Colours of creativity
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? If Singaporean Kirpal Singh were involved in this discussion, he would interject, “Where does the rooster come in?” This is because Kirpal figures that without the rooster, the chicken-and-egg thingy remains incomplete.
“It is amazing to note just how much time, energy and effort people spend, arguing, fighting, discussing, thinking and trying to figure out which came first – the chicken or the egg. And yet the crucial other, the rooster, seems to escape people’s notice,” writes Kirpal in his book Thinking Hats and Coloured Turbans: Creativity Across Culture.
“Why does this happen? Why do we allow the most significant items to slip from our fingers and minds? Why do we respond in predictable ways? Why are we afraid of being provocative? Why? Why? Why?”
The necessity of asking truly provocative questions such as why must houses have roof? says Kirpal, quoting a book about mind tools, is that “by asking such seemingly silly and stupid questions, the mind is forced to think of reversals and alternatives. So we may come up with substitutes for roofs and this may lead to new products being offered in the market!”
In his book, Kirpal contends that asking awkward questions is a sure hallmark of the creative individual, saying “this creature doesn’t just sit there accepting all and absorbing all; what he does is raise challenging questions”.
The seed of the author’s creativity was planted in Malaysia. Born in 1949 in Singapore, he was brought to Kampung Changkat in Batu Gajah, Johor, to live with his grandmother when Kirpal was six months old.
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Kirpal Singh |
Herding about 30 cows from his village to fields, Kirpal learned how he could have symbolic power.
“The power was purely symbolic because the moment the cows heard a human voice, they were frightened,” he explains.
At the age of six-and-a-half, Kirpal returned to Singapore, and the Malaysian influence made him “quite a rebellious student”.
“I am not saying that creativity is by definition rebellion,” he says. “But if you are creative, you are always thinking of ways of doing things. However, that is defined or seen by some people as being rebellious or subversive. I like to think about it in positive terms.”
From a quite rebellious student, Kirpal graduated to teaching in all three of Singapore’s universities – National University of Singapore (NUS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and Singapore Management University (SMU).
In his seven years in NTU, Kirpal headed the literature and drama department in the National Institute of Education, where he trained teachers. And he established close contact with teachers and had the wonderful opportunity to visit primary and secondary schools and junior colleges to observe how teachers were doing on the ground.
“It was wonderfully illuminating for me to see how education can cripple creativity and stifle and kill the very sparks that make a student creative,” he relates. “Students go through 12 years of rigid and exam-orientated system. This is not to say that the entire system is totally wrong and misplaced. But in Singapore, we over-emphasise the role of exams.”
Later, in SMU in February 2000, Kirpal had the opportunity to undo the damage 12 years of education had done to the creativity of students. He was made the coordinator of the new Creative Thinking Programme and every student entering the university had to take his creative thinking class and pass it.
The first exercise Kirpal does with his students is to ask them to sit on the floor, relax, close their eyes and try to locate in their mind’s eye where, when and how they lost their creativity.
“I begin with the premise that if we put a five-year-old child anywhere and do not give him or her anything, he or she will find his or her own way of amusement or diversion. In other words, the child is naturally creative,” he says.
However, Kirpal says the moment you put a child in kindergarten, that is when structure comes in. “(Structure) says this is wrong, this is right, or do this, don’t do that and with that the creative instinct and inclination of a person become dwarfed by the larger environment that basically wants you to conform,” he says, adding that creativity is inherent in diversity and not in conformity.
Kirpal always encouraged his three daughters to be creative. For example, he refused to buy them Barbie dolls. Instead, he took them to a tree and told them to close their eyes and visualise.
“The little kids were fantastic. They would visualise that they were fairies, goblins and things that I have never heard about. And that is how creativity comes about. It has a lot to do with relaxing, allowing space for dreaming and fantasising and free expression,” he says.
At the end of his first few creative thinking classes, his students will find themselves repossessing their creativity.
“Once the students learn that there is this imaginative leap and connection, then they begin to see their own creative self coming in every other way,” he says.
The creative thinking programme coordinator always tells his students that the act of creativity consciously begins by asking a very special, magic formula question – what if?
“What if things were different? What if I can fly without wings? That is what creativity is all about – asking what if? Because once you ask that question, you are then making your mind fertile for the possibility of introducing other things,” he explains.
What is creativity? Creativity, says Kirpal, is trying to bring an idea that will manifest itself in very fundamental ways and create something that is not there.
“A creative person has an inkling of an idea that is built almost subconsciously and it comes out. But the environment for the nurturing of that subconscious stimulus must be there,” he explains.
“In other words, there must not be fear or fright. If there is, the conscious creative self will not work effectively or efficiently. That is why I find that for people who are creative, a little bit of chaos is necessary. Because it is the chaos that gives them the assurance that they can be a little bit different or wrong without being punished.”
We are living in a world that is increasingly making us uniform and life is getting to be “boring”, says Kirpal, who is also a fictionalist and poet.
“It is getting to be very alienating and I do see the flip side of this alienation and boredom manifesting itself into kinky and bizarre things such as cannibalism taking place around us. They are creative cells crying out to be heard, wanting to be expressed, except that the expressions are negative, always in the more unpleasant bizarre things,” he says.
Does the word creativity and Singapore gel?
“A lot of people ask me about this. They say that Singapore and creativity is an interesting combination,” he says.
“My answer is that a lot of creative people such as musicians, writers and singers left Singapore. I suppose the political leadership did not at that point think that the role played by creative people would be as important as the role played by engineers or scientists. Now the situation is changing and it is changing very positively.”
It is very instructive, says Kirpal, that senior minister Lee Kuan Yew recently admitted that when he was Prime Minister, he did not take into account the important role mavericks – people who think out of the box – could play.
“(Lee) says that it is very important now for social cohesion to take into account the existence of these people. For a long time, Singapore was hell-bent on achieving pragmatic goals such as good roads, safe hospitals and good airlines. But now we are realising that we are reaching that kind of state that is developed and, like all developed society, we have to find new creative ways to gain a competitive edge.”
What’s the idea behind Singapore’s attempts to make its people more creative by allowing bungee jumping and bar-top dancing?
“It is all in the spirit of trying to become more creative because creativity requires a little bit of untidiness, messiness and a bit of ‘dirt’, and Singapore political leaders now realise that it is a little bit necessary.
“A lot of creative ideas come from places like London, Paris and New York, and when you actually go there, none of them is clinically clean.”
Which country is more creative, Singapore or Malaysia?
“If you ask me, top of the head, I would say that in some ways Malaysia is more creative partly because it is more relaxed, more open to certain kinds of ideas,” he says.
“But by the same token, Singapore is better at implementing these creative ideas. When Singapore picks up on a creative idea, it follows through all the way. In Malaysia, there are a lot of creative ideas floating around but the problem is implementing and sustaining them.”
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