Kishore Asthana of Dhruva, Mensa India's Underprivileged Gifted Child Identification & Nurturing Program

I've been talking to Kishore Asthana of Dhruva, Mensa India's Underprivileged Gifted Child Identification & Nurturing Program looking at the current resources and potential available.

My vision for some time has been to provide autodidactic resources at a point where they can be leveraged to provide much higher levels of help. Helping the underprivileged (and indeed street children) survive from day to day is a worthy cause, but is essentially ploughing the sea in that it is an ongoing task that if anything grows each day. This is very worth if your primary goal is giving to charity, but if you want to create a lasting change there needs to be a better way.

For me this is not about Mensa, or India - it's about doing the maximum good globally both in the short and long term, and in us having the humility to see that our legacy can be enhanced geometrically by enabling others to help.

By helping the underprivileged, but highly talented to develop in such a way that they can develop to become the people who address the problems first hand  rather than simply being drip fed charity. This is more like being Johnny Appleseed rather than just giving a bite of your apple to a growing hungry crowd.

So how do we do this? If you've read Neal Stephenson's excellent book "The Diamond Age" you'll remember it features the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. This is an electronic book that features everything needed to take a young, just literate child us to University level. The aim was also not just to turn out a "walking dictionary" capable of spouting facts and figures but creating an emphasis on training logical as well as practical and emotional skills to develop a capable well rounded personality with a developed Emotional intelligence as well as intellect. There are many improvements and ramifications that an electronic device can add, everything from testing to provide feedback and engagement, to training pto clear, international pronunciation and processing to develop mental skills such as super memory skills. This can be fitted into the context of creating an effective, satisfying life as we now have extensive data from the Harvard longitudinal Grant Study to help that

The ideal starting point for that is through Mensa India's Underprivileged Gifted Child Identification & Nurturing Program has a key set of "100 underprivileged gifted children and about 50 other underprivileged class toppers"  and the aim would be not just to provide them an unstructured resource but rather a structured, balanced resource to guide them though their formative years.

Like the idea? Then link to this post, G+ it, tweet it, spread it on all your social media and reach out to me to tell me how you can help.