Aditya Mukherjee
I love the four months I get off at the end of every study-year. They are just mine, for me to use in whatever way I want to. I began planning the coming summer break a couple of months ago. That planning brought out interesting priorities which weren’t what I thought they would be when I started out. Call it personal development if you will. Ever since I was a child, I’ve liked to spend my time on my own—doing things I like to do. Fortunately or unfortunately, what that involves is finding ways of keeping oneself entertained without someone else telling or showing you what to do. Hence, I’ve gotten pretty good at it. But the trick is to differentiate between wasting and not-wasting time. When we are children, it doesn’t matter what we do. Nothing is really a waste of time since we have so much of it. But as we grow up, time seems to be always against us. Months and years fly by and suddenly we have lost all this time that we had such big plans for.
So I made a mental list of four things that I wanted to work on over the next few months that actually achieve something and enable other things for the future. They can be broadly categorized as literary, artistic and relationships—you know, all the things humans are associated with. The last one is a little personal, so while I’ll talk about it since it must be said, I will keep it short and cryptic. Of course, plans being plans, they have a way of not working out to one’s satisfaction. But I’m trying to go into this without my usual level of pessimism. •
I want to start reading and writing a lot more than I have been since high school. When I was younger, I used to read a book before going to sleep every night. I have never been a television person and reading was the best form of comfortable entertainment I could have asked for. The books I read were nothing special. Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Sherlock Holmes, Eragon1—the usual suspects with any kid. But I used to read2. Over the last five or so years, I’ve stopped reading as much as I should—forget about the amount that I would like to. It’s not just the quantity but the quality as well that has significantly dropped.
Books have been replaced with blogs and Twitter. Long-form reading has taken a massive hit because today’s Internet causes ADD in people with the amount of information it throws at them. The good thing is that there is enough of good long-form material to read on the web; one just needs to find it. I do try to shield myself from the bullshit, but to receive the signal one must go through the noise. Our tools today still aren’t good enough at automatically filtering out things we don’t need or want, and that’s why I know machines aren’t going to take over the world any time soon. I’ve been slowly building my sources over the last few months3 in preparation for this time that I’m going to get, and now it’s time to cash in.
The medium doesn’t matter at the moment—although I would prefer a bigger screen than my phone for reading in bed. The idea is to start off by getting back into the habit of reading for long stretches of time without getting distracted. I plan to get a Kindle or iPad (or some equally crippled device, for myself this time) in the future that, by design, gives me a distraction-free container so that I can get some real reading done. Small steps for now, however.
The other goal is to write more—but in quality and not quantity. My tumblog was good for me, but it seemed too much of an easy thing. The temptation to write out a quick post and queue it off was too high and instead of being content worth reading it ended up just being content. I want to improve as a writer and not become just another “blogger”.
That also involves writing about real things; not Apple and Google’s rivalry. I am not entirely clear about what “real” includes, but I have a good idea of what it doesn’t. I realised that I have outgrown such insignificant topics. The discussions that matter are the ones that lead to something. That “something” can be as small as just an increase in personal or group-knowledge, or as big as causing a government to dissolve—it doesn’t matter. What matters is that they always lead to something. And those are the only type of discussions I want to be a part of. Life’s too short for idle chatter.
Every child loves to draw and paint. And yet, we have just a handful of painters and artists in this world. Somewhere between being a child and being an adult people lose their will and/or ability to express through non-verbal means. I used to be pretty good at sketching when I was young, but went through the same rut. I have tried to keep my hands practiced over the years, but again, the temptation of immediate gratification in the Internet age is such a creativity killer.
I made this sketch of a friend quite a while ago. Using real drawing pencils would have given a better result, but I was trying it out, after close to 4 years, to see if I still had it.
I used a photograph for reference, and my friend liked it, so I guess it came out pretty well.I am going to start sketching again. And while something like this shouldn’t have deadlines, I want to finish every sketch in a week at the maximum. That’s 16 sketches by the end of the break if I manage to stick with it, which is quite a respectable number. Considering I already have ideas for my first two sketches, I’m on the right path I suppose. I’ll be setting up an exhibition-section for them soon, as well as take the best ones and frame them up in my room. Nothing like a constant reminder of what you’re capable of to keep the motivation going.
Along with sketching, I want to become a little more serious about photography—or as serious as I can look with an iPhone in my hand clicking pictures. Photography is something that I’ve been in and out of at various points in my life simply because I’m constantly surrounded by people who are into it a lot more seriously than I am. Even my father is a pretty decent photographer himself. Looking at the photographs they come up with pull at my creative-strings; it’s another outlet for creativity—a way for me to show others what I see—which I wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.
But there are two parts to this. Over time, I had begun entertaining the idea that maybe I’m not really a designer. Maybe I’m just someone with good aesthetic sense, who learnt how to use certain tools so that he could create things with the same aesthetic beauty he loved in things he saw. That’s a pretty long offshoot from being a designer. And I realized that such self-doubt creeps in when you stop doing. The Imposter Syndrome doesn’t kick in if you’re constantly achieving personal goals, and I have stopped achieving my artistic goals.
So to remedy that, I jumped onto the formless content bandwagon. I designed4 my entire website from scratch to hold all my creative things—writings, sketches, photographs and anything else I might get into in the future—and I made it all formless. The idea is to design a unique environment, a unique container for everything that I create. It’s similar to how magazines, newspapers and other publications are designed. There is a very basic structure for the container in place, but it is effectively liquid in the sense that it can be morphed to suit the content it is meant to hold. For a better idea of what I’m talking about, have a look at the websites of Jason Santa Maria and Dustin Curtis. I ran into a couple of more over the last couple of months in Craig Mod’s and Andy Grauland’s, and I decided I wanted in.
Taking this post as an example, everything in it is changeable. There is no style, no declaration or element that is fixed. The title should give that away stronger than anything else. While I’m new to this kind of freedom, which makes it a little overwhelming at first, the ability to make things I write beautiful as well as interesting makes me giddy with happiness.
Yes, it does mean content will take longer to go up because I will be designing it after I finish creating it, but think of that as another inherent quality control step that improves the experience rather than detract from it. It lets me exercise all my creative muscles, and that’s just a happy day for everyone. •
As I’ve spent most of the last two years on my own, away from all the places and people I knew growing up, certain aspects of human association begin to stand out. When one spends as much time as I do thinking about things, it becomes important to not drown within oneself, one’s own thoughts and ideas. But while the occasional sitting with friends talking about nothing in particular is helpful, the value and strength of familiarity, of a connection with another human being cannot be substituted by anything else.
I suppose people who spend a lot of time around other people inherently understand this, but being an introvert, I don’t. And over the last few months I’ve started realizing why. Meaningful relationships are as strong a fuel for the mind as any. I’m not happy about it; it means a decent change in lifestyle, but we all have to do what we have to do to keep ourselves happy and functioning. •
I have big plans for the next four months, and this will serve as a little reference that I can come back to at the end of the summer, to see how my plans eventually turned out. It’s probably not apparent from the text, but I feel the next four months are very important for me as a person. I am pretty determined to see them through because it’s important to establish priorities rather than walking through life aimlessly. Enjoying the journey is only good when you know, or at least have an idea of, where you’re headed.
Here’s to a great summer!
The elitist in me doesn’t want to admit that I read the Eragon books, but I think they were half-decent. I’m a sucker for fantasy stories, regardless of how badly they’re told. But I am glad it’ll come to an end (hopefully) in November so that I know how it ends and I can stop reading the monotonous drivel. ↩
It’s probably the reason why English is my first language over Bengali and Hindi (although I can speak, read and write the latter two almost equally well). I’ll always be indebted to my parents for getting me into books at the young age they did. ↩
Props to Reeder for actually making feed reading a pleasant experience. ↩
Obviously I’m not finished. Nothing in this world is ever truly complete. So if you see something that doesn’t look right, it’s probably waiting to be fixed or reworked. ↩