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...

min read

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.)

An Institution Above Identity

Commodore S.L. Deshmukh

Dec 15, 2025

4 min read

Miscast as a religious controversy, the Lt. Kamalesan affair underscores the non-negotiable primacy of military discipline in the Indian Armed Forces.

The controversy surrounding Lieutenant Kamalesan has been framed by its loudest critics as a test of religious freedom. It is nothing of the sort. At heart it is a reminder of an older, sterner truth: armies function by suppressing difference, not by celebrating it. The Supreme Court’s recent ruling, which upheld the primacy of military discipline over individual preference, was therefore not an aberration but an affirmation of constitutional logic. Uniforms, after all, are designed to erase distinctions that animate civilian politics of class, creed and conviction so that soldiers may act as one.

To see this as uniquely Indian is to miss the point. Militaries across the world, in democracies and republics alike, have long wrestled with the question of faith in uniform. Their solutions vary in texture but not in essence. The demands of cohesion trump the claims of individuality.

Multi-Faith Care

Consider the United States Army, often invoked as a paragon of pluralism. It maintains one of the world’s most elaborate chaplaincy systems, catering to Christians of many denominations, as well as Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus and others. Services are held in chapels, multi-faith centres or quiet rooms. Scripture may be read from the Bible, the Quran or the Torah; meditation and interfaith blessings are common. Yet all this operates within a clear framework: chaplains are trained for multi-faith care, and every accommodation is ultimately subordinate to mission readiness. No soldier is permitted to recast institutional practice to suit personal theology.

Australia offers a similar lesson. Through the Royal Australian Army Chaplains’ Department, the force provides spiritual support across faiths, adapting prayers to regiments and occasions like Anzac Day, Remembrance Day and deployments abroad. Christian blessings sit alongside Jewish invocations such as Oseh Shalom, and broadly interfaith themes of courage, peace and sacrifice are woven in. The emphasis is not on asserting belief but on reinforcing shared values of service and duty.

The British Army, heir to centuries of regimental tradition, is even more explicit about this balance. It supplies chaplains and resources for Christians, Sikhs, Muslims and others, distributing everything from Nitnem gutkas to collections of duas. Regimental prayers ask for strength, fellowship and courage, and are rooted in history rather than theology. The aim is moral formation: loyalty, discipline, comradeship. Diversity is accommodated, but the ritual life of the regiment remains non-negotiable.

France, with its uncompromising doctrine of laïcité, might seem an outlier. Yet even the French Army recognises the psychological utility of faith. Catholic prayers such as the famous Prière du Para, which asks not for comfort but for struggle and strength, coexist with a system of chaplaincy that quietly serves multiple religions. The Foreign Legion, famously multinational, has long understood that morale is sustained as much by shared ritual as by strict secularism.

Germany’s experience tells a similar story of evolution without rupture. Historically anchored in Catholic and Protestant traditions, the Bundeswehr once relied on standard prayers like the Lord’s Prayer and explicit blessings for victory and protection. Today it offers broader spiritual support in a more plural society, but the core logic endures: liturgy is adapted to the battlefield, not the other way around.

Wilful Distortion

Against this backdrop, the attempt to cast the Kamalesan episode as evidence of majoritarian coercion looks less like principled dissent and more like wilful distortion. India’s Army has, for decades, operated its Sarva Dharma Sthal system - shared spaces where symbols of multiple faiths coexist. These arrangements are not a concession to theology but a triumph of pragmatism. Soldiers standing together at a mandir parade, a gurudwara service or an interfaith observance are not endorsing one creed over another; they are affirming the unity of the regiment.

Those who insist otherwise are not interested in complexity. By giving the episode a religious and political colouring, they evade the harder truth that the Indian Army’s secularism is neither doctrinaire nor performative, but functional. It rests on a sensitive balance between individual freedom of belief and the impersonal demands of discipline. To tilt that balance in favour of personal preference is not to advance liberty but to erode cohesion.

The danger is not abstract. Militaries rely on uniformity, predictability and ritualised coherence to function under stress. If individual choice were allowed to dictate participation in institutional practices, the chain of command would fray. Orders would become negotiable, rituals optional, authority contingent. The result would be not a more humane force, but a less effective one.

Citizens, too, have a stake in resisting this slide. India’s armed forces have earned global respect precisely because they have remained insulated from the sectarian tempests of civilian politics. To drag them into culture wars is to push them onto a slippery slope whose consequences would be felt not in op-ed columns but on the battlefield.

General Bipin Rawat once warned that India’s enemies are not only across its borders but also within its society, in the form of forces that spread communal disharmony. His words bear repeating. The defence of the republic does not end at the frontier; it extends to safeguarding the institutions that bind its soldiers together. In an army, faith may guide the soul but it is the uniform that holds the line.

(The author is a retired naval aviation officer and a defence and geopolitical analyst. Views personal.)

A Drought of Wisdom in an Ocean of Information

An Institution Above Identity

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