morning boy's letters on serious matters and commentary on funny things aplenty
Treat your own behavior as ‘experiments’. And make sure that one of your experiments is ‘stubbornness’.
You’ve to be stubborn, and record your experiences emerging out of your stubbornness.
That’s the surest way of understanding and making good of your thoughts, ideas or ambitions.
What personality trait in people raises a red flag with you?
Ambiguous Answers/ Statements/ Compliments
Interview someone — a friend, another blogger, your mother, the mailman — and write a post based on their responses.
Huh! I interview myself in the company of good writers almost every day.
So, I asked myself an important question:
Why did they, the ancients take the trouble to carve out rocks and stone to produce all the temples across the length and breadth of present day India and around India?
My response to myself: To avoid the horror, rather the boredom, of ugly information. They knew it, not in these very words, but they knew it. And that was only way of information storage they knew.
What was the last thing you searched for online? Why were you looking for it?
Few questions as immediacy-oriented as this one.
This couldn’t have been asked in the year 1989. Come to think of it.
And that ‘why’ will kill you if you really are honest.
I was looking for a Nikon Z mount DX lens that ends up around 35mm focal length in equivalent full-frame terms.
Why? Just like that. To have a camera to fiddle buttons on and create pictures. I already 3 very good cameras, mind you. Sorry, wait, I have 8 good cameras. You see, ‘why’ can kill you.
What’s your favorite recipe?
I must confess, I hardly make a thing. Women around me are such proficient cooks.
Not that I mind learning how to cook Indian food. Especially traditional Indian food.
Every Indian house, where women take pleasure in cooking, and attempt to keep family members healthy via their cooking, becomes a cooking powerhouse.
But the question doesn’t imply that I must cook. At the same time, how would I know the recipe if I didn’t cook. Goddddd! Sometimes, you have to revisit the question even as you are typing the answer.
Favorite recipe, it will emerge. You wait, I will write about it.
The city of the future won’t be of a singular type.
And it would be presumptuous of anyone to ‘design’ such a city. May be, some town planners can lay claim to designing a city, but you really think that a city can be designed by someone!
Okay, wait. I know you are asking an imaginative question and I am running it down. But that’s my limit I suppose. I can design so much less than a city even in my imagination.
So let’s rephrase this question and answer. What would be my contribution to the city of the future? If the city of the future would have women with ears for earrings, then I would open a huge store of earrings. Would that be good enough? Or am I expected to do more?
What are your top ten favorite movies?
I come across this question early morning, sipping coffee, reading Niklas Luhmann’s LOVE AS PASSION – A CODIFICATION OF INTIMACY.
So I have to scratch my head a bit to get back to my ordinary senses and extract a couple of names… Generally, just can’t bring myself to commit 2-3 hours of time to movie-watching.
Some here:
Ghulami, a movie from the Indian cinema of 80s
Guide
Khamoshi
V for Vendetta
In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar Wai)
Dunkirk / Interstellar
Terminator – Judgment Day
On another day, such a list might not read the same. But I have no doubt that I would consider these my favorites anyway.
What positive emotion do you feel most often?
I do not yet think that we have named them all, the emotions we talk about.
Playful. That’s the positive emotion I feel most often. A result of that emotion is this.
And then, since the question has these words ‘feel most often’, and since it is just this morning that I discovered the expression or the name closest to what I feel most often, I am glad to share that in this very post.
AMBIGUOUS LOSS.
Wait. I reached this expression because of a certain playfulness that I exhibit every morning, and that which makes me search for exciting book titles…
It was important to talk about both in the same breath.
How do you plan your goals?
Here’s the plan:
Verbalize the goal if you can. I mean spell it out. Word it.
Listen to the words.
Keep the words on your tongue.
Take a step. Two. Three.
Repeat the words of your goal.
Write about the steps in whatever funny way you find.
Take more steps.
Write…
Take more steps.
Write…
What is a word you feel that too many people use?
I wrote about this in a post a few months back.
MANAGE
That word that means ‘doing nothing’ or ‘handling through inertia’.
What brings you peace?
A good morning run followed by concentrated, perhaps solitudinal, work in the studio.
When I speak to myself about ‘the most important thing’, I ask, “thing means what?”
That’s right. Thing means what?
Say, the most important thing to carry is my ‘sling bag’. Does it mean a bag without any thing that the bag is meant to carry? Or, does it mean the bag with all the things that I usually carry?
Thinking of my sling bag, I have to ask, can your car be the most important thing? Or your motorcycle? But then do you carry it or does it carry you? Or ‘carry’ doesn’t work when speaking of a car? Do you notice that ‘carry’ and ‘car’ both have ‘car’? Does it bother you?
What are you curious about?
Surely, am curious about Book Titles.
To be more general, am curious about Names. Histories of Names.
Am curious about Analogies.
Am curious about Aphorisms.
Shapes.
My future. Romantic interests. Owen Barfield. Coleridge.
Wow, am curious about a lot of things. The list has just begun.
How would you describe yourself to someone who can’t see you?
Is there a purpose to describing yourself?
You gotta sing a song, may be record it, and email it across.
Record a poem otherwise in your voice. Or write one, and record, and email it across.
Or get a miniature of yourself crafted and send it across.
Describing yourself takes more than words, more so if one can’t see you.
Was today typical?
Yes, it has been a typical morning. Except that I do not wake up to the sounds of the rain outside.
I am hunting, sorry scrolling for good titles to explore interesting books.
Key words:
Attach
Source
Box
Generator
Storage
How would you describe yourself to someone?
I ask this question often whenever I find myself teaching a new class.
Now that you are asking me:
Banyan Tree
What’s the story behind your nickname?
I don’t have any story unfortunately behind my nicknames. Love made folks call me with names. And they stuck as well.
Meanwhile, here’s a thought. I was trying to understand what results in good sound quality when you record a video. It turns out there’s a thing called preamplifier. It comes in different forms as well. Am pretty sure preamplifier has certain components that make a preamplifier. Each such component has a name.
Names of component parts make up a name called preamplifier. Now, that is educational. More educational than a lot of things touted as educational.
What strategies do you use to maintain your health and well-being?
How hard it is to implement big strategies!
But there is onr strategy that works for me. I step out in the morning sun without questioning myself.
Sometimes I walk ever so slowly. Sometimes, by the time the sunrays hit my face, my feet break into a jog, sometimes into a run, and then everything starts feeling better.
Once soaked with sweat, body feels better. Mind wanders into ideas and book titles to explore…
What would you change about modern society?
The education system ought to gear itself to train youngsters in neighborhood appreciation.
Neighborhood includes geography, history of the neighborhood, trees, plants, animals small and big, minerals, public works, sources of water et al.
In India we have been very very poor in doing this.
Leave a Reply