The strange obsession with trivia
ANUPAMA KUMAR
Yes, we’re talking about, analysing and dissecting Slumdog Millionaire. How it portrays Mumbai and the real India. How it is poverty porn. How it might win oh-so-many Oscars.
But there is another angle to it, the strange obsession with trivia. We haven’t talked too much about the fact that the protagonist makes a fortune on a show specialising in tiny bits of random information. Kaun Banega Crorepati
managed to capture the imagination of an entire nation, both on and off screen. We find schoolteachers rewarding any enthusiastic little boy or girl who comes up with a factoid for the class. The child is praised, his/her ability to collect and memorise random factoids touted as the Next Big Thing.
Lucrative market
Why would anyone waste precious time learning junk of that kind? Because quizzing is a lucrative business. Prizes for several national level quizzes are five figure sums, sometimes more. And there’s the added bonus of being on TV, or finding your picture in the newspapers. The result? A huge market for quiz books of every kind. And quizzes are an excellent way to beef up an otherwise unimpressive resume. They supposedly carry an impression of intelligence and a love for detail. Not surprisingly, parents are often enthusiastic purchasers of quiz books for their often not-so-enthusiastic children. The obsession grows up. Hugely popular game shows are several times, little more than trivia fests, Kaun Banega Crorepati being a case in point. It doesn’t end with entertainment or a harmless school pursuit. Competitive exams test knowledge of trivia too, under the fancy name of General Knowledge.
The Civil Services entrance examination has a huge section devoted to it, as do the suddenly popular Common Law Admission Test and the IIT Humanities and Social Sciences Entrance Examination. And who’s forgetting the educational system, where textbooks are little more than a lot of facts loosely strung together? Somehow, the writers of the books forget the more important aspect of these factoids – the implications they have.
An average chapter in biology, for instance, would tell you about the structure of DNA while omitting to tell you why exactly it’s so important. A Geography textbook is usually a collection of facts on what grows where, and what is mined in which part of the world, with no insight on how this might influence lifestyles, cultures and economies. We need to ask ourselves an important question here—why exactly do we value the knowledge of random facts so much?
Useful information?
How useful is this information anyway? Would knowing the name, the nationality and the height of every Miss Universe in history make me a better civil servant? More importantly, when information is so easy to carry around, shouldn’t our focus be elsewhere? Like how a fact can be used for something constructive. Instead of asking little children in school to learn about the behaviour of elephants in the breeding season, shouldn’t we be asking them how we can use this fact to protect the elephant and the forest it lives in? Or how the idea of a Miss Universe can sell cosmetics? What the Booker Prize winners are trying to tell us in their books? But while we’re pondering over these (permit me to flatter myself here) deep and worthy questions, let’s not forget that quizzes are still great fun. After all, aren’t we still raving about how Slumdog Millionaire and its worthy protagonist got all the answers right?
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Open Page
