Having this question in mind, I would like to mention a recent real life event of a cold January morning, when a man standing at a metro station in Washington DC, started playing his violin for the ongoing passengers.
The musician knowing his music well, passionately played few beautiful musical pieces for about 45 minutes and since it was the peak hour period, the station was full of thousands of people moving towards various destinations as per their daily schedule passing him every second. After a few minutes a middle aged person, spotted him playing well, slowed down for a moment, stopped for a few seconds and hurriedly began walking again to catch up his set schedule. And then the violinist received his first dollar tip from a woman, who kept the money in front of him and continued to walk without making a halt. A few minutes later, someone was seen leaning against the wall to listen him playing, but then he too looked at his watch and started walking away from the musician, may be because he was getting late for his daily work.
Among all these people, the one who gave the maximum time to the musician was a 3 year old boy, who had to be dragged by his mother as he was keen on listening more, without having any knowledge about the music being played. Interestingly similar kind of action was experienced by many other children too, who also had to be moved by their parents forcibly. Eventually in those 45 minutes of playing, only 6 people stopped and listened to the musician for a few moments. About 10 people placed some money in front of the him and then continued to walk away to catch their daily routines. And the ones who paid him the maximum attention were children. As he stopped playing, there was a deep silent in the station, which no one noticed and the musician collected his few dollars and moved on, without getting any applause, recognition or a word of praise from the public.
NOW no one knew or realised, but this violinist was Joshua Bell, world’s renowned musician playing one of the most detailed musical pieces ever written with a violin worth 3.5 million dollars. In reality, this was a ‘Social Experiment’ organised by “The Washington Post” which was also taped on camera with thousands of people passing by, finding no time to listen to this world famous violinist and only one of them actually managed to recognize him in those 45 minutes. Plus the other irony was that just two days before, Joshua Bell had a completely sold out concert in Boston with the average cost of tickets being 100 dollars.
But the more important conclusions derived from this unique experiment were, that In a normal routine environment at an inappropriate or unexpected hour - Do we care to identify the beauty around?.............. Do we find some time to stop and appreciate it?........... Do we recognize the talent in an unexpected context?.................or We have completely lost this art of loving and appreciating music, art or other finer details of life amongst all this overloaded unnecessary information, electronic gadgets, virtual lives, breaking relationships and much more given birth by the so called new age life of the 21st Century.
In my opinion, its not that we have lost that art of understanding and appreciating the quality art forms as it might seem, but its our own attention towards the other materialistic needs of this competitive life, which forces us to simply pass in front of such artistic expressions in a “Sleep-Mode”. And just imagine that if we do not have that willingness to enjoy or don't care at all for such quality music being played while walking on to our daily routine, then how many other smaller but important things, we must be missing in our lives constantly moving in this “Sleep-Mode”?
Anyway thinking about the experiment I fondly remember the time when we friends used to travel long distances to get a particular song recorded from another fellow music lover living far away in the city or all those hours spent listening music, sitting in front of those big high-end speakers in our small rooms with several rounds of tea being angrily served by our mothers. Probably the time has changed a lot and it all seems to be the talks of that gone era, as today we might have our hard disks full of music, videos, films and other important stuff to be explored later but no one is actually finding that much desired time to give to these different forms of art as required. So perhaps, we now need to think upon our chosen ways of living life once again more urgently..........and make a change.........!
Cheers!
