The Jalsa and Jilpa Snack edition

With the wife and assorted ladies deciding to engage in large-scale transfer of hard-earned wealth to garment merchants in T-Nagar over the weekend, I did what seemed like the most natural thing to do - watch all episodes of Big Bang Theory. I enjoyed the geeky, often-science-centric humour and was pleasantly surprised that a mainstream TV show could actually cash-in on Nerdvana and Geekdom, and still be reasonably accurate. I mean, Hollywood has had a rather dark history of not paying enough attention to detail when it comes to science and technology, at least in mainstream movies and TV-shows. C++ code to hack into alien OS, any one? Or Visual Basic GUI interfaces on CSI? Cringeworthy stuff, mostly. So I rather enjoyed the seemingly better attention to detail that BBT offered.

That was of course till I actually paid a little more attention (than was necessary) to Dr. Rajesh Koothrapalli, the stereotypical Indian Phd types who cannot exercise his vocal cords when in proximity to the other sex. That caricature, while generally enjoyable, has way too many flaws that, in the Indian geek world, would be considered Ramayan FAIL. Let’s list the inconsistencies, shall we:

1. Despite possessing a name that clearly sounds like he is from Andhra Pradesh (Palli in Telugu means “Village”), Rajesh’ parents appear to be North Indian. They even attempt to hook him up with a “Lalita Gupta”, again, a cultural faux pas. Indian parents typically do not hook up people with family names that seem to be in two different languages (Sanskrit and Telugu)
2. When Rajesh quotes Leviticus to induce feelings of guilt in Howard Wolowitz when he is about to enjoy Moo Shu Pork, Howard retorts with - “Do I quote the Bhagavadgita when you dig into a cheeseburger?”. Again, geekery fail. The Gita is not the religious text that imposes sanctions on cow slaughter. That would be the Manu Smriti.

So, well..ok, BBT gets the Indian caricature slightly wrong, but in the Geek world, slightly wrong just does not cut it.

But wait, did I just watch a TV-show and point out small errors in areas of my expertise (being Indian) while possibly ignoring several other errors in areas that I only possess second-hand knowledge (Jews, String Theory and Neuroscience)?

So perhaps, BBT is riddled with errors all over the place, and my faulty geek-filter failed to detect them. Perhaps the internet is crawling with “BBT inconsistency compendium” type sites, and I just don’t know about them.

Damn.

But wait, the whole point about being a geek was to be hopeless obsessed about trivialities like a TV show to the point where one actually spends hours finding out inconsistencies and documents them on the internet.

So yeah.