Have you ever wondered why educated Indians love to talk authoritatively about things they know nothing of? When such an issue comes up, which is quite often, why don’t they just say “sorry, it’s a technical subject about which I know nothing, so I will keep my mouth tightly shut?” Has this tendency become even greater after the internet came along and started dispensing half-baked knowledge and more recently, more harmfully, AI and social media? I think only very few would disagree that more people talk more nonsense now than ever before.
It’s not uncommon to see someone talking ignorantly about all sorts of issues that require a lot of expertise. Like the Constitution, for example. People just rabbit on about it without knowing the first thing about it. NGO activists are particularly good at it. Or foreign policy which is another subject on which everyone has an opinion, usually an ignorant one.
Health and medicine are another example. My utterly well-meaning 82-year-old sister, with no knowledge of medicine or human anatomy whatsoever, routinely lectures me on my health and even prescribes medicines. Fortunately, these are all homeopathic ones. She says she doesn’t believe in allopathy even as she swallows Crocin etc, and puts eye drops into her ageing eyes. That’s not all. She has a friend, also in her 80s, who used to think she was an expert on the stock market. The two of them would routinely buy useless stocks and lose money, though fortunately not much. Whenever I told them to cease and desist from homeopathy and the stock market they would tell me I was a fool. But they have stopped dabbling in the market now.
There are others I know who hold forth on statistics and econometrics without any expertise in these fields. Zero. Zilch. I asked one of them once, just as I asked my sister and her friend, what made them so sure they were right. It’s a gut feel, they said. Gut feel? About statistics and econometric methods?
Once, during the course of a formal dinner, I told a woman I was a journalist. Whereupon I was given a long lecture, in a grating voice, about how journalists should do their jobs. I asked her what she did and her reply was “Nothing. I am a diplomat’s wife.” I am sure she also told her husband how to do his job. He had retired from a very senior position.
The same thing happens in sports, too, cricket especially. Men, women and even children have become total experts without having played the game except in the street with a tennis ball and a washing board. Sunil Gavaskar summed it up very well many years ago when he asked a particularly irritating journalist, “How many centuries have you scored?” Gavaskar has scored 35. The odd thing is that when India wins there are no comments. It’s only when it loses that they get into full flow. Nor are there ever any comments on the opposing team’s performance when it wins. No one bothers with it.
A world-renowned economist also once expressed his frustration. “How come,” he asked, “everyone feels free to comment on economic policy but no one comments on aeronautical design”? And that’s the crux of it. Economics is a highly specialised discipline, requiring a lot of technical knowledge. Yet it’s a no-holds-barred, free-for-all.
The late Italian novelist, Umberto Eco once had this to say: “Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community… but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It’s the invasion of the idiots.”