It is time for us to admit that at least a few of us (including yours truly) enjoy watching game shows on television but do put up an air of contempt about them in polite company. The thrill is vicarious, like when that guy won the crore rupees booty in Kaun Banega Crorepati a couple of years back. But the thrill also is majorly accompanied by envy when one brooded, “Why didn’t I do that?” This was inescapable.

This is true of most game shows, and there is at least one exception. In my mind the show “Jeopardy!” hosted by the suave Alex Trebek is one such show. As you watched the show and as the winner was announced at the end, one hardly ever went, “Why didn’t I go there?” It was, many times, “I am glad I am not up there!”

I am not trying to make it sound very high-brow, but the pace of the game and some idiosyncrasies made it very interesting for me, when I was glued to it every weekday for half hour in the evening. I can claim millions of dollars won on this show slouching on my couch, yet, I did not relish the thought of actually getting into the battle.  The topics were wide ranging – physics, chemistry, literature, history, arts and trivia too – and the show has the twist of giving the answers in the form of a question. This tripped many a contestants unless one was extremely conscious of it in the heat of the moment.

I remember one specific instance that attested to the class of the show: a contestant gave the answer (actually the question!) for ALCOA as Aluminium Corporation of America and it was passed. But, later on in that show, it was pointed out as the answer is a proper noun it should have been “Aluminum” instead of “Aluminium”, and the correction was effected in all fairness to the other contestants. I was duly impressed.

But why suddenly this trip down memory lane? In a recent article in the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/08/science/08tier.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Cognitive+Dissonance&st=nyt&oref=slogin another game show was mentioned in the context of misleading interpretations of results from some experiments by psychologists done over the past five decades or so for tracing the evolution of what is called “cognitive dissonance”. This article pointed to the genesis to a game show popular in the US before my time there, “Let’s Make a Deal”. It piqued my interest as I vaguely recalled a brief one page article in the Sunday supplement Parade by Marilyn Von Savant in the late eighties or even 1990 (just before I left the US for good) that mentioned the fallacy. I had forgotten the details of the argument. Just out of curiosity I googled “Parade”, “Monty Hall” and “Marilyn Von Savant” (her name I had forgotten but I remembered that she was the wife of the artificial heart valve inventor, Robert Jarvic – what a tortuous path I took!). After reading through http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_hall_problem and

http://math.ucsd.edu/~crypto/Monty/montybg.html, now I can claim a certain level of familiarity with the math behind one of the features of the show (the one that got the ratings high for it). This is nothing to sneeze at as more than fifty years of experimental research are coming under a cloud, all due to the eponymous “Monty Hall problem”. I feel good about this and also about game shows.  But, I do not expect a “KBC problem” to prop up anytime soon!

This indeed is the reason I am blogging on game shows today. I think Indian TV is in the early stages of evolution with respect to game shows. The producers are vying with each other to feed the viewing public items stacked up amongst the lower common denominators. When will they climb the ladder and bring shows like “Jeopardy!”? I am waiting. I can then watch all the game shows without putting on an act.

Raghuram Ekambaram