A photograph of the author respiring fresh air in the jungles of Attapadi. Photographed by Amjad
“A person does not grow from the ground like a vine or a tree, one is not part of a plot of land. Mankind has legs so it can wander.” ― Roman Payne, The Wanderess
One of my long time read is the beautiful blog Notes from the Road. It’s written by Erik Gauger and it is an excellent road travel writing blog. I love the aesthetics and the overall way in which content is articulated on this page. Not sure if this would change in the future, but it looks stunning! What I like the most is his philosophy of travel writing at the core. If we read online, pure travel writing is a treasure to find out. My dad was a forest officer and may be due to the opportunities that I had with him to visit some of the most remote hill stations in South India, I am very much enticed by travel narratives when done well. Erik has done a wonderful job in narrating his travels and as he himself writes on his website,
“At Notes from the Road, I try to stay grounded in my original vision for what travel blogging can be: independent, visual, personal. Travel writing has never been about hotels and reviews. It is, and always has been, about ideas, people, and faraway places.” – Erik Gauger , author of Notes from the Road
Another example of how beautiful things can get when somebody puts his heart and soul into what he does.
“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
These are the famous words from a rebranding slogan “Think Different” which Apple ran in 1997. I have read that, more than for the public, the ad was basically intended to its employees to inspire them. This was written by Rob Siltanen, chairman and chief creative officer at Siltanen & Partners. After Steve Jobs passed away, someone dug up an old video from archives in which Steve Jobs personally spoke the words of the same ad in his own voice. I saw this many years back, but its timeless theme still strikes a chime.
Recently I’ve have been grazing through the videos by Chinese blogger Li Ziqi, who became an internet sensation after her videos on handicrafts, traditional cooking, and DIY from the countryside of Mianyang in southwest China’s Sichuan Province grew in popularity and caught netizen’s attention worldwide. What attracted my attention is the inherent calmness and the passionate composure with which each theme is made. It is in stark contrast with the heavily commercialized video bombardments, often largely obliquely spurious that we see on every video platform. Each video I’ve seen so far is so genuine and brilliantly captured. From what I’ve read in magazines, Li lives with her grandmother in a Chinese rural province. Orphaned at a very young age, she moved to city to work. After her grandfather’s death, she returned to the village to take care of her grandmother who fell ill. All her food and handicraft videos are often crafted from scratch and are prepared using authentic basic ingredients and tools making the best use of Chinese traditional techniques.
She initially started posting videos on Mepai, which is a very famous social platform in China and garnered great attention. In 2017, she started posting videos on Youtube which grew in popularity ever since. Her grandfather was a cook in the village. She learned how to grow vegetables, fish, carpenter handiworks, traditional dishes, and bamboo crafts. The well-made videos with its passion and subtle nuances give a wonderful experience of Chinese traditions and culture and her positive spirit on self-reliance sent by her life expertise has attracted warm international reception.
Her videos are unfeigned, lucid and basics from scratch and mostly don’t use any sort of modern technology or even electricity in most cases. She does everything on her own from cutting goat and rabbit fur for the brush hairs to chopping small trees to make paper. In one of the videos that I saw, she built a coffee table and two sofas using bamboo in its entirety using carpentry skills inspired by her grandfather. In some other videos, lip colors are prepared from fresh flower petals and honey. You’d be amazed by how she delves to the roots. The honey shown is not from a supermarket, but from a beehive in the village. She prepares her own deserts, sweet potato jelly, and pancakes from the sweet farm potatoes which she harvested on her own. A lot of traditional ways of preparations are shown.
The authenticity and fervent equanimity keep these visuals apart from the rest of the crowd and has truly impressed me. As we touched upon in our note on compassionate prudence, true magic ensues when people put in their signature on every single thing they do and when everything is done with love. Stories like this truly inspire!. God bless!
“God opens millions of flowerswithout forcing the buds, reminding us not to force our way but to wait for things to happen perfectly in time.” says a beautiful quote. The bandwagon of precariousness drives us through events of uncertainty and dubiety but always trust in the divine timing in which events uncover like a flower growing out of a bud. For young minds reading, always relay this when important decisions or events pass your life so that we come sanguine and hopeful to pass through them with grace. God bless.
A beautifully done tribute to late former Indian president and aerospace scientist Dr APJ Abdul Kalam. Beautifully shot by Matt Shaw and directed by Senthil Kumar, the video gracefully walks through his struggles and awe-inspiring journey in 6 minutes. My father had gifted his book Wings of Fire when I was in school and I was really inspired by his firm determination and hard work in working towards a dream.
Short Summary: It’s a stormy day on a bridge over the Indian ocean, to the island of Rameswaram, a night train delivers the morning newspaper to a newspaper boy who rides out into the storm to deliver the news and is the first to read the newspaper everyday as he reads all along his morning route, under the big banyan tree and sitting on the boat while his father rowed people from the island to the mainland. One day he sees the picture of a spitfire aircraft in a newspaper article about the Supermarine Spitfire, a fighter jet used by the British in World War II. He cuts it out, makes a paper rocket out of it and makes it fly and puts it up on his wall. This newspaper image became his life’s purpose. His dream was to fly a fighter plane as a young air force pilot but he fails the Indian Air Force Pilot entrance exam after India’s independence. The young man did not give up and went back to his reading habit, that helped him overcome his fear of failure. He switched lanes to become a rocket scientist on autopilot, flying missiles and testing nuclear weapons, and rising to the highest office in the country. And when he was President of India, from 2002 to 2007, he was the Chief of all the armed forces in the country. It was finally time for his childhood dream to come true. He was flying a fighter plane, at the ripe old age of 72 years as the President of the world’s largest democracy. One of the oldest men in the world to ever fly a fighter plane, which was his childhood dream. And that’s when he wrote the famous motivational line to all children : “Dreams are not what you see in sleep. Dreams are those that don’t let you sleep.” The story of a newspaper boy who woke up the country. A true story to ignite the power of dreams in a billion young Indians.
