“Because forgiveness is like this: a room can be dank because you have closed the windows, you’ve closed the curtains. But the sun is shining outside, and the air is fresh outside. In order to get that fresh air, you have to get up and open the window and draw the curtains apart.”
– Desmond Tutu
..“Everybody wants to reach the peak, but there is no growth on the top of a mountain. It is in the valley that we slog through the lush grass and rich soil, learning and becoming what enables us to summit life’s next peak.” -Andy Andrews
Stumbled across this old video aired by Doordarshan (For those who are not aware, it is India’s public service broadcaster) somewhere in the 90s. This ad came as a part of some government initiative which encouraged parents to take their kids to school and provide them with a good education and this movement drove a huge push towards mass education throughout India. This video used to air all the time on the TV back then promoting this spirit and is truly beautiful.
I’m a 90s kid and I have vivid nostalgic memories of the time. I’m not sure of how many of you’re recollecting the general life in India during the lovely 90s. It was the age before high-speed internet, Instagram and this fast-paced life that we are used to these days. Maybe, it’s my perception and can vary from person to person, but I strongly believe life was much more vibrant and jovial at that time (in general sense) with lesser hustle and bustle. Not sure of you, but this one really took me out to a blithe throwback of memories. The most exhilarating aspect I could recollect first is the relationship between people. Although online technology explosion have made our lives easier, somewhere we have swayed adrift the “human touch” in everything we deal with. Most of the things we deal now are fed on an algorithmic mode or is based on some kind of automation. I discussed this topic earlier of losing the human touch & the cultural aspects with the intricacies in our life in my review on the book Sensemaking: The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm. For instance, back in the day, when we get something from a nearby shop, we foster a friendship with the person. Coffee with warm conversation in the 90s turned to Venti soy mocha lattes with photos and cafe tagging now. Summers in the 90s with outings to the beach with music turned into the time now when everyone is absorbed into their Pandora or Spotify stations in quiet rooms. Dinner in 90s was lot of laughs around the table for on and on whereas now we have check-in tagging, checkouts, snapping photos of menus, dinner photos with descriptions. I’m not rambling, and none of these are wrong and of course, we cannot generalize into everyone. Neither can we do something about it or fly back in time. The least we could do is to do our part in being kind and cementing profound human relationships and friendships in whatever avenues we are profiling through. God bless with you a beautiful day. More 90s reminiscents and throwbacks coming soon!
Instagram insight while pruning some indoor plants today =)
reminiscence! and thought of the day.
“Don’t ask why the elephants wear such large shoes,
And why the kangaroos are reborn kidnappers,
And why the sailing birds are all Romantics.”
― Talking into the Ear of a Donkey: Poems
“I thought you could build a story that would function as a machine or else a complex of machines, each one moving separately, yet part of a process that ultimately would produce an emotion or a sequence of emotions. You could swap out parts, replace them if they got too old. And this time you would build in some redundancy, if only just to handle the stress.
One question was: Would the engine still work if you were aware of it, or if you were told how it actually functioned? Maybe this was one of the crucial differences between a story and a machine.”
― Paul Park, ‘All Those Vanished Engines‘
“Think the tree that bears nutrition:
though the fruits are picked,
the plant maintains fruition.
So give all the love you have.
Do not hold any in reserve.
What is given is not lost; it shall return.”
― Kamand Kojouri
“Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne, Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.”. These are the lines from an 1844 poem by James Russell Lowell. This briefly touches through ours innate nature full of contradictions that we talked about recently. The basic theme is that no matter how dark it gets, the end is for piety and truth and for the people of consciousness. That’s today’s night to ruminate over. God bless : )
Original photograph by MHP. Edited by yours truly.
