One of my friends had once asked me a question, how do we measure intelligence? I would come back to it soon but before that I would like to address an even more fundamental question, What is intelligence? How do you define and is it even possible to put a grade label on something so vast. Probably an example might suffice. How do you manage a crowd of people who are about to leave a movie hall, if there were 100 gates and all of them opened at once, there would be a chaos right? As everybody would be able to go anywhere! ... very unmanageable situation! so we open just few of them so that the crowd gets channelised into lines and moves "systematically" Something similar happens, i think, in case of education trying to handle a deluge of intelligent minds. It cannot cater to every one of them, so it forces them to form groups instead, you are good at mathematics go to the engineering door, you are good at biology go to the gate for doctors, "but mam i am also good at drawing".. "Oh come on don't be such a baby.. didn't you see that door is closed for like a century now". Didn't you know that education is, there to cater to the needs of industry and not creativity... "no mam ..i didn't", the child sighs and joins the crowd and is later consumed by it. Creativity cries of agony yet again. Difficulties in management cannot be used as reasons for curbing talents. We need a lot more open gates.

I was at office today (Saturday) thank you to the release time next week. But as a wonderful byproduct of my compulsive contributions to already blown code, I could get an enormous bandwidth to download few videos and one of them (link below) turned out to be incredibly powerful, hilarious and eye opening. This now makes my belief even stronger that books, lectures, videos and every such form of learning chooses its recipient and not the other way round. So if you are good at something may be its good to thank that "something" for having chosen you. And acknowledging the fact, that just as you might likewise you might not, be the only choice. Now how wise would it be to repaint the choice with somebody else's color simply because we can not afford those many shades?

Intelligence is diversity, its the ability to be able to immerse in reality and enjoy your leisure in the bliss of creativity. Intelligence is not an accident nor an incidence its acceptance of your ever growing capacities. Its the longingness to slow down and pause a while to watch ruffling of leaves and chirping of birds. Its to let the mind think and not just gather and reorganize. Its to let the knowledge blossom on its own rather than make it stretch and sometimes even shrink, to fit the needs.

Measurement of something which should ideally only grow, is same as asking where light would be the next second, you surely can tell but you would never be able to verify :-). So I think we can only measure a snapshot of it. If we are ok with this limited source, well then yes we indeed can label a person as intelligent or dumb but just as motion needs 4 dimensions to be defined completely, such labeling must also account for all the dimensions. So if you are about to able a child stupid as he is not so good at school, you should probably try saying something like, this child was not good at school when we was thirteen, well dear child don't worry about it, nor was Einstein!

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html