The International Literacy Day is an international observance, celebrated annually on 8th September. Celebrated for the first time in 1967, this day is a significant remembrance of our progress as a society. No matter what we say about our country or society regarding poverty, we've come a long way in tackling this continuous challenge. When I first started to research about this day, the first word that caught my eye was celebrated. I didn't really see anything to celebrate in us as a society having so many illiterate people. However, this isn't only a day to pledge support to combat inequity and frown about lack of access to basic literary tools but it's also a chance to celebrate those who've defied their families and communities just to get educated and have triumphed. There is a yearly theme set by UNESCO and for the year 2020 it was 'Literacy teaching and learning in the Covid-19 crisis and beyond', focusing especially on the changing role of educators and methods. While we certainly made gradual progress as a society over decades regarding improvement in literacy levels, there was still a stark divide within populations, and the arrival of the pandemic just made that gap wider. During the initial phase of the pandemic, adult literacy programmes worldwide came to a sudden halt, thus negatively impacting the progress of these people. What we know but yet constantly underestimate is the proportionality of literacy to an informed and modern society, both in beliefs and actions. Such societies have drastically reduced poverty levels too. This statement assumes importance as nearly 775 million adults lack minimum literacy skills and 1 in 5 adults are still not literate. An alarming fact is that two-thirds of these are women. 60 million children are out of school and many more attend irregularly and are dropouts. These statistics show us that we have a big challenge in today's pandemic-affected world which is how to make remote learning more accessible to the poor and marginalized. Hence, recognizing the digital divide and lack of access to basic tools required for online education in many poor communities, societies, and countries, the theme for this year is 'Literacy for a Human Centred Recovery: Narrowing the Digital Divide'. Education goes both ways, learning and teaching. It is important to spread awareness amongst people and encourage them to seek some form of education. The older we get, the one constant we are aware of is that there is so much more out there in the world for us to know and learn. Those who accept this fact are driven to learn more so that every day there is a new nugget of information garnered and that is how true learning progresses. Hence, to sum it up, this is a day which can be viewed through numerous prisms -be it introspection, celebration, or scepticism. It depends on us. Progress is always made in society. However, it's up to us to decide the rate of this progress. This is a day to reflect and celebrate, but more importantly, it's a day to decide what kind of a world we want to live in.