It was just one of those numerous internal exams in college for me. I sat pondering over the solution to a question that had me baffled for the past half an hour.I finally decided to give up, when it suddenly struck me ! No, not the answer to the question, but the weird way in which you get the brightest ideas when you least expect it, and worse, whenever you need ideas the most(like in an examination), you are blank !
Yes, I'm referring to all those strokes of genius that occur when you're in the middle of a shower, or in the loo. I mean, isn't it really funny that the greatest ideas occur in seemingly whacko situations, and not during brain racking sessions ?
I guess it all started with Archemedes. Yeah he was the guy who got his stroke of genius in the bathtub.Okay, so some of the water in the tub became the water on the floor,when he stepped into the tub.Now, under those circumstances i would have happily gone on to enjoy my bath. Cleanliness is next to Godliness, they say.But Archemedes who, it seems, was not a person overly concerned about personal hygiene, wondered about the phenomenon and went on to state the principles of buoyancy(No, it's still not a good enough reason to go around running stark naked on the streets)
Not to be outdone, Isaac Newton discovered gravity under equally odd circumstances. A mundane thing like an apple falling on his head got him started. The normal thing to do when such a thing happens is to curse the tree and maybe kick it to add injury to insult and go try catch up on your nap under some other tree(preferably not a coconut tree !) But no, the little apple that landed itself on Newton's head led to the formulation of the laws of gravity.
Okay, now my brother who has been looking over my shoulder for the past twenty minutes, while I was typing this out, wants to come under the lime-light too, and goes on to explain how he got this amazing idea about black holes transforming into quasars under the influence of another black hole.(Nope, I have no idea what he's talking about either!), on the potty. Yeah, that about explains the seemingly interminable wait I have to endure each morning for the use of the toilet. He has a million other examples to give on the issue, but I'm not going to delve into them so as to protect the sanity of the readers(I'm assuming that Stephen Hawking will never read this !!)
Coming back to the examination,the solution to the question occurred to me while I was playing a game on the computer later that day(You saw that coming, didn't you now !) Reflecting on all this I can only draw one conclusion. Contrary to popular belief, we all get our best ideas when we're chilling out. So the sensible thing to do during exams would be to play tic-tac-toe with the person sitting next to you in the hall. But no, they'd never let us do that, since it would make the whole process of answering examinations a piece of cake. So I guess we're going to be stuck with getting ideas at all the wrong times for a long time to come.(Needless to say, I did not write this entry in the shower !)
