Save Us The Super Brilliance Of The Precious Few

Times of India, Delhi, 11th Jan 2015

http://epaperbeta.timesofindia.com/index.aspx?eid=31808&dt=20150111

I quite love the presentation and analysis of this article. In fact, if one thinks about it, the conclusions are quite stark and hardly surprising.

So, what does it mean? Does more equality mean less creative brilliance, innovation and enterprise? Absolutely not! However, what it suggests is that only when we have widespread creative brilliance, innovation and enterprise so that the terrain is not monopolised by so few, that we will have equality.

What it may also mean is that the presence of a few extremely brilliant super-achiever individual icons could be an indicator of a largely mediocre and sub-optimised social system. For a system to develop as a whole, it needs to continuously produce newer icons in more numbers and frequency so that monopolies can't set in.

But do societies have weapons to deal with this situation? How can we make creative brilliance, innovation and enterprise a norm rather than a random, rare happenstance as it seems to be at the moment?

To my mind, that weapon can only be education. An education that reaches every child and strongly inculcates in her the values of free thinking, innovation and enterprise from a very early stage. It definitely cannot be the prescriptive indoctrination which is often passed off as education, howsoever well meaning it might be.

Obviously, such an education as needed will not be in the interest of the present day powerful and brilliant masters of monopolies. In which case, will such education get the policy support, investment and the encouragement it will need to develop? 

Well, the writing on the wall makes a sad reading but there is a hope in the ubiquitous, democratic ways of modern technology and internet, provided they themselves are not monopolised!!