making curiosity open source

For the past few weeks, I've been making a list of different universities for MS and the pre-requisites for different courses. Being a third-year student, many people say it’s too early to start but I believe it’s good to start early so that you can plan it out and easily achieve things without being in a rush. And now 2-3 weeks into it, I realized that I need to learn a lot more things, like a lot! And that got me into thinking this.

I have often heard people saying how flawed the Indian education system is, with more focus on theoretical knowledge. Being a student who has gone through the system, I kind of agree with that. Usually, it is only when we join college, most of us realize what we lack but just blaming the system won’t help. What could help is if we could think of ways to improve it without actually fighting against the system. We already have lots of educational websites and YouTube channels that are open-source, but what we need is practical knowledge and analytical skills, one way of doing that is to spark curiosity within an individual about everyday things. When I wake up in the morning, I tend to be curious about every object I interact with daily, for example:

• When I have my breakfast, I often think about how did people come up with the ideas of such different recipes, how did cooking evolve?

• When I interact with someone, I think about how was the first-ever language developed, and how did they decide upon the rules of a language?

• When I speak, I think about how exactly is my brain makes up a sentence, and my mouth reproduces the same thing without me knowing the whole internal process of thoughts from my brain to my mouth.

• Whenever I buy something I think about how did people come up with the idea of money and how was it circulated among people for the first time?

And many such examples...

These might seem like very vague examples, but there are so many different things we deal with every day in our lives and we don’t even understand the working of most of them or how did the person who invented it, come up with the idea. In school, we learn History as one of the subjects, we learn about the emperors and different dynasties, but how was the first-ever dynasty found and how was the king elected.

I have a habit of reading newspapers, especially during this pandemic and my favorite part is to turn-over to the second-last page of the newspaper and solve puzzles, thanks to Japanese people for developing such beautiful puzzles. But I often wonder about how can these puzzles be used in some very different applications. One of my favorite puzzles is slitherlink, which is published by The Times of India every day.