Romance

Memory tag: Navigating “romance” at the fag end of an academic session.

A word that is wide open to interpretation. Especially when it is a class of youngsters that are a school-leaving- going- to college lot! I took on this ‘general’ class attracted by the fact I would have no set syllabus to follow. They would only be required to give a written term end project. Recklessly, I dived straight into these dangerous waters and suggested brightly to the class they could set the programme. That’s how at the fag end of academic session I was navigating romance at their behest.

Did anyone talk of romance to you they asked. They were finding it probably difficult to connect romance with a teacher, graying and clinically teaching biology. They were a little taken aback when I told them my parents often discussed romance with me. My parents born in the second and third decades of the 1900s bemoaned the fact that their kind of romance was out of fashion now. So, in the 1980s, when I was in university, they were not impressed that it had become an all encompassing alter ego for what went by the name of love or/and what the birds and bees are supposed to be doing! From them I slowly learnt (and learnt agonizingly slow), it was the courage to chase rainbows without running amok. Of course the last was a golden chain that could be pulled at will dictated by what was expected of one! These strictures notwithstanding I met a lot of romantics. When I asked the class who their romantics were, they named the time honored and contemporary love birds. This was when the class became fun! I named mine.

Vincent Van Gogh in Arles, Robert Falcon Scott in the Antarctic, Salim Ali the ornithologist, Marie Curie the scientist, my father who needed to see magnolias and my mother who needed to paint them. What is romantic about them one chirpy kid immediately wanted to know. They had the courage to chase rainbows! Is that romance? Of course that in essence was what I believed what romance was! I let this sink in and then asked them for their definition. This time fun, adventure, exploring, love got added in. We were beginning to progress. Was romance only roses? What about the thorns? What would you say to a city business man who apparently walked out for the moon and sixpence?

I went back to one sunny lazy afternoon at home, flipping over a beautifully bound volume on Paul Gauguin. Later from the treasure trove of our home library I read Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Six Pence. A middle aged stockbroker gives into his passion for art and walks out on his family. From the streets of Paris to the coral island of romantic Tahiti disease ridden, poverty stricken he continues to paint. He used the walls of his hut when he had no canvas to paint on! Maugham’s sums it up by saying Gauguin was so busy looking at the moon that he did not see the sixpence at his feet. Gauguin created a new style in painting and today each one of them is valued in millions. The title he gave to one of his most famous probably sums up his life best 'Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?'

Still looking for a satisfactory definition of romance, I went back to the my most trusted friend, the Encyclopedia Britannica. That seriously academic tome came out with answer that took my breathe away. I took up a piece of chalk and wrote on the blackboard,” Romance is a holiday from common sense”.