Know your IQ

My wife Suvidha wants me to take an IQ test she thinks is very accurate. Time and again, I am bemused by her obsession with vocab and anal development; could be a hangover from various national level management exams. I feel lazy and give up on such questions, often too easily. I find myself regurgitating the importance of a 'milansaar' approach to people skills - I liberated myself of guilt the day I entered the land of opportunity. Americans, I found, were much more open minded than us. Being business oriented, as contrasted with being business process oriented, can be an advantage here, something you can see from the glittering navratri celebrations all over NJ. The americans do not gauge smartness from scores alone, which may be a function of cultivation, often a distraction from the real callings of business, or even technology. If the deal you bring to the table is smart, you need not feel embarrassed about every odd score. This is probably a comfortable antithesis of Indian mandarin culture, which IMHO need not apply to business, other pursuits maybe withstanding. Going back to the times of nehruvian brahmin condescension of business, jokes about stupid baniyas appeared in widely circulated news papers. One went thus : Einstein went to heaven and a gujju bhai approached him. Humbly, the latter asked in congenial adoration : ' how did you manage to solve the greatest riddles of physics ?'. Einstein replied 'I have an IQ of 148,...  I would like to learn how you managed to make so many millions in the stock market ?' at which the gujju bhai responded, ' well I have an IQ 82' !! When I went to work at a prestigious financial firm in Chicago, I realized how narrow our Indian preconceptions about business were. Einstein himself, the son of a businessman, might have studied with great interest the application of probability to the stock market, a subject that dated back to Bachalier. In the end, even Einstein did not have a very high IQ for his accomplishments; he outshone most similarly endowed aspirants of genius. So, I tell Suvidha, 'correlations do not imply causation' ; and...business by the way is not correlated with low IQs, it is just that in India, people with lower patience with scoring subjects are relegated to business'. So, in the end, all that we do on Walls street is a genre quite independent of IQs or theoretical physics acumen, both of which are quite independent of each other. It may be that smart people have an advantage here, but so do stupid people, by being singularly focused. Suvidha does not look impressed. But so what. Who cares anyway.