Competition – An Essay

“Competition” is a process between entities, where they contest i.e try to prove their superiority over other in some way or the other. Entities can be individuals, groups, organisation or even ideologies.

“Competition” has been a great driving force for evolution, since it leads to an enforced action. It keeps us interested, involved and more importantly working, thereby not allowing us to relax or stagnate. Human beings have a natural tendency to compete, to prove their mettle and as a result competition has played a great role in human development.

However, unfortunately the nature of competition degrades as fierceness increases. Ethics, fairness take a backseat and the only objective is to “win”, this lead to an undeserved satisfaction for winner and the loser, who otherwise believed in fairness, is forced to adapt evil practices. Thus the propagation of forced unethical practices. This is because we treat win as just win, we never recognize or appreciate the nature of it. (All this is said with the assumption there is an honest way of competing and in most of the cases there is.)

To win a fierce competition fairly, is far more respectable and difficult, than to just win it. In addition to this, fierce competition can have a paradoxical effect as it reduces the scope for experimentation and innovation, as cost of failure is tremendous. It kills human freedom to do what he wants to, but taking in to account the circumstances he relents to the pressure of competition, thereby doing what he needs to. Thus the creative potential remains untapped.

“Crab Mentality” is another significant problem. Though it is nothing related to fierceness of competition, its the problem with the approach. It means neither develop nor let develop. This attitude defeats the purpose of competition that is to attain overall progress or development. Instead the attitude should be to focus on developing self and learn from the opposition as well, this way world will be a better place to work and develop.

In practice, there have been issues of unfair competition between say large multinational and a small scale local industry. Thus one more important point is that competition is always on a level playing field. The state(India) has competition commission employed to ensure that.

Competitions are undoubtedly great source of thrust, spirit but the approach, the nature of it are of equal significance, to develop universally.