I thought I had written about this already sometime ago, but I can’t seem to find it. Anyways.
When we were in class 6, we were taught to write essays in Hindi. “Taught to write” is a loose phrase there, for we were just given two essays and asked to mug them up. One was on “gaay” (cow) and the other was on “daakiya” (postman). The teacher had reliably informed us that while the exam would have a question requiring us to write an essay, the topic would be either “gaay” or “daakiya”. And it was a given that mugging up the given essay and spitting it out would get full credit.
To my credit (I used to be topper types, you remember?), I mugged up both. This girl who was at my van stop didn’t. She only mugged up “gaay” since that seemed to be the more likely to appear in the exam. Another girl, two years our senior, who had been through this routine, consoled her saying that if the question is for “daakiya”, she can still write about “gaay”, and she would get at least 2 out of 5 marks.
As it happened, the exam required us to write a question on daakiya. The girl in my van stop wrote an essay on gaay. And got 0 for it.
This brings me to a fairly common practice, at least in India, of coming up with a set of answers and spouting them out irrespective of what the question is. And I call this the “cow-postman paradigm” based on the above anecdote.
A popular example of the cow-postman paradigm can be seen at beauty contests, where the beauty queens spout inanities in order to show off their “nobility” and show themselves as being “worthy ambassadors” of the Miss Whatever project. The most famous example of this probably is Priyanka Chopra, who answered “Mother Teresa” when asked who is the “living woman she most admires” (Mother Teresa had died two years before Priyanka Chopra became Miss World).
Politicians and PR agents are also masters of the Cow-Postman paradigm. Irrespective of what interviewers ask, they simply spout their prepared lines in the hope that it will sometimes answer the question. In case the interviewer decides to be snarky, this can be made fun of. In most cases, the “leaders” get away with it.
It is possibly these instances of “getting away with it” (or even “benefitting from it”) that results in propagating the Cow-Postman paradigm. Maybe it is a worthy effort of journalists, possibly at listicle-based publications, to make note of and make a list of such famous cow-postman instances. That’s the only way we can cure it!