5/30/2005 1:33 PM

You will not believe what kind of politics people play even as coordinator’s of a simple placement committee in an MBA institute. It surprises me why people even get into such complexities. The problem I feel lies with innate human belief that there is but scarcity of everything, whether opportunities, or for that matter jobs (which perhaps is true) and therefore, someone else getting something means me losing out on something.
It is somewhat like what the belief was among workers in the days of Peter Drucker. They believed that if they worked more on a day there would be less amount of work left for them to do eventually. Such a thought process arising out of the belief that there was finite amount of work and more work finished today meant that less was left to do tomorrow.
That is probably what we are all taught to believe. Heck every book on economics seems to start with this notion of ‘scarcity’. So, we believe that there is no room for sharing, forget sharing, the basic thought is we must grab as much as possible, not just that, we must also make sure that others cannot have anything, worse do not get away with anything. It is a hoarding tendency that manifests itself in every sphere of life.
Even if we do not require a whole lot of anything, we still hoard it just in case in some future time we might feel the need for some more. It is our blind belief that if we let anybody else enjoy a bit of that there is the dark possibility that there will be less left for us when we eventually someday feel the need for it.
Worse even although there is no remote possibility that we may be interested in something, whether be it a job or anything else we must make a grab, or at least put in some impediment in the way of those who may require or may not even require that object. I wonder at times where so we get such a mentality??!!