“Everybody is born a genius”. I started believing in this quote through several phenomena that have always been a riddle to me. We, as adults, take more time to learn a new language and attain fluency, than that taken by a baby to pick up a couple of absolutely new languages with no other reference besides body language. Even when you are half asleep, you can recite the entire length of any song which you memorised as a kid; also the long-forgotten ones play involuntarily on the tip of your tongue if you give them a try. Whereas the songs you come across as an adult, don’t stay as etched into your mind as the nursery rhymes do. While pondering as usual over mundane things in life, I came up with a couple of possible explanations behind this puzzle.
First, a new born baby’s condition is similar to a person just done with practising genuine meditation. Meditation involves maintaining a blank state of mind and focusing all your concentration on a single point; as simple as it may sound, I believe it is the toughest mental exercise that only few people could possibly pull off. Every baby in this world, is born after a whopping nine months’ worth of meditation! Just like the enlightened Rishis who achieved this feat inside secluded caves in the past, similarly, in the dead of the mother’s womb, the inexperienced baby has no thoughts to interrupt its natural state of meditation. It is as if the baby is at equilibrium with the world, both being oblivious to each other’s presence. That is why I believe that any human is at his sharpest at birth, ready to explore the world with an unbiased frame of mind. The equilibrium is disrupted as he is gradually exposed to the world and the intellectual downhill begins from then on.
The keyword here is ‘inexperienced’. Although it is true that you learn from experience, it also brings in a set of ethics, values, principles and biases, which might cloud your thought process, making you unable to absorb new things as open-mindedly as you did before. In this sense, experience acts as a double edged sword in shaping an individual’s intellect over his lifetime. Everybody is born a genius with respect to one talent or the other, but later on, it depends on how each person wields his double edged sword called ‘experience’! However, the following last point illustrates how experience is still an indispensable part of our life (in any case, it's unavoidable even if you stay idle!).
I came up with another explanation recently while humming “Tujhse naaraz nahi Zindagi” from Masoom. I must have been barely 4 years old when I listened to it for the first time. Despite not understanding a word at that age, the tune had quite an impact on me. I found it intriguing because although it sounded soothing and melodious, I felt it had a tinge of sadness in it. I kept on humming it till I was old enough to understand the lyrics and yet, I still couldn’t fathom what situation made this man sing such twisted words, despite watching Masoom several times. As an ‘enlightened’ teenager, when I understood the plot of Masoom, I could finally comprehend the song’s profoundness. I suddenly realized that this is very similar to how I would sometimes craftily back-calculate from the ‘desired solution’ in laboratory to obtain ‘favourable’ experimental readings (Dear Professors, kindly ignore this part :P). The song was the ‘desired solution’ in my hand as a kid and ironically, as life progressed, I ‘back-calculated’ using my experience and worked out it’s ‘readings’. After several years of mulling over something which is beyond your grasp as a child, you build it into an ‘experiment’ you thoroughly grasp, something you understand better than the things which you learn newly as an adult. You can apply Pythagoras theorem or Trigonometry that you learned as a kid, to ‘n’ number of real life situations, as you understand them increasingly well over the years. But that is not the case with the calculus that you learn as an adult.
When you grow old, you revert back to being a child, albeit a foolish one, who is not that hungry for knowledge anymore. And yet, you have all the wisdom you gathered through experience, to hold you up till the end.
Life is about being born an inexperienced genius and dying an experienced, wise fool.
-Rati Bhagwat
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