Live Below The Line

What’s common between Oprah Winfrey, Harry Houdini, Jim Carey, and Daniel Craig? All of them have had extremely humble beginnings and have lived through various levels of poverty before achieving the glories that they have achieved.

Oprah Winfrey, admired for her enormous talents and someone who continues to be an inspiration for the current generation, has a perfect rags-to-riches story of our era. She was in abject poverty during her childhood and she has used her talents to overcome her circumstances and become the richest female in the world. Halle Berry used to stay in a homeless shelter, Jim Carey used to sleep in VW can during his early days with his family, Daniel Craig (James Bond) is also known to have slept on park benches in London, Harry Houdini considered the greatest magician ever used to beg for coins on the streets before turning into a magician.

Steve Jobs in his famous Stamford speech said that he during his college days slept in his friend’s rooms, returned coke bottles to buy food with and walk seven miles every Sunday night to get a good meal at the Hare Krishna Temple. What is really interesting here that he mentioned that all this helped him learn many things which turned out to be priceless later on.

While we always like to hear the stories of those who succeed and there are only a handful of people who have made it. There are probably many more of the estimated 1.4 billion people living below the poverty line. In India 32.67% of the population live below the poverty line. India still ranks 36 below in the list of countries with high poverty rates.

It is perhaps difficult to emotionally connect and empathize with those who live in poverty unless one experiences it. One concept which is building awareness as well as creates the experience (at least partly) is “Live Below The Line”. This is a campaign which challenges participants to feed themselves on the equivalent of the extreme poverty line for five days. The line is defined as US $ 1.25 per day which is defined by the World Bank as the extreme poverty line.

For India these figures seem to be high as about a quarter of Indian population is estimated to be living at $0.40 a day. Through this campaign the participant raises money that is used towards poverty alleviation. The live below the line schemes challenges people to try and keep the expenditure on food alone below the poverty mark. The very thought of living with 15-20 Rs a day for the next 5 days seems daunting. If we had just Rs 15 a day what do we eat?

A Beautiful Mind

Someone asked me what I would do if I were sitting under an Apple tree and an apple falls on my head. I could only think of the obvious answers - eat it, throw it away, move to a safer zone, look for other apples which I could catch before they fall. Sir Issac Newton instead got into a contemplative mood and the rest on gravity is history. However what is an interesting theory of speculation is that Newton was someone who had Asperger syndrome.

 

Asperger syndrome is a term that is used to describe a form of autism referring to a condition that is characterized by difficulties in social interaction, repetitive patterns of behavior that relates to abnormality or weirdness. For that matter most people today are still unaware of autism unless they have a direct experience through someone in their family.

However there is a lot more awareness thanks to the growing publicity provided for by various movies like Rain man. Many who have asperger syndrome also demonstrate savant syndrome which is mostly characterized by extremely good memory which is very deep but narrow. Asperger syndrome is not mental illness but just a state of mind for lack of a better term given my limited exposure to medical terminology. Imagine a world where we did not have Sir Issac Newton, Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Jane Austin, Henry Ford, and Michelangelo all of whom have been speculated to have demonstrated signs of Asperger syndrome.

There is a general feeling that most celebrated scientists and many other people who have been outperformers in various fields have demonstrated asperger syndrome with savant skills. Since this is all speculative this may or may not be reality though. One plausible reason is that these geeks who excel in one particular area often have shown lesser social skills and stories (maybe real) about traits which are now considered Aspergerish, are also associated with them. In simple words a boy with an IQ of over 150 but limited social skills would have been thought of as a genius a century ago may now be called a person who has Asperger Syndrome with Savantism.

Irrespective of the whether the above theories are correct or not what you will uncover with such people is a beautiful mind underneath. Immense fascination for structure, a mind which can understand numbers without being able to appreciate currency, a deep rooted fascination for melancholy, a heart which is pure, a mind which does not understand sarcasm, expressions which in a normal world are scoffed at as sarcastic or mad but which definitely mean quite a bit, feelings which are richer and truer but never expressed that well, a focus which is narrow but deep, an ability to notice very small things which we take for granted and never notice. While all of the above may vary between individuals there is some commonality in many of them.

Forget the geek world, forget all the jargon of the current day, I think it is still a gift to be associated with such people just for the reason that it is a pure and uncluttered mind not willing to change in a world which is clamoring for money and following Darwin’s survival instincts. Surely the world has become a better place thanks to these people