Nitya Newsletter: Volume V

THE NITYA NEWSLETTER

Welcome back to another edition of the sporadic newsletter!

I hope you had a great Diwali, and that your ambitious planning for Christmas and New Year's is in full swing. If you're determined, I'm sure you'll make that offbeat plan happen.

Determination is kind of underrated, and for me, it is also extremely rare. It's not often that I've actually wanted something enough to be determined to achieve it.
There is a famous dialogue from Om Shanti Om {2007}, "Agar kissi cheez ko dil se chaho... to poori kainath usse tumse milane ki koshish mein lag jaati hai". Although I'm doubtful about how much the Universe actually has to do with our hopes and desires, I like to think of this line as just a matter of setting your mind on something.
If you're determined to achieve it, you are going to do everything in your power to get it. I guess the surprising bit here for me is not that you get what you want, rather it's that there are so many things in your power.
I know this seems like a pretty obvious thing - a lesson that every poster that hung neglected, slowly peeling at the back of most classrooms in most schools, generously offered - but it came as a sort of revelation to me. Of course, most of us don't have a span of two life times, as Om from the movie does, but I'm sure we all have found, at some point, something that feels like it's worth all the effort you can possibly manage.

I went to a multiplex to watch a movie a couple of weeks ago. There was an addition that really stood out from the usual line-up of the national anthem and the national advertisement (Vicco). Apart from feeling astounded at the fact that someone spent money to make such a substandard ad, something about its... aggressiveness left me feeling uncomfortable. An article from this week's Sunday Times uses an example from the movie Thor: Ragnarok (2017) to point out the flaw in the current concept of nationalism: "... in the movie, the people survive and they do so by convincing themselves that a nation is ultimately its people."
Are shows of nationalism something you've witnessed first hand? Is it something that affects/bothers you? What are your thoughts?

It's certain that we're going through many changes right now... the world feels like a cocktail shaker that's been picked up and is being shaken very thoroughly. And we're feeling these changes in every sphere - globally, nationally, our workspaces, our daily interactions, how we understand currency. This tiny animation shows the difference between the world map as we know it, and how it should actually be, if scaled proportionately. Take a look if you want to also shake up your visualisation of the world.

Some would say that we may understand the world better if we could only understand ourselves better. In 2015, Giorgia Lupi and Stephanie Posavec collected data about their own lives for each week over a year for a project they called 'Dear Data'. This was data about anything and everything - all the sounds that they heard, number of times they looked at the clock, the thank you's they gave and received - which they would then visually represent on postcards. They exchanged these postcards with each other across the Atlantic, and it ended up giving them great insight about themselves. You can see some of these postcards on the Dear Data website. It really is beautiful how each person has distinctly interpreted her data. In an interview, Georgia said: "By naming it and counting it you gave very mundane things amazing powers and made very personal and powerful things like negative feelings very mundane"

I recently pulled out a Go board, which had been lying in the depths of my father's cupboard for around 10 years now. It is based on logic and strategy, and until very recently was the only game that a computer couldn't beat a human in. It requires a great deal of time and mental energy (both of which I always seem to be running low on), but when you do get down to it, it's insanely fun.
What is your favourite game to play - board game, card game, word game, drinking game, outdoor game? Have you ever made up a game? Tell me about it!
Here's a game (read it in a talk show host voice, just for kicks):
What does your personal space say about you? Giulia Dini took photographs of hotel rooms soon after guests checked out. Her photo series creates a unique portrait of these unknown occupants, based on how they left their hotel room. So the game:
Send me a picture of your personal space - your dressing table or your desk at work or your bedroom. Or write me a description of it. I'll try to write to you a portrait of you based on that, keeping aside all prior knowledge.

I was in Uttarakhand for a shoot for a month. I had a little notebook with me, on which I would doodle and write down random things. Inspired by Frank Ocean's zine, I made one of my own, using this notebook and some pictures I took. You can view it here.

Until next time,
Nitya

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