Essay, Paragraph or Speech on “Curiosity” Complete Essay, Speech for Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.

Curiosity

Most of the world’s leaders of philosophy and thought attribute their achievement to their sense of curiosity which is defined as a deep desire to seek knowledge and to find the truth about life and matter, why and how of what goes about in the world. Curiosity is of two kinds—idle and real. The latter category is responsible for the world’s major achievements in the different fields.

Idle curiosity covers such fields as poetry and literature while real curiosity covers fields of more serious nature. In poetry and literature, the sense of curiosity expands with the purpose of arousing interest in things of beauty, entertainment and aesthetics for their own sake. The motive of such curiosity does not belong to this world but is a part of the world of imagination, having only indirect reference to the realities of life. Its basic purpose is to entertain and touch the livelier and lighter aspects of life. Music, painting, cartoons, jokes, poetry and such other things arouse idle curiosity. They have very little reality to deal with, although sometimes the best philosophy gets narrated in the language of these works of artistic creation.

Idle curiosity dominates every human being’s life with the exception of a few, who always move about with a mask so that others should consider them to be out of the ordinary. The idle curiosity, which makes us come out of cur room and leave our study when we hear an uproar in the street, holds a mirror to our anxiety about our fellow beings, though verging on sentimentalism. Apart from that, this reduces the tedium of work, breaks the spell of boredom and engenders in us new energy, and we got back to our work with a revitalized interest.

How idle curiosity develops our personality and intellect can be best known from the study of the lives of Wordsworth and Shelley. Wordsworth’s curiosity led him to love nature. Whether it was the enigmatic sound of the cataract or the rustling of the leaves, he fed his senses to satisfy and gave us wonderful nature poems. Shelley, who used to make startling experiments like an Indian magician, expressed his love for what was not traditional. And his poems are only a vocal expression of his fondness for the unusual. Feats curiosity, kindled by his first reading of Chapman’s Homer, made him a poet of unique imagination so much so that the sight of a “Grecian Urn” could inspire him to write such a wonderful ode. It was his curiosity which made him see romantic shapes in the changing clouds and write his sonnet: When I Fear I May Cease to Be.

In fact much in literature and art is curiosity translated into signing words, immortal characters and wonderfully eloquent pigments and stones. It is, however, a different thing whether their curiosity to know and understand and to unravel the mysteries of human nature was idle or otherwise.

The great achievements of mankind to their capacity to channelize his curiosity is not confined to the field of arts. Perhaps the achievements of science would have remained unknown if man had not been given to curiosity to know the world around him. Newton’s idle curiosity led him to think about the cause of apple falling down and not going upward. And the result was that he made us know about the gravitational force of the earth. But for such a curiosity Copernicus might not have written his revolutionary book, Revolution of Heavenly Bodies. Nor would have we known about the startling experiments of Galileo. Sir Francis Bacon of the 16th century England might not have paved the way for experimental science if his curiosity, which caused his death due to exposure to extreme cold, had not urged him to get at certain truths about the ways of nature.

Scientists’ curiosity is, however, an enigmatic admixture of the idle and the purposeful. Benjamin Franklin, who would fly kites on cloudy days, gave us electric conductors with which we protect multi-storeyed high buildings from being struck by lightning. Had James Watt not watched the kettle lid being lifted by steam, there would have been no steam engine. Had Marconi not studied Hertz and Maxwell with curiosity, someone else not he would have taken the credit for the invention of wireless. It was owing to Edison’s purposeful curiosity that his contributions to scientific inventions outdo these of any other single scientist. Again, man’s landing on the moon is the fruit of scientists’ insatiable curiosity.

Purposeful curiosity has much to do with all that medical science today is. It was out of curiosity to understand the inner human machinery that Vesalius first practiced dissection of corpses, William Harvey’s curiosity, which made him examine reptiles, fish, birds, snails and all living things, exploded the traditional theory about blood circulation and declared that veins carry blood to the heart and that blood entered the heart on the right side and was then flooded into the lungs, cleansed by the air in the lungs and passed over to the left side of the heart and pumped into arteries and round the body again. It was this purposeful curiosity which made Pasteur and Lister to give their contribution to medical science. Ronald Ross’ curiosity to study the cause of malaria was so intense that he exposed himself to the mosquito bites. Men of purposeful curiosity have made no less contribution to natural history. Charles Darwin, instead of studying the family profession of medicine, pursued the study of the natural science under the spell of the Reverend J.S. Hens low, the Professor of Botany at the Christ’s College, and discovered the Origin of the Species. Gregory Mendel, an Australian monk, cultivated peas to investigate the transmission from parent to off-spring of such pairs of alternate characters as round or wrinkled seeds, green or yellow seeds, and tall or short plants and concluded that the heritable characters of plants are represented by particles or factors, and propounded the Theory of Hereditary.

It was again man’s curiosity to find out whether there could be another route from Europe to India, other than the known one that landed Christopher Columbus on the shores of the New World. It was under this invincible instinct that the great explorers like Captain James Cook, David, Livingstone and Robert Falcon Scott braved hazards which no ordinary person would like to undergo even in dream. Their curiosity to “sail beyond and the sinking star” and to conquer the invincible, in fact convinces us about man’s strong will to strive and not to yield.

In day-to-day life, it is this sense of curiosity which makes people learns new things. In the field of education the teacher is supposed to arouse in the children, curiosity for knowledge. His success depends on his ability to create this sense in the child. Without curiosity, life is dull and drab, meaningless and routine. The whole of world’s fiction is designed to create curiosity among readers and to make them sensitive to human behaviour. If the world were bereft of curiosity, there would be no fiction, no fantasy but only a matter-of-fact living—emotionless and futile, indeed lifeless.