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By:

Anil D. Salve

21 March 2026 at 8:11:09 pm

A Drought of Wisdom in an Ocean of Information

We live in an age where information is everywhere. With a single click, we can access news from across the world, thousands of opinions, countless videos and endless claims. Knowledge has never been so accessible. Yet, in this overwhelming flow of information, something increasingly scarce is discernment-the ability to distinguish what deserves our belief from what deserves our doubt. Information and knowledge are not the same. Reading, watching or hearing something does not automatically...

A Drought of Wisdom in an Ocean of Information

We live in an age where information is everywhere. With a single click, we can access news from across the world, thousands of opinions, countless videos and endless claims. Knowledge has never been so accessible. Yet, in this overwhelming flow of information, something increasingly scarce is discernment-the ability to distinguish what deserves our belief from what deserves our doubt. Information and knowledge are not the same. Reading, watching or hearing something does not automatically make it true. We need the ability to verify information, understand its context, recognise its purpose and only then form an opinion. In the digital age, this ability has become one of the most important forms of wisdom. Social media has transformed the way information travels. WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and other platforms have made communication faster, wider and more accessible. But the same speed that connects society can also overwhelm it. Information often reaches us before facts do. A headline is read before the full story. A short video is watched without knowing what happened before or after it. A photograph is circulated without its original context. A message arrives with the familiar words, “Forwarded as received,” and within minutes it may reach thousands of people. By the time the truth catches up, the rumour may already have done its work. The problem becomes even more serious when misinformation is deliberately created and circulated. Rumours may be planted not merely to mislead individuals but to divert public attention from an important issue, create suspicion, damage someone's reputation or push society towards a particular narrative. A distraction does not always need to be completely false. Sometimes a small piece of truth is mixed with exaggeration, selective facts or emotional language. The result can be more powerful than an outright lie because it appears believable. This is how narratives are manufactured. Social media platforms can become powerful tools in this process. A repeated claim begins to look familiar, and familiarity is often mistaken for truth. A provocative post attracts attention. Thousands of reactions create the impression that “everyone” believes it. One emotional video triggers another, comments intensify the mood, and before facts have an opportunity to speak, public sentiment may have already shifted. This is where mob psychology enters the picture. A society can move from calm to anger, suspicion to trust, or optimism to fear with surprising speed. People who would ordinarily think carefully may react differently when they see thousands of others expressing outrage, fear or hostility. The individual begins to follow the crowd, and the crowd begins to reinforce the individual. The danger is not limited to negative emotions. The same mechanism can also be used positively-to mobilise people for social causes, humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, public awareness and community action. Technology itself is neither wise nor foolish. Its impact depends on how information is created, amplified and consumed. The greatest danger, therefore, is not that we have too much information. It is that we may lose the habit of thinking while consuming it. We are increasingly becoming consumers of information rather than creators of thought. Everyone has access to information today, but access does not necessarily mean understanding. The boundaries between a rumour and a report, an opinion and a fact, popularity and truth are becoming increasingly blurred. A post does not become true because thousands of people have liked it. A video does not become evidence merely because it has gone viral. An opinion does not become a fact because it is expressed confidently. An idea does not become correct simply because it confirms what we already believe. This last point deserves particular attention. We often accept information not because it is accurate, but because it is comfortable. We are naturally attracted to information that confirms our existing beliefs and suspicious of information that challenges them. In the digital world, this tendency can be amplified by algorithms that repeatedly expose us to content similar to what we have already watched, liked or shared. Gradually, we may find ourselves living inside an information bubble where we hear many voices-but mostly voices that agree with us. That is not diversity of information. It is an illusion of certainty. Discernment does not mean doubting everything. It means thinking before believing. It means asking simple but powerful questions: Who is saying this? What is the evidence? What is the context? What may be missing? Who benefits if I believe it? And have I heard the other side? These questions may take only a few seconds, but they can prevent hours, days or even years of misunderstanding. This responsibility is particularly important for the younger generation. Children today are growing up in an environment of unprecedented information exposure. They can encounter more information in a few hours than earlier generations might have encountered in weeks. Therefore, education cannot merely teach students how to collect, remember and reproduce information. It must teach them how to question, verify, analyse and interpret it. A student who can write the correct answer in an examination may be academically successful. But a student who knows how to ask the right question is better prepared for life. The classroom of the future must therefore produce not merely informed students, but thinking citizens. They must learn that forwarding a message is also a form of responsibility. Sharing a post is not an innocent act when it can affect someone's reputation, create public fear or influence social behaviour. The challenge becomes even greater in the age of Artificial Intelligence. AI can generate information, images, audio and video with extraordinary speed and sophistication. The distinction between what is real and what merely appears real may become increasingly difficult. In such a world, human judgment becomes more valuable, not less. Technology can produce an answer in seconds. It cannot automatically tell us whether that answer deserves our trust. Some answers require experience. Some require context. Many require the ability to think independently. We have more information, more technology and more connectivity than any previous generation. Yet our real challenge is to preserve something technology cannot manufacture for us: the capacity to think for ourselves. The ocean of information will only become larger. The question will no longer be, “How much information do we have?” The more important questions will be: What should we accept? What should we question? What should we verify? And what should we reject? No technology can completely answer these questions for us. No number of likes can substitute for evidence. No viral trend can replace judgment. No majority can turn misinformation into truth. That responsibility belongs to human beings. Information can tell us what happened. Discernment helps us understand what it means, why it happened, what may be missing from the story and how we should respond. Perhaps, therefore, the greatest educational challenge of our time is not to teach people how to find more information. They already know how to do that. The greater challenge is to teach them how to pause-to pause before believing, to pause before reacting, to pause before forwarding and to pause before joining the crowd. Because sometimes the most intelligent response to information is not an immediate reaction, but a moment of reflection. The ocean is already around us. It is growing deeper every day. What we need now is not more information to swim through it-but the wisdom to know which direction to take. (The writer is the Principal of Podar International School, Ausa, Latur. Views personal.)

A Loss Well Played

Correspondent
Jun 24, 2025
3 min read

The BJP’s bypoll defeat in Visavadar may look like a setback, but is in fact a cunning move in a longer game to fracture the opposition ahead of the 2027 Gujarat Assembly polls.

GUJARAT
GUJARAT

In India’s most saffron-saturated state, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) defeat in a by-election normally signals seismic political tremors. That the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) won Visavadar, a Patidar stronghold in Gujarat’s Junagadh district, with a margin of over 17,500 votes has thus sparked no shortage of commentary about the BJP’s supposed vulnerability. But seasoned watchers of Gujarat politics would do well to read between the electoral lines. Far from being a sign of weakness, the BJP’s ‘loss’ may well be a calculated concession - a Trojan horse designed to induce a premature alliance between two uneasy opposition parties, the Congress and AAP, and in the process, bleed them both.


On the surface, the AAP’s win is significant. Gopal Italia, its controversial former state president, has clawed back a seat his party originally won in 2022, only to see the victorious MLA, Bhupendra Bhayani, defect to the BJP. Italia’s win also marks the party’s first flicker of resurgence since its drubbing in the Delhi Assembly elections earlier this year. Yet the BJP’s loss was not unexpected. Bhayani, the original defector, was not fielded. The BJP instead ran Kirit Patel, a relatively low-profile candidate in a region where local loyalties run deep. Against him, AAP fielded a polarising but high-visibility leader in Italia.


Italia’s candidacy was a gift in disguise. A known firebrand with little cross-community appeal, his victory, while headline-worthy, brings with it a curious political arithmetic. By handing a seat back to a leader best known for viral videos and agitation politics (but not effective governance), the BJP has ensured that the AAP remains just relevant enough to be a nuisance, but not formidable enough to truly threaten its grip over Gujarat. In fact, the win may compel AAP and Congress to enter into a seat-sharing arrangement for the 2027 assembly elections - an arrangement almost certainly destined to be fraught.


The two parties, after all, are natural rivals masquerading as reluctant partners. Since its Gujarat debut, the AAP has grown at Congress’s expense, not the BJP’s. In 2022, the AAP’s vote share was drawn largely from constituencies where Congress once held sway, especially among SC-ST blocs and sections of the Patidar community. By entering Gujarat as an ‘alternative,’ the AAP undermined the Congress’s claim to be the sole national opposition.


The Congress, for its part, remains in disarray. Despite launching a statewide ‘Sangathan Srijan Abhiyan’ to revive its grassroots apparatus, factionalism continues to hobble the party. A prospective alliance with AAP, especially after the latter’s posturing in 2022, could demoralise loyalists and further erode its social base.


Beneath the electoral theatre lies the BJP’s longer stratagem, say observers. The saffron party, which has ruled Gujarat uninterrupted since 1995, knows that its biggest strength lies not merely in winning votes, but in shaping the terrain of contest. It has long specialised in forcing opposition parties into reactive positions: engineering defections, exploiting rival egos and amplifying internal contradictions. The Visavadar bypoll fits neatly into this playbook. It allows the BJP to temporarily cede space to a lesser adversary while ensuring that the broader anti-BJP front remains divided and incoherent.


There is also the matter of optics. AAP’s hyperbolic claims that “only it can defeat the BJP in Gujarat” following this single-seat win will not escape the ruling party’s notice. Such overreach only adds to internal Congress frustrations, thereby accelerating the very fragmentation the BJP thrives on. So, while Visavadar may seem like a crack in the BJP’s Gujarat edifice, it is in reality a pressure valve that is calculated, timed and deliberately opened to destabilise its opponents. The real battle, as always, is not the seat at hand, but the narrative that follows after. On that front, the BJP remains leagues ahead.

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