'Lock kiya jaye: Catch the hot seat fever

If you are a quiz show junkie like me, perhaps you are perched on your couch every night these days, waiting for Kaun Banega Crorepati to air.

Like me, perhaps, you do the ‘Fastest Finger First’ test and wait with bated breath for the answers to check if you might have made it to the hot seat. Then, when the quizzing starts, you might also rack your brains to jog all those dusty geography and history facts back into your memory.

What always surprises me however, is the amount of knowledge the contestants seem to be holding in their memory. Granted, they have been given weeks to prepare, but even that would not have helped them foresee the kind of questions. You might have your history and mythology up to date, but how would you store all kinds of facts about sports, presidents, around-the-year-crops, astronomy and what have you in one little brain?

When I want to enjoy a lighter moment, I switch to the Jay Leno show where a recurring sketch is his ‘Jaywalking’ sequence. Here,  Leno goes out into the street and asks passers by random general knowledge questions. The people who are quizzed almost always get the answers hilariously wrong.

(My personal favourite, which always sends me into gales of laughter is this one... What does the DC in Washington DC stand for? Answer: Da Capital).

Whenever I watch these shows, I find myself wondering whether it is important to memorize trivia and retain all kinds of knowledge in the brain. After all, didn’t many of us spend hours memorizing Eliot’s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock and Coleridge’s Kubla Khan and never used it since? Didn’t we spend months learning the Periodic Table for no reason at all?

To test my theory I call up a highly qualified teacher Ms Rosy to tell me what’s going on in schools these days.  “When I ask my students to memorise things, I hope that it will help them some way,” she says. “But they forget most of what they have learnt the minute they step out of school. Gaining knowledge has to be an ongoing habit. I firmly believe that even as adults we need to constantly brush up on our old knowledge whenever we can.”

That evening, as I watch the inimitable Bachchan on KBC on television, and pit my brain against the contestants, I like to think that my old teacher, Ms Rosy would surely approve.