Art and Life

Life is game of reality and imagination. How we balance each other, how we aspire for what we imagine and how we shun down the so called negative thoughts. But there is a dimension beyond this, where there is no distinction between thoughts and reality. A place where imagination takes an absolutely incredible art form, by the synchronous play of brain, thoughts, hand, fingers and of course, ART.

Can we imagine a work place that is so unstructured and gives a non Institutional
environment to play with our ideas and thoughts and nothing else? If there is a course, where the classes are just studios and you are the same person inside and outside the classes, will you withstand it? Shanthi nikethan - founded by Rabindranath Tagore to create a space to inculcate the wild imaginations in daily life and living with it everyday, is the answer for these questions.

Before going into what this place is about, we have to take a pause and introspect what is Art for each one of us. My perception was "Art is an epitome of creativity and few people can do magic with their hands- either by creating art pieces and music". I looked up to these people for their skill and talent. From childhood, I was brought up and I also grew up with a rigid idea that art is recreation. It is an escape route to play wild and to unbind our emotions and thoughts. Art was never ever a way of life for me. It was only a part of life and only special people can do it. Others, the majority, can only be spectators. We can listen to music, buy sculptures, adorn our homes with art. But can never create anything.

For a being like me, world is a basically two worlds - a real world where we actually live. Our family, job, salary, passion, culture, goal, all takes the higher priority. We usually run for things that are already cultivated, structured and rigidly placed with a set of rules. The real world is the  world where we explore, believing that the life we live is ours. It is industrial fuelled and pulled far away from nature and has made us believe that world is non existent without established institutions. By established institutions, I mean not just schools and colleges but our nationality, religion, culture, language, caste, class, marriage, family, job - everything. We take constant efforts to prove ourselves to these institutions and finally end up getting exhausted, drained out and above all - we become empty. This pseudo real world takes everything away from us and fill us with a vacuum. We always regret or acknowledge our past experiences and decide for something in future. And we never think, "Where is the present  here?"

A world of thoughts - being a victim and survivor of so called mental health issues and depression, I had profound ideas about mind in the last one and a half years. I always thought of a proper balance between imagination and reality. If the imaginary world takes over my structured thoughts, I used to think, "Am I sane?". It is indeed true that if we let our thoughts flow, it will branded as psychiatric issues or we as eccentric non cultured people. But shanthi nikethen is the first place I saw, where people are beyond this imagination reality game. For them it's only one world - where they take spontaneous artistic efforts to bring their imagination and express them so beautifully in a very refined way, either by art or music. If we walk around their homes, nothing is junk. And nothing is impossible. From 8 foot art installations, to bronze apples, sculpted wooden bags, bamboo carvings, different techniques of painting - rust, limestone, zinc, rice paper, oil, nitrous acid, natural ink, iodine, copper sulphate, magnesium sulphate, even bamboo paint brush, clay palette, real size self portraits. Their life is all about blurring this line of real and imaginary world. And because of their courage and love towards art, they have come with unimaginable works. Even life size human sculptures, where they don't make measurements. We saw our friend just sculpting a human figure just out of his hands. No chart, no measurements, nothing! He said, "Life size is easy. Coz it's our size". 

And the most interesting part is, everyone does everything. Once they start living life of art, every thing is art for them. There is no sculptor, painter, designer separately. I felt each person is like a university. Every one who showed their work to us, made me and my friend to be totally dumbstruck about the feasibility of human creations, from a single person.

Another thing that moved me was, the raw expression of dreams. when we dream, the world we see is not the way it is. Everything is possible. From fantasy to death, love, fear, pain - like every emotion is possible, that too in an uncontrollable way. I saw these friends expressing their dreams without any hesitation in their art pieces. When we asked how do you do this difference between dream and reality, they said, "There is only one truth. That is us. We give respect to our thoughts. Once we start acknowledging and respecting them, we are able to express them. This is all self growth and self introspection."

Shanthi Nikethen gives them a space for them to grow. But I feel this place is not about the place. We realised life is much more beyond what we think it is. And now we are extremely lucky to have found friends who live life. For themselves.

Art is not for the spectators. Art is for the artists. For their purpose in life, for their happiness. Art is a way of life, a way of natural, raw, wild and exciting way of life!

Thanks to Amal, Kamala, Gokul, Sri Lakshmi, Lakshmi, Suja, Tito, Farzee, Akash for giving us this fruitful realisation!