Rishita Chaudhary

There's something uncomfortable about people who are trying too hard. We judge them for their pretensions; we feel embarrassed at the nakedness of their effort. The embarrassment is often a projection of our own insecurities about striving. If we managed, with heroic unselfconsciousness, to really commit to becoming a writer, an artist, a better... See more

Travel in both its literal and symbolic avatars is the process of acquiring cognitive empathy. When you visit somewhere with different norms to those that you have known so far, the realization dawns that those norms are not “normal.” Every person’s experience of the world is particular, but this specificity only becomes obvious when another way of... See more

Writing, Coates recalls, was one of the great “obsessions” of his childhood — he relished the “private ecstasy” found in “the organization of words, silences, and sound into stories,” in “the employment of particular verbs, the playful placement of punctuation,” this mysterious alchemy of skill and vision with the power to “make the abstract and... See more

Spending most of his time alone, Soares sits thinking, celebrating the “sombre majesty of splendours no one knows”. He advocates buying books never to read them. He fondly remembers an office boy who collected travel brochures, but never travelled. He looks forward to recognition after death not because he expects to achieve something, but as a... See more

we are allowed to know peace, to feel ease, to experience softness and deem it sacred. we are allowed to be well without needing to earn it through agony.

What a truly poetic way of measuring the passing of time:

“In the old days (...) every time a geisha arrived at a party to entertain, the mistress of the teahouse lit a stick of one-hour incense—called one ohana , or “flower”. The geisha’s fees were based on how many sticks of incense had burned by the time she left.”

Although incense was commonly

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varda reveals the importance of three things in this journey: inspiration (the motivations, ideas, circumstances and happenstance that ignite the desire to create), creation (the means, structure, details, and the work), and sharing (perhaps the purpose of creation).

The great problem of consciousness is that all it knows is itself, and only dimly. We can override this elemental self-reference only with constant vigilance, reminding ourselves again and again as we forget over and over how difficult it is — how nigh impossible — to know what it is like to be anybody else. It does not come naturally to us, this... See more