Intelligence...

Mr Chandru (name changed) was quite a character, he worked in the media for more than 10 years and was a planning director for an ad firm in UAE He took a sabbatical for 5 years, learnt music, visited countries and learnt yoga.. An old colleague of Chandru insisted he come back to media and act as an independent consultant for the firm he was heading. And so, he was back in action. I had to meet him and had to update him on certain planning related stuff.

As I went about my usual rigmarole, Chandru interrupted “This trp, grp, frequency is all bull shit in the larger perspective of life, you know” he began, “I have seen a doctor yawn in an ICU room and brood about how thankless his job is, you know” I was puzzled why he brought this topic in but I let him speak. I soon realized, this was going to be the story of the day.

“Ok lets go for a smoke” he stopped me.

“Do you smoke?” he asked.

“No” I replied, “I do drink but” I told just to ensure he doesn’t think am too much of a innocent kid.

“I think you should smoke too, when you are 40, you realize you ought to have had more fun.” I was blank.

So as he took a deep puff of the cigarette, he resumed his monologue

“You know research is all humbug...

Its like this, a researcher had whiskey and water on Day 1; he had a bad hangover the next morning. So the next day he had vodka and water, he still had a bad hangover next morning, the third day he tried rum and water, the hangover still seemed to be there. And so he concluded, ‘since I had water all 3 days and I had hangover all 3 days, water causes hangover’”

I laughed in agreement. What he said was true, When you look at correlations and patterns, common sense takes a kick, many a time.

And then the topic shifted to mythology, Mr Chandru seemed to be an authority in Mahabratha and Ramayan “See, Krishna gave this bhagvat gita gyan to Arjun in the battle field right, lets do some numbers here, there are 700 verses, each verse atleast requires 2 minutes to recite, so make that 1400 minutes, (that’s 24 hours) does this mean when the war was happening around them, these 2 were busy discussing the truths of life for 24 hours non stop??, who are they bull-shitting?? And the kurukshetra war had 21,870 chariots, 21,870 elephants, 65,610 horses and 109,350 foot soldiers (source wiki), what the hell was Indian population then? The entire Kurikshetra battle field cant hold more than 10,000 people even now.”

He then told me about how the actual Mahabarath was a literal porn, “you wouldn’t find such cheesy porn even in the internet these days.” But the version we get to hear is all sugar coated and totally censored.” He then narrated an anectode of how a bird carries a sperm from the guy and drops it in the river, which a fish takes and deposits in the lady to finaly create the author Vyas. That was news for me!

“If they show the actual uncensored Mahabarath in TV now, the TRPs will sky rocket” I quipped wisely. He chuckled.

And with more such gyans of this and that, and after a mild argument, which he settled with a “Don’t get too worked up, there are plenty of opportunities for that in life!!!”

I went back wondering what to take home from the day. This guy just made mockery of research,. Ofcourse research isn’t all that bad, without looking at the past, and understanding what we really are (which is research) one cant move into the future.

And as I map my thoughts that night, “What is intelligence, Is making inferences from the past and present and predicting the future, intelligence? or using one’s instincts (the unique 6^th sense) to know whats the next big thing called intelligence. I somehow am slightly biased towards the intuitive intelligence, the idea being the difference between a trend setter, and a trend follower"

This chap made me think, afterall!

Arun