Intelligent Conversations and A Disputed Dream

I was having a conversation with my amigo about ‘intelligent conversation’. I firmly believe that every quality is relative and well, the supposedly ‘good’ ones can be as ruinous as the apparently ‘bad’ ones. For instance, optimism is good in a sense. You could keep seeing the glass as half full. But being overly optimistic has its pitfalls. You could so much believe in the half-full theory that somewhere down the line you overlook the reality of the other half of emptiness. There are instances when being practical is important. So that said, ‘intelligence’ again is Relative. Jessica Simpson and Paris Hilton are prime examples of how one can cash in on the ‘dumb’ quotient. But then, they don’t really deserve being mentioned more than once.

The crux of the matter is how is it that you can manage to have an ‘intelligent conversation’? I believe that most people do gauge intelligence in terms of how aware you are of those ‘important issues’. Maybe if you knew Watergate and Perestroika you could be termed so. Or maybe how the FIIs are determining the course of Indian economy. And well, you’re definitely high up on the list if you can throw in a few quotes by Shakespeare or start a discourse on what John Donne meant when he claimed that “no man is an island”. All of that is very impressive. But I believe that unless you’ve something of your own to contribute to all those arguments, views and counterviews about the aforementioned topic it is quite, well, unoriginal. At least that is how I would like to measure intelligence. Maybe it is creativity. But ultimately, I suppose intelligence and creativity do stem from the same source. If Einstein wasn’t creative enough, I don’t think relativity would have been born. In a sense I suppose it is the ‘imagination’ at work here. Intelligence should be measured in terms of how you can come up with plausible theories about how things work. How you can imagine something to be, how you can assimilate arguments and derive your own.

In that sense, an intelligent conversation would be one in which you can fuel each others’ imagination. It is very easy to mug up a lot of facts and have a conversation centered around them. But when it comes to actually kick starting your brain, it requires conversations that make you think, that lets you see different perspectives and somehow manages to take you to a whole different level. For me intelligence would be defined in how one can actually sit back, look at things differently. A way we can stretch ourselves beyond the accepted limits of human imagination. And also, to have an ‘intelligent conversation’ you need someone who can compliment you on the other side. And from such a conversation arose this:

A disputed dream

Serenity blankets me today
in a world disillusioned
i have found my caffeine
reality is the drug that keeps me alive

in the never ending tussle
between yesterday and tomorrow
maybe expectations are to be referees
biased and prejudiced towards the latter

the next dawn teaches me about hope
peace could indeed be contiguous
And yesterday taught me about my disputed dream.

The credit has to go to Mr.C for putting the words “disputed dreams” in my head, so much so that I had to write this. Tanka!

pooF.