Lines Of Conviction

We, as a nation, owe a lot to our cinemas for it has always unfailingly filled in the gaps in our education system.

- Jitha Karthikeyan [e-mail] (Jitha Karthikeyan is an artist and curator, passionate about making art accessible to the larger public)

No English class had ever taught us that all the love sonnets we had to recite, would eventually be tuned to music and sung while prancing around trees.

We were never told in all the Sherlock Holmes novels we've read that the prime precondition for a perfect disguise was a fake mole on the chin. It took our films to enlighten us on these details. And what about the courtrooms?

What appeared as boring spaces in our innumerable books, miraculously turned into venues of spectacular drama on screen. Lawyers would flutter their black coats while engaging in vocal cord debates, tempers would run high, and the audience would wait for that one hard-hitting dialogue that would clinch the case in favour of the hero. Amid all this drama, one ingredient alone was ignored in our textbooks and our movies—the courtroom artist.