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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 Encounter That Wasn’t: How Col. Purohit Survived a Framed Death

Akela
Aug 6, 2025
5 min read

A multi-part investigation into how the 2008 Malegaon blasts was turned into a political weapon, a narrative war and a cover for deeper conspiracies involving India’s most wanted fugitive and the Maoist underground.


The Malegaon Files - Part 3


An inside account of how Lt. Col. Prasad Purohit narrowly escaped a staged killing and what it reveals about the murky world of India’s anti-terror investigations.

With the recent acquittal of Lieutenant Colonel Prasad Purohit and others in the 2008 Malegaon blast case, the smoke is finally beginning to clear from one of India’s longest and most politically fraught terror investigations. But Purohit’s painful odyssey remains one of the darkest chapters in India’s intelligence and policing establishments. It involves not just fabricated evidence, but a chilling attempt to eliminate him in a staged encounter.


On the night of October 29, 2008, the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS), aided by officers from Military Intelligence and the Intelligence Bureau (IB), transported Colonel Purohit from Mumbai airport to a secluded bungalow in Khandala, near Pune. He had just been spirited from his language course in Panchmarhi, Madhya Pradesh, under a forged movement order signed by his senior, Colonel R.K. Srivastava. The trap had been set; now came the violence.


Present in the Khandala bungalow were a cluster of high-ranking officials: Colonel Srivastava, IB officer Sanjay Garg, ATS chief Hemant Karkare, Additional Commissioner Param Bir Singh, an officer of the State Intelligence Department (SID), and six ATS constables. Purohit, a military man long used to navigating operational grey zones, had just been thrown into one far murkier.


A large television blared news of the case. “Breaking: ATS cracks Malegaon blast; Sadhvi Pragya, Lt Col Purohit among key accused.” Before he could digest the spectacle, Purohit was tied to a chair by two constables. Over the next five days, from October 29th until the evening of November 3rd, Purohit endured systematic torture. Senior officers including Karkare, Srivastava, and Singh interrogated him with brutal physicality to extract a pre-scripted confession.


The questions they demanded answers to were telling. Who were his sources in the intelligence world? Who was passing on information about Islamic preacher Zakir Naik, the Pakistani intelligence agency ISI, and the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI)? And above all, they insisted, he must confess to masterminding the Malegaon blast and implicate the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), and BJP MP Yogi Adityanath. That Purohit refused to admit to any of this only escalated the violence.


The ATS officers, already under public and political pressure to ‘solve’ the Malegaon case, appeared determined to extract a narrative that fit a political thesis: that Hindutva groups were engaged in “saffron terror” as a counterweight to Islamist militancy. Purohit, a military man with links to Hindutva groups but no proven involvement in the blast, became the ideal fall guy.


By November 3, something shifted. Karkare suddenly told Purohit: “The information about you was wrong. You have no role in the Malegaon blast. You are innocent. You can go now.” But after days of beatings, Purohit could barely walk. An old knee injury from an earlier operation in Kashmir had been aggravated, and he pleaded to be dropped at the nearest bus stop or railway station.


Hemant Karkare refused. “Your bag has wheels. You can pull it. The bus stop is only 500 metres away.” Then, curiously, state Director General of Police Anami Narayan Roy, known more for his political leanings than his policing acumen, entered the room. Roy, who styled himself ‘Roy’ to appear Bengali and less North Indian, was reportedly close to the ruling Nationalist Congress Party (NCP). When Purohit asked to be dropped to the State Police Headquarters in Colaba, Roy simply left the room.


By 9 p.m. that evening, the bungalow was largely empty. Purohit, battered and confused, was preparing to leave when a junior ATS officer entered the room. He quietly locked the door and folded his hands before him. “Sir, please don’t step out tonight. An encounter has been planned at the bus stop. ATS officers have already taken their positions.” The officer’s name is known to this writer.


That quiet warning saved Purohit’s life. But that is not where the plot ends.


The same day (November 3, 2008), another covert operation was underway in Deolali, near Nashik. There, Assistant Police Inspector (API) Shekhar Bagde, then with the ATS, allegedly planted RDX and explosives at the rented home of Sudhakar Chaturvedi, who would later be named as Accused No. 11 in the Malegaon case.


Bagde’s motive? According to sources familiar with the internal workings of Military Intelligence (MI), this was part of a broader attempt to frame not just Chaturvedi - an MI-paid informer - but to justify the planned killing of Colonel Purohit. The explosives allegedly recovered from Chaturvedi’s house were to serve as ‘evidence’ of Purohit’s terror link after his staged death in Khandala.


The facts are chilling. On the evening of November 3, Bagde contacted MI Subedar Keshav Karbhari Pawar (also known as KK Pawar), seeking Chaturvedi’s address. Suspicious, Pawar reported the request to Colonel Praveen Madhav Khanzode, who in turn informed MI headquarters. Once cleared, Pawar passed on the address, only for Bagde to later claim that he no longer needed it.


Sensing something amiss, Khanzode and Pawar rode a scooter to Chaturvedi’s residence. What they saw confirmed their worst fears. The door was slightly ajar. Pawar entered to find Bagde rubbing something on the floor beside a suspicious-looking bag. When challenged, Bagde folded his hands and begged: “Please don’t tell anyone. I will lose my job.”


Chaturvedi was soon arrested, and the explosives ‘recovered’ from his house were used to build the Malegaon case. What most reports ignored was that Chaturvedi was not an outsider. He was a registered informer with MI, his rent paid by the agency, and his assignment focused on political surveillance and anti-national activities.


The plot becomes darker still when one recalls that just hours earlier, ATS officers were preparing to kill Colonel Purohit in Khandala. Once dead, it would have been easy to link him to the explosives planted in Chaturvedi’s house. The two ends of the conspiracy - a dead colonel and a pliant patsy – could then neatly tie the Malegaon case into a package of ‘Hindutva terror’.


This was not an anomaly in Maharashtra’s policing landscape.


Consider the curious parallel with API Sachin Waze, a notorious officer with deep political links. Waze planted explosives in a car near industrialist Mukesh Ambani’s residence, then murdered the car’s owner, Mansukh Hiran, and tried to pass it off as suicide. It was only the intervention of the National Investigation Agency (NIA) that derailed the plan. Waze, like Bagde, enjoyed the patronage of NCP heavyweights, including former Home Minister Anil Deshmukh.


Bagde too had his political protectors. Then closely associated with current Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde, he had a reputation for impunity. While posted as Senior Inspector in Manpada, Dombivli, Bagde once killed a young man inside his cabin in front of a complainant. The case went nowhere.


In that context, the alleged effort to kill Purohit and pin the crime on a fellow MI informer appears less like a rogue operation and more like a sanctioned campaign. A campaign that extended into the manipulation of evidence, abuse of military and civilian authority, and the use of India’s terror laws to settle ideological and political scores.


What saved Colonel Purohit in 2008 was not just one low-ranking officer’s guilty conscience, but the vigilance of Military Intelligence. The warnings, the scooter ride, the confrontation with Bagde - each helped unravel a chilling tale of institutional betrayal.


But while the courts may have acquitted Purohit and others, the deeper questions remain unanswered. How many more officers were complicit in shaping a terror narrative for political gain? How many informers like Chaturvedi were thrown to the wolves to prop up a headline?

 

(The writer, who goes by his nom de plume of Akela, is a senior investigative journalist based in Mumbai)

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