IMAGINATION RULES THE WORLD

 

 

When I was in school I was often caught staring out of an open window or at a blank wall, all lost on my own world and not paying attention to what was being taught. Needless to say this often led to detention, punishment and a note to my parents. I had no problems with that but what I resented was the blame of 'inattentiveness'. I was not being inattentive but on the contrary I was being extremely attentive in my world of dreams in my open sky of imaginations. It is quite a different issue that neither I could put this in words then and nor did my teachers understand my predicament but I was convinced that whatever I was doing was far more interesting than the lessons being taught! 

 

I was dreaming of becoming like the surgeon who took out my tonsils and offered me ice cream the same evening when I was 6. I was dreaming of playing cricket in Lords like my hero Sir Garfield Sobers, going to the space like Yuri Gagarin and I was dreaming of becoming the Principal of my college like the legendary Mr. H. L. Dutt. And I did all this because my father often said that 'If you can imagine it, you can become it!' Imagination is not a waste of time; it is a road map for future.

 

Imagination is endless. It is a power vested in each and every one of us. Neither the skies nor the stars are the limit for an individual’s imagination for we are the only determinants of what we can and can’t imagine. Our varying experience in life, however, will create a great difference of pattern of our imagination. Why else would William Blake, the romantic English poet, painter and print maker say “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees”!

 

Conflicting opinions

Imagination has not always been very kindly looked upon over the ages. Plato, the Athenian philosopher of the Classical period in Ancient Greece and founder of the Platonist school of thought and the Academy, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world, looked down upon imagination as something wishy-washy, illusionary and just a distraction. However his student Aristotle, the famous Greek philosopher, considered imagination to be the foundation of all knowledge.

 

Our brain sets us apart from other species and provides such a rich internal playground for us to think freely and creatively. Imagination helps us to create a mental image about persons, places and things. Colours, shapes, voices, movements and all such scattered bits of information, which we gather from our experience and knowledge, coalesce and synthesize to form a pattern, a collage which is very uniquely ours. While you can copy-paste my words, my verses and and can pirate my videos and audios you can never replicate my thoughts and my imagination. I hold their divine copyright and will continue to do so as long as I live!

 

Imagination is what allows us to envisage our life goals and our greatest successes. It symbolizes our vast potential in life, which is actually limitless. It shows us that despite what we may be told or what others expect of us, we are as capable as we strive to be. Imagination gives us what we seek most in hard times: hope. Our imagination allows us to enjoy the small things in life and extracts more gratification from even our hardships.

 

Imagination and creativity

Noted scientist and thinker Albert Einstein stressed that imagination was more important than knowledge. This is because knowledge is limited to what is known and understood while imagination embraces the world and points to all there ever will be to know and understand. Imagination is at the basis of creative actions like art, science or engineering. An artist with an overly active imagination would be a good and productive artist, but a run-of-the-mill person with a fearful imagination would be crazy.

 

One can improve his/her imagination with practice, by creating complex and varied lenses through which to see the world. It is one thing to imagine the world as you would like to see but it is quite different and difficult to imagine it through the imagination of others. This is what authors and novelists do day in and day out. Geniuses like Sarat Chandra Chattopadhayya, Munshi Prem Ckand, William Shakespeare have created memorable characters like Paro, Dhania and Portia respectively by imagining the world they lived in and the complexities in their lives they led. More recently how can we forget the trials and tribulations of a young wizard, Harry Potter, and his friends Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley, and their fascinating Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry created so beautifully by J. K. Rowling? The ability to disappear in their character and inhabit their point of view as if living their lives is what makes these characters memorable and  all this the genius of the author’s imagination.

 

The downside

Unfortunately if imagination becomes day dreaming at work it can be disastrous. Besides the consequences of inattentiveness, which itself can cost multiple lives as seen in accidents in road, air and sea, failing to concentrate on the task in hand and dreaming of Utopia is outright foolish. Imagination also gives rise to something else: expectations. Expectations always seem right until they aren’t fulfilled. Expectations can lead to great satisfaction and a feeling of accomplishment that everyone hopes to achieve in their life. However, unfulfilled expectations fill us with an agonizing feeling of disappointment. Simply put, it is like building a magnificent castle in the air only to see it come crashing down with the slightest jostle from the wind. Our imagination gives us the capacity to dream of accomplishing whatever we can conceive with the magic of our minds. But what it doesn’t give, is the rationale to know what our current capacity seems to be. So imagination should be a stimulus to achieve and not a destination by any means. Only a rational mind will understand this.

 

Having a focus on something creative will provide an excellent way to exorcise the catastrophic thoughts of depression into something productive and positive. An unused but over active imagination is a terrible thing to waste. Not all imaginations are creative; some are stupid, some fearful while others can be even feral in nature. How else can you explain the common imagination of 72 hoor (virgins) in heaven for every God fearing Muslim as the Taliban preaches?

 

What is technology doing to imagination?

My parents read the great Indian epics, Ramayana, Mahabharata and the Jatak Kathas to us when we were children. Those were the pre- television days and so there was no visual support. Our parents would emote them and we would imagine our own Ayodhya, Hastinapur, Sita and Draupadi in our minds. The better was the description the more vivid was our imagination. Then came Amar Chitra Katha and and all these characters from our imagination as if came to life. The television gave human face and feelings to these individuals and the stories became even more interesting. But now very little was left to imagination.

 

Has technology killed imagination?

This is a really difficult question because while I have to agonizingly agree that technology has replaced creativity with piracy the fact that it has given wings to imagination and oxygen to innovations cannot be denied. Any thesis or academic writing is rarely original today because the computer and the internet has made it easy to access academic information at any given point in time. This restricts human imagination and creativity in academic settings. Replication of information has become easy and intellectual data theft is rampant thanks to technology. Perhaps the biggest obstacle in giving a free rein to human imagination has been the use of pirated software and products in the market. Data theft has become a common problem across creative fields such as movie making and fiction writing thanks to piracy and the influx of technology. Technology has mechanized everything from music to film making and there is no scope for innovation or human creativity to take flight and special effects further cancel out human imagination and creativity. Thanks to the presence of graphics software and other technological advancements, creativity and originality have gone for a toss. Replicating Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or Van Gogh’s Sunflowers is now possible with the click of a mouse.

But on the other hand the fact that technology has made many innovations possible in fields as diverse as music, entertainment and film-making cannot be overlooked. It has expanded the scope and power of human imagination by enhancing the limits to which one can go in the creative process in the health sector and enabled healthcare to become life prolonging. Using scientific creativity and human innovation, biotechnology has revolutionized the field of pharma and healthcare. Technology has also boosted communication which facilitates creativity through the spread of knowledge and ideas across the globe. Technology has provided an online knowledge industry which is thriving and enhancing human creativity by leaps and bounds. So it will be fair to say that technology has only unleashed the power and potential of human creativity and imagination.

Imagination is also a great way to identify what is going on in your unconscious mind – your outside world is a mirror image of the inside and hidden mental world. Deepak Chopra, the Indian American author and alternative medicine advocate talks about the mind and the body in parallel universes. Anything that happens in the mental universe must leave tracks in the physical one. 

 

Napoleon was spot on 'Imagination rules the world!'