I spoke at the Queens city Rotary Club in Bombay. The topic was:

Literacy in the 21st Century
Vidya and Avidya

Sharing some points with you

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write,

The 3 Rs
Reading Writing and Arithmetic

but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

What do we unlearn?

1) We must unlearn
To discriminate between Education of Boys and Girls

Education does affect a girl’s marriage prospects
But
It is imp that a girl is financially independent
What happens if the marriage does not work or she is widowed?

2) We must unlearn that we cannot learn because we are getting older.

“I am learning all the time. The tombstone will be my diploma.”
- Eartha Kitt


“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.”
- Henry Ford


Each one Teach one
Teach your help
Take time out to volunteer

“The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.”
Anisthenes




“Learning is not attained by chance. It must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence.”
Abigail Adams

Computer literate
Tech Savvy

Mobiles
sms

Learn
Emails
Google search

In fact you must learn as you are getting older
You have more time to have fun

Websites
More structured
To sell goods
Spiritual
Poems
Jokes
Sayings

Blog
Journal
Twitter
Facebook

The above is Avidya
What is Vidya
Finding you real nature
The real goal of human life.

Vidya is real literacy

Hindus believe in 4 different Paths
Karma

Bhakti

Dhyaan Gyaan

In Advaita Vedanta
The work of avidya is to suppress the real nature of things and present something else in its place. In essence it is not different from Maya (pronounced Māyā). Avidya relates to the finite Self (Sanskrit: atman) while Maya is an adjunct of the cosmic Self. In both cases it connotes the principle of differentiation which is implicit in human thinking. It stands for that delusion which breaks up the original unity (refer: nonduality) of what is real and presents it as subject and object and as doer and result of the deed. What keeps humanity captive in Samsara is this avidya. This ignorance is not lack of erudition; it is ignorance about the nature of 'Being' (Sanskrit: Sat). It is a limitation that is natural to human sensory or intellectual apparatus. This is responsible for all the misery of humanity. Advaita Vedanta holds that the eradication of it should be humanity's only goal and that will automatically mean Realisation of the Self (Sanskrit: atman).
[edit] Adi Shankara on avidya
Adi Shankara says in his Introduction to his commentary on the Brahma Sutras, "Owing to an absence of discrimination, there continues a natural human behaviour in the form of 'I am this' or 'This is mine'; this is avidya. It is a superimposition of the attributes of one thing on another. The ascertainment of the nature of the real entity by separating the superimposed thing from it is vidya (knowledge, illumination)". In Shankara's philosophy avidya cannot be categorized either as 'absolutely existent' or as 'absolutely non-existent'





“The beautiful thing about learning is that no one can take it away from you.”
B.B.King