As I was scrolling through Instagram one day, I found a great sketch made by one of my colleagues. I never knew he had a passion for this creative art. The next day, I made it a point to ask him more about his exceptional talent.
The discussion I had with him was similar to so many other stories I’ve heard of artists and there is a common realization out of all these tales - that very few extraordinary talented people find their profession in sync with their artistic edge. To add to the misery, it becomes rather difficult to stay close to your passion and creativity with all other worldly responsibilities.
Besides, Arts is always underestimated as a field of study. When I was in school, I pursued music lessons till class 10th. The next grade saw a race between future engineers, doctors and chartered accountants. No one even gave a thought about giving ‘Arts’ a chance, be it music, painting or crafts and somehow, creativity took an eventual exit.
“Every education system on Earth has the same hierarchy of subjects. Every one. Doesn't matter where you go. You'd think it would be otherwise, but it isn't. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and at the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on Earth. And in pretty much every system too, there's a hierarchy within the arts. There isn't an education system on the planet that teaches dance everyday to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important. I think math is very important, but so is dance.
(Excerpt from a TED talk on ‘Do Schools kill Creativity’ by Sir Ken Robinson)
My contention is that as we age, we start growing out of creativity. We lose the importance of creativity in our life. Try to look back at the 5-year-old you, who had a curious weed in head and wanted to color the world with crayons. As we grow up, we edge the world on two stubborn colors- white and black. We are so scared of being portrayed as wrong that we stick to one path all our life. Being wrong is not same as being creative but if you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never be creative.
There is one question that hits my mind constantly, that why do we start focusing on just one part of the brain and become more rational in our approach towards everything? The creative intellect is so undermined that many brilliant artists think they don’t have any talent, because the thing they were good at in school wasn't valued, or was not actually “branded”.
Creativity has its own prominence and it is this creativity that lets a mathematician or an engineer to focus beyond conventionalism. It is this creativity put together with other fields like Computer Science which makes products work so intuitively and appeal aesthetically, at the same time. The best thing about creativity/arts is that it can blend with every field of work.
It’s high time that we redefine intelligence and education; and consider the role of originality and imagination as important as rational and logic because most of the world we live in began with imagination.
