KOCHI: A long time ago, when we could breathe without fear, when the 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 truly golden era! 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 showcases or mantel it rested on.
Phones would be bursting 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 inconceivable 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 compartment on the outside. With uncertainty in the air around, there is no better time than now to integrate art education into the curriculum and children’s lives.
(The author is an artist and curator, passionate about making art accessible to the larger public)