The Genius Grants

The Genius grants were announced today. Also known as the MacArthur Fellowship, they provide a five-year grant for individuals who show exceptional creativity in their work and the prospect for still more in the future. The stipend for the MacArthur Fellowship is currently set at $500,000, paid in quarterly installments over five years. It is designed to provide seed money for intellectual, social, and artistic endeavors and the Fellows Program places its emphasis on individual creativity because the discoveries, actions, and ideas that shape our society often result from the path-breaking efforts of individuals. Typically, between 20 and 25 recipients are selected each year.

This program (a) identifies creative individuals with extraordinary promise for significant accomplishment; (b) selects these individuals from across a broad range of fields and professions; (c) gives them enough money to live decently, so that they would not be required to take other work; (d) pays out this money over a long enough time period to allow them the freedom to set their own agenda; and (e) leaves them alone to work on whatever they might choose, without any strings attached to the use of the funds or any reporting requirements.

There are two Indians who have been awarded the Genius grants this year by the MacArthur foundation. Manish Agarwala who is a computer scientist designing visual interfaces that enhance our ability to understand large quantities of complex information. Working at the intersection of visualization, human-computer interaction, and computer graphics, Agrawala draws on cognitive psychology to identify the key perceptual and design principles underlying graphic illustrations http://www.macfound.org/site/c.lkLXJ8MQKrH/b.5458001/k.92B8/Maneesh_Agrawala.htm and L.Mahadevan, who a mathematician who applies complex mathematical analyses to a variety of seemingly simple, but vexing, questions across the physical and biological sciences — how cloth folds when draped, how skin wrinkles, how flags flutter, how Venus flytraps snap closed. Through his explorations of shape and motion, in many different material types, sizes, and time frames, Mahadevan http://www.macfound.org/site/c.lkLXJ8MQKrH/b.5458019/k.8448/L_Mahadevan.htmstrives to identify commonalities of the fundamental nonlinear and nonequilibrium behavior driving them.

What is not as well known is the fact that India too has had its MacCarthur grants since 1967. The Homi Bhabha Fellowship Council has been selecting Fellows since 1967 and its objectives closely mirror those of the Macarthur grants.

The Homi Bhabha Council too seeks out and assists outstanding young persons to provide them with the means, training and opportunities for the full development of their abilities at an age when they are at the height of their energy and mental powers, thus enabling them to provide the leadership required in various spheres and, in some cases, to make creative and original contributions in the future. The object of the Homi Bhabha Fellowships Council is to give to young men and women of exceptional talent, opportunities to develop their abilities at a relatively early age, through study, research, travel and practical training, so as to enable them to provide in time the kind of leadership the country requires in various fields.

Here is a list of 125 Homi Bhabha Fellows selected over the past forty years http://mumbai.mtnl.net.in/~hbfc/fellows.html

But there is clearly a need for more initiatives of these kinds by the Indian industry. Surely investing in the young is a far better contribution to the future than a $ 1billion skyscraper?