My inclination towards art started at a very young age. By that I mean I could barely hold the pencil and had JUST learnt to say a few words, so I'm thinking I must be around two at the most. This is when I would go to whoever was willing to give me a little attention with a paper and pencil in my hand and ask them to draw four things only; phool (a flower), chiyya (a bird), Tadoo (my embarrassing nickname), ghar (a house). Now I really don't know what my fascination with these four things was at that time, but I do know that years later I was still hung up on them. Actually I shouldn't say four because I'm definitely not a self-obsessed person, so perhaps the only reason why I added my name to that list was that I was the only girl my age that I knew of. Yes, it's sad but true. I didn't have any cousins my age or even friends till I started school.
Anyways, it was much later that I realised that what started off as an interesting thing that a two year old would do, later determined who she was. Now that I'm a grown woman, I am so much into gardening and homemaking that sometimes I feel I should be making a living out of it. And ofcourse no matter how rotten I'm feeling, if somebody gets me flowers, I cheer up immediately. And although I can't keep any birds because of lack of space and allergy-prone kids (though I did keep parakeets for some time), I love them. I love looking at them perching on the trees behind my kitchen, I love the little sparrows gathering around the birdbath in my backside balcony, I enjoy watching the pretty ones discovering the pond in my front balcony and calling their mates for a quick dip or drink and I enjoy leafing through the pages of my coffee table books on birds.
Sometimes I wonder what if I had wanted to draw airplanes and rockets or princesses and fairies or even bugs; would I have been a different person now? Is it because of what I thought about in my early childhood that I am this person today or did I draw all that because I was that person from the very beginning? I still haven't figured that out.
No comments:
Post a Comment