A Personal History of Curiosity
The act of growing up is an exercise in becoming a child again
My mother tells me that as a toddler, I loved going to railway tracks to touch the rails. My grandfather would carry me on his shoulders to the nearest railway track, find a time when there were no trains, and lower me to the ground. I’d jump out of his hold excitedly to touch the rails like a toy. Looking back as an adult, this bizarre proclivity towards railway tracks doesn’t make any sense. A fascination with moving, speeding trains is understandable, but with static, metallic rails? Whatever birthed that instinct in my proto-conscious mind, it is my first memory of being curious.
I am 10 years old. Class VI. The social science teacher is teaching ancient Indian history. She begins by asking the class the alternate name of Indus Valley Civilization. I know the answer. I shyly raise my hand and answer ‘Harappa Civilization’. Correct answer, she says and instructs the class to applaud for me. I sit down, as though in slow motion, basking in the applause. That was the first time in my life someone had applauded for me. It was a high like no other, enough to convert an impressionable, young mind into an addict.
I started spending entire afternoons memorising names of people, places and things from encyclopaedias and atlases. I participated in trivia contests and quizzes. Now, instead of a class, an entire school applauded me. On my birthdays, the gifts, invariably, were books and trivia games. Mothers of friends encouraged their kids to be like me. A social identity took shape which I wanted to uphold at any cost. It was the first social currency of my life.
Soon, the burden of maintaining this identity would replace the sheer joy of knowing things as my primary motivation. Learning started to feel like a chore than a hobby. I started losing interest.
If my curiosity had to continue, it would need something more. Something meaningful.
Thankfully, it came 3 years later. I am now 13, class IX. I have just learned about Newton’s Laws of Motion from my Physics Textbook. I am in awe of how simply it applied to real life. How could a bucket pulled over a pulley be understood through simple math? It was magical, as though I had unlocked a deeper, invisible layer of reality. It was also the beginning of the realisation that name learning is not knowledge. Understanding is knowledge. I no longer want to remember names to earn the applause of strangers, but to truly understand everything for the clarity and euphoria it brought. Science became my new best friend. A never-ending tale of cause-and-effect, till the last whys, whats and hows are answered.
Thankfully, my curiosity rekindled.
But it would be tested again.
My interest in Science led me to prepare for India’s toughest entrance exam to study at India’s best engineering college. I started attending hours of tuitions for Physics, Maths and Chemistry. The singular goal was to clear this hallowed exam for it promised a very successful life. Now, I was no longer learning for the joy it brought but to be able to select the right answer from the given 4 options. Two years later, I cleared the exam but the preparation beat the love of Science out of me. Yet again, my curiosity was weaponized against itself. And yet again, what began as a joyful activity became a boring chore.
My zeal for Science died, and something else took its place - Politics.
A friend had recommended Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead to me. It had a profound effect. I was convinced that Rand’s capitalist, laissez-faire philosophy was the capital-T Truth. And that I was ahead of the curve to have uncovered it at such a young age. But in my university, I discovered a different reality, incongruent to Rand’s view of the world. I was surrounded by the smartest minds of the country who had fought their inherited misfortunes of caste and class to get there. They would go on to move their families out of poverty in one generation, which would have otherwise taken many. An unlearning happened. The pendulum swung to the other end.
In years that followed, the pendulum of my ideology would swing many times depending on the slice of the world I was exposed to. But no matter what side I was on, there was always the opposite side, equally convinced that they were in possession of Truth. Heated arguments ensued in real life, and online. Tribes formed. The people in my tribe were good people. The people in the opposing tribe were evil. Tribalism brought with it a different kind of high - a very comforting feeling of belonging. I knew that my tribe will never betray me, as long as I do not betray it. God-forbid my curiosity led me to consider the ideas of the enemy tribe.
It did not take me long to realize the emptiness of it all. Ideology was not a product of my curiosity, as I had previously thought, but its very demise. It naturally made me wonder - does curiosity always lead to its own end? What was the point of learning if it could not exist for its own sake? Was wanting to know and learn inherently immoral? I started doubting my raison d’etre. It sounds trite but for a young man who had prided himself for his ability to learn, it was a very unpleasant time.
And then it came to me in a flash.
The answer lied in my deep past. I thought of the toddler who wanted to touch the rails. He hadn’t learned to speak, walk or eat properly but he damn well wanted to touch the rails. He did not care for a classroom’s applause, or cracking a competitive exam, or the validation of his politics. An intrinsic intuition, hard-coded by evolution, drove him to examine a piece of his reality. Curiosity had preceded consciousness, reason and morality. That 3-year old was curious for curiosity’s sake. He owed no explanation to himself or to others. In a sense, he was closer to the Truth than the boy who won quizzes, or the teenager who passed a tough exam, or the adult who tried to get his politics right.
I realized that curiosity had to be protected like a child protects his toy. It exists within all of us, deep inside, covered in layers of growing-up muck. It has to be anchored and re-anchored to something internal, untouched by the outside world. This has been the single-most comforting realisation of my adult life.
I recently learned that Newton whose laws of motion had deeply affected me as a child, and who pretty much founded Physics itself, was a devout Christian. His curiosity led him to navigate the two worlds of Physics and Faith simultaneously, an idea that would shock a ‘modern thinker’. His last words are instructive. As he lay dying on his death bed, the most intelligent man of his time said:
“I don't know what I may seem to the world. But as to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than the ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
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