Tuesday 8 October 2013

Discord in harmony!

If you have ever sung as part of a choir, you will experience the need to fit in, to modulate your voice and tone to be in harmony; a feeling not unlike the strain felt by a teenager who buys the latest Nike shoes or the latest iPhone. It takes a while for the novice to realize that along with the accompanying beats, words and music, there is space for individuality. This taut relationship between uniting togetherness and rippling below-the-surface individuality is what makes for an engaging performance!

This constant battle between being one and united as one is played out in numerous arenas. A group of amateur Garba dancers offers a glimpse into their multifarious lives. The synchronous feet matched with every beat and the arms swaying to the lilting song, cannot hide the different colours. The restrained sari clad housewife ever mindful of her pallu, the playful teenager with limbs flaying in all directions, the maverick who dances to her own beat, the thoughtful young lady on the cusp of maturity ......all in harmony, playing out the garba in tandem, in surprising congruity! A microcosm at play!
The world is all about non-conformists revealing blasphemous great truths to the regimented troops that abound. It took a Snowden to question conformity, a Newton to ask an obvious yet unasked question, a Gandhi to challenge the notions of superiority of force.

And yet we are obsessed as ever with suffocating order and discipline in schools and colleges. ‘We don’t need no education’ screamed the rebels but we looked away. It’s convenient after all to herd children together and guide them through the same rigmarole day after deadening day. The same chants and the same rhymes repeated year after year, long after London Bridge and all the accompanying references fell down!

Mercifully they break away at play. Anywhere in the world, you give me a park with a slide, and I’ll give you a child who climbs up and refuses to merely slide down! Rules be damned! A plastic cricket bat turns into a microphone, a guitar, an athlete’s pole vault, a road for miniature cars, a gun, an impromptu tray, a cash counter for an imaginary retail store, a propped up tree- what have you not!

In a world where more than ever before, we need creative politicians, scientists, teachers, entrepreneurs...and more and more out of the box thinkers, where are we going to get our saviours? We’ve boxed them in!