There were only four students in the room, and none of them were allowed to speak English.
The rule seemed simple enough until the first sentence collapsed halfway through.
It was a 200-Level Chinese course, still early enough in the journey that confidence had not yet arrived. The instructor enforced the rule without exception: every question, every answer, every attempt at conversation had to be in Mandarin. There were no translation lifelines and no retreat into the comfort of English. Just four American students sitting in a classroom in China, wrestling with tones that refused to behave the way they expected.
A phrase would begin confidently and then stall as a missing word interrupted the thought. Tones drifted upward when they should have fallen. Someone would pause, laugh nervously, start again, and attempt to rebuild the sentence piece by piece.
Language learning, especially Mandarin, has a way of humbling people very quickly, stripping away the illusion of competence faster than almost anything else. In that room, four young Americans who were perfectly articulate in their own language suddenly became beginners again.
Sitting in the back of the class, I admired their persistence.
Among them was a student from New Jersey. He had Italian roots, was attending a university in North Carolina, and had now decided to spend a semester in China studying Mandarin. When he was called upon, the words came slowly, assembled with visible concentration as he searched for the right character and tone. Each sentence seemed to require the full attention of his mind.
Later that afternoon we met again over lunch, and the difference was immediate. The moment English returned to the conversation, so did his personality. The quiet student from the classroom suddenly became animated, curious, talking rapidly about everything he hoped to experience during his time in China. He described the food he had already discovered, the cities he wanted to visit, and the people he hoped to meet once his Mandarin improved enough to make real conversations possible.
He had only been in the country for a week.
But the excitement was unmistakable.
When I asked why he had chosen Mandarin, his explanation was refreshingly simple. From his perspective, China was clearly a major force in the world, and learning the language felt like a sensible way to understand it better.
What struck me later was that we were having this conversation on my very first day in China.
I had not yet experienced the country myself. I carried only the same headlines and assumptions that most of us arrive with when we encounter a place that has already been heavily narrated for us.
And yet, almost instinctively, I felt a familiar reflex rising in my own mind. Years of observing global politics can make even curiosity look a little naïve. When someone expresses excitement about exploring a country that dominates so many geopolitical headlines, the instinct is to filter that enthusiasm through everything we think we already know.
But as our conversation continued, that assumption quietly dissolved.
He was not unaware of the headlines. He simply refused to let them become the only lens through which he understood the world.
He wanted to see the country for himself.
And somewhere in the middle of that conversation, I realized that what I had initially mistaken for naïveté was actually something else entirely.
Agency.
For a moment, sitting across from him at lunch, I could see a younger version of myself in the room. The same restless curiosity. The same belief that the world was larger than the place we had grown up. When you are that age, exploration feels natural. You follow questions wherever they lead without worrying too much about whether the answers will confirm what you already believe. Only later do most of us begin to trade curiosity for certainty, exploration for caution, and questions for conclusions.
It doesn’t happen all at once. Curiosity rarely disappears in a single moment. It is negotiated away—a preference for familiar answers over uncomfortable questions, a shift toward efficiency over exploration.
At some point, I found myself wondering if I had done the same. If somewhere along the way, curiosity had become something I admired in others more than something I actively practiced myself—because certainty is easier to defend.
————
Thirty-four years ago I boarded a flight from India to the United States with two suitcases and very little understanding of the country I was about to enter. I didn’t know much about its political divisions or its historical contradictions. Information simply didn’t circulate the way it does today.
Looking back, it would be easy to call that moment naïve.
But it wasn’t.
It was curiosity doing what curiosity has always done throughout human history: pushing people across borders in search of possibility.
Students today move through the world very differently. They arrive with far more information than my generation ever had. They know the controversies, the criticisms, and the political debates long before they step onto a plane.
And yet many of them still go.
They still cross borders. They still learn languages. They still step into places adults often describe primarily through suspicion or rivalry.
Every year millions of students make similar decisions, not because they have resolved the political tensions of the world, but because curiosity continues to pull them forward.
Curiosity has a peculiar effect on the human mind. It complicates certainty.
The world students encounter when they step into another country is almost always more complicated than the one presented to them online. Algorithms reward certainty. Experience introduces doubt. Curiosity is what allows us to stay with that doubt long enough to learn something from it.
That process is rarely comfortable. It involves mispronounced words, awkward pauses, and the realization that the world is larger and more complicated than the stories we inherited about it.
Once you have struggled through conversations in a language that does not come naturally, shared meals with people whose lives unfold under different political systems, and navigated unfamiliar streets with nothing but curiosity as your guide, the world becomes harder to reduce to simple categories.
And that changes what you think you understand.
Because the competition that ultimately shapes the coming decades may not revolve around territory or ideology alone. It may revolve around something far less visible: where curious people choose to gather.
Nations often speak about talent as if it were a resource to be acquired or defended. But talent rarely moves toward control. It moves toward possibility. Curious people gravitate toward places where questions are encouraged, where ideas are allowed to collide, and where exploration is not treated as a threat.
Over time those places accumulate something far more valuable than influence.
They accumulate the future.
———
For much of the last century, universities became the pathways through which curiosity crossed borders. Students left home, encountered unfamiliar ideas, struggled through new languages, and returned with perspectives that could never be acquired from a distance.
Those journeys were rarely smooth. They were often uncomfortable, occasionally disorienting, and sometimes politically inconvenient.
But they worked.
They created generations of people who understood that the world could not be reduced to simple binaries.
If curiosity is going to remain a global force, the pathways that carry it will have to evolve. Physical mobility will always matter, but it cannot remain the only gateway to global understanding. Technology now allows ideas, classrooms, and conversations to cross borders even when students cannot.
The real challenge for universities in the coming decades will not simply be attracting students to campuses. It will be designing systems that allow curiosity itself to move more freely across the world, even when geopolitics makes people less mobile.
Curiosity still exists in abundance.
But the pathways through which it travels are narrowing.
And yet, in classrooms like the one I visited in Beijing, it stubbornly persists.
Curiosity has always carried danger. People who encounter other societies directly tend to develop inconvenient habits. They ask better questions. They notice contradictions. They grow skeptical of the simplified narratives that once seemed sufficient.
Curiosity rarely produces perfect agreement.
But it often produces something far more valuable.
Understanding.
Sitting in that Mandarin classroom, watching four students struggle through tones they had barely begun to master, reminded me that the world’s young people often see possibilities long before political systems do. They step into unfamiliar places while the rest of us are still debating whether it is safe.
Curiosity has always required courage—the willingness to step into unfamiliar places and remain there long enough for the world to become more complicated than the stories we were told about it.
More often than we realize, it is that courage—not certainty—that reshapes the future.
The students had already decided that understanding the country was more valuable than fearing it.
Watching them, I found myself wondering something I suspect many of us should ask more often.
When did certainty start feeling more comfortable than curiosity?
History rarely moves forward because the most powerful people demand it.
More often it moves because someone, somewhere, refuses to stop asking questions.
Ex Cogitatione, Progressus
Girish
