While working at GB Pant University as a teaching associate, a low-key job that, in retrospect, suited me the most, I met Dr. N.S. Mishra, my senior by about ten years, who joined the faculty in 1978. He had lost one of his eyes in an accident, but he neither used dark glasses to cover it nor opted for prosthetic surgery. He used to say he didn’t want to be judged by his appearance, but rather by his intellect and usefulness. He studied Metallurgy at BHU and worked for the Steel Authority of India before settling into academia. He gave me the book, The Act of Creation, saying that he had received it from his professor as a gift and was passing it on as a baton.

When I relocated to Hyderabad, I took this book with me and read it over the course of several years. The author, Arthur Koestler, found by studying inventions and discoveries that they all share a familiar pattern, which he named ‘bisociation’.

I have coined the term ‘biociation’ in order to make a distinction between the routine skills of thinking on a single ‘plane’, as it were, and the creative act, which as I shall try to show, always operates on more than one plane .  . . transitory state of unstable equilibrium where the balance of both emotion and thought is disturbed.” ((Book 1, part 1, chapter XVIII, p. 36)

He described it as blending components from two formerly unrelated matrices of thought into a new matrix of meaning through comparison, abstraction, categorisation, analogies and metaphors. The best part of this book is its celebration of humour as a creative process. A joke is looking at life from a radically different perspective.

Koestler also compared creativity with the surfacing of the unconscious mind into awareness. Citing the examples of lodestones (natural magnetic rocks) and amber, which attract small objects when rubbed with a cloth, Koestler explains creativity as the process of understanding the reason behind the phenomena. The Greeks had dismissed these as freak phenomena, leaving it to Dr. William Gilbert, physician to Queen Elizabeth, nearly two thousand years later, to discover that the force attracting the magnetic needle was not in the skies, but within the Earth, which itself is a giant spherical lodestone.

Creativity disrupts the status quo. Those who are comfortable and satisfied with their conditions can rarely create anything new. However, even most dissatisfied people merely lament and criticise. Only a few do something to change the situation—and that is the essence of creativity.

“The history of art could be written about the artist’s struggle against the deadening cumulative effect of saturation. The way out of the cul-de-sac is either a revolutionary departure towards new horizons, or the rediscovery of past techniques, or a combination of both.” (Book 1, part 3, chapter XVIII, p. 335)

Arthur Koestler and his wife, Cynthia, died by suicide together at their London home by overdosing on a medicine they knew would kill them. He was suffering from terminal blood cancer (leukaemia). It deeply saddened me. What a tragic end for a man who best understood the science of genius.