This is intelligence?

EpporuL yAr yAr vAy kEtpinum apporuL mey poruL kAnbadaRivu - Tirukkural

Loosely translation : True intelligence discerns facts based on what is said and not based on who is saying it.

Have you seen this thing about these sayings and quotes? They seem to be designed to make life difficult for you. You go to them, thinking that they will help you to make life easier for yourself, and they send you out with a flea in your ear, and a conviction that life looked a lot easier before you were foolish enough to take recourse to them.

Take this one for example. There you were thinking of life much like it was at school. You sit in class, the teacher squiggles on the blackboard and says this is 'A'. Did you spend time thinking whether it was really 'A' or not OR did you take it for granted that it would be 'A' because the teacher said so? And now this chap TiruvaLLuvar pokes his nose in and says that you cannot lead your life assuming things to be true just because they are said by some people (teachers or otherwise) and not true just because they are said by others (your juniors, the school peon...). Well, you can, but you ought not to consider yourself intelligent if you do.

Being considered intelligent is sort of nice. So, you think that, maybe, you should apply his concepts. Maybe there is an exception only for schoolchildren and adults have to operate by different rules. The problem with it is that it seems to involve too much...err...thinking.

You just cannot take it for granted that pigs can fly, just because your friend says so, and start building nests for them. Nor can you sneer at your foe when he says that pigs prefer sties to live in, at least in comparison to nests on top of tall trees. Just as you were relaxing and thinking that you cannot go far wrong if you believed everything your friend said and disbelieved everything your foe said, this old man from the past pops up and upsets your harmony.

That's fine as far as friends and foes go - they are largely your age group and can hardly be expected to know any more than you. Teachers are all right - they can be trusted to know, or so you think. Then up pops your neighborhood kid - a nerd to end all nerds - and proves her wrong about what she thinks is possible with a Tablet. Huh? You revise your rules and say that if it is Infotech, the young are right and the old are wrong - and your octogenarian grandpa helps you out when you are stuck operating a spreadsheet! This old man from the past really does muck up your life. Centuries gone since he last took a breath, so how did he know about your neighborhood nerd or your octogenarian grandpa or even about Infotech that what he says proves relevant today?

If that were all, it would not be so bad. The problem with the guy is that what he says also means that you cannot assume that a woman dressed differently is 'asking for it', merely because your grandpa said that such was the case. You cannot assume that anyone ranging from a newborn babe to a doddering old man, belonging to a different religion, is out to shake the very foundations of your own, and that killing them will guarantee your own quota of houris in Heaven, merely because your religious leader says so. You cannot assume that there is no value in whatever has been developed or conceived in a different culture, merely because your own leaders have told you that all that is good is only there in your own.

In short, this chappie - TiruvaLLuvar - makes it very difficult to live. Being considered intelligent is nice, all right, but it involves too much hard work - thinking! Being an idiot is so...stress-free.

It is a no-brainer as to what I chose to be and, I am sure, most of humanity agrees with me.

P.S: A response to a 3-quote challenge, tagged by Rachna