Questions?

I am writing this post to discuss the inherent fear of raising a question in public, which undoubtedly resides within many of us. Most of us fear becoming the butt of everyone’s jokes for asking a seemingly dumb question, although we secretly admire someone brave enough to ask the same question. Having experienced the pangs of many an unasked question personally, I can easily relate to this thought. Where does this apprehension arise from? I feel one overarching source is the fear of being judged by others. Questions tend to acquire tags, which lead to you questioning yourself and that eventually results in hesitation. I am, often, amused by the tags people assign: a ‘simple’ question gets the ‘dumb’ tag, a well-framed question might be called ‘smart’, etc. Such tags invariably get transferred from the question to the questioner, and may have high levels of persistence.

As a high schooler, I remember feeling happy asking questions in class. Some were due to my imagination, a few would come to my mind because I would day dream in lectures and lose track of what was being taught, yet others came up when I wanted to break the monotony of the class; and I would always have one question to eat up the last five minutes of class hours! Asking questions is always easier when people around you are interested more in the discussion than in taking potshots at each other. It also has a lot to do with how the respondent answers a question. I have felt less inclined to question teachers who have rubbished my questions nonchalantly. Instead, those who would help me frame a question properly and then go on to answer it were the ones who got more queries from me later. Brushing aside a question without paying attention is probably the worst thing a teacher could do. It breaks the confidence in the teacher, sending out a message that the teacher is superior and hence should not be bugged with trivia. Giving a patient hearing to a question breaks the ice between the questioner and the respondent, paving the way for detailed discussion.

Some of my most memorable classes were in Biochemistry during my Masters where my teacher would set aside time in each lecture for questions alone. The thought of being able to ask any question, even one without any relevance to the day’s discussion, was liberating. He would then ponder over it for a minute, and give a lot more than just a straightforward answer. A good answer should open one or more windows, he would say, that allow the questioner to look beyond the confines of a specific answer and provide ample opportunities to scratch parallel lines of thought.

Shashi Tharoor, former Under-Secretary General of the UN and member of the Indian Parliament, said about his undergrad life, “In College, in addition to answering questions, we learnt to question the answers. Some of us would go a step further and question the questions!” Questioning observed and abstract concepts lies at the root of science and life. Ignoring or discouraging this basic act is akin to anathema.