A beautiful, cloudy day most often plays havoc with one’s imagination. It prods you, cajoles you, coaxes you to get out of your indoor spaces and embark on that dream stroll on the streets. With a tune on your lips and music in your heart, you step outside, all set for that blissful rejuvenation. All it takes though is five minutes into that imagined heaven to realise how far away you are from reality. Buildings jostling for space on one side and boxing matches played out by the unruly traffic on the other, leaving you sandwiched in between — walking seems like the remnants of some hallucination you had. You jump, skip, hop on the pavement, finally knowing what that free Zumba class trial must feel like.
Footpath it may be called, but where one can place a foot on that path is inconceivable. To add to the distress, unmasked fellow pedestrians appear at regular intervals, threatening to make you lose your balance and your sanity. And if your bad luck decides to take a turn for the worse, and that overcast sky, which tempted you on this adventure, bursts forth into heavy showers, be assured that you will not find a single tree to take shelter under; they have all been chopped to accommodate this very chaos.
Some things in life are best left undescribed. Your mood, for example, on your return home. No attempt at any description would have succeeded anyway. “Ready for a duel with any unfortunate soul crossing your path” mood would be an understatement. All your romantic notions of a walk are laid to rest forever.
The badly planned towns, the neglect of parking woes, the assumption that people can simply fly over open manholes/ potholes, the horrendously garish constructions, rising to the sky like stacked matchboxes, the absence of greenery — do our cities have to be this way? Aren’t we to blame for this apathy? In the pursuit of our varied ambitions, we have cast aside the pursuit of beauty and meaning in our lives.
Our education system has also ensured that the rat race matters the most. If only equal emphasis had been given to art education, every child would have grown up to be able to not just solve mathematical problems, but also be sensitive to the surroundings. Class trips to museums (even the dilapidated local ones would have sufficed) and an introduction to art history and art appreciation would have all gone a long way into shaping the individual into a compassionate human being with a strong sense of aesthetics.
This individual would have then planned both personal and public spaces (which eventually constitute the city) keeping in mind the thousands who use the streets every day. Inconveniences caused by one’s haphazard parking, mindless destruction of green cover and ugly buildings may well have been almost non-existent. Beauty may have been the driving force behind any endeavour. All is not lost as yet, let’s hope! Let us expose our children and ourselves to art, in some form. Let us create open spaces to interact with it. Let us aspire to turn that stroll into a truly ecstatic experience!
Jitha Karthikeyan
Email: jithakarthikeyan2@gmail.com
(Jitha Karthikeyan is an artist and curator, passionate about making art accessible to the larger public)