Plagued

 “I think, at child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.”

~Eleanor Roosevelt

When we are born, we’re already blessed with that one most useful gift. The gift that allows us to survive, to learn, to explore, and to grow at every step of life. We learn to speak, and then to ask. As kids, we want to know everything about everything. What color that is or which flower or which is that bird flying in the sky or what thing we are eating… My two year old nephew’s favorite phrase is ‘ye kya hai?’(what is this?) He wants to know what everything is, what its color is, how we operate it, when we use it and so on and so forth.

We grow up a little, and we’re sent to schools- to learn. Now school is the place where we’re supposed to be given answers to our previous questions and encouraged to ask more. Schools are supposed to quench our hunger for knowledge, and increase our appetite. But that’s the job of an ideal school.  The bitter truth lies in the following extract from one of my favorite books, The little red schoolbook:

“Instead of helping you develop as an individual, schools have to teach you the things our economic system needs you to know. They have to teach you to obey authority rather than to question things, just as the exam system encourages you to conform, not to be an individual.”

It’s not that schools are worthless. There are some teachers who really understand the correct purpose of schooling, and try, on their individual level, to meet it as much as they can, but even they are under pressure to follow the norms, and there’s little they can do about it.

Albert Einstein said, “It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.” He was probably a little too positive about that. In most cases, our curiosity starts wearing out in schools, when we’re asked to not question too much ‘out of syllabus’. And the answer we get to most of our questions is that it won’t be asked in exams, so we don’t need to know it. Sure Einstein wasn't wholly wrong. It is indeed a miracle that curiosity survives formal education for some of us. And those are the people who really do something worthwhile in their lives.

 Then we grow up some more, and curiosity fades away in most of us. Or let’s put it this way: We’re all plagued with routine. We grow up and we realize we have to do stuff, become something, earn money, follow routine, achieve targets, meet deadlines, and we suddenly feel so overburdened that whatever new things we see, we don’t really care to know what they are or what they mean and all. We just want to deal with things that concern our ‘business’, which we often confuse with ‘routine’. The point is: everything is our business. We have the right to question ourselves and the world.

 Experience teaches us lessons, curiosity enables us to have those experiences. So there is one thing I wish to remind all of us, including myself:

What we question is what we learn, the rest is just taught to us. Isn’t it?