Five Slices #18: India through an outsider's eyes
PMF or Die, Dostoevsky's bet, why the world is losing color, India through outsiders' eyes
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The Cornell Pumpkin Incident
How does a pumpkin get on the pointy end of a tower? It’s the kind of prank you expect Fred and George to pull off at Hogwarts around Halloween. But in 1997, somebody saw an orange globe stuck on the McGraw tower, 173 feet from the ground with the last 20 feet being a slippery metallic cone. It turned out to be a pumpkin. Nobody knew how it got there but it soon acquired a following: A website showing a live webcam feed of the pumpkin was viewed over 700,000 times.
The pumpkin stayed on the tower for seven months until the university organized a carnival for the removal of the pumpkin. While they were rehearsing the removal of the pumpkin, they accidentally knocked it off before the scheduled removal. Its remains were freeze-dried and kept on display till it decayed.
PMF or die
If you got a month to complete your college assignment but ended up pulling an all-nighter the night before submission, then you’re familiar with Parkinson’s law. It’s the idea that work expands to take up the time that you allot to it. It’s a depressing truth to confront, but once you understand it, you can turn it to your advantage – Tim Ferriss suggests in The Four Hour Work Week that you should set ultra-tight deadlines to trick yourself into being more efficient.
Two entrepreneurs in Philadelphia, Blake Anderson and Patrick Callaway took this to an extreme by locking themselves up in an apartment with $25,000 to spend. Their project titled “PMF or Die” aims to make $1 Million in revenue by building an app within the next 90 days. To prove that they’re actually building the app, they’re live-streaming their room’s camera feed 24x7 for the world to see. It’s been 25 days and they haven’t made any money so far, but I’m rooting for them to succeed.
Would you try something like this?
Write like Dostoevsky
Having a tight deadline is one way to do things. Another underrated productivity hack is to push yourself into debt and risk losing everything that’s valuable to you. That’s how Dostoevsky got things wrote the book The Gambler.
When Dostoevesky discovered gambling, he wrote confidently to his wife’s sister that he had discovered a system that made it impossible for him to lose. Sure enough, within a week he was writing a letter to his brother begging for money after he had lost all of his winnings.
To pay back the money, he borrowed from an unscrupulous publisher who made a deal with him: Dostoevsky had to deliver two manuscripts for publication within the next five months or forfeit the rights to all his previous novels for the next nine years. Working at a frantic pace, he dictated two novels to his stenographer, Anna Snitkina, who went on to become his second wife (imagine that). The first novel turned out to be The Gambler. The other was Crime and Punishment. What a chad.
We’re running out of color
If you think the world looks drab and dull now, you probably aren’t imagining things. The world has been losing color gradually over the last few decades. Outlets like McDonald’s are shifting from a fun, playful look to a more surgical, playful look. Major brands like Apple, Microsoft and Google are going for a minimal aesthetic to fit in with a more “serious” image. Even movies are color-grading in a way that makes vivid colors look duller than they are in reality.
Why is this? Well, it’s partly because we’re moving from more colorful and richly textured materials like wood, paper, and fabric to dull and polished materials like plastics and metals. But also, the influence of Greek thinkers like Plato and Aristotle might be on the rise . According to the book Chromophobia, lurid details like “color” and “aesthetics” were seen as distracting from the pursuit of “real truth” embedded in thought. Everything from product design to architecture seems to be embracing this philosophy, and it’s making the world a duller place to live in, in my opinion.
But I also think that this sameness in public places is an opportunity for small businessmen to break the monotony. Small cafes and designer brands are now creating distinctive, bold designs that make them stand out and appeal to a very specific audience. I can’t wait for color to be back in style.
Source: Culture Critic
India through outsiders’ eyes
I really like the movie Darjeeling Limited. I’ve grown up in India and also seen it depicted on screen by hundreds of filmmakers. But seeing an outsider who didn’t grow up in India visualize the country gives it a fresh look. Whenever I stumble across such works of art, I file them away for later reference. Here are some that I really liked:
Mitch Epstein, an American photographer, documented the color of 1980s India:
Hiroshi Yoshida, a prolific Japanese artist who created over 250 woodblock prints in his lifetime produced 32 prints as part of his India and Southeast Asia series in 1931:
Want to go back further in time? Here are some paintings of Bengal by Scottish painter William Simpson, set in the 1860s.
Further evidence that color was doing fine once upon a time…
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In the last issue, I wrote about a game in which you need to stop AI from destroying the world. You can find the complete list of issues here.
How do you think being from outside of India (and usually the West) might have changed how these artists chose their subjects and framed their shots? Another layer of mediation here is the fact that these were not digital cameras - and the action of photographing someone very conspicuous.
It is true (with portraits, especially), that photographs often reflect the relationship between the subject and the artist. Do you think dynamics like the native-former colonizer, or even the Young White Man on a Gap Year in South Asia play out on print? That'd be really interesting to notice, I think.