shreyasnr

I am trying to practice some essay writing. Here is a sample of what I have written. Please let me know your views on the same. Issue Topic: "In most societies, competition generally has more of a negative than a positive effect" Competition drives this era of a rapid technological and social change leading to increasing life complexity. It has both positive and negative effects. The winner gets it all and the looser is left with nothing. Competition is necessary in some fields to drive people to perform better, at the same time this brings in some of the major flaws in the basic methods people devise to win. I would like to take the example of basic sciences. People talk about how important basic sciences are in every walk of our life. Basic sciences have experienced a growth not very different from the microbial culture. Bacteria go through an exponential phase of growth, multiplying every few minutes, until they exhaust the medium or the essential nutrients required for them to grow. They, then go into a stationary phase. We in science have gone through an exponential phase of growth and we now have to cope with some of the stress and strain and the lack of nutrients. Basic science has come to a stationary phase. Think of a reason for this to happen, you come out with the answer as competition. One may feel that competition cannot affect the growth of basic sciences, but the fact is it has and it has affected in not a good way. More of the development that is currently happening in science is that of applied sciences, the engineering part of it. We as students at universities, strive to get the best scores by only studying what has been prescribed in the syllabus, we forget that the syllabus has been framed only to kindle the interest in us in a particular subject. In the competitive world where every single mark that we earn counts for our rank, we develop a narrow outlook where we start feeling that all that we have to study is something that is prescribed in our syllabus. Our innovative thinking dies. Instead, if we can manage to come out of the element of competition, we tend to see the other side of the world where more than just the text book plays a vital role. We start thinking. As the age-old aphorism goes, “Necessity is the mother of invention” is not usually correct. I would like to paraphrase in the inverse way, “Invention is the mother of necessity”. Most of the inventions have been serendipitous. Discovery of x-rays, invention of penicillin, polio vaccination were all accidental discoveries. None of these was oriented towards a particular goal. Research should not be goal oriented as it is required in this competitive world. Great inventions seldom take the world by storm. They must be cultivated to be understood, understood before they can be properly appreciated. For a successful invention, there is a necessity of time and financial support. These are a couple of things tough to ask for in a competitive world. Basic science today lacks both of the requirements. As I said, the nutrients required for the development of basic sciences is exhausted or people have diverted these to applied sciences where they thrive to win in the competitive world. Competition is good to a certain extent till it thrives the people to do something. But it should not be extended in all the fields and in all walks of life. Importance has to be given to researches which are time oriented as well.