Two tigers and a philosopher

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One day a philosopher was passing through a forest. He encounters a tiger with a tiger cub calmly lying down with their chins touching the ground. The tigers see the philosopher and offer a very dumb look. The philosopher says, “Look at yourselves lying down with absolutely nothing to do, no clue of what’s going on, not good enough brains to think, leave aside thinking about thinking, merely existing.”

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.

Painting recipe

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In an interesting turn of events, I started painting! The best part here is – how simple, fascinating, enjoyable and satisfying this could be. And if you take my word – you can paint too. Everyone can paint. Take a brush, take some color and show your wizardry. That’s it, there is to it(atleast for the lazy skeptics).

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/

Smart recollection

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This particularly very small incident made me write this.

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.