This is one club where money, contacts, political influence or muscle power will not get you a membership. Mensa’s door is open only for the intellectually gifted and there are just 100,000 Mensans throughout the world. But before you label the club as boring take a look at some of the members’ profiles — Julie Peterson (Playboy playmate), Asia Carrera (pornstar), Raven (professional wrestler) and Geena Davis (Hollywood actor). Sharon Stone claimed to be a Mensan for many years until 2002 when she declared she never was. But then, she said that she had been to a Mensa school. There have been no Mensa schools since 1960s. Stone was born in 1958.

We all like to think we are smart. But if you seriously want to carry the smart chip on your shoulders forever, take the Mensa test. In one hour and 30 minutes flat, you’ll know where you stand.

All aspiring Mensans have to score within the upper 2 per cent (135 points) of the general population on an approved intelligence test that has been properly administered and supervised. The test is to judge your intelligence quotient, or IQ, where anybody scoring above 140 is considered a genius. If you score less than 40, you are likely to be labelled a moron.

Originally, IQ tests were designed to detect children of lower intelligence in order to place them in special education programmes. Today, most entrance exams have IQ tests to determine an adult’s mental potential, uninfluenced by their culture.

The template for the Mensa test is designed by its headquarters in London. In India, the test is designed and evaluated by Jnana Prabodhini’s Institute of Psychology in Pune based on the original template. The test is supervised by Mensa proctors trained at the institute.

India’s tryst with Mensa started with Vivek Pendse of the Pune institute who visited the London headquarters and established Mensa India in 1972. Later, the late KC Shroff (chairman emeritus of Excel Industries) spread it across Mumbai and western India. In the 1990s, a ‘firestarter team’ from Mumbai went to various cities and conducted mass tests, spreading Mensa’s wings in Chennai, Hyderabad, Delhi and Bangalore.

At present, Mumbai has the maximum number of about 400 Mensans, followed by Chennai with around 200 out of about 1,000 members in India.

There are people who have called Mensa an elitist group, perhaps because of its hard-to-get membership. Some even question if the tests actually measure all kinds of genius.

Kishore Asthana, 64, the oldest Mensan from Delhi, an alumnus of IIM Ahmedabad, says, “There are many kinds of gifts and we measure only a very narrow spectrum defined by what is generally known as intelligence quotient. Lata Mangeshkar is a musical genius, Sachin is a sports genius, but it is not essential they would qualify in the Mensa test.”

And yes geniuses are born and not made, as some members of Mensa prove. The youngest Mensa member is a two-year-old girl from the UK. Elise Tan Roberts, who became a Mensan on April 30, 2009, has an IQ of 156, just below that of Albert Einstein (160). Elise started talking at five months, walking at eight and when she was two years and four months could name

35 capital cities, recite the alphabet and name all different types of triangles.

Another young Mensan joined when he was two years and five months old. Oscar Wrigley has an IQ matching the likes of Einstein and Stephen Hawking. His vocabulary is amazing and has a way with words. Once he told his mother, “Mummy, sausages are like a party in my mouth.”

In India, the youngest Mensan joined when she was 11 years old. Gaargi Sharma from Mumbai is now only 14. Siddharth Bhatia, a 17-year-old class XII student of DPS Vasant Kunj, is the youngest Mensan in Delhi.

Quite expectedly, Siddharth is a science student who likes computer programming. He claims to be the youngest student to have participated in the Indian National Olympiad at the Informatics camp held in Bangalore in 2008.

Last year he won a Singapore Airlines schorlarship to study in Singapore for two years, but stayed back because he wants to study in IIT.

Nirav Sangavi, national secretary, Mensa India, says, Mensa does not test aspirants below the age of 14, but if one is too impatient to wait, Mensa Pune conducts tests for those as young as 10 years old. Younger Mensans usually take the general intelligence test.

The search for young minds is, however, very tempting. Mensa India is designing a programme to identify Indian genius on the lines of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, but unlike the TV programme, questions will only test raw intelligence and not general knowledge. The programme outline is ready, Asthana says, and only a TV sponsorship is awaited.

The National Geographic Channel did approach Mensa India a couple of years ago to design a similar programme but nothing came of it. “It had something to do with sponsorship,” says Asthana, who for a while served as a business adviser to a member of the royal family in Oman.

The idea of joining this high-IQ club is not just to solve crossword puzzles and engage in esoteric babble. It is also about fun and games.

“There is a very flawed view that Mensans are geeky and involved with mostly mental activities. Nothing could be further from the truth,” says Nirav Sanghavi. Mensans meet every third Sunday of the month and have an annual international meet. Along with discussions, debates and chats with their international members on technology and science, physical activities such as hiking, paintball and sports are also part of Mensans’ idea of fun.

They are, however, a serious group of people, in the sense that they like to create history, Clive Sinclair (inventor of the electronic pocket calculator) and Issac Asimov (science fiction author) being outstanding examples. India has its own share of achievers. Bhushan Mahadik has an asteroid named after him. Mars Society president Robert Zubrin has allotted Bhushan an acre of land on the red planet. All this when he was just 18.

Another young talent, Shaleen Harlalkar, made a remote-controlled landmine destroyer as part of her school project, which IIT Mumbai bought for further research. Even former president APJ Abdul Kalam was impressed with the project.

Yet, Mensa is not very well known in India, says Asthana, when asked if any government body or organisation has approached them for help or advice.

He says, “Mensa is a society of generalists, not specialists. The Indian mindset is yet not one of asking someone for advice just because they are brighter, though I am confident that we are capable of finding innovative solutions to at least some problems bedevilling our society.”

The biggest project that Mensa India has undertaken is more welfare than mind-oriented. Mensa Pune has a progamme that seeks to uplift tribal society through tribal teacher training. On similar lines, Mensa Delhi plans a gifted child programme which will identify gifted girls from the underprivileged society and ensure they get educated and their potential explored.

Karthik S, a senior manager at Bharti Airtel and founding member of Chennai Mensa, estimates that there are about 10 per cent IITians in Mensa India and about 50 of Mensans are in the 20-30 year age group.

He says that for the first time Mensa is co-hosting the IIT Chennai fest this year — a sign of the club’s growing influence. So if you want to get a peek into what this exclusive club is up to, you know where to be.