Sunday Posts

What enables Creativity? This has somewhat become the central question of my work. In a way, it was always there. I always sought opportunities where the boundaries between work and play fades - in other words, sought out work that I love - though this often meant a circuitous route to what other people may call Happiness. In fact, with time, happiness became something I do not seek, just the right opportunity to be creative! Happiness became, to me, a bottle, and the outside it, in the ephemerality of work and play, joy is to be found!  However, as Freud would have said in a different context, the economic life suppresses, rather than enables, such opportunities. The modern men (and women) is expected to play its part in the vast, global arrangement we have come to call civilisation, trading their very opportunities to be themselves, in return of happiness - or, what everyone calls happiness. In this sense, pursuit of happiness is the antithesis of a creative life, and y...

I wrote about a fresh start in 2016, but unlike all the grand plans of new beginnings I usually make around the year-end, this fresh start was not really that fresh. Rather, I am seeking to be boring, conventional, going back to a professional life etc. Was this about a burn-out, am I giving up, I was asked, and my answer that I am trying to be realistic did not have much weight. After all the years of attempting not to conform, this idea of settling in can only be seen as giving up, rather than a bidding time strategy. The point, of course, is that I am not giving up on my ambition, but seeking a different one. There are certain assumptions I made about my abilities and what I wanted to do, and to be sure, I tried them out. It did not work, or at least did not work the way I expected it. Like a good entrepreneur, I have learned and now, I am trying to pivot. Stepping back and getting back to professional life is not giving up entrepreneurship, but rather seeing my life as a con...

This is the 1001th post on this blog, done over almost six years. Not that I have written it all, some are videos and snippets, and a few are guest contributions. However, it is still a large number: I am amazed myself that I managed to find time to write all of that, amid everything else that happened in my life during the period (which, to sum up, amounts to five deaths, four marriages, two divorces, three births in my close family, alongside four job changes for me!). However, as I mentioned earlier, this is precisely the reason I write - for me, writing is somewhat therapeutic - a few minutes of space to indulge and dream, much needed amid all the chaos and confusion of everyday life. This writing was what some of the French philosophers will call my strategies of living, my window of sanity and escape from the framework of compliance, my moments of being myself rather than a cog on bigger wheels. But these 1000 posts lie in the past now: The sheer volume of the posts, and I am a...

My blog writing obscures the trouble I am having in my life, and that is precisely the point of it. With social commitments, a deadline to turn my dissertation in by 7th of September and an M&A situation at work, I have not had a free weekend since New Year, however, still I keep posting a few hundred words ever so often. Indeed, this makes me look non-busy, and creates arguments that I am ignoring the other tasks while I still find time to write. However, for me, writing is critical: It is therapeutic, it is what keeps me sane and able to do what I must do. I shall not make the claim that I am 'visionary' in any sense (a common description on Linkedin these days); I shall settle for the humble claim of being a dreamer. I keep talking about things that are not there. I live a rather strange life, half in what I do, but other half imagining and talking about things what I wish to do. However, this isn't any hallucination and most of the things I dreamt, I have at l...

I just read a piece by August Turak on the Forbes blog ( read it here ). My takeaway is the six lessons on teaching creativity that Turak claims his mentor, Louis Mobley, embedded in the IBM Executive School. It affected me deeply and made me think; hence, I am trying to reproduce these six lessons here: One, the linear methods of teaching - books, workshops etc - do not work in teaching creativity. This is not about giving answers and formula, but about encouraging a person to ask questions. Radically different questions! And these need to be generated in a non-linear way. Two, teaching creativity is more about 'unlearning' than 'learning'. So, the whole experience was designed to be a humbling experience, even in a frustrating, infuriating way. The end objective was to make people feel - wow, I never thought that way before! Three, one does not learn to be creative; one must BECOME creative people. So, the learning experience was designed so that no answer is ever ade...

I am asked, very often, why I write this blog. People wonder how I can find the time. Others conclude that I don't have much to do. Even my protestations that I usually get up at 5am to try writing the blog does not clarify the point: Surely I can find something more worthwhile to do even at that time, they would so. This blog, when I started writing this in October 2004, started as my 'morning pages'. I just read about the concept then. I used to write, and my aspirations during late school years (when I grew beyond the dreams of being a cricketer) was to become a journalist. I did do some fiction and poetry writing and published some of them in amateur magazines. Then, as I started working and traveling, I gradually lost the habit. I did give up and thought I couldn't write anymore. In October 2004, after having just come to England, life was tough. I did not have a proper job and was working in a Cash and Carry intermittently. It was a strange time to go back to writ...

Holidays almost over and work has returned to my mind in full blast. In a few days, I travel - to Malaysia first and then to familiar Manila. This, as I said before, promises to be a busy year, and hopefully a meaningful one. And, as I prepare myself for the work, and the change that must inevitably come with it, I had to question all the things I do, and see if it is worth doing. Why I write this blog, indeed, is something I had to ask myself. This is an important part of my life. I have been writing this blog for 5 years now, and have written 600 notes and posted another 100 odd from somewhere else. That indeed is quite a bit, and considering that almost 500 of these entries have come in the last two years, this is indeed becoming a bit of addiction. So, I usually blog early in the morning, rather than browsing a newspaper or watching television. And, some of the evenings, and most definitely Sunday afternoons, like now. This means eating away the time I could see movies, read books ...

The trigger for this post comes from a recent conversation at the Nottingham Trent University School of Narrative Arts, where students in the Undergraduate programmes on Multimedia Programme use a blog to maintain a learning journal and many find this useful to construct a narrative identity (and look up narrative identities of their colleagues and seniors) and build their learning endeavours around it. I found such use blogging as a learning tool innovative, though it indeed seemed obvious after I learnt about it. Consider the programme structure and one gets to understand how it helps further. The programme in question leads to a B Sc(Hons) in Multimedia Programming. It starts with a generalist first year, but a specialism starts to develop in Year 2. The students have a choice to pick up one from three available streams - Moving Images, Interactive Media or Animation - and work on it for next couple of years. While it sounds straightforward, the biggest challenge for the students is...

I could not write for last ten days. Considering my obsession with this blog, that's a long time of not writing. And, though I was busy, the reason for not being able to write was not my schedule, but the fact that I have started writing seriously. Holy cow! Suddenly, I realized writing a blog is a very public show. While it is as exciting to be invisible and nude in the public at the same time, it starts getting serious when I am upgrading my writing as a serious hobby. Something I wish to pursue, that is, with a little more effort. Besides, I am told that my writing is too verbose. By more than one person. And, that it put them off. Suddenly, I have this load on my head - thoughts on how I can make my writing more interesting. Pretending can be a lot of burden, and my pretensions have at last caught up with me. So, the world comes full circle. I started writing this blog as a sort of 'morning pages', attempting to practise writing and sending off writers' block f...

I have been writing this blog since October 2004. Yes, I have deleted all the posts prior to January 2006 - there weren't too many - when I decided to renew my blog writing efforts. Or, writing efforts, to be precise. I just read Julia Margaret Cameron and wanted to start writing 'morning pages', just to get into the practise of writing. However, despite her advise to keep the writing private, so that one is not conscious of what's being written but just goes with the flow, I chose to put my writing on public domain. Obviously, I hoped my efforts are going to be so obscure that no one is going to read it anyway, giving me the privacy of the morning pages along with the manageability of web based writing, and an opportunity to share some ideas with friends and colleagues when I have grown more confident. I feel happy that I took such a decision because, since then, I have made about 430 posts, some private but mostly public. It feels good to look back at all that writing...