enLIghtenment 1 - Amol Deshpande

Thinking of doing this series where I do a collation of posts and videos that I come across on social media that I don't want to save or send but want to remember them. So I'll put them up here, and maybe someday turn this all into a book or something? Don't know... but for now, here's the first one:  

Queer Made weekend

Yesterday we went to the Queer Made event by Gaysi and Tinder. It was at the Jio One World space in BKC, about 5 minutes from Starbucks Capital. 

So we got there around 7, and found out the event had started at 3 pm. Most of the stalls were just shutting down for the day. Aditi badly wanted a face painting, which she couldn't get. 

When we got there, this group called Wild Wild Women was on. They were pretty good. Rishabh came with us, and he and Aditi got apple cider beers by Bira. 

Met a bunch of people too. 

Aniket, Dipti, Rishabh and us danced a bit, took some photos, and lounged about in the mall, chilling and talking about advocacy-related stuff. Lol. 

Rishabh got sick on the way back. 

The highlight, though, was a very, very prominent business person telling us, "I love Much Much. Love the content you guys do." 

And the other highlight was someone coming up to Aditi and going, "You make videos on autism, na? I see them." 

Good stuff.

Sunday was a regular day. Did some work, some good music stuff. Organized all my Kontakt instruments into a separate folder and deleted the ones I hardly ever use. Turns out I have so many good instruments that I never use, and then complain about not having enough string section patches in my existing synth plug-ins. 

The next week's kind of packed for us. I have an event coming up next Saturday also, which is going to be long and exhausting. 

In the evening, we shot for something new. I kind of had a meltdown midway through the shoot. I'm not really used to being in front of the camera with the lights shining in my eyes. It can get really overwhelming. 

Plus you don't know where to look, really. 

Anyway, so that's that. All in all, decent weekend. 

The highs of the upswing and yet the sameness of every day, and the wait

Little changes on an every day basis. And yet the graph is either moving upward or downward. Of course the exact direction that it moved in in a given period of time can only be determined once that time period has gotten over and the movement happened. 

But as objective as this visual may seem, the implications of it aren't as straightforward. By that I mean, from a given plane the graph may seem as one line. But zoom in further and you see it's a bunch of thin intertwined lines, and zoom in even further and each thin line is a bunch of intertwined lines. Where each line represents one of the many paradigms that form the larger picture whose progress you're trying to measure. 

Of course this graph that you see is part of an even bigger line that represents something way more macro, but zooming out to that plane requires time that you may not have at hand. 

So anyway, the central graph has its highs and lows - the lows always more intense and longer lasting than the highs. 

When the highs come, they're nice. You tell yourself not to feel them completely because they're so ephemeral and might disappear on you without warning. But when the lows come, they don't seem ephemeral at all. They seem all-consuming, like a 1000-tonne ship on fire, sinking on top of your chest. 

The graph moves upward and downward every second, and yet it moves so little that you hardly see anything. I guess all that matters is that on a large enough timeline, the graphs all move upward. That's a state of happiness, when everything's in an upswing. 

The thing is, eventually everything is upswing. The graph is defaulted to move upwards. It's all an illusion, anyway. 

So what is life?