Here’s the thing about taboos and stigma: don’t talk about doing it. If you want to get high, you don’t tell people. You just try to do it without anyone noticing. But, let’s get a little serious now. I want to let the world know that I have been doing something that’s considered unconventional. I am a secret artist.
I was born into a South Indian family as the first child with a lot of expectations dumped onto my shoulders. I lead the average life of any NRI student. I’ve never once complained about my life, until this one time when I told my parents I was going to become an artist. They laughed at me. I was very young then, but, as I grew up, along with some of my other interests, the passion to become an artist was slowly growing, like a huge balloon that would eventually burst in when I came to Class XII. I chose a course for myself that would definitely support my creative mind. But guess what. Yup. I was made to take B. Com instead. I began looking for a way out of it, which for me is by being a secret artist.
Now let me tell you what this means to me. You all know how the life of an average Indian student goes by. It is acceptable for you to become a doctor, it is great if you become a lawyer, and it is a future full of great things if you take up a government job. But it is just not acceptable if you want to become an artist. This in a nutshell means that it is not acceptable for a person to be unapologetically themselves. Which sickens me. And the reason people give for this is that you “can’t take art seriously”.
Leonardo Da Vinci, the great artist, seemed a little bit of an oddball to me, according to the things I have read and heard about him. Ask me why I think he turned out that way, and I would say it’s because he was not accepted as an artist.
So many of us are driven more by the thought of “log kya kahenge” (what will people say) rather than “one must invest in oneself“.
Imagine a world without art. But you can’t imagine a world without art because, in any world you imagine there will be humans like yourself, and aren’t we the ultimate form of art, created by God?
All I want to say is that, give creativity a chance. Give art a chance. Us creators will show you how beautiful this world can be. And even if you say no to us, even if you stigmatise our interests, we will find a way to keep doing it like I do it. We believe in ourselves and hope that someday soon we will be able to change your minds for the good of future artists. We want you to know that art, just like science, can show you how far human kind has evolved, since that one time an unruly kid sat in a cave and drew people, bonfires and animals.