LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE

Actor Kubbra Sait has made the best lemonade with the lemons that life gave her

- ANJULY MATHAI

In his book Originals: How Non-Conformists Change the World, Adam Grant details a surprising fact. Despite what one might think, child prodigies do not end up changing the world. The gifted learn to play magnificent Mozart melodies and beautiful Beethoven symphonies, but hardly ever compose original scores. “[Child prodigies] conform to the codified rules of established games, rather than inventing their own rules or their own games,” he writes. In other words, they lack creativity.

Kubbra Sait was the opposite of a child prodigy. She was timid, introverted and a poor performer, bullied by her classmates. “Not a day went by when I would not have to kneel in a corner of the classroom, or eat lunch alone, or be teased by my classmates,” she writes in a new book, Open Book: Not Quite a Memoir. Maybe that is why Grant would have been so pleased with her. He might have seen the spark in the child that smoldered beneath the bullying and the perennial red marks on her school diary.