Igniting Curiosity: How a Transistor Radio Led to a Career in Engineering, Design, and Entrepreneurship

As a little boy, I used to think that tiny little people lived in my transistor radio, singing and playing their tiny little instruments. How else could it sound so real? I had a lot of questions, like, how do they live in this box? Do their kids go to school? How do they cook without smoke? Are there little toilets inside my radio?  I did not know anything about radio waves at that age, nor would I have believed if someone had explained that there was music all around me in the air that I could not hear. 

The thing is, one can build a hypothesis only on things one already knows. At that young age, growing up in a village in India in the 60s and 70s, this radio was our only technology product in the house. I had seen people singing in real, but this magic box was hard to figure out for an 8-year-old. I tested my hypothesis by shaking the radio, thinking it would upset the singers. Of course, it didn’t. I didn’t know enough to build a second hypothesis, but I was still curious to figure this out. It led to an encounter with a radio repairman who showed me what is in a radio and that no people were living inside it. This incident ignited my interest in electronics and changed my whole life when I look back. It was pivotal to me to become an engineer, product designer, and entrepreneur as an adult.

Curiosity is the urge to figure out what doesn’t make sense. It is the innate drive to understand the unknown and make sense of the world around us. Children are fearlessly exploratory learners. As adults, we still come across things we cannot figure out, but we have lost the confidence and drive to figure them out. We lose our curiosity as we grow up. It normally starts to happen in the mid-teens. I believe it is because the school system feeds us answers to questions we didn’t have or feel were relevant. Giving the answers before we feel the urge to know kills the learner in us who is willing to seek. 

In my experience teaching creativity and design to middle schoolers, I challenge them to go beyond what they believe they can do. Usually, I get pushback from kids, but after struggling and figuring things out a few times, they realize they can learn. This confidence is the fuel for curiosity.

More on this topic in the following mini-blogs.