I made a mistake, I woke up and started scrolling through Instagram.
For the past year, I had made it a habit to not look at my phone the first thing and it hasn’t been that tough really. There is no lure left in that for me. Everything seems to be transactional these days. Everything is a paid partnership. Instagram is nothing but a marketplace, where people are either trying to sell you some products or a lifestyle. They know we know it's all a lie, right?
I try to keep my feed clear of most of this, and full of creators that are making some stuff that's better than full budget films these days, to really inspire me. But the algorithm sneaks up on me and tries to feed me more bullshit. Is anything real anymore? Is all art becoming just content? What the fck you mean I “need” this new skincare routine?
Anyway, that was my morning and it left me quite angry, so I apologise in advance for whatever is to come next. Today, I find it easier to hate everything.
It's urgent I keep to myself. I can't have this world bother me anymore: that'll only distract me from changing it. I can't be waking up and scrolling through Instagram.
Well, it's that time of the year again. It's the festive season.
I’ve never been much for the festival, although for me it was the one time of the year I would spend with my loved ones, so it has its charm.
When I was living away, Diwali used to be the time I came home every year. It was the time we caught up with each other, or rather my family caught up with whatever new version of “me” I morphed into at the time. As for them, things always seemed to stay the same. Nothing ever changed back home. The same jokes, the same arguments, the same fights, the same laughter, the same disappointments, the same qualms, the same routine. That's the comfort of home, I guess. The whole world could be changing around you or within you, and yet Mumma will still say her filmy dialogues while she loses a game of Catan, Papa will still do his silly dance moves as he tries up some new experiments in the kitchen that we’re all dreading, and my brother would still be forced to wake up earlier than he would like, to make his special chai for everyone in the mornings.
This time around, however, everything seemed different. My family isn’t together this Diwali and there’s no Diwali without family. The world around me looks grey and sad.
Winter is coming, which means Delhi sky would don its favourite grey smog sweater that it refuses to give up on. I miss the colours around me. It's official, this city is not for me.
On such numbing days I like to think about Simone Weil. She’s one of my heroes, a brilliant philosopher, who unlike most philosophers embodied her beliefs through her actions. At first glance, her philosophy seems too cliche and obvious, however the more you understand her, the closer to beauty and truth you find yourself.
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
- Simone Weil
For Weil, attention was a crucial element for living a meaningful life. She believed that the way individuals direct their attention significantly shapes their experiences and the possibilities that unfold in their lives.
As I said, it seems basic, but this idea that a different experience of everything you do is available to you all around you, hasn’t left me since.
I’m not doing a great job explaining her larger philosophy, I’ll try to talk more on her in the coming newsletters, because she has truly changed my life in multiple ways.
It was time to find joy in the saddest places (as Arundhati would say).
So here I was, sitting in the park in the morning, hoping some sunlight and fresh oxygen would help. It was quite a funny experience because the familiarity of the setting, of sitting under trees with grass under your feet, watching a couple of squirrels play an unending game of chase, only reminded me how foreign this experience is in a city.
It felt deranged to me that we have designated spaces for “nature” in a city. Such a bizarre concept - parks. Words flow much more easily now. I notice many lives, old and young. A group of little kids playing their own unending game of chase (a group of tiny squirrels on the slide). They are playing some version of a zombie apocalypse + floor is lava with invented rules that seem completely arbitrary to me even after staring at them for 20 mins straight and trying to make sense of it.
When did we forget that we can make up our own rules? And change them whenever we wish to?
A lot of the time I feel like a kid too, unable to understand the rules made up by society. As I sit alone in that park, watching these kids, I’m reminded of Rilke. He writes a great deal about loneliness and solitude in “Letters to a Young Poet” (this book is my Bible, for lack of a better reference). He writes,
“What is needed is this, and this alone: solitude, great inner loneliness. Going into oneself and not meeting anyone for hours - that is what one must arrive at. Loneliness of the kind one knew as a child, when the grown-ups went back and forth bound up in things which seemed grave and weighty because they looked so busy, and because one had no idea what they were up to.
And when one day you realise that their preoccupations are meagre, their professions barren and no longer connected to life, why not continue to look on them like a child, as if on something alien, drawing on the depths of your own world, on the expanse of your own solitude, which itself is work and achievement and a vocation? Why wish to exchange a child’s wise incomprehension for rejection and contempt, when incomprehension is solitude, whereas rejection and contempt are ways of participating in what, by precisely these means, you want to sever yourself from?”
- Rainer Maria Rilke; Letters to a Young Poet
For more than one reason, I haven’t felt like myself this month. It seemed to pass me by, even though I managed to work on some great things in the meantime.
If you must know, I was in a bit of a reading slump this month. I managed to finish a total of zero books. (dun dun dunnnn) I finished reading “Justice” by Michael J. Sandel in the first few days of the month and that book shook me a bit, honestly.
It was Devesh’s pick for our tiny book club we have between the three of us. I couldn’t pick up another book for a while.
Contrary to what it seems like, I would urge every single person to read that book. Political philosophy is an interesting subject and one that must unsettle you. It's not something I want to give you a brief or pointers about, you must read it and understand it. But I can leave you with some words from the man himself to get you interested.
“To read these books, in this way, as an exercise in self-knowledge, carries certain risks. Risks that are both personal and political. Risks that every student of Political Philosophy has known. These risks spring from the fact that philosophy teaches us, and unsettles us, by confronting us with what we already know. There is an irony: the difficulty of this course consists in the fact that it teaches what you already know. It works by taking what we know from familiar unquestioned settings, and making it strange.
Philosophy estranges us from the familiar, not by supplying new information, but by inviting and provoking a new way of seeing.
But, and here is the risk, once the familiar turns strange, it is never quite the same again. Self-knowledge is like lost innocence; however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'. What makes this enterprise difficult, but also riveting, is that Moral and Political Philosophy is a story, and you don't know where the story would lead, but you do know that the story is about You.”
- Michael J. Sandel; Justice
My dad gifted me the Penguin Green Ideas collection for my birthday, and it just stared at me from the bookshelf, so I finally picked up the first two.
I started with the Greta Thunberg book, which is essentially a compilation of her speeches over the years. It was another kid, unable to understand the rules made up by adults and why we won't do something about a crisis that seems so obvious. Her anger is pure and justified.
Reading Hot Money was a bit heartbreaking, because it explains exactly why the adults won’t do anything, it doesn’t align with the economic idea of growth, the endless exponential growth that is the bottom line.
“..changing the Earth’s climate in ways that will be chaotic and disastrous is easier to accept than the prospect of changing the fundamental, growth-based, profit-seeking logic of capitalism”
- Naomi Klein; Hot Money
Another skewed, bizarre, adult logic.
Looking back, it seems like this one was quite a bleak one, so let's end on some exciting stuff. We all need to do little things to restore our lost faith. As mentioned in the last newsletter, I am making an attempt to turn everyone around me into a reader. I’m starting a book club, finally!
I realized even being a self-certified ‘reader’, I haven’t read much from different genres, and this would be a fun way to get into new genres along with people who are both new and seasoned in reading. And of course you know about my newfound love for sharing books with others.
It's called ‘shelf indulgence’ - call it dorky but I’m too proud of this pun to care.
Anyway, here’s how it works.
Just like a relationship between any two people will always be unique, a relationship between a reader and a book differs with every reader and every book. It opens up new possibilities and sides of ourselves. I’m hoping this book club helps you find the book that would shift something in your life too.
I can’t wait!