The ACTUAL Underpriviliged

‘Taare Zameen Par’ has had a profound influence on me, I won’t deny it. But what I’m going to say, has taken root not from this movie, but actually from somewhere else.
TMZ threw focus on dyslexia, and more generally on the trials under-performing students have to go through. It is common knowledge that children, who don’t score an A+ in school, face a lot of discrimination from peers, and often from parents too. But, a quick search on dyslexia on the Internet reveals a rather stunning and less known fact about the ‘disability’.
It seems that dyslexics, who suffer from reading-writing problems, often have a rare and unnatural ability to think out of the box. That being a primary reason why such unnaturally gifted children are not recognized by our exam oriented society.
When I read this, my mind took a flashback to a seminar I had attended in office on ‘innovation’. That being the buzzword in the industry today, we are goaded by managers to think ‘out of the box’. One of the guest speakers was trying to explain a theoretical framework for innovation. He ended his lecture, with a rather interesting model.

He says that the human race has seen several transformations over our history. It started with the Stone Age. That’s when man learnt to mould stones and flints into weapons and instruments. To use it for hunting. From there, we progressed to the age of Metal. That’s when Man was able to transform and mould steel, and use it as implements, obviously more effectively than stone. Then came the industrial revolution, which brought about factories and assembly lines, the age of Automation. Today, we are in the age of the Machines. We have designed machines, robots and computers to do all our work. We have reached a point where these Machines even ‘think’ (Read AI, distributed intelligence etc.). Thought and logic, the 2 qualities that set us apart from the animals, were also emulated by our machines. So, the obvious question is, where are we headed? What age is next? His theory was this.
To date, we are able to make machines think, perform logical operations, and even act like us. Basically, all our ‘right brain’ activities can be done by these machines. So, up next would be the Age of the ‘left brain’. The age where machines think for us, but the aesthetics, art, creativity takes precedence. These are typically functions of the left half of the brain, and hence the name.
And hence the emphasis on creativity, innovation and OFTB thinking. Now, think of this. The very dyslexics we look down upon are already gifted with this exceptional ‘left brain’ activity. So, it is they who inherit the earth! And people like me have only our right brain to fall back on. So it is our burden to cram books, study hard and pass exam after exam, basically because that is all we are good at!
So, now I think, who is actually underprivileged? And in the coming world order, who will be labouring away and who inherits the earth?