Aiming the Impossible: An Artist's Memoir

II

Beautiful days are like books, they smell good. It was a perfect day. After skipping the exam, I wandered around the city and got inspired. I did not attempt another Eligibility Test till this day, due to the sheer aversion to the process of testing one’s abilities with respect to someone else’s standards. It’s for a teacher, not for an artist. But how can a teacher teach art if he or she knows art in terms of its history alone?

As all contracts end, my contract with the private institution too ended one day. And a state came upon me, which is generally not very comfortable for parents; called joblessness. I remained jobless for the next four months until the local university needed an art teacher and my ill luck decided to favour me. Teaching in the university offered a new set of artistically stimulating period in my life. And like all artistically stimulating experiences this too was an ordeal. Ask any artist, the best of one’s works would be the product of the worst days of his life. Inspiration is mostly like lotus. Its roots lie in dirt.

Joblessness of their children endows parents with a sense of urgency. The time spent in jobless state is directly proportional to the degree of this urgency. This is a psychological state in which parents lose sight of their children physically and mentally. Children become invisible and their being becomes an alien equation to be sorted out. And they make impractical and illogical plans for their offspring who they can’t see or feel any more. Instead of the golden principle which dominated the family dinner-table, “there is a limit to the happiness money can buy”, money becomes the only matter of talk and the only idea worth living for.  

And in one the days of this specific psychic disorder my father decided that I should apply for the job of a clerk in a bank. 

{Will be continued in the next post}