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| Ananda Shankar Jayant |
India 2015: A pulsating energy of the can-do spirit, a synergy of an
ancient civilisation walking hand in hand with a young nation. Ready to
lead the world.
Our globalised era is dominated by the
rationalism of science and technology, economics and commerce paradigm,
often at the expense of humanities and arts. Yet can there be
science-technology without the human? Technology in its broadest sense
is about tools and their usage. But who uses them?
Today’s
lifestyles demand a fresh redefinition of the perimeters of
science-technology vs arts-humanities; intersecting as they do, in so
many ways.
Designs that aim at making the user interface of
technology more pleasant; visual aesthetics of our everyday necessities
of laptop, tablet and phone; language interfaces; etc., all areas of
function, but caressing the world of arts. Some of the world’s greatest
innovations, as Steve Jobs succinctly said “intersect at the crossroads
of technology and art”.
Outside the worlds of academia, arts are
often regarded as ephemeral and of no practical use. The reluctance of
generations to engage with art in its broadest sense is to me a colossal
waste of human potential.
An engagement with arts takes the
soliloquy out and forces you to have a dialogue across disciplines and
perspectives. Humanities recognise the dynamics of differences in human
thought and life, revelling in the unsettling crevices of difficult
dialogue, even while they negotiate the paradoxes of learning and
living.
In today’s education system, arts have been booted out.
Over the last few decades, we have reinforced public perception that
arts are lovely but not essential, and have been trivialised as mere
entertainment. Most of our academic institutions do a wonderful job in
preparing the students for successful careers. But they fail in
preparing them for life as good human beings.
We are training our
youth in skills, not in thinking; millions of engineers, no innovators,
a cry voiced by none other than Mr Narayanamurthy himself. We
regurgitate outside innovations and are proud to be babus of a new
imperialism.
In our single-pointed trajectory of profit, return
on investment and bank balances, we have obviated art. What price tag
can we put on the Taj Mahal, the Ellora temple, Carnatic music,
Bharatanatyam, Patachitra, to name a few? If this collective unconscious
memory is systematically erased, what does that leave us with?
When
any country showcases its strength on the global stage, it is always
with a dazzling display of its culture. Our Republic Day parade is a
stellar example, and yet the infusion of arts in education is barely
there. If economy and business make the spine of a country, then culture
is its face and soul. If this very culture is not nurtured, would that
not make us faceless?
Access then becomes the key word. We need
to figure out multiple ways of continued access of as many varieties of
culture, to as many people. Because if the young are not ever exposed to
arts, what will they spend their bank balances on later?
But
more than that an engagement with arts, creates value, not in terms of
money, or even a career, but in terms of a deep landscape of personal
resource, a core strength to be drawn on at key points of one’s life.
To
me the nation is like a 32-wheeled truck, trudging along the highways.
Culture and arts comprise one wheel. Ignore this wheel at your own
peril.
Ananda Shankar Jayant is a serving bureaucrat and a Padma Shri awardee. She can be contacted at ananda.jayant@gmail.com
Source : newindianexpress
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