Education, not money, is what can lift a child out of poverty, the Romanian musician Damian Drăghici has said, arguing that the chance to learn and build a different path matters more over the long term than any immediate financial help.
Asked whether money or education offers the real way out of poverty, Drăghici said the answer does not lie in money but in the opportunity to study and to construct another trajectory in life. What a child gains through education, he said, can count over the long run and can change the direction of a life.
The artist, known for a career that spans both traditional Romanian music and international collaborations, said one of the biggest myths about success he believed early on was that external things, results and achievements would make a person happy. He expected certain projects to change his life immediately, but reality turned out differently. Some of them had an impact on his life, on culture or on society only after years.
Drăghici also reflected on what lasts in art. Asked to choose between a Grammy and a song still listened to a hundred years from now, he picked the song. For him, the fact that a creation can remain alive across generations matters more than a prize received at a particular moment. Among artists no longer living with whom he would have liked to share a stage, he named Miles Davis, Bill Evans and Jimi Hendrix.
He said he learned over time not to follow other people's paths. «Do as I do», he argued, is the worst advice a person can receive, because it does not help the one who hears it find his or her own way. In his view, every person is here to contribute something, and if you do what someone else does, you do not fulfil your own mission.
Turning to public life, Drăghici said there are people who enter politics with good intentions but later become disconnected from reality. When you reach the point of seeing only figures, regulations and laws, he said, you lose contact with what happens in everyday life. The solution, he believes, is a return to roots, including through simple things such as working in a yard, so as to see reality again from the grassroots.
On prejudice, the musician said it is not his job to convince a racist to attend a concert by a Roma artist. Music itself can do that, he said, if it carries the true energy and conveys the message that the artist is there for the listener. In that way, he argued, music can reach beyond prejudice and change how a message is received.
Asked what he would like to remain after him, Drăghici said he would want to be remembered as a good man who left something behind and did something good for society. He said it also matters to him how he will remain in his child's memory. In the end, he suggested, everything returns to what you bring into the world, what you pass on and what you leave behind. «We are here to give, not to take», he said.