A few days ago, as I was playing Manic Monday by Bangles on YouTube, I idly looked at the suggestions my search had turned up on the right side of the screen. Amidst links to the group’s other hits, Walk Like An Egyptian and Eternal Flame, there was one on how to make ‘ragi mudde’, a rustic delicacy from Karnataka.

Not since Deve Gowda became prime minister and famously declared this humble dish of millets was his staple diet have I really thought about ragi mudde – and even then, not much. So how it landed up in my YouTube search for a Western pop hit is quite a mystery.

As I understand it, search works through a combination of terms most frequently keyed in by you or me on our computers and other things the rest of the world is obsessed with. Look at the auto suggestions your computer throws up - some are quite funny and some are unsettling.

Let’s take the 5 Ws of journalism, for instance. Type in ‘when’ into Google, and my machine unfailingly suggests ‘when will I die’ after ‘when is mother’s day’. I’m curious about many things, but not about my own mortality. Once in a while, morbid quizzes and apps about ‘when/how will you die’ pop up in my virtual world. One of them focused on whether you would meet your end for a noble cause or not!

Death is not a suggestion when you type in ‘How’, though! The suggestions are full of life, literally – ‘how to kiss’ and ‘how to get pregnant’ are the first two.

‘Who’ turns up, among other proposals, the philosophical ‘who am I’. ‘Why’ – you guessed it – ‘why this kolaveri di’ and further down, ‘why are manhole covers round’. Why indeed? I probed deeper and discovered it was a question made famous by Microsoft as a job interview query.

‘What’ yields ‘what is love’, a question to which no amount of pondering might offer a satisfactory answer, so you can listen to the many songs which seek to explore that emotion or give up and progress to more productive tasks, like writing a blog post.