I thought I was good with words, but there’s always so much to learn. If you’re in a position of influence, your vocabulary, your tone and your attitude can have such a ripple effect.
Title: Marshall McLuhan
Tag Archives: Captivity
Staying sane
My survival and stress relief strategy has always been through drawing.
Anteater: Just writing the word won’t make them disappear, you know…
When I was younger I usually drew everyday, but since becoming a parent it’s every other day, and always on weekends. Looking back at all my published and unpublished work I always feel grateful for this gift.
“Everyday do something that gives to you.”
Yours truly
Not inhabiting weekdays
Every other month there’s a week when all I’m doing is working. Maybe you have a week or two like that as well. Working, commuting, working, and then suddenly you look up and day has turned to night.
A free day
Sometimes it’s important to just to get out of the daily grind and recharge my soul by looking at some art. Way back in 2017, this was one of those days.
I took the elevated road past Humayun’s tomb and went to see a show at Vadehra Art Gallery.
Just the ability to do this, which I’ve also done while living in Bombay and Malmö, is a pleasure and a blessing.
A dream deferred
The last few years has been a lot of late nights working, and in the lows of those hours between midnight and dawn I always end up questioning the larger purpose of my life. This is a poem for those times.
From Harlem by Langston Hughes
From the sketchbook Captivity (Feb 2017)
One nice thing
It’s a milestone indeed when one of your friends says something nice about your work. Here’s Nityan, artist and erstwhile potter, who is an inspiration with his beautiful sketchbooks and his prolific expression.
“The only difference between your sketchbooks and mine are that you draw so much better…”
Let’s be enemies!
Over the past few years, we’ve moved cities, homes, neighborhoods quite frequently. Every new house needs a new social life, but before we’ve been able to settle down to do that, we’ve moved again. Here are some drawings from a couple of years ago when we had just moved to yet another new house.
[It’s been so long since I made any friends that I’ve forgotten what one does with them…until I read this book with Orin yesterday: Let’s be enemies by Maurice Sendak. Friends do things together – like playing and birthday cakes and making sand castles.]
[I wonder what activities a solitary person like me will do with a friend? Work? Draw? Eat. Talk. Cook. Watch a movie? I need to do more things. I need to make new friends.]
“She always believes the solution lies outside herself. Tsk.”
Anteater
Read a book you hate
I read a lot of books in 2017 and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was one of them. I’ve always steered very clear of psychedelic fiction, being the straight-laced person that I am, but when I received the exact same edition on two separate occasions from two very close friends, I had to finally read it.
No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted.
All the references to the Rolling Stones’ music and The Doors’ music was quite an educational journey for me – [who] steered so clear of all this narcotic-induced visions. This could be one of those “Read a book you hate” challenges!
I remember reading it and feeling quite hot, the language was so evocative of the Las Vegas strip and hot US highways in summer, and didn’t hate it as much as I expected to.
Here are some images from Google:
Ralph Steadman and Hunter S. Thomson had met once and it hadn’t gone too well: “A year later, Steadman was asked if he’d like to illustrate another, much longer, piece of Thompson’s for Rolling Stone magazine – about a drug-crazed trip Thompson had just made to Las Vegas with his Samoan attorney….Despite never having been anywhere near Las Vegas, he set to, and four days later sent off his drawings. “I was quite pleased with them, I remember. I thought I’d managed to complement the style of Hunter’s writing.” When the drawings arrived, Thompson anxiously unrolled them. “Ye gods,” he recalled. “Every one of them was perfect.” Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was a huge hit and the two of them became friends. Under Thompson’s influence, Steadman’s work changed. “My drawing got stronger, less flaccid. He exposed me to the screaming lifestyle of the US.” But it was a friendship that came at quite a cost – to Steadman anyway.”
Have you read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas? Would love to know what you liked about it.
A Bad Day at Work: Surviving Work, Part 3
As I said the other day, all through 2017 I was drawing out my stress. One day, after an incredibly difficult meeting I came back to my desk, and took a few minutes to quietly straighten myself out.
TRANSCRIPT
- 01: Soo: Thankful I can draw
- 02: Soo: Ah…Instagram…
- 03: Instagram post
- 04: Soo: Quickly finish this then go home for the next meeting
- 05: Soo: Ma? Umm..hmmm
- 06: Soo: I’m OK, I’m at work. Such a bad –
- 07: Ma: Oh you’re at work? I saw your post on Instagram – I thought something was wrong with Orin! Bye!
Surviving work, part 2
It was early 2017 when I first started to use my drawing to deal with work stress.
I was still grumpily trying to understand what my role as a Design Manager should be, and the anteater, as usual, gave his sage advice:
Sometimes all you need is a different perspective on life, like The Principles of Uncertainty by Maira Kalman.
And I also finished reading M Train by Patti Smith around that time.
While all this helps momentarily, there’s actually larger causes for work stresses which need to be carefully resolved. But of course, I didn’t know that then…
inktales 
