The title is heavily inspired by one of my favourite artists these days. I always wondered if they missed a "3" at the start of the band's name. It would sound much more routine and more much grandiose at the same time. A quick look at their wiki page, which I am not a fan of admittedly, but which nonetheless provides some quick, cheap information, can give you some of the origin stories of the name which are pretty interesting, almost as much as the band. When I first listened to their songs, I placed them in the secondary bucket of the 50 odd interesting bands I stumbled upon over the course of a fortnight while in office. Since then, they have grown on me like no other band, and with their new release, well, shit's gotten real.
No Man's Sky is an ambitious sci-fi game. Gazillion planets and hence, gazillion scenarios, which would require a gazillion years for a human being to complete. I am not a gamer - never played any video / computer game ever - and this game still does not resurrect the non-existent gamer in me, but the concept sure as hell sounds amazing. Couple this with the fact that the soundscapes for the entire gazillion years that would be required to finish the game are all created by the band, and generated during the game by computer algorithms, and that the experience would be different every time you play the game, makes me lose my shit!
Which is why, when on weekends I am at home and watching movies like "Singh Sahab The Great", "Sheshnaag" or "Mumbai Ki Kiran Bedi", I realise there is more to life than going out on weekends for pointless (and expensive) dinners or boring pubbing / club-hopping - I stopped consuming alcohol last November, and I am very awkward with dance music, which may have resulted in me antagonising a very dear friend. Sometimes good music makes it really worthwhile to do nothing, which, while a continuum of the rest of my day, is still of a different kind. The soundscapes that music is capable of drawing are potent instruments with which to shrug off a lot of weekend blues, and yet all of it happens in a timeframe that does not appear to move because of the manner in which the overall experience subdues any externality. 65daysofstatic is a project where band members are acutely aware that they don't sell a multitude of records, and that they are no longer 21 while making career decisions, and that continuing in a band may mean they have to work minimum wage jobs while still creating an output that they are satisfied with and one that wins them the adulation of an ever expanding fan base. And they still do it. And they still call themselves 65daysofstatic.
A lot of us, on the other hand, are struggling to come to terms with who we are, and who we could not be. There are a lot of self help books dealing precisely on this subject. My aim is not obsess over what I think is guess work - I stopped guessing answers when I was taking the Bansal Classes entrance exam in 2005 A.D. - about what could be, but to highlight that just like a lot of other things that happen in this universe, we just happened to be humans. Whether of not this points at some divine machination or a greater scheme of things for us is something that I am not sure has an answer. Neither do I need / intend to try and find an answer. I am too lazy and too indifferent towards a lot of "life" shit, to go about this business. Then there is small matter of the good and the bad, the socially acceptable and the socially not-so-acceptable, the whole debate around choice, impressionable personalities, passions and more. The purpose of life is to live, I think - you are born and you will die. In the interim, you will need food, shelter, clothing, crave for luxuries, attain them and get bored of them, or in some cases, never manage to, but eventually, all us live. All of us live to talk about shit, all of us live to become someone, all of us live to live multiple persons. All of us live, whether lonely or surrounded by people, sociopaths or gregarious, introverts or extroverts, heroes or villains, superstars or the uncelebrated. But all of us live. (Of course, some of us of course make the terrible (according to me) choice of deciding not to live). So I don't think it helps when people talk in exalted or subdued manner about what life is to them, or what life has done to them, or the surety with which they claim to know who they are.
A lot many of us are now in environments different to that we have not been brought up in. So our sensibilities around a lot of socio-cultural things happening around us are playing catch up. And amid some of this cultural shock, we tend to go back to the comforts of our imaginations. It is a fascinating thing to do. We create our own synthetic universes, we create our own scenarios, we create synthetic feelings, we manufacture sympathies, we sing paeans, we assume personalities and draw up interactions that are well nigh impossible in the real world. Basically, we mostly self-aggrandise or self-loathe. The interesting thing here is that we are almost always biased and our choices / actions are almost always justified in a universe that is anyway of our own making. So while we warm ourselves up to our social environs, we still feel the need to reassure ourselves of who we are in a bid to make peace with the nibbling sense of being out-of-place and out-of-time.
The sense of static has somehow never been accepted by us. Evolution has always been at the forefront of any agenda at any point in human history. We have always worked away from inertia, and towards things that would seemingly define us in the contemporaneous social context, and mark the change in epochs. Stone age to iron age to bronze age to industrial revolution to so many more ages in between to space age to today. And yet, it is surprising how few of us have ever actively contributed to this movement away from the static. Passively, we all have. Quite a lot of us have jobs that we don't like, quite a lot of us have opinions which remain just that, quite a lot of us are torn between socially acceptable and personally desirable, quite a lot of us live the same lives 7 days a week, 365 days a year, quite a lot of us are static in a certain sense. So it is not difficult at all to see ourselves in an empathetic light. A lot of us are living lives that will not leave a mark in history or make a difference in the larger scheme of things, and yet all of us are living a life that will forever define our epoch. We are all creators of our time as much as we are its constituents and products.
I love static. I love limbo (a wrong usage of the word, but I want to use it anyway), and can absolutely see no reason why it is not acceptable. Except that it is not. And the Lord almighty has devised things that will keep reminding how pathetic it is. Our family, our friends, our girlfriends, our colleagues, our conscience, and of course social media. I am not accusing any of the aforementioned, but, you know! Internet (I will use internet and social media interchangeably, though they are not in a strict sense, but I am sure you will understand) is a very powerful source of information and at once, a sounding board, though not just a passive object. It is a throbbing place, and we are coming to terms with a reality many of us would never have thought of - the internet, and social media specifically, is transforming very rapidly into an echo chamber, reinforcing anything that we want. While it has made our lives easier in more ways that I know of or can count, it is like walking on a tightrope. We are all creators of internet as much as we are its constituents and by-products. We all live two lives today. We are happy in our real lives, and happier over there. We are sad in our real lives and sadder over there. We are gregarious in our real lives, and even more so over there. We are lonely in our real lives, and even lonelier over there. I am convinced that there is at least a smidgen of truth in the fact that this is a spiral.
Ad yet, a lot of us choose internet / social media over real life experiences (well, everything we do is a real life experience for us in a certain sense). Partly because we don't have a sense of belonging for where we are, partly because we are escapists, partly because we are strangers in stranger lands, partly because we all passive-aggressively crave attention and internet is like a choupal - anyone who manages to make enough noises in the right manner is very likely to get some attention.
And yet, all this while, I am at home on a Friday night writing emo Facebook posts about my loneliness, living a 7daysofstatic life. Or 365. I can't see the difference anyway.
No Man's Sky is an ambitious sci-fi game. Gazillion planets and hence, gazillion scenarios, which would require a gazillion years for a human being to complete. I am not a gamer - never played any video / computer game ever - and this game still does not resurrect the non-existent gamer in me, but the concept sure as hell sounds amazing. Couple this with the fact that the soundscapes for the entire gazillion years that would be required to finish the game are all created by the band, and generated during the game by computer algorithms, and that the experience would be different every time you play the game, makes me lose my shit!
Which is why, when on weekends I am at home and watching movies like "Singh Sahab The Great", "Sheshnaag" or "Mumbai Ki Kiran Bedi", I realise there is more to life than going out on weekends for pointless (and expensive) dinners or boring pubbing / club-hopping - I stopped consuming alcohol last November, and I am very awkward with dance music, which may have resulted in me antagonising a very dear friend. Sometimes good music makes it really worthwhile to do nothing, which, while a continuum of the rest of my day, is still of a different kind. The soundscapes that music is capable of drawing are potent instruments with which to shrug off a lot of weekend blues, and yet all of it happens in a timeframe that does not appear to move because of the manner in which the overall experience subdues any externality. 65daysofstatic is a project where band members are acutely aware that they don't sell a multitude of records, and that they are no longer 21 while making career decisions, and that continuing in a band may mean they have to work minimum wage jobs while still creating an output that they are satisfied with and one that wins them the adulation of an ever expanding fan base. And they still do it. And they still call themselves 65daysofstatic.
A lot of us, on the other hand, are struggling to come to terms with who we are, and who we could not be. There are a lot of self help books dealing precisely on this subject. My aim is not obsess over what I think is guess work - I stopped guessing answers when I was taking the Bansal Classes entrance exam in 2005 A.D. - about what could be, but to highlight that just like a lot of other things that happen in this universe, we just happened to be humans. Whether of not this points at some divine machination or a greater scheme of things for us is something that I am not sure has an answer. Neither do I need / intend to try and find an answer. I am too lazy and too indifferent towards a lot of "life" shit, to go about this business. Then there is small matter of the good and the bad, the socially acceptable and the socially not-so-acceptable, the whole debate around choice, impressionable personalities, passions and more. The purpose of life is to live, I think - you are born and you will die. In the interim, you will need food, shelter, clothing, crave for luxuries, attain them and get bored of them, or in some cases, never manage to, but eventually, all us live. All of us live to talk about shit, all of us live to become someone, all of us live to live multiple persons. All of us live, whether lonely or surrounded by people, sociopaths or gregarious, introverts or extroverts, heroes or villains, superstars or the uncelebrated. But all of us live. (Of course, some of us of course make the terrible (according to me) choice of deciding not to live). So I don't think it helps when people talk in exalted or subdued manner about what life is to them, or what life has done to them, or the surety with which they claim to know who they are.
A lot many of us are now in environments different to that we have not been brought up in. So our sensibilities around a lot of socio-cultural things happening around us are playing catch up. And amid some of this cultural shock, we tend to go back to the comforts of our imaginations. It is a fascinating thing to do. We create our own synthetic universes, we create our own scenarios, we create synthetic feelings, we manufacture sympathies, we sing paeans, we assume personalities and draw up interactions that are well nigh impossible in the real world. Basically, we mostly self-aggrandise or self-loathe. The interesting thing here is that we are almost always biased and our choices / actions are almost always justified in a universe that is anyway of our own making. So while we warm ourselves up to our social environs, we still feel the need to reassure ourselves of who we are in a bid to make peace with the nibbling sense of being out-of-place and out-of-time.
The sense of static has somehow never been accepted by us. Evolution has always been at the forefront of any agenda at any point in human history. We have always worked away from inertia, and towards things that would seemingly define us in the contemporaneous social context, and mark the change in epochs. Stone age to iron age to bronze age to industrial revolution to so many more ages in between to space age to today. And yet, it is surprising how few of us have ever actively contributed to this movement away from the static. Passively, we all have. Quite a lot of us have jobs that we don't like, quite a lot of us have opinions which remain just that, quite a lot of us are torn between socially acceptable and personally desirable, quite a lot of us live the same lives 7 days a week, 365 days a year, quite a lot of us are static in a certain sense. So it is not difficult at all to see ourselves in an empathetic light. A lot of us are living lives that will not leave a mark in history or make a difference in the larger scheme of things, and yet all of us are living a life that will forever define our epoch. We are all creators of our time as much as we are its constituents and products.
I love static. I love limbo (a wrong usage of the word, but I want to use it anyway), and can absolutely see no reason why it is not acceptable. Except that it is not. And the Lord almighty has devised things that will keep reminding how pathetic it is. Our family, our friends, our girlfriends, our colleagues, our conscience, and of course social media. I am not accusing any of the aforementioned, but, you know! Internet (I will use internet and social media interchangeably, though they are not in a strict sense, but I am sure you will understand) is a very powerful source of information and at once, a sounding board, though not just a passive object. It is a throbbing place, and we are coming to terms with a reality many of us would never have thought of - the internet, and social media specifically, is transforming very rapidly into an echo chamber, reinforcing anything that we want. While it has made our lives easier in more ways that I know of or can count, it is like walking on a tightrope. We are all creators of internet as much as we are its constituents and by-products. We all live two lives today. We are happy in our real lives, and happier over there. We are sad in our real lives and sadder over there. We are gregarious in our real lives, and even more so over there. We are lonely in our real lives, and even lonelier over there. I am convinced that there is at least a smidgen of truth in the fact that this is a spiral.
Ad yet, a lot of us choose internet / social media over real life experiences (well, everything we do is a real life experience for us in a certain sense). Partly because we don't have a sense of belonging for where we are, partly because we are escapists, partly because we are strangers in stranger lands, partly because we all passive-aggressively crave attention and internet is like a choupal - anyone who manages to make enough noises in the right manner is very likely to get some attention.
And yet, all this while, I am at home on a Friday night writing emo Facebook posts about my loneliness, living a 7daysofstatic life. Or 365. I can't see the difference anyway.
