Humble Pie

I am old enough to confidently state that I won quite a few high school quizzes by sheer dint of reading up all the newspapers of the day and also catching up on the occasional article from the encyclopedia. Yes, I belong to the pre-Wikipedia, pre-Google era where information was not necessarily available at my fingertips, and I actually had to go to a library to pull out these books and read them.

What this meant was that I enjoyed a distinct advantage and an edge over people who didn’t quite read up as much as I did. I mean, I studied in a boys’ high school and if knowledge would give me an edge over other testosterone-filled young teenagers, I grabbed it with both hands and made the most of it.

What this also meant was that this ended up with me having an unnecessarily ‘superior sense of confidence’ in stating dubious facts and figures with so much confidence that the people hearing them believed them to be true. Well, at least those that weren’t too obviously false. Again, this was something that I used to my advantage on more than quite a few occasions to win an argument or get away from a sticky situation.

However, times changed, the opening up of the Indian markets by the Govt and the influx of high speed broadband internet meant that Indians woke up to using Google and Wikipedia to do their research. And what’s more, the smartphone revolution sweeping the country with decent 3G connectivity all over meant that information was all the more closer to everybody. This situation immediately put people like me, who were used to winning an argument with strategically placed facts and figures, in a tight spot. We now actually needed to know our stuff before we blurted it out at random occasions.

As the law of averages caught up with me, there have been numerous occasions when I have been made to eat humble pie when my wife or sis-in-law (these are the two principal antagonists in my story) immediately use Google to verify any and every random statement I make. And what’s worse, these incidents become the fodder for family gatherings where they use them to have good laughs with my cousins and others. But then, the way I look at it, if I can make somebody laugh, then eating humble pie is worth it. Don’t you agree?

I am sure all of you have also had to eat ‘humble pie’ on more than a few occasions in your life. Go on, use the comments section and share some of these stories with us.

——————-

This post has been written for Project 365: A post a day where the intention is to publish at least one post a day based on the prompts provided. Today’s prompt was to write a post about when I had found out that I was mistaken and made to eat humble pie. As the post suggests there have been way too many occasions of this happening.