I didn’t read any baby books when I was growing up, by that I mean books specifically written for infants and pre-schoolers. I got thrown straight into the deep end with fairly serious comics, books of folk tales, and some other strange things that most wouldn’t consider appropriate childhood reading. It was only natural after growing up listening to stories from Indian mythology and fables from around the world, lovingly narrated by my parents and grand parents. These stories weren’t protective, or clean, or politically correct, instead they were raw and brutal and beautifully human. It was a time when He-Man cartoons were being shown on TV and the idea of moral stories for children that didn’t all involve cute teddy bears, was considered normal and healthy.

During a recent chat with a friend, our rambling conversation drifted towards the issue of being a parent and the trials of growing up. Our discussion reminded me of an old story I had read somewhere, and I shared it with her in short bursts of instant messaging nuggets. She loved the story, so much so that she later went and shared it with her 8 year old son. When he reacted with similar enthusiasm, she asked me to send her a version for her to keep, and this is what I wrote:

The Sun and The Wind

Once upon a time, the Sun and the Wind got into an argument about who was the greater force of nature. The Wind was very proud of his unstoppable strength, so he challenged the Sun to a test.

Looking down at the world, they saw an old man walking down a village road wearing a coat. So, they decided that whoever can get the coat off the man would win, and be declared the strongest.

The wind tried first. He became a great storm, howling and pushing the man around. The sound was deafening, and the wind was freezing cold. But the old man had survived many storms in his years, so he just wrapped his coat around himself even tighter and continued walking against the force of the wind. Eventually, tired from all that effort, the wind gave up. He told the Sun it was impossible, for that man was surely a powerful wizard for having stood against his great powers.

The Sun listened patiently. It was now his turn to try, so he smiled his warm smile down on the old man. Feeling warm in the sunlight, the man took off his coat himself, without a struggle.

It’s usually easier to get someone to do somthing with kindness and warm smile than it is by force and shouting. And so the wind learnt his lesson.

The End

Not a particularly remarkable parable, although a very succinct and appropriate one for a lot of human behaviour. What I found interesting is the reaction children have to stories like this even today. You would think simple tales of archetypal creatures and symbols, which add meaning to the world around them, would not hold as much of a sway over kids in the age of the internet, computer graphics, and video games, but they do. We adults take well to these tales too, if we let ourselves be taken, but somewhere along the way we get cynical and begin to believe morals and lessons are only for the young and the naive.

Why is it then that the old stories are still told and listened too? Because they mean something, and as much as we like to shun meaning as adults, deep down it is in our human nature to search for pattern and meaning in everythng we experience. There isn’t a scarier thought than that all of this, existence itself, means nothing, has no greater purpose.

It is unfortunate that with time morals have gained a bad reputation. So caught up are we an the apparent randomness of the universe, and the immorality of life, that we have begun to shun the very idea of morals, and even of right and wrong. Right and wrong in their most basic sense have become politically incorrect concepts. A dangerous and ultimately fruitless mode of thought, but a natural reaction in a world caught between living by dogma out of habit, but unwilling to accept that it does. Morals and dogma are not the same thing.

As I was writing this, I looked around for illustrations to go with the piece, and found the images that are now at the top of this article. Miraculously they described the story I had remembered. These exquisite pictures were done by Milo Winter for a 1919 edition of The Aesop for Children. I read this story as a metaphor for a point in some forgotten non-fiction book, but it would seem it was one of Aesops Fables all along, originally called The North Wind and The Sun.

I tracked down the originally brief tale, as written in the Greek version, and many details were different from the way I have told it above. But while the specifics were different, the spirit was the same. I had simply sculpted the tale based

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I haven’t drawn in ages. Let me clarify. It’s not like I haven’t drawn anything recently, I draw doodles and thumbnails of things all the time. I’m a designer and a lot of my ideas come out in tiny visual sketches. But those are all documentary and explanatory drawings. I haven’t sat down and sketched anything purely for the sake of drawing in ages. Wanting to break the long famine of purely exploratory sketching, today I set out to do some pen drawings.

Most people don’t think of the standard ball point pen as a drawing instrument. I love it for drawing, and there are a few reasons for it. Firstly, it’s not a specialist artist’s tool. It’s office equipment, and the idea of using something so ubiquitous to produce beautiful imagery excites me. Secondly, I like the fact that I can’t erase my mistakes with a ball point pen. There is a certain freedom that comes from the permanence of the pen and ink on paper. You can just let go, put line down on paper, and simply live with your mistakes, incorporating them into the finished piece. It frees you up from over thinking the drawing process, and it also encourages a certain level of mental discipline to put down only those lines which you think are absolutely necessary.

I set myself the task of finishing at least three A4 sheets of sketches today, which I did. I sat down with a bunch of magazines, opened them up and chose interesting images in sequence which I then proceeded to sketch quickly on the paper, directly with the pen. There was no plan or decided layout. An image was chosen, it was drawn on the sheet and then another was chosen and drawn until the sheet was filled to satisfaction. Obviously, there was some thought put into where to place the next piece of imagery, but since all the elements that were to go in were never pre-decided, the collages have a randomness to them which I like.

For a beginning after such a long hiatus, I am quite pleased with the results. Each of these took me about 30 minutes to complete. While the quality of the drawing is not quite up to even my mediocre standards when I was drawing more regularly, It’s nice to see I haven’t lost it completely. A bit of regular practice should bring me back up to speed soon enough. At least with the excuse of putting up sketches on this blog, I can push myself to do this more regularly. Any sketching and drawing fans out there.? What are your experiences with sketching and keeping in practice?

Samir

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A good personal business card or visiting card is an invaluable thing to have. If your a designer, writer or independent weirdo of any sort, I’d say it’s absolutely essential. Whether you like it or not, telling most people you’re a freelance anything is tantamount to telling them you are jobless and destitute. The number of people who reply to “I freelance” with a sympathetic “That’s ok” is not funny.

Hand them a business card and maybe they won’t give you unsolicited career advice, and maybe actually remember you. In case you haven’t realised it yet, most people don’t remember you for ‘you’, they just remember what job you’re in. You’re usually that guy who works for XYZ, or that girl who’s into ABC. So, that guy who’s jobless is unlikely to stick. I don’t make these rules, I just read them as I see them.

When I started freelancing I was still studying. Most work came in through direct personal contacts, for whom business cards were unnecessary. As I started working with friends of friends, the need became more apparent. Thankfully, one of my final year classes was about the professional practice of design, and creating your own business card was one of the projects. That’s how I ended up with my very first personal business card.

Origami Business Card

I had my personal logo ready for more than a year before I took the professional practices class. It was now a matter of coming up with a visual style and concept for the card. I was always a firm believer in functional design, so I decided to create a card not so much with an aesthetic in mind, but one that met all my practical needs.

I needed a card that worked to promote me as a freelancer, and also had to be easy for me to produce. My requirements were these:

1. It had to be produceable on regular colour laser printers. This was practical, because I didn’t need, nor wanted to spend the money for, a proper offset print run. If I went that route I would end up getting something cheap which was un-impressive.
2. The card had to be very impressive! To get past the freelancer barrier, people needed to notice this card, remember it, and through it remember me.
3. Because it was to be laser printed, I had to have a one-sided card, or at least one that was only printed on one side of the paper. Aligning the two faces of a two sided card on laser printers was almost impossible.

With these points in mind, I figured I needed a design that was printed one one side of the sheet but was somehow a two sided business card. I decided keeping to a simple one-sided card would make it look like a cheap print. While it would be a cheap print, it couldn’t look that way. I realised I could pull this off by printing both faces on one side and then folding it into a two sided card. I could have used glue to hold the two sides together, but that would have looked tacky. Since I have always been an origami buff, I decided to use a paper fold for the fastening mechanism. Thus my origami business card was born.

This card served me well. I used it for 5 years, and it never failed to get a response from anyone I gave it to. They wanted to know what it was, why it was folded, what was inside. It did what it was supposed to do and caught their attention. But after five years it was beginning to show its age. For one I now had a website which didn’t appear on the card. I stuck it into newer versions but it was an uncomfortable add-on. Also there was the issue with people trying to open it and not finding anything inside. I needed a new business card design so I set out to work on one.

Pop-Up Business Card

Another of my paper passions provided the solution to my new problem. If you want to print on only one side, but you want something to be on the other side as well, what better than a pop-up cut into the plain white side of the paper?

That was the trigger that set me off. This time my requirements were:

1. The design had to be laser printed on one side of the sheet, with creases and cut lines included.
2. My website address had to be prominent.
3. The cutlines had to form some sort of mini pop-up sculpture on the inside white of the card.
4. Since the card could now be opened, but also was a flat business card design, there had to be a simple fastening device to keep the card closed and flat when required.

The solution you can see in the pictures. A design that kept the very textured aesthetic from the first card and my website, while also including the pop-up word “design” on the inside. It graphically described what I do better than any line of text could have. I also put in an extra flap to fold over the open edge as a seal, to keep it flat, and this flap prominently featured my website address. Not only was this a flat business card, but it became a mini table-top display with my web address on it when opened.

Coming up with this final design was not a one step process, and I do plan on writing a more detailed article on the design of just this card in the future, with pictures and explantions of my thought process. As cards go, it worked pretty well. Granted it was a bit delicate, but if people were impressed with the origami one, you can imagine the reaction to this. It worked wonders!

Unfortunetely, my pop-up card design was far from perfect. I only ever made a score or so of these and they quickly disappeared to people I met over those next few weeks. I didn’t make any more because it was too time consuming. Remember that the issue with laser printing these is that I cut and finish every one of my business cards by hand. It adds a nice personal touch to everything, a philosophy I like to maintain with my clients, but there are always practical limitations. While I could cut and fold two dozen origami cards in an hour, it took me an hour to just cut four of these pop-up business cards. I am all for the personal touch, but there are only so many hours in the day.

I’m still very much sold on the idea of a pop-up business card. I’ve seen people do very simple things with a few cuts, but my point has always been to make my personal business cards impressive. For that I need something more elaborate but also easy to produce quickly. Accepting that this was not a problem to be solved overnight, I shelved this particular design after my initial batch and planned on working on more practical alternatives in the future.

Simple Business Card

The great pop-up card saga happened last year. Into this year I didn’t have many contacts with new people. I was doing a lot of continuing projects with old clients and the need for a business card didn’t come up. All the time the ideas for business cards and especially the pop-up continued to haunt me, but I knew I needed a simple interim design which would be quick and easy. There was also the nagging feeling in the back of my mind that something like a simple personal calling card was in order. Then last month, I suddenly got into quoting for a few copywriting gigs. When a meeting with a new prospective client was set up, I found myself card-less. This was now urgent.

My simple personal business card needed to do the following:

1. It had to be dead simple as a design.
2. It had to be one-sided, flat, and quick to produce.
3. It had to reflect my personality within its limitations.
4. It had to still be memorable, if not impressive.

Since it is fairly difficult to make a laser-printed rectangle of thick paper seem like anything more than what it is, I needed to be clever with what I put on it. I decided to get rid of all color because that could sometimes come out looking cheap from a laser printer. I highlighted the fact that I write by making the card one small paragraph of writing rather than the table of informtion people are accustomed to.

As a finishing touch I resorted to a small technical trick. I used “rich black”. For those not familiar with print production, let me explain. Print works by using four colour inks: cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (CMYK). If you want a specific colour, you print the four inks on top of each other in various proportions to get what you need. To print black text you only need to print the black(K) ink, but black ink is never purely black, and it’s never the deepest black you can have. So, designers use a trick called “rich black” to compensate. This is where you print a little bit of one or two of the other colours (CMY) and then print the full black, like you normally would, on top. This makes the black look much deeper and ‘blacker’. In this card, this trick helped immensely and gave the text a bit of a raised appearence when studied closely. A worthy trick.

I’ve been using my simple black & white personal card for only a few weeks now and I love it. It’s easy to deal with and does exactly what it is meant to do. It might not attract as much attention as my previous trick cards, but I’m ok with that for now. I plan on continuing work on the pop-up design in time, but even when I do get another impressive personal card, I think I will continue to use the simple card in parallel, when it is more appropriate.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the saga of my personal business card designs to date. I hope you enjoyed this tale of design and intrigue, and I hope you will share your own busines card stories with me. I’m sure you have some good ones, and I can’t wait to hear them.

Samir

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Since when did everyone expect to get paid to be nice and do the right thing? Look around you, it’s happening as we speak. It’s not new, of course, it’s been going on a for a while. Right from the beginning of time, religion has been promising you good karma, a luxurious after-life with an attached bath, or at least a favourable promotion in the next life as compensation for being nice. That was all fine and good in a slightly abstract way, but the moment doing the right thing started to become worth your while in cold hard cash, we were doomed.

Just a few days ago I was at one of the large hypermarkets in town and saw some examples of this misguided strategy. The shop in question has started charging the customer a small token sum of money for every plastic bag they take at the checkout, to encourage the use of reusable bags. Also, to make it seem like they are doing it purely for the betterment of the environment, they offer you the money for the plastic bags back if you return them for recycling.

Sounds perfectly reasonable on the surface. But think about it. Most people are still going to pay the extra token money for the plastic bag, and consider it a small service charge. Then, very few people are actually going to take the trouble to collect up those specific plastic bags and return them to the shop for recycling. Even if the customer gives in the bags for recycling through other channels, the shop still gets to keep the money for that bag, which while small, is way too much for a single plastic bag produced in the hundreds of thousands. So the shop makes a good profit. Small amounts add up when multiplied by thousands of customers per day. All this rather than switching to more expensive biodegradable bags at their own initial expense, and then charging the customer. That would be really environmentally friendly.

In the same place they also have the system where you need to insert a coin to free a shopping trolley. The coin is returned to you when you deposit the trolley into the correct receptacle in the parking lot. This to prevent people from wandering away with the shopping trolley to carry heavy shopping to their nearby homes. And this is where the flaw in this ‘money saved or given for doing the right thing’ system becomes clear. If you’re living close by, maybe that one lost coin in the shopping trolley is a reasonable service charge to have the convenience of using a trolley to your doorstep, rather than lugging your shopping in many bags, which you also might have paid for.

As soon as you put a monetary value on doing the right thing or being nice, being bad now acquires a cost, which tells the average person that it’s ok to be bad as long as you are willing to bear the cost. It’s ok to use lots of plastic bags when you’re paying for the privilege. It’s ok to kidnap unsupecting shopping trolleys beyond supermarket parking lots when you’re paying for it with a coin. It’s ok to speed dangerously on the highway, as long as you’re willing to pay the fine.

And why not, really? After all, it’s ok to be a polluting industry as long as you are willing to pay for your institutional laziness and irresponsibility with carbon points. How can any of the above examples be considered any different when they are so much more harmless in scale?

Wake up zombie hordes! Being nice or doing the right thing was never meant to be worth your while. You do it because it’s the right thing to do. As soon as you incentivise good behaviour by charging bad behaviour, you are legitimising bad behaviour. When it’s ok to do the wrong thing as long as you pay the price, how can doing the right thing be priceless? And if being nice isn’t priceless to us anymore, then we’re doomed, because even the birds, the animals, and the trees understand that concept, and so much of nature works on that basis. The universe doesn’t do monetary penalties, green incentives, or karma points, it just sees the hand you were dealt and looks at how you dealt with it.

Samir

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The whole world is out to get you. All the signs are there. You never get a lucky break. People always treat you like dirt. And the few people who are nice? They’re after something, obviously. Everyone else is on a life-long personal vendetta to make your existence slightly more unpleasant: the people at the bank, your boss, politicians, that team you support who always loses just to spite you, and random children & animals who insist on walking in front of you when you’re so busy mulling the sorry state of the world.

Go on, admit it. You’ve had all this go through your head at some point. But some of you have this going through your head all the time. There, you see, you were just thinking it right now. To you, ladies and gentlemen of the persecuted elite, I tip my hat in awe. I would like to come up to each one of you personally, and shake your hand. Because to truly believe and live with the faith that the entire human race and stray rocks are out to make your life miserable, requires a level of self-confidence and ego that is tremendous. With that level of confidence in yourself you must all be the most creative and productive people in the world!

Why the awkward silence? What is this you say? You’re neither creative nor productive? I think I can explain the problem. Like all good human stories it starts a long time ago, on a tree far far away. The early mammals were likely always running away from dinosaurs. Hey, I don’t care if it’s true, it just looks much cooler in my head this way. So anyway, since they had to always keep an eye out for the supporting cast of Jurassic Park around every tree bark, they developed a drug habit. Every time there was the possibility of danger, their brain sent out a signal which pumped their blood with a wonderful energy drink called adrenaline. Suddenly they were filled with the instinct and energy to fight or escape whatever threatened them (fight or flight).

This drug habit worked out well for them. It meant more of these little mammals survived and avoided becoming buffalo wings for some hungry dino. Of course, back then they weren’t called buffalo wings because buffalo hadn’t been invented yet, but I digress. Eventually the dinos died out for having played too dangerously on the cosmic stock market, and the little scurrying creatures survived due to their frugal lifestyle. But the drug habit continued, because there were always new things to be threatened by.

Over the aeons, those mammals evolved and moved into caves to get away from deadly predators, and then into buildings. But while the old predators had died out and been forced into the entertainment industry, our drug lust didn’t stop. It’s quite difficult to break a 100 million year old habit. It still has its uses, of course, when you’re trying to save yourself from a burning building, or you’re trying to throw yourself out of the way of a runaway bus, but how often do those things happen to you? Not regularly, I hope. The rest of the time, our adrenaline-junkie brains make up imaginary dinos for us to run from.

Back when we were still in the caves, one or two trouble makers found a solution. They were the first to say things like, “To hell with all that hunting, man!”, and, “I’m never going to work for THE (cave) MAN,” and, “Make finger paintings not dangerous bare-fisted battle with a woolly mammoth.” Those were the first human beings that realised there was a way without the drug they had been used to, and that there was a drug with a much bigger high: creativity. Not only did they realise that getting rid of the adrenaline gifted them with the spark of creativity, but also that the spark of creative thinking helped set them free from the flight and fright feeling. This is why they went on to invent spears, solid walls, fortresses, and eventually frozen chicken.

Obviously, the rest of the population of fine upstanding cave dwellers thought these proto-artists and proto-inventors were nuts. Sure they went on tours of the neighbouring painted cave on their holidays, and sure they started copying those strange spear things the weirdos had come up with because it made the hunt less tiresome, but they weren’t falling for any of this creativity rubbish. No, they were still old fashioned, traditional people, and they preferred their drugs in adrenaline shaped bottles, thank you very much! So while the art and invention was being developed in one corner they created something more sinister in the other: gossip, and the news. You see, now it didn’t matter if dinos were chasing you, you could just hear about how dinos allegedly chased someone else and the adrenaline would taste just as good, the stress would feel just as real, and you could constantly scurry around like it was the good old days on the trees.

It was inevitable, because giving in to baser instincts is easy. Creativity is also an instinct, but one that only flourishes when the parasitic influences of fear and aggression have been removed from the equation. The cave painters knew that. Giving in was easy for them too, but keeping their heads and being creative human beings in spite of all the chemicals rushing through their blood that told them otherwise, was hard. Like those early pioneers, even today some people choose this hard path, in whatever field of endeavour they might be, because painting is not the only creative act. They choose to ignore the most powerful antagonist, their own basic natures, to do more and be more. Who would you respect, someone who always takes the easy way through everything, never achieving their best, or someone who takes the hard route, ever striving towards their best? Are there any doubts as to why the whole world is not jumping with joy every time they see you?

So, embrace the fact that you are human and meant for more than scurrying around headless. First I suggest you go break your ridiculous addiction to the news and current events, and then come back and talk to me when you are sober. I promise, I will welcome you with a warm embrace, each and every one of you. We can sit together and laugh about the good old caveman days, when the whole world was out to get you.

Samir

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Few amongst us take stock of our lives regularly, if ever. But, there are those occasions when life forces us to rethink and re-evaluate where we have come from, and where we are heading. These are significant, pivotal moments when drastic changes compel us to take a few moments in thought and see the forest for the trees. Wouldn’t it be better if we were asking ourselves these questions and answering them honestly when there wasn’t a proverbial gun held to our heads? I think so, and I wanted to share with you one of the ways I do it.

My madness you are familiar with, but one of the current methods to this madness I stumbled upon quite by accident. A few years ago I got myself a new mobile phone. I still use the same one today, but back then it was state-of-the-art with an infra-red connection and 12 whole megabytes of memory. It still had a limit to how many text messages it could store though. I like keeping a record of my conversations, so when the phone first filled up, I figured out how it could connect to an old laptop I had and back up all the messages stored on it. I was very happy with myself, but when I had to repeat the performance a few months later it didn’t work, and it never has since.

At the time, in a moment of boredom, I decided on a strange solution: I would write down all the messages in my inbox and sent folder in an old diary I had lying around. Back then I thought it was a one-time thing until I figured out the connection glitches, but I’ve been writing down messages with pen & paper in that old diary ever since. I’m glad I do, because what started as an act of desperation has proved to be a very useful exercise over the years. Let no man ever claim that failures of technology have no benefits.

I’m not one of those obsessively texting teenagers (or any sort of teenager for that matter), so every few months my phone hits its limit and starts warning me that it’s running out of space for messages. This happened continuously over the past weeks. During a particularly procrastinatory mood a few days ago, I decided to sit down with my diary and do the needful.

Looking through my old messages in the correct chronological order is like a telegraphic recap of my life over the past few months, and I always find it fascinating. As I read through the vague shadows of past conversations and events, more comes flooding back, the short text acting like mnemonic triggers, and I inevitably start asking myself some useful questions:

Where was I back then?

My current batch of messages started towards the end of December 2008. At the time I was very busy churning out articles and layouts for the regular magazine project I was working on. We were behind schedule and it looked like work would continue well into the first week of the new year, which it did.

When I finally laid that project to rest, I got a call from another designer friend who wanted help with some of her more technical work, and we had a meeting in which we discussed the looming deadline this work was to be completed by. As I read our messages arranging the meeting, I realised it had been 3 months since that meeting, the project had never quite materialised, and I had forgotten.

There were plenty of other tales in those snippets: College friends who were back in town for a quick visit after many years, online chat appointments with clients, design issues for an artist friend’s website, trips to the airport, long lost school buddies. A lot happens in 3 months of your life, even a quiet life like mine. A lot happens, and at the same time many things stand still.

Where did I want to go?

The magazine project was a business boon that provided some regular work over the last year, but every time I was working on it I looked forward to finishing it so that I could move on to other things. Writing and laying out a magazine, even a small one, can be all-consuming. So with the magazine done, I was glad I wouldn’t have to worry about that for another 2 months.

I had a handful of ideas for websites and other things I wanted to get started on. the plan was to build them up over the coming months, and have them ready and running so that regular work and updates on them could continue.

My other big to-do was to get back to writing some fiction after a hiatus of many years. Writing has always been a passion, and fiction especially so. Over the years though, I have had more occasion to write non-fiction articles and my more fanciful writing gradually took a back seat until it completely vanished. In January, I decided I must tackle a short story at worst, or ideally start writing one of the many ideas for a full sized novel I had in my notebooks.

Am I getting there?

I look back at all those things and in a word: no. I have barely put up a few place-holder pages for the web site ideas. I have done almost nothing on my other schemes, and I have yet to write a single sentence of fiction.

An honest evaluation of your progress, such as this, is very tough to face, but completely necessary if you want to seriously re-evaluate things as they stand.

Do I still want to go there?

Yes I do. I haven’t changed my mind about anything I wanted to do when my phone’s message archive began. There have definitely been refinements in some of my ideas, and the thrust of some others have been altered in my head, due to new things I’ve learnt or changing priorities. But the essentials stay unchanged.

Changing priorities and rethinking whether your old dragons are still ones you wish to slay is an important question to ask yourself, and the one question we often lie about. It is usually easier to chase our old aims in a half-hearted way than to admit to ourselves that those goals and dreams no longer interest us. Always a tough call to make, but don’t think of past time spent pursuing something you’ve changed your mind about as time wasted. It rarely is, and lessons learnt are ever applicable to new situations.

What stopped me from getting there?

These questions of ourselves get more and more difficult to answer honestly because our own minds get more treacherous and self-aggrandizing as we dig deeper. In my case the simple answer to this question would be: laziness. But, laziness and procrastination are usually symptoms rather than causes. The causes can be several:

Did I over reach?

I always do, and I am aware of this. But we aren’t always aware of our impractical demands upon ourselves. A fair measure of whether or not something we wish to do is doable usually escapes us until much later and that is a tendency to fight, for our own sanity.

Did I under perform?

Yes again, and the trick here is always to specifically think about the mechanics of how you didn’t do enough, rather than think in generalities.

Did I just not know clearly where I was going?

Also true, and in my case it is often from wanting to go too many places at once. That need not be true for everyone. It is perfectly possible to be unclear of what you want to do even when focussed on a single task. It falls upon us to recognise that and correct it in time before too much is lost in the process of finding your way in the darkness.

What held me back? What distracted me?

Not being focussed on a manageable number of things for one, runaway research, and there is always my need to carry out elaborate conversations with people using any and all mediums at my disposal. I enjoy it and I still wouldn’t give up on it, but like all things it needs to be done in a controlled and organised way. It’s just too easy to wake up in the morning, get straight into your email or Twitter account, and only realise at bed time that the day is over and you did none of the ‘work’ on your to-do list.

All things in moderation, is a worthy motto in life. The same can be said for whatever distracts you regularly from what you want to be doing.

What pushed me in the right direction?

In spite of all the critique and self-criticisms that are a necessary part of any healthy self-evaluation, taking stock of your life should emphasize equally what has worked well, and what is working to take you towards your goals.

I mentioned runaway research as being one of the things that distracted me; It is my personal favourite form of procrastination. But, I also need to admit that not all that unplanned and un-metered research was a waste. A lot comes out of my aimless wanderings and devourings of technical trivia. Many new ideas are born this way, and over the past few months, my reading has gained me insights which will very positively affect all my projects in the future. I will also save myself a lot of grief and failures due to things I have learnt that I didn’t know before. Also, some of these research marathons provided the immediate stimulus for me to do whatever little I did get done.

Never forget to look at what is working well. If something is working for you, do more of it, and if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

How does where I wanted to go back then gel with what I now know, to change my path forward?

While I’ve always loved my long conversations with people, I was nowhere as active in online social forums at the beginning of this year. While that provided one of the main distractions against my progress it has also taught me a lot and changed my mind about some of my plans.

Back then I was planning on working on my various ideas and website projects in isolation, and letting my own site languish for want of a good reason or audience to keep it going at a healthy pace. Now, I am convinced my own site is still a key element of my various plans, without which all of it will never quite work at its full potential.

While I’ve always though in a big-picture, interdependent sort of way when it comes to my plans and ideas, the past few months of online social activity and the very interesting and dear people I have met, has changed my perspective on my plans a bit. Now I’m thinking in a more organic way as to how the various pieces of the picture should grow, and how I should never lose sight of my own personal web site, and the people who grace it with their attention along the way .

As I closed my diary of short message wonders after a few hours of diligent transcription, my fingers were sore and I needed to stretch to get my limbs working again. In that itself, I came to the realisation that I almost never use a pen to write any more. Continuous keyboard use had let my writing muscles atrophy to a sad state. And with this I decided that any fiction writing that was to happen would happen on paper. In writing as in other things in life I guess ‘use it or lose it’ holds true.

My ritual stock taking of life was now over and I would not return to it for a few months. As always I found the process enlightening and educational. In the rush of everyday life we forget to step back and think of what it is we are doing, and such rethinks and re-evaluations are a must if you are one of those who want to do more than merely survive for the length of your life.

I clicked on the over-used keys on my phone, and navigated the menus to the fateful choice that said: Clear All Messages. After warning me of the permanent consequences and asking for my approval, the phone froze for a moment and then the messages were gone. My phone was clear, my mind was clear, and the future was filled with possibilities.

Samir

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Is there such a thing as truth? A very complex question if you really think about it, and quite impossible to answer without trying to define what truth is. Ask a random group of friends the question “What is Truth?“, and you will be greeted by a variety of replies ranging from blank stares, to utter confusion, to concerned queries about your love life. After all, the truth is just the truth and that’s all there is to it.

A Question

I have always wanted this site to be a conversation rather than a lecture. I’m happy to say it has worked out quite successfully so far, with many people asking me questions through the comments and the contact form. Mostly it’s practical advice on photography, cameras, design etc., and it’s often something that requires a personal reply. But sometimes it gets more esoteric, and of more universal interest. A few days ago Paul J. Richardson left me this doozy:

Most formulations of shareable “knowledge” since Plato’s original JTB definition, are just knit-pickn refinements - ignoring of course, magical and illogical ones, such as implantation by God(s). How can we avoid circular reference back to knowledge when ‘proving’ (arguing) that truth exists or is possible?

Thanks for the question, Paul. I had to mull over this for quite long before deciding on how to answer it, so here goes.

A Story

A spider sits on a small web in the dark corner of a closet. Instinctively it awaits its prey. While it waits, it starts looking around and trying to make sense of it all. It is not a creature of the light, and is quite accustomed to stunning, killing and devouring any insects that get entangled in its trap without the need of light, but on occasion its world is bathed in brightness. It has found that almost like clockwork, twice in what we know as a 24 hour period, its tiny world is flooded with blinding yellow light from the star above. Immediately, one side of the heavens open and a large creature as tall as the universe appears, and seems to rummage through the heavenly bodies that hang in the sky. The creature’s vast limbs often eclipse the star, and then it goes away, either inserting or removing a heavenly body from the heavens. The fracture in the sky is then repaired, the star goes out, and darkness reigns again in the universe until the next cycle.

The spider in the corner doesn’t quite know what to make of it. It has spoken to some other spiders who have formed a cluster of webs on the other side of the small universe, and they believe this is all based on the laws of physics, the cycle of light and dark, the movement of the the heavenly bodies in and out through the fracture in the sky, and yes, even the creature itself. They have found that the cycle is not completely regular. There are some periods of long darkness when the skies never part, and at other times the fracture appears often and the universe is lit for long periods. They are still trying to come up with a formula which would explain all their observations. They figure once they find that single, all-encompassing formula for explaining it all, they will know the whole truth about existence itself.

The loner spider in the corner is not completely convinced by all this, especially since one half of the other spiders have started to worship their formulas, and the other have begun to worship the creature, while a small group continues to claim there isn’t actually any creature, just natural forces at work. The loner spider has his own theories and he likes to keep them to himself. He’s convinced the sky is alive. He is sure that if he deciphered the working and behaviour of the sky, it will all be clear. He will finally know the ultimate truth.

Jane Smith has different concerns. For one, she never gets a chance to clean her closet. She keeps her coat in there. Every morning she takes the coat from the closet before she goes to work, and puts it back in when he gets back in the evening. She’s always planning to clean the closet over the weekend, but since she rarely opens it during those days, it always slips her mind, and the closet remains untouched. She’s spotted some spiders in there a few times, but they don’t bother her too much. She believes in live-and-let-live and is actually thankful they’re getting rid of some of those insects for her. It must be such a simple life, she thinks, to live on instinct and natural drives alone, and not need to worry about the complications of life and work. No thinking, no questioning, and no wondering about the meaning of it all.

A Truth

My fragment of a story above was meant to put our search for Truth into perspective, and those of you who are masters of reading between the lines of tales have already spotted most of the issues the story of the spider in the closet brings up.

But first, some explanation of the question for those who aren’t familiar with philosophical jargon (I myself am only partially adept at it). Western philosophy is pretty much all based on the fact that the philosopher Plato had too much time on his hands to think of life, the universe, and everything, and he bothered to leave behind written records of what he thought of it all If not for him, this entire field would either be very different or simply not exist in any formal way.

Philosophers have many ways of defining and explaining truth, all of which are confusing, counter-intuitive and contradict each other, while using co-opted terms such as correspondence and coherence. I’m not going to go into that because it doesn’t much matter. Needless to say a lot of the explanation of what truth is has to do with facts. Things that are. You need to know facts to know the truth, which brings us to the question: What is knowledge?

This is where we come back to our good friend Plato. His explanation of knowledge has been the accepted official version for millennia in western philosophy and it is usually referred to as JTB. According to Plato, knowledge is Justified True Belief. He explains further, that for you to know something 3 conditions need to be met:

1. What you know is true
2. You believe it is true
3. You are justified in believing it is true

Have you spotted the problem that Paul is talking about? Truth is related to known facts, i.e. knowledge. But, Knowledge is defined based on what is true. If truth is factual knowledge and knowledge is based on truth, how does that explain anything? It’s a circular reference.

Now we come back to the story of Jane and the spiders and why I wrote it. If you apply Plato’s knowledge formulas to what each of the protagonists of that story think they know, you will find that they will mostly meet all the criteria with flying colours. Yet, the spider in the corner, the other spiders, and Jane, all seem to know a different version of things, and so they have different facts. Since they are all justified in their belief of these facts, they must all be true. But isn’t there supposed to be the one Truth, rather than the multitude? A sort of philosophical monotheism?

The problem is that philosophy hasn’t embraced a now basic fact in science. The universe is relativistic. Our experiences of the universe, our observations of it, and therefore our knowledge of it and truth itself is relative to our senses and our frame of reference. That doesn’t make the things we know less factual, but none of these facts individually can be considered the ultimate truth. You see and feel a solid computer in front of you, and yet for an electron your computer is a vast field of empty spaces it can stroll trough. Does that mean the computer isn’t solid? Well, it’s certainly not liquid! From your frame of reference it is absolutely solid. From another, it is not. For both you and me, and the electron, there can be no ultimate truth if we can’t agree on such basic facts. And we can never agree on basic facts as long as we are trapped within limited frames of reference.

Can Truth exist? Is an Ultimate Truth possible? That was Paul’s actual question and I have to say it is possible in a theoretical thought-experiment sort of way. But as far as I can imagine, it can exist in only one every special situation. We can never see the truth because we exist as a subset of existence as a whole, and so our frame of reference is limited. The same goes for the humble electron and the mighty Milky Way galaxy. We are all trapped in limited frames of reference no matter how vast the differences in scale.

If you want to believe in a personal God, a creator who some how created the universe and all that exists, then you must believe that he/she existed before the universe, which means there is more to existence than the universe. In which case, even such a God might not necessarily know the ultimate Truth. But if existence is the universe, and the universe is so complex as to be sentient in some way beyond our comprehension, and if this sentience is omnipresent in the entirety of itself, then the universe might know the ultimate Truth. The only way I can think of for Truth to exist is for a frame of reference to exist which is all encompassing and cannot itself be observed by anything external, because nothing external exists. Only existence itself being sentient and internally self aware in a way free of all scale, reference, and time can meet this criteria.

So, I would say the ultimate Truth is beyond us. We can strive for it, as we must, we can seek it, as we all should, and we might even touch upon it, glance it with our meager intellects and feel it in some vague way for a fraction of a second. But, I seriously doubt we can ever completely posses the truth. That possibility just doesn’t fit with the facts, or with anything we know and understand. And that at least is a truth, if not the truth.

Samir

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The traditional definition of holistic health

Dictionaries and encyclopaedias define holistic health in a variety of ways to encompass different things, depending on how close to scientific and medical orthodoxy the editors stood. It comes down to looking at human health as the health of the whole individual rather than the well-being of parts. The variations come in while defining what makes up a whole individual. Some say it’s the whole physical human being who is so much more than the sum of various biological systems. Some claim it also includes the psychology of the individual. And some go further in wanting to heal the whole being, which involves the body, the mind, and the spirit.

Is holistic health another name for alternative medicine?

Short answer: no. Once again definitions limit us, and this one is even more complicated. The term ‘alternative medicine’ is a pretty bad one, not only does it not describe anything, but even the semi-description it contains only tells you what it’s not. Alternative medicine is simply everything else. Here, of course, we are talking about everything else other than what can officially called Medicine: Allopathy, Western medicine, scientific medicine, modern medicine. You know, people in white coats, syringes, pills and stuff.

Alternative medicine encompasses all manner of wonders and blunders. It is true that many disciplines which fall under the umbrella of alternative medicine do take a more holistic approach to human health. Whether or not you believe in them, systems such as herbalism and homoeopathy take the mental state of the patient as much more of an important diagnostic input than modern medicine usually does. You can look further and find more esoteric arts like transcendental meditation and yoga which go further to consider even the elusive human spirit in their quest for health.

However, alternative therapies are not automatically holistic in their approach. While many encourage the holistic view, most succumb to the the need for human beings to look at everything mechanistically and find one-to-one relationships between health problems and solutions. For this reason, today herbalism and homoeopathy are often practised in a symptomatic way, to cure symptoms rather than curing the whole person and the root causes of disorders, as was their original mandate. So while part of the puzzle, alternative therapies are not equivalent to holistic health.

What it actually means to be holistically healthy

Holism is the belief that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That belief is the basis of holistic health, and we have adequate descriptions of what makes up this whole that must be treated: body, mind, spirit, and whatever lies beyond those pieces of humanity. We have also seen that therapies which integrate some of this holistic view of health do exist, but what is holistic health in practice, and how does one achieve it? That answer would give us some insight into this beyond the definitions.

With the development of scientific thought, we have learnt to divide and subdivide the universe into ever smaller and smaller slices, so that we might understand these pieces in isolation. This is what has lead to the symptomatic treatment of human health as the orthodox way. Systems, organs, tissue, cells, and enzymes can be measures, tested, and found to be within or outside the standard parameters. The psyche, the ego, the id, and above all the spirit are less obliging to our need to observe and measure. This makes holistic health very difficult, if not impossible, to completely outsource to experts.

All our advances in physical medicine have come by relinquishing the individual responsibility of our own health to others. If you want to talk of the whole, mind, and spirit, there is only one ultimate expert in the details of your health: you. There is only one person who can look at the big picture of your health, watch your diet, practice due diligence in what you eat, how you eat it, when you sleep, what you think, and how you feel. It’s all on you.

This can either be a scary though or an empowering one, but if you want to get any real insight into what holistic health actually entails, this is it. Holistic health is about you taking responsibility for your own health. Without that there’s nothing holistic about it. Modern medicine and the many other possible therapies at your disposal are irreplaceable tools in your arsenal, as are nutrition, hygiene and common sense. You can try to describe it in large complex terms all you want but that is what it comes down to. Holistic health is your health in your hands, with the guidance and the help of others. That is how it is meant to be, and that is how it can work well, but only if you take up the mantle as captain of your own well-being.

Samir

A big thank you to Pearl for the writing nudge.

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Go forth and have an affair to remember. I’m not advocating promiscuity in your relationships, but rather in your creativity and your ideas. The good thing is that ideas don’t have feelings that can be hurt, or self esteems that can be crushed. Your mixing it up a bit with your ideas is not going to make you a bad person, just a more creative one.

In a few more days we will be at the vernal equinox. Spring is here, and in this age of global warming, you might as well take advantage of the weather to have a summer fling a little early. A spring fling with a new idea is the perfect way to kick start your creativity and be happier in the process.

Why is it then that so few of us take this plunge into a whirlwind romance? There are usually three reasons we get stuck in a rut when it comes to ideas:

1] Too few ideas

If you haven’t yet perfected your own method of generating new ideas at will, it is likely you are a bit uptight about the few ideas you have. Possessiveness is a negative emotion, as much with ideas as with people, and sometimes you have to let go. To get more comfortable, discover some new ways to brainstorm and generate ideas. Once you realise there are more fish in the sea, perhaps you will loosen up a little and take the odd chance on a casual fling.

2] Too many ideas

You could have the opposite problem. You’re spoilt for choice and so you’re never quite sure which of the thousands of ideas to choose to select wallpaper with, and which to consider as temporary distraction to have a little fun with. I have news for you, there is no magic bolt from the sky which will make these decisions for you. If you have too much to deal with, choose one promising idea at random and pursue it like a lovestruck teenager. Maybe it is a short affair, a minor infatuation, but at least you will enjoy the time you have together and maybe you’ll even be friends for life. We can all use all the friends we can get.

3] Too serious about ideas

The most common reason for freezing up with your ideas is that you are too embroiled in them. You think too much and take every idea too seriously. Just barely have you laid eyes on a vaguely pretty face of a new concept, and you’ve already started planning your future together, and how you’ll spend your long weekends, and who’ll take out the trash. All this before you’ve found out if the object of you attentions is worth your attention in the first place. To take your ideas too seriously prematurely is as deadly as being frivolous about them once they develop. You have to realise that every idea you come across is not your soul mate, and you must also realise that engaging these temporary distractions helps you grow and gives you happiness that is as important in the long run as that big idea you’re still waiting for over the horizon.

All these possible scenarios lead you to be overly attached to your ideas and that blocks everything. You could be out there in the golden spring Sun courting a beauty and accepting that it’s not meant to last, and instead you are sitting in here worrying over who will take care of whom when you get old.

Get over it. Pick an idea and run with it. A quick and breezy romance is often just what the doctor ordered for the creative type. Something that doesn’t require too much thought or planning, or guessing and second guessing. Something that is fun while it lasts and enriches your experiences for ever more. At worst it teaches you a few valuable lessons, but you can’t abstain from these in fear of the future if you hope to continue being creative.

Spring flings and quickly executed ideas are good for you, like a stint of quick exercise, or an unexpected surprise. Indulge in these without guilt because your spring flings with ideas will gift you with spontaneity, courage, and self confidence, all of which will be invaluable when you do want to tackle a serious idea which you would like to spend the rest of your life with.

You know that little hottie you’ve been flirting with or eyeing cautiously from afar? Take them out for a spin. Take a chance, make your move in good faith and with good humour. Delay too much and some other creative devil will swoop in while you’re blushing and dilly-dallying and sweep them off their feet. You would have missed an opportunity, an experience, and things will never be exactly the same again. Times change. At best you’ll be invited to their whirlwind wedding and enjoy some free food. At worst you’ll be stuck with baby sitting their pesky kids forever. Doesn’t a casual fling sound like more fun?

Samir

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All good art reintroduces you to a part of your humanity. Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Delhi-6 does just that, many times over during its running time. Starring Abhishek Bachchan, Sonam Kapoor, Waheeda Rehman, Rishi Kapoor, Atul Kulkarni, Divya Dutta, Deepak Dobriyal, Prem Chopra, Vijay Raaz, Pavan Malhotra, Supriya Pathak, Om Puri, Sheeba Chaddha, K.K. Raina, Aditi Rao, and Cyrus Sahukar, it is an energetic tale of urban India with a mythic quality usually assigned to stories of a much more ancient variety. Roshan(Abhishek Bachchan), a fairly Americanised young man whose parents moved there decades ago, is unexpectedly thrown back into a small locality of old Delhi when he offers to bring his ailing Grandmother(Waheeda Rehman) back to India; She wishes to die there. What follows is an intricate study of humanity, of a small slice of India, how it affects Roshan, and how he affects it.

As a director, Mehra’s work has gone from strength to strength. While I haven’t seen Aks in its entirety, the jump in the quality of film-making craft was very apparent between that and Rang De Basanti. The leap to Delhi-6 is a less apparent one, but more significant. Technically as beautiful and more so than the previous film, Delhi-6 achieves that which very few writers and creators achieve, the point where the work seems so “right” that any overt style of the creator disappears, and only the story remains. This makes Delhi-6 a very intimate and involving film, and I would love to see where this director goes from here, because it is bound to be engaging.

In the cinematography department, Delhi-6 is Binod Pradhan’s best work. And the contribution to the photography in this film cannot be discounted. What we see on screen is exquisite but not glamorous. While Pradhan has an impressive body of work behind him, here for the first time he has accomplished something that neither he nor anyone else in my recollection has done so convincingly, he has made the streets of India look the way they do when I walk down them. This result is a lot more elusive than you might think, and is the visual potion that makes this piece absorbing and involving for the audience.

The acting performances in this film are excellent all around. Abhishek Bachchan is an actor I admired a lot when he came into his own in such greats as Yuva, Bunty Aur Babbli, and the unfortunately ignored Bluffmaster. What followed were a string of much-shouted-about but ultimately academic performances, which were a sad shadow of the past. I’m happy to say in Delhi-6 I once again saw the Abhishek Bachchan of old. He plays Roshan with an easy innocence that few others can pull off, and I hope this means I shall see many more such performances from this talented actor.

While the character of Roshan is the viewer’s window into the world of the movie, the story is dependent on the ensemble that surrounds him. Everyone shines here, and seems like they were picked off a side alley in Chandni Chowk to essay their roles, even though they are all familiar faces. Waheeda Rehman and Rishi Kapoor add the class to this milieu, showing their maturity in buckets. This is one of Rishi Kapoor’s best performances, doing with subtlety what he did so well with near-pantomime in the recent Luck By Chance, creating a distinct and believable character.

The “bit” players have a lot of bits to carry here. Vijay Raaz brings his usual street-wise sensibility to his role as the local police officer. K.K. Raina and Prem Chopra play the pillars of the local society with ease and experience. Atul Kulkarni is refreshing as the slightly slow Gobar. Om Puri and Pavan Malhotra are perfect as feuding brothers who still need to deal with each other on a daily basis, and their families consisting of Sheeba Chaddha, Aditi Rao, and Supriya Pathak do a remarkable job of playing women caught in a no-win situation. Cyrus Sahukar plays the fly-by-night photographer with just the right amount of sleaze.

Amongst the supporting cast I think a few deserve special praise. Deepak Dobriyal plays the pivotal character of the local shopkeeper, Mamdu, with passion and humanity. Without him the story would not work as well. The same should be said for Divya Dutta playing the fiesty garbage collector, Jalebi. I have seen her in many roles before and while she always does a good job, I think she has surpassed herself here. This time I can’t imagine anyone else in that role and certainly no one else doing it better. Last but not the least, I couldn’t track down the names of the two child actors in this film who played the two young boys from the feuding families. My congratulations to them and the director for creating what might be the most realistic sounding Indian children in film history.

I have reserved a special place in this write up for Sonam Kapoor. She is the de-facto female lead of this film, if you need to narrow this broad canvas down to the concept of leads. She is a key catalyst in the plot, while also being an entire subsection of the plot herself. This is her second film after Saawariyaa, which I have not seen. I think she is very impressive, but not in the way you would expect. The regular role of the female lead in Hindi cinema has always been to be glamorous and unattainable. As Bittu, Sonam Kapoor manages to be un-glamorous and down-to-earth, while maintaining a simple charm and a beauty. You know, like a real person. She mouths no dramatic dialogue, she isn’t the most voluptuous thing you’ve ever laid your eyes on, she doesn’t watch how she looks and talks at every moment, she looks like any number of normal Indian girls I or anyone else has know in their lives. That is something I haven’t seen done so well before. I hope she goes on to use this as a strength rather than see it as a weakness, because having seen this performance I will gladly see the next Sonam Kapoor movie to be impressed again.

Another slight surprise for me here was the music by A.R. Rehman. He’s a huge talent, he’s just won two Oscars, and he’s obviously in a league of his own. But, I think talents such as his should only be measured against themselves and his recent work has not impressed me. It’s all been perfectly good and maybe even great work in general, but it was all sub-par A.R. Rehman work. I am happy to report that in Delhi-6 he is once again impressive. The soundtrack is a beautiful mix of old and new with everything from traditional folk melodies to more urban electronica. It’s all good but of special note are the title theme, Masakalli, and the very endearing Genda Phool. All excellent tracks which I will be listening to forever, and all tracks which add immensely to the experience of this film. Good film music must be both good and an integral piece of the experience, and this music is both.

Delhi-6 is a beautiful movie and one that follows in a long tradition of storytelling in parables. I think it has gotten a lot of less-than-glowing reviews because many reviewers simply didn’t have anything to put into that section of their write-ups which they reserve for exposing which English movies they think this film was shamelessly plagiarised from. In many cases it is true, but in many it is just their imagination and a looming deadline. It’s impossible to point fingers at this film in that regard because it is so unlike anything else you have seen. And that’s a good thing. Delhi-6 manages to unearth feelings within you which you had either forgotten you had, or which you had prayed you didn’t have. Having thus laid bare your human frailties to yourself, it begs you to question your own contribution to the chaos of the world. To put the viewer under such scrutiny while also making an entertaining and engaging film makes this a brilliant achievement, even if what you see isn’t always comfortable.

As a complete piece, Delhi-6 is life affirming rather than depressing. It forces you to accept humanity’s shortcomings while also celebrating our greatness. It seems to reassure us that our positive qualities can far outweigh our stupidities if only we accept it all with open arms, and think a little. This film is a lot about open arms. It is about embracing the human emotion, human prejudices, life’s inconsistencies, and India’s chaos; In all these lies a deeper happiness just waiting to be found. The best I can say about Delhi-6 in Hindi is “dil se banaya hai“, it is made from the heart. If you can see it in a similar light rather than only through the lens of your pesky intellect, you’re in for a ravishing revelation. I highly recommend you try.

Samir

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