Experts

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. A place where a spot of warm weather is considered a godsend. And where does their data come from ? From the experts at the poles.

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 ?