My lamentation on artistry

Not long ago (in comparison to the age of this universe), there was this human being who was extremely idle. He just had a raw hyena (which he hunted down) for food and was sitting under a tree, without a care in the world, after a hard day’s labor. His eyes suddenly fell on a stone that was a few feet away from him. His knowledge on stones was restricted to their breakability. If you give him a stone, he’d hit it hard on the floor and tell you whether it’d break or not.

Now this person’s tribe had built its communal game on this very concept. You have two stones and two teams of eleven players each. Each team owns a very well chosen stone (mostly granite, of whose chemical nature the tribe didn’t know). The game progresses in turns. The opponent’s stone is placed in a neatly designed ring and the player’s aim is to throw the stone as hard as possible so that the opponent’s stone breaks. The game progresses in turns, where each team alternates in aiming at their adversary’s stone.

Now, our subject was supposedly the coordinator of the game. He hails from the family that was solely responsible for inventing and maintaining the communal game and hence inherited the rights for conducting the game. One look at the stone, he was sure of its worth for the game. Just to test it, he aimed it at a similar stone that was lying beside it. What came out of the collision was a spark and a huge one at that. The surrounding leaves caught the fire and the fire began to spread.

Today, fire is used so extensively that we Indians call it one of the panchabhutas, one of the five essentialities that we human beings can’t do without. And to what do we attribute this to? - The playful intent of a tribesman? Ladies and gentlemen, it is this ability in a person to ‘grope’ into matters totally unrelated to him that I called artistry. The discovery of fire was artistry. The cognition of an apple falling from a tree was artistry. The attempt to mimic the bird and realizing the ambition to fly was artistry. The creation of a very ambiguous portrait of a busty woman is artistry. And my lamentation of artistry in this manner is sheer artistry.

FORGIVE ME