Often times when a new Netflix thing becomes the talk of the town, people are often quick to quip like “If you don´t live under a rock, you must know yada yada yada”; I will not use that metaphor given its looseness — however I did just devote three lines to merely achieve to say, you do know The Social Dilemma, right, I mean come on who does not?!
I did watch the documentary the other day and while nothing particularly was an utter and complete shock, it did do a decent enough job in comprehending the bits and pieces of allegations against the social networks into an intertwined schema of things, previously scattered and once understood, hardly deniable.
I did not want to be the overly dramatic person who deletes the Instagram app right after watching the documentary, so that´s exactly what I did.
That was a couple days ago. While no magnanimous epiphany has happened so far, I do feel a bit calmer, a bit less anxious, a bit less worried about how many people might feel negatively about my last story, or my last post, should I be posting pictures from my hikes while the half of the world, and especially where I come from is still in lockdown? Will it be perceived as a thoughtless act best and a show off at worst? And the train wreck of thoughts goes on..
So yes, this has calmed, no arguments there, but it is literally been a couple of days so I will not say much more about my newly found enlightenment, or the paucity thereof.
On the flip side, I do feel a minor loss of connection, there are a couple people who I always share intellectually snobby memes with, there is a lot of ultra #woke content right now, especially as far the Indian politics and the Indian media psychology is concerned; and I do miss a platform where anyone can express themselves, you know? Like this article which is definitely going to find its way to the Gram.
And this detox comes at a point when Manasi is on her annual solo traveling voyages, the last time I did that was in December, in the same country and boy oh boy! am I exhilarated? I would have thought that it might get a tad mundane to travel alone without having a device with tons of content, refreshing every nanosecond at your disposal, to serve as a constant distraction.
I was dead wrong: Books, magazines, writing, walking, podcasts, water and food. Family, phone calls. Things that matter. They´re all back and they were aching for my time. Time that was previously whiled away.
The whole of last night was an adventure staying up at the airport and the podcast from Azeem Banatwalla — https://sentimentalpodcast.libsyn.com/ was the best company I could have asked for. It was absolutely worth every second, full of content and the most like minded conversations I have heard in a while. For all the Abhishek Upmanyu fans, he is a guest on one of the episodes and you will NOT be disappointed!
Back to solo travel, I am finding it absolutely impossible to find words that resonate with the euphoria I am feeling, of feeling so proud to not just be okay in your company but getting almost addicted to it. It is one of those epiphanies when you realize you just understood a concept? For the lack of a better word, Eureka, and my smile says it all!
I have, for a couple of days, this room that you see on the left, tiny, minimal, perfect.
The sea is brewing up in the background, like a herbal tea in my daydreams;
an absolutely Prateek Kuhad-ish writing desk and a small candle stick on it (ohne candle; ab sab kuch to nahi milega!), a place which almost wrecked in me a sense of urgency to write;
I HAD to write, like, right away.
Hoping for much for personal and public writing to happen at this cathartic piece of wood.
It´s a feeling I so strongly want to hold onto, trying to capture it in words, in pictures (a couple below), in scents and in memorabilia and yet the zeitgeist of this very tiny moment in the frame of a lifespan, is just in the here and now! At least in this moment, I am just that, present, mindful and ergo, moderately ecstatic.
Hope all is well.
