Talks By The Firelight 3.3: Painting Laughter
Harish Bhuvan, Therapeutic Clown and Founder of Compassionate Clowns
From overcoming his childhood trauma of hospitals to making it a profession, Harish Bhuvan has come a long way. Founder of the organization Compassionate Clowns, he spends his weekends lighting up the dim corridors of children’s hospitals in Bangalore with a colorfully painted face and a cheery gait. His mission to spread laughter and love to children has inspired more people to join him on his journey.
Exploring how he tackled everyday problems with gratitude and happiness reminded us just how beautiful and necessary the journey of compassion is in all of our lives.
When was the first time you heard about the practice of therapeutic clowning?
I didn’t know what therapeutic/medical clowning was, in the beginning. Then I started researching about the practice, gained a lot of insight and made modules so that I could share it with others. A year after I had launched Compassionate Clowns, I came across Patch Adams, who had actually founded these unconventional practices. I connected with him soon after, when he offered to meet me the next time he came to India and also let me visit his Academy.
What does compassionate clowning mean to you, personally?
I question the purpose of anything and everything I do in my life.
As a kid, if a toy truck shot ahead when I dragged it backward, I’d open the truck and see why that happened. Likewise for every job that I have been doing, I would ask myself and get a clear answer as to why I’m doing it. The question is, in therapeutic clowning, who gets healed?
Is it the clown who does the healing by amusing the patients, or is the clown being healed by the patients themselves?
I haven’t found the answer to this yet. The day I do, I will stop clowning. But until then I’ll continue to be a compassionate clown.
How often do you come across therapeutic clowning?
The number of clowns in India are very few and the number of organizations which promote therapeutic clowning are even fewer. A couple of friends are inspired by my organization. There are people who were initially volunteers at Compassionate Clowns, and then went ahead and started their own ventures.
The community of therapeutic clowns is small but tightly knit, whereas there are a lot of performance clowns. When people learn that I’m a clown, they throw the name of a circus clown and ask me if I know them, often unaware of the distinction. We are clowns who go to hospitals and what we do is known as therapeutic/medical clowning. Hence, there are very few times that I know a regular clown.
How do the children react when they see you for the first time?
Some are scared, some have a laugh and some just stare. We always find a couple of children who would start smiling instantly. So, we directly go and interact with them first. The resulting laughter is so infectious that when one kid starts laughing, the others follow suit. We end up having a laugh riot in the end.
But there are few times when children are really afraid of clowns because of the exposure to horror clown movies, a phobia hence developed as coulrophobia. They grow wary and don’t smile at us for the remainder of the session. But we don’t leave them scared — we wash our faces, come back and explain to them that we are just like them, here to interact, play and have fun, after which they open up.
Is there any particular incident that made you realize that all this effort you’ve put in as a therapeutic clown was worth it?
Compassionate clowning is an activity which requires a lot of energy transformation.
We enter an atmosphere which is totally negative and grim, and we have to fill people up with joy. I’m talking from experience when I say that I come out very exhausted. I get the desired outcome, but I also burn myself out most of the time. During the second year of Compassionate Clowns, in the summer vacations, we didn’t have volunteers. The thought of quitting Compassionate Clowns loomed over my head. This is something I very rarely share.
During that time, an NGO called me and asked if I’m interested in doing something for a Palliative Institute. I didn’t know much about it but I wanted in.
Later, after further inquiry, I was explained that my audience constituted of people who were counting their final days, and that we were going there to celebrate their birthdays.
I decided for that to be my last performance — it would be the “grand exit”. I went in, put my makeup on and five minutes before the show was going to begin, I started to panic. The people in the audience that day had seen life — they knew death was imminent. What could I possibly do to make them laugh? I didn’t want to waste their time. While I was spiraling, somebody put a hand on my shoulder and informed me it was time. Mine was the first act. I was confident on the outside but I knew I was panicking on the inside.
I went on stage, closed my eyes, and when I opened them, I started singing a song. I only remember a minute or two of my performance, and then again there was a tap on my shoulder, and they said that it had been an hour and ten minutes already. I didn’t realize the passage of time at all. Everybody was laughing and dancing with me; the caregivers were enjoying themselves along with the patients. And there were even two people who were crying tears of joy.
I have a theory that came out of this incident. In order to be compassionate, you have to surround yourself with people who are kind, people who do random acts of kindness — which will bring the feeling of love inside you.
And whatever you do out of love becomes compassion. All you are then left with is gratitude.
Until that particular day, I realized all my acts were a little selfish. There was a hidden agenda everywhere. But this was my exit performance — I had nobody to impress. There was no recording of this show. It was, for the first time in my life, an act solely for others. And that’s an act I can never forget. I approached everyone in the audience personally, did my ‘namaste’ and bowed my head and presented them with roses.. They blessed me with both hands and that gave me goosebumps.
And that’s when I realized that no matter what I do in my life, clowning is something that I’ll never stop practicing. That’s when I revoked the decision of quitting.
We noticed that one of your organizations also set a Guinness World Record on the largest child safeguarding session. We’d love to hear the story behind it!
The story behind it dates back to a Sunday clowning session, wherein I had built a heartfelt connection with a small nine year old girl.
Every Sunday, when we’d visit the hospital, the kids would leave their parents and get ready for their time to have fun. They’d say, “our bhaiyas and didis have come”. There will be a volunteer group of 20 or 30 people, or even 120 at times, and this one girl always waited in the parking area to hug me. That’s how my Sunday mornings started.
But this one Sunday, I reached there and this girl refused to even smile. I started asking her if I did something wrong, or if she was angry with me. She sat through the three hours of clowning with a frown. After everything was done and every volunteer went home, I stayed back and asked her what happened.
I said, “You consider me your anna right, tell me.”
“No anna, I don’t know how to tell you,” she replied. I told her that she can trust me and she opened up. She told me that her maternal uncle had sexually abused her saying that if she took this ‘injection’— injection being male genitalia — then she would be healed. And in order to get rid of the cancer pain, she allowed it to happen. After it happened, she felt lost. She said – “Earlier, I was anticipating death; but now I’m dead inside. Now I don’t want to live.”
She gave me an instruction in Kannada – “Anna idhu nan jothe agidhe, neenu confirm madko idhu yaar jothe no aagbardhu”, meaning, “Brother, this happened with me but you have to give me an assurance that this won't happen with anybody else”.
Until that day, I didn’t know what child sexual abuse was. I didn’t know the seriousness of it. Sure, I’ve faced child molestation on a smaller level myself, but I never took it seriously — it never impacted me to the level that listening to this story did.
I started researching and I wanted to get into child sexual abuse awareness and reforms, child safeguarding lessons, body boundaries and everything that concerned sexuality, LGBTQIA, adolescence, rehabilitation, workplace sexual harassment and so on. I underwent an extensive six-month long course in all these modules and learned to train people. And I started training in schools and colleges — just like every other trainer. I would give lectures and return, only to realize that I wasn’t liking it. That is when I started using clowning to train children. And that was how it began.
We then started getting invitations from everywhere when our module was reviewed. That was how we broke the world record in our first go.
Our latest record involved the participation of around 3000 teachers at one go along with another trainer from Hubli, Dharwad.
We did it thrice, starting with 1297 students, then 2000 teachers and now 3000 teachers.
What are the things that you hope to accomplish in the upcoming years?
To be honest, I don’t know. I realized that every time I make a plan, something totally different happens. And we don’t know what the new normal is. But if you had asked me this question before the lockdown, I would’ve spoken about a solid 5 year plan I had, which is so obsolete now that I think of it.
But I'm taking it very positively. I’ve started organizing cancer support groups on behalf of Onco. I've also come up with an online structure and now we’re having sessions in Alaska despite the twelve and half hour time difference. We did four similar ones in India as well. We have inspired more than 500 people to come forward and share their cancer stories.
We are going to begin online clowning so that clowns from all over the world can now come together. We are also trying to raise money for setting up projectors in hospitals so that this can be made possible.
We are planning to put up community fridges in the streets for migrant workers who are facing the wrath of COVID-19. Anybody can provide food and anybody can access it. We have our fingers crossed, and we are hoping to raise enough money to turn our plans into reality. Our project’s name is #100donatekarona. We are asking people to donate just 100 rupees a month for six months. We want to get more people involved, making it a community effort — by the community and for the community.
In this time of a medical and humanitarian crisis, how do you plan on using therapeutic clowning to make the situation better for people?
I’ve been calling up all the clients that I’ve had so far — people who have been taking counseling from me, and checking up on them. They’ve had cases of mental health issues at some point in their life, and the lockdown is just going to magnify it.
I’ve been letting everyone know that if anyone requires a counselor who is also a therapeutic clown to keep their counseling sessions live, they can always reach out to me. In Baroda, we managed to put together an online clowning session, where a group of 7 to 8 clowns came together to perform over a Zoom call.
What are your future goals beyond therapeutic clowning?
I'm working on a book which consists of 73 modules that I have personally designed. I want that book to be a source of empowerment to people. Topics like child sexual abuse and mental health awareness have been covered.
I don’t want anyone feeling clueless or in a state of shock when they hear a case and are not able to help out.
Throughout my life, I’ve done more than 5000+ workshops involving more than 5 lakh people. And I'm hoping to put together a single book, with all the topics I've covered in my lifetime. Each topic will have around 5 pages, making the book have about 350 pages in total.
Harish has given without expecting anything in return, learnt without considering age a bar, and loved without leaving anyone in the dark. He continues to clown, to light up the grim days of people who need that dose of happiness the most. All the mental toll, exhaustion and weariness on a therapeutic clown gets winked out with one small, innocent and pure expression — the smile of a child’s face.
If you wish to help keep these thousands of smiles alive through these unprecedented circumstances, you can donate an amount of your choice to the following account:
Compassionate Clowns
Federal Bank Current Account No: 17690200002227
Link to Facebook Page: Compassionate Clowns
IFSC Code: FDRL0001769
UPI ID: compassionateclownsorg-1@okaxis
This interview was taken in collaboration with isha jha.
