Guessing Games

People seem to be going gaga about technology and all the benefits it gives the common man. Maybe it does but t0he dratted thing has also stolen some of the simple pleasures of life. Things that perhaps will become legends which will be disbelieved by the generations to come.

We used to have such fun playing guessing games. Ah, no, no, not that sort of guessing game where someone accosts you in a wedding with that question, "Remember me?" and expects you to guess it right in one. THAT is no fun, to be frank. If you know the person, it does not last long enough to be fun; if you cannot recollect him, it is no fun squirming and saying things like, "I remember the face, the name is at the tip of my tongue but..." and other such white lies which stand in as socially acceptable versions of "I do not know you from Adam (or Eve, lest I be called out for being a chauvinist) and couldn't care less."

I mean the fun we used to have were guessing games of another sort. You know, someone hums a song and you try to recollect the movie in which it featured and cannot remember it offhand. You ask the crowd if anyone remembers the movie and, if nobody does,...voila! Each one tries to make a guess; someone remembers the hero or the heroine; another remembers the singer; a third remembers the music director; then you try to put it all together and start off guessing the movie. The conversation, most times, digresses into other good songs by THAT hero/heroine/ music director. And, whether or not you guess the right movie at the end of it, you'd have had a fun conversation lasting hours. All set off by a guessing game.

And now...NOW, if I ask the same question, some idiot whips out his smartphone, types in the question and pops the answer. Now WHAT's the fun in that? I mean, just imagine that there is a quiz show, a question is asked about the capital of Sierra Leone or some such, and your competitors just google the answer and give it to you, would you be keen on watching it? Gives a whole new meaning to that 'fastest finger first'...he who googles fastest wins! (By the way, do quiz shows still exist? I am the antediluvian fossil who has not kept up to what's on TV these days, ever since Arnab Goswami and his clones caused me to take sanyas from the idiot box.)

Anyway, Google and the Smartphone have spelled the death of guessing games of this sort. Well, I suppose they are dead anyway cos who converses these days? You cannot play these guessing games on WhatsApp, especially not the way it used to digress and traverse the length and breadth of moviedom.

My only hope is that they will soon find a way to kill off the other guessing game as well. Like, the chap pops into your ken, asking you, "Guess who?" and you whip your smartphone, take a pic and google him.

Meanwhile, on that, I still have to squirm and mutter, "Your name is stuck in my throat like a recalcitrant bit of phlegm but I am unable to spit it out."