meethapani

Nurturing Creative Children How do families deal with children who show an inclination to the arts? Drawing and painting, singing, playing music or dancing is sweet when they are young, but troubling when they don’t grow out of it. One of our final year Fine Art students had his drawings regularly torn up by his father who wanted him to concentrate on a career in Engineering. Many famous artists developed their passion at odds with their families. Degas’ father wanted him to join law school, Gauguin   gave up his life as a stockbroker, Cezanne attempted to become a banker as desired by his father; Miro attended commercial college and after two years as a clerk, had a mental breakdown before his parents let him attend art school.   While Toulouse Lautrec’s aristocratic parents did not prevent him from studying art, his physical deformity after fracturing both femurs in childhood made him feel more at home in Bohemian Montmartre amongst the outcasts of the music halls and brot

Building Bridges Bridges mean many things to many people . One can see our life journey as the building of bridges such as establishing relationships, developing a language to communicate, teaching, composing music , writing letters, publishing   books, praying   to God or engaging in peace talks. Each generation is also a bridge between the past and the future. The author, Les Coleman, points out “a bridge has no allegiance to either side”    It is neutral, connecting and   enabling both sides. There may be uncertainty about crossing a bridge, expressed by the French anthropologist, Jean-Pierre Vernant,    as leaving the familiar and entering   the unknown. Most myths about life after death   involve the crossing of a dangerous river – the Greek river Styx, the   Mesopotamian Hubur, the Norse Gjoll,   the Vaitarna in Hinduism. In Muslim traditions after the Day of Judgement, all persons will walk across a bridge thinner than a hair called Pul -e- Siraat.   True believers

The Culture of Cleanliness During the recent combination of flooding rains and Eid-ul-Azha in Karachi, social media was rife with desperate requests to dispose offal responsibly to prevent the spread of disease. Desperate because it is assumed, quite correctly, that the plea would go unheeded - strange in the land of the great Indus Civilization that gave the world its first planned cities and sanitation systems. One thinks of cleanliness as a management issue – the responsibility of a city municipality.   However cleanliness is also an attitude with cultural, spiritual, psychological and religious significances. Many religions have ritualistic cleansing – tahara, wudu, and ghusal in Islam, baptism in Christianity, mikvah in Judaism, misogi in Shinto, bathing in sacred rivers in Hinduism. Here cleansing is not simply the cleaning of physical dirt but entering a state of spiritual purity.   Water is also presented as a metaphysical force. Narratives of dramatic floods

Protecting our Wild Side Much of our lives are lived in conformity with family, social structures, local laws, political and economic   realities, religious pressures, geography and climate. Most, if not all of us, conform outwardly, while as individuals we may share some but not all the values we publically profess to.   Some people suppress their individuality, others are determined to express it; some fall in line, others rebel; some transfer traditional   values to their children, others decide to establish new ones. These opposing behaviours are like the waves of oceans – that can be gentle troughs and crests or alarmingly polarized, threatening to overwhelm societies. Extreme individuality is considered disruptive. The exception is culture, art, science, and technology - all expected to generate new ideas, or the ability to see things differently and generally seen as a positive force. Creativity has been called the harnessing of ‘the wild mind’. The term ‘wild’

Fame   or Anonymity? Andy Warhol famously said "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes", to which Banksy has responded "In the future, everyone will be anonymous for 15 minutes." Fame and anonymity are two opposing aspirations, examples of which are found in the long history of creativity. We live in an Age of Celebrity with photo ops, paparazzi, internet, fan mail, brand ambassadors and book signing, creating opportunities for those who seek fame or who have fame - or infamy - imposed upon them. At the other end of the spectrum is what Tom Geue calls the “Technology of Absence” – the desire for anonymity. The identity of Protest graffiti artists is hidden as is that of cybercriminals, and users of   the Dark Web. Technological innovation is often developed by teams and the product is known by the company they work for rather than the inventors, who remain anonymous to the public. We rarely know the names of the designers

Who Decides Who Decides? This question   is easily answered when it refers to politics or business whereby   the authority to be a decision maker in   politics comes from the ballot, the civil service , or   some may say, the deep state;   and in business from   savants of the business world . It becomes far more complex when it comes to Culture – who decides what culture is?   the   academic?   the government? the Community? The word has been defined and redefined over the ages, invoked for nationalism and tourism, restrained by religious beliefs, deconstructed by sociologists and reconstructed by artists.     Geert Hofstede says “Management can never change a national culture, it can only understand and use it” .He proposes that Culture as a collective identity is manifested through symbols, heroes,   rituals and values. The most enduring are values - which are determined within the first 10 years of our lives. Historically, the culture of a civilization was defined