How to Remember Every Boring Lecture You've Ever Had to Sit Through

Kaustubh Khare was sitting in a sociology class in first year, as part of his liberal arts course as part of the Young India Fellowship at Ashoka University. Though he had graduated from IIT-Kharagpur in Architecture, he was having a hard time writing down the complicated theories his professor was talking about. So he began doodling. Mid-way through the lecture, he gave up on words entirely. Aristotle, Plato, democracy, anarchy, eastern and western philosophy—all found their way into his notebook in pictures.

“Although the subject was intriguing, I could not concentrate for three hours straight and understand whatever was happening,” says Kaustubh. “I just took out my pen, and began drawing the way I understood those theories.”

Khare, who is now 27 and runs Khetify, a “smart urban farming” startup, told me that since childhood, “I have had difficulty making sense of text.” He said he’s always “some sort of dyslexic condition.”

“In school, I wouldn’t understand how two-plus-two worked. But you draw me lines, and I could add up just about anything.” From an early age he realised that written words didn’t make sense to him as much as images did.

For the rest of his course, Khare sat in the lecture rooms surrounded by a bunch of fine liner pens and pigment markers. Although initially his drawings were simple, his skill at converting words to images flourished with support from a mentoring professor—an artist himself.

In terms of learning through images though, Khare’s father was his first teacher. His father would illustrate things for him, so maths would become an affair of lines, and Newton’s Laws became illustrations of moving cars and seesaws.

Outside of class, Khare uses doodles to record the minutes of professional meetings and sessions too. “I have observed and recorded meetings of United Nations as well as Oxfam on a couple of occasions,” he said. “When I showed them my observations of their meetings, they just loved it. It is easier to recall the details of the meetings by just looking at the drawings instead of going through a thick document full of text.”

Called sketchnoting or graphic recording, this method of taking in information is picking up around the world. It’s less common in India, but people like Digital Tsunami author Abhijit Bhaduri have advocated it, and others, like Rasagy Sharma and Kriti Monga, post their sketchnotes on Instagram.

With an education system that encourages rote learning, and some estimates that 10 to 15 percent of Indian children are dyslexic, visual learning may be a helpful tool for those who don’t quite fit in the box. “Text, being linear in nature, confines the way in which information can be communicated,” Khare said. “Images, on the other hand, allow the freedom to express in an unrestricted manner.”

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