ANUV

#1 Something is better than nothing.

Kolkata - 20th July 2021

Existence of something is a moment of creation. 

I believe whenever we create as humans, we add value to this universe, but more importantly, we add value to our lives and lives of people around us. This 'creation' can be of any form and can often be a therapeutic outlet for many people. 

There is a difference between a room that has been lived in, and a room that hasn't. Every moment of time, our environment leaves an imprint in us, and we, in turn leave an imprint on the environment. That imprint is an indelible part of us, and will tell a story about us. Just like all the cracks and depressions on the floor can tell a story about a room. One can always draw inspiration from a particular something at some point in one's lives. So it is important for one to be mindful with that something: not to hate it or love it, but to know that one day you might need it.

When we have nothing to draw lessons from, we lose depth. 

Nothing, you cannot critique.

#2 Infinitely Extensible

Kolkata - 27th July 2021

Whatever we use around us, become living when we touch it. 

Let me explain.

Cut my hand, and throw it away, it will rot. That means as a separate entity, the hand is not alive. However, it was a part of something that was alive at some point: that's me. It was alive, when it was a part of me.

All our limbs and senses can be imagined as biological tools, we can also mount technological tools to our lives. That's what phones are... the internet, cars, planes, rockets, ovens! 

Everything we use, become alive when we use it, because whatever we use joins the part of the design that makes us alive.

Our relationships with things and people keep us alive.

We are infinitely extensible! 

#3 Automatic Specialization 

Kolkata - 3rd August 2021

We mold ourselves to fit in with our environment. That environment includes both people and things. 

When we depend on tools that can compensate our weakness, we abandon our inbuilt tools, and convert our weakness into strengths by extending into those external tools. Our brains are adaptive organisms, and will take every opportunity to become more efficient and make its own life easier. That's why we don't remember things that we can look up, because looking up is easier than remembering. Our brain actually perceives the internet as part of our memory, in dramatic case of cognitive offloading.

When we live together with people what compensate our weakness, we as individuals each tend to sacrifice generality, to make the group of people living together becomes a more robust and powerful unit. The only requirement for such specialization is trust.

This is simply a broader take on the basic economic principles of trade. When two actors each can produce two different goods at different rates, both actors are well off if they each specialize in what they do best and then trade with each other.

Everything in nature seems to grow in this pattern, general functioning actors eventually specialize and form larger complex units, in a recursive manner. 

What makes us infinitely extensible is our capacity for automatic specialization. 

#4 The Leaf

The leaf had fallen into deep thought.

She realized, that most of the food she was making was being taken away from her. Her beautiful bright green surface was one of the best in the tree, and being near the top, she received ample sunlight throughout the day.

"How dumb...", she murmured to herself, "This is unfair! I am lean and healthy why should I work so hard to produce food when I barely get to keep any of it! The branches, and trunk eats up what all what we make and they keep getting fatter and fatter."

"They also keep talking about some 'root', they send most of what we make to the roots, but where are the roots? I've never seen any such thing in my life! This whole thing feels like a scam!"

"My branch just provides me with the water, everything else I gather on my own! The sunlight, the air, and heck, even the mist in the morning is sufficient for making my own food."

And like that... She detached herself from the branch and flew with the wind... 

"Freedom at last!", She thought to herself.

#5 Memoryless

I woke up.

I don’t know where I am: I look around. Everything feels... familiar, but unknown.

A woman walks in, and tells me that she loves me, and she is my mother, and I have a rare disease that wipes my memory every time I go to sleep, and so everyday morning, when I wake up she repeats the same lines everyday, to give me an orientation for that day. What I do, where I go, who are the close people, and what I am skilled at.

I look at her, dumbfounded. 

We sat there in silence.

I asked, “How long has it been like this?” 

“For a long time, you started to have mild issues at the beginning, we went to the doctor, he said that it wasn’t treatable. So I started to make a system within which you can live a normal life”

“Normal?”

“Relatively normal, yes”

“Do other people know this?”

“Well, some do, some don’t. You can function quite coherently when you are with other people, you even instinctively know that you’ve known them for a long time and that helps you orient yourself, but you don’t remember the specifics, but other people do. That’s why sometimes you can be quite hard to deal with, because it seems like you never learn from your lessons. But that’s not true. You do learn new things, but it’s much harder for you and it takes more repetitions, so that eventually your brain gets the habit of it, even if you consciously don’t know it. That’s how you can speak, write, swim, read a clock or ride a cycle. You don’t do it consciously.”

“I don’t remember anything about my past, it feels like I am just born, but I am not overwhelmed.”

“That’s right. It is your instincts that know that the world you are in is not new, you have been here before, and even if you don’t know it, your instincts do. You treat people poorly today and then you forget it, and tomorrow they will give you the cold shoulder, and you’ll wonder why, but deep down you know it is justified. Because, you don’t remember, but the world remembers and deep down, you do too.”

“Why should I go to sleep then, if I keep forgetting everything? I should just stay awake”

“Hahaha...”, the woman laughed. “You have tried it many times. Once you even managed to go without sleeping for a whole week. But eventually you got tired and fell asleep. Nobody can stay awake forever, we will all eventually go to sleep sometime or the other.” 

“So like death?”

“Yes, like death”

#6 Fishes

Back when we are kids, we used to go for long afternoon swims, my brother and I.

After splashing around in the water for a while, we used to sit together on the stairs, dip our feet in the water and just sit there, basking in the sun.

After a while, if we were still enough, schools of fishes - small fishes, would come and move suspiciously around our feet. 

Then sooner or later, a brave one would grab a quick nibble at your feet and dart back(Nothing can quite prepare you for how this first bite feels). The courage of the first mover, used to inspire his friends, and they would come for more nibbles. Soon, before you know it, you would be overwhelmed by a therapeutic tingling sensation.

This didn't happen everyday. Some days, the fishes wouldn't dare come near and would instead shoal only at a safe distance, other days, it would linger around but wouldn't take a first bite. There was no way, you could force this to happen. When it happened, it just did. 

They knew the days something bothered you, no matter how still you thought you kept your feet, and they knew the days when you were completely at rest. 

It is easiest to lie to your own self. However, there was something between you and the fishes that you couldn't lie about, not even to yourself.

#7 Jack

Jack loves plants. He enjoys the greenery, he loves to water the trees in his backyard once in a while. He loves to touch the leaves, feel the stem, smell the flowers. He can almost talk to the trees. 

In a fourth standard biology class in school he learnt that plants grow from seeds: you put them in soil and with just the right conditions, a plant magically breaks out of the soil. A new beginning. 

That was 3 years ago. 

Jack sits outside looking at his wilting mango sapling, under the high afternoon sun. It's about 1.5 feet tall, it's the biggest one he has ever grown. He looks at it carefully, softly touching its leaves. He slowly grabs the tender stem with both his hands, tugging at it lightly. The soil moves, a bit. Jack, breathing heavily, withdraws. Looks at it again. It's been exactly 89 days, 6 hour and 17 minutes, since he planted it. It is growing, but it is not growing fast enough. How do people grow huge trees, he wonders, in disbelief.. maybe...

Then, he grabs it's again, with one smooth yank, pulls it right out of ground, roots and all. 

Peter, watching Jack through the window, mutters to himself:

"Jack loves trees, but his impatience makes him a terrible gardener... He loves them too much."

Yanking at the plant doesn't make it grow.

He keeps forgetting that.

#8 Learning

Kolkata - 7th September 2021

The fan spun noisily over our heads.

I asked my cousin, “Have you learned how to drive yet?”

He let out a grin - “I already have my license, but I can only move around in Salt Lake, slowly, in first gear. Plus, I don’t need to, you can get whatever you need within walking distance, I never feel the need to use the car, it's just lying around, gathering dust. I have to properly learn it. I have driven a fair bit here, but can't find the confidence yet.”

“You learned to drive, by driving inside Salt Lake, didn’t you?”

“Yes”

“Hmm… That’s why”

“What?”

“Salt Lake is a comfortable place to drive, but it’s a terrible place to learn to drive. This is because the rest of Kolkata is not like that. The roads of Kolkata are packed to the brim with traffic, there’s buses making sudden stops, there’s motorcycles on the wrong side of the road, cars moving an inch of one another... It’s a mess. Salt Lake is not like that, Salt Lake is a controlled environment - the roads are well maintained, the traffic is low and mostly consists of other cars, there’s a proper footpath alongside the road, and at every turn there’s a roundabout! Real life is not like that, real life is messy.”

It’s an island of comfort at the center of reality, and you can only learn so much there.

#9 Pressure

Kolkata - 14th September 2021

"I don't think I should take up this project. I already have a project at hand, and I am not even working on that. Taking up another project will just make me feel worse."

This is a common story.

Here's a way to think about this:

In F1 racing, the cars are extremely light. The light build of the car is helpful because it can move extremely fast when coupled with a powerful engine. But it also presents a few problems.

One of the problems is braking. For braking to be effective, there needs to be sufficient downward force. In normal cars, the weight of the car provides sufficient downward force.  The F1 cars are too light for the weight to be sufficient. 

However, the cars are designed in such a way that the aerodynamics of the car at high speeds provides sufficient downward force - often more than the weight of the car, which makes the brakes work as intended.

This presents a peculiar conundrum. Either you have to drive the F1 cars very slowly or go much, much faster. There is no middle ground.  

Some of us are like the F1 cars.

Some of us procrastinate because we know that we can handle the job at the last moment, and often, we can. But it's never as good as it could be. Being under reasonable amount of pressure and responsibilities improves the overall quality of work across all projects as we are forced to develop better habits.

If you can't do a small amount of work, try doing more.

#10 Intertwined

Bhopal - 21st September 2021

Yes! That one!

We’ve seen the same model of car on the road nine times in the last week, on nine different occasions.

It's a new arrival to the market, it’s available in several colours but we like the dark gray one. We hadn’t seen many of them on the roads around here, liking the novelty, we booked one last Wednesday, to be delivered in a month’s time. 

Since then, we’ve been seeing these cars everywhere. Just the morning after booking the car, we found a large advertisement on the front page of The Telegraph, a beautiful picture of the car in dark blue. 

On the way to the bazzar Ma overhead two men commenting on the same model - "Black one's the best". 

Baba has been noticing one or two on the road almost everyday on his way to or from work.

While flipping channels on TV I spot a scene from the soap with that car - bright red.

What’s going on? Was it always like this? If so, why are we noticing now?

We smile nervously. The car smiles back.

The car says: “Our stories are now intertwined. You used to ignore me before just like you ignore everyone else, but now that’s it’s about you, you can’t do that anymore. The world is a blank canvas, you paint on it with the colours of your perception. You could have painted whatever you like, but here you are, painting me.”

“Your love of self has touched me now, and I feel loved. I feel like I belong: I have a home now. Your home.”

“See you soon”

And she zooms past, 60 miles an hour.

#11 Figs

Bhopal - 28th September 2021

Siddhartha was walking along the road, picking up everything that caught his attention. 

Shiny stones, broken pieces of ceramic, some nuts and bolts that may have fallen from the rattling trucks that frequented the village roads. He didn’t know why he was collecting them, but his pockets were full, and at this point, quite noisy.

Once in a while, he came across a particularly impressive piece of stone that he liked better, and he had to decide which one to throw away - because he couldn’t keep all of them.

A low flying crow distracted him, and his eyes followed the flight of the crow.

He spotted at some distance, his friend, Ravi looking up at a fig tree. 

Ravi has been contemplating getting some fig, but he was not sure how to get to them. He didn’t know how to climb a tree, and there were no low hanging ones that he could just jump and reach. Seeing Siddhartha approaching, he smiled, knowing that his friend had a sharp aim, and could easily down some figs from the tree - he looked around to see if there were any stones lying nearby.

Siddhartha asked, “What are you looking for?”

"I’m looking for some stones, I want to eat some figs, you could easily get some for both of us by targeting them with stones!"

“There’s no need for that. I have a pocket full of them”

And before Ravi could say anything, Siddhartha drew a small stone from his pocket, aimed at one of the figs and launched it. Both of them watched the fig come falling down, hitting the ground with a soft thud.

By the end of the hour, they had collected quite a few of them, and they sat in the shade eating figs. 

“How did you end up with your pocket full of stones?” Ravi asked.

“I liked how some of them looked, so I started to collect them. I don’t know why I felt like picking them up, it’s a funny coincidence that all of it turned out to be quite useful... Be careful, there may be some dead wasps inside.” Siddhartha warned Ravi. 

“Oh yes, I’ve noticed that, I’ve always wondered how did they get inside”

“That’s an interesting story! These are actually not fruits, they are a special kind of adaptation where are insides of these figs are really just a bunch of flowers, and since they are on the inside, they can only be pollinated by only a special kind of wasp which can enter the fig through the small hole at the bottom. The wasp lays its eggs inside the fig, while also pollinating the flowers. That’s why when you open an unripe fig, you might find it crawling with larvae. They have co-evolved, both of them have just the mechanism that the other one needs and they can’t survive without each other. The wasps and the figs shows up just at the right time and place when they need each other”

“Quite like our story isn’t it?” Ravi smirked.

“Quite so”, Siddhartha said, biting into a ripe fig.

#12 Understanding

Bhopal - 5th October 2021

The dog that roams near the mess has been acting up lately.

He has been attempting to bite students on their way to the mess, going for their ankles. However, the dog isn’t vicious. It’s clear from his slow approach and wagging tail that he's not out to get you: He wants to play. 

Last night he finally got too far, he sunk his teeth into the trousers of a student and tore it apart. Luckily the student wasn’t seriously hurt. 

“That bugger needs to be relocated”, the student exclaimed later.

“We’ve thought about it, but relocating stray animals from their territory is actually illegal in India.” replied another student, “Plus, he just wants to play, but he is being too aggressive about it. The vet vaccinated him last week, said he is having anxiety, probably from the sudden influx of students. For now just ignore him when you go by, don’t look into his eyes.”

It does work, if you completely ignore him - even when he is approaching you, he might ignore you as well. No one likes being ignored. 

Later that week, I see a boy sitting on the ground and petting the dog. He seems to share a magical connection with animals: like he speaks to them and understands their language. The dog seemed comfortable and calm. ”

"How is he not biting you?” I ask.

“He feels understood. He was anxious and lonely. And everybody was too scared to confront him and try to understand him."

“Understanding is the most valuable thing you can give to someone."

"It might change one.”

#13 Houses

Bhopal - 12th October 2021

Houses are like the hearts of people.

There are small huts for two. 

For living in serenity and seclusion. Outside the usual chaos of life. We speak a different language, we find comfort in each other. And we are not concerned with what goes on the outside.

There are houses big enough for a joint family.

Kaka? Mama? All living together. We love all of them and they love us back. With a strong sense of belonging, nobody feels left out and that makes us a formidable team.  We may not know the entire city, but the entire city knows about us. 

Then there are apartments. 

So many people that you'll have to count twice. The people the different - the apartment knows; it doesn't judge. We are separated by walls, but we are united by an address. We all make compromises, but the apartment is benevolent. It looks after everyone. 

No house is made for everyone. 

But all houses shelter the people inside from the storm outside.

#14 Missing

Bhopal - 20th October 2021

I think we have all felt at some point, the feeling of something missing.

Like something ought to be here, but it isn't.

Forgetting something important. Not being somewhere we had to be.

An empty wall missing a picture. A puzzle missing a piece. 

It's the feeling of not wearing your mask when you've left the house.  

We are forgetting something - it's missing. A part of you knows what it is you're missing, but its not in front of you yet, you don't see it - until you do.

We talk about missing people too, but that's not quite the same. We often know who we are missing. I feel missing people is a misnomer, unless we are talking about someone who has actually gone missing.

We long for some people. Longing... not missing.

Longing is remembering. And if we are remembering it, we probably haven't missed it. We paid attention - lots of it.

I couldn't go to sleep because my brain wouldn't shut down.

It kept saying, "You're missing something."  

#15 Different

Bhopal - 26th October 2021

The crow believed he was different.

He didn’t spend much time with other crows, as he didn’t fit in well with them. The usual crow stuff like hanging around humans fighting over leftovers bored him. He prefers to hunt for insects on the tree - like his friend, the woodpecker. 

He had met the woodpecker one afternoon while resting on a tree branch. It was tapping away its head on the trunk of a tree. The movement fascinated him, he had never seen crows do that and wanted to learn it. 

One day the crow asked the woodpecker to teach him to peck on wood. 

The woodpecker agreed because he thought it would be interesting. 

Hence the classes began. 

The woodpecker showed the crow how to claw onto the trunk and move it’s head swiftly back and forth, hitting the same spot every time. The crow observed.

At first he couldn’t balance himself on the side of the trunk, so he just stood on a branch and started to peck on the trunk. But his hits were all over the place, and his beak and head hurt from the jerks after doing it for a while. “He is not built for this” the woodpecker thought to himself, but didn’t comment, as he didn’t want his friend to feel bad. 

But the crow knew he wasn’t built for this. It wouldn’t come naturally to him, and he needed to put in more time and effort, and so he did.

He tapped on wood everyday with his beak for a whole year. 

By the end of the year, he had become quite good at making holes in the wood. Even the woodpecker was surprised at the progress of the crow. However, it was still nowhere close to the speed and accuracy to what the woodpecker could do. His beak had broken in parts from all the stress, but that had only made the beak sharper and easier to peck with. 

The other crows found it quite amusing.

Two years later, heavy monsoons in the area resulted in a massive flood. 

Humans moved out, and low places lay submerged under water, many animals died. 

The crows didn’t die. But they were hungry and many of their nests were destroyed. They had gotten used to humans, and they suffered when they went away.

The crows, now in trouble, looked up to the one crow that was seemingly unaffected by the floods - “Can you help us?”

“You guys can stay in the holes I have made in the trees while I was practicing, there should be enough for all of you, and I’ll teach you to hunt insects from the tree” the crow replied, feeling sad over the plight of his fellow brothers.

The crows crowed, “Thank you! You are truly one of us”

#16 Diwali

Bhopal - 2nd November 2021

Gungun is the youngest member of the family.

She is deeply loved by the entire family. Young Darshan plays with her all the time.

But today, Darshan is playing without Gungun, because she doesn’t want to come outside the house. And Darshan does not want to miss out on all the fun. 

The house looks beautiful. There’s candles on the railings, terrace and verandah. There’s a row of candles on the boundary wall. 

Ma calls out, “Be careful Babu-"... Darshan lights a Tubri with a Tarabaji and sprints away. A fountain of sparkles lights up the whole compound - Baba shoots the video. 

Boom....

A shell explodes in the distance, forming beautiful patterns in the sky, then another, a bit closer. 

Gungun doesn’t understand what’s going on. She’s huddled up under a chair in darkness, afraid of the sudden sounds of explosions and bright lights of fireworks. She’s a bit shaken. 

She’s learning the price of being a man’s best friend.

#17 Money Plant

Bhopal - 17nd November 2021

"Tea leaves make great fertilizer" - my roommate, commented, as we sipped steaming hot tea he just brewed. 

"I started adding used up tea leaves to this pot and look how tall this plant has gotten" He pointed to the money plant placed on the window sill. 

The plant has been climbing the window steadily for some time and now it's about two feet tall. Next to the pot there's a small glass bottle containing water, and one of the stem has been submerged in it, for new roots to grow. 

"Plants this big don't usually grow in pots this small."

"Why do you think it's called a money plant?", I asked.

"It's believed that this plant brings good luck and wealth."

"So, has it made you wealthy?", I joked.

"Maybe"

"The wealth doesn't have to be monetary." He added.

"Hmm... I sometime think the superstitions we have, may have mythical roots"

"Oh yes, we can often find logic in some superstitions if we think about it, like, maybe the reason we light diyas in the East, because that's where it gets darker first, as sun sets in the West"

"No, I don't mean that. When I say mythical roots, I mean that we may have something to learn from it. At some point we knew the lessons, but then we lost it. But we kept the practice alive."

Consider this, suppose you read an useful book, which helped you in some way. Then you decided to share it, and the booked helped the people you shared with, and they in turn shared it with someone else. Eventually, it may become a widespread book that helps people if they absorb what is taught in it.

Now think of someone who doesn't know how to read, one may mistakenly think that the book has magical powers and people who possess it suddenly become lucky. And one may also decide to keep the book in possession simply based on the belief that it is lucky. In this case, the practice is alive, but the reasoning is lost. If you ask the person why he has kept the book with him, he'll say he has kept it because it's lucky. He's mimicking the practice without understanding the reason behind it. And you would say that the man is superstitions - books can't be lucky!

"So then, what does the money plant have to teach us?"

"Adaptability", a prompt reply.

"It is extremely resilient, it can grow with or without soil. It will grow new roots if you put it in water. It will survive even if you don't water it too often, it isn't affected by large changes in temperatures. 

It will climb anything it can reach, and if it can't find anything to climb on, it will just spread out. If you cut it, it won't die, it will multiply.

It teaches us to adapt to our circumstances and just keep growing, with whatever resources we've got."