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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.)

‘Woh Shimla ice-skating rink tha…’

Quaid Najmi
Jan 26, 2025
3 min read

Updated: Jan 27, 2025

Bollywood

Mumbai: Bollywood fans still marvel at the rocking and memorable Asha Bhosle number, “Shokh Nazar Ki Bijliyan…” - composed by the legendary Madan Mohan for Raj Khosla’s spooker, “Woh Kaun Thi…” (1964). The film featured the ghostly Sadhana Shivdasani wandering the deserted pale hills at ungodly hours, a ravishing beauty sporting just stark white saris despite bone-chilling temperatures, but creating scares in dark cinema halls.


It was considered the first song shot entirely on the smooth, chilly, open-air rink of the 105-year-old Simla Ice Skating Club – SISC, (Shimla from 1972), with actress Parveen Chaudhary and Manoj Kumar gliding in their winter finery, against a backdrop of snowy hills and picture postcard scenes, though all in mesmerizing black-and-white.


Today, the famed SISC’s ice-skating rink is thawing and the vicinity is a ghost image of its own lush beauty seen in that seat-edge mystery thriller - and some others like “Aa Gale Lag Jaa” (1973) or “Mera Naam Joker” (1970) – thanks to the combined effects of global warming and indiscriminate development in its surroundings that hasten its untimely and unnatural demise.


An adventure sports buff from Mumbai, Firdaus Irani - who visited SISC last week with family - was speechless to notice that the ice-skating rink was almost reduced to a puddle, and others like him were staring at it in silence.


When contacted by The Perfect Voice, the SISC Media Secretary Sudeep Mahajan admitted that this winter (2024-2025), the rink functioned for barely a few days as it didn’t freeze naturally as in the past over a century, hampering a host of its snow sports activities.


He said that besides commoners, it was a favourite with bigwigs who have visited/skated here, including former Prime Ministers Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, Sanjay Gandhi, former Vice-President M. Hidayatullah, ex-CM of Tamil Nadu M. G. Ramachandran, state CMs, Ministers of the centre and states, etc.


Among the glam crowds who chilled there was the entire Raj Kapoor clan over generations, Sanjiv Kumar, Manoj Kumar, Sadhana, Rajashree Shantaram, Saroja Devi, Simi Garewal, Kumkum, Nana Patekar and many more, sliding over the 3-inch-thick glassy cold surface without a care.


This winter, a concerned Mahajan said SISC could barely conduct two dozen ice-skating sessions as the rink remained mostly watery – compared with 160-170 sessions-plus in the 1950s-1960s, with the packed season usually blooming from mid-November to February-end.


Locals blame the prime culprit as climate change, the hacking of greenery in and around Shimla – the summer capital of the British Raj for 83 years till Independence – once known as the 'queen of hill-stations' at an altitude of 2,276 metres, but now getting slowly poisoned by the toxic atmosphere.


There is indiscriminate construction going all around, two huge escalators for the Shimla Smart City Project, use of diesel-powered generators, growing human (around 2.80 lakhs) and vehicular population in the hill-station, a Himachal Pradesh State Road Transport Corporation bus depot barely a stone’s throw away, plus many eateries and stalls spewing fumes and raising a stink.


“All these are hastening the rise in local temperatures and pushing the SISC rink - which is Asia’s oldest (since 1920), biggest, open-to-sky, naturally-freezing ice-skating stadium measuring 1,500 sq.metres - to the brink,” rued Mahajan.


In fact, the rink was born out of fluke in 1920, when an Irishman – Jack Blessington, who manufactured carts, rickshaws and carriages in Simla – noticed that domestic taps, and even a bucketful of water he had forgotten outside his home one evening, froze overnight.


Surprised and delighted, he decided to experiment in a small open ground near his house, by throwing some buckets of water at night… and Lo!, the next morning it had solidified into an inviting cool skating rink…


That was in the 1920 winter, and later he opened it to his other British or European friends and their families to cavort there… rekindling their wintry memories back home, till Blessington, 57, succumbed to a gunshot in Feb. 1938, as per official records.


Post-Independence it was unveiled for the wide-eyed natives and others who thronged there, aided by the 97-km long Kalka-Shimla Railway and the quaint toy-train became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1908, said Irani, who travelled by it.


With the ice-rink thirsting and sweating for ‘low temperatures’, Mahajan said the SISC plans to develop an all-season indoor ice-skating rink on its premises costing around Rs 35-crore, but struggles for resources.

“Though we manage to break even, SISC needs help from the government or corporate CSR schemes. All must unite to preserve this unique heritage, not only in India but Asia, and believed to be the only one of its kind currently in the world,” said Mahajan.

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