Sunday Posts

Calcutta Coffee House - Famed but Forgotten One of the key arguments in favour of urbanisation is that cities can be creative and innovative in a way the rural life may never be.  This is indeed a very modern idea - and perhaps one of the signature ideas of modernity - as Cities, at least until the 19th century, was considered a place of squalor and crime. Until then, cities were economic and administrative necessities, and existed in forms of Forts, Bazaars, and after the eighteenth century, increasingly as Factory towns. Creativity resided elsewhere, closer to nature. Since the end of 19th century this started changing. The improvements in sewage and transportation made cities very different place than they were before. Mid-19th century also saw shaping of some of the great modern cities, Paris and Vienna among them. A celebration of cities such as Athens, Florence or Edinburgh, as places of ideas, entered the conversation. Cities, as places that brought people to...

Creativity was perhaps never been more glorified. We have appreciated art, music and literature, enjoyed the fruits of scientific research and technical invention, indeed, but never before we have considered Creativity as the sole source of progress as well as redemption. Governments never wilfully proclaimed the goals of building creative economies, city planners never before had an explicit mandate for creative cities, and here is the clinchers, accountants never concerned themselves with creative output. Creativity, seen in context, is a modern religion, a source of collective well-being when all other prospects have failed. Accordingly, there is a stampede for making creative places. Start-ups have taken the place once Public Corporations had in public imagination - the mainstay of a middle class economy! Governments now divest in public sector, they are so last century, and proclaim policies to encourage start-up making. Economists write about idea economy and collective IQ....

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...