Hello World

I've always been a person engulfed with inertia. It takes me forever to come out of my comfort zone, take a step towards disrupting my monotonous daily routine and start with something. Consider sticking to it in the long run, and you'll have me run away in no more than a week. It's not that I lack the mental strength to persevere. It's just that I don't find meaning in consistently repeating something most days. There's no motivation to do that, and I've not stuck around if I've not found it. This is probably why I have come to become a jack of al-l(ot) of trades, mastering in none. I'm not proud of it, but who cares? Why I share this part of myself with you, is because I intend to change it. One step at a time though. Writing, and this blog is how I plan to start, how I plan to stick with something and see where it takes me. As advertised though, I function on motivation, and so without fuel to the fire, even this is likely to get appended to the string of activities I've become amateurish (mediocre?) at. So that's why I write today. To pen down what my motivation is, if there is any. It'll also serve as a social contract for me. The words I've said need to have some power over me for this to work. The internet is a vast space of beautiful people, and anyone who reads this has me accountable to them. Atleast that's what I'll look to find solace in. There are three angles to it though, perspectives that touch different parts of who I am, or have come to be till date.

Let's start with the first one, The Curious Mind. I've always been an insanely curious child. Find the eleven year old me and you'd see someone with his hands all over the place. I learnt to play the piano, basics of music production, was into making films/video editing, learnt basic web and Android game developement, the list just goes on. For the longest of time, I thought the innocence of childhood and the absence of pressure freed me into this creative disposition. That's not true though. If anything my (now obsolete) relationship has taught me about myself, I have always been this person deep down. My brain organically stirs up waves of dopamine with the arrival of anything intellectually fresh. Writing touches that chord in a not so obviously apparent way. Let me explain.

There is something to be said about how language evolved. Within the vastness of what phonetics and unintelligible enumerations of the human vocal cord encompass, humans found a way to store all of it within 26 letters (speaking about English, that is). It's fascinating how just 26 symbols can help you communicate across centuries and preserve everything that can ever be said. Think about it, just 26 symbols! The magnificence of this moment will feel all the more astounding when you start to contemplate the impact all of writing, poetry and cinema and music has had on humankind. All made possible because of this moment! Simple 26 symbols. What a way to compress all of this knowledge into such a beautiful and clear set of characters!

To draw a parallel, inspired from my fascination for intelligence (both human and artificial), the Hutter prize defines an artificially generally intelligent algorithm as one having the capacity to perform perfect lossless compression. The creation of language was compression.

Beautiful writing minimizes entropy. Beautiful writing is compression at it's very core. It succinctly compresses the most intense of human experiences into a string of words, which has the ability to move humankind for generations.

There is a rare level of beauty in taking your emotions and penning them down in a single word. A word that feels beautiful at its very core. A word that will make anyone feel the same emotion instantaneously. It's like a culmination of one's mind being one with one's heart, wiring the emotion from the chest to the arms and making it pen down the exact linguistics.

This amalgamation of multiple aspects of my intellectual fascinations through the process of writing is what partly drew me to the art. That's why I've decided to write, because honestly, every piece I write and that satisfies me, draws me back to the epiphany enumerated above.

There's a reason art moves people. Think about the time a beautifully written poem or an acoustically rendered song moved you to your bones. Why do you think that happened? It's not the words or the music per se. It's the communication of an emotion through them. The strength of an artist lies in making the audience empathise with the emotion of the piece. You feel love, heartbreak, motivation, whatever is possible on the face of the earth. That's where the beauty lies. Art takes something that's intangible, an inextricable phenomenon we call as a feeling or an emotion, and transfers that to everyone observing. An artist feels something and then makes you feel the exact same emotion, without saying anything. All through the medium of the art. Words have that power. Take a moment to appreciate the magnificence of this. I have the power to make you feel what I do, take my physiological spark and transfer it to you, even though I'm not around you at all. How beautiful is that!

I write, to crystallize my emotions in a place, for their permeance through time. If nothing at all, it will atleast give me a place to store pieces of my heart as it evolves over time, and someday allow me to come back and see how it all was at some long time in the past.

All this raving was probably unnecessary. Sometimes I just think a lot and end up spending some really huge amount of energy walking and processing my thoughts. Maybe this is a better way to simply pen them down for another time. I feel a lot better having done this too.

Being a Digital Nomad accompanies walking the depths of the internet, seeking whatever solace information can offer. Every traveller leaves back a trail, and this is my attempt to do my part. Someday, I will look back on all my posts to (hopefully) see my growth through time. That will be the day this will all seem worth it.