The philosophy of trivia-hunting

This week, I sat down to binge-watch the last six episodes of Orange is the New Black ’s (OITNB) fourth season. I like OITNB not just for its razor-sharp writing and acting, but also its left field soundtrack choices. Every new season has introduced me to some great music. In the gut-wrenching final scene of the season, a song called ‘Muddy Waters’ introduced me to the force of nature called Laura Pergolizzi, better known as LP, a New York-based singer-songwriter who may be the most singular vocal talent you’ve never heard of.

Watching her performances on YouTube, my girlfriend and I were both smitten instantly. You could have knocked us down with a feather. Juggernaut three-octave voice? Check. Mop-top curls and perfect teeth? Check. A killer androgynous suits-and-denims game? Check. Ali Smith’s lines from the novel Girl Meets Boy came to mind: “She was as brave and handsome and rough as a girl. She was as pretty and delicate and dainty as a boy. She turned boys’ heads like a girl. She turned girls’ heads like a boy.”

LP and her all-round winsomeness redirected me to an old, long article I read about Tilda Swinton and androgyny in fashion, to the film I’m Not There , where Cate Blanchett was one of six actors playing aspects of Bob Dylan, to the androgynous, anthropomorphic entity Desire from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics, to the... and these are but a few of the trajectories that my browsing took the following morning. In my petty grandiosity, I felt like a Moriarty of trivia, a spider at the centre of his web, a web with a thousand strands and I alone knew which strand led where.

Every quizzer I know has told me about this euphoria, typically experienced when curiosity tries valiantly to keep pace with the velocity and range of incoming data. It doesn’t matter what triggered the burst of manic, miscellaneous absorption of trivia. It doesn’t matter what you hoped to gain by the end of it (annotations to a cool new song, interpretations of an enigmatic movie scene you saw last night, droolworthy pictures of a new celebrity crush). In the very near future, you are going to be hyperactive, hyper-aware, hyperlinked. And this changes everything.

Please understand, also, that trivial pursuit is different from a cold-blooded, calculated, organised scavenging of specialised knowledge, the kind a professor would excel in. Distraction isn’t the enemy here. It is an old friend welcomed with open arms. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in their two-volume tome Capitalism and Schizophrenia , wrote about the move away from an old, hierarchical, tree-like model of knowledge to the concept of the rhizome (an underground stem that grows continuously, nodes shooting out in every direction).

A rhizomatic model deals in trans-species and three-dimensional connections, “(...) ceaselessly establishing connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.”

The arboreal model, however, is restricted to horizontal and vertical connections. The polymaths of our parents’ generations nurtured their solid-oak intellects slowly, steadily, the watering cans of neighbourhood libraries and kindly mentors chipping in from time to time. The wunderkind of our generation displays rhizomatic growth: I have lost count of the number of people I know who’ve become incredibly well-informed in a matter of three or four years; sometimes to the point of being unrecognisable (smarter people are prettier by default, don’t you know?). And a fair few of them were trivia hunters, lone rangers who found their professional niches or super-specialities during manic bursts of trivial pursuit, and never looked back since.

Once again: let this be said that whatever this game is about, it’s not about being knowledgeable in a pragmatic way. In the four years or so when my teammates and I were serious contenders at collegiate and open quizzes across north and east India, we would come across old faithfuls, trivia buffs who would turn up at most quizzes, knowing fully well that they could never clear the qualifying stages, even. They would greet you with a sheepish, panglossian, it’s-me-again smile.

Philosophically speaking, these were the trivia hunters I most admired: they had, to quote a terrible film called Besharam , neither samman ka moh (a craving for respect) nor apmaan ka bhay (fear of ridicule). Their respect for the thrill of the chase was paramount. It was the opposite of utilitarianism: they could never, after all, successfully apply what they had accrued over the years. I never saw one of them setting the stage alight, or cracking question after inscrutable question. They were fuelled by a belief system that went beyond petty victories and pettier losses.

And that is how I intend to spend the rest of my trivia-hunting days; as quiet as a bee-keeper among a hundred hives, quietly siphoning off what honey I can.

Growing not like a tree, too proud to bend, too set to shoot off in unexpected new directions, but like a rhizome, steadily working its magic underground.

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