The tiger blinks and the cub blinks twice. He continues speaking contemptuously, “Does your species even ask questions like – why do we exist and”

The tigers ate the philosopher.

me2 : No

me : Do you want to know what that is?

me2 : No

me : Why don’t you want to know what that is?

me2 : No

me2: What?

me: What do you think is going on?

me2: I see, the chicken finally made it to the other side of the road

me: So now what?

me2: It wants to come back.

Until now(the time of writing this post), I have made 3 paintings. I will be uploading them here as and when I make them. I have realized that I am an expressionist. But, that’s just what I am doing currently. My aim is not be a great painter and seldom do I know before hand as to what I want to make or what colours I will use. It happens in the moment. Leave your mind on that blank canvas with all the colors and let it paint.

So how do you paint? Do you feel you are a terrible painter? Are you afraid of the critiques? Do you think you are too old to paint? Is your choice of colors poor? Are you too much of a right guy that you cannot risk painting something “wrong”? Are you very busy in life? or Do you believe in photoshop?

How to get started? I started simple. Get normal drawing sheets, brushes, and a 12 color paint box.

How to paint? Well, this is the easiest part. If you have reached here, the road ahead is interesting and easy! Just sit down with those colors, brushes and the paper and start painting. That’s it. Start putting colors onto the paper the way you want. If you just don’t know what to paint, just don’t care about it and start filling the paper with colors as you please. If you want to make something that you see or make a clone of a painting you have seen online or somewhere, then just go for it. It might be the case that you pretty much suck at it, but that’s just the beginning. Keep going. If at the first go, you want to make the blue skies and mountains, you might be decently successful. If however, you want to paint Mona Lisa, go ahead but don’t expect a master piece to just come out the way it is. It might come out properly, in which case you are really good at it. If it doesn’t, paint something else, or try again. Whatever. Mostly, if you don’t complicate things too much and are free with your painting it will take 1-2 hours per painting and the value you will get out of it will be worth it.

What if someone doesn’t like your piece of work? You shouldn’t really care. This is not for them to like it. It is for you to create it. If however, someone likes it, that should be good.

What if you yourself dont like it? That’s fine. Try to analyse what don’t you like about it. Is it the colors? Is it the shape? Is it the thought that someone else didn’t like it and hence you are not liking it? After answering this, paint again. You will be glad at your instant progress.

Paint more, paint free/

I was having a chat with a senior(and a Morgan Stanley colleague from IITB – Swappy) about books, specifically this book – Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid and surprisingly also a bit on why I haven’t blogged for a while. After getting a basic idea about what the book is all about, I started reading a basic introduction to it. Suddenly, I saw the author’s name - Douglas_Hofstadter

And something clicked- I have heard this name before, “Hofstader… Hofstadter”, I said to myself, trying to pronounce it properly. And I remembered, there is something known as the Hofstadter’s law

It says -

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account the Hofstadter’s Law.

Awesome law! So obviously I was interested in finding whether this was the same Hofstadter who wrote the above mentioned brilliant book. Well, the probability of two brilliant “Hofstadters” writing amazing things about somewhat similar things seemed low to me. It turned out he is the same guy.

Cheers to the amazing connection(actually a simpler one as, it’s not very often that you hear the surname “Hofstadter”) made by my brain and the deducibility of the fact in seconds given the all-helping internet.

Also, this too helped me break the ice in a serendipitous manner as I hope to write more often.

us know the reason of our existence

• Fasam is the way of life
• Fasam is not an octopus
• Fasam has a sense of humour
• While in darkness, fasam shows you the way. Also, he can lead you to salvation, too. <Citation needed>
• Fasam gave humans the power to extrapolate
• Fasam is Eric Clapton <Citation needed>
• Fasam was the one with the idea of free software movement
• Fasam laughs on your jokes
• Fasam is watching us, all this while
• Fasam likes you
• Fasam uses linux and vim editor <Citation needed>
• Fasam doesn’t care
• Fasam is everything from nothingness. It is the immortal relationship between 0 and infinity. It is that singularity which created this universe.
• Fasam is above all
• Fasam is like fasam(not a male or a female). You don’t ask that question.
• Rajnikanth believes in fasam
• Fasam loves prime numbers
• Fasam knows no religion. Infact, he knows nothing as he doesn’t care
• All fail fasam
• Long live fasam, oops, it is immortal!

Also thanks to Tapan Pandita for enlightening me about things related to fasam.

Good night fasam!

If you are a GNU/linux user, (I have been a linux user for approximately 4 years now) this concept of doing one thing well shouldn’t be alien to you. Even if it is, you haven’t paid attention to it. For the unaware ones, this “unix” philosophy dates back to the time of its creation and it actually means this - Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. (That is why we have pipes in unix :)) It is similar to the concept of decoupling things when possible. The concept is very simple to comprehend, it just says, decouple things such that the task you do are meant to do just one thing and will get fixed in the bigger picture somewhere. Going a step ahead, to the thing about “unix pipes“, the idea is also analogous to building-blocks of any system or think of these small things as parts of a lego-kit which are senseless, simple objects who do one thing, by virtue of it’s shape and ability to be fixed in the bigger picture maybe a house, a kid is trying to build. Infact, now that I think of it, this philosophy shouldn’t be alien to most.

Recently, I have been reading other blogs like zenhabits, power-of-less, etc/ It’s surprising, how this small, yet elegant and powerful philosophy, the so-called unix philosophy is also the content of many self-help and advice books who (try to) help people get things done. As simple as this concept might sound, it is very difficult(not impossible) to put to practice in real lives, I think. I have been failing at this, for some time now but I have realized some loopholes in my way of “doing” this philosophy. In real life, things overlap invariably. You cannot just break down things, but if you can in whatever ways, I am sure it helps. Essentially, it will help you focus on doing that thing well and generally the task won’t be overwhelming as most tasks are when you start it.

Also, the best part of this philosophy is that unlike a monolithic way of doing things, I mean without segregating into smaller tasks that “do one thing well”, if something breaks, you will very often know which one thing isn’t doing its part well. Fixing that would be easier than to figure out whats wrong and change lots of things around it, in the other case. Well, you can say, this is what humans call “planning”, which I would agree to, in some way, but believe me, it always helps to have a strong philosophical backing and probably now you can look at things in a more fragmented and discrete manner, for the betterment. Atleast, I believe in trying this out, to reform my “ways”. Also, one need not overdo it. This is also an essential concept in itself to help you “plan” properly.

After all, 40 years of unix of doing one thing and doing it well is a big example.