• Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right! - Isaac Asimov
  • World Fame takes a lifetime of effort. Though sometimes the fame preceeds the effort - Me
  • I cant understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm afraid of the old ones - John Cage
  • Nearly all men can stand adversity, if you want to test a man's character, give him power. - A. Lincoln

March 03, 2007

Indians lack creativity

Had written this a while ago, thought of posting after reading Sujai's article - Are Indians creative and original?

Indians lag behind not only in science but in arts, music and other forms of creativity as well. India has 1/6th of the world population. Thus 1 out of every 6 famous artist, musician, sculpture, scientist, writer should be from India.

Indian musicians are still trying to catch up with the west. No offense to Indian music, but it does not have the concept of harmony at all. Nor does it have a concept of providing a bass. Comparing western and Indian music is like comparing a Windows OS with a dos prompt where only one task can run at a time. Though the Indian classical ragas have good melody as well as subtlety, but just having melody is not sufficient. While the west experimented with drums, toms, cymbals and other percussions totaling more than 100 types of percussions, all we have is a tabla, mridungum and maybe one or two more. No Indian instrument produces harmony. They are all designed towards one note as a time.

The sports story is well known.

I haven't heard of any notable Indian sculpture. The only ones of value are in the ancient temples which were made hundreds and thousands of years ago. And if someone were to attempt to make something like that now, the society would eat up that person with all kinds of people protesting against his/her art.

We have a fair share of writers, though many of the good books are banned, with the writers forced to take refuge in other countries and India tries to avoid giving even a visitors visa to them.

Indian culture hinders free thinking. While the school system is bad enough, even at home, children have to agree to whatever the parents or elders say and don't have a right to opinion. Some people might say that this is a good thing. But whether good or bad, it leads to a decline in creativity and we produce a generation of robots who can be programmed to take calls in a call center or maybe write code in c++ or java.
The goal in life Indian children are taught is to get admission in IIT/IIM/AIIMS, so that their parents can gloat in front of their peers who's children did not score so well. If the children score, they are a success otherwise a failure.

Very few children have the resilience to defeat the environment of upbringing during the first 20 years of life. Those who do, have to nourish their creativity either by hiding it from parents and other people surrounding them or through the brute force of rebellion.