Shantiniketan Calling
I remember I was a 10 year old when I first found out there was a school where classes were conducted under the shade of margosa trees, the names of flowers were learnt from observation rather than rote, children were taught to sing as the birds that surrounded them and competition was an absent entity. I begged,pleaded and whined to no avail. My parents couldn't bear the thought of sending away their only daughter to a school on the opposite end of the nation. In a village nonetheless. My father was unamused. Ambitious parents dreamt of an American or British education for their budding prodigies and here I was begging to be educated under a tree in a village.
Flash forward to 2012. I am walking towards the gates that contain the life I so longingly begged for, the masterpiece of my most admired cultural polymoth. Tagore's undying legacy in the form of an educational institution coloured in his vision and sensibility even to this day. I could only watch the goings on of the school from outside as is policy. A bunch of third graders were frolicking around a tree between classes. Another group under another tree had a music class while a third was studiously nodding at a blackboard I couldn't read. All the while the contrast between the sterile,walled education I endured and this free, liberated and human environment was glaring me in the face.
Tagore was an anti-traditionalism, anti-structure rebel much unlike his paternal visage and cultural role. He despised classical structures and anything that stood in the way of universal humanism aspiring to blend the best of the East and West thanks to his brief stint at a British educational institution . Be it a stifling classroom that functioned like an assembly line or an educational system that was founded on conformity. His own college education was a single day at the Presidency College which was his last. I can only imagine him walking out it's gates fuming and defiantly decided as to his course of action.
As I walk past the breathtaking mural work that adorns the many buildings of his Art Institute Kala Bhavan I can visualise his satisfied profile. Students cycle past me in traditional Bengali garb around a university that had churned out many of our nation's most prolific artists and thinkers. There is no sound of the bell signalling the clockwork of a routine in action. Many are gathered under trees in like minded groups discussing things that I in Mumbai never had time or space for and neither did my friends. Once again, confronted by moments and experiences that were stolen from me ....
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