P. A. Chacko
This day is set apart by the United Nations to promote the importance of creativity and innovation in problem solving for sustainable development.
Today we remember, very specially, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Italian. He is widely considered ‘the polymath (person of wide knowledge and learning) of Renaissance.’
His areas of interest were: invention, drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture, science, music, mathematics, engineering, literature, astronomy, geography, botany, paleontology, cartography etc.
Leonardo da Vinci was primarily a painter and had no formal training. His well known painting Mona Lisa is the most famous portrait ever made. The Last Supper portrait is the most reproduced religious painting of all time. Leonardo da Vinci was ‘a man of unquenchable creativity.’
This day, April 21, reminds us of the need to put on our creatively thinking cap not only today but every day, and for all time. In a progressive world as ours, we cannot remain with our retarded thinking and mythological theories. Logic and reasoning have to accompany our thinking and deeds.
Humans have become so innovative that they are capable of directing our steps to the moon and the planets at the click of a mouse. But, unfortunately, the tiny corona virus has upset all our apple carts. All our progressive thinking and accumulation of wealth and wealth’s adjuncts can be wiped away by a tiny virus before which we seem to be helpless.
The once richest nation, Britain, has run out of protective equipments for doctors and nurses even as the pandemic is taking a heavy toll of its citizens. The modern richest country America with its most modern weapons and arsenal is humbled by tiny Covid 19. The American President has had to beg, coax and even order India, a developing nation, to send shiploads of medicine, hydroxychloroquine, to save Americans even as the death toll in the America is the highest in the world.
So, where is our creativity and innovative spirit? To accumulate weapons and arsenal to destroy other nations? To create enmity between communities and religious groups or races?
People can be so creatively insane as to use a trident, a religious symbolic implement, to disgorge, in cold blood, the full grown embryo from a pregnant woman’s womb.
A needle can be used in the hands of a surgeon to save a life. The same needle can be used by a terrorist to kill a person.
Shall we promote ourselves to lynch, murder and annihilate people and communities and races in the name of religions, for the cause of racial purity, in the name of progress?
Our urge for fashion has gone so wild and insanely innovative. It reached such a point where a village woman, after seeing a skimpily clad ‘society lady’, uttered a compassionate remark: ‘I pity that woman. She is so ill clad. She must be so poor. I should help her with a gown.’ Can we call the limit of our innovation our creativity? People can be even more creative to revert back to the primitive existence.
Even the so-called most progressive web world has innovatively cut off family members into individual entities, separated with the wall of a mobile. A palm size mobile has become a very powerful contrivance that spreads communal viruses on social media threatening to wipe away sense and sensibility from the human world and to turn us humans into worse than primates.
Will Covid 19, the tiny corona virus, teach us a lesson in innovation and creativity? One sincerely hopes that human beings will get back to ‘a new normal’ in post corona period where we shall be reminded that our power and prowess, wealth and arrogance, our religious fundamentalism and naked narrow-mindedness are but temporal peripheries, beyond which we need to build a new world of human solidarity and fellowship. Even a new ‘religion’ has to emerge where there will be no buildings and walls to separate people as Christians, Hindus, Parsees, Muslims, atheists, etc. Rituals and rubrics may have to give way to human community service and table fellowship of common humanity for genuine sustainable development.