CHENNAI: A long time ago, when we could breathe without fear, when home was a place we yearned to get back to at the end of a tiring day, when hugs were not defined by an emoji and, most importantly, when we could sneeze and be blessed oh! what a golden era that was indeed! Back in that period, this was precisely that month of the year, when all of us summer vacationers would be heading home, suntanned and exhausted, bags filled with memorabilia that would loudly announce our trip forever, no matter which showcase or mantel it rested on.
Phones would be burs t ing way beyond the storage capacity with perfectly composed photographs of the monuments visited in the day and the local cuisine sampled by night. Unpacking could wait till new school bags and shoes were bought, notebooks covered and labelled with glossy brown sheets, uniforms stitched, while children held on furiously to the last of their holidays. Hard to imagine such a scenario now. With lockdowns in place, holidays merely mean a shift from online classes to online games.
There simply seems to be nothing else to do. Reading books has become a rarity for today’s generation. Outdoor games are inconceivabl e with the pandemic raging. This is where art would have come in handy if only our education system had taken it more seriously. Our earliest memories of self-expression are very often those indecipherable lines and forms we scribbled with the set of crayons gifted by Aunty I-don’t-remember-her-name (colouring material was the customary present for those kindergarten birthdays back then). Today, when numerous subjects jostle for space in schoolbags, art has been gently relegated to that small compar tment on the outside, only to be whipped out to provide some breathing space between two very heavy subject sin the timetable.
A scenery here and a flower there, coloured on instructions, are taken home to be admired by family, before going on to principal matters like Newton’s Laws of Motion and the Pythagorean Theorem. Some are sent to weekend art classes, only to give it all up when the coaching classes for board exams wins the wrestling match in the formative years. Art really isn’t all these. It is not just the sunset the child learnt to draw or the flower painted in bright colours.
It is about how creative the child tried to be with that sunset, the ability to focus on minute details, the decisions taken on how best to express, the development of motor skills, the freedom to imagine beyond the confines of numbers and texts,the understanding of cultural history — art is all this and more. Another summer vacation may have gone by. With uncertainty in the air around, there is no better time than now to integrate art education into the curriculum and children’s lives. Let children walk with minds that run amok with creative imagination and eyes that see the world with curiosity and immense possibilities. May our children bloom despite all this gloom.
JITHA KARTHIKEYAN
Email: jithakarthikeyan2@gmail.com
(Jitha Karthikeyan is an artist and curator, passionate about making art accessible to the larger public)