The Option of Art | Omair Rana | TEDxKingston College Lahore

Omair Rana opens by recounting his experience introducing O-level drama to Pakistan, where he found it was not students but parents who resisted the subject. When he asked parents how they chose subjects for their children, they laid out a logical chain: good O-levels lead to good A-levels, good colleges, good degrees, good jobs — and ultimately, good marriage proposals ('rishtas'). While the room laughed, Rana identified a deeper tragedy: not that art lost to other subjects in a competition, but that society lost art itself.

Rana challenges the way educational systems worldwide — including O and A levels — place arts quietly in the corner as 'optional options among options.' He argues this is paradoxical because subjects that teach us how to feel are precisely the ones we categorize as expendable. Rather than trimming excess, he says, we are numbing our own nervous system. He reframes the issue entirely: art is not a subject but a human function, and the framing of 'art versus science' is a false dichotomy — it should be 'art in everything.'

He draws sharp contrasts to illustrate art's irreplaceable role: economics explains behavior, but art teaches experience; law defines justice, but art asks what justice feels like; business creates value, but art creates meaning. Without art, he argues, intelligence is efficient but empty. He supports this with the example of COVID-19 lockdowns, during which people across the world turned to baking, cooking, writing, and dancing — forms of expression — as a means not just of survival but of existence itself.

Rana then distinguishes between popularity and influence, criticizing the contemporary culture of content creators chasing followers, likes, and views. He argues that a million views can pass through a person without leaving a mark, while a single line of poetry can stay forever. That, he says, is true influence — influence that sinks deep rather than runs wide.

He defends artists' tendency to speak uncomfortable truths, clarifying that artists are not braver than others but simply less able to stay silent and more capable of translating ugly discomfort into beautiful language. All societies draw lines, and artists dance on those lines — and sometimes step over. They are not always right, Rana says, but they must be given the right to ask questions, because power survives instability while art introduces doubt, and doubt is where change comes from.

The emotional centerpiece of the talk is Rana's account of Pakistani revolutionary poet Habib Jalib, who under harsh military rule chose to speak truth in public squares despite knowing the personal costs, including arrest. Rana ties this to a personal moment on a film set where he discovered a worn, forgotten book — a personally signed collection of Jalib's poetry, unclaimed among a crowd — and describes holding it as holding 'a portal.' This moment crystallized for him what art truly is: the rehearsal of empathy, allowing us to feel someone else's life without living through their struggles.

Rana closes by stressing that art does not belong exclusively to artists — artists refine it, but all humans possess the capacity for expression and the ability to respond to it. Change, he argues, cannot happen if people refuse to feel first. He asks the audience not necessarily to become artists, but to become conscientious consumers of art — to pause, feel, think, and choose what deserves to be called influence. He ends by reframing the central question: not 'why art?' but 'what happens to us when we live in a world without it?' — concluding that arts are not optional.