Is the ability to Connect the Dots Hereditary?

Is there a dish that your Mother or Grandmother prepares/d, that has/d a special flavor, which no one else could replicate and people visiting your home, ask/ed for it to be on the menu, before visiting?

Is there a dish that your Daughter or Son prepares or is likely to prepare, that has or would have a special flavor, which no one else could replicate and people visiting your home, ask or would ask for it to be on the menu, before visiting?

Chances are that most responses to the first question are in the affirmative while most people would be unsure about the second. There would be a few exceptions of course. Just a few.

The credit for this does not go to your mother or the grandmother. Nor is your daughter or son to blame for not having a signature dish, in their name.

The earlier generations spent a disproportionately long time, sourcing, cleaning and experimenting with proportions of each ingredient that went into a dish. If your mother’s Biryani, Sambar or Kheer tasted better than anyone else’s, it was because she varied the sequence of adding the ingredients and the duration of each stage of cooking, till she arrived, after multiple attempts, at a ‘formula’ that tasted the best. And that is what she codified and everyone loved.

Your daughter or son are unlikely to spend that much time sourcing the ingredients or experimenting with the stages. On most days, food would be ordered in or taken out of a packet lying in the freezer. On a rare weekend afternoon, when ‘cooking’ is undertaken, the ingredients would be premixed and the recipe prompted by the mother, YouTube or similar. 

What have these 282 words got to do with Connecting the dots and Heredity?

The earlier generations, including mine, while growing up, did not have access to information as readily as we have today. If they wanted to know about something, they went to the library. Calculators were expensive and computers did not exist. Magazines were printed and had fortnightly or monthly editions. People did not have screens that they pored over while they were at home or when they traveled. If it was day, they looked out of the window of the room or the bus they were in and during the night, they observed those around them and their behavior. Possibly even interacted with them and exchanged views.

Observing real people and their activities, events and their outcomes, helped them establish patterns and predict the natural next step of whatever they saw. And they improved with every observation and interaction. 

In the 1980s, while on a market visit to the outskirts of Bikaner, on a hot summer afternoon with clear blue skies, I observed some older folks, sitting under a tree, bet on whether it would rain that night or not. As per met records, Bikaner has only 26 rain days in a year and it actually poured that night. The man betting on it could predict by observing the wind speed, its direction and the smell of the air.

Each one of us knows people who can look at Excel sheet after Excel sheet, have access to the best of analytical tools, yet are non-committal about whether a new product or a process could boost revenue or reduce costs. 

We also know someone who glances at a couple of graphs and tables, goes out and speaks with a few people and is willing to sign in blood on the certainty of an outcome. He is not always right, but he rarely fails.

I don’t think the latter is genetically superior to others. He is more like our mothers and grandmothers.