actions and the self-control to abstain from present pleasure or to endure present pain to obtain greater pleasure in some future time. That injunction was obviously lost on Ram Singh and his accomplices.

Human beings are, by and large, so hopeless at making inter-temporal choices. There seems no alternative to somehow hard wire into our psyche the virtues that Adam Smith felt would be useful for us. Just as squirrels are genetically programmed to collect nuts or birds naturally take to flying down South in the winter, we need some such device. It is worth bearing in mind the ideology that inspired the founding of the UNESCO.

“Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.” Rape after all, is a war on the fair sex and defences of peace must of necessity be constructed in the minds of men.

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