Friday, November 02, 2012

I Know it all


Once upon time, in college, I knew a person who knew everything. He always had an opinion on every topic under the sun. Though irritable, we used to put up with him and listen to every possible, plausible trivia he told about every thing we discussed.Only when he took me to his home I realized that he had access to most news papers, various magazine and a cable connection. He had cousins in US who were telling him on what was trending. Initially I were in an impression that he was the smartest person in our college, but by the end of term he became the most obnoxious person in our college. This was one thing that he never knew.


I always marvel  internet and how democratic it is. Thanks to it that we now have the new breed of "I KNOW IT ALL" people around us. I'm meeting many such people every day who are just like that. You tell them some thing and  next thing they say is, I know it. They can even explain why the inflation is so high, or how Mallaya duped the banks, or even talk about quantum teleportation. Few days back I saw a beautiful Egyptian Vulture flying and pointed that to a friend, next thing he did was to Google and verify if I was right. He was such a dumbo, i was trying to appreciate the way it was flying and i was not on a fact checking nature audit. He was trying to experience something that was in front of his eyes through an LCD monitor. It does not stop at that, we google the details of drugs prescribed by a doctor and verify if the doctor is competent. Watch a movie based on review written by an unknown person. Not that it is wrong, but it will be very wrong if we do not use the information we have access to in the RIGHT context.


I have even coined a term for such people and call them "NETHERENT".  They are such people who use you tube to solve a Rubik cube. Convincing such persons to make a decision is very easy. Write a nice detailed review on net, use some clever tricks to increase the page rank, time it and publish your(anonymous virtual expert on that topic) opinions, they will stumble upon that link and will in turn call us back and explain about the same review as if it was there own. As I said, borrowed opinion is such a dangerous thing and many don't realize that they are becoming that obnoxious person I was referring to. As they say, the smartest person today is not the one who can solve a problem but the one who can control the flow of information. 


Take such people on a long trek to a mountain that has no connectivity, when they are completely tired with no electronic gadgets with them and are sitting all by themselves you will hear them say, "This Sunset is soo beautiful"  instead of  "Do you know why the sun is red ?