My country – A sad piece of art……

Ok i am going to say it…………….. I am not a religious person, least of all a nationalist, but something in my heart broke of what happened in my country this week. Call it my inflamed sense of nothingness or de-flamed sense of identity but I felt as if i was made naked with the tiny helicopters hovering around with spotlights and capturing my nakedness. I felt tangible sadness in the air for my land, my painting…

One needs to see my land as as a painting or a piece of art and not as work of science, if they really want to understand it. You cannot study it by measuring the amount of colors used or the geometry of shapes painted, you need to feel it as if you are studying a painting. Like monaliza you need to feel the subtle levels of hope and fear in the smile and not the dark hazy background in green.

People tend to mix logic with emotions in terms of explaining things, assuming as if all things can be explained by logic. There are countries like america and australia, which are made more on physical and natural boudries, there are countries which are made on the basis of natural resources or race or color, they have logical boundries and to some extent can be explained and understood logicially but My country! my country was purely created on emotions and had no logicial grounds for its creation. She was created based on emotions of fear and hope, fears of few, fearing they will not be able to live freely with the people of other religion and hopes of many on maintaining there unique culture and nothing to do with religion. (irony is now many are living in fear of their own religion). Lines of red were drawn by the artists to represent that fear and hope, and a painting was created out of big white sub-continental canvas in a majority-as-authority green, and a bit of whiteness kept intact.

Now imagine if a painter no matter how famous comes with his paint brush and paints a small dot in a painting you created, to tell you that it looks more better now, what will you feel?. will you love it ?or will you be angry like hell of someone ripping you off with your originality . I personally will go the second way . There were other painters in the past coloring my land’s painting indirectly and remaining hidden but this time it was a direct visible bold attempt. The super painter felt joyous of putting dots on the painting drawn by the people of my land so ardently for years.

I am not questioning here the rightness or wrongness of the painter who did this, I think i for the first time felt the pain of american people on what they felt on 9/11. Somebody ripped off and challenged their authority and originality, dotting up the picture of the free nation they created for them. I can totally empathize with them. But my pain is much more then theirs, as they were able to spend billions of dollars to clean up their painting for years, they had the means and guts to do this and they were able to maintain their authority and sense of pride if not originality, but my country people cannot do anything for years. My land’s painting is damaged , its a small damage, but as i said before, we cannot measure the amount of damage in numbers, we can only feel the tiny dots in the far surrounding corners damaging the whole painting.
I am still hopeful the painting will survive but a part of me is really beginning to question if it is worth to paint anymore and was it not a wrong attempt in the first place……..