41st Foundation Day Lecture at IIMB
In January, 1882 Van Gogh, the great Post-impressionist painter in a letter to his
brother Theo, wrote “Drawing becomes more and more a passion with me, and it
is a passion just like that of a sailor for the sea”. Van Gogh’s art represented
painting as music. “They are not just flowers in a vase, they are something almost
cosmic”, said a critic of The Sunflowers, one of Van Gogh’s most famous paintings.
Unlocking the creative potential of children, adults and communities around the
world - rich, poor and downtrodden - is one of the central challenges of the 21 st
century. By the end of my speech you will learn about the transformative power
of curiosity and new ways to see, unlock and unleash your own creativity.
So, what makes you creative, innovative, or a great problem-solver? Is it
something in your genes or a skill that you have learned? In 1884 when Einstein
was 5 years old and ill in bed his father brought him a gift, a magnetic compass.
The compass fascinated the young Einstein because whichever way he held it, it
always pointed in the same direction. It was a momentous gift. Einstein
remarked years later that it was the magnetic compass that made him wonder if
there was an invisible force behind everything in the universe and as you know
he dedicated his life to finding it. I know what you are thinking. Do I have to be
an Einstein to be creative? So let’s fast forward more than a century later to 2008
on a hot summer’s day in rural India, when two village girls, Rani and Roja – one
the daughter of a farmer with no more than 1 or 2 acres of land and the other the
daughter of a carpenter – sat under a tree to escape the sun. Rani looked at Roja
and said “Roja, do you ever wonder why you feel cool sitting in the shade of a
tree?” Roja thought for a second and replied “maybe it has something to do with
the fact that the leaves and branches of the tree shield us from the sun”. The girls
continued talking until the Aha! Question popped out “Would different leaves
have different cooling effects? That question led to a project not surprisingly
titled the cooling effect of leaves, and working with teacher-igniters from the
Agastya Foundation nine months later the girls won a prestigious Intel-IRIS
Science Award competing with the best and brightest students from across India;
most of them from urban schools. Is the story of Rani and Roja an uncommon
one? Let me tell you about Sai and Pavithra two kids in N. Karanataka who used
to visit their village on their vacation and see mountains of groundnut shells
piled up on the countryside. India, as you know is one of the largest producers of
groundnuts in the world. Sai and Pavithra wondered if anything useful could be
made from the discarded shells and came up with the idea of making paper. So
they went their idea to see their Chemistry teacher and came up with a formula
and produced a paste to dry. When it dried the paste would not hold together, so
they had hit a brick wall, until one day observing his grandmother cook his
favorite ladies finger (okra) dish Sai observed that the boiling okra left behind a
gluey residue. That was his Aha! Moment! The kids used the residue as the glue
to hold the groundnut paste and produced quality paper. Their innovation was
filmed by the Deshpande Foundation and uploaded on YouTube. An
entrepreneur watched it and came to Agastya with an idea to commercialize Sai
and Pavithra’s innovation, but that’s another story, which time does not permit
me to get into today. Since 2008, hundreds of poor children – children whom
Agastya teaches to teach other children, children of parents with little to no
money - have produced projects with creative and innovative findings and
insights, and many of them have won prizes and awards in India and abroad.
What do these stories tell you? I think they tell you the value of curiosity, the
spirit of enquiry, the magic of wonder, the power of passion. Einstein attributed
his earth shattering insights to curiosity, obsession and dogged endurance -
staying with a problem until you have cracked it. Newton’s peculiar gift wrote
Keynes was his “continuous, concentrated introspection”, his ability to hold
continuously a problem in his mind for weeks until he cracked it. Our Rishis had
great mental energy, which enabled them to hold ideas in their mind
continuously for years and decades. In 1988 when I was a banker in NYC I saw a
film on PBS called The Man Who Loved Numbers, about the mathematical genius
Ramanujan. As I watched fascinated, Janakiammal, Ramanujan’s wife’s
comments on her husband moved me deeply. A few weeks later I was on a visit
to Madras, and one evening I mentioned the PBS film to my uncle. To my delight
and surprise, he asked me “Would you like to meet Mrs. Ramanujan?” I said,
“Yes!” About an hour later I was led into a modest home in Triplicane and was
immediately drawn to a magnificent bust of Ramanujan’s made by an American
sculptor, and funded by a 100 mathematicians around the world. The bust
dominated the room. As we chatted, Mrs. Ramanujan, who was 89 and hard of
hearing, said in a high-pitched voice with tears in her eyes, “People have
forgotten my husband”. Speaking about Ramanujan’s last days she said that
pieces of paper with abstruse mathematical formula scribbled over them were
strewn on his deathbed. “For him”, she said with wonder, “it was only numbers,
numbers and numbers”. Ramanujan did not just love numbers. He lived them -
an astounding, perhaps even an extreme, example of passion-based creativity.
So why should you be creative? Creativity is the most desired trait among
knowledge workers today because creativity leads you to new ideas, which lead
to invention and innovation, which lead to productivity and prosperity. And as
future leaders you need to be creative, to build environments where creativity
can flower and flourish. Equally, the creative spirit as the great sages, artists and
poets tell us elevates your vision. It connects you to things beautiful and sacred
beyond your narrow self and experience. It infuses spontaneity, and gives
meaning and purpose to life. When someone asked J Krishnamurti why he spoke
so much to public audiences he replied, “Why does a flower bloom?”
Twelve years ago when I returned to India to start Agastya Foundation I asked
the question: What makes a country creative and innovative? Can you raise the
level of the ocean, the speed limit of creativity of a country? Through discussions
with Dr. PK Iyengar, KV Raghavan, teachers, educators, students and business
people on what distinguishes a creative person we came up with a model. We
said that you the creative person are a great observer; you see more than others;
you hear more than others; you feel more deeply than others; you experience
deep, unbiased awareness, which gestates and grows an idea or thought. You
tinker and experiment; you have the capacity to connect, assimilate and
associate different pieces of apparently unconnected knowledge and
information, and the ability to apply your insight to produce something of value
for yourself, your community or society. Skills, identical to the discovery skills of
creative entrepreneurs that Christensen and others document in The Innovator’s
DNA. So we asked the question “can you learn such skills?” and the answer was
“Yes you can!” Iyengar told me that he was certain that a non-scientist like me
would become a much better observer if I practiced doing a bunch of low cost
science experiments. When Chanakya was sitting downcast in a village
questioning why he and his protégé Chandragupta were losing their battles
against their hated enemy the Nanda king, he saw a boy being served a plate of
hot rice by his mother. The boy was hungry, immediately scooped a handful of
rice and put in his mouth. The hot rice scalded the boy’s tongue and he screamed
in pain. His mother scolded him, saying “You silly boy. Don’t you know the rice is
hottest at the center? You should start from the edges and work you way to the
center”. That was the Aha! Moment, that Chankaya needed. He realized the
reason he had been losing his battels with the Nanda king. He and Chandragupta
had been attacking their enemy at the center, where he was strongest. From that
day forward they changed their strategy and started attacking the fringes and
gradually worked their way to the center. Their successful strategy, known as the
rice bowl stratagem, led to the Mauryan empire. To observe better, you must
have the urge, the motivation and the passion to enquire and discover. So if you
want to raise the speed limit of creativity in a society you have to create
conditions to trigger and unleash curiosity. You might not produce a Ramanujan,
but you can build systems that encourage and enable more Ranis and Rojas to
express and give shape to their ideas fearlessly. How? We decided to focus on
hands-on, experiential learning because cognitive scientists tell you that this is a
proven way to increase learning and retention. The human brain on average
retains 5% of a lecture in its long-term memory, 50% of what you see and hear,
70% of what you discuss with someone, 80% of what you personal experience
and over 90% of what you teach to others. Also, hands-on experience results in
higher levels of motivation and confidence.
Over the years we realized that the answer to triggering curiosity and fostering
creativity and innovation might well lie in a simple toy like the Tippe Top. The
Tippe Top highlights the three most important elements in learning. When you
spin it, it tips over unexpectedly and you go Aah! Rather like how you feel when
you see something counterintuitive, arresting or beautiful, when your curiosity is
stirred and your mind is awakened. And then you wonder why or how this
happens. And the process of discovery leads you to the Aha! Moment or several
Aha moments when things click, or when you have an insight. Finally, you must
have fun doing what you are doing, which is the Ha-ha element. Fun and humor
remove fear and anxiety, help retention and increase performance. If the 3Rs
were the stepping-stone for education in the 20 th century, I believe the 3 As –
Aah, Aha and Ha-ha – are the stepping-stones to creativity in the 21 st century. It’s
easy! Infuse the 3 As into education, into the way you live and you will raise your
creative output by triggering important behavioral shifts, from Yes to Why, from
Looking to Observing, from being Passive to learning to Explore, from being
Textbook-bound to Hands-on, and finally, the most important shift, from Fear to
Confidence. Some years ago, I happened to visit a village school where I met the
head teacher and asked her “what impact is Agastya having on your children?”
and she pointed me to a tall girl, Uma who was standing under a tree. So I went
up to Uma and asked her “Uma, you have been visiting Agastya for several
months now, has there been any change?” and do you know what she said? She
didn’t say that she was doing great in her studies – which apparently she was –
she just looked at me and said, “I am not afraid to speak anymore”. This was an
Aah, Aha and Ha-ha moment for me. I realized that the real value of our hands-on
interventions was the precious opportunity they gave disadvantaged children to
lift their confidence and self-belief, to shift from what psychologists call ‘learned
helplessness’ to ‘learned optimism’. Uma became the first girl from her village to
go to an engineering college and her example inspired many other girls from her
village to join college.
So curiosity is a wonderful thing. But as life shows you all too often curiosity
alone does not guarantee action. And confidence alone sometimes can lead you
to ill conceived and - when it spills into arrogance - disastrous action. Curiosity
combined with confidence can lead you to strong action. And curiosity with
confidence and humanity can lead you to right or creative action.
I have talked about curiosity in terms of the external world, but this is only half
the story. There is, equally, the power of curiosity into your inner world, the
science of the interior, or Adhyatma Vidhya. Among Indian sculptors of old long
periods of meditation produced godly and spectacular works of art, what
Aurobindo termed as great examples of ‘spirit to form’. On the seventh of June,
1893 when 24 year-old Mohandas Gandhi was thrown out of the first class
compartment of his train in Maritzburg, South Africa he sat humiliated and
shivering in the dark waiting room pondering his plight. He thought, “I have
three options. I can forget what happened to me and continue with my life. I can
go back to India, or I can stay and fight”. He concluded that he would be a coward
if he chose option 1 or 2. He decided to stay and fight. Gandhi’s introspection on
that miserable wintry night, when he questioned, discovered, felt and explored
his fears and motives in a moment of personal crisis was a defining experience, a
deeply creative one for him and a pivotal moment for the world; a moment
which led to action, whose results benefitted millions. The coming together of
Gandhi’s inner questioning with purposeful action changed the world.
So when the two worlds of curiosity – the outer and the inner – meet you have a
revolutionary mind, a mind that is infused with abiding curiosity, confidence and
humanity, a mind that lives and acts creatively, a mind that acts with passion and
purpose. That mind is yours if….IF you are aware and alive to the power and
richness of being curious, to the fun and excitement of uncertain and unknown
outcomes; if you enquire, tinker and experiment not only because you want a
result be it money, fame, success, love or liberation but because you enjoy and
love the process of discovery!
Five thousand and one hundred years ago a blind kind asked his charioteer
“Dharmakshetre Kurukshetre Samveda Yuyutsava, Mamakaah
Pandavashchaivvah Kimma Kurvata Sanjaya?” You are today at the crossroads
of a similar ‘make or break’ decision. You have a great responsibility. Like never
before in our history, what you chose to do in and for India will have a profound
effect on the world. As Krishnamurti said, “You are the world”.
Do you want to build a creative India? An India, that invents and innovates, an
India that creates and builds new ways and methods of learning, business,
entrepreneurship, politics, social enterprise, sustainable living, and spiritual
living. Or do you want to copy what someone else says or does? As you step out
of IIMB into the world to produce great results and make a difference, be curious
in the deepest sense. Practice the art of being curious. Take projects and
assignments with uncertain and unknown outcomes that force you to enquire
and discover. Watch yourself closely through your journey and write down and
discuss your observations. Elevate your vision, go where no one’s gone before,
challenge and inspire yourself and your colleagues through your unique mission.
Sing and dance, or create environments where singers and dancers like Rani and
Roja or a young Ramanujan can flourish. You will be creative either way. Find
your Tippe Top and live the 3As – Aah! Aha! and Ha-ha!
