👋 Welcome to the latest issue of The Curious Corner – a weekly newsletter where I share interesting reads around culture, psychology, work-life balance, books and more!
There, this page is no longer empty. It is an unnerving experience each time to look at an empty page that is magically supposed to transform itself into the next issue of this newsletter. But we get there. One word at a time. Thank you for coming along on this ride.
So many phrases for life come from this notion of a ride - buckle up, put your foot on the gas, slam the brakes. For the next few minutes, I invite you to do something different - roll down the window, take a look outside and let your mind wander.
Here are some reads that made the ride worthwhile in the week gone by -
Aren’t you always feeling rushed? Like you’re running from deadline to deadline. Slowing down can feel like the one thing you cannot afford to do. And yet, slowing down helps you more than you know. The onslaught of stimulus and data and information is not something we are programmed to handle. But we can reclaim our bias to be present, to be attentive. You really do have more time than you think. Breathe. This read reminded me of the different ways to connect with the world sensorially. And to slow down. 🍃
In her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019), the artist Jenny Odell describes how, through the simple act of learning to identify local plant and animal species, her preconceived reality was deconstructed:
[Attention] can also mean the discovery of new worlds and new ways of moving through them … It can open doors where we didn’t see any, creating landscapes in new dimensions that we can eventually inhabit with others. In so doing, we not only remake the world but are ourselves remade
If you’re even slightly active on Instagram, you cannot scroll more than a couple of minutes before you encounter a food-related post. What started out as a beautiful food photos have now moved to food and cooking videos. This is ever since Instagram has shifted focus to the video format. But there’s this very relatable other shift happening. The aesthetics are changing. The “perfect” shot is being replaced by DIY aesthetics and photo-dumps. Is it more inclusion or just a nod to the fact that the earlier aesthetic made popular by food bloggers is just too much work? This read broke down this shift lucidly. 🥙
“You’re at a restaurant and they bring out the food and everybody takes pictures for 15, 20 minutes and it has to be perfectly staged and no one can bite it,” she says of those early days. Recently, she’s noticed the shift to the laissez-faire aesthetic. “The things that I see in photos now are really more of that photo dump style,” says Maggie. “It’s less of the perfectly curated marble studio and more interest in my actual kitchen that I actually cooked in.” That “photo dump” style Maggie describes is one piloted by Gen Z, who have — more than other generations — given up on the curated feed in favor of going weird, ugly, and unfiltered.
Though TikTok is banned in India, the phenomenon called booktok remains too interesting to ignore. Book reviewers, readers and content creators are behind this phenomenon of certain books, genres and authors finding thousands of readers and book orders. So much so that some publishing houses have dedicated pages on their websites that list books currently popular on booktok. You will see this happening on much smaller scale on Indian social media platforms. But if it makes reading fun, accessible and exciting - I hope we see more of it! This read about the influence of booktok was a fun read. 📚
This TikTok-fueled literary resurgence isn’t an anomaly. Over the course of the pandemic, book sales have skyrocketed. According to Forbes and NPD Bookscan, the U.S. print book market is up nine percent compared to 2020. This recent spike in sales has been greatly attributed to TikTok’s reader-centric community BookTok. Last year, when the British publishing house Bloomsbury saw that profit growth was up 220 percent, its CEO Nigel Newton ascribed it to the “phenomenal impact of TikTok.”
If I write the word picnic, what do you imagine? Maybe it is a spread of sandwiches and pastries and baked goods spread over a soft blanket. In the middle of trees or on an isolated plain with a beautiful view. You will probably think of it this way - the view and food immortalised by Enid Blyton and her rich description of picnic food through her books. But what is the Indian take on a picnic? What was our historic alternative to this British setting? I loved this read about food and picnics from the Indian perspective. 🧺
Centuries before British sahibs and cold champagne came to India, Indians were enjoying recreational outdoor eating their own way. Classical Indian art and literature are strewn with references to picnics and garden parties of the upper crust. A terracotta sculpture from the Sunga period (185-73 BCE) discovered in Kaushambi, for instance, “portrays a picnic party moving in a chariot”. In its centre is a big platter of “cooked food with clear suggestion of rice, sweet balls, round cakes, etc.,” writes Vinod Chandra Srivastava in his book History of Agriculture in India, Up to C. 1200 AD.
The last read for this issue is a beautiful conversation around how philosophy can explain love and heartbreak. We have failed to understand how rich and complex love can be as an emotion and routinely reduce it to the feeling of happiness. But it’s so much more. And the philosophical angles to love will make you appreciate the finer things. In everything. Enjoy reading this conversation on love and philosophy. ❤️
What I try to do is talk about a kind of love that has space for the full range of human emotions. That includes happiness, of course, but also sadness and anger. And also just the day-to-day, grayscale grind of getting up and going to work and not feeling particularly any kind of way about that, just doing it.
Those are most people’s lives day to day. Most people are not particularly happy all the time. Most people are not particularly sad all the time, although some of us have experienced that.
But what I want to say is all of these emotions are valid. All of these feelings are part of being human and being alive. And I think that means they should be part of love
This week was spent in reading Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton. Wise, funny and full of wonderful insights, this book is a study into how our status markers have changed throughout the centuries. By examining that, we can better understand why some things affect us the way they do and cause so much anxiety. Various external factors dictate what we treat as high and low status. This book is also a look at how different generations tackled this whole concept of status. Alain de Botton’s writing is one of my favourite styles - warm, witty and full of hope. Give it a go!
Some quotes before I meet you next week -
“The coolest most amazing people I have met in my life, I said, are the ones who are not very interested in power or money, but who are very interested in laughter and courage and grace under duress and holding hands against the darkness, and finding new ways to solve old problems, and being attentive and tender and kind to every sort of being, especially dogs and birds, and of course children.”
- Brian Doyle
“Empathy isn't just something that happens to us - a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain - it's also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It's made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. Sometimes we care for another because we know we should, or because it's asked for, but this doesn't make our caring hollow. This confession of effort chafes against the notion that empathy should always rise unbidden, that genuine means the same thing as unwilled, that intentionality is the enemy of love. But I believe in intention and I believe in work. I believe in waking up in the middle of the night and packing our bags and leaving our worst selves for our better ones.”
- Leslie Jamison
“Every man rushes elsewhere into the future, because no man has arrived at himself.”
-Montaigne
“Peace of mind does not come from finding an indisputable way of enhancing our status, it comes from discovering a sufficiently elevated and distant angle from which to look at everything we are and do in order finally to understand that we are blessedly and thankfully irrelevant to everything.”
- Alain de Botton
Till next week, stay curious!
- Sukhada