What’s a completely useless fact you love sharing?
I love learning a good fact or two. With things online, it is actually quite convenient to go through quite a large expanse of the facts around. There are dedicated pages just for that, with animations and voice overs. But yes, there is still nothing with the charm of going through a well-designed book with a good collection of facts, feeling that smooth hardcover. A book in form itself demands a certain amount of focus and seriousness, and I think ‘I read that in a book’ still sounds quite interesting.
I was a person who loved to state facts, it was something I was inspired to do from my late maternal grandfather. But my maternal grandfather was a journalist and thus he actually had quite interesting facts and information to share, something you can only get when you go around out in the world, collecting news and meeting people. My facts were more from books; I even used to state things written in my school textbooks like facts. I can still recall telling someone elder to me about early humans and he was completely bored.
There was a brief period of time when it was pulling the prank phase for me. Texting through messaging apps had sped up, and before sending of videos, there was a time of facts. Facts of various nature, political, religious. ‘Forward it to five people and you will have good luck’, things like that. People were so addicted to forwarding these facts, you send something to that person and you will be forwarded the same message back the same day or the next.
That was a time when I was in my tuition, so I decided to prank a guy, he still doesn’t know I have. I just made-up some name Mr Hui, I made him a great revolutionary and wrote down in great detail his history. The first few lines made sense, but after that it was all how he got caught for embezzlement, smuggling and what not. I ended with, his life should be celebrated on a particular day. Who reads after the first few lines anyways. So, I sent it to the guy, he forwarded it to everyone he usually forwarded messages to, it was among the many messages he forwarded every day.
He heard some heated replies from some of his elder family members about it over the next few days and he could not recall who sent him the message in the first place.
In the present, I don’t state facts unless necessary, I give space to the person eager to do so when it is a conversation among few people. I have become more of a listener and there is quite some merit to it.
Written by Anuran Chatterji
