Asha Iyer Kumar :
Didn’t know during our school days that there was so much creativity in you,” wrote an old school mate recently. Truth be told, I wasn’t aware of it myself, thanks to limited avenues to develop talent and the stress we placed on academics then.
Those were sedate times in which there was barely any means of tapping what lay concealed in our creative realms, and whatever surfaced eventually can only be construed as an incidental manifestation of an inherent flair.
With passage of time, the dearth of exposure in our children has been amply filled and knowledge accumulation has grown to revolutionary proportions. We are now disgruntled over the limitless, uncontrolled nature of exposure that they have to facts and fallacies, and are now seeking ways to curb the freedom for fear of moral corruption.
On the other hand, the emphasis on academics has touched unprecedented levels, thanks to our aspirations. However, have our children lost their innate creative qualities between the surplus of knowledge and an over emphasis on academics? Has the need to excel in the external world arrested the expansion of their inner precincts? Do our children suffer from an acute deficiency of aesthetic appreciation and artistic creation? Saddled with new age obligations, are they left with no space for expressing their hidden imaginativeness? I am made to think.
I have often been quizzed about the creative writing lessons that I give to young schoolers. That a child can be ‘taught’ and ‘trained’ to be creative is something that has been viewed with both surprise and suspicion. The answer is, one need not teach a child to be creative; one merely needs to provide him or her with the right stimulus to awake what lies slumbering in them.
The fact that my own creativity was in throes of evolution for long before it appeared in varied forms makes me conclude that inspiration and imagination are innate, but need fertile grounds and conducive atmosphere to flourish. It is this that I provide to the youngsters in my class.
In their scramble for scores and craving for allied cerebral interests aided by technology, our children have frozen the right side of their brain that appeals to art and artistic variations. There is no denial that we enlist them in various extra-curricular activities, but I have often wondered if these decisions have not been made based upon our own choices than their predilections. Haven’t such recreation been driven by our adult ambitions and not designed for their childish pleasure?
Our dreams for them as parents, guardians and mentors are certainly not misplaced, nor are their aims, but in this over enthusiasm to make the cut in a cut-throat world, it appears like they have lost their sensitivity towards the fine things that can add aesthetic quality to their lives. The fast and the furious objects catch their imagination than the slow and the subtle. There is no finesse left in their articulation and expression. There is no art, no poetry, nor imagery left in their lives.
Art and literature may not fill coffers or aid a living, but they effectively cushion the pressures of material living, provide for amusement and diversion, and take the stress out of the rat race. One doesn’t need degrees to express and embody thoughts, nor do such expressions need a definite worldly purpose.
It is this insight that I impart to my pupils. The aim is to help them find splendour in all things they see, interpret what they see into perceptions, convert these into thoughts and express them in fluent language. The medium can be words, colours or tunes, and the idiom simple or sublime, but when our children discover their own channels of creative expression, they become gentler, sensitive human begins, who will see life beyond the caprices of wealth and vanity. Analytical study will feed them, but it is the artistic fervor that will sustain them.
(Asha Iyer Kumar’s new collection of poems, “Hymns from the Heart’ is now available on Amazon.com)
