Book Excerpt | Speaking My Mind

A celebrated dancer, choreographer, scholar, motivational speaker, and former senior railway officer, Dr. Ananda Shankar Jayant has spent a lifetime building resilience through dedication and hard work. When diagnosed with cancer, she relied on that strength to face the challenge with courage and determination.

Her experiences are captured in her new memoir, Dancing with Joy (Garuda), where she reflects on her journey through art, adversity, and healing. Through personal stories and life lessons, the book shows how passion can inspire strength, healing, and purpose, offering valuable insights for young artists, parents, and anyone navigating life's challenges.

Book excerpt – Pg 215 to 220

India’s cultural and civilisational legacy goes back millennia, and is at once the face and soul of this ancient land. Yet, India, with its turbulent political history of the last few centuries, has seen a negation of its cultural legacy for various reasons, of distorted and abridged histories, leading to a confusing and convoluted understanding of our cultural history and its place in our lives.To me, the nation is like a 32-wheeled truck, trudging along the highways. Culture and arts comprise one wheel. Ignore this wheel at your own peril.And that peril is already very visible. In today’s globally connected world, we are all lonely, yet seek approbation outside ourselves from random social media. There is so much more anger, fear, desperation, violence, and lack of respect. An engagement with the arts creates value, not in terms of money or return on investment or even a career, but in terms of a deep landscape of personal resource, a core strength to be drawn on at key points of one’s life, even as you buttress one’s core competency.

My own story of dealing with the challenge of breast cancer through the pathways of classical dance, reinforces my strong belief that a passion becomes one’s core strength to tackle the many challenges that life is bound to throw at us.So what can we do?A broad definition of a nation’s wealth should include personal happiness and fulfillment. In this broader view of wealth, culture fits right in.

Culture, creativity, and entertainment are slippery concepts. Culture in its broadest terms, demands an engagement of the actor and the viewer, the performer and the audience; engagement being the key word here, derived from civilisational knowledge underpinnings.Our world today, celebrates the genius of scientists and technology pioneers, and uses their discoveries and inventions with panache. Yet, this still is the outside world. There is another world, the internal, that stays alive with the creativity of centuries, a world that is the collective unconscious of a society, which sometimes precludes even formal learning, distilled as it is sovereign on transmitted knowledge, distilled as it is sovereign on transmitted knowledge, what we loosely call civilisational knowledge.A world that is being snatched away from the young generation. Stop any young iPod-holding, jeans-clinging, sneaker-scuffing, young lad or girl, and ask any of these three questions:

Who is Annamacharya?

What language did Thyagaraja sing in?

What are the two major styles of Indian classical music?

Which place does Madhubani painting come from?

Name any five classical styles of Indian dance.

Answers: perplexed look or worse, rolling eyes, mumbled and unsure answers, an attitude of ‘I am not interested in this old stuff’, and sheer rejection. Replace the questions with all things related to Western culture, and you will have your answers pat.

So, what’s happening? Our own personal and social unwritten laws, have made us believe that culture is not important and is at best, entertainment; for we, as a society, have come to believe that while the learning and understanding of the external world is within the range of people, an appreciation of our received legacy of culture is beyond the pale of the average student. And hence we facilitate in paring down centuries of wisdom and great art into the lowest common denominator, of little canapés of dumbed-down culture.

The reluctance of generations to engage with culture in its entirety is to me an enormous waste of human potential and loss of human realization. Are we as a nation driving our young to have a malnourished core, a dwarfed inner space? Are we, as a society, directing the young to seek nourishment from a predetermined paradigm of market economics? Sure, markets have their place and are important, and yet can we even attempt valuations on our cultural legacy of India’s many arts and crafts? They are all part of the collective memory of centuries of time, over the geographical definition of India that is Bharat, and define us in more ways than we can imagine. And by wilfully not acknowledging, leave alone engaging with our precious legacy, are we not wiping and erasing this collective memory.

India’s youth is overwhelmed by the weight of familial and social expectations, mostly measured by the size of one’s pay cheque. Running towards that unidimensional goal, the young have little mindspace to even explore what their passions could be, let alone nurture them.Alongside this overwhelming pressure to succeed socially and financially, is the lack of a safety net, to dissipate the negativity caused by oneself and the exceedingly angry and violent world around us. Daily news brings in the worst we can as humans possibly descend to — ad nauseum, ad infinitum, thereby inuring us to the ugly, and somewhere, this desensitization catches up.

How can we retrieve this situation and our own humanity? Education, yes, with the caveat of an equal engagement in our arts, an equal integration of arts, at school and college levels.Again, access is the keyword here. We as society and government need to figure out ways and means to provide access to as many varieties of culture to as many people. If music, dance, sculpture, painting, etc., are never taught in schools, how will the young engage with it? If they are not even exposed to it, what will they spend their bank balances on when they grow up?Many of us as parents, introduce our children to some art, not seeking for them to be the next MS Subbalakshmi or Rukmini Devi Arundale, but because we think that there is value in that artistic exposure that they will carry for the rest of their lives.

Value, not in terms of money or return on investment, not in terms of even a career, but in terms of nurturing a deep landscape of personal resource that the child can draw on at key points of their lives, a set of superfine tools to deal with life and its challenges. A deep landscape of personal resource, the essential tenets of human capital.And thus, if we do not provide an opportunity to the youth of India for learning and finding one’s core strengths through the window of arts, then we as a society are not giving our best to our children, are we?If we as parents, and society do not help the child nourish and nurture this personal resource, then we are indeed leaving them very impoverished.

By not giving the child that exposure and choice, we are snatching away a child’s right to the means to a better life.For this inner landscape of culture is the magic set of keys that will unlock curiosity and creativity, and strengthen self-esteem, enforce diversity, ensure lateral thinking, upgrade IQ and EQ, build values and provide value to oneself and the world around us.

Curiosity, creativity, diversity, lateral thinking — are the many words we use to make a difference in our own organizations.And you will ask, what can we do? We inherit our workforce trained by this very educational system. The Education Policy needs to be revamped. I will say, “I agree with you completely.”And yet, do we also not have the responsibility as civil society, nay for the sake of our own families and organizations, to grow and nurture our own human capital? It is in our interest to nourish this capital beyond just institutional and work-related training. It is important to create mechanisms to build a robust human capital.

I remember a university conference I went to a few years ago, where a pharmacy major was pleading for value and ethics teaching to be an essential course for pharmacy students! Ethics and pharmacy ought to go hand-in-hand, right? The education system doesn’t think so.Thus it becomes necessary for society and industry to make these demands on the education juggernaut, to create the workforce it needs, not just catering to the skill sets needed, but also to create a full-bodied human behind that skill set.

Today, with India at an inflection point, what we can do is to nurture culture and creativity, not as a selective marketable money churning culture, but nourish and create a mechanism to support this cultural understanding and education in schools and colleges. They are absolutely necessary soft tools for the nation, for the organization and for the individual.