Rishita Chaudhary

She is interested in the relationship between care, intuition and guts; what we eat and how we feel; and how we digest feelings and food. How can food and art relate to the inside feelings that shape our social behaviors and decision-making?

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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In The Disappearance of Ritual, Byun-Chul Han explains that “Rituals are characterized by repetition. Repetition differs from routine in its capacity to create intensity.” ... Rituals involve enacting reality; tapping into the imaginal, the place between our minds and the world, to take on new and wider perspectives. We can do this by revisiting,... See more

“Yes, I’m ambitious,” a friend told me recently, “but climbing the corporate ladder does not interest me like it used to. A title, a bump in pay—it’s not satisfying. What I need to feel successful and fulfilled is completely different. Am I doing something that brings satisfaction? Do I feel like I’m learning? Do I feel like I’m contributing? Do I... See more

Do you have a writing routine?

I meditate first thing in the morning, then work out. I do much of my reading at the gym – something about the kinetic energy being discharged leaves my mind more single of focus. And then I write, standing, for as long as the writing feels alive. By mid-afternoon, my mind begins to slip out of the poetic dimension,... See more

It is an attack on the cruel idea that work confers dignity and therefore that people who don’t work—the old, the disabled—lack value. On the contrary, dignity is intrinsic to all human beings, and in designing a work regime rigged for the profit of the few and the exhaustion of the many, we have failed to honor one another’s humanity.

Social media doesn’t let us actually absorb the information we consume. We’re blasted with low-context content and given no time to reflect on what we’ve just consumed before the next video starts to play. Functionally, it’s the same as junk food – we absorb the message straight into our psyche without vetting it, contextualizing it or reflecting... See more