Growing up, Indians of my generation took great pride in rattling off the capitals of other countries, their presidents and prime ministers too if possible. India’s state capitals, their chief ministers past and present, major rivers and heights of mountains were also part of our must-know list. Games like Scrabble, Trivial Pursuit and even Name-Place-Animal-Thing tapped that reservoir of information inside our heads. No wonder quizzers were the heroes of our time.
But today there is a cachet in being ignorant and proud of it, among adult Indians. And most of those who insouciantly proclaim their unfamiliarity with what were once ‘must knows’ have attended school/college and presumably learnt to acquire and store knowledge and seek more of it later too. But everything is on a “need to know” basis now, epitomised by that famous clip of Alia Bhatt and a fellow actor on a chat show not knowing who was the President of India.
She was panned only half-heartedly, that too probably by people much older than her. Very few young Indians cared about her ignorance and her nonchalance about it. It can be argued that as an actress Bhatt does not need to know who the president (of India, US, Ukraine, whatever) is, just as that socialite didn’t need to know what Mt Rushmore is, although one of her friends clearly did. But are unabashed insularity or disconnect something to be lionised?
Back in my youth, and even in the early years as a journalist, getting information was a bit of an obstacle course, needing time and considerable effort, legging it to libraries and archives in pursuit of details and clarifications. We went on the trail of elusive information with the eagerness and tenacity of Sherlock Holmes. Today, information is available at the press of a few keys on a phone or computer. Yet, knowledge dissemination has not increased with accessibility.
If anything, the algorithms that control what is given priority on our screens compel us to stay within grooves, bombarding us with information that is mostly just more and more about things we already know a lot. Fashion for fashionistas, Bollywood for stars and the starstruck, investment news for market dabblers, science for the nerds and so on. People just have to ‘like’ a reel on any subject and there will be an avalanche of them for the next few weeks.Poverty and illiteracy were once deemed responsible for ignorance and lack of awareness among Indians. Today the well-off and supposedly “educated” are just as nescient. Incentive or inclination to know about new things are now minimal, especially after school, college and examinations are no longer factors to goad them into mandatorily imbibing diverse information. More dangerously, cinema, TV, reality shows and social media endorse and validate fatuity.The still-vast numbers of Indians who are pulling themselves out of poverty and backwardness by dint of education and hardwork do not deserve to get wrong messages from people who have supposedly “made it” and are being posited as aspirational. Ignorance and insularity are neither praiseworthy nor ideal. Every Indian need not know about Mt Rushmore, but to truly rise we have to try to be aware of more than just the goings-on in our condos or mohallas.