Break a leg

 

Recently I was taken aback by the news in the paper that a petition has been filed in the Bombay High Court against the makers of Ludo Supreme, alleging that the online game promotes gambling that deviates from the original board game, which is a "game of chance". The decision regarding this popular game relies on skill or luck may soon be decided by the Bombay High Court - at least in the case of gaming application Ludo Supreme. Will you please lend your mind to ponder over the issue a little bit!

 

It has been a curious habit of me to know the story of success-people, interesting-people, famous-people, privileged-people and even adverse-people, unsuccessful-people too? I question even to myself why I was successful in a particular case and not at other times? At my tender age I used to think it is luck but now I realised it was my incompetency that drove me such a bad consequence. Somehow I was fascinated with my growing up in a poor family where luck, fate and hard-work are at times, pitted against each other. They almost seem to play hide and seek at different turns in our lives. Hard-work and hard-work was the only winner! Well, it has never stopped surprising me even now!

 

I remember how we sisters along with mother, used to play Ludo hours after hours, sometimes tampering, at other times getting angry if defeated, and making mess of the whole Board.  However, I still think that was pure fun and enjoyment along with learning the skill of the game, where rolling of dice holds the master-key which controls the whole parameters. However, once one gets that number one plays the tokens with skill to ensure that they stay safe and away from the opponent’s tokens while killing opponent’s tokens. It is a game of reducing probability of getting hit while making the moves. A question that often comes up during Ludo matches is whether the winning player is employing a clever strategy or making their way to sheer luck.

 

It is true if you play in your cell phones and on internet, it is all random. Dice turns randomly, you can say ‘according to your luck’, whereas, if you play manually on board with dice in your hands, it can be 80–20 ratio of skill and luck both respectively, according to expert’s opinion. Therefore, the secret of Ludo King’s trick is in the strategy, I suppose so.  But wait!! Friends!! It cannot be so easily decided –let the High court speaks out. I will chew over the issue only.

 

It is well said that our birth, health, wisdom, death etc. somehow depend on luck, if I say so, since we have no control over them. You don't know whether you're going to be born rich or poor, male or female, infirm or able-bodied, in the United States or Afghanistan. Through dumb luck I got the best set of parents anyone can wish, for I got good schooling, I had a knowledge-rich-environment while growing up and all these shaped me. The best way to find out what the bearers of luck are consists in ascribing the predicate like “lucky,” “a matter of luck,” or “by luck.”....!! Have you ever felt lucky? Most of us do, from time to time. We have probably felt unlucky too. What does it mean to say ‘wish you good luck’ when going for an interview or ‘break a leg’ when a theatre artist goes to stage!!

Indeed, finding money on the street may seem like a lucky break, surviving an accident, a poor decision or epidemics are typical examples of luck. Without our intervention, things happen to us and around us. Luck, therefore, is nothing but an explanation we give to the good and bad things that happen by chance when we use to give meaning to random events. Holding “lucky charms” are popular worldwide with their ability to control somehow natural psychological fear, anxiety chaos within. Some evidence supports the idea that belief in luck acts like a placebo, producing positive thinking and improving people’s responses to events, warding off dangers, resolving issues. For example, flipping a coin at the start of sporting event may determine who goes first.

 

But a rationalist approach includes the application of the rules of probability and an avoidance of dogmatic faith. And for skeptics? Let God save us !  it is a bottomless pits...there is no end. For them, if two events are connected randomly it involves a kind of logical fallacy –post hoc ergo propter hoc and if connected sequentially always they are connected causally. But friends!!  Who is going to believe scientific knowledge which is always hypothetical and ever evolving subject to falsifiability…it never gives true judgement like ‘it is raining’ which is true in common life, grew out of the conviction. 

Ok, Ok, Can one define “luck” –– a concept loaded with certain deterministic events occurs very much the way laws of physics prescribes that certain events occur. No, it seems a matter of tentative random chance in many cases. Let me share an interesting story of my father, who was not an academic degree holder from any educational institution nor was he educated in reading and writing. More interesting thing was he knew only Mudia-language (मुड़िया), a language of the Munim-s. But he had a tremendous insight of Stock Exchange Markets’ ups and downs. When he first came to Calcutta, Kolkata now, he was looking for a job. But ‘who will hire him as an employee’–– was the harsh reality before him. One day when he was roaming on the street and incidentally he came across the Dalhousie Stock Exchange Market, one British gentle man picked him. Though my father did not know English but the British gentle man had sparkling- eyes, so he allowed him to join his Firm as an employee for rupees 250. He used to deal on behalf of his Firm and he never failed in any dealing. At the time of his death, his other employer (by the time another gentle man purchased this firm), complimented my father –“He had earned for us crores and crores throughout his life but never took more than 500 rupees which was his due salary, by that time, and never failed in his dealing.” Only once he failed but that is a different story ( Friends!! Sorry for sharing personal history). Now, how one should explore the cause-effect relationship….here too?

 

However, let me begin with the notion that Luck is a two-edged sword. While it drives us to predict and manage the world around us, we also know that we have limited success in this. So how do we cope? In short, we lie to ourselves. We explain our failures as the incompetence of others or just bad luck, pushes us to test our boundaries, to take risks and to gamble. When we succeed against the odds, when the gamble pays off, we feel lucky. If we examine the secrets of the most successful people, the deep underlying assumption is that, we can learn from them their personal characteristics––such as talent, skill, mental toughness, hard work, tenacity, optimism, passion, and emotional intelligence– that got them where they are today. I am often intrigued by just how much of the variance is often left unexplained, is it courtesy of a lucky break? I do not know.

 

Should I say Luck is to some extent a vague notion? Not all instances of luck are as clear-cut as a lottery win. For example, goals from the corner kick in professional soccer matches are considered neither clearly lucky nor clearly produced by skill. if someone drops her wallet, keeps walking and after five minutes realizes that she just lost her wallet, returns to the place where she dropped it and finds it, is that person lucky to have found her wallet? The answer is not clear. Accordingly, we should not expect an analysis of luck to remove this vagueness. One of the most widespread intuitions about luck is that lucky events are events beyond our control. Unless one possesses the complete state of a deterministic world at a prior time one fails to predict the future vis-a-vis inherent cause and effect relationship. Surely one misses some important variants that have to be accounted.

 

Why luck is so significant in our life? The simple answer is if an explosion takes place in our planet, it hurts us, it may change our life, but if the same explosion occurred in other galaxy we would have been least bothered about its luckiness or unluckiness.

The assessment of the relationship between chance/luck and skill depends on the approach of the individual moves. We introduce the measure of chanciness to rolling of dice and skill to the move of tokens. But then all other games vis-à-vis all our creative activities involves a kind of decision-making-strategically-skilled which determines the winner in it. It depends how he utilizes the ingredients in this case the dice number. For instance, by mixing a small tinge of spice, changes the taste of the cooking, but before doing that one must learn the basic grammar of cooking.

 

Take Soccer, for example, where the aim is to score more goals than your opponent. What if a player aiming for goal strikes the post and the ball then goes into the net – is that down to skill or luck? Using the location from where the shot was taken, we matched all scoring shots with non-scoring shots taken from that location; one finds that there is no visible difference in a player’s skill or performance. But the effect of this single shot was substantial. There is clearly an element of unpredictability in matches, with even the best teams at the risk of losing against a weaker team. Remember Columbian player’s deadly and accidentally own goal shot and subsequent murder in 94 FIFA World Cup.

 

It is often impossible to know all the potential choices that could have been made to assess whether a decision was the best one, given the available options at the time.  One can say that the element of luck is as inseparable from the operation as the element of skill. But we also find that the most skillful people were almost never the most successful.  So what is it that determines success? Hard work or good fortune? Effort or randomness? I think we all understand both factors play a role, but I'd like to give you a better answer than “It is insight”, my friends !!  In spite of having a combination of the right genes, the right connections, the right timing, and a thousand other influences none is wise enough to predict. Whereas the wild success is attributable to variance one does not know. Dismissing my success as luck devalues the hard work I put in. This is not always true, of course. A severe illness can wipe out your health  and work…..but is not health a birth-luck? Yes.

 

 Maradona Diego described his grand shot as an “Act of God,” because he did not know what he is doing at that crucial moment. He cried, “lo! It happened”.  Ustad Amjad Ali Khan, while playing Sarod, says a time comes when “I do not play Sarod rather Sarod starts playing me”. Pt. Budhditya Mukherjee, another Sitar player narrates, “I explored 22 years the sound which I would like to have on my instrument …at last I found out within a flash of tuning my instrument….” All of these events arrive entirely out of the blue, with no effort on agent’s part. Not correct....Rather it requires the labour of the whole life which he has dedicated to a particular skill. Take another example, if you understood cryptography in the early 2010s, perhaps you could have spotted the opportunity in the currency Bitcoin. It was the Luck in preparation… how easily we slip into believing that we make our destiny. Yes…

 

Nevertheless, Rules of games are often almost impossible to learn by observation only, it is to be learn intuitively, so when luck will about to come, rest assure, it will come… the loftiest and ethereal conditions of the surroundings… excite my sterile imagination to conjure up a story… sudden steady shower… provoked the artist like Raghu Rai to capture the image beyond the structural unity of a person … something is clouding …and an unrepeatable tan (तान) will come out from vocalist Ustad Amir Khan… an extended area of un-stretched canvas on the ground, inside and around… translating a form of inner pain or violence to a great painting… huge crowds on the garden …shouting …and pushing… driving the player to trigger the shot….unbelievable shot …and he called it an act of God…because he does not.…yet know it was his skill, practice and hard work that was an act of God… thus, all activities aim at horizon of Expectation… that is intangible…insight evolve out of skill… great music is a cosmos imposed upon chaos. The single closest expression, for above the incidents, is ‘improvisation.’  It is as if turning of a key in a lock. A sudden leap is presented in the platter. It is also known as an  epiphany, eureka moments or the penny dropping moment, whatever one wants to adjectivized.

No, friends, I do not propose to answer the question what is that unbound canvas before us.. ? The truth is those possibilities are always within our reach. One may not be able to quit one’s job or develop new skills, but every day contains within it countless opportunities, all dictated by the choices one makes. The current moment shows us that we are intimately connected to our planet with roads of escape and hide and that we glimpse with wonder. Nothing in life is more exciting and rewarding than the sudden flash of insight that leaves you a changed person. “Oh-Aha” moments are some fizzy moments that occur inside –– a correct solution following incorrect attempts based on trial and error. The Homer Simpson's catchphrase exclamation, D'oh!–– a sudden discovery of the stupid act. Solutions via Insight have been proven to be more accurate than non-insight solutions. Insights illuminate, expand our minds. For me, Insight is a distillation of all the research and desk work into a magical brew. It is not quite a black and white approach––something "weird-normal" It's a temptation to interpret “luck”. This is what Lewis Carroll did incredibly well with Alice. Her adventures are not solemnly obvious statements — they are a series of anomalies inviting your mind to unpick the norms, in which the only sane person turns out to be the one who has dreamed the crazy rules.

D'oh

 Now, let us wait for the Bombay High Court’s verdict.