Creativity and original thinking. If only I could!

So, when I blogged about Narendra Modi's methodical quest to lead the country, I titled the post "India turns to Narendra Modi for gung-ho capitalism and national pride?"

The Economist, while commenting about Modi's ambitions, titles its report in a way that makes me so jealous: Finding NaMo.

What a wonderful play on Finding Nemo!  Now, why didn't I think of that!  Darn :(

So, how the heck can one become creative?  As John Cleese remarked:

Telling people how to be creative is easy - being creative is difficult.

Yes, creativity is so inexplicable.


I recall reading a long time ago, that something like Einstein's famous equation would have been eventually figured out by some scientist, even if we didn't have an Einstein--perhaps it might have taken a lot longer.  The logical thinking in science, and its constant testing of even established ideas, mean that eventually we would have arrived at Einstein's conclusions.  In Einstein's case--when it comes to scientific thinking--we can at least hypothesize that Einstein's creativity can be substituted via the logical scientific process.

But, in the non-scientific world that is not governed by logical thinking?  You remove a Mozart by going back in a time machine, and it is quite possible we would never have had his Symphony #40 and, therefore, I would not have grown up listening to this Hindi film song either.

So, back to John Cleese.  Of course, he has earned the right to talk about creativity.  A wonderfully original thinker; I laugh even now, watching the philosophers' soccer championship.

Often, as in his case too, such creativity is not without some serious intelligence, as I was reminded by this essay in the Atlantic--Cleese is a Cambridge graduate!

[The] BBC offered Cleese his own series. He was interested, but he didn’t want to be the show’s star. He preferred to surround himself with a team of Britain’s cleverest young writer-performers. Chapman, Cleese’s writing partner since their days in Cambridge’s Footlights club, was first on board. 

Yep, smart enough to have been at Cambridge.  But, again, smartness by itself doesn't guarantee creativity either.  If it were that simple, schools and universities would have routinely graduated a great number of Mozarts and Cleeses.

Instead of thinking about such complex issues, policymakers want to make education, especially higher education, nothing but a factory to produce worker bees.  Automatons in flesh and blood.

They want universities to mass produce automatons at the lowest possible prices.  In fact, they want to start this right from the kindergarten levels, it seems like, silencing, for all I know, the Mozarts and Cleeses right from when they are four years old.  Maybe we will not even have creative headline writers in the future, and the world will be full of uncreative Srirams.

How boring!