Given the mounting numbers and nature of problems being faced by people as individuals, society as a community, governments as custodians of administration and, last but not the least, the nation as a country of relentlessly expanding population with diversity that no other country in the world hosts, it is presumptuous to feel complacent about addressing the problems to their logical end. However, human ingenuity raises hopes of success by choosing the wiser option in the grim scenario of not giving up. The poet has rightly said that hope is eternal in the human breast. Since the time of earth first playing host to homo erectus (human being walking with a straight back), life has never been hunky-dory marked by countless problems, many of them being the result of misconduct on the part of human populations, in addition to factors beyond human control.

History recorded over centuries, portraying the happenings in different regions of the globe, is replete with details of wars that see human beings in poor light and devastating outbreak of diseases that have taken toll of lives of people in numbers of astronomical proportions. Driven by the desire to live free from suffering, man continues to find remedies for the life-threatening diseases using his creative faculty. Sadly, that faculty has failed human species, being exploited to design and produce lethal hardware to fight wars.

Can the faculty of creativity in a person be created? Or is it an inborn gift? are questions that are surely fascinating to debate, more than answering without ambiguity. Schooling and creativity may not be intimately connected, going by the remark by the famed British Philosopher Bertrand Russel: “Education is one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought” (the two ingredients of creativity). The episode in which the legendary explorer Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) came out unscathed when his jealous detractors thought nothing of his superior mental faculty (they struggled unsuccessfully to make the egg stand on its narrow tip, but the explorer showed his creative genius by pressing the egg hard on the table achieving stable equilibrium for it, remarking that no condition was stipulated to make it happen).

Perseverance and an outlook of not-giving-up being the soul and life of creativity, its seeds have to be sown in childhood and nurtured all along in daily life. Starting with A-for-apple, B-for-bat and the rest of the school scene is not the best start to play the game of chasing creativity. Albert Einstein serves as an outstanding example of avoiding the school to enable him to learn. Again, one has to wear one’s thinking cap to come out with a creative alternative.