Imagination is the essence of creativity!

Imagination is more important than the knowledge gained – so alleged the great Albert Einstein. I suppose he should know. Yes, imagination is a product of our nurturing in ways that fire up our curiosity. Just allowing young minds to inquire and explore lays the basis for life's transformational process, and those imbued with this blessing keeps on asking the questions that allow them to be creative life long.

In Maldives this vibrancy of an inquiring mind is sadly lacking, and it is not for no reason. The causes point to notable cultural impediments in our childhood mainly and the nurturing of these over the years into our early adulthood. The culture in our schools, our upbringing in families and the condescending nature of our bosses at our workplace are all hindrances that we accumulate in our personality as we go through our life. 

Firstly at home our parents have nurtured a world view that children should be seen and not heard. This quickly puts to rest the inconvenience of children hanging around us disturbing the flow of our work, whether gardening, picking firewood in the forest, making our homes, cooking and cleaning and the like that is the chore and industry of life. When children are around the work gets disrupted or the children are put into some danger just because we cannot keep all our attention on them. In the process, that child care edict had come to hold. Yes, that maybe appropriate for efficiency of our work process but it nevertheless eliminates the opportunity to instill creativity in our children because we may not have stimulated the inquiring nature of their minds. In our schools too this process repeats where impatient teachers inhibit the kids from asking any questions that might ‘squander away’ teacher time or on the other hand reveal the teacher's state of ignorance -- for our 21st century kids armed with their computers tuned to the many websites at their disposal glean a plethora of information that teachers cannot keep up with. So the easiest way to save face is to keep kids quiet and force them to memorize the lessons given for later regurgitating it at exam time.

Such is the inhibiting nature of our schools to creating inquiring minds. Our bosses too ensconced in their comfortable offices will not brook dissent for the blemish it will have on their hubris. And so, here too we have a future of organizations that are turn of the mill types lacking imagination or creativity. This regressive ambiance can only offer our Maldives decadence rather than development. For building our society of the 21st century we will need creative minds that think out of the box of the past and imagine the lofty vistas of creativity that lies beyond a recycling of the past and the blind engagement with materialist culture. We the public and our leaders must become aware of this God given ability we have to be the transformers of ourselves through the power of our inquiring minds. That is the divine attribute that we sometimes forget we can nurture. And for this, we must give our children a new beginning in our schools and in the loving laps of their parents.