Creativity is Rebellion

Your art teacher gave you a sheet and a pencil and tells you to sketch something down. Now, while you’re thinking at it, you remember the various arts you’ve ever seen. Then you look around the room and see scenery sketched on a sheet on the wall. There you go, pick up your pencil and get at it. Or don’t you? Don’t tell me you’ve never drawn scenery! Of course you have. All of us have.  But that piece of art is never creative. Because it wasn’t your idea, it wasn’t my idea. It’s borrowed. A carbon copy is never creative!

I think Creativity is a result of absolute rebellion. In order to create, you need to strip your soul off the conditioning that you’ve ever had.  When we’re young, we’re in school, we have uniforms, and we have a code of conduct. We are taught to conform to rules before we are taught to speak. Hence the conditioning. Which institute taught you to go ahead and be yourself? Often you may want to write something, but before you write a line, you will become the reader and forecast how you will be perceived. What is this mental block of heaviness we’re living with?

Often we misunderstand creativity with discovery! Creativity is invention, it is innovation. It is coming up with something nobody, nowhere ever did. It is fresh and breathtaking. You may be the worst dancer in the world, but try and do it. You may have never entered a kitchen but try to fry an egg today. How about trying to do something new for self-pampering today? How about trying something you never learnt? Perhaps that is when a creative act comes up!

Until and unless you stop and recognize the trash that conditioning has given you, unless you realize that what you are saying/doing/writing is not your actual thought, unless you believe you have to dispose it and chuck it far away; you are certainly not creative. Throw away the guidelines in your head. Do it just the way that you think is right. No matter how wrong you are, you will learn. Bare yourself from the burden of regulations and create. If Lady Gaga (whom you hate or love, is the biggest pop star in the world today) ever thought how she could capture Madonna’s crowd, she would have ended up using Madonna’s music as her guidelines. If she ever tried to dress the way other stars do, she’d never become the world’s biggest fashion icon today. If Alexander McQueen, in order to become a successful fashion designer, tried to ape market fashion trends, he would’ve at maximum become a tailor next door. Today, he is McQueen! A guy who sold his debut collection amidst the recession of 2008 in USA for millions of dollars.

And when you think, you’re creations may leave you on a lonely island. Stop to think, and know, that there are kazillions of creative people in this world doing 9-5 jobs all through their lives, that they don’t enjoy, just because they never had the power to take a stand for their creativity. When you believe in your creations, the world believes in them. Go ahead, strip your soul off the rules, be a rebel and you will be creative.

Shivani Sharan