Let us begin with pictures, shall we? :)
To the left, is a picture of students of DAV College in Chandigargh protesting St. Valentine’s Day and the public display of affection by, well, people. And to the right is a group of people in Manhattan protesting the war in Iraq.
Do you see any difference between the two? No? In that case, let us move to another example:
To the left is the office of dean in IIT Karaghpur (Please correct me if I am wrong), and to right is the engineering college in Stanford [more here]. Now, do you see what I am getting at? Or did I lose you further?
No, this is not a `US-is-better-than-India’ post, this is beyond that. It is about art and its influence on us. Just look at the pictures in the left column, and pictures in the right column. What you see in the left are the symptoms of the artless, while the right is just a glimpse of how art influences life.
It is unfortunate that we as a society are increasingly distancing ourselves from art. This can be seen in the falling quality of our movies (barring a refreshing few) over the decades. This can be seen in the increasing barbaric nature of our disagreements (from the Bombay riots to Godhara to Nandigram). This can be seen in the state of our public utility buildings (the red streaks for pan and tobacco in every corner). What does all of this have to do with art? Actually, quite a lot!
Art is a means of controlled expression. When you repress or discourage art, you lose the means of control, and its only a matter of time before society finds some means of expression. This new mean, unfortunately, has no control (because if it did, then it would be art). This manifests itself as an abomination which we refer to in different avenues as `movies’, or ‘protests’, or pretty much any form of expression you can think of.
But that’s just the half of it. When you lose art, you are not just losing pretty pictures, or soothing music, you are losing the ability to sympathize, the ability to empathize; you are losing emotion and feeling itself. Its all too common to hear a parent tell their kid “Don’t waste your time drawing pictures, its not going to put bread on the table tomorrow.”, or “What good is your acting going to do when you have struggle for your next morsel? Go pick up your textbooks and concentrate!”. And the child will listen, it will do well in school too, but when it actually comes down to having some happiness in life, the child would rather solve second degree partial differential equations than dance. It’s no joke: we are raising a generation devoid of art, a generation with no sympathy. A generation which sees injustice meted out to people, and yet doesn’t react because it cannot feel sympathy. A generation whose eyes don’t tear up to Taare Zameen Par because they ‘get it’ but they don’t ‘feel it’. A generation which looks puzzled if a stranger smiles at them. A generation which doesn’t understand how to express itself and vents itself through hysterical screams, violent mobs, and arson.
We, as Indians, are already building such a generation. We have taken away most of the playgrounds for high rise apartments and multinational corporations. We have already stifled our children’s creative spark for the rote of the textbooks and the multitude entrance examinations. We are replacing the people in our children’s lives with TVs, Computers, and a set of spare keys to the empty house.
There is only so much further down you can go before you hit rock bottom. What good is all the wealth in the world if you can’t shed a tear for it?
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