September - 2021

Sep 29, 2021

LIVING on your toes

Being ’on one’s toes’ could mean to be alert or ready for any eventuality but in a way also warns us against the dangers of being firmly rooted in the ground. One of the highest virtues of being human is being able to adapt to the times and the situations. But at times our memories and our conditioning binds us into an inflexible identity. More we relate to this identity lesser we can adapt and in turn we become a slave to our identity, a lesser human. He not busy being born

Sep 28, 2021

Bloatwares in the mind

Spend more time searching for better information sources. A body filled with junk food struggles to move well. A mind filled with junk thoughts struggles to think well. - James Clear We were just talking yesterday about how our current age is one of the most taxing on our mental health. Not only do we have the sedentary lifestyle introduced heavily in our earlier generation but while we are sedentary, like a captive audience, our minds are now shoved with a tidal wave of info

Sep 27, 2021

Better than YOUR best

Watching Schumacher’s documentary yesterday I realized how athletes at the top of their sports generally have the mindset of competing with one’s self more than competing with others. Schumacher talks about how he becomes one with the car and how important it is to know how much you can push your car. If you push it above its limits the car is not happy and if you are running considerably lower than the car’s limit you are not happy. Its important for both of you to be happy.

Sep 26, 2021

Ingredients of failure

Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will - Suzy Kassem I was cooking a dish today and wanting to make an improvisation and started thinking if I should take that one step that I havn’t taken before to improve on the recipe at hand. And I started wondering what is it that am afraid of here? The answer was of ‘failure’. Of the dish going bad, of the ingredients going to waste, of my time going to waste. And I began to wonder how bad it was to fail to begin with having bro

Sep 25, 2021

Not Acknowledge the Status Quo

The challenge many a times is to not overturn the status quo or fight against it but to ignore it entirely. The moment we engage with a status quo and bend our will to do something for it or against it we give our power entirely to it. The status quo reduces our identity to binaries of ‘for’ and ‘against’ and we forget what it was we set out to do in the first place. The things that we like and we want to do will sometimes be limited by the artificial constraints around us bu

Sep 24, 2021

To adapt to the new or stick to the old

In his blog article defending change (or the status quo) Seth Godin argues that its easy to take the stance of either sticking vehemently with the old and not giving the new a chance or entirely getting sucked up into the new (like technophiles) and denigrating the old. He says What’s truly difficult is being a fair arbiter. I fall into this trap all the time. We begin to develop a point of view, usually around defending the status quo, but sometimes around overturning it, an

Sep 22, 2021

Be Useless

While writing my morning pages this morning came up this line. Come up with something useful everyday. Every day, no matter what, I make a poem and post it online. Most days they’re mediocre, some days they’re great, and some days they’re awful. (Jerry Garcia: “You go diving for pearls every night but sometimes you end up with clams.”) But it doesn’t matter to me whether the day’s poem was good or not, what matters is that it got done. I did the work. I didn’t break the chain

Sep 21, 2021

Changing Roots

A conversation over coffee led us to the topic of childhood. Somewhere down the line we spoke about how we are all like trees, our roots being our past and our trunk and branches growing from our past into the now. And we thought how difficult it is for a tree to grow to its full potential if its roots have an atrophied growth due to negligence or active harm done to them in their formation. One can easily get rid of unwanted growth in the trunks and the branches of life, yet

Sep 20, 2021

Understanding Imitation

From Morgan Housel’s - The Psychology of Money A young lawyer aiming to be a partner at a prestigious law firm might need to maintain an appearance that I, a writer who can work in sweatpants, have no need for. But when his purchases set my own expectations, I’m wandering down a path of potential disappointment because I’m spending the money without the career boost he’s getting. This is one of the clearest examples I’ve found yet that illustrate not only the futility but imm

Sep 19, 2021

Re-solving Resolving

Yesterday I watched episode 3/5 of Agnes’s From Here to There where she documents the places, people, artists and artworks she loves. She is one of the most amazing film-makers that we’ve ever had. A powerhouse of love manifesting on screen. There is a scene in the film where Agnes interviews art collector Elsbeth Bisig who claims to be really sad to sell an artwork by Mario Merz, a piece that she had with her for over 18 years . Agnes responds by humbly asking “I imagine it

Sep 18, 2021

Profession, titles and the human

The oxford dictionary defines the word ‘Profess’ as to ‘claim that one has (a quality or feeling), especially when this is not the case.’ And from the word Profess comes Professional and Professor Then what does it mean to be a Professional or a professor. I’ve always found titles to be empty and restrictive. Titles like musician, animator, designer, artist, writer, etc. claim to create a certain identity of the person through a popular notion of others doing the same thing.

Sep 16, 2021

Character and repetition

A person’s traits are reflected only on repetition. Getting to know a person better is basically understanding what are the things he/she repeats and thus then predicting how he will repeat them in other circumstances. Those repetitions can be pleasant or unpleasant to us. Those repetitions can be in harmony or disharmony with our own repetitions and this is how we come to like or dislike a person on various levels. Identity sets repetitions in actions and repeated actions cr

Sep 15, 2021

How Tools shape our perception

If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail - Abraham Maslow I recently upgraded my old MotoG 5 phone to an Oppo Reno 5, since the camera broke on the former. I’m not much of a sucker for tech these day because of the appalling strategies of almost every company wanting to shove a new device on you every 6 months to a year but I had this observation. The camera on the Oppo is slightly tweaked in its software processing to saturate the colours it picks a

Sep 14, 2021

Inspiration - Creation - Sharing

In the film Varda by Agnes, Agnes Varda, often called the godmother of the French New Wave shares the driving principles behind her prolific film-making life INSPIRATION - CREATION - PARTAGE (Sharing) She emphasizes that for her a work of art is not complete until it is shared. At once succinct and profound, the power of these lines has stayed with me since. A little elaboration on its understanding Inspiration - Observing the things around you and within you that make, a sta

Sep 13, 2021

What to do in breaks?

Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed. - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Flow) Its a nagging feeling I get at the end of every weekend that I’ve res

Sep 12, 2021

Why draw and write?

Its been about a decade now that I have been maintaining visual journals as a regular practice. Basically a journal with some sketches, doodles and notes observing the occurrences around me and the feelings within me. Bulk of these years I’ve religiously scanned and put across in a tumblr page. These are some of the benefits I gather from maintaining the practice. Seeing Clearly: Our mind is used to relegating large amount of details to the background and creating only a mini

Sep 11, 2021

Don't Focus on the Goals

My approach to what I do in my job — and it might even be the approach to my life — is that everything I do is the most important thing I do. Whether it’s a play or the next film. It is the most important thing. I know it’s not going to be the most important thing, and it might not be close to being the best, but I have to make it the most important thing. That means I will be ambitious with my job and not with my career. That’s a very big difference, because if I’m ambitious

Sep 10, 2021

Pareto’s Law- A primer on smart work

The Pareto principle states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes (the “vital few”).[1] Other names for this principle are the 80/20 rule, the law of the vital few, or the principle of factor sparsity. - Wiki I only recently came across this principle a few months back while doing Ali Abdaal's wonderful Skillshare course. It has made me reconsider all of the decision making that goes onto my projects and actions in life. it might be the c

Sep 9, 2021

Ice age, dirty rooms and compounding

If something compounds—if a little growth serves as the fuel for future growth—a small starting base can lead to results so extraordinary they seem to defy logic. It can be so logic-defying that you underestimate what’s possible, where growth comes from, and what it can lead to. - Morgan Housel It was surprising to me when I read the cause of Ice ages in Morgan Housel’s amazing book The Psychology of Money. After decades of assumptions scientists basically came down to this c

Sep 8, 2021

The Blue Hour

Just before dawn, there’s a minute of silence. The day birds aren’t up yet and the night birds are already asleep. And then…..there’s real silence. -Reinette (From the film) Started watching this beautiful film yesterday by Eric Rohmer. The Blue Hour is part 1 of the film and being an early riser I could relate a lot to this. Reinette stresses heavily in the film that the minute is something to be experienced and no one can just know the blue hour without feeling it and being

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