Learner for life

A few years back I was at home during a vacation showing my new ‘smart phone’ to my dad and brother. While I was walking them through the new features of the phone, my grandpa, who was in his early nineties came across and listened to me. I was quite surprised to see him more curious and way more inquisitive than my dad and brother put together! He in fact showed a lot of interest in how modern day technology helps in connecting people and how smart phones are meant to change the way we live.

This was not the first time he asked me questions about what’s happening in the world around and expressed interest about latest happenings. I distinctly remember the days in the past when a shiny silver-black radio, the size of a shoe box, which used to come to life everyday afternoon exactly a few seconds before 1 o’clock. That was when my grandpa switched the radio on to listen to the news broadcast of the day in Malayalam from the only radio station available then, All India Radio or better known as Akasha Vani.

News from radio was not the only source for him. He used to interact quite frequently with the regulars he met during his routine morning walk. The daily visits to church and the discussions with the clergy as well as folks there added to the world of information around him. This was well supported by a detailed reading of one of the well-known newspapers in Malayalam named ‘Deepika’. It was so detailed an activity that there will be hardly a word left unread by the time he puts the paper down.

He was indeed a scholar with all these sources feeding him valuable information day-in day-out, though with his father’s untimely demise, he had to stop his formal education with ‘4^th Form’ which, in the pre-independence era of 1920s, was equal to high school today. What classified him was his perpetual passion to know what’s new in the world every day and can be rightly called a ‘learner for life’!

I consider myself lucky enough to have lived during his lifetime to see such an undying spirit exhibited by a man who went on to cross the magical number of 100 years in a lifetime. It is a lesson for many of us who tend to be contended with the formal bit of learning we have in our early stages of life. After this we spend time in ‘earning’ and quite naturally ‘learning’ takes a back seat. With the advent of social media though there are enough and more that comes to us even without being asked, the question that is relevant today is how much of that constitute ‘real learning’?

While our parent’s generation is relatively lucky, I’m quite sure that we and our next generation are not that fortunate to avoid the clutches of this social media driven ‘learning’. The very nature of this sort of learning provides less of valuable insights and more of junk which adds no substantial benefit to our grey matter that includes the regions of the brain involved in memory, speech, decision making and self-control among other vital functions.

While I pen this down, I’m well aware of the fact that I’m no exception to the sharpened claws of social media learning. Having said that I whole-heartedly appreciate my dear ones for alerting me of this social media evil that is spreading its wings around me that literally makes me learn less every day. I definitely need to trace my steps back to the days of my grandpa who taught me with his life the value of real learning. Without this, all of my education how much ever great that be, will be totally futile.

Here is an honest appeal to each one of you to reflect upon yourself and your ways of real and useful learning. Ask yourself, when was the last time you really learned something new that truly added value to your grey matter. How many of us can really say that our time spent in the few hours that we are awake every day is effectively spend in learning and not just feeding junk to our brains?

Stop. Introspect. Change.

God bless!