Paras Ra­moutar

With a den­i­gra­tion of moral­i­ty and spir­i­tu­al­i­ty in our so­ci­ety, and be­yond, a Cen­tral Trinidad teacher is us­ing her artistry skill and cre­ativ­i­ty to bring back san­i­ty through her works of art. Navi­ta Sid­diqah Hanooman, a So­ci­ol­o­gy lec­tur­er at Up­per Lev­el Ed­u­ca­tion­al In­sti­tute in Ch­agua­nas has be­gun the trek. "Even though it may seem daunt­ing, but I will suc­ceed in my jour­ney as I use the teach­ings of Is­lam to reach this goal," she said. "The pur­pose of my works of art is to re­mem­ber, obey, praise and spread the teach­ings of Al­lah through the Prophet Muham­mad. There is not even a hair's line sep­a­ra­tion be­tween my love for Is­lam and my love for art. They are both com­bined and in­sep­a­ra­ble. There is no dif­fer­ence," she said, as her deep sense of spir­i­tu­al­i­ty ra­di­at­ed through her al­ready charm­ing per­son­al­i­ty."

Hanooman re­called the be­gin­ning of her quest to reach the pin­na­cle in art at the age of 11."At this age, I start­ed to draw and paint, and since then there has been no turn­ing back...for me the sky is the lim­it in this field of en­deav­our. "The on­ly for­mal train­ing I have had was to pre­pare for the sub­ject of Vi­su­al Arts at the CXC lev­el. "I use Ara­bic words that praise Al­lah, and this is in­ter­spersed with an ab­stract back­ground. Each piece of art has a spe­cial spir­i­tu­al mes­sage. "We need to re­turn to se­ri­ous works in art and this would cer­tain­ly help to bring an au­ra of peace, broth­er­hood and har­mo­ny, away from the deca­dence in which we are ful­ly en­gulfed," the grad­u­ate of the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies with a Bach­e­lor's de­gree in Ed­u­ca­tion added. "Even though the world so­ci­ety is ful­ly dig­i­talised through com­put­er, IT, Broad­band and oth­er in­for­ma­tion para­pher­nal­la, the works of the mas­ters over the many cen­turies con­tin­ue to ex­cite, in­spire and of­fer new mes­sages about hu­man ex­is­tence and life as we know it," she not­ed. "I would like to spur, and en­cour­age our young peo­ple to seek refuge in the works of art...to study the works of our great mas­ters as this could serve as an en­cour­age­ment to re­turn to our orig­i­nal moor­ings in re­la­tions to our par­ents, our peers and our so­ci­ety as whole," she said.

She is pre­pared to work with any­one in­ter­est­ed in the pro­mo­tion of art as a ca­reer and as a medi­um to de­vel­op their own per­son­al­i­ty. "This as­sign­ment we must give our­selves and we must not shirk from it and help de­vel­op a for­mi­da­ble arts body in Trinidad and To­ba­go. "The world comes to our Car­ni­val. They must come here as well for our works of art and cre­ativ­i­ty," Hanooman added.