Gone are the days of street performers !?

The first time that I saw The Prestige, I was 9. Being a child I was obviously fascinated by the naive magic tricks that my cousins played on me purposely and it always ended up with me asking them, “How ?”. Perplexed in the middle of the act and later too sluggish to chase the solutions are the only stages I remember going through. That spark which kindled after the act was over was short lived but cosmic.

Ah, the golden question, you might say. But it was the root of all evils. Deeply placed somewhere in the cortex, those tricks always bugged me. Some people say that music, food and sex are the three things that definitely will enchant a person irrespective of all the other factors. Adding to that I would say magic can surely find a place in this list, and if you feel the opposite then the next time you see someone on street, wild guessing the card that you picked a few seconds ago, don’t curiously ask him “How ?”

Curiosity and the need to know-how is the answer. That’s what makes it so beautiful that we are ready to reward the people. Lately there’s been a blind fall in the number of people who really master street art. This is an outcome of the direction in which the society is drifting today. This direction of “instant gratification” is the culture that is budding around the world now-a-days and technology intensifies that. You book an Uber and need to know the exact time when it must reach your location. You order a new phone and everyday you need to track it’s current location.

Instant gratification is as good as fool’s gold. Synchronous to a person injecting heroin into their vein, instant gratification is rarely beneficial. It gives you short-lived pleasure but creates a need for the same result next time. That’s what makes it dangerous. A society full of people who need what they need and they need it now is a very good factor for business but at the same time harms people that are lured into the trap.

This behavior, when rooted in an infant can develop an attitude which drives them towards professions that are easy to achieve rather than the ones that need years of practice and have minor chances of success in the very field. Hence they are driven to secure ways of living where they can get a lot of chances and freedom to avoid any situation which gives them even a little discomfort.

Society needs to accept that in this tech-driven era, where multiple software cater to all their demands instantly, impatience is surely to grow. Though successful, millennials are tagged as time wasting and lazy. And technology plays a crucial role in creating such an environment where you will end up losing half a day on leisure even when you didn’t intend to. This behemoth illusion of social interaction without the occurrence of any is what blinds people. It leads to a sensory deprivation coupled with mediocre health.

The fact that social interaction play major role in success of street performers can never be neglected. You may think that this seems as a rant on the generation, simply aimed to tarnish the impression of millennials but I would rather say that Truth is rarely fun. And this is the truth. We are in a generation of screens and are losing social touch everyday. We create state-of-the-art machines everyday and are steadily transcending to an altogether different perspective of what humanity could ever be. It’s substantial but in the very process of its fabrication, street art is clearly suffering.

Related posts:

The job search process can be stressful and tolling. With the job search, as with any long term project, visualizing progress through time provides security and comfort. It turns those uneasy murky…

Journaling can be fun and stress relieving as it helps us keep track of our thoughts and goals. The experience is even better when we can customize the pages to our liking with a stash of stationery…

Evolve November Poetry Competition. “The Evolution of a Cancer Diagnosis” is published by Roxanne Barbour. poetry; fiction; short story; writing