When everyone is an expert, no one is!

An old school friend recently sent me a detailed analysis of why Virat Kohli keeps getting out to deliveries around the fourth stump. It had something to do with certain planetary motions and Anushka Sharma’s social media activity. Another watched half a podcast on YouTube and had strong opinions on China-Taiwan relations. Such commentary is relentless and breathless. Informed, half-informed, misinformed – it does not matter. It just has to be there. Sometimes it seems that, like Jim Carrey in the Truman Show, you are living inside a panel discussion with no commercial breaks.

However, this is not new. Indians have always had a soft spot for opinions. Amartya Sen in The Argumentative Indian showed that the edifice of Indian civilization is built upon argumentation. This argument is not the one that you have with your local sabziwala, but one steeped in the tradition of vada and prativada. Indians have debated and argued over everything from esoteric metaphysics to statecraft strategies for over five millennia.

But where once there was conscientious deliberation, now there is the rapid-fire certainty of the ‘hot take’. Rather than thinking and speaking, we feel first, speak next, and think, if at all.

To be clear, this is not a sermon, lest it comes across that way. I am as guilty as the next person. I routinely weigh in on cricket strategies despite having last played the game properly in the 2000s. I have waxed eloquent on issues far beyond my remit. My only qualification, it seems, is a narcissistic fondness for my own writing.

The problem is not that Indians have too many opinions. There is a certain democratic texture to having opinions, for, after all, having opinions and voicing them is not (and cannot be) the preserve of the elite or the literate. The old man at the neighbourhood cigarette shop might have much more sophisticated and grounded views on Indian polity than you can possibly imagine. When you talk to an auto driver, he will explain in no uncertain terms the pain of migration from his home state.  

The problem arises when we wear our opinions lightly and without experience. When the burden of proof is replaced by a dangerously breezy confidence that would be admirable if not so unearned. There is absolutely nothing to differentiate between detritus and genuine insight.

And this thirst for commentary has been turbocharged by social media. The internet is no longer the global library that Berners-Lee wanted it to be. It is now a loud Indian wedding reception where everyone talks over the other person, passes judgements, and performs acts of subtle (or blatant?) social bragging. Platforms built to connect disparate humans and democratise discourse have handed every citizen a megaphone without any moderator.  A scroll down any comment thread will confirm that we are not debating but hollering at each other in parallel monologues.

In such an environment, nuance and discretion begin to look like non-chalance and are mistaken for either shyness or incompetence. Where is the quiet, internal voice that says, “Perhaps I do not know enough to comment on this” ? A willingness to let a thought remain unfinished? 

We are also a society in which being wrong carries no real cost. There is no shame in backpedalling, because memory is short. The same person who celebrated a celebrity’s flop movie yesterday will today be retweeting about their latest hit. We do not really mind being wrong; what we do mind is being unheard. No one in India has ever lost a friend for having a strange opinion, however many have lost face by having no opinion at all.

And so, we plod on despite there being something tragicomic about it, almost like Harishankar Parsai’s short stories. But we don’t mind. Will we? I doubt.

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