It was June 2014. The General Elections had just ended with a massive victory for Narendra Modi. The 129 years Grand Old Congress Party had been decimated in the electoral process. I was having a discussion with my roommate who had high regards for highly educated people like former PM Dr Manmohan Singh & Home Minister P Chidambaram. He was puzzled that how come such highly educated persons having very high caliber just got decimated in the elections. To explain it, I narrated my roommate a bed-time Panchatantra story which my father used to tell me when I was a small kid. The story goes like this -
Once upon a time there were four scholars from Ujjain. After finishing their education, they were returning home through a dense forest boasting of their knowledge all the way. Suddenly, they found a decomposing carcass of a lion. The first scholar boasted that he has a divine mantra, with which he can re-assemble the skeleton of the lion. To demonstrate his skill, he chanted the mantra and within a split second, the lion skeleton was assembled. The second scholar taunted him and said that this was a child's play compared to his mantra, wherein he can give flesh & blood to the skeleton framework. To demonstrate his skill, the second scholar chanted a mantra and in no time the skeleton was converted into a dead lion with flesh, bones & skin. The third scholar laughed at the others and said that their skills was nothing compared to his mantra, which has the power to give life to any dead organism. Before the third scholar could chant his mantra, the fourth said that he was afraid of whatever they are doing. All the three scholars laughed him off and taunted him to be a coward and dull student. Out of fear, the fourth scholar climbed up a tree. As the third chanted his divine mantra, the dead lion came back to life and pounced upon the three scholars and mauled them to death.
Moral of the Story: Knowing the purpose of what you know is the Real Knowledge.
Coming back to our discussion I told my roommate that the revered personalities whom he mentioned just now are like the 3 scholars. They have high knowledge in their respective fields but lacked the ability to visualize the consequences of their actions, as the 3 scholars in the story were ignorant about the consequences of their skills. On the contrary, the present PM Mr Narendra Modi was like the fourth scholar. During the election campaign, many have thrown their jibes on his humble beginnings as a tea-seller which seems no match for a Harvard or Oxford or London School of Economics degree. But, what our PM does possess is an extraordinary degree of common sense. He knew the purpose of what he has learnt and that is the main reason for his rise from a tea-seller to the Prime Minister of India.
Most of us believe that knowledge is directly proportional to the number of books one has read. This is true provided one knows how to read. For instance, a book is written by a human being based on his experiences, perceptions and knowledge. Reading a large number of books is good as it helps us to know in vivid detail about each and every aspect of the subject. But the problem lies when we do not use our own brain and stop questioning what's written in the book. Stereotyping a subject starts when we read only the lines of a book and not read between the lines. In short when we use more of our eyes to scan each and every alphabet of the book rather than our brain to interpret each and every fact, the problem starts.
A person with bookish knowledge knows about the Gravitational Force F = (G*m1*m2)/(r*r). That person can beautifully explain about how the moon rotates around the earth due to earth's gravitational force. But such a person's knowledge runs off the rails when you ask him/her that what causes the entire milky way galaxy to rotate. This is because, 10th standard Physics do not give the concept of Supermassive Black Holes. On the other hand, a person who knows how to read between the lines, intrapolate and extrapolate facts can do this very easily. For such a person, if the earth can rotate another heavenly body like moon by sheer force of its gravity, then how much mass is needed for a central object to rotate millions of stars in Milky Way galaxy around it. Just by estimating the mass of the central object to be somewhere around millions of stars, one can easily say that there is a super massive black hole at the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy.
So, is it a folly to read more books to acquire knowledge ??? The answer is a big NO. One should read books, but the knowledge acquired should act like a base for further research. In Mahabharat, all princes including Jayadrath were pupils of Dronacharya. Jayadratha kept on reading the lines. He seldom used his innovation in archery and restricted his skills to day warfare which rendered him defenseless when Arjuna slayed him in the darkness of a solar eclipse. On the other hand, wielding bows & arrows was just a foundation course for Arjuna. He did reading between the lines and practiced archery in all possible permutations & combinations like shooting in darkness, shooting with left hand (Sabyasachi - The Ambidextrous) etc. This made Arjuna the greatest archer of all times. Hence, to sum up, the idea is to read voraciously; but smartly with more use of brain and less of eyes.
No comments:
Post a Comment