Am I a factoid philistine? Boorishly unfervent about the nuances of narrative nuggets?
Should I on that Saturday night, have applauded the curiously cubic chronicle of the number ‘1729’ ?
A Saturday night that began at eight pm with a million multicolored balls in the air. Tickets to a to nine o clock play at Prithvi Theatre with free seating that ensures that the later you get the worse corner bench you’re squashed in. Yoghurt I HAD to set for tomorrow’s cream cheese dip, and then a call to the shop next door. Dosa batter, soda and bread for Sunday breakfast that I must remember to order just as I finish ironing this silk blouse. Oh and the strawberries too, and these from the fruitwala. So what then, if spouse and soul mate (lounging on the sofa with ‘A History of Numbers’) found me unappreciative and inattentive . Yes , mathematicians Hardy and Ramanujan did meet a century ago. And Hardy remarked that he had arrived in a taxicab whose number, 1729, was quite uninteresting. But then Ramanujan replied that, on the contrary, 1729 was quite interesting as it was the smallest positive integer which could be written as the sum of two (positive) cubes in two different ways: 93 + 103 = 123 + 13. So ?
It’s not like I’m mathematically challenged. Seat me at a desk, a laptop or even in a silent space and I can juggle numbers as well as any man.
And so it goes with other stuff. But no, I can’t co-obsess about coordinates on a wonderfully scenic drive. Or swoon over the survival instincts of the Savannah centipede. Or expand enthusiastically and endlessly, on where Sachin Tendulkar scored centuries .
Call me crass , but I’d rather read a thriller, than read up on the origins of the ektara. I don’t, like my fact obsessed better half , browse through Bradshaw’s for breakfast. And if you do inform me in tones of newly discovered awe, that the Rajdhani takes 20 mins less than the August Kranti in its journey to Delhi, I’m more likely to be busy with the Bombay Times.
Does that then make me then the archetypal enemy of the arcane – the ‘soft’ sex with more EQ than IQ , more right brain than Left ?
It seems it does. And what’s more I’d like to state ( in my statistically unsupported stance!) that this maybe all to the good. Life’s way is most likely to be the highway, never mind all those beguiling branch lines to eternity.
What’s it then with this male mania for trivia ? Are narrative nuggets the new age medallions ? ‘ Mr. Know It All’ Esquire magazine Senior Editor and author Jacobs would agree. And he should know. Jacobs spent a whole year reading the Encyclopedia Britannica . As he says in an interview shortly after, having just read about a long-dead ruler of Saxony who hunted and killed more than 42,000 deer during his reign,” I’m worried I'm not much better than John of Saxony. I'm just trying to fill my wall with the stuffed heads of deer and lion and bears, though in my case, my wall would be filled with facts about lions and bears - for example, bears are not true hibernators - their body temperature doesn't dive and they are easily awakened. Is all this a macho accumulation?” It’s an accumulation that serves Jacobs well and not just on the cocktail party circuit, though it works well on that too. Too much trivia maybe a tad tiresome, but it certainly has its uses and these are not just limited to BBC Quiz Time, topic ‘The life and times of Martina Navratilova age 26 to age 28’.
In the end it seems more about a male craving for the comfort of cold fact. As one blogger confesses,” I can only speak for my own gender, and I can reveal that men are mostly dragged kicking and screaming into grown-upness. They never give up the secret hope that complexity will go away and leave them alone. They take refuge in trivia because facts, nice orderly facts, are psychological balm to the friction burns inflicted by contact with real life.”
In Man's World January 2007
