Barter in the blood

I get these quotes for the day on my i-google homepage. Helen Keller is on today saying “College isn't the place to go for ideas.” All the due respect to the great woman, but I can’t seem to agree with that statement.

To the vast majority, college appears to be a collection of people who can be classified as the haves and the have nots. And I’m talking strictly brains here. You have those who have brains, and you have those who don’t. Or atleast that is the popular belief. The dogma persists that a nerd is brainy and the guy with gelled hair and torn jeans is thought to be sans the gray matter. Or the girl with the skin huggin' outfits. But we’ll get to that in a minute.

I’m doing the 3rd reading of a classic book written by Dr. Charles Schwab called The Magic of Thinking Big. Chapter 5 – 'How to think and dream creatively' outlines the meaning of the word creative thinking. He says in this chapter that when the word 'creative' or 'creativity' is brought to the forefront, most people think of the inventors and artists of the world. The author clarifies here that creativity includes even the smallest of things: like a person managing to live inside his/her budget, or a teacher who gets her students to do what they aren’t ready to or any of that stuff. All of that counts as creativity too.

If you aren’t familiar with the two halves of the brain, fyi the left side does the logical reasoning and the right side is responsible for the creative side of things. And so, going back to the case of the nerd and the non-nerd, the former might have a highly developed left sided brain, while the non-nerd might have a superior right sided brain. That doesn’t really make one better than the other, does it? But yea, our big bad black society likes to put labels on people.

I’ll prove it to you.

While I was in Engineering College at NIT Hamirpur until last May, we ran a bi-annual quiz called The Big Quiz. This was a major event for all the quizzers on the campus; the prizes were usually attractive and there was a rolling trophy attached to it as well. As organizers, we seldom expected the beer guzzling, late night-partying, movie watching crowds to show up at the quiz. We were mostly right. But there was this one guy who did all the ‘wrong’ things in life and he’d show up at these quizzes and would be seated in the audience. He would answer nearly 60 to 70 percent of the questions that were passed to the audience. And every time he got one right, the quiz master threw him a Perk or a Munch. By the end of the quiz, this guy would have collected close to 5 or 6 of these chocolates. He’d then leave the venue and make his way to the little chaachu’s dhukaan. He’d hand in the 5 chocolates to chachu and get a packet of Kings in exchange for it.

I think smoking is bad, but come on; that barter was some creativity from a right-brained torn-jeans beer guzzling dude.