When ABC becomes a Cab

Category: Articles/Opinion
Written by: Rabia Sameem (on February 20, 2008 - 06:34 AM)

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The cycle of learning has always been a fascinating concept for me….how does one learn? What makes understanding such an adrenaline rush? How is the brain able to hold such gigas and teras of information?.....if you are thinking this is going to be a scientific analysis of learning filled with facts and figures, then you are thinking quite wrong unless you envisage me as an Einstein and count my postulations as the foreword in the bible of Science.

Now what I am about to say is such a cliché but hey so is singing “Happy Birthday”…Well Newton discovered gravity because of apple falling and that too when he had bunked school. Galileo engrossed in the rhythmic movement of a chandelier during a church service discovered the periodicity of a pendulum. Archimedes ‘Eureka!’ hit him when he was relaxing in his bath….Likewise to some extent I agree with what some of the Voodoo Tees announce so proudly: “I was born intelligent but education ruined me”.

Call me ‘flipped’ but the quote has actually started to make some odd sense to me….but don’t take me wrong either, I loved going to school and attend all my classes. However looking back I realize that as you climb the ladder of standards your ability to wonder starts getting somewhat stringent. It is not because your mind starts to close or collapse or anything but it is that your imagination begins converging and becomes more focused. As our mind opens up to logic and understanding we tend to think more and more on the lines of what we are studying, more or less staying within the confines of our subjects or jobs. What I realized is that when you are younger there are a thousand things you think of and want to know more about….since you are not aware of the terms ‘failure’ and ‘reality checks’ you are not afraid to dream.

When you are a kid there are a thousand things you want to be when you grow up, a scientist, an artist, a musician, an architect, an archeologist, a model, a spy etcetra and never once does it cross your mind that you may never be able to hang on with where your thoughts are flying to. But this article is most definitely not about fading dreams either… The point is that when you want to reach out for something, your mind is quick to pick up anything remotely related to something you love. Learning is not a thought out, well planned process…it’s a random, spontaneous moment…a moment of acknowledgement, a moment of enlightenment….a moment of exultation and brief euphoria….a flash in time when the haphazard bits and pieces in your brain, instigated by some happening or event, suddenly become a clear picture….from chaos emerges order!!

I had a good fortune to read this book called ‘Siddharta” by an award winning writer Herman Hesse and amid the very many thought provoking ideas and philosophies this one idea literally made me jump of joy, for it so plainly mentioned what I always wanted to convey to others but never really knew what it was that I wanted to say. The idea was that there are many things you can teach and learn from others but it is wisdom that is non transferable….it comes from experience and self delving. You can never take from other what you cannot feel within yourself…but you keep on trying and one day wisdom comes to you. Every day we pass our life by raw pieces of information stick on to us.

We keep on storing the things we hear, the scenes we see, the words we read in our mind’s database unless of course we purge all, supposedly irrelevant things from our brain. You never know when the most useless bit of thing would strike a chord. I haven’t lived long enough to be called the wise woman of the world (Yeah I’m big on tongue twisters) but whatever life I have lived has taught me one very big lesson…’you never know enough’…so ok if this isn’t an out of this world declaration but it is true that you never know when something you have firm belief in would suddenly turn out to be the longest mirage of your life or when a disarrayed thought would start seeming the most logical thing. There may be a rule which the universe is following but it is not one which you can understand in a single lifetime….and if you want to live every moment of it then you need to become one big brain with eyes all around (Now that creates one disgusting picture).

I love mathematics and wish it was all about math (somehow it is too) but there are a hundred and one things which are zapping past me and they are so not related to the pure language…So what all this long ranting sums up to is that, every scene sings a different tune and every birds tells a different story (Maybe I just confused the metaphors a bit, but they make sense nonetheless…don’t they?) and so every passing moment teaches us something new, provided we do not crystallize our thoughts and notions such that there may never be a new moment of where you suddenly go ‘Voila!’

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