Starting Over

The episode is a vivid reminder of poverty amidst plenty - a very sharp focus on the ill-balanced society around us.

As a consequence of hunger, poverty and deprivation, even innocent children turn to delinquent behaviour, beyond their primary need. Unfortunately these occurrences are not uncommon. One of the principal tenets of Hinduism pronounces the world as "Vasudaiva Kutumbakam" – meaning this world is our large family created by God –and those with a little bit more should share their fortunes with those who don't have enough.

Regrettably, it is a shameful indictment of our society that these pearls of wisdom have become engraved stones only in mind, not in practice. The greatest challenge posed by the film to all of us is how to craft our social policies to eradicate poverty, educate society to share and care. The goal for all of us should be "Bahujan Hitaye –Bahujan Sukhaye" (meaning- 'The greatest good of all brings the greatest happiness of all). With determined efforts nothing is impossible.

Starting Over involved me immediately. I shuddered as I watched the youngster cope with rejection by his peers and mother, I feared for him as he engaged so passionately at the video games arcade, and I ached for him as he returned home, lurched off to his bedroom and lay, eyes open, while the noise swirled around him. What on earth was he thinking? Why is life so unfair?

Nestled in the South Transept of Westminster Abbey, London, is Poets' Corner: the resting place of Chaucer, Dickens, Kipling and Tennyson. There stands a sizable memorial to William Shakespeare, who gazes upon a floor slab – a more modest memorial to Laurence Olivier.

Why should such an extraordinary congregation be gathered in this famous church? Not purely for doctrinal reasons, surely. The writers and actors remembered here are not uniformly ambassadors of the Church of England. Rather, this expresses a tendency in the great religions of the world to value art, to celebrate it, and even to appropriate it.

And what would religion be without its art? What is the Vatican without Michelangelo? Andalucia without the breathtaking intricacy of the Alhambra? Islam without Rumi? To survey the great art, and the great artists of world civilisation is inevitably to survey the triumphs of religious art. The relationship between the two in human history has been richly symbiotic.

Recent decades has seen this relationship erode with increasing rapidity. Much of the art that captures the popular imagination both in the West and the East, is thoroughly secular. Several religious movements have come to disparage artistic expression as vain, perhaps even necessarily decadent. Such religious austerity can be deleterious. As the prophet Muhammad disclosed: "God is beautiful and loves beauty". While secular art is valuable, art must not be surrendered to that realm if religion is to flourish.

Yet art, like religious thought, does not stand still. In St Paul's cathedral stands a modern sculpture of the mother and child, an abstract rendering that would have been incomprehensible to classicists past, but that contributes to the self-renewing dynamism of this medieval edifice. Today, theists may relevantly embrace digital and transient media, and in this festival, they do. These explorations are embryonic in a sense, but in an artistic age dominated by the secular, they are importantly pioneering. We cannot yet know what will come to endure. But we do know that in the absence of such initiatives as these, the answer will surely be "nothing".