Page 12 - SREENARAYANAGURU OPEN UNIVERSITY

Let us go back to Asan’s poem we talked about by way
of illustration. Each of you might have interpreted the poem
differently, come to different narratives or drawn different
conclusions to the poem's meaning. Perhaps you may find
different questions of research based on this small and
seemingly simple poem of a of domestic situation vividly
etched by the poet. This poem makes you appreciate the fact
that there are multiple ways in which questions can be asked
Diverse of this poem or that the poem can be interpreted in different
interpretations & ways, and that the conclusions drawn or explanations given
varied questions would be related to the questions one chooses to ask. It also
makes you realise that a researcher is like this child who
knows that he cannot fly, but imagines that the flowers possess
this capacity. The child’s curiosity is aroused by the mother
contradicting his knowledge. This would now persuade him
to ask different questions, such as, why don't flowers fly but
butterflies do? Or, why when a child can run around and play,
the pichakam is immobile? And so on and on and on. Not all
children would ask the same questions, and some adamant
ones may not ask any questions but may insist that they are
only flying flowers and the mother is the wrong one.
As a curious inquirer, you would ask questions with an
open mind and in a spirit of inquiry, and the motive, as
Boulanger says, is discovery. You would identify gaps in your
knowledge, some questions more significant than others. An
inquiry is all about asking questions to dig up ideas. This
asking of questions may be as exhaustive as possible; it
would all depend on the degree and level of curiosity you
have and the corpus of information that you have mustered
through dialogues with people who are knowledgeable in
Wide exploration this or sources that deal with the subject matter that holds

your interest. They may not be all experts or literature in your
discipline alone, but the net of information would be cast
very wide so that you, as an inquirer, would get an idea as
to what all information is out there in relation to the general
question that has caught your interest but you have not yet
framed your researchable questions.

French philosopher Michel Foucault beautifully describes a few of curiosity’s
inherent characteristics: “Curiosity evokes ‘care’; it evokes the care one takes of
what exists and what might exist; a sharpened sense of reality, but one that is never
immobilised before it; a readiness to find what surrounds us strange and odd; a
certain determination to throw off familiar ways of thought and to look at the same
things in a different way; a passion for seizing what is happening now and what is
disappearing; a lack of respect for the traditional hierarchies of what is important
and fundamental.”

6 SGOU - SLM - Foundational Skills for Research and Writing