Friday, June 16, 2006

Genius

Genius! The word used to conjure visions of 100 percent scores in mental math classes and an absolute stunning proficiency in something as boring and unwonderful and markedly adult such as chess... I mean a genius wouldnt even use a word like unwonderful in the colourless existence attributed to geniuses in my juvenile mind...

But I guess the meanings, contexts and environs attached to every word change with time and the situation of life we are in that is our maturity...

Why am I saying this?

Because today I read somethingabout a person I knew a long time ago in life... A person I thought was a genius because he scored such brilliant marks at the school finishing exams and was the apple of everyone's eye... Oh he's going to be special one day was the common consensus on the subject... And I thought yeah well its just the marks... Anybody could do that if they tried hard enough... Such was the thinking of my childlike mind....

But the truth is there is such a thing as a person who just hones his/her mental skills better than all of us put together. Partly maybe because they try hard enough and partly because they can...

I used to believe writing is a skill as far divorced from math as possible.. I mean it was always one or the other... Either you could write or you could do math... But you know what there are people who can do both as well??

And then the ultimate bastion of marked intelligence is that they can play a good game of chess.. How do you compete with that?

The answer is you don't... Some people just are better than others... I think it is such people who stop us from taking ourselves too seriously. The belief that we could do what we want to do if only we pushed ourselves hard enough.. But if we're so complacent about our potential then why are we not exhibiting it more often.. Because somewhere deep inside, we're not sure we can push ourselves that far and not snap...

That is not to say that all the guys who did well in school are the true geniuses who will build the future of India (or Amreeka, as may be the case) or even their own future for that matter...

But truly there are people who have an aptitude for engineering and an interest in medicine and who succeed a hundred percent even when they do medicine.... And they can write well, they speak well... And to top it all, guess what, they can play chess too!!!

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