View from my window. Graphite, Collage.
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in
your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like
books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the
answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will
then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the
answer.”
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
I came to Canada at a time when I have the right
mindset to face the challenges of being an immigrant alone in a foreign city. In
the last six-months I have thankfully manifested no headline-grabbing success.
Instead, I experience each day as it comes and spend my time learning,
integrating and absorbing. I am trying to fit in pieces of a puzzle to make a
complete picture, but I am discovering that with each piece I search for and
fix into place, the picture constantly changes and takes a life of its own. I have to accept that and follow it through to see where it leads me. The
act of creating this picture was once a vision in the distant future. It is now
the task of the present.
The things that I wanted most happened to me last year when
I least expected it, when I was occupied doing other things, like doing what I
loved and enjoying life. I achieved a kind of professional success I never
imagined would happen to me - fantastic assignments, great fees and a sale of
paintings which astonished me. But before I could let it sink in, it was time
to leave, to new adventures and onto something that I had planned and worked so
hard upon for the last four years and wanted so much for the last twenty.
When you return from studying abroad back to India or when
you move to a foreign country from Indian shores, there are always high expectations
of you. The underlying expectation is always variation of the same presumption and
always unimaginative – you have to become an instant success immediately. The
word success is always defined by one thing alone – money, or the appearance of
having some. The resulting anxiety created when you are in your twenties and
thirties is enormous, a façade has to be created for the approval of the
community lest you be ignored and discarded, if you don’t flaunt yourself instantly
and continuously, professionally and personally you are quickly assumed a
failure, the times become strange, empty and anxious, nobody waits for roots to sink
in or branches to spread.
