Last week I met a baby wallaroo. If you, like me, have above average wildlife trivia, it is possible you are thinking “the what now?”. Perhaps you have truly great wildlife trivia and already knew that it is not a cross between a kangaroo and a wallaby and it’s a completely different species of marsupial in that island kingdom. Well, good for you. I certainly didn’t. It’s left me thinking somewhat cheerfully about my ignorance. It’s nice to not know things.

When I was in school, I used to write letters to my best friend during summer holidays. One year she complained gently about my covering the blue aerogram from end to end with random pop trivia that I had read. “I want to know about what’s going on in your life,” she said. I was befuddled by this demand. No one had told me that the ice-breaker trivia can’t become the whole meal. All this to say I thoroughly enjoyed knowing random things. In K.R. Meera’s newest book Ellavidha Pranayavum (Every Kind of Love), the protagonist Kapila is constantly startling people she meets with the things she knows. Most people are bemused, some people are impressed but only the love interest really enjoys it. Which, if you love your K.R. Meera book boyfriends, is a IYKYK (If You Know You Know) moment. I laughed each time it happened because Kapila actually knows things and it’s not my magpie-acquisition of shiny objects but still, I am familiar with that particular dynamic.

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Lately though that dynamic has changed and not necessarily in a bad way. I am in a new city and I am back in university—two circumstances which will constantly remind you that you don’t know enough but you are here to learn. I am constantly asking my next-door neighbour where to buy vegetables or donate old clothes or what to do on festival days. At university, I have grades and reading lists. All this to say, I am not in a jaded or smug state about what I know. Even so, I was surprised to meet that baby wallaroo. I looked at that fluffy creature and thought to myself, “where have you been all my life, joey?” What else do I not know that I don’t know?”

With the internet it’s easy to feel like we know everything about everything that’s going on in the world. Except that we do not, right? For instance, if you decided this is the year that you are just going to “unfollow” Indian and American politics, doesn’t a kind of space open up? The kind of decluttered space that KonMari enthusiasts would appreciate. Or if this is the year, you decide to be offline more? Being extremely online is likely to strangely narrow your range of references. Not that we needed the internet to have a narrow set of references. It’s impressive how long being knowledgeable about America has been the norm and how long being knowledgeable about the state of any other country has made you seem in pursuit of obscure trivia.

The 1991 Malayalam comedy Sandesham’s classic line “Polandine pattioraksharam mindaruthu (don’t you dare say a word about Poland)” depended on the viewer finding two brothers knowledgeable and enraged about the inner workings of Polish politics hilarious.

I remember an interview with Nobel laureates Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo when they talked about the limitations of our educational system which doesn’t build confidence, so focused as it is on testing us on trivia. I think the rhetorical example that they used back then was quizzing school kids about the height of Mount Everest. I was thinking about that example recently. What else do we learn in school about Nepal apart from it being the home of one astonishing mountain that your neighbour is currently training to climb?

Our problem is not just being immersed in trivia produced in one or two countries. It is that the trivia convinces us that the world is like this only. For instance, we think that domestic life is ordered in similar ways everywhere in the world. Nothing in Indian or American (or Korean) media would teach you otherwise. Recently, I watched a short video by a Chinese video creator who interviewed men on the street about marrying girls who will do housework. In response after response, the men interviewed made it clear that where they live, men do the housework. I watched it again. Where was this? Sichuan in south-western China, apparently. And here was a man in the street video saying, “What kind of a man am I if I let my wife do the housework?” For the quickest round of fact-checking, I went to the comments and it was full of men and women from Sichuan swearing it was true. One commenter said, “My dad, uncle and grandpa. They definitely take care of everything.”

Not knowing anything about China (imagine!) I tried to look it up a bit. Most articles I found said that Chinese women bear the familiar, disproportionate domestic load. Surveys say so. A 2019 Chinese reality show even had that Snakes on a Plane kind of title: Men Who Do Housework. Yet, there were other small internet artefacts talking about Sichuan’s men and their tradition of doing housework. Intrigued, I went back to that original video. The comment section had grown and grown. A good chunk of the now 5,000 comments were just people asking to move to Sichuan or to import men from Sichuan. All just saying aloud, “where have you been all my life, Sichuan?

Nisha Susan is the author of The Women Who Forgot To Invent Facebook And Other Stories. She posts @chasingiamb.