Many years ago Azra Jalauddin Ahmed said to me, “Beti we have lost the grace of living.” The phrase has stayed with me ever since. As we enter deeper and deeper into the world of survival instead of living, one becomes urgently conscious of finding those clues or vestiges of that seemingly lost grace. An increasing number of people are enrolling in art schools, yet aesthetics is daily being sacrificed by arguments of economics, expediency or development goals. Of course, roads need to be expanded. If a beautiful tree is in the way, expediency demands it must be immediately cut down rather than the time-wasting exercise of careful transplantation. How annoying it is that the Katrak building on prime land that could be developed into lucrative real estate, has been listed as heritage property in Karachi?

It raises the argument that it is more important to teach aesthetics than produce artists. Sports has been accepted as an important part of the education system, not to create professional sportspersons, but to teach the importance of teamwork, planning, persistence, and learning both how to win and lose. It is also linked to career-building and nation-building. In recent years, creativity has also been linked to economy which, while true, is a further capitulation to Mammon.

According to a Unesco report (2013), the creative economy employed nearly 30 million people worldwide and generated 2.25 trillion dollars in revenue (three percent of the world’s GDP), far more than global telecommunications (1.57 trillion dollars) and greater than the GDP of India, Russia or Canada.

A culture begins with simple things — with the way the potter moulds the clay on the wheel, the way a weaver threads his yarns, the way the builder builds his house. The Greek culture did not begin with the Parthenon: it began with a whitewashed hut on a hillside.”

Herbert Read in To Hell with Culture writes, “You cannot buy the spiritual values which make the greatness of a nation’s art: you cannot even cultivate them unless you prepare the soil.” He adds, “… I have said: ‘To hell with culture’; and to this consignment we may add another: ‘To hell with the artist.’ Art as a separate profession is merely a consequence of culture as a separate entity.”

Read further explains, “ … A culture begins with simple things — with the way the potter moulds the clay on the wheel, the way a weaver threads his yarns, the way the builder builds his house. The Greek culture did not begin with the Parthenon: it began with a whitewashed hut on a hillside.”

Charles and Ray Eames, in their famous India Report for the National Institute of Design, evaluated the design of our matka, amongst its many other functional qualities, by how it “fits the palm of the hand, the curve of the hip.”

It has been proposed that the European Renaissance separated the art object from everyday life. Prior to that, in Europe, as in all other cultures of the world, aesthetics were integrated in everyday life, and to a great extent still are. The place of art in the wider Pakistani society is invested in functionality — whether a ralli for the children to rest on in a village in Sindh or the elegant wrapping of a pan gilori held in place by a clove, presented on a khasdaan. Intense decoration will be seen on a shrine or a city bus rather than a framed object on a wall.

One of the proponents of the aesthetics of everyday life, Liu Yuedi, distinguishes Western art which created ‘life as art’ in which elements of everyday life are drawn into art, and ‘art as life’ in which everyday life is aestheticised, or in other words the art of living.

Aesthetics is all around us. Nature is the perfect blend of function and aesthetics, for instance, the magnificent plumage of a peacock, the camouflage design of the owl butterfly or the intense beauty of a full moon. But humans also, when left alone from the pressure to conform to global lifestyles, are inherently artistic. The elegant body language and dress of Bheel women, everyday-use baskets woven beautifully with humble reeds, Ataullah Essakhelvi’s signature black shalwar kameez, the morning light catching air particles when we draw aside the curtains, are some of its examples.

Everyday aesthetics concerns our recurring, daily routines rather than special events like marriages or festivals — how we clean our homes, prepare foods, greet people, the vocabulary we chose. If one chooses to see, there are daily moments in all our lives. An image imprinted on my mind is of a hand stretched out of the door of a crowded bus on Shaheed-i-Millat Road holding a branch of a Gul Mohar tree laden with orange flowers. Just yesterday, our car was following a truck on the national highway with a load of beautifully wrapped grasses.

It always fires my imagination to read in the midst of the instructions in the Quran, the image of running horses, panting and striking sparks with their hooves, and the verse that describes the beauty of cattle returning at the end of the day. I imagine a painting by Mughees Riaz with the soft afternoon sun shining on the land and the cattle’s backs.

Finding the extraordinary in the ordinary creates mindfulness and an alert intensity that can be cultivated from our childhood and would bring back the art of living to our dishevelled lives.

As the Arab proverb says, “If you have only two pennies, spend the first on bread and the other on hyacinths for your soul.”

Durriya Kazi is a Karachi-based artist and heads the department of visual studies at the University of Karachi

Published in Dawn, EOS, February 26th, 2017