Nov. 26: Question for 65-plus readers: What were you doing on the historic Sunday of April 11, 1954?

Don’t blush if you can’t remember, even if you are a historian.

The day’s sole claim to fame — which you could not have known at the time — is that a computer has crowned it the “most boring day” of the just-passed century that saw two world wars, the first moon landing and the birth of 24x7 news channels.

In short, nothing much happened that day except a general election in Belgium, the birth of a Turkish academic and the death, at 69, of Jack Shufflebotham who had played a few soccer matches for Oldham Athletic.

So says True Knowledge, a computer search engine in Cambridge, which fastened on the date after being fed 300 million facts about “people, places, business and events” that made news in the 20th century.

The search engine’s inventor, William Tunstall-Pedoe, said he had found that every single day of the last century had witnessed at least one noteworthy event. Except April 11, 1954.

“Nobody significant died, no major events apparently occurred, and the only person who might claim a notable birth was Turkish academic Abdullah Atalar,” he said. “So, the irony is that the day is only interesting for being exceptionally boring. Unless, that is, you are Abdullah Atalar.”

Yet “boring” is a subjective term, as Tunstall-Pedoe accepts. Wednesday’s Bihar election results may have bored a 13-year-old but not perhaps his father; and they may have been a matter of supreme indifference to Tunstall-Pedoe’s countrymen but not to most Indians.

Alas, the biggest Indian event of April 11, 1954, not only took place in complete secrecy, its outcome probably excites no one any more. Some people appear to have plotted a coup to free Yanaon (or Yanam), then a small French colony in Andhra Pradesh, and merge it with India.

Only the plot was hatched on April 11, anyway; the liberation of Yanaon took place months later.

True Knowledge, however, missed the death that night of Harry Demsky, father of actor Kirk Douglas, but not many would deem the demise of a 70-year-old businessman in waste metals a significant event.

Earlier, April 30, 1930, had been dubbed the century’s dullest day after BBC Radio declared at the 6.30pm bulletin: “There is no news.” Evidence suggests that April 11, 1954, was no kinder to the blood pressures of news editors.

The front page of Anandabazar Patrika’s April 12 edition records then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s call for world peace, a subject that even bikini-clad beauty queens struggle to liven up. ABP also reports that a state Congress session in Burdwan witnessed an appeal for introspection, and that goons broke up a concerned citizens’ meeting against goondaism at north Calcutta’s Kumartuli.

The day is so mired in obscurity that Wikipedia has no entry for April 11 — actually, none from April 9 to 13 — under “1954 in history”. Brainyhistory.com has only one for April 11: Marlene Bauer wins New Orleans Golf Open.

The year itself seems to have been rather uneventful, its highlights including Roger Bannister running the first sub-four-minute mile and Marilyn Monroe marrying Joe DiMaggio. Perhaps history was catching its breath after 1953, when the DNA code was cracked, Mount Everest was conquered, Stalin died and the McCarthy witch-hunt hearings began in America.

On either side of April 12, ABP had little of note to report. Its April 11 front page cites then chief minister B.C. Roy’s clarion call to citizens to join nation-building efforts and “Frontier Gandhi” Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan’s speech in Karachi on the importance of non-violence.

On April 13, the paper led with a report on 10-year government bonds while noting the health minister’s announcement about an increase in the average Indian life expectancy.

And so the staid fifties rolled on, snug in the knowledge that “no news is good news”, till the 1960s burst in with Vietnam, sexual liberation, the moon and the Beatles.

True Knowledge, a child of the software revolution at the turn of the century, has given its verdict but Tunstall-Pedoe stressed that this was “just a sideline” job.

The program’s true calling is to provide a better way of searching the Internet. Unlike other sites such as Google that provide a list of links, True Knowledge provides a direct answer to queries such as: “What happened on April 11, 1954?”

Asked that question today, the first event it mentioned was the birth of Atalar, who now researches atomic force microscopy and digital integrated circuit design at Bilkent University, Turkey.