Harish Narayanan

Imagine a situation where you are dumbfounded by a very simple question, that too in front of a million people. Something even a kid with basic education could have answered. What does one do in such an embarrassing position? Grin and bear the shame, and try to learn better or get booed by the audience, or get thrown out of a job? And what happens when a nation has many such illiterates who need immediate re-education? Do you raise a nation-wide alarm and focus all energies on re-jigging your education system?

Hell NO. One makes a TV Show out of it. Called ‘Are you smarter than a Fifth Grader?’, where adults with fully developed brains are stumped by questions that 10 year olds have answered even before the question is finished. And then you coolly walk away with 50 grand in your pocket for accepting that you are, in fact, not smarter than a fifth grader.

The first time I saw it was when I was flipping channels and the ‘#1 game show in American TV’ caught my attention. And when I saw a woman wrong guessing which hemisphere North America was in (to be corrected by a 9 year old and win 10 grand or so in the process), I lost it. And it was when she had no shit clue about the question ‘if y=4x and 4x=12 then what is y?’ that I had an epiphany. Now I know why the ‘idiot box’ is called so.

In India, not knowing that piece of ultra-basic Algebra would mean your sweet ass being whooped by parents and teachers alike. And hell, it’s not even education, it’s basic common sense. Then, I notice that we seem to celebrating dumbness a hell lot. Fear Factor, where one eats worms and gulps ostrich eggs; Fist of Zen, where one has to smell burps for 30 seconds and what not; videos of really dumb people (more so Japanese humor) topping the charts in Youtube; a worrying trend I say.

Humor being dumb, slapstick and brainless is one thing. But brainlessness being considered normal, and even worth creating mass entertainment out of, is plain artlessness (in both senses of the word).

After I shut down the tele, I put on the radio for some musical and not-so-dumb entertainment. And there I was ambushed by another show called ‘Anything also can’. Let me explain. That’s Singlish for ‘anything goes’, or ‘everything is correct’. So in this show, all one needs to do is call up, give some random, totally unconnected answer, and win a prize.

And the kicker, that took away my faith in whatever was left in human intelligence, is that one lady called, and couldn’t answer a question on the show for 2 whole minutes. A show where she could’ve just said ‘I’m uber-dumb’ and still won the prize. But nope.

I expect too much from people, I’m told. Sigh.

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Tagged as Humor + Categorized as Humor