Readers of the World, Unite! You Have Nothing To Lose but Few Minutes of Your Life!
I wish you hop on this mail list, here's why. Thanks in advance already.
As Ravish Kumar said many years ago, talking about oneself is the hardest. Hardest still is narrowing oneself and one’s interests to a stream of thoughts or interests. So I’m not going to even attempt to do it. But you will still be interested to know something, what to expect from this newsletter or me, what will this contain or be about? It’s been quite a long time since I wrote a blog which I was continually writing before and that blog contained all sorts of things - short stories, travelogues, sexual gossip or knowledge if you will, movie reviews, philosophical ponderings, opinions on politics, and politicians, criticism of laws and court judgments, comments on our attitudes, poems and such (even covid). It was anything that I thought and which I thought would be interesting to those that would read them. Maybe it was too much social media scrolling and uploading Instagram stories or that fancy writer’s block, I have not been able to write or felt like writing a blog lately. I would start but would not find it in me to finish a thought and I don’t like publishing something that wouldn’t satisfy me in the first place. I read and reread what I write, and every time it should make sense to me, it should interest me, and only then do I feel okay to publish it. You see, you are devoting me a precious and limited resource of yours, your time, maybe five minutes or ten, whatever the duration, it is limited and I want to make it worth your time.
For a long now, I have been desiring to start a mail-list. A simple not-so-long mail every two weeks or once a month that I will send to those interested which will contain anything interesting that I came across for that duration. Maybe a piece of music, a playlist perhaps that is not well known but is nice, maybe I traveled to a place and found delicious places to eat or found a not-so-well knows spot that is pleasing to eyes, maybe I read an article that I felt should be read by many, or I thought of something that I felt was cool, just anything. And you will have the ability to write back if you felt like so and if that’s interesting, I will share it back in the next mail. And so we will together have a brain-train running.
The purpose of the last bit is to free us from the bubbles we all live in. There is an abundance of knowledge and experiences to be acquired in this world but we are limited by so many things - not all of us can travel or read or discover things at the same pace as others. In the end, there will be books, music, movies, ideas, places that we will not even know exist. And that’s awful. That said, however one tries, there will always be things one wouldn’t know like really don’t know. For instance, to know Tajmahal exists and to not have seen it is one thing but to not know of its existence at all is whole another. For instance, until three years ago I didn’t know a book by the name Dune existed. Some of the people I know have read it but since they believed the book was so well known and just so great, they never thought about mentioning it even once during our conversations. Same with John Mayer’s New Light - a wonderful piece of music I didn’t know existed until a few years ago. Or Maus, by Art Spiegelman, one of the best comic books I have ever read.
The first step is to know you don’t know. Next is to make yourself aware of what you don’t. And then to decide if you want to know it. There will be movies and music, books, plays, and places you might not be interested to spend your time on, and that is perfectly okay. We are humans, not robots to like and dislike the same things but to be deprived of the knowledge of something’s existence is plain cruel. That’s what I wish to bridge for myself and maybe for you, and finally to test my ideas and thoughts.
You see, we are all are beings made of our surroundings. The place we live in, the people we surround ourselves with - most of these things are decided the moment we get born - we don’t have any say in it and yet this chance happening decides our entire being, sum total of our thoughts and experiences unless in exceptional cases one pushes hard to open this envelope and plunge out of its set world. This theory of how places we were born and live shape our worldview which might seem simple today and feel like an eternal truth was revolutionary when Karl Marx wrote it in The Communist Manifesto and again I learned that fairly recently when I picked up that ageless text from Marx and Engels. The title of this post is inspired by a quote from the same manifesto too.
So yeah, if all this makes you feel even a wee bit interesting then hop on. Rest, you always will have the option at your end to deboard or not read what’s delivered into your inbox.
That’s it for now.
P. S. I was at Taj recently, here’s one picture of that trip.
In the meantime, tell your friends!