The Creative Indian

Stories of Indian creativity: Magnificent Gogoi and his flying car • Made in Tihar • Write like a dancer • The fraud of Vedic maths •  35 years of Sholay…

The nation is fenced real estate where the extraordinary forces of imagined history, habits and the many flaws of economics together shape the psychology of a race. From this cultural field, no person fully escapes. Even the creative don't. When an Assamese real estate agent attempts to make personal flying machines (the lead story of the Special package: Magnificent Gogoi and his Flying Car), his designs do not have the sophistication of a similar American contraption, his tools are heartbreakingly naive. And there is something orphaned about him because Indian aviation has no ancestry. But he toils everyday to create a flying car.

Impoverished Indians use creativity as a reaction to their nation, as a form of survival. Some of them use the government's free condoms to lubricate power looms or ferry water or even fix leaking roofs. Through the twelve stories listed below in this Independence Day Special, we try to understand Indian creativity.

» Magnificent Gogoi and his flying car

» Underdog Creativity

» How I wrote my 500 page novel set in ancient Greece without being there

» Made in Tihar

» Write like a dancer

» The fraud of Vedic maths

» Death of the political cartoon

» Bollywood on trial

» The world according to India TV

» When Gavaskar batted left-handed

» In defence of the uncreative

» Scriptwriter Salim Khan remembers 'Sholay'

» 50 Most Creative Indians