In an attempt to revive this blog which has remained dead
for a while now, I thought of answering a question which I stumbled upon while
trying to live my life. The question asked me, “Why isn’t art valued in India?” and for a moment which turned out to
be very long I was scratching my head while I recollected the sad state of
affairs of art and artists here.
My attempt to find an answer told me about things that tried
to form a reason. As Indians, We live a calculative life. There is an age for
education (which is of a lower time period for those lucky women-folk), an age
for the disguised devastation of a marital association, an age to announce the
good news and not feel as if you’d scored. Then there is the culture keeping us
in place, arranging us like sheep of a herd, heading blindly to a single
direction. And while at home, we’re busy calculating the rising commodity
prices as we weep for our pockets. Yes, an Indian life is highly mathematical,
governed by constants. But how can people living by “constants” understand
something as infinite as art?
All of us are busy moving, like gears of machinery. Not
being able to wander, to fly. The ideal career again has to abide a constant.
So half of the potential artists die a death of sacrifice, they want to fly but
“No” say their Indian lives, “Go into that cage and live chained to the
constants that you’re bound to abide”. But the artistic soul always breathes in
them, so they play a gamble some time later in life. They break their cages of
careers and try to fly. A few of them attain a flight but many crash. They see
the masses, relishing a circus in the name of art. They’re happy with a
stagnant song and dance of glamorous personas and true artists are left ignored
in the corners. So many artists face disappointment and surrender to their
cages again because it’s too late then, as the system demands them to take care
of the children they've made, even the advocates of culture threaten them to
abide by the code. And when they turn old, sitting on their rocking chairs,
they reflect about a life that never happened while they were busy in trying to
fit in a calculative existence.
This is the story of these barren artistic lands that we
live in.
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