Knowing comes through not knowing

The great orientalist, poet and scholar A K Ramanujan wrote in his memoirs that while studying at Indiana University in the US, he had a professor, whose name I'm forgetting. That professor was extremely erudite and had a convincing answer to almost every query raised by the students. Yet, he was honest enough to categorically say, 'I don't know,' whenever he had no answer or explanation to a query. That quality of honestly saying, 'I don't know' endeared him to all, especially to students and they would respect him all the more because of his disarmingly humble habit of accepting a number of times that he didn't know. " It's far better and praiseworthy to say, 'I don't know' than giving a misleading answer to create a false impression that one knows everything, " said Booker T Washington.

So very true. Even the so-called polymaths or versatile geniuses will find many subjects and areas, which are not their metiers. Ghalib put it so succinctly and honestly in one of his couplets: 'Sukhanvari ko main ne samjha apna ilaaqa/ Haif, kai baar isi halqe mein thokar khaai maine' (I thought that poetry was my territory/Alas, I fell flat in my own sphere). 

The realization of one's limitations opens up the doors to wisdom. Socrates' cryptic statement articulates this: What I know well is that I don't know. Ludwig Wittgenstein's Knowing comes through unknowing is a mantra we all must follow. Only when you're ignorant about something and honest about your ignorance, can you learn that and eventually master. The legendary French composer Frederic Chopin wrote that one day when he was a young performer on the stage in Paris, it suddenly dawned on him that certain notes in his pianissimo were faulty, he hesitatingly accepted that before an august gathering of connoisseurs and promised that he'd learn them better. Those learned cognoscenti appreciated his honesty and wished him well for his future concerts. Chopin took twelve years to master Piano Sonata 1, just because he could say at a young and impressionable age that he didn't know.