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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 Phantom Witness

Akela
Aug 8, 2025
4 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 5


If the earlier parts of my investigation into the 2008 Malegaon blast case revealed political manipulation and dubious policing, the arrest of Sudhakar Chaturvedi - a little-known functionary with shadowy ties to both Abhinav Bharat and Military Intelligence - exposed how deep the rot had spread.


By early November 2008, the Anti-Terrorism Squad’s narrative in the Malegaon blast case appeared to be tightening. Investigators claimed that Sudhakar Chaturvedi, described as the national general secretary of Abhinav Bharat, had been caught “roaming suspiciously” on the concourse of Dadar railway station in Mumbai on 4 November. The official version placed his arrest there and then.


Yet accounts from inside the intelligence community and those close to the accused tell a different story. According to these, Chaturvedi had been picked up much earlier (on 24 October) in Nashik. He was allegedly detained for four days without formal registration of arrest. This gap between claimed and recorded arrest dates would later feed into broader allegations of fabricated evidence and manipulated timelines.


In addition to his role in Abhinav Bharat, Chaturvedi is said to have been on the payroll of Military Intelligence (MI) as an informer. His possession of an MI-issued identity card, and residence in a military-subsidised property in Deolali, strengthened the picture of someone operating in the murky overlap between the armed forces and ideological networks.


The MI card bore the signature of Lieutenant Colonel Prasad Purohit, by then already cast as the alleged mastermind of the Malegaon blast. Despite the potential evidentiary weight of such a document, the ATS never appears to have formally verified its authenticity with Army authorities. Whether this was oversight or design remains unanswered.


The October 24 Nashik pick-up, according to those alleging a frame-up, was not Chaturvedi’s first brush with the ATS that month. Just three weeks earlier, on October 3, 2008, ATS officers including PSI Shekhar Bagde allegedly attempted to plant RDX in Chaturvedi’s locked house in Deolali. The incident was reportedly foiled by MI officers who arrived at the scene, catching Bagde in the act.


This confrontation, if accurately recounted, hints at a turf war between Maharashtra’s counter-terrorism unit and the Army’s own intelligence arm.


When Chaturvedi was eventually booked into the system, his personal property list contained nothing more incriminating than an identity card. His mobile phone did not appear on the initial seizure record. Oddly, weeks later, ATS documents show the same phone being ‘recovered’ from his Deolali residence during a search. Was the device in police custody all along?


Even more strangely, the recovered phone was reportedly still switched on after three days without charging. For investigators versed in chain-of-custody rules, this detail was an indicator that the phone may have been used or manipulated before being entered as evidence.


Another unexplained episode took place on November 24 when Chaturvedi and fellow accused Ramesh Upadhyay were transported by helicopter from Mumbai to Bhopal and back on the same day. Reports suggest the aircraft belonged to the corporate giant India Bulls. The stated purpose was to facilitate a mobile conversation between the two men - extraordinary given that they were both in police custody.


No public record clarifies whether this operation had judicial sanction, who authorised it, or why a private helicopter was used for what could have been accomplished in a secure police setting.


Taken together, the inconsistencies in arrest dates, the Deolali incident, the shifting provenance of key evidence, and the unexplained helicopter trip chip away at the ATS’s carefully constructed timeline. If Chaturvedi was indeed in custody from October 24, then the official portrayal of his arrest on November 4 as a chance encounter at Dadar unravels entirely.


For the prosecution, linking Chaturvedi to Purohit was essential to buttressing the so-called “Hindu terror” narrative. His dual identity — Abhinav Bharat operative and MI asset — made him a bridge between the military intelligence world and the ideological group the ATS claimed was behind Malegaon.


For sceptics of the ATS case, that same dual identity made him dangerous for a different reason: he may have known too much about both sides, and been vulnerable to pressure or fabrication.


The irregularities in Chaturvedi’s arrest and evidence handling mirror many of the troubling themes in the Malegaon investigation as a whole: opaque chains of custody, selective leaks, and the sidelining of inconvenient facts. They also underscore the fraught relationship between state police counter-terrorism units and military intelligence — two arms of the security apparatus meant to be aligned against a common threat.


Instead, in the chaotic weeks after the 2008 blast, they appeared to be working at cross-purposes, with Chaturvedi caught in the middle.


Years later, with the acquittals in the Malegaon case, the ATS’s claims about Chaturvedi and the manner of his arrest have never been fully tested in court. The Malegaon episode serves as a cautionary tale that when inter-agency rivalries and dubious police methods intersect in a terror investigation, the truth becomes just another casualty.


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

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