In the cold, analytical light of day, rejection is a simple matter of a decision taken, but as the rejected, our reaction to it is very much an emotional one. If it weren’t, we’d scarcely need to think of how to deal with it, for there’d be a logical answer to it. In fact, there is; Not one answer, rather a bank of answers depending on the circumstances, but neither you nor I are likely to see it clearly in the emotional charge of it all. This makes it all the more important that someone lays out the analytical point of view for dealing with rejection. Emotional advice such as being yourself, picking yourself up from the purported disaster, and other such platitudes you can find plenty of on inspirational posters everywhere. However, once you’ve indulged in all the love, healing and angst you can (which I recommend if you find them helpful), perhaps you’d like to know what to do next.

Rejection, beyond the broad linguistic meaning, is always connected to the creation of something new. Sometimes it is a personal relationship, at others it is an assignment, a job, or an admission into something you were looking forward to. When we are refused a physical object, we feel a deep disappointment at worst, but rejection is the quashing of a dream; Something that could have been, and that which could have been is always for a deeper motivation. How you deal with it has a lot to do with that motivation.

‘Dealing with it’ means different things to different people, ranging from scholarly debate to throwing fragile objects against a violent wall. When some talk of dealing they mean fixing and others mean coping. Th difference can be either subtle or vast, and most of us would like some mixture of the two extremes that is unique to their temperament, when dealing with rejection. To find your own personal panacea, you must understand the way these two extremes, coping and fixing, work.

The original motivation is key, because there are many reasons we want something. We want things for the sake of achieving, possessing, or for a favourable association; Often it’s for an emotion or a chance to get one step closer to some long-held ideal. Ask yourself whether you wished for the denied thing itself, or for what it would lead to and mean for you. This is quite difficult to answer honestly, because we often mistake our own intentions. We project our ideal outcome or goal onto the person, organization or entity that rejects us, but often the rejecter is just a means to an end. That end is what you need to wrestle from your psyche. Was what you were denied what you were truly after, or was it merely a step forward, a vehicle for your dreams?

Fixing things after rejection depends on this crucial question of motivation. If the rejecter truly was your aim, your end, rejection means a re-evaluation of the association is called for. If they are the important element, there is often an alternative association, a different relationship, a different equation than the one you imagined that might be more readily approved than the one you imagined. Sometimes plan-B can even be better.

If the denied thing or the rejecter was merely a step forward, a conduit towards what you are seeking, then as disappointing as the rejection is, you must recognise your true goal and find an alternative method, a new means, a different path to reach your end. The goal on the horizon hasn’t rejected you or dashed your dreams, you’ve just been refused by the ferry captain who you thought would provide you safe passage on your journey. The journey is not at an end yet and there are ever more ways to cover Earth and sky and ocean.

Coping with rejection is a confusing house of mirrors that is not open to cold analysis, but it is also not as insurmountable as it first appears. Disappointment is a clawing feeling that causes our already tenuous grasp on self-confidence teeter on the edge of oblivion. We are social creatures and to be rejected, even if not in a personal circumstance, is a painful lack of acceptance by others that gnaws at our most basic pack-animal fears: that of being alone, unappreciated and unimportant. It is the metaphorical staring into the vast abyss of the universe and realising the universe may not think we are the greatest thing ever. It may not even know that we exist. Rejection makes us feel like our existence is under question. Only, it is not.

Here again, recognising your motivation beyond the obvious helps in accepting rejection on a personal level, without taking it as a failure of all you stand for. If what you were denied was not your true goal, you should be thankful for not getting into an fulfilling, unappreciated association. Another means to your end might better recognise what you bring to the proceedings, your uniqueness, your reason for existing. You cannot please everyone all the time and shouldn’t try. An unfavourable relationship, personal or professional, can mar more than make, and you have much to make of your dreams and horizons.

If what was denied truly was your ultimate goal, a rare event, recognise the ends, dreams and needs of the other party. Find another equation that will work mutually, with a regard for the aims of all parties involved. To not see their side, their individuality, their dreams, and their reason to exist, is to reject the importance of their existence. You are not the unfeeling universe; Feel and understand, cope and create anew.

Samir

P.S. The skeleton of this post was written almost two years ago based on a discussion and a request from a friend. While the thoughts were shared privately then, I never got around to finishing it to my satisfaction for public consumption. When inspiration rejects us, sometimes we simply have to be patient and wait for the mental weathers to change.

Branding and identity design has its universal challenges and those challenges are a little bit trickier when it comes to designing identity for an individual rather than a relatively faceless organisation. These considerations went into my recent logo design for a consultant, and as time has passed since and contact information had to be updated, it came time to implement the new logo into a new business card design.

Personal business cards need to be just that, personal. The person in question needs to take centre stage and be the most important piece of information conveyed, along with a certain differentiating personality. My own personal business card currently sticks to a minimal visual style. Such simple business cards are both easier to produce and also easier to reconcile conceptually when the person they represent is a broad-ranging generalist, so I thought it fitting to create a similar simple statement with the design of this business card for my Father.

The important elements to keep in mind were to give the name prominence, to keep the information clean and easy to read, and to integrate the logo in a way that is familiar to the corporate-minded audience, while also having enough personality to not appear corporate and stoic in its mood. I think what I came up with adequately fills those requirements while also having a bit of visual flair, which can never hurt in making a first impression when handing over your card.

In keeping with the agile, on-demand nature of the way we deal with business cards as independent consultants, Vishal and myself as designers and our Dad as a water-treatment consultant, this new requirement for a business card was also dealt with in an unconventional way. Having created the original quick business card design many months ago, Vishal worked on an updated version with the logo, while as the designer of the logo, I worked on a new look from scratch. Both designers were finished and printed so that two parallel sets of cards are now available for use. This is not your standard branding practice, but is perfectly valid when you have the freedom to not mass produce cards which will last you months and years.

I’m happy with the results, and now our intrepid consultant has two cards to choose from when meeting new contacts. This added flexibility can actually help and perhaps the different designs will work best with different audiences, of which he deals with a variety in his working across technical and commercial boundaries in a very varied field of work. Maybe it will work as a very rudimentary and physical form of A/B testing; Time will tell. For now the designs is done and out there in the world to be used. Not much more a designer can ask for.

Samir

In the beginning, the idea was a simple one, to make a useful site. I always have written quite a bit on this blog about blogging software, content management systems and building websites, information I think is useful to many and surprisingly elusive in the flood of technical information online. I wanted to give all this information its own space where I didn’t have to worry about alienating my often non-technical regular readers. Then I came up with a name Content Deliverance and things got more complicated.

The melodramatic name worked well in my head, and in typical fashion, I decided that the site’s personality would come from the use of classic Biblical etchings and mythological illustrations that vaguely fit the theme of each post. When I finally got down to making Content Deliverance, I ended up creating a blog template from scratch and had convinced myself I’d make original illustrations for every post, illustrations tying the post to scenes from the grossly under-represented Indian mythos. This is how I ended up churning out some good, and some passable, Indian mythological illustrations in my vector graphics software of choice, Inkscape.

Being a sucker for punishment, by the time I’d gotten around to the second illustration for a post on the benefits of timeless content, I decided I’d try, as far as possible, to create these vector illustrations directly on the computer, with no physical sketches for guidance and with little or no reference, to test how much I could push myself. As you can see in the illustration of Ganesha scrawling the Mahabharat, push myself I did.

Over the next few months, back in 2011, I did a series of eight posts on Content Deliverance and eight illustrations on Indian mythology to go with them. Some were rudimentary and quick to execute, some took days of slow work and careful detailing to create the effect I wanted. Through the process, I learnt a lot about illustrating with Inkscape. Even more importantly, I learnt that I could in fact think up images and put them down in a tangible form, an ability I am confident of with words but wasn’t so sure of with my artistic abilities at the time. These eight images gave me the confidence to tackle a much more strenuous course of visual experimentation at Today’s Doodle later that same year. While my technical skills are still far from consistent or remarkable, the boost in confidence which started with these images cannot be discounted.

Creating vector illustrations in the planned and layered fashion the medium allows, is a skill and a thought process of its own. I had used it in various pieces of commercial work before, and even the still very detailed personal March to Your Own Tune image from many years ago, but creating so many different images in a relatively quick manner gave me a new appreciation of the benefits of working in something like Inkscape. I found myself relying less on bells, whistles and fancy automation, and more on simple layered thinking, as one would have in the old days of air-brush art. That thinking in terms of masking and overlapping I even distilled into a short piece I wrote on the Primordial Soop blog, about creating dappled light effects with vectors, from the techniques used in the above image of Ram, Laxman and Shabari from the Ramayan.

Most of all, this exercise reminded me of so many forgotten stories, so many nuances and wonders of all that is the long-running story of Indian storytelling. In trying to find appropriate imagery for obscure technical matters, I explored the mythic stories of the Vedic culture in ways I hadn’t before, and it was fascinating to see them anew and see them in ways that are just my own, as is the power of myth and parable. I was thankful for my stubborn and difficult idea for what should have been a simple technical site.

After that initial burst of enthusiasm, I lost steam in the actual writing of new material. While the site is still a sound idea, I was distracted by other projects and Content Deliverance was let to stagnate, as it has to this day. I think now of restarting my efforts, because such a resource is as needed now, and maybe more so, to cut through the clutter of me-too sites on WordPress and such popular topics that seem easy to cover with cut-and-paste blogging. I was trying to build something unique and useful, which I should continue.

I have thought more recently to give up on the dream of creating original illustrations for every post, but it doesn’t feel right to give up on what is essentially the unique character of the site, beyond the fresh start it provides in tacking the subject at hand. Only time will tell how I am able to continue this stream of technicalities and ancient tales brought to life in images, but I hope I am able to keep the knowledge alive and the myths breathing their colourful humours indefinitely.

Samir

When you sleep you dream of clouds, pink sunlight that sings aloud, and you revel in the warm cotton of dawn, not looking up but running on.

At the beginning of this year I started taking pictures of origami with my phone camera. Not counting scribbling, photography is my oldest love. I’ve been taking pictures since I could read and write, and it was always as a visual exploration rather than as a mere recording device of family snapshots. This long history means I am not quick to jump on to the latest photography bandwagons, which come up ever more often in the fast-changing world of consumer digital photography, so I did not sign up for Instagram even after I got myself a smart phone. Recently, however, I decided I could use Instagram the way I use Twitter, as a focussed project in turning out things regularly. This I have been doing and I just reached 50 photographs in my origami-picture project.

Conversation slips from cool to warm, often rises in revelled storm; In charming company it also sings, of scent and taste and poetic things.

1. To make more origami, which I do nowhere as often as I’d like to
2. To take more planned, and sometimes abstract, pictures.
3. To write less personally-motivated rhymes, which I enjoy doing.

I started off with a bunch of origami boats and random things I’ve had sitting on my desk for years, some of it from back when I was preparing the dummy site for my lecture some years ago on online portfolios. Through most of January, I tried to carry around one piece of origami whenever I’d head out, and took as many pictures as I could in a variety of locations, situations and lighting. While I do want to explore all sorts of different styles of photography within this framework in the future, I figured going outdoors, out-and-about in the world, was the best way to play with it in the beginning, rather than being stuck at home under a table lamp, the easiest option.

Numbers grant strength, inertia & drag, enthusiasm for a warning flag, for numbers expect all who are to abide, lone ships on their red tide.

Patterns form and patterns break, we stay along for pattern's sake, and in that limpid pool of chance, as patterns shift, we stay to dance.

One thing I noticed about photos of origami when I first got this idea, especially on Instagram, is that they are more often than not merely documentary photographs of middling quality. There is a rarely even an attempt to create a good photograph, with the focus being on displaying a piece of paper-folding, and that too not in the best light. Having seen that, I decided my photos should work equally as interesting photographs, as they do as documentary pictures of origami models.

A star peeks out the veil of night, in a corner a spirit stirs, spreads shriveled wings with all its might, until they beat as golden blurs.

We decry a lack of fodder for the mind, but intuit and you will find, considerations littering the ground, as food for thought is all around.

Since I now had a new Xperia-Mini instead of the old fairly-useless phone camera on my previous model, I knew I certainly had more of a technical ability to take quality pictures on the phone. That combined with all the usual wisdoms involved in making the best of the photographic equipment you have in hand, has made for some very interesting, and in some cases striking, images which I am quite happy with. A phone camera can never replace a proper one, but thinking in its terms is an interesting and educational exercise.

Trapped in the belly of the beast, not irritant nor joyous feast, yet on your little boat of chance, when sights are grim, give tact a lance.

The other aspect I wanted to add into the mix was the text that goes with the pictures. It comes almost as second-nature to most, to add in a clever or appropriate title to pictures such as those added on Instagram. I wanted to take that even further by adding in rhyme and thought, and sometimes even story, into the mix. I wanted the photo and the text to say more than either could do on their own; A chance for me to write and rhyme on a more diverse set of subjects without letting too much personal introspection come into it. I’ve let the pictures lead me to the text, which has resulted in a variety of writings.

In darkness meagre light is brighter, a buoyant heart a little lighter, so fan a flame and murk will fray, if not to white then hopeful grey.

What started with a set of old origami slowly moved into newer more exotic models. I took a few shots using the origami Diwali lamp I designed for the festival, looked up simple diagrams both online and off to make three fresh designs I was not familiar with, and I even did a couple of improvisations. Not a bad start to exploring origami more through photography and Instagram. For now I’ve been sticking to tiny models made of simple white note-paper, more for the convenience of being able to carry them around in my pocket easily. In time, I will try other scales and more elaborate models and ways to utilise them. These simple explorations have been a strong place to start.

What garb to don we never settle, clothe our souls in stone & metal, in which thickest skin does seethe, nostalgic for when we could breathe.

The world is wonderfully strange, beauty comes in every range, from sunlight glowing over eaves, to weird creatures nestled in the leaves.

Fifty down and sky’s the limit. I will continue to play with this as long as the enthusiasm lasts. As far as raw material goes, there are an infinite number of origami models out there to try, and a further infinite number of photos I could take with them. Coming up with text to go with each is sometimes a challenge, but a happy one, and I have enjoyed the results of my attempts for the most part. What I’ve done thus far has been a lot of fun and I hope to enjoy this process even more with time. Creating a couple of hundred strong photos with rhyming captions by the end of the year won’t be a bad pay-off either.

Fleeting thoughts, flights of fancy, inspired bits of logic chancy, a sparkled idea that brightness brings, notions with a touch of wings.

I’m Papernaut on Instagram. Follow me there, or just look around and read what I’ve done and will do as more gets added. You can also follow me on Facebook and keep track of my Instagram album there.

For now, onward with the experiments.

Samir

When the first sea-creatures braved the shores of a primitive Earth and pulled themselves on to dry land, their attempts were probably not the prettiest thing to look at. They were still getting to grips with, and even inventing, the basic mechanics of locomotion with rudimentary limbs in the open air. They were aeons away from the grace of a gazelle leaping confidently through the grasslands, but eventually they’d get there, once they’d figured out which over-developed fin to push forward before the other, to manage some semblance of direction without the enveloping water.

As writers and new explorers of communication with the written word, we too are often merely getting by, more involved in the basic mechanics of language and expression than attempting grace. In time, as the mechanics of writing become second-nature and we can consign the nuances of verbs, clauses and grammar to a well-trained subconscious, we begin to wonder about grace and personality in what we write, and thus we set out to find our writing voice.

A writer’s voice is a sum total of many definable things, but in itself eludes simple definition. While mechanical structures like grammar and vocabulary, and patterns such as pace and tone can be pinned down in words to varying degrees, the writing voice is the emergent character that results from all those features, a personality, a certain cadence to our words and the ideas they weave. This general writing style in time becomes a writer’s most distinguishing mark in a realm where we all have the same words to work with. It also becomes the most powerful aspect of a writer’s craft because the non-analytical reader, the vast majority who read for pleasure, will pick up on the voice in your writing before they ever do your technique. Your voice is what they will learn to love or hate, admire or dismiss; Your voice in your writing is what the average reader will come back for.

As with all literary technique, this personality in words can ascribed to all sorts of clever formulae and tricks, but ultimately the way to develop your unique writer’s voice is a matter of practice and more practice. As social creatures we often start by emulating the written cadence of the writers we enjoy reading and those who have influenced us most recently, but keep writing and in time a more unique character will emerge that is all your own. While that is the crux of it, there are things you can do to better guide you from the rudiments of dragging yourself through the mud of basic writing proficiency to the effortless sprinting through phrase and fecundity. You as much develop your writing voice as you find it, and this evolution has some helpful patterns to follow.

Expand your influences

the genetic pool

With our hard-wired social thinking of ‘monkey see, monkey do’ it’s easy to see why imitation is our first route to learning something as individual as a writing voice. Biologically speaking, it’s a perfectly valid way to learn and it saves us from having to reinvent the wheel with every generation. With creative expression, however, we are looking not just to emulate the best solutions of the past but also to grow and evolve a unique expression of our own. One way to do this is to make sure you are influenced by as wide a variety of sources as possible.

If only one kind of creature had tried to walk on land out of some primordial ocean, we’d all look a lot more similar as we went about foraging for food and purpose every morning, whether in suits or furs. But because some pulled, some pushed, some wriggled and some crawled into an air-breathing existence, the genetic pool of land-creatures was wide enough as to produce the variety you see today, each solution with its own unique grace, its own specific personality.

If you take the same route every day and never observe the people and sights along the way in an unaware stupor, you have very little to work with as a writer. The same goes for more direct written influences. If you only read one kind of book as a reader, the chances are you will only imitate that for the rest of your writing life. We all have favourites, of course, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but keeping in mind our natural tendency to emulate, a variety of influences gives us a variety of raw material to imbibe, mix and re-mix until we form our own written cadence. As a writer, you often end up being defined as much by all the things you don’t read and so it helps to read as widely as you can within reason, so that when you do find your writing voice, it is evolved from informed choice rather than from ignorance.

Talk to yourself

natural selection

Writing journals and diaries is something writers have been recommended to do for ages, and there is some strength in that claim. It’s not just for the exploration of your inner self, as most would think, or as a useful record of thoughts and conclusions, but also in the simple matter of developing your writing voice.

I’ve found talking to myself in my notes and logs to be useful in many practical, self-searching ways, but I have also found that as I have grown accustomed to writing and hence sharing my thoughts with myself in writing, I have become more casual, personal and unmistakably myself in my written tone of voice. We can be truly delusional when it comes to assessing our own talents and capabilities, but it is also true that there can be no harsher critic of unnecessary affectations in our words and writing style than our inner critic. Writing to yourself and for yourself can be an excellent way to kick-start this inner editor.

With ourselves, we have the most freedom, and in being ourselves in writing lies the key to evolving a proper writing voice. The harsh inner criticism helps in this case because you are the lest likely to tolerate anything in your writing style that is in the least bit disingenuous. Others might never know and your craft might mask any stylistic facade with sufficient conviction, but it’s difficult to fool yourself when you’re talking to the one person who can see through it. Writing to yourself is a great way to cut out the dead weight in your writing style, and thus hone your writer’s voice to its most honest core.

Experiment with language

mutation

To have all this method is well and good, and quite straight-forward to implement in your own writing, but your method really can use some madness to give it that edge. Influences and raw materials are useful, your inner critic is useful, but the occasional bout of pure random chance prodded on by foolish bravado can often result in much more startling leaps in your writing.

Evolution is not always about slow and gradual development, it is as much about the fortuitous chance, the random change, the chaotic mutation. All creatures have benefited from such random leaps of genetic faith in the history of our development and you can too as a writer, All you have to do is to take some chances on occasion with your language.

Once you are confident with the rules of writing, the mechanics, syntax and structure, try bending those rules on occasion, consciously. Try out an awkward phrase, a mismatched metaphor, an ill-advised adjective and see where it takes you. As much as you might have imbibed the dos and donts of the written word, you never know what will not work for you and with your writing until you give it a try. What do you have to lose? Any ghastly horrors of experimental word-play are only an edit away from respectability, but on occasion your chaotic trials will yield beautiful things, sometimes delicate and sometimes bold and visceral. Either can be a boon to your writing and either can become an element in reading something that is uniquely your work.

Writing is a chance; It’s a series of chances leapt into at various stages of the process. Once you’ve committed yourself to this beautifully risky endeavour, you might as well go all the way and take some chances with your language and your choices too. You never know what turn of phrase and distortion of conventional writing wisdom will come to be your personality in the written word, so take a chance and try out the untried.

As with all things human, it’s easy to paint the writing voice into a corner of methods and techniques that are both unquestionable and also utter rubbish, depending on who you are. It is just as easy to make it some ephemeral magic that happens when the moon is just right and velvet unicorns are spotted on a Sunday. As with all things human, the truth often lies somewhere in the middle of all these opposing directions. Whatever the method or madness you subscribe to, finding your writing voice is something every one who aspires to be a serious wielder of words must put some minimal effort into. Without a voice, your prose might be plump and pretty, your words might be wielded with wisdom and wonder, but they will have no personality. In the long run, it is the personalities we remember, and we all want to be remembered. It is why we write, even if indirectly, to be remembered for who we are and what we think and what we say, so make sure you say it and write it in a voice no one else ever has before, or ever will.

Samir

This article was instigated and inspired by a question in a reader’s comment on my thoughts on clear-headed writing. Thank you Satlih.

I received a spam comment recently that was masquerading as a request for writing advice. Not that receiving spam is a rare event, but this one caught my attention because it was completely coherent and asked a valid question. The basic question(s) were these:

How do you centre yourself and clear your head before writing?
Do you have any tips for getting started at every session? Since the first 10-15 minutes are often lost trying to figure out how.

Far be it from me to look a gift-writing-horse in the mouth, so I shall attempt to answer. Thank you, random spam person.

It comes down to this. People, and writers are people too, are very firmly divided on the subject of writing. There are those who think writing is hard, and those who are convinced writing is easy. Unfortunately, they’re both right. The act of writing can actually be quite easy once you learn to spew words on a page, just as we quite naturally spew words into that empty blankness of mental space. We do little censoring there, or editing, often thinking and saying things to ourselves we’d not admit in good company, and that’s where writing gets hard. As soon as you think of putting something down ‘in writing’ most of us suddenly feel we need to behave like we’re in good company, whatever that is, and so the words don’t flow but drip, and sometimes trickle, and maybe in time they near some sort of reasonably steady stream, and it might seem like you are actually a writer.

The beginnings are tough because our heads are always on, always spewing, always thinking and always shooting ephemeral words into the chaotic mental frame. There, we have no beginning to connect to because it never stops, not even when we sleep. So in some ways the challenge is not in stopping the brain, clearing our mind so that the business of sitting down and writing can be contended with in a mature and organised fashion. It’s more like being in front of a giant revolving door, or perhaps an infinite bank of revolving doors through which you may gain entry to your stream of thought, but they’re all moving at the same time and show no signs of stopping to give you an easy way in. You need to insert yourself into the proceedings to have some hope of capturing some of those precious words, which counter-intuitively, you have too many of running constantly through your head.

There is a great fallacy about the mind and the average process of thinking, and that is that it is possible to clear the mind, to clean the slate, to start from that blank page we too easily apply as metaphor for our complex process of thought and cognition. It’s poetic but absolute rubbish. Even the most adept at meditation will likely be unable to clear their mind completely. Neurons never stop firing and notions never stop being birthed. That is the nature of our existence. What we can do and so often fail to do is to focus and not be bewildered by the onslaught.

Returning to our infinite bank of revolving doors, the problem isn’t that we can’t get all the revolving doors to stop, so that we might enter the halls of centred thought and clear writing; The problem is that most of us can’t focus on one revolving door long enough to take the courage to plunge in. As a writer that’s what you must do. For the few seconds it takes to scribble your first words or type your first misspelled line of text to your magnum opus, you need to see only the one revolving door without being mesmerised by its horrific chaos, all the other doors must cease to exist in your mental eye, though they’re still there, and at that moment you must risk injury and step in.

And then there’s the other reason why beginning is hard, because as with revolving doors, those first few steps in writing are not always the most elegant. Sometimes you walk through as though nothing was in your way, sometimes you step and stumble between the glass, and sometimes the door practically whacks you in the back and pushes you around. When you start writing, all of that can potentially happen in those first 10 or 15 minutes, and it can only be minimised by bravado. If you slow down or stop, you’ll be spit back out and will need to start all over again. Go with it, however, and at worst the words will push you around or ever take you a few rounds in confusion before you are allowed to enter the focused stream of thought. What some call the flow state and others inspiration.

On occasion, what you write when the thoughts are taking you in circles will be gibberish, spam, mere warm up which you will later find can safely be excised from your piece, and their loss will make it stronger. But at times, in that whirlwind of confusion, your vision sees things in the blur which it wouldn’t otherwise, and some true gems of insight or language can come out of it. We are all buffeted about by our thoughts, even those who don’t write, and so that initial unsaid acknowledgement of your own seeking can actually work well as a reading experience. But that is a call for you to make ever time you write and every time you come to editing your sojourn into written thought.

So don’t try to clear your head; It can’t really be done and you shouldn’t. Merely be polite with your stray thoughts and move them out of your immediate attention for a little while. Don’t try to stop the chaos, because it is that revolving chaos, that mad engine of notions, which will shoot you with a proper momentum into your words, so that your interest and your hunger to seek and write shall be a healthy one. Focus, and ultimately be brave, be momentarily foolish, for what you play with are merely words and you have a lot of them, more than you know. There is no lack, merely a distribution problem, and one of access. Writing is hard you see, but also easy. You merely step into the revolving door, and enjoy the rush until it’s done. And then you can wander and dream again.

Samir

Quirky facts become anecdote and eventually settle into legend. Among Indians of a certain age-group, such is the status of tour groups of middle-aged Indian couples, and families, that go on European holidays with the express comfort of knowing their tour-provider will arrange for familiar Indian food, and in some cases strictly prepared Indian food to very exacting religious norms, all this while marvelling at the old cultures of the West and their well preserved buildings. Some people go looking for the unfamiliar as achievement but never want to have to live with it, and why not, when they have the means of dipping into a foreign culture while remaining safely wrapped in the habits and conventions of their own? I think most human beings would make a similar choice if it was easy enough to insist on without embarrassment.

It’s not just middle-aged Indians who do such things; You will find plenty of Americans who will travel across the globe only to desperately seek out the local McDonald’s for sustenance. The excuse there is that McDonald’s food is safe compared to the unknown food monstrosities out there, which is no different than disapproving Indian Uncles and Aunties tut-tutting about not knowing what these foreigners put in their food and not wanting to find out. That is the more common form of seeking the familiar in the unfamiliar, a sort of culinary and psychological life-saver to be held on to desperately, so as not to drown in alien seas and swallow the unknown waters. There is another, however, and that becomes possible when you travel to unfamiliar places which are deceptively like the familiar. Those fringe cases of culture and experience twist your mind a bit, and give you ample opportunity to rediscover the familiar through new and sharpened senses. Finding familiar treats in unfamiliar lands is as much a comfort as it is an adventure down memory lane.

While my family hails from the South of India, my experience of the region has been fairly limited thus far. I’ve made flying visits to Mangalore and Bangalore, and around Karnataka, dipping into the connections of various branches of my extended family, but I’ve never ventured into the other states that make up the vast South Indian peninsula. In Karnataka, there was always the comfort of being able to communicate in one of the local languages, in however stilted a manner, but I recently found myself in Chennai, and suddenly I was in an India I knew and was familiar with, but in an alien world where the language was unknown and the place was just that little bit on the side of the unknown.

I was walking down a tree-lined street late one evening in the genteel by-lanes of Besant Nagar with a friend, and in one of those impulse decisions we stepped into a random grocery store along the way to stock up on a few food essentials before we headed home. It was an interesting little shop because in it you could see the evolution of small-scale Indian retail, if you were paying attention.

As a kid in Bombay, I grew up with two kinds of stores serving the day-to-day needs of a home. There were the small corner shops, or kirana wallahs, little puzzle-pieces of shopping, stacked with things on every available surface, with the entire death-trap of a cul-de-sac layout wrapped around one glass counter. The proprietor sat behind the counter, and most of the items on sale stayed there too. You didn’t pick up items yourself unless they happened to be located in some corner of the shop or some cleverly constructed shelf along the wall which was out of reach from behind the counter. If anything was well out of reach, some young chap would often take out a ladder and fetch it from the heavens, the high shelves along the wall. That was one very distinct sort of retail experience. The other was the one more familiar in the modern urbanised world, one of aisles and shelves and picking out your purchases to place in baskets, and check-out counters. While this was not a popular model when I was a kid, it was well and handsomely represented by the Apna Bazaar phenomenon. Apna Bazaar was, and is, a semi-governmental co-operative run, department store chain, primarily made for the then burgeoning middle-class and lower middle-class. They had a stamp scheme for subsidised payments, had low prices, and were the go-to place for picking up all those things which you wouldn’t get in your corner store. While the kirana wallah was a few metres across, the large Apna Bazaars of the time were set off in their own little structures, some with several, albeit modest by current standards, storeys of retail space. It was a laid-back enterprise, being run as service rather than strictly profit-making business, but going around those aisles with your quaint faux-basket-weave plastic shopping basket was a unique experience for the time.

The grocery store I stepped into in Chennai was a mix of those two models, a combination of closed off counter space and browsable aisles, which we are all now comfortable with as the standard structure of most small and mid-sized stores. This one, however, had more that was hybrid about it than just that. Like the corner stores of old, some of which survive and thrive even in large cities like Bombay, the pair behind the counter were clearly father and son. The older gentleman was carefully noting down accounts in a small lined school notebook when we walked in, and the son was talking on a mobile phone, taking orders for delivery. Our shopping spree was neither extensive nor too unusual, a mix of snacks, essential emergency food supplies (read: cup noodles), and plenty of impulse buys of things you only get a craving for when they’re in front of you in the super-market shelf. Some of these well-considered purchases included a packet of arrowroot biscuits from Britannia, a packet of sugared jujubes, and a small transparent bag of murruku. Of these, one was standard fare for such casual shopping, one was a rare treat since I don’t live in India through most of the year, and one was an almost forgotten staple of childhood. All of them, however, were comfortingly familiar.

When I was little and we stayed with at my grand parents’ place in Bombay, in a corner kitchen cupboard filled with random cooking ingredients, small electrical torches for when there was a power cut, and miscellaneous kitchen bric-a-brac, there used to be a small metal tin of white powder that was fished out on occasions when sweets were being prepared. This well-preserved powder was arrowroot, a starchy thickening agent which I heard about more often than I saw used, except that I ate a good deal of it in the form of a biscuit. These days the Indian retail landscape of mildly sweet biscuits as accompaniment to chai has been taken over completely by the ubiquitous Marie biscuit, but I remember a time when equally available were the similar looking and tasting arrowroot biscuits.

Arrowroot is a plant and the starch extracted from its root, which came primarily out of the West Indies and was all the rage during the height of the British Empire. People were obsessed with the stuff and like many new food fads of current times, it was considered to be a cure for all ills and assigned all sorts of magical health enhancing and food preparation qualities. So ubiquitous was the presence of Arrowroot in the affairs of the Empire that Napoleon is said to have commented that the English only promoted the use of the powder because they had a colony that produced it. The man was probably right, because like coffee beans, the idea of a heavy breakfast, and many such mass eating habits of modern times, it’s quite likely this too was a result of commercial interests more than any inherent redeeming qualities of the food in question. Having said that, while arrowroot has sunk into relative obscurity due to a lack of marketing since, it was and is a fairly unique ingredient with several unique properties. In this age of gels and foams and such gourmet fancies, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before the ability of arrowroot to thicken and form more stable and long-lasting gels, even with acidic fruit content, is one that you’ll see and are already seeing on plates near you.

When I was familiar with the mysterious white powder in the box that was never used, however, it still came with throwbacks from the heady days of the Raj, with talk of health benefits and strength giving abilities and such. But for me above all else, Arrowroot was the name of a biscuit. A simple and fine biscuit it was too. Like the plain Marie, but always slightly crisper and with a pretty flowery dimpled edge, which differentiated it from the plain circle of the Marie. When I brought home the packet of Britannia Arrowroot biscuits in Chennai, I opened it to find they had maintained that old shape. The packaging was more fancy and computer graphics heavy but the taste was the same unassuming one I remembered, indiscernible to any normal taste buds from any other plain tea biscuit, but just that little more special for being a piece of childhood returned.

Speaking of gelling agents and food preparation wonders, you can’t go wrong with the most ubiquitous one around, gelatin, which for those who don’t know are what jujubes are all about. Jujubes are little cubes of semi-dry coloured and flavoured sweet gelatin coated in granular sugar. As sweet things go, they are blunt, direct, simple, and one of the most beautiful textures to bite into. Oddly enough, the rise of gelatin is also related to the history of marketing endeavours. Gelatin as a by product of the treatment of animal produce and bones was long known and used, but no one had found a way to make the gelatinous colourless blob that resulted into a palatable product. In the late 19th century this challenge was taken up, and with the addition of fruit flavours, colouring and sugar, and the granulation of the result into a less creepy looking powder, Jell-o was born and the world of desserts never looked back.

As a kid I loved jelly(the more common general name for it in India to this day, rather than the Jell-o brand name) in all its forms. Visits to restaurants would often end in a serving of jelly with ice-cream, a cascade of wobbly icebergs of the red strawberry or raspberry flavoured jelly, served in a fancy steel cup with a dollop of white vanilla ice cream. Even back then my Mother, being the scientifically prone woman she was, would explain to me how jelly was extracted from bones and so is quite likely good for your bones and your nails and I’m fairly certain keratin was mentioned. I’m sure there is some nutritional truth to that, and yes I had an awesome childhood. I gladly used this excuse to eat as much jelly as I could.

Jujubes were also a part of my childhood. They had remained as a echo of India’s time as the jewel of the Empire, as have many typically British boiled sweets and biscuits which we have made our own since. I was not a giant sweet fan, not as much as most children perhaps, and certainly not to the level I see in kids today. Besides my Father regularly bringing back fruits from his travels, which I loved, I have two repeated memories of adults bringing me sweet things. One was my Grandfather, my Father’s Dad, who would always show up for a visit with a single slim bar of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk in his possession, a chocolate I enjoyed both in the eating and in preserving its distinctly purple foil wrapping between the pages of books. The second was my Uncle, my Mother’s brother, who often brought home a packet of jujubes. They would arrive in a small plastic packet, holding a dozen or so of the sweet colourful cubes, wrapped in a bit of newspaper or a paper bag fashioned from a newspaper, as is still common today in smaller Indian stores. I think the jujubes were chosen as much for my benefit as for my Uncle’s, who enjoyed them himself and still does, and they were enjoyed by all, each crunchy, squishy cube savoured, and some even preserved for later. I felt the same biting into them now as I did then, and they were just as addictive in any city.

The muruku, or chakli, or any number of variations on the theme of spirals of savoury and spicy dough, deep-fried to crispness, most definitely preceded the British Raj and will continue to out-live it for a long time to come. It’s been a staple South Indian snack and one whose popularity has grown and spread to be pan-Indian over time. In an increasingly health conscious world, and an urban one plagued with incidences of diabetes, the chakli in spite of its deep-fried nature has become an alternative treat during many festivals, most commonly Diwali, when large stalls draped in colourful fabric appear on the sides of busy streets in Bombay, selling the common delicacy by the kilo. It’s quite an interesting time, with people picking up packets for home and friends as they pass by and even getting very staunch about which stall run by which organisation makes the most divine chakli, or the most healthy one, or the most crisply fried.

My memories of the chakli are homely and common and also festive. While they were and still are something we will often pick up to keep at home as a general snack to munch on, as a kid, they were a part of a yearly Diwali ritual. Back then, once a year during the week preceding Diwali, my Grandmother would convert most of our tiny house into an industrial kitchen, with my Mother assisting. Large plates and utensils would litter the floor, newspapers would be spread out as vast staging areas, and long preserved pastry shaping tools and cutting tools and all sorts of kitchen magic would be unleashed to prepare the traditional Diwali spread of treats, not just for the home but also to distribute amongst neighbours and friends. For this occasion, the kerosene stove would be unwrapped, it being the one with the largest burner to work with. Vast vats of oil would be heated and sorcery would be worked with doughs of various kinds as they were mixed and kneaded, cut and prepared to be spread on the newspapers, and fried or otherwise cooked as required, in vast quantities. One of the staples was obviously the humble chakli, the spicy chickpea flour stuffed carefully into an ancient-looking brass device, which was basically a solid pastry cone with a screw and lever on top that pushed the dough down and out the bottom through a replaceable plate, which had a hole or several holes of various shapes. The single star-shaped stencil was used to create the moist spirals that would eventually become the chaklis.

The kids would help, of course, or we tried to distract ourselves with doing stuff and tasting the results anyway, and in time all the treats would be gathered and packaged into two paper plates stapled into little individual parcels. Then we’d have the privilege of hopping over to various neighbours and presenting them with the produce of the season, as it were. Not a social duty I’d look forward to, but after all that kitchen magic, perhaps it didn’t matter as much at the time, and as children we were less obligated to stick around after the parcels had been delivered. It was a responsibility, but chaklis and murukus are never a responsibility, only a pleasure, as they are to this day.

These were the memories I brought back with me from the grocery shop in Chennai that evening, and while my plastic carry bag would have seemed modest, or even frugal, to the innocent observer, I was carrying home treasures. The foods we eat, enjoy, abhor and crave are all so much a part of us. They build our tastes when we are young and they indicate and encourage our changing tastes as we grow older. Foods have so many histories tied with them, personal histories, political histories, cultural histories and stories that some of us share and many forget, but coming across familiar foods from your past in an unfamiliar place makes you see them anew and remember some of what you’d forgotten. They make the unfamiliar seem less daunting, they make the familiar more like home, and they make your observations more human, your ponderings more pleasurable, and your memories tastier.

Samir

Logo design often involves a very fine balance between being visually arresting and blending into all the material that inevitably surrounds it. This balance becomes even trickier when the logo is for a person and not an organisation. If the individual is in a very visual line of work, the choices are less complicated but when seemingly stoic industrial realms are involved, clown colours, googly eyes and other such blatant attention grabbers are out and the logo needs to walk a tight-rope between modesty and visual boldness. This was very much the case when I set out to design a mark for my Father, who works in world of water-treatment and industrial chemicals as a consultant.

The task of branding the senior Mr. Bharadwaj’s new sojourn into independent consulting didn’t begin here, but rather with a business card design done in a hurry. Then too Vishal faced the issue of balancing staid industrial branding tropes with a more liberal application of visual design, and the more expressive won out as the direction of choice. We didn’t make a logo at the time but a certain minimalist and bold visual identity, with stylised references to chemistry molecular diagrams was committed to. That business card has continued to be used effectively and soon it was time to work on a simple single-page web presence.

In its present state, the website KeshavB.com was meant to be no more than a professional looking online presence with the most basic information of what expertise were available and how people could get in touch with queries. It was also meant to be personal, because the difference and strength of an independent consultant in a highly commercial market is the fact that they are expert individuals and not employed by a specific commercial concern to push their interests. A solution for a personal single-page website was found in The Personal Page, an open source working template to create a mobile-friendly responsive site with some descriptive text, a background image of the person represented by the site, and a small logo or monogram in the corner. It’s quite a clever little solution if you’re comfortable with HTML and CSS code. I had a fitting portrait photograph taken with my Canon G9, which only left the matter of the logo.

The final logo was designed almost as quickly as the business card several months ago, but this time I had an existing identity to build on and so the logo continue the motif of molecular diagrams. Three circles in an angled molecule was chosen to vaguely hint at the structure of water (H2O), and ‘Kb’ was written with a lower-case ‘b’ to emulate such elementary symbols as ‘Pb’, the symbol for lead.

The end result worked well as a personal monogram, a branding mark, and also fit quite handsomely into the web page layout of the one-page site. It adds a certain professional character to the page which will serve well any further stationery designs we do. For now, KeshavB.com is a wonderfully simple and responsive place for the logo to be seen and for it to strike that right visual balance between serious business and personal statement.

Samir

It’s been ages since I properly indulged in folding paper things, and yet more ages since I attempted to design an original origami object of my own. In keeping with the festive mood of Diwali, and some prior experience in this regard, I decided to create a design for an origami Diwali diya, the open clay oil-lamp traditionally lit in homes for the Indian festival of lights.

In a previous lifetime, when I was still wearing a uniform and attending school, I had designed an origami diya of this sort, but that was more remix and hack than original creation. I used modified versions of two appropriate origami objects to assemble a Diwali diya which was very convincing in its form. This time, however, I wanted to start from scratch and I wanted to create the whole thing from a single piece of paper. After a few miss-steps the design you see above resulted, and this is how it is made.

Paper Folding Steps

01] This design require a square piece of paper. You could use one of those small square note papers so popular in offices, or good coloured Japanese origami paper if you have some around, or even just regular photocopy paper cut down to a square. Since this design doesn’t involve very complex or layered folding, almost any paper of some strength will work.

02] Fold the square sheet in half down its diagonal.

03] Fold one of the top side edges of the square to align with the diagonal crease.

04] Fold the opposite side of the square in a similar way on to the diagonal crease to create this tall diamond shape.

05] Fold the broad downward pointing triangle at the bottom towards the top, along the edge created by the two folded flaps.

06] Fold the top arrow-shaped section of the shape down along one of the top edges of the triangle you just folded upwards, and create a crisp crease.

07] Repeat the same fold on the opposite side and open up the newly creased flaps and the bottom triangle to get this pattern of folds on the paper.

08] The top section of the original diagonal crease now needs to be folded inside-out, to get the nose of the design point upward, in a perpendicular to the rest of the sheet.

09] Folded flat along the diagonal, it should form this beak-like shape now, which will eventually form the flame pat of this lamp.

10] Opening up the shape and placing the entire form flat as it originally was, fold the base triangle in half, taking the bottom corner to meet the corners of the flaps above it, where they meet along the diagonal crease.

11] Fold the newly-formed short trapezoid shape upwards, along the old triangular crease.

12] Hold one of the raised triangular sides flat next to the trapezoid to ready it to create the base form of the lamp.

13] Fold the bottom corner of the entire shape to meet the corresponding top corner of the trapezoid shape as shown.

14] Create similar folds for both bottom corners to make the shape shown above.

15] Unfold the two corners, and unfold the trapezoid downwards. Fold the side corners to the middle as shown to create a crease that is perpendicular to the base of the trapezoid and joins its top corners.

16] Do this on both sides, left and right, to for the inward-facing, standing corner shapes seen above.

17] Open up the original long folds that you started with, and fold the same edges of the square to align with the long slant creases, as show above.

18] This needs to be repeated on both sides and then the new narrow slant fold needs to be refolded on itself along the original slant crease to form the shape towards the top half of the image above.

19] With the new thinner triangular shapes forming a side wall, make sure the inside-facing corners seen earlier are clearly defined.

20] Unfold the long side triangle upwards and flatten the corner against the side as shown.

21] Fold the side triangle back down over the flattended corner shapes to trap it flat and to form a box-like corner as shown.

22] Unfold the bottom triangular flap upwards and fold it in half on the inside as demonstrated above.

23] Fold the entire thing back down again to create this short and broad trapezoid flap as part of the back wall of the lamp base.

24] Once again refold the beak-like form at the pointed end of the shape to create the basic flame shape for this origami model.

25] On the bottom side of the model, this is what you should see. The triangular front and the flat back should have sharp folds while the sides should be a blunt and curved fold but not quite a crease. Not folding that fully keeps the entire form solid and prevents it from collapsing along all the sharp creases.

26] Twist and fold the flame shape on itself, towards the front to one side, as shown.

27] Twist it on the other side in a backward direction to create a more organic flame shape.

28] With the side and back walls of the base formed and joined cleanly at the corners, and with an upright flame shape created in the front, the origami Diwali lamp is ready. It’s a nice and simple stand-alone model that could just as easily be floated on water, as the traditional Diwali lamps sometimes are. The shape of the flame can be tweaked and played with to create variations.

This then is my new version of an origami Diwali diya or oil lamp. I like the simplicity of the form, the fact that it creates a proper three-dimensional object, and that it can be replicated and duplicated quite quickly, and in a variety of sizes, once you learn the folds; Perfect to add to your Diwali decoration arsenal, or just as a pretty object to place around your home. After all, lamps and lights or not restricted to any season or festivities, and elegant origami is always a welcome accent.

Samir

P.S. – If you want to save these instructions for quick reference later or want to share them with others, here is a single large tutorial image with all the folding basics:

Enjoy!

It’s been years since I’ve done anything resembling actual food preparation. Not that I’m a klutz in the kitchen or ignorant about the secret ways of the pot and the pan, but I’ve simply not found the necessity nor have had the specific inclination. Holidays, however, are meant to put you in new situations and so tonight I found myself in possession of two bundles of spinach, limited additional ingredients, and the need to concoct some form of dinner. This sautéed spinach with potato mix is what resulted.

Nothing too complex, rudimentary, in fact. A bit of oil heated in a broad saucepan. Cumin seeds (jeera) added to sputter. A pinch of sugar to help in the browning of the potatoes added in small pieces. After that it was a matter of adding what was available, salt, some turmeric powder (haldi), a few slivers of fresh ginger, and then finally when the potatoes were sufficiently brown, a healthy dose of the spinach, cut into rough pieces. A very little water to help it along once the leaves had reduced, and some chaat masala and a pinch of amchur to add some flavour.

Worked out very well, mostly because the potatoes were well cooked without being reduced to mush. It would have been better with onions, and some fresh garlic, but considering it was improvised from what was available, a flavourful success.

Samir