I still can’t decide whether knowledge kills fear or creates it. Which is awkward, because “Knowledge kills fear” is such a confident line. The kind you can end a TED Talk with and walk off smiling. BHAY, the paranormal series on MX Player, starts with that promise, only later to flip it neatly at the end: Knowledge creates fear. Similar words. Different destination. Context, as always, is the troublemaker.
Maybe the problem isn’t fear. Maybe it’s knowledge itself.
We live in an age where information is abundant, free, instant, and dangerously mistaken for wisdom. We scroll and feel informed and then we Google and feel powerful. Somewhere along the way, knowledge and information merged into one bloated idea, like a WhatsApp forward that started harmlessly and refuses to die.
There was a time when we believed what was written and what the elders said. Parents. Teachers. Textbooks. If something was printed in a book or, better still, attributed to the Supreme Court, it was final. No footnotes. No edits and no updates. Truth arrived neatly bound. No one bothered to “verify” it because there was nothing to verify against.
Today, authority has been outsourced to search engines and AI, with a permanent disclaimer attached: Don’t believe everything you read on the internet, which is ironic, because we do. We know that Vande Mataram was not written because of a cricket match decades ago. Yet someone once forwarded that explanation with great confidence and a tricolour emoji. And it lived long enough to confuse at least one generation.
Back then, the minority was still a minority, like sugar in tea or salt in biryani. Present, important, but not overpowering the taste. Maybe the coals of ideology hadn’t heated up enough to drown out everyday warmth. Festivals were shared. Participation was natural. Belonging was assumed. Today, much of that warmth feels buried under selective outrage, nightly debates, and algorithms that thrive on friction.
And speaking of buried things, nostalgia gets easily triggered.
Recently, I felt relieved. Not because of what I remembered, but because I remembered at all. A small sign that dementia is still at a safe distance. Unlike politicians, who mysteriously develop memory loss the moment election results are announced and recover fully when the next election is declared. That isn’t satire. That’s data.
I turned 62 recently and went to watch Patte Khool Gaye at St. Andrews Auditorium. The play was billed as a comedy, though most of the jokes had aged faster than the audience, and the writer had not heard of updates. There, I ran into a batchmate. We exchanged unimaginable warmth, whereas 38 years ago, we barely acknowledged each other on campus. Time breeds courtesy, especially when there is nothing left to fight for.
Oh, I celebrate WhatsApp, the single redeeming feature of social media. Birthday wishes poured in. Women who were quietly admired in school but never dared approach in that not-so-open era reappeared with emojis and fond memories. A sudden call, four decades later, rewound mind and body—no medical approval required. Old friendships, I realised, are therapeutic, unlike marriage. Someone once said: Going on vacation with your spouse isn’t a holiday, it’s just a change of location.
That same evening, I caught Rangeeli Ruchi on FM, taking the listeners through 25 years of Indian television. Nostalgia took complete control. I recalled the Ramayana and the Mahabharat, shows that left empty streets and created a curfew-like silence that even COVID struggled to match. Dekh Bhai Dekh, Hum Paanch, Antakshari, Buniyaad. Add Wimbledon, FIFA, VHS rentals of a specific movie genre, rewinding tapes with pencils, and Sholay LPs scratched from overuse. We remembered dialogues better than textbooks.
And then—Skylab.
Ah, Skylab. The probability of it falling on the exact three-by-three-foot space occupied by you was laughably low. Yet everyone walked craning their necks skyward, convinced they could duck it. Knowledge? Fear? Or imagination sprinting ahead of statistics? KK Nayyar went to the bank with his silly script, “Dada, Skylab Girne ko hai.” Today, he’d been censored and banned, fact-checked, trolled, and cancelled before reaching the counter.
Who remembers Adrak Ke Panje or Bakra Kiston Pe? Or the first solar eclipse that truly shook public imagination. That day, mythology, medicine, science, and darkness all arrived together. Knowledge was available. Fear was optional. Most people chose both.
So why does nostalgia insist life was better then? Was it really? Or was ambiguity not marketed as truth yet?
Today, everything is ambiguous. Everything is equally probable. Every claim has a counter-claim, a counter-expert, and a counter-hashtag. So we no longer search for truth. We search for comfort. For validation. For what fits what we already believe. And algorithms happily oblige.
Which brings me back to where I started.
Knowledge does not always kill fear.
It does not always create it either.
Increasingly, it does something worse.
Knowledge hides truth under an overload of information.
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