Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Note 01

Teaching is a full-time job. Lesson planning, individual attention, pedagogy, worksheets, student tantrums, counseling, demonstrating processes and techniques, disciplining, assessment, and report writing skills (all thanks to Kokila Katyal, Rekha Krishnan, Malvika Vohra, and Charu of Vasant Valley School) portfolio guidance, mentoring and many more! It is a huge task- a job needs great aptitude and tremendous organising and archiving skills and extreme patience.

It is challenging, hectic, and very draining, especially when you work in high-end schools like Mallya Aditi and Vasant Valley. The Other side, probably the most enjoyable of it all, is the interaction with young and brilliant brains. Adolescence and the pre-teenage group is a dynamic world of their own kind. They test and tease you to the bottom of your coolness, yet they are examples of great optimism. I am very lucky to have excellent students all through the last ten years (oops!). Most of them take up courses in Art and Design at Colleges and Universities of great repute in India and across the world. Few of them from the first batch I taught are now professionals and doing well. 

What happens is that by the end of a day at school one feels very drained. There is hardly any energy left in you, it is drained by the noisy classroom/students and by constantly talking to them and coordinating various departmental activities and reporting. Every day I get up with a lot of thoughts in my head and then by end of the day, I go to bed with a lost feeling of not being able to do any of my own work, my own creative career, the real stuff! ‘When Bala’, some good friends often ask! Meanwhile (last 10 years) young Indian Art become happening all over the world and gleaming in glory it looks brilliant. Sometimes I feel frustrated and depressed about what am I doing, or to be more correct, what I am not doing. Why I am not able to work like all others- Just to sit and work for a few hours a day for myself? I know that there is no point in cribbing, right? Better do it, Yeh?! Yes, Yes hopefully soon! Ha Ha, Bala, we've all been hearing it for some time!; the same good friends and Priya (my wife) would respond.

Jokes apart, it is a serious concern. Anyway, I do some project planning and preparatory sketching, etc… It is slowly happening. I had two shows in 2010. Meanwhile, for fun in school, I started photographing. Mallya Aditi with its beautiful walls and corridors and its environment provided me a little ‘possible space’ to shoot, without the need to stretch beyond the situation. It is an attempt to keep me sensitive to the spirit of ‘rasa’, and maybe in tune with the moods captured in the songs that I like from the Malayalam films of the 70s and 80s, the so-mentioned middle cinema. I am fascinated by its gentle charm and the evocative silence. I had two shows in 2010 which is a good development. I also get inspired by some of the projects that students do in school and a set of new works are in the process.

 February 2011