Just chaos ...

Last night I did witness a practical depiction of random theory during my 30 km travel from Bangalore south to Bangalore north. The opportunity to see randomness is presented to us everyday because of the chaos in traffic.

I could bet my life that there is no mathematical method to find out how the vehicle next to you would move. Any science student will tell you that the traffic follows Brownian movement (continuous zig-zag motion). And a mathematician will tell you that it is an NP Hard problem (Non-deterministic Polynomial-time Hard, where the solution can neither be obtained nor verified in finite time).

I wondered is it a flaw in mathematics and the sciences that we could not find a solution for this randomness and unpredictability? A little thought made me believe that this is a fundamental flaw in our legal system.

It is because of the simple fact that the value of human life is so negligible in our legal system. Let us consider a scenario where one’s fault leads to another’s death, it has to be compensated by him own; would you see anybody breaking the law?

People break the law all the time because it is known that if you run over 2 cops it only costs you only Rs.950/- to get out on bail and it won’t be long before the case is forgotten (Aditya Pancholi). And it costs a paltry sum of Rs.30,000/- to walk scot-free after moving down four people (Puru Rajkumar).

Is this the value of human life? Don’t you also think if our legal system treats the value of human life with a little more dignity it deserves we will see discipline in many areas of concern including traffic mannerism?