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...

Coffee shop chains are cool, but are they? That Starbucks, Costa and Pret are everywhere in the neighbourhood, offering us a standard experience - of space, coffee and everything - is signalling more than just coffee: This is about what we use public spaces for and how we use them. They are an instrument to create our identities. Imagine the morning coffee, not just its smell but also standing in the long queues at or by the station. The act of standing there is being part of a civilisation, which, despite its currency, seems to have been going on forever. This is being part of the office crowd, being busy, being hard-working, being on the path of, if one is not already, successful. The carefully crafted and branded paper-cup, with the cap and the holder, all parts of being modern, a fragment of our daily, and perennial, experience. But, more so, it is the sitting down experience, laptops everywhere, each table a small universe of start-ups and ideas, napkins specially ...

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....

This post is not about an idea that just popped up in my head, but about something that I saw. And, that, though uncharacteristic, is most appropriate. I just came across, while reading a book about 'Genius Clusters', a 'Hindu' theory of creativity! I am reading Eric Weiner's Geography of Genius , a concoction of travelogue and psychological theories, representing a tour through spots of great creative flourishing in human history. I am about half-way through, and have already travelled through Athens, Hangzhou, Florence and Edinburgh - and currently in Calcutta! It is a chatty read, serious ideas and wackiness bound together, and oftentimes, as a book of this nature would invariably be, too simplistic. But, every now and then, there is an idea worth all my effort, and my current pulse-rusher is this notion that Hindus have a different notion of creativity. Here is the argument in brief: That, in Judeo-Christian, currently Western tradition, the idea of cr...

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...