“Omen
Oh! Men!
Amen.”
From Babylonian Graffiti (Ed. Bachchoo)

An Indian magazine has published a feature headlined “The 25 Smartest Indians in the World”. Leafing through this listing of extraordinary perspicacity and achievement, it struck me that the only reason my name was not among them is that I am technically a British citizen. No doubt the editor will send me a grovelling apology lamely protesting that his readers are extremely jingoistic and would not be flattered if the likes of myself or V.S. Naipaul had been included.
When some years ago, I assumed British nationality and became an obedient vassal of the Queen, it did not occur to me that in some future listing of the cleverest Indians my name would be excluded purely because I carried an alien passport. If it had, I may have stopped myself. Nevertheless, what’s done is done, but any future compilers of such a list should take into account that I am now, as we NRIs are proud to claim, a Person of Indian Origin if not your full-fledged desi.
Getting to the point, this list may be an admirable celebration of the intellectual prowess of my erstwhile fellow citizens, but it is, almost by definition, an imperfect exercise. I mean where does one stop? Why 25 and not 27? A small shift in the criteria for judging “smartness” would, considering that we have more than a billion people to choose from, make a completely different list.
One may even argue that the criteria for judging these not-yet-scientifically-quantifiable qualities are flexible if not totally arbitrary. The British newspapers frequently publish “rich lists” of the 10 or 100 wealthiest citizens. These lists have set criteria such as figures on bank statements, value of properties and assets etc.
Not so with, say, the league table of “happiest countries” which the United Nations published some years ago. One would be forgiven for thinking that defaulting countries are justified in holding back UN dues if the organisation wastes its resources in calculating, as it did, that Bangladesh is the second-most happy nation on our globe. Shouldn’t they have asked garment workers in Dhaka or ship-breakers on the coast?
Is intelligence as vague and unquantifiable as happiness? Perhaps not. There are IQ tests and other loose criteria, such as the ability to give clear and foolproof street directions or the ability to decipher the instruction manuals that tell you how to use any electronic device made in China.
I must raise one objection to the list which puts the rest of it in devastating jeopardy. I have occasionally read the “work” of one of the names on the list and find that it is unintelligible gobbledegook, a sort of invented “academic” pidgin, though it purports to be English. I and several very well-read and celebrated friends, to whom I have confessed my puzzlement with this person’s “work”, are inclined to classify it as, to a defining extent, fraudulent — if fraud be the art of persuading people to buy snake-oil as a remedy for rare ailments. I would certainly include this person in a list of bafflers — which leads me to suspect that our list compilers may have attributed intelligence to works they are most baffled by.
Putting this niggle aside and without wanting to replace anyone on the list, I modestly offer for the consideration of the readers and the editorial staff of the magazine (which I won’t name) a few glaring omissions in their list. And, oh! Before that I ought to point out an imbalance in the list: I notice that out of the 25 there are two Muslim names. There is no one called Singh — I wonder why — and there are no Christians or Parsis!
The first person in my proposed supplement that comes to mind is indeed a Parsi and no, he is not Ratan Tata or Freddie Mercury! It’s my distant cousin thrice-removed (each time by the police) master Rustom Immoralearningswalla.
Rustom, or Russi Bhadwa as he was known in Mumbai, emigrated to darkest Canada but patriotically hung on to his Indian citizenship. (That he travels on a forged Kiribati Islands passport is neither here nor there.) Once in Canada he found himself invited, as he wrote to his mother in Mumbai, by a judge in Vancouver to spend some time as a guest of the government. During this pleasant sojourn he invented something priceless. He designed a website and software programme called “Sock It to Me” which is, to speak metaphorically, a dating site for single socks.
Apart from the human benefits to owners whose socks have got separated in dhobi washes or been placed in the wrong drawers, the mathematical theory and commercial applications that attended this invention are now well known all over Saskatchewan. Simply put, the theory is this: If all the socks in circulation were made of the same material and were the same size and colour, and further assuming that the left and right socks are, unlike shoes, interchangeable, there would never be more than one single sock in the universe without a paired partner. The theory may take some readers a while to work out, but I assure you it is mathematically sound.
Rustom has so far held onto the patent, but if any company such as Google, Facebook or Amazon is interested in a high-level purchase they can contact yours truly — as writing via the prison authorities in Canada may entail them having to pay bribes.
My next candidate, again addressing the shortage of minority communities represented, is of course my distant relative by marriage, Daisy Kalapaisa, the cleverest tax-dodge lawyer in the world; employed by 17 multinationals and now a Dubai resident. It would take more than a few gigabytes to outline the intellectually convoluted but sublime ruses she has invented to dodge governments and swindle the populations of three continents. That’s genius, though I dare not elaborate as she has sworn me to secrecy and, incidentally, has some very forceful acquaintance.