For the first time...

As 2010 slowly grinds to a halt and the last minute of the last hour prepare to bid farewell to the year gone by.
Was mulling over the year gone by...

Realized there were quite a few things i landed up doing for the first time or realizing for the first time.Here are the ones i can remember.

1. Good friends and great conversation cant compare to any of the riches of the world.
2. Truly appreciated the power of words.
3. Took to the brush after a good10 years!!loving it!
4. Have had one too many midnight conversations in the last year than i've had in my 26yrs!!Loved every minute of it!!Tx to all my nocturnal friends!!
5. Didn't let the numbers do the talking.
6. Binged on junk food for 5 days straight,only to learn too much of a good thing loses its flavor after a while.
7. Got 2 tattoos on the same day!!Yaaayy
8. Health is wealth,no fun when your at the doc every other day
9. Connected with beautiful strangers,unabashed,unafraid and enlightened!
10. Laughed so hard felt my gut pop out...
11. Lived,learnt and loved
12. Found a deeper connect in the places you'd least expect
13. Solitude is a gift we don't gift ourselves often enough.
14. Loved the feeling of freezing in cold on a terrace top with the cold wind and a warm thought for company.
15. Family gives you the time and space when you need it the most.
16. Set up a tent on an unfamiliar beach!
17. Fought the hardest than i've ever fought for what i believe!
18. Am living part of the dream already...till dreams evolve.
19. Tried my foot at a fish spa,if you haven't had a million fish exfoliating your feet you haven't really been tickled.
20. Trusted my thoughts without a second thought
21. Have learnt the whole is greater than the sum of its parts
22. Cheques don't always make you happy.
23. Took the longest bath i've ever taken a good 2 hours!!
24. Life is a whole bunch of wild,fun projects...a self proclaimed Project Addict!!
25. Mad conversation must be entertained!!
26. Celebrated Astra's birthday with an ice-cream cake!!Finally a cake she likes more than me!
27. Used more post-its and scribble pads in this year than i've done before
28. Reconnected with so many old friends and laughed about the years gone by and dreamed silly dreams of the years to come!!
29. Realized its OK to say NO when you don't believe
30. Hung upside down!
31. Bought an expensive watch i will probably never wear
32. Have indulged the unknown,with arms wide open and butterflies in my belly
33. Found a friend in the words of Allanis!
34. Ate biryani and nachos for breakfast!
35. Painted my room purple!!
36. Got left behind in a train :-( not as scary when your 26,but nevertheless my first!
37. Ate rassam pani puri!!hahahaa wasn't as bad as it sounds!
38. Gave away something that shouldn't have been given away in the first place,only to find something i wouldn't have found without giving that away.
39. Perspective is what makes you the person you are.
40. Learing to experience life...

Feeling on a global scale!

Like many posts that haven't seen the light of day this one too was frozen in my cold storage drafts for a while now.Had come across this really unusual and interesting site a long time ago.
Its an amazing project created by #Jonathan Harris.I stumbled upon his #Tedtalk video recently and there are some points he made that jumped right out and caught my attention.

•  We define ourselves by our gaps[be it educational,religion,income...]
• We have a very deep need to express ourselves and with the internet and all the online media platforms,we now leave behind digital footprints of these moments of self expression

Heres the link to the video,its amazing how its able to capture human emotion so beautiful!!The correlation is fantastic!!We are all a part of so many social experiments we are unaware of!!

Jonathan Harris 

http://wefeelfine.org

It maps feelings on a global scale,their systems search blog posts for the phrase 'I am feeling' or 'i feel' every few minutes.Resulting in a database of over 15,000-20,000 new feelings everyday.


What i love about this site is the unique artful display of these feelings,instead of having a steady stream of feeling updates[say like a twitter feed or fb feed]they've come up a beautiful collage of bright coloured particles that represent a particular feeling posted by a single person.Click on a particle and it throws up the feeling and a picture!Their systems also organize the feeling wherein each particles colour,size,shape,opacity reflects the nature of the feeling.


The feelings are broadly classified into 6 movements

1.Madness
The madness movement is a birds eye view of humanity stripped of its walls feelings exposed.It is a movement with a networks of tiny colourful particles  designed to echo the human world. Seen from afar, Madness presents a massive number of individual particles, each colored and sized uniquely, each flying wildly around the screen, proclaiming its own individuality. 

2.Murmurs
Murmurs, the second movement, presents a highly structured environment in which to view human feelings. As this movement begins, every particle on screen gently floats upwards, eventually bouncing off the ceiling several times before settling. Then, one by one, the particles are excused from their attraction to the ceiling in order to join a simple scrolling list of human feelings, organized in reverse chronological order. The sentences appear letter by letter, as if being typed by their author, and fade to black as new sentences appear. 

3.Montage
Montage, the third movement, was created to answer questions like: what does sadness look like? Happiness? Loneliness?

Montage presents the feelings from a given population that contain photographs, and displays these photographs in a simple grid of variable size, depending on the number of photographs available. Any photograph in the grid can be clicked, causing it to zoom in to the size of the screen

4.Mobs
Mobs, the fourth movement, consists of five smaller movements, each of which utilizes a self-organizing particle system to configure its shape, color, distribution and physics to best express the different zeitgeists of: feeling, gender, age, weather, and geographical location.
Mobs (Feeling) displays the most common feelings in the sample population. In this movement, the particles self-organize into rows of shared feelings. The rows are sorted by the number of particles they contain, and the particles within each row are sorted by the length of the sentence that each particle contains. The rows are colored to inherit the chosen color of the feeling they represent. Any particle can be clicked to reveal the sentence within.

5.Metrics
Metrics, the fifth movement, consists of five smaller movements. Whereas Mobs expresses the notion of “Most Common”, Metrics expresses the notion of “Most Salient”. A full discussion of the difference between “Most Common” and “Most Salient” is here. Essentially, the traits listed in Metrics are those that best distinguish the sample population from the global average (i.e. how is this population different?). Metrics displays the most representative traits of the sample population, along five axes: feeling, gender, age, weather, and location.

6.Mounds
A small scrollbar below the mounds represents the entire database of feelings, and allows the viewer to jump to a specific point in the list. The viewer can also position the mouse near the left or right edge of the screen to cause the mounds list to self-scroll. Above each mound is listed its feeling, along with the rank of that feeling, and the total number of occurrences of that feeling contained in our database. Clicking the feeling above a mound retrieves feelings from people who feel that way.




Result a delightful artwork authored by the world!!reflecting our emotions,what's in our hearts and minds shrinking the world just a more.

The right fix...

Like profound lyrics that lift spirits and make you feel like you can fly.

Like brush strokes that paint your life in the most tantalizing hues conceivable

A great book can accentuate every feeling, every emotion and every thought!

Books to me are the ultimate therapy for the restless mind. I remember when i first read The Circle of Innovation by Tom Peters[it was then clean,un-scribbled, minus bright coloured post its wedged in every other page,un-highlighted] i was so smitten by bright colours,the bold fonts with the bolder words that popped out like a tempting pieces of candy just waiting to be consumed!!

I've read a fair share of books but Tom Peters 'Circle of Innovation' is one of those books that you can re-read and it hits you differently every time!!Was leafing through it the other day and here are some of the things that still strike a chord!

•  Reward excellent failures, punish mediocre successes 
• Empower yourself NOW OR ELSE...
• If the other guys getting better, then you'd better be getting better faster than the other guys getting better...or you're getting worse
• Forgetting -not learning-is the highest art
• ME INC.-take immediate responsibility for change.B your own roc
• The death of distance marks the birth of real competition
• You don't leap a chasm in 2 bounds

• Destruction is cool
• Incrementalism is innovations worst enemy
• If you're spending every waking professional hour making "it" better today than yesterday...then... necessarily...you aren't spending every waking hour working on reinventing it,blowing it up!
• Think revolution on evolution
• Selection processes can only work on available diversity,success boils down to accidents...new tries..
• I believe in waste.Waste is very important in creativity.
• Do the right thing the first time is insane advice
• If it aint broke..break it[or somebody else will break it for u!!
• Only the paranoid survive

• You cant live without an eraser
• The greatest difficulty in the worlds is not for people to accept new ideas,but to make them forget about old ideas
• You miss 100% of the shots you dont take
• If you are not bloodying your nose in todays warp speed economy,we have a word for u.'Dead'
• In this company you'll be fired for not making mistakes
• All innovations are silly\
• We are all Michelangelos
• The best thing a leader can do for a Great Group is to allow its members to discover their own greatness
• The thing women have got to learn is that nobody gives you power. Take it
•  Expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you are doing

• Its the cracked ones that let the light into the world
• You say you don’t want emotional, volatile and unpredictable, just imaginative? Sorry they only come in a package...I can offer you a dedicated, loyal, honest, realistic, knowledgeable package, but the imagination bit will be rather limited
• Our most beloved products were developed by hunch, guesswork and fanaticism,but creators who were eccentric-or even stark raving mad
• What you know changes,who you are doesnt
• You cant find what you're not looking for
• The best way to evaluate people is to watch them work
• Whats your rate of depreciation?
• Encourage serious sabbaticals
• Luantic fringe!you cant behave in a calm,rational manner,you've got to be out there on the lunatic fringe!

• Passion demands FIXATION.
• Passion demands TRUTH...Tell the truth!
• Passion demands LOUD!Im here to live my life OUT LOUD!
• Passion demands OUTTA CONTROL!If things seem under control, you're just not going fast enough!

'Sunao'

I an effort to bring back the organized in the 'organized chaos' that is my life for most of the bit i chanced upon some scribbles from quite a while ago,a re-read made for a little  mulling over...coupled with new perspectives and new creative stimuli...yummy ideas to bounce around!

Sunao-is the Japanese word for 'Untrapped mind'

When the clean slate you were born with becomes an infinite drawing board hoarding of experiences,feelings,thoughts,preconceived notions, judgments... we become vehicles of trapped thinking.

To break free from the shackles of this existence we need to create 'Spas for the mind'-Starting first with Unlearning,shedding the information overload that experience brings with it and be selective about the thoughts and experience we choose to hold on to, i came across a line that stuck like glue in a video montage that kept me buzzing n replaying for the longest time.

EVERY EXPERIENCE FEEDS IDEAS.

Guess we need to be a tad bit picky about the experiences we choose to hold close and the ones we let go gently into the winds of change..We get so comfortable with lazy thinking,the knee-jerk responses that set root in our minds only because they are easy,effortless and without much thought..As we become more experienced our forgetting curves become harder to navigate than our learning curves.

Loved the line in a song i heard recently[ in the same video montage] that captures the spirit beautifully-

'ONE OF THESE DAYS THE SKIES GOING TO BREAK AND EVERYTHING WILL ESCAPE AND I'LL KNOW...

Breaking the skies of the mind,unlearn,create,indulge in the inane,open up,explore,live curious,unleash...

26 and rocking it!!

Mark Zuckerberg is like the ShahRukh Khan of web2.0.Emerging out of obscurity to build a platform that literally has the world hooked!.
For anyone whose taken the path less trodden to follow their dreams he is the epitome of optimism,grit and the ray of hope we need to shoot side glances at once in a while...

For all of you who haven't ready the article...tsk tsk tsk...

Please do the needful,be inspired,awed and mesmerized!

Person of the Year 2010

Floating not frivolous

This post is an amalgamation of an awesome idea bouncing session with my ex-boss from adverting[and soon to be partner in crime in a super exciting project] and thoughts that have doing the rounds pretty regularly.

What has really changed in the digi savvy,click friendly Web 2.0 babies ...Ok we opine much more,ping too often,converse on multiple media platforms[sometimes all at once],we live voraciously online, net-worth gives way to networks...the list is endless...

Delving deeper that the superficial changes of the new age existence,theres something thats changed at a human psyche level,its almost like we are programmed very differently from our parents generation,with new codes,new hardware...

After much mulling over i think the bases of this generational chasm stems from the fact that we 'Float but are not frivolous'.As shallow as it may sound,its far from that.We are a new generation that has seen so much of change so quickly we have no choice but to roll with it,to take life as it comes and learn to adapt or be left behind.We float through change almost effortlessly[well for most of the bit] but that doesn't mean our existence is not weighed down by meaningful interactions.

We look at the web and all the criss crossed connections it spins as an opportunity to interact with like minded individuals,with people who have a picture,video or a point of view that makes for the meat in our understanding of change and ever changing life itself...


Like windows to parallel worlds that don't compel you to take up residence but let you have a voice if you have something to say it allows you to floating in and out of discussion boards,blogs,tweets,updates,comments...Unlike the older generation we don't really seek out stability,don't have 5 year plans and 5 page long checklist of the things we need to do before we die.We create a subculture of connections that tap into the various facets that make us a whole,constantly updating,deleting,modifying the connections and the media platforms...

We don't look at the future with fear and worry but with a sense of wonderment...now what?what next?all these questions stemming from the innate need to feel good about the things/people we entertain at that given point in time.Our interests are an ever widening net that catches people at the same wave length,our career paths twist and turn grow organically as we explore ourselves and what lies ahead...

To the new aged floaters!!a click away from a new exploration...