Reflections of a restless eccentric

" I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail." -Abraham Maslow, The Psychology of Science, 1966 I first encountered this line in the movie Arrival . If I remember right, it was used in the context that the language you speak determines your worldview and consequently how you think. I was at the time not aware of any background, and I remember being very skeptical of this statement. Thereafter, I looked it up and found that there was something called linguistic relativity, better known as Sapir-Whorf hypothesis--a theory that strongly advocated this belief. But if I'm being honest, I should tell you that I wasn't very convinced by it. My idea was this: Language is just a medium. Regardless of the medium, what you're describing would still remain the same, right? How then, could language change the way you think? If anything, the reverse should be true--how you think would have an e...

I woke up this morning to a dozen notifications that I swiped away without even a second's remorse, till I got to a post notification from a friend's blog. I love reading in the morning(in fact, at all hours:P) and this being a Sunday, I could actually afford to laze around in bed reading. I headed over to the post in question: Fall from the pedestal . It was wonderfully written, and so very relatable. In no later than two minutes, I was sure that I would be retelling this from my own perspective. For what it's worth, here goes! :)  For those of you who haven't read the hyperlinked article(although I'd suggest you should), Dragon Rider outlines the shock,irritation and sorrow at outgrowing the books of her childhood. She talks about years spent in veneration of those characters and their worlds, and finding out suddenly that they weren't all so great. What did I like in them? Why did I spend hundreds of hours reading these? she asks. Now, being a voracious r...

Remember when a few months back I wrote this article titled On immunity to wonder ? For those of you did not read the post in question or are thinking TLDR(although why you're reading this if you think that way is a good question:P), I will spare you the verbosity and take you to the crux of the matter: I was pond ering over why we become "immune" to things/people/experiences over a period of time and lose out the initial intense emotional reactions we have to them. Quite recently, I stumbled upon an article on Hedonic Adaptation . As mostly happens with me and psychology, I was overtly elated that my weird observation was already well studied and documented and even had a name.:D For people who are still wondering what Hedonic Adaptation is, I will draw on a trivial example from my own life. As a kid, I longed for a swing. When I say longed for, I don't mean something whimsical that children ask for and then forget. I really really longed for it. I somehow epito...

On a rather chilly downcast day where the weather could not make up its mind as to whether rain was on its agenda, I found myself traveling to Electronic City. It had been two months since I had last visited. An entire 60 days without having seen this place--a year ago this would have been unimaginable. But somehow, today it is my reality. As we crossed the infamous Silk Board and took the elevated expressway, I was struck with a feeling of utter nostalgia. There was something about this flyover that made me happy. Logically, for people who travel to El City from the other end of Bangalore, this is the easiest part of their journey. The last leg, where they can comfortably sigh in relief because this is one road that isn't going to be jammed. It is a pleasant luxury, because if one day you took the route under the flyover, you would see the difference. Logically, that's how it is. Emotionally though, it's different, at least for me. It's that feeling of going...

Back in January, when the year was still young, and I was a naive enthusiastic fresh-out-of-college student brimming with ideas on how to live my life the coming year, I resolved to do one thing: Find balance--"Do good work. Spend time with family. Have a decent social life."  A friend sent me one of Kenneth Koch's poems then, and this will remain one thing I can never forget for the entirety of my life. Putting it up here, so that you can take a look too. Essentially, what it says is this: You cannot have work,friends and family all at once. You have to choose two out of three. I remember reading it, then re-reading it again. I did this many times, till it hypnotized me and haunted me. It seemed to strike a note of finality, like the final nail in a coffin. Every note rang true, and there seemed no way around it. It reminded me of those design trade offs--two you can have, but three is impossible. Power,area,timing. But like I said, I was naive and y...

NB: For all the grammar Nazis out there(I am myself partially one), I am aware that 'adulting' is not an actual word, at least when I write this. But the bandwagon of verbing all nouns is here, and who am I to protest? Also, the word is necessary because it fills a gap--'being an adult' is the closest you can get with today's vocabulary. But adulting is so much more, you know. It carries with it nonchalance and indifference, and quixotically yet a resentment of responsibilities and a longing for the 'good old days', all of which are  characteristic of millennials.   Somewhere in the past week, I came home just before it started raining cats and dogs, and thanked my stars for having escaped the wrath of the skies. My friend happened to call just then, and for a while, I was lost in our conversation, vaguely noticing that the electricity went off in the middle, leaving the house plunged in darkness. I happened to hear the torrential downpour of rain, ...