ಆರ್ಥ ಅಥವಾ ಅನುವಾದ (Understand or Translate)

To put a disclaimer at the very beginning, this line of thinking did not come to me till recent past. Also, this blog post is more exploratory than any conclusion I may have reached.

Growing up in India with language of instruction being English, we all were by default bi-lingual. When it came to academics parents and teachers always told us don’t just learn things by-heart or mug-up but understand and read it. That’s a great idea and wonderful concept but what did they really mean?. 

So, what does it mean to understand some concept? at the time when I was studying if I can explain what I am reading in Kannada (my mother tongue) then I have understood. But that only meant translating doesn’t it?.

I remember reading a quote from Dr. Richard Feynman that “if you cannot explain to the person sitting next to you in a bar as to what you do for living, then you do not know what you are doing for living”. That’s wonderful, if I can claim I understood it, I would say “I should be able to explain to a random person with no background in my field as to what I do for a living” .

Another school of thought that came from my daughters school is from her school Principal, her quote “I want my students to explain what they are doing and why they are doing it in their own words, if that is done then the teachers work is done”. This is wonderful too.    

One can argue that concept of understanding differs from subject to subject, for example mathematics at the basic level of addition, subtractions and multiplications is all about repetition and more repetition at higher level with fractions and all one can get some chance of explaining what they are trying to accomplish. Social studies in my extensive thought, one can only learn by by-heart for the level of understanding of the implications of whatever we study will change as we grow older, so at a young age by-heart so that when you get older you can recall and amuse yourself or deepen your understanding. 

Science is probably the only one which one can even make an attempt to understand and digest what we read and/or studied. One can understand the studied concept by setting up simple experiments, may be at home or collectively at school. 

In the end it boils down to, how would you know someone has understood what they have claimed to have studied :).

Tendencies of the mind - II

Back in the days, more than a decade ago when I did my very first Art of Living program, and then repeated multiple times, we were taught quite a few good behavioral aspects aka knowledge points, One of them appears to be circling in my mind for the last few weeks (if not months); It is the knowledge point about "Tendencies of the mind", one important tendency of the mind is to cling to the negative, other important tendency is to either completely in the past or in the future and never in the moment. I am sure the course taught a few more things.

That said, one other thing I realized is the tendency to categorize and label anything and everything (including itself). To elaborate, growing up in India and specially in south of India there were always few tensions between people, one had to do with  language (Kannada vs Tamil) and other with geographic location of your specific city in the Indian subcontinent (north vs south). As some one rightly put it, I became an Indian only after I left India. Living in America for almost 2 decades now, I have realized this place is no different, there are tensions between people but may be for slightly different reasons.

This made me think further and I realized, the human mind cannot and will not rest until it has categorized anything and everything around it. In the early days of civilization it wanted to categorize based on the color of skin, type of attire and then as civilization grew and expanded came  the division on occupation and with trade came the division based on location and later with the more industrial world and “intellectual” world, it became about the belief system (philosopher, intellectual, poet, activist, pacifist, communist, liberal, conservative and so on) then when the mind became even more evolved it started categorizing further and refining it even more, “fiscally conservative’', “religiously conservative”, “animal rights activist”, “women’s rights activist”, “right leaning”, “left leaning”, “extreme right wing”, “extreme left wing” and so on. Needless to say in between some where came the rich vs poor and my other favorite one “religion and culture” (I believe they exist together). I am sure I have missed a few categories and the timeline may not be perfect, but I am hoping the reader got the idea. 

It is fascinating to see the evolution of the human mind, to some extent one can argue that as a collective, human mind is evolving towards finer and finer divisions only to realize nothing exists in the end :). It’s all hollow and empty.  

ps: the game mind plays when combined with Ego is even more fascinating. I will leave it there :)