Mensa (www.mensa.org) is the world’s oldest and largest High IQ society. It was established in 1945 in Cambridge, England, with the following three objectives: to identify and foster human intelligence for the benefit of humanity, to encourage research in the nature, characteristics and uses of intelligence, and to promote stimulating intellectual and social opportunities for its members.
At Mensa India we estimated that we have 5 to 6 million high IQ children amongst our underprivileged segment of society in India. We decided to make a start with a program to identify at least some of them so that their genius is not wasted. As it happened, IndiGo had just received their 100th Airbus and they agreed to sponsor 100 underprivileged gifted children. We named the program DHRUV, after the Hindi name for the Pole Star.
We administered our standard Mensa India IQ test for underprivileged children to a large number of 10 to 14 year old students studying in government and roadside NGO run schools. The tests were conducted by certified Mensa Proctors and evaluated by Mensa India’s Supervisory Psychologist. We selected 100 gifted children who had qualified in the top 2 percentile of the general population. They are sons & daughters of day labourers, painters, carpenters, drivers, street vendors and, sometimes, unemployed parents.
We found genius in surprising places. One was a 13 year old girl who studied in a roadside school who scored in the 99+ percentile, implying an IQ of above 145. Her father had recently been killed in a construction site accident and her mother was taking care of the family through a small tea shop run out of her shanty. Many others were from broken homes, where the father had either abandoned the family or, often worse, was an alcoholic.
When we tried to move these students to better schools, we faced a surprising amount of resistance from the teachers of government schools who did not want us to take away their ‘better’ students.
Rumours were even spread amongst parents that we were going to remove the kidneys of these students in the new school! However, with proper counseling and a lot of patience, we succeeded in convincing most of the parents and moved a majority of these students to new schools from the last session.
The change in the students who moved to better schools is very gratifying. They are more confident, speak English fairly well, are cleaner and more disciplined and are doing well academically. Some children have changed so much that it is difficult to imagine how they used to be in their previous schools.
The change in parents is even more visible. We now get phone calls from parents who were initially reluctant to move their son or daughter to the new schools, asking us to help get their other children admitted to these schools. Without exception parents are grateful for what we are doing for their children and do not hesitate to say so.
We are in the process of administering aptitude and personality profile tests to those of our scholars who are in Class X this year. This will help us counsel them in regard to their future plans. Based on what they decide to do, we will help them get into proper colleges. We will also guarantee their student loans to enable them to proceed with their studies.
There has been a remarkable change in the ambitions of these children. Those who wanted to become policemen when we selected them, now dream of becoming police commissioners. Those who wanted to join the air force as airmen now dream of becoming fighter pilots. Some want to be lawyers, others want to be engineers and doctors. It is our resolve to help them achieve their dreams to the best of our ability.
Our one regret is that we have touched only the tip of the iceberg. While we nurture and mentor these 100 gifted underprivileged children, the genius of hundreds of thousands of their peers remains unrecognized and unsung. Much of it is bound to fade away. This is a sad waste of the most valuable resources of our country. However, a small satisfaction is that, at least, we have been able to something for a few of such children. Another program to identify and nurture 50 underprivileged girl students in Varanasi will be commenced soon. We hope it will be just one of many more.
Eventually if we can organize the funding, our aim is to establish a school for underprivileged gifted children in Delhi/NCR. It will have specially trained teachers and creative educational methods. We can then help polish more of these raw diamonds into the sparklers which they deserve to be.
- By Kishore Asthana, Head of Mensa India
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