I was having a look at the search patterns from India for the last 30 days on Google Trends. Amongst the top searches, ‘songs’ took the first place with a score of 100 followed by Google at 75. Games and Yahoo at 65 each. Videos at 65 and IPL at 60.

In the rising searches analysis (search subjects that registered the highest growth last month) ‘ipl20′ led the tally with a score of +4900%. The second and third positions were also occupied by keywords around Indian Premier League (IPL). At the 4th and 5th position you find ‘pnr status’ and ‘indian railways’.

Someone not familiar with Indian culture will find ‘songs’ at the first place somewhat intriguing. But those of you are familiar with the fact that the Indian culture is oral rather than visual will not be surprised. To those of you who dismiss the idea that Indian medicine, maths, philosophy, music, even architecture was transmitted orally for thousands of years as lost tradition, I’d say, think again: even today, we continue to be an oral culture. Every single imported brand of cars had to get its horn recalibrated and so was every single TV brand’s speaker(Trinitron was a failure till they realised this fact!), every single political slogan is a rhyme…

Which brings me to the really intriguing fact…

That in the rising search analysis the political parties or any politician or the Prime Ministerial aspirants did not figure in the top 10 rising search results. As mentioned earlier, the top result ‘ipl20’ had a score of +4900% growth while the 10th result ‘vodafone’ was at +40%.

In a general elections month, with peak campaigning in the world’s largest democracy, the difference in the interest levels for cricket versus elections reflects the state of Indian society.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 14th, 2009 at 7:50 am and is filed under Insight. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.