There are 65 posts filed in philosophy (this is page 4 of 7).
“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.
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
Today, most of us are spending so much time online and on our smart devices that I feel that the value of physical items in our lives has decreased a lot. A few days ago, a friend took me to a store in the 29th street mall. It was a toy store that opened just for the holidays and on that day, everything in the store was 50% off. Needless to say, most of the store was empty, toys and funny calendars having been bought by people taking advantage of the sale. I bought a nice glass chess set on the cheap and then had a chat with the store owner. Apparently, this was a seasonal store that was closing today. She told me that about eleven hundred such stores open across the country during the holiday season and this one was closing that day. Everything that was left today was going back to the factories. I looked around the store for a while. Most of the good stuff that I’d seen in the shop a few days ago was already gone, but a lot of really interesting games and toys were still there.
Today, I made my way to my first fourteener on Pikes peak. My friends and Colorado residents who are reading this will already have guessed that I did not actually complete this monumental feat on foot. I sat on a cog rail for about an hour and half each side and journeyed comfortably to the top of the mountain at 14,110 feet. Regardless of my blatant disregard for physical pain, there was something profound about the place that made me feel rather insignificant while also making me feel part of a greater humanity. The sheer height of the mountain gets your blood racing (as much as it can in sub-zero temperature) and makes you think hard about what your life means in the sea of lives that you are aware teems in the cities below. You can see far and wide, feeling the expanse of the land around you, the great nation of America which has been given an amazing gift in this diverse and challenging piece of the continent. Continue reading
