THE QUESTION AND THE ANSWER

 FROM SAMPATH’S DESK:

 

 

THE QUESTION AND THE ANSWER

  

Let me start the proceedings with Laurie Gray’s quote, “Answer all the questions. Question all the answers.”

 

Children (students), the blossoming future citizens. must question the answers rather than just answer the questions which will provide them with a roadmap and blueprint for their educational advancement.

 

While the question is the search path, the answer is the destination. A question well-understood is half-answered. In other words, a prudent question is one-half of wisdom.

 

A question that has no answer is not a question at all, as it can be questioned by those who can unquestionably give an answer if it were a perfectly answerable question.

 

A question whose answer doesn’t give you unquestionably proper inputs to answer many other allied questions is not a wholesome question. Questioning the question is, at times, wiser than the answer,  as an in-depth analysis into the nitty-gritty of an issue will help you elevate your understanding and knowledge horizons further, besides giving you new insights and additional information and guidance including the cues and clues which hitherto remained latent and elusive to work with. Contrarily, a question whose answer itself is questionable creates more confusion than clarity.

 

Albert Einstein strongly believed that questioning was essential to learning and problem-solving. He said, "The important thing is not to stop questioning!"

 

In a press conference, questions may come thick and fast. But still, you have to manage the situation, whether or not the answers given by you are directly meeting the moot aspects of the questions and the crux of the issues raised.

 

Sometimes, it's a pity that the so-called clarification raises more questions than answers.

 

Don’t think that a given question is the last while you give an answer to it, as your answer may trigger further questions to be answered unless the person who posed the question unquestionably felt that his question was perfectly answered beyond question.

 

Silence is sometimes the best answer to contentious questions.

 

It will be great if you give unquestionable answers even to unanswerable questions; there lies your intellect beyond question.

 

It may be worthless to ask a question when you already know the answer, as you are likely to run the risk of being grilled with a battery and barrage of confusing and contrasting answers - baffling and mind-boggling - leading you nowhere. 

 

A clever person can, of course, escape from answering thinking that not every question deserves an answer.

 

Life is a complex and complicated question that even the GOOGLE search engine can’t give an apt answer to.

 

I subscribe to the quote of Euripides who said in a lighter vein, “Question everything. Learn something. Answer nothing.”

 

Which was the first to see the light of the day - a Bird or Egg?

  

For this question, my father used to give a tricky answer as follows:

 

EGG IS BIRD INVOLVED and BIRD IS EGG EVOLVED.

 

The answer is more confusing than the question. Isn’t it?

 

However, biologists would only settle and bat for the ‘Bird’ being the first.

 

Richard Feynman would good-humourly quip thus, “I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.”

 

To conclude, let me recall the strong and serious quote of Harbhajan Singh Yogi, “Be that answer, not the question.”

 

  

R.SAMPATH

16/1/2025