The Wikipedia says : “Experts have a prolonged or
intense experience through practice and education in a particular field.” By
that logic ants and moles are experts at making hills, while beans are experts
at giving you a livelier constitution, just as some “blues” musicians are
experts at sounding like tortured buffaloes.
Come to think of it, we have experts everywhere,
disbursing their expertise on topics ranging from fat caterpillars to El Nino,
bombarding our senses with clueless insights, not to speak of weather-men and
economists. Ardent students of the last-mentioned two subjects generally come
across as madmen or zombies… Show me an economist who has been able to predict
even two weeks into the future about “emerging markets” or “developed markets”
and I’ll show you a blind soothsayer….
It is these expert economists that laid the
framework that caused Lehmann Brothers to go up in smoke, along with a lot of
other minor and finer details like your money and mine.
About the weathermen, the less said the better….
Their clueless predictions are nowadays backed up by equally clueless
mathematical models, which are again, “continuously updated” with data from
some more mathematical models….. Just a few months ago an expert weatherman
claimed that the monsoon over this country was impaired because a fellow called
El Nino was doing the rounds over the South Pacific, half-way across the globe.
His mathematical model said so. The TV channels kept splashing pictures of dry
and parched lands, farmers and cattle walking around with worried looks on
their faces. (I suspect those pictures were from their archives, but let us not
push the issue…)
And then the rains came. Washed away some parts of
the country. And, I guess, that expert too, because, after the flood waters had
subsided, another expert was called. He talked about La Nina, who apparently
caused this. Never knew El Nino had managed to get a girlfriend. At the end of it all, a third expert summed
it up, “We had a normal monsoon.” He followed it up with a sombre nod to drive home the point.
And then, of course, we have this hot topic of
global warming. Al Gore. TV talk shows. Videos. And then this summit at Copenhagen
These experts at the poles keep watching and
shouting that the ice is melting….. I ask you, “What else is the ice supposed
to do ?” What do these experts do all
day, day after day ? Burn up tax payers’ money to watch ice melt ?
That too,
during the summer ?
Why didn’t we have such career options in our youth ?
We learnt in school that ice is lighter than
water, and that when ice, floating on water, melts, the water level goes down….Thus
the Maldives would be sticking out like sore thumbs after a meltdown, instead
of wallowing in the waves like now. But these global-warming experts want you
to believe that it is the other way around. And another committee of experts
gave them a Nobel Prize for that.
Art experts are bespectacled, bearded, long-haired
people with terrible sartorial inclinations, who have detailed knowledge about
nothing in particular, and can create abstract flowery prose about a piece of
canvas on which a painter had spilt his breakfast…. If we didn’t have experts,
Picasso perhaps would not have been the phenomenon he is today… Can you imagine
a picture of a person with both eyes to the left of the nose and lips that look
like a carpet bug, selling for a million dollars ? Or an M.F. Hussain painting,
depicting a horse through a single meandering line with a few distinct huge
teeth with a signature at the lower right hand corner selling for equally
vulgar sums ?
Take, for example, these handwriting experts. Of
course, their art is required to track down the anti-socials, but for their
whole life they keep studying the initial letters of language that the
non-experts like you or I had learnt along with them in nursery, but diverged
with class-difference over time…
Moving on to non-subjects, look at all these
experts with a cult following…..like that Baba who spent his entire life doing
nothing but breathing exercises, and now does it on TV… It seems that a whole
nation with a five-thousand-year-old history did not quite know how to breathe
until he came along – the breathing expert.
And now ? They all breathe together. Spread out on
a meadow dotted with rectangular mats, you see hundreds upon hundreds of people
following the Baba’s every breath. One would think that breath, like death, is
a great leveler. Not so for this Baba. There are fences up front, adjacent to
the stage that separate the rich-breathers from the not-so-rich-breathers.
Short, sharp breaths, long, deep breaths, you name it and he has it in his repertoire.
Breathing as a career option ?
Wow !!! His
breath is worth millions in hard cash….. Who, in his or her wildest dreams,
could have thought of breathing as a cash cow ?
Duly inspired by all these experts I too, have
decided upon a new career path…. I will start sleeping. Most people spend
one-third of their lives sleeping, (and that is an expert opinion !!) but will I
teach them to sleep better and longer…
I will first go to sleep for hours, then graduate
to days, then do it on TV…. Very soon they will make me an expert on the
subject…. Naturally I will have some followers, then some more and then some
more, all focused on the single activity…..And one day I hope to put the whole
nation to sleep, sound sleep that is, all the while making money…… Anyone care
to join me ?
