Kaun Banega Crorepati or KBC is one of the most watched prime time show on indian television. The Indian version of “Who wants
This weekend, for the first time I watched the show this season. At the risk of hurting popular sentiment, I have to tell you that I felt completely against this show. Stronger! I hated it.
And there are 3 main reasons for that:
- It is not the GyanKumbh as it is being touted as
KBC is all about your ability to parrot out rote, memorised facts. It is not a test of Gyan, it is not a test of your life skills but a just a test of your memory.
Kaun Banega Crorepati is the complete antithesis of gyan (learning). What it is telling people is that memorising trivial insignificant facts is what is going to help you make your life significant.
Learning (gyan) is your ability to distinguish, to think critically, to be able to handle challenges of real life and not sit in a comfortable hotseat, chit chat with a super star and take some lacs home, if you are lucky. KBC woefully falls flat on its face on this.
It is not “GyanKumbh” but “MemoryKumbh”.
- It is just entertainment and a serious waste of time
The show is high on entertainment value and in bringing to light the real life plight of its hot seat participants. And while some of them are able to carry a few lacs home – not sure how much since the axe from the Income Tax department will reduce their prize money. And how many people in any case?
Let’s do some calculations:
Based on the current season, it is televised 3 days of the weekend. With 4 weeks in a month over 4 months, about 50 episodes get televised. I assume that on an average about 2 people make it to the hot seat every episode. So, in this season, just about 100 people got to take a shot on their luck with the hotseat.
A very insignificant number to the 1.2 billion population of India. And by my conservative estimates crores of people must be fighting for their chance on the hotseat. And they do it for years.
As one of the participants declared proudly that she waited for 12 years to be on the show. What a royal waste of time?
- On top of that, there is no real value add to participants
All that the participants expect to take from the show is cash (and sometimes popularity). Taking the example of the same lady who got in after 12 years, if she had spent that time learning a useful skill she would have earned far more money in all those years and would continue to for many more.
There are no life skills, no real learning, only trivial facts in this program. How does a question like “what is name of the instrument which converts AC into DC” add any kind of value to someone’s life.
Is this the education we want?
I am afraid that KBC is corrupting the minds of several people, young and old alike.
When we are fighting and working towards making education free of the uselessness that it has been for ages, a show like KBC is perpetuating the problem.
I shudder to think the parents in a small town village telling their child to start mugging up facts because that could be her ticket to the hot seat. And not so far away, the school teacher scolding the child who has not memorised the lesson and yelling at her “you have no chance at KBC”.
And I do not want this education system to continue? In this age of Google, memorising such silly facts has little use. Teaching life skills has many.
What’s your view? Let me know in the comments.
This article originally appeared on the Learning Infinite Blog.
Image courtesy: Wikipedia