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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.)

The Dashing Developer India Needs

Writer: Kiran D. Tare
Kiran D. Tare
Dec 27, 2025
5 min read

From airports and ports to power grids and knowledge systems, the tycoon’s rise tells the story of an India determined to build at scale despite relentless political and geopolitical resistance.

On Christmas Day, as the year wound down, India quietly crossed an infrastructural Rubicon. The long-awaited Navi Mumbai International Airport, delayed for years by litigation, land politics and environmental activism, finally opened its runways. For Mumbai, it promised relief from chronic congestion. But for India, it marked something more consequential: the arrival of a private operator capable of executing civil aviation projects at a continental scale.


The airport’s developer and operator, the Adani Group, has made no secret of its ambitions. By 2030 it plans to invest roughly $15 billion to expand passenger-handling capacity across its airport network to nearly 200 million travellers a year. That figure alone would make it one of the largest airport operators anywhere outside China. In India’s context, it amounts to a declaration: aviation will no longer be a bottleneck to growth.


Proxy Target

At the centre of this expansion stands Gautam Adani, unmistakably the country’s most consequential industrialist and its most contested one. To supporters, he is the embodiment of execution in an economy long paralysed by delay. To critics, especially those hostile to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s political project, he has become a proxy target – a symbol of capitalism fused inconveniently with national ambition.


Abroad, he is increasingly viewed as something else altogether - a symbol of India’s refusal to accept externally imposed limits on its rise.


The airport strategy reflects that confidence. Navi Mumbai is only the most visible node in a rapidly expanding network. Parallel upgrades are under way in Jaipur, Lucknow, Ahmedabad, Thiruvananthapuram and Guwahati. Collectively, these airports will anchor India’s aviation growth as passenger traffic rises towards 300 million annually by the end of the decade. By positioning itself to handle roughly two-thirds of that volume, the Adani Group is re-shaping India’s aviation story.


Nowhere is that approach clearer than in Guwahati. In December, the prime minister inaugurated the new terminal at Lokpriya Gopinath Bordoloi International Airport less than a year after its design was unveiled. Operations are scheduled to begin by early 2026. Designed to handle over 13 million passengers annually by 2032, the terminal named ‘Bamboo Orchids’ uses 140 metric tonnes of locally sourced bamboo and incorporates motifs drawn from Assam’s ecology and culture.


The terminal moved from design unveiling to inauguration in under twelve months - a timeline that would be considered aggressive even in East Asia. For a region long accustomed to delayed connectivity and symbolic promises, the airport has become a rare example of infrastructure arriving before expectations collapse.


Guwahati already ranks as India’s tenth-busiest airport. With the new terminal, it is being positioned as the Northeast’s primary connector to the national and global economy and an essential plank of India’s Act East policy.


Such projects explain why Adani’s rise has provoked unease well beyond India’s borders. Infrastructure is power made visible. Control ports and airports and one begins to shape trade routes, supply chains and strategic choices. It is no coincidence that as Adani’s footprint has expanded, so too has the intensity of scrutiny from Western regulators, activists and short-sellers.


The most dramatic of those confrontations came with the Hindenburg episode. Launched with maximal publicity, the short-seller’s allegations sought to portray the group as a house of cards propped up by accounting tricks and political favour. The campaign inflicted sharp market damage but it did not survive contact with regulatory reality. In September, India’s securities regulator dismissed the allegations in full, finding no fraud, no unfair trade practices and no regulatory violations on part of the Adani group.


Markets responded accordingly as Adani stocks rebounded sharply. Not long after, Hindenburg announced it was winding up operations. What had been framed as a moral crusade against Indian capitalism ended as a footnote.


Surviving Pressure

The Hindenburg episode also exposed a deeper asymmetry which is that while a New York-based short seller could wipe billions off an Indian company’s market value in hours, the burden of proof rested almost entirely on the accused. That the group survived the assault without asset sales, state bailouts or governance concessions has quietly recalibrated perceptions of Indian corporate resilience.


Yet the attacks did not end there. In the United States, frustration with India’s geopolitical autonomy has begun to bleed openly into rhetoric about its businessmen. As Washington chafes at New Delhi’s refusal to abandon discounted Russian oil or offer sweeping trade concessions, senior figures have echoed the language of India’s opposition. References to “politically connected energy titans” have entered official discourse in an extraordinary intrusion into another country’s domestic political debates.


The logic is obvious. As India’s rise cannot be checked directly, it must be slowed indirectly. Target the companies that build its ports, power plants and airports. Apply legal pressure extraterritorially. Encourage friendly governments to reconsider contracts. Kenya’s cancellation of Adani-linked infrastructure projects, citing information from ‘partner nations’ offered a glimpse of this playbook in action.


The fact that such tremendous pressure has failed to derail the group speaks to its underlying strength. Consider Bangladesh. Amid a severe financial crisis and political upheaval, the country fell behind on payments for power supplied by Adani. Electricity flows were reduced, then restored as payments resumed. By mid-2025, Dhaka had cleared nearly $1.5 billion in dues. Contracts, in the end, mattered more than politics.


The same pragmatism underpins Adani’s broader aviation ambitions. Airports are only one layer. In November, Adani Defence Systems acquired India’s largest independent flight training and simulation company, adding pilot training and simulators to its portfolio. The goal is a fully integrated aviation ecosystem spanning civil and defence MRO, general aviation and training in an approach that mirrors how serious aviation powers think about capability.


What distinguishes Adani from earlier Indian tycoons is not merely scale. He well understands that ports feed logistics, logistics feed industry, industry demands energy, and energy and trade require airports. This forms the rationale for his group to capture a massive pie in each of these sectors. It is also why the group attracts ideological hostility. After all, in India’s liberal ecosystem, builders have long been viewed with suspicion.


But Adani has responded not by retreating, but by widening the frame of his activities. Last month, he announced a Rs.100 crore founding contribution to the ‘Bharat Knowledge Graph’ - a digital platform aimed at preserving India’s civilisational knowledge for the AI era. The initiative, developed with the Indian Knowledge Systems division of the education ministry, seeks to integrate ancient disciplines of linguistics, astronomy, governance, healthcare with modern data science.


Critics will dismiss this as symbolism. They are wrong. Civilisations that fail to encode their knowledge for new technological eras risk erasure. Adani’s intervention recognises that infrastructure is not only physical. Data, culture and memory matter too.


Today, Gautam Adani stands at an unusual intersection of capital, politics and geopolitics. He is neither neutral nor apologetic about it. His airports, ports and power plants are assertions of India’s capacity to build fast, think big and absorb pressure without capitulation.


India’s political opposition, chiefly the Congress led by Rahul Gandhi, has sought to caricature Adani by alleging that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is attached to Adani’s hip. What this allegation conveniently ignores is that every governing era presided over by the Congress had its preferred tycoons, from the Wadias and Tatas under Congress dominance to a rotating cast of licence-era industrialists who prospered through proximity rather than any performance.


The difference between those industrialists and Adani is that the latter’s projects are gargantuan, visible and auditable, leaving little room for the quiet rent-seeking that once flourished behind closed doors. That openness has made him easier to attack, but also harder to dismiss.


It also explains why Gautam Adani has become such a tempting target. And that is precisely why he matters. Because in a country still learning how to grow without permission, builders like Adani are not aberrations but necessities.

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