I had a conversation with my friend Kaushik a year ago when we were having dinner together. I’ve been in the company of many people who smoke regularly, even though I don’t. He is a regular smoker as well and I asked him what kept him attracted to the bud. I was curious to know about why people find it so hard to quit. What he told me was simple to understand but still very profound.

He told me when someone starts smoking for the first time, they probably won’t like it very much. It happens slowly as they learn how to do it properly. That’s why beginners start coughing because they can’t control when and how to let the smoke in and when to let it out. But when they get hold of it, they start getting a kick out of it. And for most people, that’s the thing that keeps them coming back for more. I’ve seen very few who smoke because they like the smell of a burning cigarette and quite a lot who smoke because they think it’s cool. They are the ones you see in college all the time. But for the rest, it’s the kick they get out of it that matters and that’s the addiction. However, with time, your body gets used to it and then the only way to enjoy it like before is to keep having more. And that goes on and on and when you’ve done it for years, even 3-4 packs a day isn’t enough for you.

I don’t see addiction in the negative sense. I believe we all are addicted to something or else anyway. Be it shopping, movies, food, chocolate, ice-cream, coffee, tea, porno, adrenaline, music, you name it. I am more interested in learning about how we get addicted to something and how to stay in control rather than trying to judge a particular group of people because they are addicted to something that we consider wrong. And if you think about it, people who are addicted to smoking or drinking are the most aware of their addiction. Compare that to a teenager who just had a break up and has a low self-esteem, so starts over-eating and thus, gets fat. Most people don’t know that they can get addicted to a particular food, many particularly high in cholesterol. Any addiction, that way, can be harmful. I have asked a few alcoholics as well about it. My loose definition of an alcoholic is “anyone who drinks almost everyday”. They have shared the same view as mentioned above.

Most people who know me know that I have a lot of trouble waking up once I sleep. So a week ago, I decided one day that I won’t sleep at all, no matter what. And it was already about 3:30 pm when I woke up because I had slept at 6 am that day. That desire to stay awake intensified when a friend, who goes by the same name as me, decided to challenge me that I won’t last even for a day without sleeping. We had a wager and I was determined to stay up. I did stay up for 2 days and 2 nights. And what surprised me at the end of it was how easy it actually was. I normally sleep when I feel like sleeping. I don’t care if it’s 2am or 6am or 1pm when that happens. And I usually find it very difficult to control myself when I am sleepy but this time, things were different.

I realized that there’s a period of about 5-15 minutes, and that’s how my body works, when my brain would give up on me and force me to leave whatever it is that I am doing and just sleep. And if somehow I cross that successfully, staying up by doing whatever it takes, I am good for the next few hours. And to fight those few minutes, I did try drinking coffee once but for the rest of the times, about 7-8 in all, I tried natural ways to stay up. I had an apple once, went outside and looked at the sun twice, kept stretching and walking in between to keep the muscles from relaxing and splashed my face with water a few times. I also made sure I was sitting upright and not leaning comfortably on my chair to keep myself alert and I tried to stay away from my bed even though I use my laptop sitting there often times.

All this has forced me to think if we are all addicted to sleeping, more so, myself. I’ve been wondering if we can do with lesser amounts of sleep every day and still work as much and maintain our energy levels high. When I am tired and my muscles need rest, I sleep in a particular position that support them for sometime before I fall asleep. I normally sleep sideways but when I wake up, I find myself in varying postions every day. What I observed was that I find joy and comfort in those few minutes that I am laying on my bed before I fall asleep completely. But when I am sleeping, I have no consciousness to feel the same. Granted that my body is resting and I will feel fresh when I wake up. But many a times, when I do wake up, I want to go back to sleep “just for a few more minutes”, like many of us, and I do that in the same position as I was in when I slept. My body loves that position and my muscles find comfort that way. And no matter how much I give it that, it wants more. Because after a couple of minutes, I fall asleep again and it wants to feel it consciously. It can never have enough. And I have tried to give it a lot before. I’ve slept for 2 days continuously before to try to give it a lot in hopes that it will leave me alone for a few days. But it did not. That immediately reminded me of what Kaushik said about smoking. That when we get used to it, we need more of it to feel the same that we felt before with less. I firmly believe that we can do more than we generally think we can. And that includes sleeping less. I’ll try different things and post my experiences here. Meanwhile, I’d like to know what you think about it.

When you are looking at something beautiful in front of you and you want to remember it, or express it to the world the subtleties of something, you can go ahead and try to write about it. But it’s not easy. Writing requires a lot of effort on the part of the writer and even more on the part of the reader. As a writer, you have to know words, know how to put them in a string that not only makes sense but also is appealing to the eyes of the people who didn’t experience what you did. Your job is to make them feel as if they were witnessing exactly what you did and make them feel what you were feeling when you were witnessing the endless beauty.

You can make it a lot easier if you just paint an image, but that’s still not an easy thing to do. What most of us would rather do is take a picture with a piece of glass which is made precisely to mimic our eyes and in many ways, see better than what our naked eyes see. In the last few days, I’ve become a fan of doing that—clicking photos—and there’s more reason to it than it being easy. Easy would be the last thing it is; to take a good picture. And to take a great one is a matter of remarkable achievement that happens not to everyone; and not every day, let alone everywhere.

The reason photography is so naturally appealing to me is because it is technical. To a person who enjoys learning how things work and how they were built, photography is like learning to play music when you were Beethoven’s child. There’s more to it than meets the eye, and that’s where the beauty lies. Like my guru, Linda Goodman, used to say, “It rhymes, so it must be true”. It is not just clicking and watching what you shot. Although that can be done ever so easily these days. But easy shooting is much like easy writing. If everyone who could write wrote, it will be what it would be if everyone who had a camera, any camera, took pictures. There are great pictures are the top of the pyramid, good ones at the bottom. And the ones that don’t matter are like the grains of sands spread across the earth, of which this pyramid is only a tiny fraction. A freckle. A pimple on its cheeks.

They say it’s an art. And so it is. But more than that, it’s science. It’s mechanical. You have to turn knobs, click buttons, browse and make selections through menus, learn about light and its characteristics, learn about angles and measure distances, measure heights and widths of things, deal with lengths and distances; there’s a lot of physics involved. And if you were a photographer a decade or more ago, there was a lot of chemistry involved as well. People loved it, but it sure wasn’t simple. And there’s the digital equivalent of that as well. You have to learn to use a computer, which considering many people know shouldn’t be put in the difficult category, but if you consider how many people don’t, that’s when things start shifting. You have to make choices—a lot of them. You have to make strategies. Backup strategies, before you even begin to process any of the pictures you’ve taken. And it just doesn’t mean copying them to another media. A lot of professional photographers keep at least 4, and many up to a dozen copies of their files in different format, at different stages of post-processing and at different locations, logical and physical. Organizing thousands and thousands of image files on a machine is no piece of cake either. It is easy if you are good at creating taxonomy, and have a plan to tag every picture you take with keywords, and rate them appropriately and categorize them, and sort them and put them into folders. On a higher level, that also means making appropriate decisions on what kind of computer you’d like to have, how many hard drives for back-ups, how big should each hard disk be, what about off-site backups, what platform supports the software you’d want to use, how compatible are they, how long will they be there so you can be sure you can keep working the same way, what workflow is suited to the kind of work you do and with the kinds of ecosystem you live in, just to mention a few. You have to understand about colour and how what they call bits, which are nothing but in most cases the presence or absence of magnetic energy, and in others optical, work to represent the colours around us, what is the gamut of colours supported on the media we are working on. All of that of course, after we have decided if what we are shooting will go to print or web or for something else. And then there’s the issue of how big, how sharp, how contrasty, and every other little thing you can think of, that can vary from person to person.What may be perfect for you may be worse than looking at dogshit from an inch away from my face for me. You also must know about file formats, colour spaces or gamut of colours you can work in, aspect ratios, and monitor calibration, because not everything that displays the image displays it similarly, noise and how to reduce it, cropping, white balances, which actually means how well the colours are represented in the image when compared to the original view our eyes had, and a whole lot of things.

To reduce the burden and to be a little more effective at this, one can prepare before hand and try to take better pictures and perform minimal processing but most of us prefer taking a lot of bad ones, picking the best ones from them (the bad ones?) and performing a lot of post-processing which is like applying make up to an ugly woman. This was not much of an issue in the olden days when there were limitations. Limitations as to how many pictures you can take and how flexible you’d be in reviewing them before you take another. Limitations are those little angels we tend to avoid so comfortably as if they were like flies which are supposed to only mean distraction. Ask a writer what is better to write on, a computer keyboard or an old typewriter? The typewriter has its limitations but they tend to assist more in “writing” than the keyboard does with all of its features combined. With a keyboard, all you do is “type”, which is no art! The fact that you have a “backspace” allows you to make mistakes. More mistakes than you otherwise might make. With a typewriter, you have to think of the whole sentence in your head before you start typing and that means that you’d make lesser mistakes. Also because you develop a habit of thinking about everything thoroughly before typing, you become much better a thinker and organize your thoughts every time even when you aren’t “writing”. Not very different than this is a modern camera which tends to make decisions on behalf of you automatically. And if everyone let them do that, it would only mean—my pictures are better than yours because I have a better camera than yours! Great painters never painted better than most because they had better brushes. Nor did great composers compose ageless melodies because they had a better piano to play on. Taking control of the tools you use is very important. And the way you do that is unique to you and no one can replicate. You do follow rules and laws. All musicians know about rhythm and timing and about the way scales are made up and how chord progression works. And because they know how it works, they can break the rules to make exceptional music. An untrained amateur doesn’t know the rules and all he will do is break them unless he, co-incidentally, ends up following one. It’s what you do that makes you. And it’s what you know that helps you decide what and how to do what you do. Practice is important but no more or less important is theory.

There’s a final aspect to it, the delivery. Go ask a writer how printing works. Chances are high there won’t be any answer. Ask the same to a photographer and he’ll sit you down and tell you exactly the different types of printing and how each works, why one is better and how he likes it done. If it’s not printing, he’ll tell you about ways he uses to publish them online to third-party services and also on his own website, which he probably manages by himself. Right from being able to use a camera and understanding how optics work to being able to use a computer to manage, organize, process and publish for delivery, a photographer knows every little detail about his work. And that is far from easy. But to someone who is a geek that is far from boring. Photography is an art. A very technical one, indeed.

Thank you Sameen for editing the post 🙂

There are those who say and there are those who do. You can never do both of them together and still do them well. How many times have you thought to yourself, “I want to do this” or “I want to visit that place” or “I want to learn how to do this” and months or years later you still think, “Why did I never do that?”

I’ve always believed that life is not merely comprised of tasks but tastes. For some of us, doing more is what it means to be doing things right. If something goes wrong, we then have the excuse that we are doing too many things and once in a while, something can and will go wrong, if it has to. For others, and these are the artists in their own fields, doing less and doing well is essential. These are the people who look in to the details and the subtleties of everything. They don’t care if they do things on time or if they do as many things as others. All that matters to them is whatever they’ve done is the best they can do.

They say we humans have the potential to do far more than we think we do. And in trying to leverage that potential, we try to put a lot of our energies everyday in doing a lot of things. A lot of things, really. Not that there is anything wrong with being able to do a lot. It’s just that it never ends. The list keeps growing. It is like we are “trying to fill a bottomless cup”, to quote the wise guy from Kung Fu Panda II. The point is, we can do a lot and we can do a lot more than that. It will never end. So what do we do? Well, there’s one thing we can try. Slowing down! Take time to think about what you are doing and why you are doing it. Give every little thing the importance it deserves. And that’s important because I say so? NO! That’s important because all the crazy people knew this. They are the great ones. The greatest composers, painters, writers, sculptors and even the greatest scientists and businessmen and the like. ALbert Einstein was smart but he had no interest in showing that in any thing else but math and physics, because that was what he was passionate about. He could have done a lot but he chose to focus. And are we glad he did! Howard Hughes was obsessed with things that flew. Obsessed. Yes, that word is bad but well the good side of it is you are really in to something to be obsessed with it. And I don’t see how that can be wrong. The world has seen many a folks who have given up all and went for what seemed nothing at first, only to realize years later that it was the right choice. And I consider myself to be lucky enough to see a few of these people alive today. And one of them is Stevhen Paul Jobs. A lot of things are said about him everyday, both good and bad. But no one can deny that he and his efforts have changed the world. He did cause a “dent in the universe” because he believes in doing that, “otherwise why even be here”. In a quote (not an exact one) he said, “Some of the most important decisions we make here at Apple is deciding what not do to. That gets rid of a lot of crap so we can focus on what’s good.” We see people everywhere who do so many things because they need to be done. Not wholeheartedly, but because they have to do them. Wouldn’t a lazy person be far better who does nothing out of obligation or necessity but only when he feels like doing things? But if everyone did that the world will go crazy, right? It might lose it’s rhythm for sure, but will it be that devastating? I don’t think so.

Let me explain.

It’s simple math. Don’t we all have at least one thing that we’d like to do but we don’t for every thing that we do but we don’t want to? That’s a fair assumption I believe. So if one day, you became totally carefree and gave up feeling responsible for the things that you do only out of necessity and you started doing only those things that you wanted to do always, you’d still be doing the same amount of things, right? So what changed? The actual things! And the fact that you’ll be a lot happier at the end of the day. But wait. You ask, what happens to the things that you are not doing now but were essential like cleaning? Well, here’s the thing. It’s not that you are never going to do those things that you don’t like doing. You’ll do them for sure if they are really necessary. The catch here is this, that firstly, you get time to live without doing the things you thought were necessary and that you had to do them to exist. And that’s huge. You’ll realize that most of them aren’t really necessary. Get rid of the crap. Secondly, you actually did a lot of things that you wanted to do. That means you are very satisfied with your life now. And those things that you will still need to do out of necessity, you’ll try to find some fun in them and do them with more elegance now. Be more creative with them. You ask why couldn’t you have don’t that before? Well, do you make your strategies when you are on the battlefield? No 🙂 You need to be away, relaxed, comfortable and have a nice view of how it will be like to decide what stays, what goes. How is this math? I don’t know! It is not 🙂 I had to put it there in the beginning to make you feel that what was to follow would be very complicated, as complicated as simple math is, because otherwise it will lose it’s value. It’s so simple, you wouldn’t have taken it for a solution. Someone taught me this years ago and I want you to learn it as well – In learning anything, the fundamentals are the most important thing. They are quite often the easiest and also the ones everyone else pays the least attention to.

Simple huh?