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The latest episode of Kaun Banega Crorepati 18 has sent social media into a frenzy after Bengaluru-based contestant Kritagaya Nayar, an IIT Roorkee graduate, decided to walk away from the game rather than risk 12.5 lakh on a 25 lakh question about an ISRO scientist.
The twist came moments later.
When Amitabh Bachchan asked him to guess the answer after he had quit, Nayar chose โa sareeโ - and he was right.
The question was: Which item belonging to ISRO scientist Nandini Harinath is displayed at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum? The options were a pair of spectacles, a saree, a diary and a handbag.
Nayar had successfully answered the first 12 questions and reached the 25 lakh stage. But the 13th question left him uncertain enough to make the conservative choice: quit with 12.5 lakh rather than gamble his winnings on an answer he did not know with confidence.
And that is precisely what has made the episode so relatable, and so widely discussed.
An IIT degree may signal years of academic rigour, but KBC is not an examination of one's specialisation.
But behind the seemingly quirky question lies an extraordinary story.
Nandini Harinath was the deputy operations director and mission designer for India's Mars Orbiter Mission, popularly known as Mangalyaan.
On November 30, 2013, as the spacecraft performed its crucial trans-Mars injection manoeuvre and left Earth's orbit on its journey towards Mars, Harinath was in mission control wearing a red-and-blue saree.
That saree eventually travelled much farther than the spacecraft's mission planners could perhaps have imagined.
Harinath donated it to the Smithsonian in 2021. Today, it is part of the collection of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, where it is displayed in the museum's Futures in Space exhibition.
The saree was worn at a moment when India's spacecraft began its journey towards Mars. Years later, it became an artefact in one of the world's most prominent museums dedicated to aviation and space.
According to the Smithsonian, the images of women in colourful sarees inside India's Mangalyaan mission control became iconic after the mission's success, representing both India's space ambitions and the role of women in science and engineering.
And now, that same saree has become the answer to a 25 lakh question on Indian television.
There is another reason the moment has struck a chord.
Nayar is an IIT Roorkee graduate and works at Adobe. He also creates content with his wife, who is an AI researcher. Yet even with a background steeped in technology and science, the answer remained outside his certainty.
That is perhaps the enduring appeal of Kaun Banega Crorepati.
The show has a peculiar way of reminding viewers that knowledge is enormous, specialised and often deeply unpredictable.
A person can spend years studying engineering, artificial intelligence or mathematics and still encounter a question whose answer sits in an entirely different corner of the collective memory.
And when the pressure was removed, his instinct turned out to be correct.
The IITian did not know the answer. But, in the end, he knew enough to guess it.
And the saree that once sat inside an ISRO mission-control room - as India began its historic journey to Mars - has now found a new life as one of the most talked-about questions on Kaun Banega Crorepati.
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