Royal Hastings, University of London Multimedia Art MA Final Project

Candidate name: Jemisha Badhuri

Candidate number: 0883479

Moments of change:

A couple of years ago my brother Adi thought he wanted to be a life coach. He took me to a personal-development seminar in an old church on Piccadilly, where the ceiling was so high and the place so busy that a cacophony of voices swirled and echoed right up to the roof and back. When everyone fell silent to hear the speaker, it was as if those voices were still up there, trapped above us, talking and whispering.

The speaker said life is about change. That’s how we grow and develop, but to change we have to let go of the past. Most of us, she said, are bad at this, especially when a situation that was good turns bad. We cling to the past and deny the need for change, telling ourselves everything is as fine as it ever was, when it isn’t. Well, I couldn’t understand why everyone around us was nodding and murmuring as if the speaker was delivering a universal truth. I stuck my hand in the air. Adi hissed, ‘No, Jem, not now’, but his words flew up to the roof. ‘I don’t think that’s true,’ I shouted, and I could tell the speaker wasn’t happy at her speech being interrupted. ‘It’s not true of everyone. I love change. When something that was good turns bad, I don’t hesitate to move on. The trick is recognising that moment when it happens, because it might be something very small that gives the game away. Most people aren’t listening hard enough to notice.’ My words chased each other upwards and swirled in the air over our heads.

The speaker’s steps clip-clopped down the aisle. She stopped at our row. ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘you’re right. We need to be alert to those moments that trigger a realisation. A very good point.’

In the end, Adi stayed on his accountancy course.

I stand by what I said that day: I’m much better than most people at initiating change and coming to terms with it. There’s a reason that episode comes to mind at this point in my essay, because it might seem as if I didn’t put that skill into practice on the MA . It wasn’t because I had no idea anything was wrong, it was because I wanted the rest of the group to think I didn’t realise. Even now I can’t say for sure exactly when Alyson stopped coming in. Gela said Cameron left, but it was Alyson who disappeared. I don’t think she came back after Somerset.

Perhaps her leaving the course could’ve been explained away with any number of excuses, but it wasn’t. This is the strange thing. Everyone else pretended she was still here, but somewhere just out of sight.

Was that speaker right, after all? Were they in denial that she’d gone and tried to fill an Alyson-shaped hole in the group with talk about where she was and what she was doing?

I told that speaker I was happy to walk away when things turned bad, but on this occasion I stayed. I wanted to know what had happened, and staying on the course was my best chance of finding out.