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Delayed Gratification!

2–4 minutes

Everyone advices the other falls into two. First as stop scrolling. Second one as, to learn to enjoy a quiet evening once you’ve stopped the former. I assume, they are one loop, seen from different perspective. I believe, it is just an advice to be spread and quite difficult to be followed.

The pull isn’t the content!

TBH, most of things in the feed is forgettable the second we scroll up. Yet, the thumb keep moving, right? Does it end? IG doesn’t show the end of the gird. It feels like there is no end. Like Akashyapathiram, there are n number of new creators and consumers.

This feels addictive because we don’t know what the next scroll/reel gives you. It is usually nothing. Then, suddenly, something that resonates. It’s not chasing the good post. But chasing maybe this next one. That “maybe” is the whole game or to be precise, the anticipation is the word.

Why deleting the app isn’t enough?

Lets say the app is deleted or we have set a timer or even uninstalled. And, obviously it works for awhile. In the long run, does it?

The moment it’s reachable again, the urge to use is back. Sometimes even stronger. This never stops. We try to break the loop and the chain continues.

The Connecting dot

Lets say the boundary has been set. What shows up after the boundary isn’t calm. It’s a flatness/baseline that feels wrong. The empty feeling or dip. Now , this feels like something is missing. Like a void maybe? Not because you miss the app. Because the mind is trained on constant small surprises. It starts treating any steady as a problem to fix that we haven’t identified. Hence, the hand reaches for the phone again.

This is why both pieces of advice fail. Delete the app without expecting the flatness/baseline emotion, and reinstallation is done by day four. Trying to be present while the app is one tap away, feels the loses.

Now swap the app for a person

Lets say someone, who runs hot and cold. Replies fast one day, goes silent for three. Love bombing? Occasionally saying the exact thing that needs to be communicated in a consistent manner.

The core issue, is same as the above. Nothing in this changes too. We are not attached to who they are on average. We are attached to the maybe or the anticipation. Blocking them is deleting the app. And the flatness after is the same. A steady, kind, available person suddenly feels boring, because you’ve learned to read predictability as absence. This doesn’t have to be a partner, could be anyone to whom the issue is dealt with.

One question, not two!

So it’s one loop. The boundary has to hold long enough that ordinary time stops feeling empty and starts feeling ordinary again. Delayed Gratification.

But for how long to delay? I am not sure about this. Subjective to the individuals and the context.

Bu, most probably longer than we want. So don’t aim for feeling good but to stay long enough to stop feeling like loss.

Cheers

PS: Haven’t installed IG yet

Check out the previous post: Curse of Terminologies

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Curse of Terminologies

3–4 minutes

We’ve named everything now. Almost word for most of the feelings and emotions. Hardening. Avoidance. Emotional regulation. Staying in or out. The vocabulary is rich and glamours. The actual part of doing remains as hard as it ever was. All these terms looks similar like a solution for a particular kind of situation. i.e dealing with grief. Be it any kind. There is a follow up question as how do you come of it.

Most people reach out for one of two ways. Stay and harden or leave the place. Both sounds like a perfect answer. Yet, it hides the layers of flaw.

%Hardening: It is more of bracing. Building a shell so less gets through. Even in agriculture, right after tissue culture, the plants left for hardening. So that it gets adapted to the environment. In real life, we put the Buddha’s clam face on for bracing. But the image is wrong. Buddha didn’t harden. He turned inward and towards the difficult things until it loosened its grip. Hardening doesn’t solve but it can hold a lid over a it by a brutal force.

Leave has the opposite. There are lot of quotes on remove the distraction or stay out of the triggers. It may work well on the situation but it does nothing to the internal world. It always travels within one self and not in geographical senses. If a small trigger still sets off, then feeling was never finished.

So the real question carries two context here

  • Do you stay in the situation or leave it? If it is based on the circumstance or geography, then leave or change accordingly.
  • If it is concerned with emotions, accepting is the deal. Facing a feeling benefits in the long run rather than avoiding it and letting it grow.

Avoidance is not as same as steadiness or openness. The former says I don’t care while the latter part says I care yet not knocked over. The numb version looks wise but doesn’t help in the long run. Attaining the steadiness across all walks of life isn’t easy or can’t be forced with words. Trying to be clam while the whole larva churning inside is just hardening again. It starts with a gap of stimulus and response and until the muscle can hold the big things. Listening to the body works over the mind. When the waves are bigger, staying open or openness in a flood might be a trap. Sanity is staying at the edge of the wave and not drawing under it.

This Hardening, avoidance and steadiness might look the same but there is thread of level of difference. Hardening is like building an armor/tool to feel less. Steadiness or staying in build the capacity to hold. The avoidance and steadiness might look the same on the external but it is opposite at the core.

  • Hardening – Feel less
  • Avoidance – Feel less now and more later
  • Staying in – Feel fully now and less later.

Staying steady is not about being robotic to emotions. Sometimes, it better to be shaken (more of a human nature). But it just helps not to be thrown around by everything.

Do these words really matter? I don’t know. Maybe in the introspection or in the analysis, it does help. In the end, the everyone has different definitions of these terms including the word insanity.

Cheers!

Check out the previous post: Space for Women

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Space for Women!

2–3 minutes

When we talk about health, we often imagine gyms, playgrounds, morning runs, structured, and disciplined exercise. But for many women (especially) in tier 2 and tier 3 towns, this version of space is not easily accessible. The system isn’t build around their schedules. This blog explores about the household women rather the rural women who are even pulled into physical labor.

It is that these spaces were never fully designed with women in mind. I am not speaking about the entry. Of course, the playground exists, but is occupied almost entirely by men. I could barely see few women in the ground today. Most of the women are occupied with kitchen and households chores in the morning. Followed by work and the evening duties. Even stepping out for a walk can involve talks and permissions. I believe lot of has guilt for working out for themselves rather than working in the kitchen. Not sure tho.

And yet, here’s the paradox. Women on average, live longer than men.

Initially, this will not make sense. Less access to physical activity should mean poorer health outcomes. Right?

But the reality is more layered and messy. Women’s physical activity often exists in invisible or uncounted forms. Household work, caregiving, daily movement is not labeled as exercise. It demands consistent effort and utmost care. Women are always onto something. I assume most of the women are more into mental and autoimmune condition rather than physical ones.

So the real picture is, Women are healthier, maybe because endure longer. Rn, the system creates a quiet imbalance. Disclaimer: Not quoting this as gender issue but more of design built around.

I am still exploring the data behind this. But the pattern is visible even before numbers.

Yet some are unaware of privilege they have.

Cheers!

Check out the previous post: What Boredom is actually doing?

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What Boredom is actually doing?

2–3 minutes

Every time, I end up digging layers around the idea of boredom.

I’ve written about rest, about boredom, about stillness. Three attempts yet never caught at the core. So here’s another layer added I believe.

We take in a lot. A conversation that didn’t sit right. A decision made too quickly. Something you read and moved past. Something someone said that you filed under think about this later and never did. The intake is constant and raising with the social media. The processing isn’t (Not therapy, lol)

That gap is the backlog or unfinished business or tabs. There is no enough time given to the mind to close it.

TBH, we’re terrified of it. So we fill every gap of emptiness with podcast, scroll, task or even music (Found Guilty) that feels productive. Not because we’re avoiding rest, but because the moment we stop, the load/hanging thoughts becomes visible. This visibility feels like falling behind or even failing.

This is what I finally understand. Boredom isn’t the pile/load. Boredom is what clears it. A days ago I was in the ground for my morning walk. I forgot to recharge data plans. I couldn’t play the music nor Starva. Nothing to do, quite annoyed about it. But the walk really help me in finding the data points for the solution I needed. Because nothing else (music) was occupying the space, so the hanging thing finished processing on its own. It was nice.

They call it as Default Mode Network (DMN). When you stop directing your attention or energy outward, your brain doesn’t go quiet. It switches to a different mode. More of internal kind of one. The one it uses for replaying memories, working over unresolved things, or wandering or making sense of yourself to yourself.

This one, can’t run that opened tabs and a podcast at the same time. The input/consumption has to stop first. That’s the part we keep skipping. This is why boredom is the specific tool.

Meditation, Stillness and Boredom might sound the same, but it is not. Meditation is directed for doing something to your mind or bringing to one thought or one sound or light or even trying not to think or chew on anything. Stillness is a place you arrive at once the noise/thoughts has already settled.

Boredom is messier as compared to both. It is slightly uncomfortable and the mind wanders without a destination. And that exact thing, under which the backlog/pending ones clear. Through it despite the discomfort it feels.

So you don’t sit idle to become creative. You sit idle so the pile can finish itself. Hence, already half-formed ones finally has the room/space to surface.

Cheers!

Check out the previous post: Broken Chain of Website Traffic!

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Broken Chain of Website Traffic!

1–2 minutes

For the past two to three weeks, I couldn’t write the blog posts. The major reason was that I created too many outlets for the dissemination. TBH, most of my free time were occupied by Oil pastels and Arrow (game).

Last Sunday, I was checking my stats in WordPress (Basic plan). The numbers were usually average. It doesn’t fluctuations unless there is a movie blog got a referral or cited. But the numbers were even below average. I convinced myself that maybe because I have written only 4 -5 posts for the past two months.

Then yesterday’s Seth Godin post was slight intruding and helpful. Traffic from search is structurally declining. AI answers your question before you click anywhere. The blog as a traffic machine is a dying model. Read more here.

I went down a rabbit hole after that. Then prompting with Claude gave this chart (see below).

Then what about SEO?GEO? does it work actually? Not sure. GEO shows your content to the user without having the need of clicking the website. I am not sure if there is anything like google analytics for the ai referrals. GA4? Unclear yet.

I believe the third one (from the above image) indicates the same. But, it doesn’t show much details on GA4. Or Maybe limited for the plans or no referrals. Whatever. I am planning to adopt the strategies laid by Seth Godin. His prescription are treat traffic as a random gift, not a resource. Serve the smallest viable audience. Build direct subscriber relationships instead.

Writing only for the readers who subscribed or even to the new visitors maybe?.

Cheers!

Check out the previous post: Maa Inti Bangaram (2026)

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Maa Inti Bangaram (2026) Movie Review

1–2 minutes

I watched in Tamil, Telugu version wasn’t available here in my town. She could have picked a better dubbing artist for her. It was kind of odd to watch.

This movie is a good entertainer and there is lot of colors in it. Sam took movie single handedly. Of course other supporting roles did play really well. The friend was real phenomenal. The family bonding yet a action sequence was well placed.

Maybe, the background score and music could’ve been better. Even for Hero centric movies, the background scores, music, themes elevate the scenes to an greater extent. I am not sure whether it was purposely subtler it down to bring out more of family vibe than a action one. Action one in Saree!!

Tho, the film tried to bring out a message of accepting daughter in law as either Mahalakshmi or Kali. The difficulties of being a good daughter in law were more as compared to the stress accepting the other.

Overall, it’s good watch for the effort Sam has put in.

Cheers

Check out the previous post: Obsession (2026) & Movie Reviews

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The Real Metamorphosis

2–3 minutes

Kafka could have written it as a man with a stroke or a chronic disease. No speech, or movement. Most probably with a feeding tube. Instead, he wrote a man who turns into an gigantic ugly insect. That feels like an odd choice, if he wanted to slap us with the truth.

The book metaphor helps us get close to hard things or even perceive the hard things in life. An insect is strange, scary and could be unreelable at times. The reader can feel disgust without facing what that disgust means about real people. Or maybe metaphor does the opposite. Who knows? But, it does gives us the distance. It lets us write about cruelty without admitting it. It does happens to real bodies, in real homes. I am not sure whether fiction tells the truth. Maybe it just helps us avoid it or sugar coats in a better way.

Either way, something exits in layers. Gregor stops earning money. His family’s love starts to change. Not all at once. First there is worry, then duty and then tiredness. Then his sister calls him it. No one chooses to stop loving him. It wasn’t their choice. But it just turns out their love needed his usefulness to keep going. Once that stopped, they also did.

I used to think that being useful was the most beautiful reason or even a purpose to live. My old blogs scream the same. Something solid to hold onto when nothing else made sense. But these days, with a personal event having happened, there is this particular kind of question that lingers.

Which kind of usefulness did I mean? Is there usefulness I create for myself (a sense of moving forward without any external validation), or is usefulness the price of being kept?

The kind Gregor’s family ran on. I thought I meant the first kind. Now I am not so sure. Maybe confused?

If usefulness is the real foundation and everything stands on it, what happens when it is gone or broken? Not as an idea. But as something a body can no longer do.

That is the real problem with calling usefulness a purpose or a duty. It works until it does not. There is nothing in the idea that tells you what is supposed to hold you up once it is taken away. Is there anything like that? I doubt.

Perhaps that is the most useful thing the insect ever did. Just making us question once you stop reading it as fiction.

Cheers

Check out the previous post: A Room of One’s Own

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A Room of One’s Own

3–4 minutes

Women couldn’t write before, because they had no money and space of their own. Not because the talent wasn’t there. But the conditions weren’t available to them. This was clearly pointed by Virginia Woolf in 1929 in her book. This is one of the most precise argument made in the book.

She tries and brings it out carefully across the literature and books published. For centuries, women were the protected gender. Mostly kept away from hard labor, war, physical danger. On the surface, it looks like care or even protection. But this comes with a price she says.

No access to libraries, no legal right to own property until few decades ago, no institutional recognition. The fragility that followed was biological or intentional? I don’t know. Maybe it was produced by the confinement, then used to justify continuing it.

Think like this. If someone is only ever given desk jobs, never allowed near physical work, and then someone points and says, See, she has no muscle. Right now, most of us don’t have unless we hit the gym or do strength training. That’s not an observation. That’s a setup or system is for generations. Woolf argues that womanhood was a protected occupation. The protection looked like shelter. It was a prison with a nicer name. She also brings out that it would be better to have money than voting power. Seems valid isn’t it? even now?

She builds this argument carefully, almost strategically. And then something I felt strange happens at the end. Maybe after effect of reading Nawal El Saadawi? I am not sure tho.

After documenting every obstacle, generations of women who died without writing a word. Woolf concludes that the greatest creative mind is androgynous. To write without gender. This was quite contradicting to me. Transcending the whole thing entirely. This raised an obvious question.

How do you transcend conditions that were never neutral to begin with? Possible? The androgynous ideal assumes a level of inner freedom (maybe, Zen mode) that only becomes possible after the material conditions (money, time and space for oneself) are already secured. Shakespeare could write without ego about his gender because no one was using his gender against him. Nor he was denied of things.

And then there’s Judith Shakespeare. Woolf’s imaginary sister example. Equally talented, born into the wrong body in the wrong century. Maybe, I need to read again to understand the reference point quoted. We don’t actually know what Shakespeare thought about women and his state of mind while writing. We just know he became the default measure of genius. She could have spoken more of Jane Austen, I believe.

So why that as ending?

Probably because 1929 had limits on how much anger/opinions were allowed to express. The androgyny conclusion was the part that made the rest of the book listenable to people who needed to hear it. Maybe, It was the compromise or maybe not.

Maybe we don’t know Woolf’s full inner state either. Maybe she didn’t pull the punch out of strategy. Maybe she genuinely arrived at gender neutrality not as a compromise, but as someone who had processed the anger so completely that she wrote from the other side of it.

Is the androgynous conclusion a ending she hit, or a place she actually reached genuinely. We can’t know and never know.

But that’s almost the point. She pushed through conditions that were designed to stop her before she started. And somehow, at the end of it, she’s still asking us to go further. To write better, to think freer, to not stop where she stopped.

Cheers

PS: Might read other books of hers.

Check out the previous post: Obsession (2026)

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Obsession (2026) Movie Review

5–7 minutes

There is a particular kind of harm that leaves no marks and not spoken much. It accumulates quietly, in choices the other person made before you even knew you were part of the equation. By the time you feel the walls or the bars, you have already been inside them for a long time. Its hard to break or come out of the cage.

Obsession gives this a supernatural frame and a psychological horror. A wish, a piece of willow wood, a transfer of will is the centre theme. It might sound as supernatural or something only on the screens. But this one reminds us about the pattern that runs through ordinary relationships unnoticed.

Disclaimer: Spoiler Alerts! Do watch it!

The real victim

Nikki, independent girl, with a dream of becoming writer or in avengers (lol). She likes someone else yet she asks him directly and he said as friend. Through the scenes, the poem, we come to know that she think Bear as brother. She created a space for him to open up yet then, he used the wish to take what he wants.

We are inside Bear’s longing for most of the narrative or maybe more explicitly stated. Hope, more people get that. Nikki exists, largely, as its object or even as psycho. But she is the one whose will gets overwritten gradually, then completely. In reality she did not choose.

Nikki snaps in and out of herself. Moments where she seems aware something is wrong, and moments where she cannot. Those scenes were really good actually. This is not dramatic. It makes you unreliable to yourself. You lose the thread back to your own self which was clearly brought out through acting.

Her victimhood is not loud. It does not look like suffering from the outside. It looks, for a long stretch, like toxic love who suffocates the Bear

The portrayed victim

Bear is also a victim, but of a self-authored kind. His cowardice is not a flaw that exists. It is mechanism of self or a just defected piece. He wanted the outcome without the risk of being told no. He looks calm, approachable and never violent you know yet quite dangerous. It is something the film handles with more precision.

Bear never tells anyone about the willow until things gets heated up for real. He watches people around him get hurt. He watches Nikki become someone she is not. Yet he still wants her to love him. That forceful wanting (not stated tho), in the face of everything it costs, is not love or romantic. It is how manipulation works. An inability to prioritize another person’s reality or wish over one’s own desire. Even Nikki did ask him to kill her once.

Most people who do this do not think of themselves as manipulators actually. They think of themselves as victim who love deeply and are not loved back enough. They influence, and then feel wronged by their own influence. They create the dynamic, and then experience themselves as its victim. Classic. Maybe out of conditioning or the way he grew up. Let’s not dig that for now.

What the cat already knew

There is a quieter detail the film plants early. Bear has a cat. The cat dies through carelessness because of the tablets left within reach. Bear cannot be responsible for the things he loves. Not because he is cruel, but because he is unable to hold the weight of other’s needs alongside his own. The cat is the first proof. Nikki is the continuation of that proof. Or is she the cat? I am not sure.

Some reviewers have noted that Nikki and the cat are linked. Both independent, both drawn to his orbit, both ultimately hurt by him. Negligence disguised as love and care.

And then the ending. When Bear tries to end things himself, he reaches for tablets over guns. Even in his final act, he cannot fully own it. He hesitates. He still wants her to love him more than he wants to take responsibility for what he has done. Even when friends ask questions and Sara dies and the world narrows around him, keeps returning to the same refrain and ego or even validation. What’s wrong with wanting her, why won’t she just stay with him?

The honest conclusion

At the end, it is the aware part of Nikki (the part still herself) that makes the final wish. Nikki making the wish is, in a way, him getting exactly what he always wanted. Someone else to make the hard choice for him. Most readings will call this a twist, or justice. But structurally, it is the only exit available to the story That is obviously not revenge.

Bear, in his final moments, is afraid. He did not want to die for it. He never thought that the wish would actually cost. This is the magical thinking at the center of manipulation. What’s even more surprising is that, there are Bears in real life and only very few Nikki’s can crawl out.

What the story doesn’t stay for

The film ends when Bear’s arc ends. What happens to Nikki after? The grief, the disorientation of coming back to yourself after being someone else. The story does not stay for that. Maybe, that absence is itself a statement.

The movie did leave me with two questions!

if you wished for something like genuinely, with no intent to override anyone and it arrived exactly as you imagined, would you still want it?

And if the answer changes, does that mean the wish was wrong? Or just that you are no longer the same person who made it?

Maybe wishing, like loving, carries within it the obligation to keep asking. Not once. Continuously.

Obviously, this movie is open for n of observations and interpretations. Btw how did nikki get connected over the call while he was asking for cancellation?

Cheers

PS: Why he was named Bear. The Bears are for yes chefs you know.

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You do not fully exist to yourself!

2–3 minutes

There are parts of you that have never been touched or remain unexplored. Not because you haven’t looked, but some mirrors exist inside other people.

Relationships are not just company. I mean, not specified to partners alone. They help you to dig deeper. Each one brings a version of you that solitude cannot reach. Certains part of us are dormant without the right connection. Waiting for someone who carries that particular key. Be it a rivalry, or a mentorship or even grief

Isn’t it kind of disturbing? Unreachable or unexplored qualities that are hidden for even oneself?

There is a second thing, somewhat buired inside the first. Every relationship runs on two channels. Ofcourse, how you receive, and how you give. Most people assume these are the same. They almost never are.

For eg, you might give through action like through showing up, through doing the thing without being asked. But what you might like to receive might be just words, and only words.

The language you speak and the language that lands are two different ends. Like the quiet rivalry between a reader and a writer. Most of us are running translations inside every relationship we have, often without knowing it. At somepoint of time, the bridge collapses. Certainly, the translation cost is real.

I don’t have a name for that. I am not sure it needs one.

What I do know right now is this. If the translation never made right, it doesn’t tap the unexplored parts. The version of you that person (not necessarily to be a human) could have called forward, never arrives. You do not fully exist to yourself. You are partly a function of who has shown up and what they unlocked.

But,

Who are you for real? What is still dormant in you, waiting for the right kind of connection to arrive?

Cheers

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The Devil Wears Prada!

3–4 minutes

Would Tamil Cinema?

People say geographical location is a myth when it comes to who you are. But there are advantages and disadvantages to being born in a specific place or country. Culture always shapes how you think, conditions you to an extent. Also, it influences on what and how you expect from the world and from yourself.

The later part of life is always in your hands, I believe. Either you relearn or you stay absorbed in the same world you were grown. In the current digital era, you have too many options to expose yourself to different cultures through media and people. Cinema plays a great role in it.

Which is why I keep thinking about Andy Sachs.

Devil Wears Prada came out in 2006. A normal girl shows up to a job she didn’t plan for, gets changed by the room she walked into. She loses herself a little, makes choices she isn’t proud of, and then walks away to start over. No grand lesson. No message delivered to the audience. Just a woman becoming something, gets messy, raw, unresolved. The ending wasn’t becoming a great writer, just a start over.

Andy has no safety net. No parents nearby framing her choices. Her boyfriend leaves. The film doesn’t mourn either for long. She has no power like physical (I mean more muscular kinda), institutional, or social. She just showed up. And the plot stays with her, on her, about her.

Coming here to Tamil cinema, it has given us women who struggle with a power or a resource. Ramya in Bad Girl, Manju in Aval Appadithaan, Kavitha in Aval Oru Thodar Kathai, Thulasi in Marupadiyum, all navigating a world that wasn’t built for them. All trying to establish something for themselves. But even in their struggle, the family is in the background or it revolves around the relationships. The camera returns to them.

The woman’s story is always legible through someone else’s witness.

Bad Girl came closest. But even there, the film needed to resolve. She ends up find a place, which is still a statement. A conclusion with a message attached.

Andy doesn’t conclude. She just leaves and starts over again.

What’s missing in Tamil cinema isn’t strong women. We have those as cops, as CEOs, as survivors. What’s missing is the unprotected woman. The one whose becoming has no grand witness. The one who is just alone in it, losing herself, finding herself, no one to report back to.

That feels real. That’s what a lot of women actually live.

Would Tamil cinema have Andy?

Maybe. But, again I think it would give her a mother who calls. A resolution that means something. A message to take home. The story would need to justify her choices to the family, to the audience, to even someone.

Andy doesn’t justify anything. She just lives it. Makes wrong turns, absorbs the wrong things, and walks away when she recognizes herself in someone she doesn’t want to become (Miranda). No one has to approve that arc. No one has to witness it for it to count.

That’s what’s missing i think. Not the story of a woman succeeding or suffering. The story of a woman just… happening in her world. To herself. On her own terms, even when those terms are messy.

I am not against Indian culture. We are a collective society and there is something real and sustaining in that. But wouldn’t it be nice to have a film on the other side of the coin? Not as a statement or a lesson. Just as a story that’s also true.

Andy gets to just be a person. That’s the gap.

Cheers

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What does an empty mind see?

2–3 minutes

I was staring at a blank page of this post for quite sometime. Thoughts were there, somewhere. Just needed time to find words. But then, does the mind really stay empty?

J Krishnamurti usally talks about an empty mind like it was the most natural thing. His mind mostly wandered from the curl of a leaf to the colour of dusk. The observer being observed. He spent time with trees and open skies.

What about the rest of us? We mostly stare at walls, screens and almost right angles everywhere.

There is this study that I came across in the media. The Coffer illusion. People from the US and UK almost always see rectangles. Rural Himba people from Namibia almost always see circles.

Half of them can’t see the rectangles even when told to look. Not because one group sees better. But because the environment trained the eye. Grow up around round huts and curved horizons, your brain learns curves. Grow up in a modernized and industrial world, most of us see straight lines, sharp edges, right angles. Our brain learns geometry. None is superior but the way brain is trained to see things.

The observer is not neutral here, I believe.

This is what I have been looping around in the tulips post. The brain builds the things based on the inputs received and sometimes it is beyond. What we call perception is just the brain pattern matching to everything it has already seen.

So when JK says empty the mind and observe the observer, which observer? Observe the trained observer?

I’ve been doing oil pastels lately. Mostly curves, sharp edges are not quite easy in pastels. I could see that I am reaching more of rounded edge pastels instead of a sharp ones.

Btw, does emptiness truly exist? Or does the mind just hallucinate a quieter version of what it already knows?

I don’t have an answer yet.

Cheers!

Check out the previous posts: Things nobody tells you before your first trek!

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Things nobody tells you before your first trek!

2–3 minutes

Not a gear list. Not a training plan or check lists. Just things that actually matter once you’re out there.

Summit is optional. The return is mandatory.

This one sounds obvious until you’re standing 200 meters from the top with bad weather rolling in and your ego is doing all the talking. The mountain will be there. You need to be there too, next week. Turn around when it’s time to turn around.

Finding someone at your pace is harder than finding the trail.

Some people will always be ahead. Some will fall behind. That’s not a problem to fix. Thats just how it goes. If you want company on a trek, get comfortable with the idea that you’ll have to choose. Do you slow down, speed up, or make peace with walking alone for stretches? It depends on what you pick. All three are valid.

Mountain weather doesn’t care about your plans

Clear skies at 6 AM means nothing. It can rain, hail, fog over, and clear again all in one afternoon. Check the forecast for sure. But carry the raincoat anyway and always. The mountains might look calm. They’re just not thinking about you at all.

Bananas & oranges over electrolyte sachets.

The sachets work. But a banana at altitude hits differently real sugar, real potassium, and it doesn’t taste like disappointment. Oranges give you water and energy in one go. Obvisouly, you need to carry the water bottles.

Train with weight on your back before you go.

Walking is fine cardio. Walking with 10 kilos on your back is a different sport entirely. The load shifts your center of gravity, tires your shoulders, and tests your knees in ways that no amount of flat road walking will prepare you for. Start loading up a month before.

Your knees will remind you of every shortcut you took in training

The descent is where knees go to protest. Strengthen them before the trek squats, step-downs, lunges. And on the way down, take your time. The trail doesn’t reward speed there. Slow and steady on the descent is the best way.

Trekking is not just walking. It shows you who you are when no one is watching and the trail still has two hours left. It shows you who others are too. The ones who wait, the ones who don’t, the ones who become strangers you’ll never forget.

You go up a mountain. You come down changed. That’s the whole point.

Cheers!

Check out the previous posts: The Flowers & The Truth!

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The Flowers & The Truth!

2–4 minutes

I finished Women at Zero Point yesterday. It took me very little time as the book is conversational, almost deceptively so. But by the middle of it, my cortisol was too high. At the end, I didn’t know what to do with what I was carrying. I was almost blank, felt heavy. I did want to isolate and then I was calling my inner circle to feel better actually.

Firdaus’s life moves from one man to the next and each one taking something. And I kept waiting. I know for one of them to just not. Her uncle, briefly, came close. That was it. The rest? A procession of harm dressed in different characters.

I was surprised by how much that surprised me.

The first time I read a story about a sex worker was Eleven Minutes by Paulo Coelho during the COVID era. More pages, more pain spread across them. Maria goes through it all. The loneliness, the transaction, and the self harm. And then at the end, a man comes. He understands her. He chooses her. He brings her flowers at the end.

Covers of Eleven Minutes by Paulo Coelho and Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi.

I felt relieved. Happy, even.

I’ve been thinking about that relief since yesterday. What exactly was I relieved about? That she suffered and then was chosen? That the flowers made the suffering mean something? A man’s arrival was the resolution the story needed? Is it all at the end (Apo avolodhan la) ?

I don’t know how much of that relief was mine and how much was years of conditioning telling me that being chosen is the ending worth wanting or suffering. That love, specifically from a man, is what converts pain into something bearable. Maybe, that’s why I didn’t question why before.

Firdaus was never chosen. Not in the way that offers relief. And the book doesn’t pretend otherwise. Too brutal you know. There are no flowers. There is no arrival. Only death at the end.

She sees clearly. By the end, she has stripped every illusion away about men, about society, about what freedom actually costs and even about women who sell and who doesn’t.

You are not saved by anyone. At the end you save yourself or you die. That is the truth Firdaus is carrying and conveyed at the end. Quite cynical. But as you sit with it slowly, you will realize she has more courage than most of us will ever need to have.

There are more Firdauses who are alive and died before. Women whose stories are not going to resolve into relief and obviously, pain is not going to be converted into meaning by someone showing up.

Maybe we don’t need more stories of Firdaus to show us the pain. The pain is not the revelation. Maybe what we need is more Saadawis. People who are willing to sit across from an impossible truth and not look away. To witness it, and then make sure it doesn’t stay buried.

I finished the book yet Firdaus lives rent free.

Cheers!

PS: No hatred towards XY!

Check out the previous posts: What is likely to be seen?

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What is likely to be seen?

2–3 minutes

Is it possible for a person to be fully seen??

Not naked, i mean here is to be witnessed completely. The thought process, the paradoxes, biases, the thing that we believe at 2 am that doesn’t match with our public self. Can anyone person/thing hold all of that?

I keep coming back to this for about past few months.

I read Anne Frank’s diary few days back and then immediately Women at Zero Point by Nawal El Saadawi. Two women, at different timelines, different traps. Obviously, both had different path of suffering yet both has a medium to express.

Anne had her diary. Firdaus had one night and a listenerbefore her execution. Both of them had something or someone to show their story to the world. Got witnessed in some form. Is it their complete, raw picture? Not sure. But many of women stories would have buried with them.

But, what if the person being witnessed isn’t pouring into one vessel? or had different forms ? A witness standing at any one point gets only a partial view.

This reminds me of a line from The Lunchbox. Irfan says, more or less, that unshared things fade. A life without a witness loses its edges.

So does feeling seen gives satisfaction? pride? legacy? or is it closer to relief? The brief sensation of setting something down? Or of having someone else hold the weight for a moment?

Maybe what we are actually looking for is not to be fully seen. That probably scare the shit out of us. Maybe we want to be seen enough. Just past the surface we perform to the external world, below the part we control. To have someone not flinch at what’s underneath.

Whether anyone was truly seen/witnessed by anyone. I doubt certainly. But maybe reaching towards it. The attempt to be seen, even partially, even imperfectly.

I am still thinking about this!

Cheers

PS: It’s not about social validation ;)

Check out the previous posts: Unhappened Data Points

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