Celebrating and exploring creativity

Bangalore gets to host the centennial exhibition of the Nobel prize on behalf of India.

If you are creative, you get a chance to become even more so. That is the good fortune of Bangalore whose Visvesvaraya Industrial and Technological Museum will be home, on behalf of the rest of the country, for the next three months for "Cultures of Creativity", the centennial exhibition of the Nobel prize that has been touring the world since 2001.

It has already been to 11 countries and will be moving to Singapore after Bangalore. This global journey is intended to emphasise the international nature of the institution of the Nobel prize and the foresight of Alfred Bernhard Nobel who created something so totally international at a time when the world was inexorably hurtling towards the first world war.

The rest of India is being brought into the experience with a national quiz among school children.

Ten winners and their class teachers will get to visit Bangalore and see first hand the exhibition being sponsored by the Swedish electronics and mobile telephony company Ericsson.

But science, in fact, has managed to crash distances in its own way. There is a massive virtual exhibition and much more at www.nobelprize.org which got 25 million visitors (hits) last year, compared to the over 2,00,000 visitors that the exhibition received at its last two halts at Kuala Lumpur and Tokyo.

The exhibition, like all commemorative ones, is rich in memorabilia.

You can see some of Alfred Nobel's experimental equipment and books, replica of the different Nobel medals and the royal spread that is laid out for the annual Nobel dinner.

Among scientific memorabilia, there is a part of the great antenna that was built on the lawns of Cambridge, leading eventually to the discovery of pulsars by Antony Hewish, and replica of the equipment used by Ahmed Zewali to conduct what he called "phemtochemistry" through which he photographed with the help of lasers how chemical reactions occurred.

Great as this is, the most significant aspect of the exhibition is the idea behind it "" in a word "unconventional", says Svante Lindqvist, director, the Nobel Museum.

And so it is. It seeks to illustrate the creativity and courage of Nobel laureates in trying to answer some of the questions around how they managed to do it.

He says you can take it as "an intellectual amusement park" and with great modesty, where "you may not get all the answers but certainly a lot of food for thought".

At the end, "you may go back confused but at a higher level". To nurture creativity, the place to begin is "early schooling" and its midwife is the "enthusiastic teacher".

A key concept highlighted, through movies and displays, is the informal meeting place for spontaneous discussion which sits at the heart of the creative process.

One such was Paris between the wars which was home to not just Frenchmen like Andre Gide by Americans like Ernest Hemmingway and Irishmen like Samuel Beckett.

Another such meeting place is CERN, European Centre for Particle Physics where many Nobel laureates have worked. But there are a few high schools around the world that have been almost literally the cradle of creativity, like Santiniketan (Tagore and Sen), three high schools in Budapest and the Bronx High School of Science, all of which have been home to Nobel laureates and which are still in existence.

Much of the ethos of creativity which the Nobel prizes seek to cherish is captured in the many short films that can be viewed at the exhibition.

There are as many as 32 screenings on different aspects of the creative process in the lives of people as diverse as Wilhelm Rontgen, who discovered the X-ray, and Boris Pasternak, the Russian poet-novelist. There are also eight films on great creative milieus like Cambridge, Paris and Santiniketan.

Perhaps the most unique display is an attempt to construct a creative "bundle". It is made up of transparent glass sheets outlining the earth's land mass stacked up like books on a book shelf.

Through these run thin shiny metal strips that depict how a creative person has journeyed to different parts of the planet during his lifetime. The horizontal dimension represents place, and the vertical dimension, time.

The bundles occur at Cambridge, Massachusetts, home to Harvard and MIT, University of Chicago (economics) and Cambridge University which accounts for 80 per cent of British Nobel laureates.

In this celebration and exploration of creativity, there is a silent but resounding comment that deserves utmost attention. In an age when the politics of commerce is creating a huge din about intellectual property rights (IPRs), two immortal quotes adorn one little corner.

"Nothing can be created out of nothing," said Lucretius in 55 BC.

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants," echoed Isaac Newton in 1676, a little more than 1,600 years later.