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Art, Artist, and Are They?

“The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.” ―  Anton Pavlovich Chekhov The democratization of technology has made tools once exclusive to professionals now accessible to everyone. Anyone with a smartphone and an internet connection can become a photographer, a musician, a painter, an artist, an author, or a poet. The barriers to entry have been dismantled so thoroughly that the true essence of being an artist has been diluted to the point of absurdity. Gone are the days when art required peer review and validation by credible authorities. When people understood the concept of being rejected and accepted the idea of not being good enough. The self-serve platforms have effectively obliterated the need for hardened training to excel in any craft. Instead, we're drowning in a sea of self-proclaimed artists who possess the tools but lack the discipline and skill honed through years of dedication and critique. The result? An overwhelming flood of what can only be descr...
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One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy

“Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.” ―  Emil Cioran A few weeks back, I was sitting in the food court of a mall with some friends having Taco Bell and I had just finished reading 'Nausea' by Jean-Paul Sartre. In the book's Afterword, the editor mentioned Albert Camus drawing comparisons and parallels between the two greats. The editor also mentioned the famous conclusion from Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus - one must imagine Sisyphus happy. This thought was left lingering in my mind. I carried it with me for a few days until that evening in that food court where I saw something which etched it permanently in my brain. I had a moment of epiphany. I saw a woman who was not well; you could see she was suffering physically just by the look of her. She was handed over a tray of food from a shop and struggled to hold it together. Her hands were shaking and a person standing next to her had to support the tray so it did not fall on the...
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Welcome to the Machine

  “One day everything will be well, that is our hope. Everything's fine today, that is our illusion” ―  Voltaire Perhaps one of the most famous thought experiment ever devised is the trolley problem. It is said to be the classic representation of the clash between the two schools of thought in the western philosophy  - utilitarianism and deontology. The problem states that a trolley is running down a track and on the track there are five people tied up and unable to move. There is an alternative track on which a single person is tied up. You are standing at a lever that can change the direction of the trolley to the alternate track. Your choices are to either do nothing and let the trolley kill five people or to pull the lever and divert the trolley where it kills one person. The dilemma here is that which is the more ethical option? Upon facing the situation, I assume, many people would choose to pull the lever. I myself might end up doing the same. However, t here are m...
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News - facts or story?

“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.” ―  Thomas Jefferson In the times that we suppose are unprecedented, it is not the ubiquitously luring dangers of the pandemic that scare me the most but it is the news; something that we are more exposed to than the disease itself.  Open any news channel at any time (although maybe when they are actually reporting a piece of news and not discussing celebrity hairstyles or hooking up actresses with cricketers or reporting an Instagram video to be the best thing on the internet today) or read any column of any newspaper and you will find the tone of the report to resound that of someone telling their plight or sharing their joy or venting their anger or ranting their frustration. This may not seem a much of a problem as doing all that is the job of a reporter but it is a huge problem. And that is so because when a news report sounds like a story, it means that the reporter has...
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"What is happiness if not the true agreement between a man and the existence he leads" - Albert Camus As the evening air starts bearing a chill and the life in the streets gets covered in mist, as the sound of the clock ticking in the room grows louder every second and a distant howl breaks the continuity of time, I find myself retreating into a state of reclusion, wrapping my heart in the thick blanket of memories of a life lived. Good or bad, memories or hopes, it should not matter, as long as they keep my heart warm. I have come to believe that the closer you come to yourself, the more consciousness you gain about your being, the better understanding you possess of your social, economic and personal problems, you understand and relate to the whole of humanity in a better manner. This is when you realise that the mass of the world is the same everywhere dealing with the same issues, struggling with the same hassles, being harassed by the same establishment. And it mak...
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The Fighter Inside Us

“...It has been a beautiful fight. Still is.” ―  Charles Bukowski,  You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense For a long long time, I've been trying to open up this space on my laptop and keep hitting the keys until the characters turn into a passage that resonates the beating of a heart that is still alive. As romantic as it may sound, that's not how writing works. It demands efforts and time. It needs you to sit down and think about what you have to say and how you will say it. It wants you to fight the turmoil that is whirring inside you and write whatever escapes its vortex. Hence, this blogpost. Life is a constant struggle and I believe that this struggle is the greatest proof of being alive. If you are still breathing, you are alive and fighting. And fight you must, for the day we lay down and turn our backs on life shall be the day all meaning and purpose of our existence is lost. In a utopian world, there is no struggle but this is no Wonderland. You ...
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Art, Artists, and Fate

A few months back I came across a small article that casually mentioned that there are two types of arts - popular art and high art. Popular art is the one that the masses enjoy. Art that is being created at this very moment and consumed by the people in their revelry,  as soon as it is born. Art that is accepted in the present is what we call popular art and the practitioners of it as artists. Then again, somewhere in an old winter shack, away from everything he holds dear, a man is creating something that will change the perception of human vision towards a particular art form by forever expanding the boundaries of our knowledge and exposing us to horizons that we never thought existed. That is what we will come to call as high art. However, the path that it will follow is not easy at all. It will not be readily accepted by the experts and connoisseurs because it challenges every notion of the textbook version of the art form. It will not be liked by the public because they alwa...
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