The Red Door is a fun event with colours facilitated by artist and mental health advocate, Reshma Valliappan. On 29th November 2011, the students of FAT's Tech Center organized a Red Door in their community. The event saw a plethora of colours and creativity in the premises of the Jalvihar locality in Lajpat Nagar. Reshma's aim through the concept of Red Door is to encourage people of different age groups express their hooded imagination and creativity through the medium of art.
The whole initiative was carried on by our Tech Centre girls who spearheaded in planning and organising the event. As age was not an issue, Red Door hoped to see participants from diffrent age groups come and participate. As we headed on to start the event, many children started to stream in due to curiosity. The overall turnout was really overwhelming.
Reshma started by narrating a story to the participants. Then participants were asked to draw anything which they remembered from the story. The zeal and enthusiasm of the participants with the papers and colours in their hands was undoubtedly encouraging.
Since the event was held in a public park within the community, onlookers and passing by people kept on pouring to check what is going on. It was a big lot to manage, but our girls managed it well. It was chaotic, but fun. As Reshma said “Red Door is always so unpredicatable and different, everytime and everywhere..it is so diverse!!”
At the end of the activity the blank drawing sheets had colour stains on them. Each group was invited to describe their work of art. Some of the descriptions were funny yet eye catching. Few were shy, and few bold and loud enough to describe their art through words. As the crowd dispersed after the end of the activity, we were left with a handful of people. Our tech centre girls and few people of the same age group. The second activity involved this smaller lot which had mainly adolecent girls and boys. Reshma asked all of them to define madness, after which she threw a series of questions on them which made them question their own perceptions and actions. After a self-reflecting discussion on madness, they were all once again asked to draw anything which they perceived to be 'madness'. It was an interesting session as they interpreted madness in their terms! For someone madness was all about enjoying one's own freedom and choice, or treating other people with disrespect was madness, while for someone else hypocrisy is nothing but madness which needs to be cured.
The Red Door event ended witha small discussion on mental disabilities and society's attitude towards mental health patients. Reshma talked to the group about discrimination against people with mental disabilities and encouraged them to be aware and support people who face some mental challenges, rather then discriminating against them.
Special thanks to Aparna Sanyal of Mixed Media Productions for helping us organize this event.
