When I was a kid, we lived in a modest 2-room apartment (that’s 2 rooms only – not 2 bedrooms, hall and kitchen), on the 6th (topmost) floor of a building with one of the rooms bang under the water tank on the terrace. Over a period of time, the tank started leaking and the water made its way into the ceiling and one of the walls of our apartment. After multiple complaints when the authorities remained non-responsive, my father decided to take matters into his own hands. He bought a dhoti, plastered it all over the leaky patch, tied a thread to one end of it, and hung it outside the window. Due to capillary action, the water that got soaked into the dhoti eventually made its way outside without leaking onto the floor and making a mess. In summer especially, it even had a cooling effect on the house.

My father took immense pride in showing off his creativity and explaining the science behind it to every guest who visited our house. Apart from this, he also took immense pleasure in explaining scientific phenomena to us with the flair of a magician. Our house was full of little scientific knick-knacks and I remember him showing us how rainbows are made from light passing through a prism, how sunlight concentrated through a magnifying glass could actually burn paper, how to build a transistor from scratch, and even see the corona of the sun reflected onto a glass plate indirectly through the telescope.  

A few years later, when we moved to a particularly hot city with temperatures hitting the high 40s in summer, he devised a contraption that consisted of a can of water hung over a table fan with a drip mechanism that allowed droplets of water to fall on the blades of the fan at regular intervals and creating a delightfully cooling & refreshing spray in different directions depending on the velocity of the fan. He had cheekily named this contraption “Sawan Bhadon”. I always wondered why the number of visitors to our house increased during those hot summer months and I realized later that it had more to do with getting to spend some time in the cooling company of “Sawan Bhadon” more than anything else, because not many households those days had the luxury of having Air Conditioners.

And while my father’s mindset was more in line with the typically Indian “jugaad”, he was truly creative when it came to cooking. No, he was not a good cook at all, but whenever he had to cook, he always added his own twist. And while the boiled rice did not taste any better than what my mom would make in an ordinary pressure cooker, imagine our childish pleasure when the same rice would be served to us packed in carved-out tubes of snake-gourd, their ends sealed with slices of potatoes. Opening the seals to discover the boiled rice inside was like discovering some sort of long-lost treasure!

My brother demonstrated that he had inherited my dad’s creativity when he adopted an interesting technique to catch a rat in his room. After placing a piece of bread under a round, upside-down basket, he lifted one side of the basket using a small pencil. When he discovered that the rat was more creative than him, and could go in & out of the basket with ease without disturbing the pencil, he tied a thread to the pencil and hid in a corner patiently waiting for the rat. The rat though was intelligent enough to understand what was going on and did not appear – at least not as long as my brother waited in the shadows.

In a bid to improve the process, my brother stacked his fat medical books to create a short staircase leading to the basket on the top, with the pencil in place, and the bread underneath. This time though, he placed a little bowl of whiskey at the base of the staircase. The logic was that the rat would drink the whiskey first, get tipsy, stumble up the staircase, and get caught. He went to sleep that night with a feeling of immense satisfaction and anticipation of seeing the results of outsmarting that audaciously intelligent rat. The next morning though, he saw that the whiskey was gone (as expected), the bread was gone as well, and there was no sign of the rat. Well, while his “jugaad” did not bear the desired fruit, he did turn out to be an extremely creative person especially when he used his spectacularly beautiful handwriting to create the most wonderful pieces of calligraphy.

Years later the two of us visited the Salarjung Museum in Hyderabad and we spent the entire day there since both of us are highly appreciative of anything and everything even remotely related to art – literature, paintings, sculpture, music, and the like. And while we lapped up everything in the museum as enthusiastically as kids in a candy store, we were particularly enamoured by the section that housed the different kinds of arms and weaponry. It sounded funny back then when my brother expressed his surprise of how creative humankind got when it came to killing people. Needless to say, with the advent of the nuclear age, that creative instinct only gets better and better every passing day making creativity itself a double-edged blade – a weapon of destruction in the hands of the ill-meaning, whereas, a tool of construction in the hands of the well-meaning.

My sister who spent a major part of her childhood perched on the kitchen platform observing my mom cook, can challenge a Michelin-starred MasterChef with her creativity in the field of culinary science – not just in terms of the appearance, but also the taste of her exquisitely crafted dishes. I got an opportunity to learn knitting, crochet, and embroidery from my mom and put to good use all the leftover pieces of wool, thread & cloth by making headbands, mufflers, and stuff that I thought were exquisite pieces of art.

That said, creativity is not just about “jugaad” or fabricating beautiful pieces of art. It is also about devising simple solutions to complicated problems just by thinking outside the box. The simple concept of “shared economy” leveraged by certain platforms like Airbnb, has revolutionized the industry by connecting people “who have something to share” with those “who need it”. The simple financial intervention of providing small loans to entrepreneurs in developing countries empowering individuals to start their own businesses has turned out to be a powerful tool for poverty alleviation.

It’s all about looking at problems from a totally different perspective, focusing on functionality, and avoiding unnecessary complexity. After all, most (if not all) problems, usually have a simple solution disguised under the complexities of stale mindsets that refuse to appreciate diverse points of view, do not dare to be radically different, are not open to innovative ideas, and are happy in their own comfort zones. Creative thinking can lead to remarkable results with a profound and significant impact on complicated problems.