LESSONS IN LIBERATION

By the age of nine, I had been witness to my parents being asked to take me out of school; by then I had also attempted to run away from home, twice; and to add insult to injury, I had been caught ripping car monograms and had seen the insides of a police station before blowing out 10 candles on my birthday cake.

I have supportive parents and some very good friends, who did their best to hold me high but the education system of the time had swallowed me whole and then it spat me out like a bite of rotten wretchedness. Year after year, my report card would say that I was hopeless at math, terrible at chemistry and uninterested in physics. My teachers would push the dreaded document under my nose with an expression that seemed to sway violently between a deep sense of disgust and resignation. I was always at the top of the class when it came to languages or history but I didn’t know it then. No one told me. It didn’t matter…

They told me I was a loser. I believed them.

Christopher Langan had started talking in sentences in his sixth month. He could read at four and at 14 he had read his way past a tome as forbidding and doleful as Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica. Inside his rather large head throbs a brain with the intellectual might of Samson. Ever since his childhood, Langan has been smashing IQ (IntelligenceQuotient) tests and he oft en scores ‘off the charts’, which means most IQ tests aren’t equipped to test such stratospheric levels of intelligence. He would crack language tests and math problems with equal ease and got ‘a perfect SAT score’.

To give you a sense of perspective, while most of us would be lucky to score about a 100 in an IQ test, Albert Einstein, the man who remains the intellectual standard for the human race had an IQ of about 150. And Christopher Langan with an IQ of 195 or thereabouts announced himself to the world as the smartest man of our times.

He was marked for greatness and he knew it.

Vincent didn’t need to be told he was a loser. He knew it. He had failed at everything he ever tried.

Whenever Vincent fell in love, he was spurned and rejected with disdain. It was his lot to be scorned and despised as an abomination by every woman he confessed his love to. When he tried to be a teacher, he failed. When he tried to be a preacher, he failed. And when he went to study art, Vincent was turned down yet again.

But, in his heart raged a passion that wouldn’t be denied. Eventually, Vincent gave in and started painting. Flames and forests, and flowers and trees, they all burst forth onto the canvas with a repressed fury. And yet the world around him refused to notice.

Depressed and alone, Vincent Van Gogh shot himself. He was 37. He died of his wounds, unrecognised and unknown.

Years after school, I find myself in a class room again. But this time, my flesh isn’t crawling under my skin. This time, while walking into the classroom, instead of feeling like a French nobleman, brought bound and gagged to the guillotine, past an angry crowd of partisans, I feel like a matador entering the bull ring. The task is daunting, but I feel prepared. The audience was expectant and appreciative. I was nervous but I was excited. I was teaching a class, about the CALL (The role of Creativity Attitude Logic and Language in communication) and the class I was teaching was a class of teachers. I had come a long way from those unhappy days in school. Forgive me if I sound smug or pompous but it really isn’t the idea, I’m only trying to paint a contrast. The point is how did I get to be where I was? How did a boy earmarked for failure end up as a man whose thoughts might matter to a whole bunch of his peers who were all rather successful professionals with scholastic records far more impressive than mine?

Well, I got here thanks to an opportunity that was almost thrust my way right after school. I had always wanted to be a cricketer and that’s all I thought I was good for, but then fate conspired with circumstance and I found myself in a B-school class room attending an integrated BBA programme.

I did not expect much, either of myself or from the programme. And yet, as the days rolled by, I felt that for all these years I had been trying to fit in, like paint trapped inside a bottle. But here, for the first time, I felt that there was faith, and there was freedom. Our teachers encouraged us to discover our true nature through the framework of a curriculum that covered the length and breadth of human achievement and helped us appreciate not just our innate uniqueness but also gave us the independence to help us find ways and means of expressing that uniqueness in a manner that created social, and therefore commercial, value.

No longer was I paint cooped up in a bottle. I had been liberated, splashed out on canvas and free to be what I wanted to be, whether it be the rays of the rising sun or the mane of a prancing horse.

It was here that I learnt that it didn’t matter if I wasn’t a genius at cracking convergent (a test of logical sift ing and arriving at the one correct answer, like solving most mathematical tests and most school-level question papers) problems. I could generate equal levels of social value, and interest, if I could be good at solving divergent (a test of creative comprehension, expression and integration, like for instance developing an advertising campaign) problems instead.

I owe a big debt of gratitude to the institution and the idea of business education that introduced me to the possibilities and the potential that lie within all of us, and for the realisation that each of us indeed is a diamond in the rough.

It is an institution and an education system that needs to understand people and their greatest motivations, and therefore it is only natural for such a system to identify that it doesn’t matter if we aren’t blessed with exceptionally high IQs. What we really need to live fulfilling, prosperous and happy lives is a high dose of EQ (Emotional Quotient) instead. Read that as the ability to relate to and understand our own selves as much as the ability to understand the feelings and motivations of others. To live such a fulfilling life, you would also need what Malcolm Gladwell and Robert Sternberg call ‘practical intelligence’ – the ability to read situations and emotions and to act in a manner that would elicit a desired response. It is the ability to build a bridge between your thoughts and ideas and the world’s ability to value and appreciate them.

However, unlike IQ, practical intelligence isn’t a genetic gift . And nor does it imply that just because you have a high IQ, you would automatically also be good with practical intelligence. In fact, practical intelligence is a consequence of culture, upbringing and education. The family is the best source of practical intelligence but what’ll come a close second is a B-school education that invests in you with lots of faith, focus and freedom. Unfortunately, Vincent Van Gogh never had such an education and neither did Christopher Langan. Which is why in spite of his obvious genius, Van Gogh failed to inspire or impact lives while he was around while Langan, his amazing intellect notwithstanding, has been unable to find acceptance or an opportunity and nor does he seem to have the ability to reach out and share his genius with the world.

Today Christopher Langan, the world’s smartest man, after dropping out of college and spending his adult years working as a construction worker and as a bouncer in a bar, spends his time on a ramshackle horse ranch. He gets invited on reality shows as an intellectual oddity and that is the extent of his impact on our world. It’s a crying shame and an unfortunate irony that lesser mortals like us have been able to maximize our limited talents and share them with those around us, creating our own little waves and ripples on the shared surface of our lives while those with gifts far greater than ours have been living lives frustrated by their sky-high IQs trapped inside their limited practical intelligence.

Now if only someone could get Chris Langan some faith and freedom and a B-school education.

THE SECOND COMING OF THE THIRD REICH

While celebrating the World Cup win on the streets of Delhi last Saturday, I was suddenly reminded of a day from very long ago. It must have been about a couple of years after India had won the World Cup in 1983 when a favourite uncle of mine, an amateur cricketer who used to knock the ball around for Hindu College, came over to our house and saw me beaming with pride at an archival centerfold image of Kapil Dev holding the World Cup high in one of the first ever issues of Sportstar that I ever bought. He looked at it for a while and said that whenever he saw that image it reminded him of a story… a story which at the time I found rather strange. It was a story from the Ramayana, the story of Bali and Sugriva.

Bali, the invincible lord of the vaanar sena was immensely powerful. Warriors great and small would bow in reverence as the great one would stride into their presence with his mighty mace resting on those massive shoulders that seemed to span the breadth of the earth. Bali’s younger brother Sugriva, though able and strong in his own right, was in awe of his elder brother’s prowess. Bali ruled Kishkindha with Sugriva by his side. Sugriva, though a devoted brother, might forget himself for a moment and think what it might like to be king, but the sheer presence of the indomitable force of Bali would bake his dreams like dewdrops on the desert sands in the afternoon sun.

But one day, a demon challenged Bali to a fight and as Bali gave chase, the rakshasa retreated inside a cave. Sugriva tried to stop Bali but the great and impetuous warrior followed his quarry inside the cave while Sugriva waited outside. Gripped by fear and anxiety, he waited for a sign. The sounds of battle reached his ears and then a deafening silence followed. And then there was blood, streaming out like an angry tongue from the mouth of the cave. His mind, clouded by horror, sorrow and fear, and what only a cynic might call the slightest trace of ambition, was convinced that the blood was his brother’s and Bali must have met his end. With a heavy heart, Sugriva blocked the entrance to the cave with a massive boulder, ostensibly to keep the demon in, and ran back to Kishkindha.

News of the king Bali’s death shook the city and the nobles suggested that Sugriva should be made the king. The reign of a great king was supposedly over. There was a new king now. And as he wore that crown on his head, he held it high for in that moment there was both pride and glory. But in his heart he would have known that the crown was too heavy for his head; that he was a mere pretender to the throne and no match for the one whose crown fate had snatched and placed on Sugriva’s head instead.

And soon enough, Bali returned. He had vanquished his nemesis only to find his way home blocked by a boulder placed by his brother who he thought had taken both his wife and his throne. Sugriva tried to explain but Bali’s wrath was too fierce and fists too strong. Sugriva’s resistance and his pleas crumpled like a leaf in a flame and he barely managed to escape, scarred and scorched, with a few of his trusted friends. Stripped of his throne, his crown, his queen and his pride, Sugriva the accidental king was king no more but a mere fugitive, cursing his fate and cowering in fear of the king whose crown he had dared to wear…

In 1983, when West Indies lost the World Cup final to India, like Bali, they were seething with rage. They had been denied a crown that was rightfully theirs by a quirk of fate and a brilliant catch. That winter, they entered the lair of the new champions and blew away the Indians. The new World Cup winners were beaten five to nothing in the one-dayers and three-nil in Tests. The pretenders had been put in their place and the real champions with their explosive batsmen and demonic bowlers had announced to the world that the era of West Indian dominance was far from over.

By narrating that story, I don’t mean to pull down the old masters. My generation owes Kapil’s Devils a debt of gratitude for infusing us with pride and self belief. And while that victory at Lord’s may not have been the final nail in the coffin of West Indies’ supremacy on the cricket field, but it may have well been the first. But ‘uncle’ had a point. No matter how good or gift ed were the India team of the time, world beaters they weren’t. In the 80s, at best, India were second best by a country mile. In fact, except for Australia’s last three victories and the first two by the West Indies, none of the World Cup victories of the past really heralded a new world order.

But this time when Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s men in blue made the World Cup their own in Mumbai last Saturday, it was a definite sign that seemed to announce that modern day cricket was experiencing the charge of its ‘Third Reich’. If the 70s and 80s saw the stadiums of the world being ruled by the Calypso Kings from the islands, then from the mid 90s onwards and right up to 2010, it was the reign of the imperious Aussies that left the rest of the cricketing world fighting over left overs in its wake. And now, the crown of this World Cup victory sits not on a head that is uneasy with the weight of its glory like Sugriva’s but on one that was anointed for such glory, many years ago in the spring of 2001 on a hot and blustery afternoon in Kolkata.

Ever since that day, India had been hacking away at the halo of invincibility that seemed to surround the men in gold and green from Down Under. Just the way the Australians were the first ones to score a few knockdowns against the West Indies in the early and mid 90s before deposing them and assuming the mantle of World Champions, so too have the Indians struck repeated body blows in their duels with the Aussies all through the first decade of 21st century before knocking them down for the count more than once since the tri-series in 2008 and at the World Cup. The count down has started and the Aussies are still on the ropes.

And if you’d excuse a round of gloating, this seems like a good time to remind you dear reader that just before the World Cup, I had gone out on a shaky limb and written that all the signs suggest that India would win the World Cup, and before you claim “so did I!”, I had also said we would win it batting second. So with that, if I now have your attention, and dare I add, a whiff of grudging respect, let me stick my neck out and predict that Mahi’s boys in blue are now going to seal their claim to the crown of the world by knocking the Australians out in their backyard this December. And in that victory will lie the seeds of eternal greatness for this team, for the lessons from that tour will lay the foundation for India’s campaign in 2015.

Staggered World Cup wins are for pretenders. The real champions win a string of them and this time India is no Sugriva but a veritable Indra, destined to rule the gods of the game for a fair while to come. In the next issue I will dwell for a while on the ‘hows’, and for some doubting Clarkes and Johnsons, on the ‘whys’ too, but until then, let’s stand shoulder to shoulder and raise a teetotaler’s toast to the team and drink our fill from this cup of joy.