Overwhelming Retail Therapy
Recently I travelled to the U.S on an office trip. On a weekend, I visited my brother who is staying in Berkeley, California. He wanted to do some monthly grocery shopping. I was curious about how the grocery shops in the U.S are like. So I ready for the adventure. He took me to nearby Costco.
O.M.G.
This was my reaction at the scale of Costco. I have read about Sol Price, who was the inspiration behind Walmart. In that same article, I read Costco was also an offshoot from this. Even Amazon Prime idea was copied from Costco. As a business tech fanboy, I have read and heard a lot about Costco.
But to witness it in person was a different experience. Everything at Costco is on a different scale. It is almost 10x to any kind of hypermarket in India. The food items are super specialised yet affordable. They are of huuuuuuuge size and portions. I mean that size is really unthinkable to buy in India. For every single item, there are multiple options and choices. I mean, I never thought just spending 45 minutes in Costco is mindbogglingly tiresome. I didn’t do any physical activity there but I really felt drained and tired after just going through the checklist and picking up the stuff.
I am told that Costco is nothing compared to the scale of Walmart. Thought of entering a Walmart in the U.S is really a daunting one now.
Positive Bingewatching
The term bingeing or binge-watching is always associated with a guilty pleasure or a mild sin way. It is not a positive thing to do. But sitting and reading a book at a stretch is considered an intellectual pursuit. If you think like a Gen-Z, reading a novel like Anna Karenina or Infinite Jest at a stretch for two to three hours, is actually binge-reading.
You are immersing in a world created by an artist or artists, which transforms a part of you. I will never be able to know what it ent a gay-couple adopts a Korea-based child in India or what goes into the mind of a billionaire like Bezos in hedge fund company.
In watching movies/TV shows, I try to follow a strategy that Tyler Cowen says in reading books: Be curious about a theme or a question and follow it. In his words:
Follow the questions, not the books per se. Don’t focus on which books to read, focus on which questions to ask. Then the books, and other sources, will follow almost automatically. Read in clusters! Don’t obsess over titles. Obsess over questions. That is how to learn best about many historical areas, especially when there is not a dominant book or two which beat out all the others.
(I want to go down the rabbit hole of how this strategy applies to movies and TV shows tomorrow.)
Highest RoI - Change in Mindset
I have frequently written about a prolific Tweeter, Visakan Veerasamy. He is popularly referred as Visa. We both share a common mother tongue, Tamil. His name itself is a typical Tamil name. I started following him purely because of that. But I have been impressed and many times awestruck by his body of work: Twitter Threads.
Visa uses threads as a medium of expressing his thoughts. He also uniquely repurposes his old tweets and quotes it with the new tweets. Retweets are quite a popular thing, but I suspect because of Visa, Twitter may think of releasing a feature called Quote Tweets. I am digressing, because my post is about a specific thread that connected with me.
Never downplay your work. Took me years to learn this, and you can actually decide to do it in an instant. In my experience, editing the language you use to talk about you is one of the highest ROI activities there is. If you straight up ban yourself from talking shit about yourself, you almost start becoming more interesting just so you have something to say. And you don’t even need to change to be more interesting! You’re already interesting! Once you ditch the self-diminishment, you can start finding out the details. And focusing on the details helps you develop your taste, which makes you more interesting still.
Never describe your work as “uncool”, “no big deal”, “kinda shitty”, etc.
This thought really left a lasting impression on me for the past two weeks.
In my young days, I think I used to feel guilty of fame or popular. If anyone appreciated me in public or private, my first reaction is always feeling shy or feeling not worthy. I used to always put qualifiers like “humble effort”, “way less cool”, “not so great”, to describe my work in blog. Even though I was not feeling depressed, I somehow had this low self esteem. I still have the remnants of feeling. I never used to publish myself in Twitter or Facebook without any inhibitions. There was always something pulling me back.
Yes, there are spurts of zeal and moments of enthusiasm that drives me to publish and be active in social media or blog. But I never was comfortable fully. There used to be lingering thought: may be an impostor syndrome, may a feeling that someone else has done a great job on that topic or may be I have never published a blockbuster article that went viral. But I know that all these things doesn’t matter to write online.
This thought from Visa is a great antidote to this mentality. Visa is a very young guy. But these set of thoughts are so profound and so liberating for me. In the past two weeks, after coming across this tweet, I feel quite happy and relieved in my head.
Gadget Fan A.k.a Ubiquitous Tech Support
I am a fan of gadgets. Be it an Apple Watch, iPad with Apple Pencil or Oura ring, I have tried them all. My obsession with gadgets dates almost two decades. Long back, I have tried all the bulky digital cameras and clunky MP3 players.
I wish my family sees me as a uber-cool geek that can compete with Linus Torvalds. But they see me as a tech support person. I used to fix problems in assembled computers, TV sets, radio and cassette players. I graduated to fixing problems with phones, digital cameras and routers. Now my expertise is in configuring the mobile phones, weeding out the WhatsApp forwards and saving the phone memory, uninstalling junk apps.
But I love these tasks. I never sulk at it. My younger brother is an ultra-nerd-gadget geek. I used to outsource these tasks to him in my family, but sometimes my presence is needed when he is away.
I now have graduated to explaining intricacies of WhatsApp or Google Pay to elders and non-geeks. Last weekend, I was visiting my grandma and my uncle. I was helping my uncle to share his location using WhatsApp. His eyes were filled with joy and awe, when he came to know that he can send voice messages in a very simple way in WhatsApp. He was so curious about “Status” and explored this. I really felt so happy at this. It is like being the ambassador of technology to mere mortals.
Today I commuted from office to home in an auto-rickshaw (or tuk-tuk, as they say in Thailand). I didn’t have any change or cash to pay the auto-driver. The driver surprised me and asked to transfer via Google Pay. I was so delighted. He had some trouble in accessing his UPI code and sharing it others. I was so happy take time and explain it to him.
We all build products and cram it with so many features. You may be a developer, devops person, UI designer, engineering manager or a scrum master. If you were to talk to regular people and see the friction in discovering those features or how they use, it is extremely illuminating and enlightening.
Masala Shakespeare
Masala movies are my favorite stress-busting genre of movies. Hollywood and in general, the movies from West, has a strong genre. At least, in my experience. They are either a thriller or musical or horror or rom-com. Very rarely I come across movies that mixes genres. Like “Get Out”.
Indian movies are evolved from the musical theatre. We used to have movies that had close to 60 songs and they were superhit. It slowly transformed to dance and musical. A lot of Indian movies also follow this strict genre.
Masala is a genre mixing trend. You have thrilling opening sequence, some comedy track, suddenly we are transported to a foreign land where the hero and heroine dance with a group of White people, there are some stunt sequences, some emotional dialogues or court room drama and a climax with a punch.
Some directors are genius in weaving these masala elements into a screenplay. Some of the very well made Masala movies are super-duper hit in India. Baahubali, Saamy and Omkara are just a small examples of very well made masala movies. I don’t find such a genre in Hollywood.
The reason for existence of Masala movies, in my opinion, is: India is a huge and diverse nation. An entertainment in the form of a Masala movie caters to every segment of audience. People who do the daily labour work as well as rich people who want to enjoy some time out. A housewife toiling in daily work, as well as, a woman working to climb a corporate ladder. Everyone gets entertained by masala movies.
I came across a Shakespeare scholar, Jonathan Gil Harris. He is from New Zealand, got married to an Indian and settled down in Delhi. He teaches English Literature in a university at Delhi. He has written book titled Masala Shakespeare. He argues that Shakespeare’s play in his days were meant to reach all strata of the society. So his plays were deliberately provocative, subtle, grandiose and complex. His challenge was to attract the Barons and Lords as well as the peasants and workers.
Jonathan himself is a quirky person. He speaks a decent Hindi for a Kiwi. He is obsessed with the single screen theaters and masala movies of India. He argues that it is a tradition or a genre that is unique to India that has a root in Shakespeare.
I have always been mesmerised by the adaptation of his play into Hindi movies. A brilliant Hindi director, Vishal Bhardwaj, has a trilogy movie based on Bard’s work. Maqbool is based on Macbeth. Omkara is based on Othello. Haider is based on Hamlet. You don’t have to be a lit nut or a Shakespeare nerd to enjoy these movies.
All three of these movies are a standalone masterpiece of Hindi cinema. The characters are fully Indianised and locale and setting is completely in rural India or underworld of Mumbai or the troubled state of Kashmir. These movies have songs, stunts and thrilling sequences like just another masala movies. But the script is nuanced and poignant, characters are complex but very relatable.
I still cannot believe that a playwright’s work which is 400 years old can be so fresh, relatable and enjoyed in its modern retelling.
Embracing Mediocrity - Key to Happiness
Yes, you read it right. This is a key lesson that I have assimilated in the past few weeks. Thanks to the popular blogger, Venkatesh Rao, for planting this idea in my head. He calls this as premium mediocre. I really found the article to be a typical of him: interesting but not easily accessible. Luckily he had done an AMA for the subscribers of his newsletter. All the answers in his two-part AMA were fantastic.
The following advice really stood out for me:
(What specific advice would you have for someone who is pretty thoroughly traumatized but not sure if she’s learned enough from it?)
I think the best thing to do if you really are in this stage, is to lower your standards, embrace enlightened mediocrity, and focus on living well rather than “learning.” Don’t close your mind to learning, and accept the challenges and new experiences that life will continue to throw at you, but “learning” and “preparing” for life is no longer task #1. Task #1 is actually just surviving with grace and living life. Stop trying to win, work on continuing the game. Sometimes that’s one day at a time, sometimes it’s one year at a time. The life-long learning, hustling, stress-driving pressure we get from society is somewhat necessary (at a cost) in Act 1, but if you let it keep riding you into Act 2, it’s mostly masochism. There’s a point past which it makes more sense (and better mental health) to inhabit the life you’ve built for yourself as gracefully as you can, rather than trying to keep raging and storming to extract more from the universe.
I found this piece of advice very timely and very liberating for me. At the cost of winning and being successful, we beat ourselves too much and sometimes suffer a lot. It may manifest in some people as depression or irritation or simply being uncontent with everything. If you are deriving meaning for your life based on success and high standards, then it is easy to set oneself for disappointment.
As Nassim Taleb says in his book, the first and most important thing for thriving is as actually surviving. First survive and then think of thrive. So many times, I find this advice to let me put myself off the guard, enjoy the life, spend playing some goofy games with kids, watching trash-movies and junk-TV with family. Yes, they are not high quality entertainment, but living life with grace and happiness is much more important.