Of making art

“Do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you’re Count Dracula.”
Kurt Vonnegut

I stumbled on this quote when I was least expecting to. But it made me stop and lean back in my cold, stone chair. It made me look out into the void, thinking, mind wandering, wondering about the undeniable necessity of art.

Remember when art was hobby? Singing, dancing, writing, painting, crafting—all of those were categorised as activities to do during your leisure. Stuff you do to de-stress, to clear the mind after a long day of work. That’s the mentality I grew up around. My family and teachers looked at art and creativity as an add-on to normal life—not life itself.

Kurt challenges that ideology. Creative thinking shouldn’t be allocated or limited to a specific time. Instead of looking at art as an activity for an appropriate time and place, we should think of it as part of our everyday lives.

Art is everywhere. From a puddle in the street and the graffiti on the toilet walls to an activist’s speech and signs on a protest. Everyone has it within them. And we should consciously choose to bring it forth and declare it as part of our personality—our identity.

Except, we don’t.

Think about it: what would people say if you skip home from school one evening? When and where I grew up, people would label me as crazy, undisciplined, and out of control. They’d blame my parents. A child dancing on the street is unruly.

In reality, though, it’s self-expression. Children will be children. And they shouldn’t be penalised for it. Our society has become so adept in suppressing the artistic and creative outlets of our younger generation that we’ve ended up with a group of people who’re too busy to have time for art in their lives. And thus, art is now luxury.

As Australia burns…

“We think most of the animals were incinerated – it’s like a cremation, […] They have been burnt to ashes in the trees.”

Sue Ashton, President, Koala Conservation Australia.
Source

That line jumped out at me as I scrolled through today’s news. For a while now, most of New South Wales, Australia, has been burning. As of early morning today, a million hectares of land has burnt down, a number greater than the previous three years of bushfires combined. And it’s only spring. Bushfire season is only beginning in this part of the world, and even before its proper entrance, greedy fires are lapping their way into people’s homes and lives.

Yet, somehow as I read multiple articles mentioning three deaths and over a 150 destroyed homes so far, it didn’t hit me as hard as the incinerated koala bears. Though I haven’t lived through many global disasters, I have seen and heard of enough violence and terrorism to develop a mild numbness to human deaths. To me, it always felt like one group of humankind is always paying for the mindless blunders of another.

This time, however, it wasn’t just the humans. This time, for the first time in a long time, vulnerable nature is suffering from its own wrath. That article put it well too. The precise choice of words got me unawares, gripping my throat, crushing, pulling the air out of it in such a slow motion that I wished it would hurry up and get it over with. The casualness of that word threw me off balance. It made me breathe in so sharply that my eyes teared up from the pressure and the pain that shot all the way through my body.

Words are powerful. Saying that over 300 harmless, helpless, animals were crisped while they clung to their homes, paints a picture so vivid that readers would relive the moment again and again. It was strong, writing. As a writer of things myself, I admire the gallantry of whoever wrote that speech.

As a reader, listener, it triggered me. It’s made me abhor the world we live in. Although my mind accepts the direness that’s become the new normal in the state, my heart still clenches to think that at this rate, koala bears could be extinct in 30 years.

It’s scary to imagine a species that I’ve admired, photographed, and smiled at, would die out right in front of my eyes, and I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.

The state government has declared emergency for the first time since 2013. According to meteorological forecasts, tomorrow (Tuesday) will cause more damage than we’ve seen so far. Greater Sydney, NSW, and parts of Queensland are expecting extreme bushfires—in addition to the 60 that’re still uncontained. Over 500 schools will be closed. Millions are evacuating to safer areas. High temperatures, low humidity, ghastly winds, and catastrophe await the state as it spends another sleepless night.

And someone said the climate’s fine.

The thing about routine

November is National Novel Writing Month. That means, aspiring novelists, and even established ones, spend an entire month feverishly writing a full-length novel of at least 50000 words. NaNoWriMo (short for National Novel Writing Month) is also a non-profit organisation that mentors participants, keeps them motivated with pep talks, and organises group meet-ups across the world for people to write together and make the most out their time this month.

November is also National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo). For the less motivated and less ambitious than the NaNoWriMo participants, this month is all about posting at least one blog post a day.

About five years ago, I tried NaNoWriMo and finished writing my first full-length novel. I was thrilled. Over the moon, to put it in figurative terms. The following year, I took up NaBloPoMo. And to my utter surprise, I managed to succeed in that as well.

Since then, though, I haven’t officially participated in NaBloPoMo or NaNoWriMo. I did challenge myself to finish a shorter novel (of 30000 words) during Camp NaNoWriMo in July, and I did. However, I have lost interest in joining others as they declared their big goals for November, of writing at least a little everyday so they can meet their goal. I have my goals too, but I no longer feel the need to broadcast them. And the reason for that, I think, is that ever since I did the one blog post a day challenge, I’ve been posting at least once a day. For over two years now, I’ve had a blog post go live every day at the same time. To do this, I’ve had to often force myself to write something every day. Some days it flowed easily, but some days it didn’t. Some days, while travelling in particular, I’d schedule a bunch of haikus to go live even if I couldn’t publish them myself.

Therefore, for the last three or four years, I’ve written and published every day. Some days I don’t do too well, but some other days, I impress even myself.

During this practice, I’ve learnt that writing something, anything, every day is a great way to keep the brain muscles oiled and nourished. I’ve now developed a certain itching in my mind whenever I don’t write. It’s become part of my routine to sit down for a while every afternoon, regardless of how busy I am, and write a few words about whatever strikes my fancy.

You never know what such habits will lead you to. For me, it got me hooked into the art of telling a story in 14 syllables. I started writing a lot of haikus. I found stories in people I observed and translated them into short stories and 100-word flash fiction pieces. After all this time, these random pieces of work have become my life. Now, I’m making conscious efforts to submit my work to online magazines. It’s been a great journey so far, and I can only see it improving.

Routine life can be tiresome, yes. But sometimes, it can also be rewarding.

Tea or coffee?

“Er—”

As a lover of both, it’s one of the biggest dilemmas I face in a gathering. Most people are either tea drinkers or coffee fanatics. I understand that. However, I come from a long history of tea estate owners and workers who used to wake up to the decadent smell of dewy tea leaves outside their windows, and who washed down their morning carbohydrates with a steaming pot of black tea. To say I’m a tea lover is like saying the Joker is eccentric. It’s moot.

That said, I also partly come from a society that relies on the laxative power of coffee to kickstart their day and metabolism. A hot cup of flutter coffee infused with sugar and milk is the stable beverage of a typical south Indian household.

And so when choosing one, I struggle like a mother being forced to choose between husband and child. While the former leads to the discovery of the other, the other only increases her passion for the first.

I like tea. I like coffee. And I always struggle to choose between the two.

So for a long time, I made a compromise in such a way that I give both of them equal importance in my life. Instant black coffee served as the first dregs of fuel for my engine, kicking off the day, whereas a cup of tea became my standard breakfast. Afternoons were dedicated to either lemon tea or black filtered coffee, depending on the weather, while the other one became my regular dinnertime beverage. Some days lemon tea went with lunch and some days with dinner. Either way, I was sure to get enough of both in a day.

Then I went to Melbourne for the first time, the coffee capital of Australia. It offered me some of the best-tasting coffees I’ve had in my life. Not to mention affordable, even in the central business district (CBD). However, that wasn’t the most noteworthy thing about Melbourne. Aside from the impeccable coffee, I discovered a strange thing called dirty chai.

Dirty chai with cinnamon topping - Melbourne

One of my American colleagues (who was visiting Australia) introduced me to the miracle that is the dirty chai. I had no idea that you could mix tea and coffee and end up with a concoction so addictive and mesmerising that it’s unbelievable it’s not more prevalent.

Yet, there it was—a simple brew of stewed tea leaves and a shot of espresso, melded to create a beverage that not only thrills the tastebuds but also satisfies, satiates, the penduluming soul of the tea-coffee lover.

It’s one of the many reasons to love Melbourne. It has such good coffee that it transforms a plain chai into a dirty chai that you’d love to cuddle between your palms, taking in one of the world’s best fusion creations.

Seeing nothing

Art is seeing things no one else does. From nothingness comes beauty and a stream of endless creativity.

I came across this piece of work in one of the many alleyways in Melbourne. Like most of the graffiti there, it was insightful and stunningly beautiful. But it was more than just eye candy. It made me stop and stare. Even after browsing through countless alleys and numerous shades of black and brown and everything else in between, after taking photos from all angles that my camera could twist into without losing its stamina, this art stopped me in my tracks.

It was powerful because, unlike most art you see on a daily basis, it stood out in a different way. It requires the viewer to look at it from a certain point of view. From close by, the art is nothing but a bunch of oddly stuck pieces of paper with strange ink marks. From close by, it’s easy to assume it a worthless waste of space. You have to be far enough looking into the art to see it for what it is. You have to have a mind and eye open enough to entertain the possibility of blending a physical product with a patchwork figurine.

And that’s what good art does to you. It makes you consider aspects you’ve never considered before, see visions you’ve never envisioned before, and feel emotions you’ve never thought you were possible of feeling.

Art forces you to become aware of what’s around you, in such a way that you start sensing the wetness of the dense air that hangs right above your shoulders, like a ghost’s arm, invisible but so clearly present.

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