INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Every morning, for over two decades, millions of TOI readers woke up with a smile to Ajit Ninan's cartoons
Friday morning, his colleagues at TOI woke up to the news that he'd passed away, at the age of 68, in the middle of the night at his home in
He was in daily touch with many of us through this week, and was drawing till the end - the laptop on his desk was open.At TOI, we were
privileged to see his genius up close and personal
And it wasn't just his prolific output (such as his daily 'Just Like That' cartoon) that he was valued for - Ajit was also central to every
editorial discussion in our planning and preparation for big news days such as elections and the Union Budget
But for us, he was much more than that: He was a warm and wonderful human being, always appreciative and encouraging, bubbling with
enthusiasm and humour (if you thought a cartoonist was supposed to be funny, he didn't disappoint).Countless colleagues from across TOI,
young and senior, have their own stories to tell of Ajit - our designers and illustrators, for instance, will testify to how generous he was
with his advice on, say, visualising a graphic-heavy page and at creating 'balance'
We will miss Ajit, for both his craft and his camaraderie
But he also leaves behind so many happy, smiley memories - most of us have our favourite 'Ninan moment' - and then there are of course his
timeless cartoons! Maybe creativity is overrated Creativity is an excellent thing to aspire to, most of us would agree
Self-help books, TED talks, corporate memoirs all talk up the value of creativity
It's no longer seen as the preserve of artists and geniuses, but as a wellspring we can all tap into, in all types of work, in engineering
and management, in schooling and parenting and cooking, in living well.But what is creativity? Originality? Ingenuity? Divergent thinking?
Far from being an eternal value, it is a foggy idea, a word that only came into popular use in 1950s America amid Cold War anxieties about
conformity and falling behind in technology, says The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History by Samuel W Franklin.Of course
humans have an urge to make things, and an appetite for novelty
But the idea of a trait called creativity is a recent invention
It replaced the older Romantic idea of the 'mad genius', which was both a gift and an affliction for those who had it
Creativity was a more democratic idea, accessible to all, and it suggests health and vitality.In post-war America, creativity was cast as
the force of individualism, and it had both anti-communist and aspirational uses
If the Soviets were improving their technology by blueprint, Americans had ingenuity, they claimed
Psychologists, engineers and advertisers embraced for their own ends
Corporations introduced techniques like 'brainstorming', with 'freewheeling' sessions where good ideas could be generated by committee
In classrooms, creativity was taught as a kind of general ability, an overarching attitude.These were the decades when it was common to map
political beliefs and systems onto personality types
Creativity was cast as an individual signature and a democratic value, the ability to live with some disorder in free societies, compared to
the totalitarian systems that suppressed human impulse for the sake of stability and unity
But it was, and remains, a catchall term that people use for things they like, rather than any specific quality
The definitional ambiguity has helped it endure, and spread without question, the book explains.The uses of creativity have only multiplied
in 'post-industrial' economies, which are supposedly no longer about making things in factories but having brilliant ideas
Today, as AI's abilities threaten to supplant human workers, there is even greater insistence on creativity, as the very thing that
Creativity is packaged and sold as a product, as 'design thinking', for instance
Neuroscience and its applications promise to identify, quantify and maximise it.The book calls for a closer examination of what we label
creativity, because there is no such pure spirit to be found
For instance, when it comes to accomplishing something, what matters is not some elusive inspiration but motivation, persistence, and the
Secondly, it might be helpful to look at the value of what's been created rather than its novelty
The cult of innovation and disruption has caused climate catastrophe and tech-driven chaos
Rather than glorifying change and newness, a more useful ethic could revolve around care and maintenance
We could value the work done by nurses, janitors, most engineers, garbage collectors and so on, mundane and essential work that keeps the
The opposite of destruction is perhaps not creation, but preservation, suggests the book.
