[Reader-list] the Act of leisure

[joy at sarai.net]

Dear Iram,

I find the topic very interesting. Being a designer myself I see leisure
like a negative space against something called positive space.

It means our time and acts are divided in work and leisure. I think I have
grown up with that. In school between two classes we had roaring moments.
It was leisure. But we knew we couldn’t go out in the corridor. We grew up
with monitors inside and prefects outside. And there were chamchas,
informal surveillance.

But still we managed lots of things, stealing books from library, breaking
windowpane, crackers in the principal’s room and many more things. We were
punished each time. Our batch was extremely notorious. Later a special
prefect was deployed outside our class till we passed 10th standard and
dispersed. We were given lots of notes to copy during breaks. We thought
our leisure was controlled.

In the process we forget that so called work time or study time in those
days was also controlled and that control is taken for granted.

In the colony where I live builders are demolishing old houses and
building new flats. When some one builds a house he is supposed to leave
few feet empty form front and back. But these builders leave no space they
cover the whole area. They don’t want to waste any land. No negative
space. Whether the extra space is built as a garden or an extended room
hardly matters.

In our school we had some thing called ‘games’ class. On Sundays evening
we could watch movies on television. Once in a winter we used to go for
picnic. We grew up with such given gift of leisure. We learnt to enjoy
those moments. A school holiday on a rainy day was always a surprise gift.
Those moments are cultivated and then deployed very interestingly. I am
told a film on teenage love story called Bobby was shown on TV on the day
of Jaiprakash Narayan’s rally in Delhi during emergency.

Gifts are offered to us each time we performed. Someone got bicycle,
someone got camera, someone got a trip to Shimla. We live with gifts and
punishments, we live with work and leisure.

Best
Joy