Towards the end of a long, far-ranging conversation I was having with Ant on Tuesday, I happened to utter the rather profound line- "Non-negotiables can wait". We were talking about how, as we grow older, we prefer to stay back home rather than go out to party and get wasted on weekends because you'd rather not play catchup during the week. A large chunk of growing up is learning to say no immediate gratifications. So far, so fair- but the flipside of that temperament is also the reduction of zones of serendipity and thus a foreclosure of transcendent possibilities. What that also does is elevate the tangible over the intangible, and it is no surprise that as we grow older we get more obsessed with money because it genuinely is a terrific tangible medium of exchange. I'd mentioned earlier in that conversation that I'd gone to watch a 35mm presentation of 2001: A Space Odyssey during Easter weekend and he said he loved that film. So at this point I posed him a thought experiment: "If you had to choose between getting to watch that film in the theatre now vs being paid $1000, what'd you choose?". He laughingly said, "Thousand obviously because I can buy a DVD and keep the rest" to which I responded, "See that's exactly the problem. The joy you will get out of watching the film is real, immediate and memorable and yet we rationally choose to take the money. Not because its somehow better but because we've gotten used to exalting the tangible over the ephemeral which nonetheless is real" [Or a version of those words]. We then riffed for a bit on chores and work deliverables and how that permeates a lot of what we choose to do even on holidays and it went on like that for a bit before I had to get off at Parra.
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Back in the day when we were obsessed with Naipaul, Deekshith told me of an incident where during an interview, he [i.e., Naipaul] pointed to a stack of all his books and said, "Everything I am is in there" and I remember going Aww over it. While it is probably not true (Don't all of us like to believe there's something more to us than what's out there already) and an exercise in delusional arrogance to compare what I do here to Naipaul's work, I sometimes feel the same way about this blog. That all that there's to me is in (if not should be) in here. In his wonderful episode with Amit Varma, Chandrahas Chaudhury says that when he sits down to read a book he does so with a certain sense of respect and humility because when he is encountering the best, most thoughtful version of the writer, it is on him to offer his best version too. I think its a lovely, charming practice. And yet as a quasi-writer, I seem to be incapable of doing that. It seems to me that what I should put forth is not the best version but all of the bad, the ugly and whatever little of the good. While a large part of it comes from my lack of discipline, inability to revise, hubris and frivolousness, atleast a sliver of it is motivated by what Kaufman said in his BFI speech- "..if you’re honest about who you are, you’ll help that person be less lonely in their world because that person will recognise him or herself in you and that will give them hope." I know that that is not an excuse to present mediocre work or half-finished, unapproachable thoughts or a profound lack of craft, but that is probably why for all my failings, I haven't stopped blogging - It is a medium which allows for my short, somewhat self-contained bursts of thought which when seen together hopefully presents a more coherent evolution and worldview. Despite failing repeatedly, even last week I wrote a couple of pieces in a notebook to kick this habit, I'm doing this fairly frequently - comfortable in the knowledge that this the right thing to do. I really don't know if its genuinely my calling or intertia/ addiction but somewhere deep inside I know I'm my most natural self here. And natural is supposed to be good right?
I have been working on a couple of minor projects since Jan and April respectively. They are non-serious, almost hobbyish and there's not much work involved; I spend like 2 minutes everyday on both of them combined but I've been doing it continuously for many weeks and I'm kinda surprised with my regularity. I must reiterate that quaility of each of those daily components is sub-par but the hope is that the overall mosaic will have enough to atleast protrude above the surface. The idea, again, is not to strive and find the best, and then polish it for presentation, but on the contrary to keep making them, without much thought of artistic intentions and motivations, to both capture the prosaic and cherish the making itself. If something larger/ grander/ deeper can be coaxed out of it, it is a (happy?) side effect. I'd like to feel there's something artisinal about it but even broaching those thoughts is to fall into the artist/ curator trap. It is what it is - a slice of my day that is true to itself with all its faults, follies, cracks, and intentions.
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