Ingenuity

Resources abound in this world to supply our wants. We are capable of producing fivefold the amount of food that our medieval forefather once did but hunger continues to be a pressing global issue. We have the technology to make car run alternative fuel yet it has never been successfully implemented at a large scale to replace the conventional petrol-driven vehicles. We have choice to live in harmony and common understanding via globalisation and the increasing linkages between sovereign nations, yet terror instigated by extremists still walks upon this planet. Ironically, the resources, despite their availability, have not been optimised to cater to our intentions. Something appears to missing - a "key" to unlock the gate that stands between the two aspects.

Yesterday, I made a call to the National Library at Bugis to source for materials for my recent research on a Cambodian lake. The library itself is an astounding feat of assembling and cataloguing millions of books for the public use. The cumulative knowledge contained within such large voluminous quantity of reading materials is so astounding to the extent that almost any question in mind has an answer tucked somewhere among the neat, orderly rows upon rows of shelves. Acting as an archive, the library plays the final resting place of many collections of old colonial-era newspapers, unless if they are interred by young minds eager to look into the events of the old past. Adding to that, the library boasts a virtual, user-friendly catalogue database that allows users to locate the desired material by entering a related keyword.


Making use of the last mentioned amenity, I punched in "hydrology, tonle sap", hoping that this intellectual warehouse will supply me, in abundance, with the much needed information about the nature and processes occurring and around the lake. To my dismay though, the several seconds of waiting only yielded a few items, which had much more to do with the inhabitants of the lake than the lake itself.


I stopped for a while, calming the storm of anxiety that brooded over the question of whether my research was ever successful. I closed my eyes to the outside world and opened the ones that glimpsed inside. There I saw it, among the chaotic disorderliness of thoughts, a spark of inspiration. Immediately, I typed in "hydrology, Cambodia". It worked out just right as a long string of name of relevant books began to pop up. Looking through all these books, I felt satisfied for I have found the much-needed information to feed into my research blueprint.


I was a fool in my first round of book search. "hydrology, tonle sap" was too parochial for a keyword. Moreover, if someone were to write a full length of literature regarding tonle sap, my research would be void since I would end up plagiarising the same lines from the book itself. Why would I want to write about something that has been written before? Instead, the second keyword granted me a vast collection of data snippets that I can string together to form the framework of my research paper. The day was saved thanks to the timely arrival of ingenuity that sparkled in my mind then.


I am not alluding to any sort of self-glorification through this anecdote; we all have a genius in each of us. It comes in many forms, very much like the different talents that distinguish an individual from another. However, we often suppress our ingenuity in our endeavours by shrouding our thoughts with anxiety, fear, arrogance, pessimism, overconfidence and almost-unreachable expectations. The self is not the only enemy to ingenuity as some people try to stifle the works of ingenuity produced by others. There have been hearsays that large oil conglomerates deliberately pay a ransom sum of money to inventors of alternative fuels to shelve and hide their findings away from the public. As a result, many products of man's ingenuity have never found its way to doing good to humanity and some which did were abused, as in the case of atomic bombs and nuclear weaponry.

Excellence can be forced through intensive training but ingenuity is a spark of inspiration; it comes and goes as it will, unbidden by another and favours a mind of tranquil harmony. It is emotionally neutral and does not precipitate out of sheer will, nor does it emerge from abject desperation. It is a free entity, as though taking its own form of consciousness and choosing whoever it pleases to confer its power to. If we were able to sum up all of man's ingenuity and to channel it to the betterment of our society, we would have long lived among the stars.