The objectives of art are always broad and its efforts are empathetic and richly humane to its core. It can never be art and at the same time a brutal force serving only a certain section's interest. It takes no side and it has neither friends nor foes and its fight is the relentless struggle to master the craft itself.
Few days ago I happened to glance at few lines on the film industry in my home state; there were talks about what needful should be done to improve the so-called art in that industry. Without listening to and reading the critics' comments I could conclude: the industry is suffering from parody. If Mumbai has been doing its in the worse form, then rags of it are being picked up and flaunted by those in the industry and after constant repetition it has become a formed-bad habit which by now can be construed as destructive spontaneity.
When one attempts to reproduce a bad work, it will end up as a terrible work, done somewhere close to the original junk, just like a kindergarten student who is not yet able to say all the words but have picked up few mispronounced words of his or her teacher. And there is the tendency of people, involved, wanting for quick success, as though art can be understood and achieved overnight. This attempt runs parallel with reproduction of painting, say the reproduction of Dan Vinci's masterpieces. When one has copied it and compared it with the original the only remark a wise person would give would be “very very close.”
Reproduction is no crime, but looking from the creative perspective it is a contagious mania; it can result to painting with toxic instead of colours and an ignorant audience inhaling it and touching it out of admiration thinking it really is a work of art.
Perhaps with the understanding one will be able to feel the artist inside instead of simply picking up a copiable rubbish work only to fulfill his/her pseudo-artistic endeavour which is already corrupt by strong commercial interest.
All bad forms of art should not be banned ,though; the world could otherwise be a dull and a monotonous place without them, living only among the good works and not knowing what it means by inferior works. But is the pervasiveness of it is what we should resist so that it shouldn't become a laced drink going to be consumed by multitudes.
Further elaborating on art in Kangleipak, it is one such place where nothing adventurous and literary has happened in the last several decades and whatever little sprouted was obliterated by a Sanskrit and Bengali-soaked people and now by an anglicised generation ,including myself. We have become a people incapable of inward-looking and before we even begin we surrender to the baseless idea that there is nothing, and when trying to do it in others' then copy the entire thing just like a high school student copying even the flattened dead and stuck flies on a notebook page while copying homework mistaking it for a part of the text.
To know what you want requires the knowledge of who you are and also about the place where you are. When you haven't expressed any interest in leisha hiyen(canal), which you grew up seeing every day, how would you sit on the bank of the Niles telling yourself you really want to know the mighty river? Then you would end up as a man hollering "save Kangleipak" in Hindi wearing Rajput costume, which has become quite a pervasive fashion, in front of Kangla Gate.
Khamba-Thoibi epic was created without a single foreign word and yet everything in it so clear, relevant and indigenous, and there are the works of Kwairakpam Chaoba.
People are forced through an irrelevant education in which a bit of us is considered inferior or classless, and before we can figure out what it was all about we are hurried out from the place. So the educated talks and intelligent discussions are done in another environment through another medium in which many are left unsaid because we are not capable and our mother tongue, in which we could have done easily, pushed back or aside, has become a language of hi and bye and how are you being the longest expression. A sharp and beautiful knife it was once and now buried and each day more rusted.
The absence of art is the reflection of what we have become in generations; confused and all painted in our own decay.
Comments
Post a Comment