Please invest in the arts

If it weren't for music, literature, and cinema, how would we manage to get through this pandemic?

What did you do during the past year when you weren’t weeping into your pillow or struggling with crippling anxiety? Billions of people around the globe coped by switching on their television sets, streaming movies on laptops or mobile phones, and playing all kinds of songs in demented loops. I thought about what life must have been like for those who had no access to these escapist options available to so many of us, and simply couldn’t fathom how things must have seemed to them.

There is privilege at work here, of course, because rural India has gone about its business for millennia without worrying about what arrives on or departs from Netflix. I mention it not to comment on economic or class divides though, but to wonder why we have such a huge problem with investments in the arts. Yes, there are sums doled out annually by a government ministry towards the preservation and promotion of art and culture, but I couldn’t help wondering about the plight of the people responsible for creating this art and culture during the pandemic.

Think about the writers you know, or the filmmakers, painters, and musicians. Ignore the ones whose names appear in flashing lights and consider the thousands of others in the wings. For every film star who makes it on the comfortable back of nepotism, there is an army of technicians, understudies, stunt doubles, extras, dancers, and make-up artists who come together and breathe life into a film. For every bestselling writer, there are a million others selling their work on digital platforms for a pittance, hoping to earn enough to pay rent.

The pandemic caused significant damage to museums, movie companies, orchestras, and publishing firms around the globe. It may take years for the havoc it wreaked on individual lives and families to be uncovered though. I thought about the decades it takes for a violinist to be good enough to make it to a stage, and how the shutting of an orchestra must feel to one who has spent a lifetime preparing for little else. How do we, as a society, place any value upon the time and energy expended by someone to entertain us? How do we quantify the skill required to become a good writer, illustrator, or set designer, and think about how these people will survive without our patronage?

There are always complaints from some quarters at the announcement of a new fund or endowment for the arts. ‘Why can’t we spend that money on hospitals,’ those responsible for the complaining usually ask. ‘Why spend on dance when we need schools?’ The inanity of drawing these specious comparisons is always lost because to choose one over the other is never an option for any society that believes in improving the quality of every life.

The allocation for our government’s defence in 2020-21 is Rs 4,71,378 crore, a reported increase of approximately seven per cent from the previous year. Place that alongside the Rs 3,150 crore allocated for the Ministry of Culture, and it’s not hard to see that our priorities are at serious odds with how a majority of us live.

A country that spends most of its taxpayer-money on defence rather than on things that affect the daily lives of citizens, is one that invests more in the profitable business of war than the less profitable pursuit of individual happiness. And yes, that may be the bitter truth for much of the world, given our pathological inability to get along as a race, but it doesn’t excuse us from failing to support those who use their talent and skill to bring us joy in all kinds of ways.

Every aspect of our lives is touched by the arts, whether we choose to acknowledge this or not. Buildings and gardens that please the eye, incidental music that makes us smile, even memes on social media that inform or entertain us for milliseconds, are all a product of someone, somewhere, calling upon a muse.

We need to ask more questions about why our taxes aren’t offering more support to vulnerable artists, given how their work helped us cope with 2020 as much as the support and care offered by our medical fraternity. Who is to say one wasn’t as important as the other as we huddled in our homes and hoped the virus wouldn’t get us?

Some governments know how public funds ought to be spent. Others spend it on promoting themselves. No prizes for guessing where India fits in.

When he isn’t ranting about all things Mumbai, Lindsay Pereira can be almost sweet. He tweets @lindsaypereira. Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com

The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper

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