Lately, I came across an article where a survey revealed, that more than half of the global youth population has turned itself away from reading newspapers/ watching news, because they aspire to sprint up the ladder of competition and not climb each rung at a measured pace; and Indian students also account for multiple digits in the same report. That’s quite dismaying to know that youngsters, who are supposed to sensitize themselves about the ongoing events of their surroundings, are demonstrating a limited or rather, an inadequate interest towards obtaining knowledge.
Most of us could be university toppers too, but we shouldn’t forget that our universities gift us with systematic syllabus copy, comprising of distribution & weightage of marks for different topics and even most expected questions too, in some cases. But life never provides us with any prescribed blueprint as such. In fact, every scenario in life comes with an unprecedented intimation and every incident weighs of equal importance. Therefore, we need to approach an unpredictable life by accommodating ourselves with enormous amount of knowledge and basic awareness.
But the question arises as to how to develop basic awareness and enhance general knowledge? Well, an infant learns to cry to express its hunger, without anybody teaching it to cry to get food, because food serves as a necessity for survival. But on the other hand, when it comes to learning a new word, even perhaps an alphabet, it needs to be taught to pronounce the letter in a particular tone, by attaching an object to it. E.g: – A for Apple!
Similarly, at the grass-root level, kids need to be taught to read. It could be anything – a novel/ a comic/ a story book or even a playbook. But cultivating a reading habit in kids is a parent/guardian/teacher’s primary responsibility.
Recently I read an article which said that these days, the first word which a child utters is that of the ‘GOOGLE’ & not ‘Mumma/Pappa’! Thus, it is my sincere appeal to parents to keep your phones at bay, whenever not required, especially when you’re around your kids, because it isn’t any untrue that the kids mimic their ‘elders at home, and teachers in school’. Teach your kids, the language to speak, and not emojis to tweet!
Once, they adapt themselves to the habit of reading from an early age itself, they continue the legacy of reading, automatically thereafter.
A major difference between a ‘hobby’ & a ‘habit’ is just this – a hobby is an activity undertaken during leisure hours, and a habit is something which we do on a daily basis. Therefore, I strongly insist every student to include ‘reading as a habit’ in your day-to-day schedule, in addition to & irrespective of, your hobbies.
Next, we come to students who belong to the phase where they need not be spoon-fed when it comes to reading, but are just a little lethargic and turn a blind-eye towards reading newspapers or watching news in television. They are more often found entangled in the ‘social-media epidemic’, busy making their presence felt; through posts, reels, Q&A’s etc. This set of students know ‘how to read’ and ‘what to read’ but just ‘Don’t read’!! To such ones, here’s a suggestion being shout-out, to grab the news, current affairs and basic knowledge; because it is the only thing that will save you from going haywire in your respective futures.
Most of us follow a ‘byheart approach’ memorizing word-to-word and line-by-line, instead of understanding the concepts. And because a human brain is programmed to confuse us when two things look or sound similar, we get perplexed when it comes to applying our knowledge in real world. Therefore, it is the basic awareness that’d come in handy during such times.
Let’s understand this with an example – a class topper who scored nothing less than an ‘out of out’ in every subject, in every test and exam, was once sent to a market to get some milk and few onions. Now, it was a huge task for him, because it turned out to be the very first time in his life that he stepped into a crowded market, which was at a direction exactly opposite to his college, and in between his college and home.
Leave aside crowded market, he was never even aware of a market being present in the vicinity of his residence, for years together, because he was used to walking straight from home to school and school to home, as though devoid of his neck’s flexible mobility altogether! After a while, he finally found a shop having milk and onions both.
Though he was his college topper, he couldn’t recall his ‘byhearted units of measurement chapter’ properly infront of the shopkeeper and mixed up saying – ‘Please give me a litre of onions and a kilogram of milk!’ and when the shopkeeper tried to correct his byhearted knowledge through his learned wisdom, the student mocked at him saying he was a mere shopkeeper and lacked correct knowledge. This is the outcome of a bookish knowledge, devoid of general awareness.
Let’s take another case where a student followed a proper approach in her studies and studied all the concepts by properly understanding them as per their chronologies and timelines and never followed the ‘byheart method’. But she lacked newspaper reading and was never familiar to watching news.
All of a sudden, her very expensive wrist-watch gets stolen. And she is not aware of the rules & regulations or ‘laws of the land’ because she was not a law graduate, and hence hadn’t studied them in her books. The only available options infront of her would be either to call up her lawyer friend and seek advice on how to proceed or walk upto the nearby police station and file a complaint against the thief, thereby running short of time and energy.
But, if only had she updated herself with the latest ongoing news, would she have had known about the ‘E-complaint option’ through which she could have lodged a complaint against the thief online; saving some time, energy, and also fastening the process of tracking the robber, helping her trace her stolen watch.
Very often, ‘a neglected stone becomes a corner-stone’. Thus, basic awareness should never be neglected or ignored because an awareness of the surrounding is not for the sights, but to get a new set of eyes & it is not about – ‘to move’ but all about ‘being moved’!
What next?? instilling basic awareness? – Absolutely Yes!!
But how to begin? And how to go about??
- Use a kid-glove approach: begin by reading a paragraph, slowly jump to reading a page, followed by reading the chapter, keep it going, and read many more chapters, and then, reach up to reading one entire book.
- Know the News through Newspapers: because you’d have already acquainted yourself with reading a complete book before, a glance over the newspaper wouldn’t in any way become any herculean to you. You can best assure yourself with that. But yes, newspaper reading should be made a compulsion in one’s life, to keep yourself at par with the ‘fast moving world’ and even ‘ghastly competing universe’.
There are two categories of people who read newspapers differently. The first category people reflect our parents and elders at home, who put up their glasses and read newspapers, holding the pages of the newspapers wide open, with the pages just capable enough to fit in both the palms of their hands, every morning. They ‘READ’ just to keep an eye on the happenings of their surroundings.
Whereas, the second category of people comprise of those aspirants who are busy preparing for different competitive exams, which include GK as a part of their syllabus. They don’t read a newspaper, rather they ‘STUDY’ them!
So, you decide as to which category do you best suit for. But in either of the two, you ought to be reading newspapers though!
- Switch on your T.V: just incase had you missed a day or two’s newspaper reading, a news channel may perhaps bridge in the gap by keeping you informed about the ongoings of our surroundings.
- Instant news applications: There are many news apps available in play-store which contribute towards keeping us informed about the ‘breaking news’ in brief, in the form of one-liners. But care should be taken to not to deviate towards the common denominator of ‘clickbait captions’ and/or ‘sensationalized thumbnails! Hence, we need to learn to navigate our lives amid these digital genies.
Ultimately, ‘knowledge is an infinite sphere, of which, the Centre is everywhere, and the circumference, nowhere!’
Thus, let us all, as “knitters of the society, knit, little ornaments of general knowledge, and pearls of basic awareness, by supervising ourselves and our intelligence”.
It isn’t sufficient to excel in Euler’s equations or Maxwell’s laws or Darwin’s theories or Pythagoras theorems in contemporary world, but a collaborative intelligence of textbook knowledge integrated with general knowledge alone will help you to strike a stellar performance in your lives, and will efficiently prepare you to face and ace the challenges in life. It’s only when we update, upgrade and integrate our knowledge and skills, that we escalate our wisdom and save ourselves from feeling alienated, especially when we encounter such and such situations in our lives.
By: ASHLESHA.SHIVANAND.BHALARE
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