To Know or Not

Have you ever given a thought about the dwindling count of sparrows in your neighborhood? or to be more relavent, what constitutes the poverty line, leave alone knowing the fact as to what percentage of our population  live below the poverty line. Not many of us would have bothered about all of these. Most of us are so much lost in the chores of our meaningless day to day life that we miss the importance of knowing some of the basic facts around us. There is so much stuff that we take for granted as it does not impact our daily livelihood ie. money making. I feel that it requires some amount of passion to want to know about the things around us which indirectly impact us. Take your son's or daughter's school books and you would get to know how much ignorant you are in basic science & history and more importantly in the day to day affairs. Most of us don't mind spending hours and hours watching mindless movies or unimportant cricket matches. The other day, it was a shock for me to see a television show where some youth were asked as to who the father of our nation is and many did not know. May be the question was not relevant to them as it was not connected to Cinema or Cricket. The habit of reading and the inquisitiveness to know the fundamentals seems to be lacking with the youth these days. Moreover, a majority of  the children nowadays seem to be more obsessed with online games and television shows than reading a good book on history or current affairs. Reading is one thing which always has the power to keep you contemporary apart from the pleasure it gives you in getting to know things. It has to be encouraged among kids in schools even from a little age of 6 or 7 when they are taught to read small sentences.