As I stood there in the hall, waiting for the pizza delivery woman to figure out down which path lay apartment 219, I felt the overpowering urge to rip out my beard from my face. My beard was itchy and irritating, having not grown fully as it has now and I just felt like tearing it out, along with the skin just below it, leaving behind the same smooth skin that I get after every shave. I covered the hair with my hands and imagined doing just so, knowing full well the impossibility of the task. Yet I imagined it away and just imagining it made me feel better. Continue reading
philosophy
There are 67 posts filed in philosophy (this is page 4 of 7).
Death
Death,
come to me slowly
and stand besides me
like a friend
for I will have lived fully
by the time you come.
Or,
stand in attention
like an enemy
and let us fight
till the end of eternity
before you take my soul.
But,
do not creep up suddenly
and take me with
a treacherous knife in my back
like a wretched, unwary man.
Death,
fight me like an enemy
or greet me as a friend
but be not a stranger
when you take me in the end.
Pablo Picasso – Words To Live By | waldina
“The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.”
via Pablo Picasso – Words To Live By | waldina.
Excellent words. Perhaps this is why I write. When daily life becomes too much, it is an amazing feeling to escape into a world where you have total control over the actions of people and can create a place where you can be at peace.
The Path of the Creative person
I was talking to my friend Rahul[ADN|Twitter|Facebook] about an idea I had about ‘ideas’ and how I would represent visually the need to protect our precious idea from all the negative people around us who would rather see that idea die than to help or even support us. He captured it quite brilliantly in this sketch he made –
The Path of the Creative
Rahul does some pretty creative work on his Tumblr – LicenseToDraw
The Death of the Author
there is, however, someone who understands each word in its duplicity and who, in addition, hears the very deafness of the characters speaking in front of him-this someone being precisely the reader.
via The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes Full Text, Downloads, Cliff Notes, and Essays.
This text, pointed to me by Dan on ADN (which was in response to this article posted there by Matthew) reflects what I believe about writing today – that in as much as we want to give meaning to the text in terms of the context of the author, the real meaning can only be derived by the reader himself. The same is true, in my book, about any art – paintings, sculptures etc, where it is not the artist’s life, times, societal pressures or addictions, that define the true meaning of the work, but the impressions it makes upon the viewer that truly reflect the value of the art. Continue reading
On Writing
Recently, while on a plane, I was talking to the person next to me and in his inebriated drool, he gave me an idea that can be a major plot point for a story I’m working on. That spurred me into thinking that of all the things that we as writers do to get ideas flowing. Most certainly, on the top of the list is taking inspiration from around us. There’s plenty of inspiration hidden all around and we just need to reach out and allow it into our lives. It may be by talking to strangers or reading new things or just carefully observing something commonplace.
Vast
I start my car and pull on to the road. The sky is hung quietly above me. There’s a single cloud towards the west, meandering, with a pinkish hue that bursts in my mind like cotton candy. It looks soft but tomorrow it’ll have jagged edges where the wind will have tugged at it. The day after, it’ll dissipate. The Sun is low in the sky and so it’s late in the evening. Not the time to be going home, but the time to be at home. I notice a bird dive in front of the car. It maneuvers to the right quickly and flies past me. There are two planes leaving marks high up in the sky, slowly gathering distance between them, like galaxies floating away from each other. Continue reading
25
Today, I turned 25. To some, this may not seem like an amazing feat, but for me, this is a great accomplishment. Why, you ask? Because this is the oldest I’ve ever been! It’s an amazing feeling!
But more than amazing, it’s humbling. It’s humbling because while on the outset, I’m this young kid who’s got his whole life ahead of himself, inside, I am well aware that I have about 25 years of experience which, though most of it has been forgotten, dictates who I am as a person. Continue reading
How the Common Man will pay for the Internet soon
If there’s one buzz word that’s promised to solve all the monetary problems of every Internet-based startup in the past two years, its “Big Data”. Everyone’s collecting it, everyone’s recording it and everyone’s saving it for tomorrow. From Twitter’s Billions(of tweets) to your Netflix queue and even your Google Search history, everyone’s looking to figure out how to sell you more stuff based on your habits.
But no one’s actually selling the data. The data in itself is useless, no matter how much of it you have. It’s the connections that are formed from it that are important and that’s what everyone is hankering to sell – information. However, all that these companies are trying to do is sell information to advertising sources and point of sales organizations like Amazon because that’s where they can easily get a large paycheck in exchange for a much larger database of customer information. Continue reading
The guy in the rain
Image Courtesy CU Boulder
About two years ago, when not one month had passed since I had entered the US, I once got a free bike from CU Boulder’s Bike Station. It’s a great service where any student or faculty member can rent a bike for forty-eight hours, for free. Since it was time to return it, I cycled up to the UMC, near which the bike station sits under a large tree. As I was returning the bike, it started to rain. Afraid for the newly bought iPhone in my pocket, I went into the shed and hid from the rain. Two guys were working at the station that day. The one on the inside showed me a Lenovo laptop that was basically everything proof – shock, water and temperature. It was given to the bike station specifically because it faces all the elements on nature all the time. Continue reading