How a child's art unlocks life's bigger questions

What does the end of the world look like to a child who is not yet seven? At the Clint Art Gallery in Kochi, I stood before a drawing accompanied by a note saying that Edmund Thomas Clint had imagined what a final world war might look like. I tried to decode the psychology of the child making it. What had he seen, heard or imagined? What did the end of the world mean to someone who had barely begun to live in it? There was no way to ask him. Clint had died decades ago, just short of his seventh birthday. The drawing remained, along with the note beneath it, offering an interpretation that neither the picture nor the passage of time could settle for me.

I had come across the gallery by accident, on a day when I had no intention of thinking about any of this. I was walking out of a hospital in Kochi when I noticed an arrow painted on a wall across the road. It pointed towards an art gallery. A girl was coming downstairs, and I asked her if the gallery was there. She said it was, but it was closed. She also told me not to go upstairs. However, out of curiosity, I went upstairs anyway. The gallery was indeed closed, she was right. But again, out of curiosity, I pushed the door and entered a dark room, using the torch on my phone to see where I was going. On a balcony there was an elderly man standing. When I asked him whether the gallery was closed, he turned on the lights, just for me.

Between his birth on May 19, 1976, and his death on April 15, 1983, Clint made more than 25,000 artworks. His mother, Chinnamma Joseph, preserved his drawings. Years later, writer and illustrator Boney Thomas worked with the family to select 101 works for the gallery.

I moved from one drawing to another. There was a train accident drawn by him. Another artwork showed an airplane with the wings and legs of a bird. Then there was this drawing accompanied by the note about a final world war. In another artwork, a sun was setting in the background, with a question mark and an exclamation mark beside it. I could not tell what the picture meant. I did not know what to make of the punctuation, either. Was the sun setting on something, or was the child simply drawing what he saw in his mind?

The elderly man, T.K. Sadasivan, managing trustee of Clint Foundation and a writer who helps look after the gallery, said something that stayed with me. “We cannot know what Clint was thinking when he made these drawings,” he said, “even if the notes beneath them offer possible interpretations.”

At one point, I asked for some water to drink. The bottle inside the gallery was empty. I told him not to bother, but he went downstairs to fetch some anyway. There was something moving about the encounter, though I could not have explained why at the time. A stranger had gone out of his way to help me, so that I could focus on Clint’s artworks. I was standing in a room full of artworks made by someone who had been dead for decades. The child could no longer explain his work. The man looking after it could not tell me what the child had intended. All I had were the drawings, the notes and the questions they left behind.

Clint’s short life is often remembered through the astonishing number of works he produced. But the number also invites a question that is easy to overlook. What do we mean when we call a life remarkable? Is it the amount someone produces, the talent they display, the recognition they get, or something else entirely?

The question has become difficult for me to avoid. I have spent years trying to understand the world through politics, social science, art, cinema and the lives of other people. Making things, and trying to understand what other people make, can be absorbing work. But it can also become a convenient way of postponing a more uncomfortable question – what is all this for?

There are periods when work gives life its shape. A story needs to be finished, a film needs to be made, an idea needs to be followed until it leads somewhere unexpected. The days acquire a purpose because there is something to do. Yet finishing one thing only makes room for the next. The satisfaction is real, but it does not necessarily last. Eventually, the same question returns, when there is nothing urgent to distract us.

Leo Tolstoy encountered a version of this crisis after he had become one of the most celebrated writers in the world. In ‘A Confession’, he describes how success, family life and literary achievement failed to answer his questions about why he should continue living. He had accomplished what many writers spent their lives hoping to accomplish, yet achievement did not protect him from the feeling that life lacked meaning.

Andre Agassi, too, describes in ‘Open’ the emptiness that followed him through a career in which he became one of the greatest tennis players of his generation. He could win matches, collect trophies and reach the top of his sport, while privately struggling with his relationship to the game. It turns out that success and purpose are not necessarily the same thing.

I have returned to Bhagat Singh’s ‘Why I Am an Atheist’ several times. Written in Lahore Central Jail in 1930, a year before his execution at the age of 23, it has stayed with me for the questions he was willing to ask himself. Even as he faced death, he examined his own convictions, wondering whether his beliefs came from reason or vanity. Here was someone who had committed himself to a cause larger than his own life, yet was unwilling to take even his own convictions for granted. I find myself returning to that insistence on questioning. What if finding something to live for is not enough? What if we must also keep asking ourselves why we have chosen to live for it?

Neither story offers a simple answer. They do, however, make it harder to believe that a life becomes meaningful merely because it has produced something extraordinary. If achievement cannot settle the question, what can?

Perhaps, the answer has something to do with the world beyond the work itself. Art does not exist outside the society. The images we make are shaped by what we see, what we fear, what we inherit and what we cannot understand. Sometimes they help us see the world differently. Sometimes they give form to things that have been ignored or deliberately hidden. But what happens when the act of making something becomes an end in itself?

It is possible to spend a lifetime observing the world without feeling responsible for how one lives in it. A person can document suffering, describe injustice and make compelling work about the lives of others, then return to the comfort of being an observer. The work may be honest. It may even matter to those who have encountered it. But there remains a question about the relationship between what we understand and what we choose to do with that understanding.

Across the world, people continue to take to the streets to demand change, often knowing that doing so comes at a cost. In our country, too, people have been protesting. Those who protest risk being detained, dismissed or reduced to a label. Others watch from a distance, trying to understand what is happening and what it means. Neither position is simple. There are many ways to contribute to this world, and not everyone is called to the same kind of struggle. But watching events unfold can leave us with a difficult question of our own – what, if anything, are we willing to do in response?

This is where the question of purpose becomes more than a private search for satisfaction. It is not enough to ask whether our work makes us happy, or whether it will survive us. Maybe, sometimes we must also ask what place it occupies in the lives of others. Journalism, for instance, can bring events to people who would otherwise know nothing about them. It can record what those in power would prefer to erase and give space to people who are rarely heard. At its best, it helps people understand the world they inhabit. But the larger question is whether we can find a way to connect what we do with what we believe matters. This does not mean that everyone must become an activist. A teacher can do meaningful work by teaching well. A journalist can serve the public by reporting honestly. An artist can make something that allows another person to recognise a feeling they had never been able to name. These things matter, even when their effects cannot be measured.

I know I want to make things, to understand people and to make sense of the world around me. But I sometimes wonder whether that is enough. There is a difference between finding the world interesting and feeling that you have a place in it. I don’t know how to bridge that distance yet. Perhaps that is why the question of purpose refuses to leave us alone. You want to do something that matters, but you are still trying to understand what that something is.

John Lennon’s song ‘Imagine’ has always seemed to hold this tension – “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us. And the world will live as one.” The word that matters to me is ‘join’. It suggests that a dream is not complete simply because someone has imagined it. It requires other people, and it requires a movement from thought into action. And that the dreamer must leave the room.

I do not know what that movement should look like in my own life. I am wary of grand declarations about changing the world, especially when they come from people who have not yet worked out what they are willing to give up. I also know how easily uncertainty can become a permanent excuse. There will always be another book to read, another film to watch, another story to make sense of before we feel ready to act. Understanding can deepen our engagement with the world, but it can also delay it indefinitely.

At the gallery, I had been looking for these meanings. The drawing of the setting sun, with its question mark and exclamation mark, remains unresolved. Perhaps the notes beneath the pictures help visitors enter his world. But they cannot return us to the moment in which he made them.

That is the strange thing about leaving something behind. An artwork may survive its maker. But the survival of an object does not tell us whether the life that produced it was complete, or whether the maker ever found what they were looking for.

When I left the gallery and stepped out into Kochi street, the day continued as if nothing had happened. The hospital was across the road. The arrow was still pointing towards the gallery. I had followed it without knowing what I was looking for, and I was leaving without an answer.

I could keep the artworks in my memory. I could write about them. I could make something out of the questions they had raised. But somewhere beyond the frame, the world was carrying on, full of people trying to change it and people trying to understand it, people who had the luxury of watching and people who did not.

I thought again of the child’s drawing of a world at a final war, and of the note that tried to explain it. We cannot know what Clint was thinking. We cannot ask him what he wanted his artworks to do, or whether he thought about what would remain after him. All we have is what he made, and the fact that someone cared enough to preserve it.