Can butterflies swim, fish fly and bicycles grow?

Legend has it that Archimedes was in the bathtub when he discovered the law of buoyancy. Do you think the idea of buoyancy could have been actually lying inside the bathtub, holding its breath under the water, waiting to be found?

And while I am not quite sure if it enjoyed the free run in the street with a naked man, I am confident that it would have been happier to have been discovered and given a name. Is it possible that the Buoyancy Idea went around the world spending many nights lying motionless in ponds, lakes, and rivers until it found the bathtub of the aforesaid?

Similarly, was the idea of non-violence on board when a man called Mohandas was traveling to South Africa? Or more recently, did the Google idea sit at the back of the Phd classroom of Stanford University before Sergey Brin and Larry Page went up to it and said hello?

Which brings us to the question, how do ideas come? And then, where do they come from, and how do they come from where they come? And why are they so hard to find?
I have a theory.

Ideas come from Nowhere, a land that actually, physically exists. A land where butterflies swim, fish fly and bicycles grow. Where the days are always bubblegummish and nights are forever mint-fresh. Where surprises lurk at the corners like accidents waiting to happen.

This is the land where ideas take birth, grow but don’t die. They leave on a higher calling (more of this later).

There are all kinds of ideas that live here. Small ideas. Big ideas. Good ideas. Fabulous ideas. Giant visionary ideas. They all live short, wonderful lives. Short because they exit Nowhere land to visit us right after their adolescence. And wonderful because they are nothing short of wonder.

Like human beings, they come in different colours. Except that their colours are wilder than one can imagine. A single idea could be made up of a zillion colours. They never look aged or tired. Always restless, they keep buzzing around talking of their next big project on planet earth.

Unlike us, they don’t hold Q1/Q2, H1/H2 conferences. They meet up almost every second to check where and who needs help to invent, discover or crack something.
And because they are in so much demand, they have to mate all the time to produce a million baby ideas some of which die during birth because they weren’t either practical or plausible.

Turn by turn, ideas leave this land and pay us sudden visits.

Mind you, they don’t come easy. They play hard to get. They need a calling. If you want them, you really need to want them.

They respect hunger. They also respect sacrifice. The more you want an idea, better are the chances for it to leave Nowhere and visit you in your cubicle, the boardroom or the more popular bathroom.

The writer is executive creative director, Dentsu Marcom