Writing Experiment Lab | Poe's Law Playground
As this is not a competition, I am going to not write a daily blog on Weekends from now on. Not that I can’t, but I want to let the brain take a back seat on weekends and indulge in other skills I might want to improve on.
Not that someone is complaining, but I just wanted to make it concrete by jotting it down.
I was recently listening to a podcast by Sanjay Dixit called ‘The Jaipur Dialogues’ in which he had invited Shiv Sastry. Dr. Sastry is a retired Surgeon and is apparently the son of the founder of the famous Mysore Sandal Soap. The podcast mainly dealt with him talking about his new book about the myth of ‘Aryan Invasion Theory’. I am not going into much detail about the myth or the theory but Dr. Sastry said one thing which caught my mind’s attention. When people asked him in Q and A about what he thought about how can we educate people about the prevalent myths and Indian history in general as most of the stuff we have is from a perspective of Western Lens. Basically, how to think originally by doing research and how not to get swayed and be submissive to ideas from others (West)?
He said that one can stop seeking other’s approval if one’s truth is true only when one believes it is true.
The last sentence is pretty confusing. But what it insinuates is that we can be confident about our beliefs only when we don’t feel guilty about them. If our knowledge and research are solid, we don’t have to seek everyone’s approval because the evidence would speak of itself. Nobody is going to believe you if you don’t believe in yourself first.
It might seem a far-fetched idea in today’s turbulent time but people do respond back when you write to them, normally.
As it is clear from the fact that I have a blog for over a decade and I do enjoy writing, I like many others who write too. I always want to write back to them and sometimes I do. Often times, we are hesitant to praise while we go all guns blazing while criticizing or complaining. But if you actually like someone’s work and if you tell them (or even critique), they would genuinely take it in a positive stride and reply back.
Lately, I approached 3 people whose writing I liked, and not only 2 of them did reply, we actually exchanged a few emails back and forth. The 3rd one didn’t reply maybe because my mails might have automatically gone to spam. Plausible and possible!
I guess a lot of people agree with that too.
Only Twitter might not be the right place to seek a reply due to its signal to noise ratio. But people do respond when you engage in a correct manner and that makes me happy.
Photo by Álvaro Serrano on Unsplash
I just wish to have a belief system that is un-offendable. No matter what anyone says, it shouldn’t really bother anyone. Like offense-proof. How does it matter if someone disrespects it by calling it names? They are just names, right? Say if someone abuses someone. Nothing changes in them physically at any level. They are just words and they cannot hurt anyone. Words hurt only if someone close says them, not strangers or non-believers. If someone abuses my idols (figuratively), they won’t be able to diminish them or their virtues in any way (If they do literally, that is vandalism). I needn’t take offense by words. I should rather be offended only by actions or lack of actions. I need such a belief system that is unshakeable because it stands for truth.
I think I might already have that.
Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely.
Edward Tufte
In whatever hurry, you may be,
the waiting time doesn’t care,
ok, you might have an appointment,
but crossing the receptionist, you shouldn’t dare.
There might be hardly a day on the Internet when I would not have used Wikipedia to satisfy my curiosity about something. And there has been no day when I didn’t open a page on Wikipedia and just closed it after reading. It has always led to opening a link on that page, and another link, and another link, and so on. There was a period in 2013 when Wikipedia was the only website accessible from my office. One can imagine that my whole day used to be falling freely in the rabbit hole of Wikipedia. I liked every minute of it. That is the right kind of dopamine hit the mind craves for.
So much information for free was never available or accessible throughout human history and it continues to be so. Of course, it can be edited by anyone but there are so many volunteers ready to fix the issues if need be. And that is the epitome of the Internet’s purpose.
Wishing the best to every user and everyone who edits, submits, and maintains Wikipedia!
