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There are terms we take for granted that perhaps we need to look at closely.
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Can art only be done by those who have been deemed by elites and academics to be artists?
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Is a 5 year old kid drawing an upside down house and a pink moon creating art?
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As a guide to thinking about this, I recommend an excellent book by Ernst Gombrich, The Story
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of Art, which begins with these words, quote, There really is no such thing as art.
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There are only artists.
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Once these were men who took colored earth and roughed out the forms of a bison on the
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Today they buy their paints and design posters for the underground.
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They did many things in between.
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There is no harm in calling all these activities art, as long as we keep in mind that such
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a word may mean very different things in different times and places.
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And as long as we realize that art with a capital A has no existence, for art with a
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capital A has come to be something of a bogey and a fetish, you may crush an artist by telling
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him that what he has just done may be quite good in its own way, only it is not art.
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And you may confound anyone enjoying a picture by declaring that what he liked in it was
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not the art, but something different.
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I agree with Gombrich, and I am glad that we are finally achieving a world in which
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a small group of elite gatekeepers and tastemakers don't get to decide what is art, to hell
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We can all be artists if we want.
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Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen.
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My guest today is Nishan Jain, better known online as the sneaky artist.
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I first noticed Nishant when he put up these timelapse videos of him sketching people in
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Later, I realized that's what is known as urban sketching.
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Then Nishant signed up for my course, the auto-clear writing, and along with other participants
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in the course, we have since had many lively discussions on what constitutes art and what
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is this thing called the creator economy.
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Nishant thinks about this new world in counter-intuitive ways that are filled with clarity.
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He does unconventional things, but he's thought them through and he's clear about why he's
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After doing my course, he also started a long-form conversation podcast where he speaks to artists
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like himself and he began an excellent newsletter where he writes about his journey, thinking
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aloud in a sense for all of us.
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He lives in Vancouver, but he happened to be in India in November.
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So I said, hey, if you're up for an episode, come to Mumbai.
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I was kind of kidding, but he flew down just for this recording.
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We had so much to talk about that we crossed five hours and felt we could have spoken for
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I love this conversation, but before you begin listening to it, let's take a quick commercial
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Long before I was a podcaster, I was a writer.
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In fact, chances are that many of you first heard of me because of my blog India Uncut,
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which was active between 2003 and 2009 and became somewhat popular at the time.
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I love the freedom the form gave me and I feel I was shaped by it in many ways.
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I exercise my writing muscle every day and was forced to think about many different things
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because I wrote about many different things.
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Well, that phase in my life ended for various reasons and now it is time to revive it.
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Only now I'm doing it through a newsletter.
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I have started the India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com where I will write
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regularly about whatever catches my fancy.
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I'll write about some of the themes I cover in this podcast and about much else.
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So please do head on over to indiancut.substack.com and subscribe.
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Once you sign up, each new installment that I write will land up in your email inbox.
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You don't need to go anywhere.
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So subscribe now for free.
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The India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com.
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Nishant, welcome to the scene on The Unseen.
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Thank you for having me.
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I'm both excited and terrified at the same time to be here.
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You know, you're a podcaster yourself, you should kind of know this by now that the only
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person who has any business feeling terror is a host because a host has to kind of constantly
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be alert and think about where to take the conversation left, when to interject, all
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Well, you know, guests just chill and they just kind of chat about stuff.
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But since you are so terrified, let me ask you a sort of unconventional question, which
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is that if say Da Vinci or Rembrandt were alive today, would they do what they were
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Would their art be what it was then or would they go off into different directions?
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That's a really good question because what often happens, I feel, is that when people
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look back at the art of people they admire, they sort of transpose them to the current
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moment doing that same thing.
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So somebody looks at Rembrandt and decides they want to be a fine artist.
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But Rembrandt was a fine artist of his time and they are trying to be a fine artist in
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the 21st century using the same tools almost.
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That's a strange decision in my opinion.
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So I don't know much about the background of these people and how they came to be artists,
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whether they went through formal education, but they were alive in a time of great discovery
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and they were leaders of various movements, artistic visions and ideas.
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So how I would like to think of it is that they would be using all the technologies they
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could because that's what they did then.
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People used technologies like camera obscura as soon as those were available to them.
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Too much criticism that this is not real art and a lot of great artists have faced this
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criticism in their time that what they are doing is not real art.
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And it is only in retrospect centuries later that we are looking at their work and now
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giving it the title of real art and trying to imitate that in the same way today.
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So I feel like somebody like Da Vinci for sure would have a TikTok channel and you would
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see NFTs from a number of them and all kinds of... because these were people excited by
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So I had a guest on my podcast some time back and we were talking about the things that
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people make as subjects.
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So I speak to urban sketches on my podcast and one of my consistent questions to them
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comes from the fact that urban sketches come from a very diverse set of backgrounds.
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Anybody is an urban sketch or if they simply take a sketchbook and they walk around their
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So I'm always curious to know what is it that makes you draw?
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What about your city do you look at that gets you interested?
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So what are the subjects that excite you and why?
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And this is something I try to find out through these conversations I have.
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He broached the subject of Rembrandt and Van Gogh and the idea was that these guys painted
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landscapes and rural landscapes and windmills and things like this, we might look at that
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and inculcate a romantic notion of pastoral rural life and think that this is what we
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Real artists paint windmills and old buildings and that's what we should do.
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But windmills were the latest technology of Rembrandt's time.
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The farming scenes that Van Gogh was painting were happening outside his home.
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This was modern life for him.
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So somebody like Rembrandt painting windmills is like someone like me going to Silicon Valley
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and making a drawing of Googleplex or finding Elon Musk and drawing a portrait of Elon Musk
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and not of some other thing which is informed by an aesthetic that is two centuries or three
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So it's kind of difficult to think about what someone would precisely do.
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But the easier route is to think about the motivations that they had in the time that
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they were alive and how those motivations can be the same for us today in the time that
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So I have a couple of related thoughts.
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I'll just voice them and tell me what you feel about them.
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And thought number one is this, that the population of Versova today is probably more than all
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of Europe at the time Da Vinci was alive.
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And therefore just looking at it in a crude statistical way, you would assume that the
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distribution of artistic talent is as much if not even better.
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And I say better because you have much more exposure to art, you have that entire body
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of centuries of art which you can look back on and learn from, if not consciously, then
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at least sort of imbibe it without realizing.
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And also we have far better technology available to us.
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So my assumption would be that in modern times with so many more people, which by the way
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is a bloody good thing.
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Population is not our problem, it's our greatest strength, that in these modern times with
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so many more people, with so much better technology, with so much better exposure to art, my assumption
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would simply be that we should get art of a much higher quality than in days past.
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And I think this is happening, but I think it is happening in ways that are unseen by
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And I think that what is most likely happening is that we are so inundated by all kinds of
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music and sound and visuals and all of that, that a lot of stuff just falls by the wayside.
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That there is a great danger today to be lost and perhaps lost forever.
#
Like I remember there was this thread on Twitter a while back, which I think Roshan Abbas had
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pointed me to, which was about Billy Joel.
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That when Billy Joel's Piano Man came out, it sank basically.
#
And the record label was just not going to print anymore and it was a done thing and
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he wasn't going to do any more records.
#
Till one random enthusiast decided that, no, this is such an amazing album.
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And he himself took it around to all the radio stations saying that, please play this, which
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in the early 70s was how you made a mark by being played at a radio station.
#
And finally, he made the deal with the RJ of a big radio station that there was some
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kind of quid pro quo, but basically, I'll give you something that you want if you kind
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of play this and that guy played it.
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And you know, what happened happened.
#
And similarly, I remember this old video by Rick Beato, the music YouTuber, where he talks
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about how during his lifetime, Bach was unknown.
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You know, he was a marginal figure.
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And then in the decades after his death, you had this kind of Bach Renaissance and today
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he's a great figure he is.
#
And the truth is that number one, there are possibly many people like that today we don't
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recognize but future generations might, but also that there is a danger that a lot of
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people are A getting lost and B that we aren't adequately appreciative of the quality of
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art out there that we're looking at past centuries.
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And of course, we should admire pioneers of the past like Da Vinci and Rembrandt for
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everything they did and everything they stood for.
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But we are probably closing our eyes to a lot of incredible art that is already out
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And some of us may even be sort of looking down on it with this nobbish thing, ye to
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canvas pe nahi hai, therefore it is not art.
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Looking down on new media like, for example, TikTok.
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If there is a Da Vinci on TikTok today, obviously he's not being regarded as a Da Vinci of TikTok,
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Well, the question of regarded implies who is doing the regarding.
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So this is the great liberation of today, right?
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Like when we think of Da Vinci's time or we think even 50, 60 years back, let's say there
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is a certain group of people who have the privilege to be able to regard and then give
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value to someone's art.
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They own galleries or they own auction houses and they get to decide, OK, art and OK now
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and therefore you become an artist.
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So these people come through the cracks, music industry, even film industry, everything because
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of those gatekeepers and gatekeepers is a pejorative term, but they would see themselves
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They are the ones preserving and proliferating a movement.
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So it is a very noble job to do, very true.
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But when you say something like say Da Vinci today on TikTok, today's Da Vinci not being
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regarded, I would counter that with saying that there is no need for them to be regarded.
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Someone like him, and there are hundreds like him on TikTok, and the beauty of today's time
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is that we can find each of those hundreds of people.
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When I think of the 1600s and 1700s, I think of how many people perhaps died remaining
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unknown their whole lives, their paintings lost to us because the geographic location
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of where they lived made getting access to a gallery difficult, made getting access to
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an elite patron difficult.
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If you don't have an elite patron, your paintings don't last 200 years later for them to be
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seen and then to be discovered again further and put in museums and to become a name.
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So there are so many geniuses who simply by not having the right set of circumstances
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around their work could not become big names.
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And today all of those things have been shattered in lots of different ways.
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Today it is possible for an artist to be known and to earn the value of their work in their
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And you don't need to have a situation like Vincent van Gogh and somebody being appreciated
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after their death, somebody committing suicide out of the lack of appreciation for their
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So when we talk about this thing of things getting drowned, so I always think about music
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because I have grown around good music.
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Music has been a very deep part of my life always and I have sort of gone backwards in
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time in my appreciation of music.
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I started off when I was a young teenager, I wanted the music of my time, Green Day was
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big for me, Brian Adams was big for me.
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And every year since then, I would go another decade back and until I came to settle on
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even music from the 20s and 30s and like jazz and old blues and that became my music.
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And how I think of it is that somebody might look at my choice of music and say, you don't
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even listen to pop music.
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I have never heard a Taylor Swift song, for example, I wouldn't be able to tell her voice
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apart from some of the other big pop stars of today.
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Does that mean should I feel that the kind of music I like is being drowned out by the
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This again implies that there is one pyramid to climb and that you have to be the top of
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this pyramid, otherwise you are nothing.
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And this has been true for centuries that there is one pyramid or two pyramids.
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You have to be top of the pops or you are nothing.
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The doors get on this TV show and they get to perform live or they are nothing.
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But that's not the case today, right?
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You can exist within your own ecosystems.
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All of these musical genres have their own ecosystems within which they thrive.
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There is more incredible jazz today than there was in the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s,
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This year has the most jazz.
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This year has more people appreciating Bach than ever before in history.
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This year has more people appreciating Da Vinci than ever before in history.
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So our notions of what is being drowned out is, I feel like it is a function of this old
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idea that there is one pyramid.
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And if you are not on the top of that one pyramid, which is incidentally driven by corporations
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who want to sell certain things and who want to prop up certain musicians, I answer the
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pop music question by simply saying pop music is one thin layer on top of what is music.
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All the music of the whole world, all the centuries of it is accessible to me today.
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Why does it matter that I didn't listen to an album that came out in 2021?
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What makes it special compared to an album that came out in 1970 that I also haven't
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heard that I might be curious about?
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Because now I am in my world of discovery, my ecosystem through which I go to YouTube
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I go to Instagram to access my art.
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I go to another place to access videos and music and things.
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Spotify tells me about music from the 30s and 40s, just as it tells me about music from
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So these races almost of who is on top is increasingly irrelevant.
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It has helped me to think like this as an artist myself to consider these things irrelevant
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because it has helped me to do more work and it has helped me to make peace as a creator.
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This feeling that you are being drowned out by other things, the understanding that we
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are not in a single race anymore as listeners, as readers and as writers and as musicians.
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That's so well put, many different races to run and sort of a sideways sort of angle before
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we continue with the line we embarked upon, which is, you know, you mentioned about how
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in Da Vinci's time or Imran's time, they are the guys who got lucky enough to get noticed
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to find a patron to be geographically in the right place.
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And there's another aspect of this, which is at one level, of course, you're lucky enough
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But at another level, if you're not noticed, what is also happening is you're not iterating,
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you're not improving your art, you're not getting better and better.
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You know, even canvases are expensive back in the day.
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Somebody who could have been a great artist never even gets close to that because he's
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not painting enough canvases because of course an incentive.
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So there's this artist I really admire.
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And he died of the Spanish flu almost exactly 200 years ago, Egon Schiele.
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And he died in his 20s.
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And I saw his work in a museum.
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And this was the first time that I also read about his life.
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So it was a chronological collection of his work next to incidents of his life.
#
And one of those incidents was about how he went to, I think, in the hills of Switzerland
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There's no art supply store to go into and get a full palette of colors.
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You want a particular shade, you have to source those things from a part of the world where
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You know, this brought to mind, like yesterday, I saw this video of this guy called Puneet
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Have you heard of Puneet Superstar?
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Neither had I till yesterday.
#
We are recording this in 23rd November, right?
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And we'll sort of broadcast later.
#
So Puneet Superstar is this guy who's apparently very big on TikTok and Instagram and all that.
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And there was a time where he was putting out, guess how many videos in a day?
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It's obviously a high number because I'm asking you, but guess.
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There was a day he put out 500 videos.
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He was just sitting with his phone, turning it on himself, record clip after clip, put
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He's made more than one and a half lakh videos.
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He said in his early days, it was disheartening because he was getting three, four likes per
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video and his family was like, ki beta kya kar rahe ho?
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In fact, even one uncle, like he had called himself, I forget the exact term for it, but
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basically useless unemployed, the Hindi for it.
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And his uncle had told him, what are you doing?
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Why don't you see this thing called TikTok?
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Why don't you make videos?
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So he started making videos and after a week, his uncle was, what the fuck are you doing?
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You know, what is this?
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That just daale ja rahe ho, daale ja rahe ho, three likes, two likes per video, probably
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But he continues and eventually a video goes viral, which in his terms is like 1500 views.
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And then he stays stable at that level and then he hits another level.
#
And today, apparently people pay him to record personalized birthday messages for him.
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So in a day, he'll do like 30 personalized birthday messages and the manner of that,
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and again, I've seen him speaking about this, I haven't even seen any of those videos.
#
I'm entering a rabbit hole of Puneet superstar soon.
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But apparently what he does is he'll take a cake, he'll take a separate cake for each
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guy and he'll wish the guy and smash it on his face.
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So he speaks about the process of then wiping off all of the previous cake and before he
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It must be less than that, 15-20 cakes for whoever he wishes happy birthday to.
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If they make special requests, he'll give them more.
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So one guy apparently said, ke cake ke saath mat karo, chowmein ke saath karo and I'll give
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So then he went out and bought some chowmein and did it with the chowmein.
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This is approaching some sadism territory though.
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But the guy is making money.
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It's an interesting way for a creator and the thing is the bugger is iterating.
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I keep telling people that quantity leads to quality, keep doing, keep doing, keep doing.
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But I'm not sure I would say that for 500 videos a day.
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There is a market for this kind of thing.
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What's happening is that not only are you creating video content, but you're inviting
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your viewership to contribute to the creation.
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You are giving them a reason to talk to you, to reply to you.
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Maybe if he has a live stream, then they can tell him something to do right then.
#
So a lot of creative technology and it's a little controversial to say, but a lot of
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creative technology and online individual creator technology benefits from the pornography
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And that has given us handicams that has given us independent micro payments that has given
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us all these platforms that Twitch and everything thrives upon.
#
Like the reason why video streams are possible today is because there was a market in porn
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So a lot of the intimate creator economy is kind of driven by OnlyFans as well.
#
And OnlyFans works on this platform and it has like it's taken huge leaps since the pandemic
#
because so many people lost conventional income streams of live streaming things.
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Well, there are different degrees of how intimate and how explicit things get.
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But the fundamental concept of somebody feeling like they matter, that somebody that they
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watch on video is responding to them in a sense and the value that that has.
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What's happening now is there is a phase when ideas are skeuomorphic, not only in format,
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but even in the mentality of what is the idea?
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A drawing is a drawing that I sell physically.
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Otherwise it is a drawing that somebody sees digitally.
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But the idea that the making of the drawing could be the product.
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If I live stream a drawing, then people would pay money just to watch me draw.
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And people might pay money simply because I live in a part of the world that they can
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never otherwise access and actually watch over my shoulder.
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So the technology is making possible this interaction between us.
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And therefore it has value because it is otherwise impossible.
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So this is as things evolve, as we get more into it, you get these very digital native
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ideas of what is a product and what has value.
#
And it's super interesting.
#
Like young people are better positioned to do this because they are digital natives.
#
And I think all creatives, all creators should look at what the youngest person they can
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find is doing and apply their creative ideas to making that work in their favor.
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I mean, I think both of us benefit from being at a point where things have changed in a
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Like, of course, 12 years ago or more than a decade ago, Kevin Kelly wrote this great
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essay, Thousand Cool Fans.
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And just to kind of summarize for my listeners, Kelly's thrust there was that artists no longer
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Like earlier, if you were a musician, you'd need to be, you know, make it to the top.
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People at the top make a lot of money, not so much for everybody else.
#
But his point was in the new age, artists will no longer need to scale.
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If you just find a thousand fans who are, say, paying you a hundred dollars a year,
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that's a hundred thousand dollars a year.
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That's extremely healthy.
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And you can get by on that.
#
And something that both you and I have seen where it's no longer so important to get
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into the mainstream, even if there is a mainstream at all.
#
Which is why what you said about the Da Vinci of TikTok not needing that kind of large audience
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He's got a thousand or more likely a hundred thousand true fans.
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And that's perfectly fine.
#
And thinking aloud, it also strikes me that that is not only a fantastic shift from a
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creator's point of view, it's also a very interesting shift from the consumer's point
#
Like, much as you and I are creators, we're also consumers.
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And a lot of the stuff that I consume is stuff that I feel an intimate connection with.
#
Like, there will be podcasts I listen to like Russ Roberts doing his thing or, you know,
#
Tyler Carvin's show or Hardcore History, which is so incredible, where it's not like you
#
are listening to something broadcast to you, but you actually witness you're sitting with
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People often say this about my show, that I felt I was sitting on a sofa and you and
#
your guests are just sitting and talking and I'm just listening in, which is incredible
#
because it fosters a sense of intimacy.
#
Like earlier, your artists were at a plane removed from you.
#
You know, like Amitabh Bachchan had temples made for him.
#
So they were at a plane removed.
#
They are larger than life.
#
Today, you are so much smaller than that.
#
You're next to the guy.
#
When you, if you accidentally meet him, you feel like you actually know the person, which
#
is what many listeners of the podcast sometimes tell me, except that they wonder why am I
#
speaking like a retard at half the speed because they listen at double speed.
#
So that apart, what is your sense of this, of the kind of art you consume and the liberation
#
that this realization must have brought you?
#
So I grew up in the nineties and like I was 10 years old when I first went on the internet
#
with the dial-up connection and everything.
#
And instantly this opened up a world.
#
Like immediately there was the idea that you can have online friendships.
#
There were these chat rooms and this idea that you can talk to somebody so you can get
#
something from somebody that you've never met.
#
And there was no money in these ideas initially.
#
So I look a little nostalgically back on those times because what that meant was because
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there is no idea of it being financially feasible or financially profitable.
#
Everything was sincere.
#
Only somebody who really, really cared about a subject wrote about a subject.
#
There was no incentive to have disinformation, for example, because why, what will, how will
#
There's no political angle to it.
#
There's no money to be made.
#
So somebody writing about history, the only reason they would do it is because they honestly
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actually love this subject or politics or art or whatever.
#
So there was this native sort of niceness about the internet in its early form in that
#
So what I have often felt is that I have learned so many things from being on the internet.
#
And what that has done to me as a consumer of the written word, of music, of videos,
#
of folk art and all these things is that it has empowered me in so many ways.
#
I would always draw when I was young, but I used to think that I'm not good at it because
#
I can't draw from imagination.
#
I was always, even when I was super young, very good at looking at something and drawing.
#
And I used to think that that is not art.
#
So I would dismiss my abilities like this and think that I don't know.
#
But so from watching people do this thing and watching people put out content, which
#
is not that simple idea of this is art, that singular definition.
#
Art means a finished painting with all this level of detail, with all this huge canvas,
#
with all these tools and supplies that I will never own, like oil paints and big brushes.
#
But then I saw this webcomic, I saw XKCD and XKCD is this webcomic with just lines and
#
just stick figures, and it made me feel things.
#
It made me feel, think about ideas.
#
It made me think about love and math and science, which are the various subjects that that webcomic
#
And I could see that it's instantly connecting so easily with me and I am geographically
#
so far away from this person's world.
#
And so it has to be similarly connecting with so many thousands of people.
#
And it's just stick figures.
#
And that was the first time that I distinctly remember that a piece of content on the Internet
#
And this idea of permission is very dear to my life because I feel like I have always
#
been a contrarian who does not seek permission.
#
But even that idea is on the surface.
#
Like deep inside, I feel all of us need permission from various forces in our life to do anything.
#
And we seek it from peers.
#
We seek it from people who inspire us.
#
Tell me I can do something.
#
Show me how I can also do something.
#
I saw the stick figure comic and I told myself, you know, I don't know how to draw, but I
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can also make a webcomic.
#
And I started to make a webcomic and I started to make a webcomic just like XKCD.
#
I would talk about my life, though, but just like him, I would draw three times a week
#
And I got into this idea that I can put my drawings on the Internet, which are not very
#
I can't draw really, but I can be funny about it because I've always been putting writing
#
I'd been a blogger for about five years before then.
#
And this is another thing that I took permission on.
#
There was a Telegraph article, Telegraph in Calcutta with the title of Weblogs, this new
#
thing that has happened.
#
And there is a blogosphere on the Internet.
#
And that reading that gave me the permission to put my writing online.
#
Hey, I don't need to be Enid Blyton or I don't need to be Arthur Conan Doyle.
#
I can just write and I get to hit a publish button.
#
What an empowering feeling that I get to do that.
#
I started a weblog, a blog, and I started blogging religiously.
#
And five years later, I started a webcomic and I had the right to do that.
#
Somebody gave me the permission to do that.
#
And this is what content on the Internet is to me.
#
No matter what I consume, no matter what someone else consumes, whether you enjoy it or not,
#
it gives you this, it empowers you.
#
You get to appreciate it.
#
And you know that your appreciation has value to that person who is seeking it from you.
#
Even the idea that I have the right to appreciate something, who am I to appreciate something?
#
Who am I to say that this person is an artist?
#
Don't gallery owners get to decide those things?
#
But now on the Internet, I get to decide that my like button matters.
#
If I upload a video on YouTube, that person becomes a more consistent YouTuber.
#
So it is empowerment on all ends of the spectrum, handed out to every average Internet user.
#
It's been just amazing for me these last 15 years of doing this.
#
The point to make about who is an artist and this permission that we need is so true.
#
Something that I discussed on an episode I recorded recently, though I don't know whether
#
it will release before or after this one, probably before and I don't have said it,
#
is with Annapurna Garimela, the art historian.
#
And we were kind of discussing how a lot of fine art through the ages, the problem that
#
I have with it, and by fine art, I mean painted canvases and all of that, is that it's restricted
#
You have a bunch of elite gatekeepers at a particular point in time who may be in the
#
throes of particular ideologies or beliefs or politics or whatever.
#
They decide what is good and what is not.
#
They decide who is an artist and who is not.
#
They create this distinction between, oh, art is this and the rest is craft or whatever.
#
And I've actually had fine artists here in India talking to me about referring to something
#
a famous critic wrote about their work saying that I don't know, none of that was in my
#
head when I made it, but he's seen something that's not there.
#
And to kind of get past that elitism to make those gatekeepers irrelevant is pretty fantastic
#
And just speaking of forms, I remember I was one of the early bloggers here.
#
And when I started blogging, the great part of it was that I was a mainstream journalist,
#
but it freed me from the necessity of following the news cycle that you have to write about
#
It freed me from dictates of style, what the house style in a place might be so I could
#
And most of all, it freed me from formats, the 800 word article.
#
And we used to think in fixed formats, like a writer would think that an article has to
#
be 800 words, a book is 100,000, filmmakers would think that a Hollywood film is 90 minutes
#
or a Bollywood film is three hours and you're stuck to those formats.
#
And today over time, and it took even me a while to realize this even after I had blogged
#
a lot and all of that, that today that thinking is outdated.
#
Like you said, skeuomorphic, and skeuomorphic, by the way, is a design term.
#
And what it means is that when you're working in a new format, to make it familiar to people
#
who've used the old format, you reproduce some of those motifs even though you don't
#
For example, I think Apple had an e-reader once and they made it look like a bookshelf,
#
Or you can think of a music processing app like GarageBand having those same knobs,
#
Digital knobs, exactly.
#
Because people are used to the physical knobs, so they will translate, whereas you don't
#
need a knob anymore because it's just moving your finger on a screen.
#
Yeah, yeah, that's fantastic.
#
And a time will come when even people who've never used a physical knob will still be,
#
you know, will think knobs are something.
#
Because if you think about, I think the easiest example of skeuomorphic stuff is icons that
#
So the use of the classical staff notation as the music icon, who recognizes that?
#
Like most people today don't, but that instinctively means music to us and we know what's being
#
Or even the folder icon on the desktop.
#
So an interesting observation on that, like I was just reading this article about how
#
somebody was talking, college professors were speaking to design students about this idea
#
of just a file organization and the new students have no concept of it.
#
They don't understand what you mean by C drive, then doing a docs folder, then another folder
#
because the way we use our phone, the way we use these devices like iPad and things
#
like tablets and things.
#
So the idea of organizing information in folders and directories with references is an older
#
And the idea today is that everything is sort of like a big bag.
#
I put it in and when I need it, there's a find function that finds it for me.
#
Why should I know where exactly?
#
Where exactly it is located?
#
And cataloging something like that is already a skeuomorphic idea.
#
That's really interesting because I use Roam research to take my note that is based on
#
this old German system called Zettelkasten.
#
Forgive me if I pronounce it wrong.
#
That again doesn't have like a folders concept, though you can have it, you have nested entries
#
and you could think of each category there is a folder, but you also have bidirectional
#
linking and you can get to any part of your repository from any other part.
#
So that's kind of interesting.
#
Let's now go back to where I normally start my episodes by talking about somebody's personal
#
Like you are a Marwari from Calcutta who did engineering and built race cars.
#
So tell me a little bit about your journey, specifically, you mentioned you grew up in
#
the 90s, presumably in Calcutta and all of that.
#
Tell me what were those years like?
#
What was growing up in those years like?
#
What was Calcutta like?
#
What did you want to be as a kid?
#
So for the longest time I can remember, I wanted to be a writer.
#
This is how I talk about it now that I'm a very deliberate writer and I'm a very accidental
#
Becoming an artist was never part of the plan until it sort of happened one day.
#
And it took me another year after that to accept that label.
#
But so I grew up in Calcutta and I was a voracious reader like any wannabe writer is to begin
#
and I would read everything.
#
Like I read books and I read dictionaries and I read encyclopedias and I would read
#
Just if there is something with words on it, I will read it and I will just keep reading.
#
My parents were very hands-off, like they let me do things.
#
They let my brother and I play however we wanted and do whatever we wanted.
#
We didn't have many rules set on us.
#
One thing interesting about my life growing up in the 90s, because I am part of the generation
#
that had the big push towards engineering, right?
#
So IITs became a thing, IIT-JE and AIEEE and all these competitive exams and preparing
#
for them became a thing, very firmly a thing for us.
#
And I, in my high school years, was the only person I knew who did not have any tuitions.
#
So I never took any tuitions for science studies and I gave all these entrance exams.
#
And I gave all these entrance exams simply because that's what's done, like this idea
#
of what do you want to do.
#
I don't think it was ever put to me.
#
It was, maybe it's not something that quite occurred to my parents as that kind of open
#
world in which you just become whatever you want.
#
And it was just taken for, it was implicit that you're good at science, so you'll become
#
And I've always been that way, that I'm a very curious person.
#
I like to know how things work.
#
I always try to figure things out and I love learning.
#
I just really love learning things.
#
So I pay, I'm the guy who sits in the back row, but pays attention in class.
#
I'm the guy who sits in the back row, but takes notes.
#
So like I have diligent, neat notes of all my classes.
#
But why do you sit in the back row?
#
Just because I don't want to sit in the front row.
#
Why don't you want to sit in the front row?
#
Because I will not be the kind of guy who sits in the front row.
#
So there is a bit of the rebel, but I just, I love learning things, like even in my college
#
years when I was a very, very anti-authority, anti-establishmentarian, contrarian rebel
#
kind of person, I still took diligent notes in class because I just loved thermodynamics
#
and I loved mechanical design and learning all these things.
#
It was just so much cool stuff.
#
I always wanted to know it.
#
When I was in class eight, my English literature professor stood me up in class and said, Nishant,
#
you are the most cynical person I have ever met in my life.
#
And I thought that was the greatest compliment someone could give me.
#
Because for all my, these young years, I used to think that the only weapon or armor, and
#
it's sort of the same thing at that age, I had was my wit.
#
I loved words and I loved what words could do, how you could disarm someone or cut through
#
And I cultivated sharp words, nice sentences, comebacks.
#
I had all of those things.
#
Because I always felt like an outsider.
#
So I was in a very posh school of Calcutta.
#
I was in a Lamartineer for boys and I wasn't the in-crowd of that school as I saw it then
#
and as I see now looking back at it.
#
I'll tell you an incident from it is really funny and I recently refreshed this incident
#
in my mind, which sort of told me about my place in this world that I was in in school
#
and I didn't realize how profound it is.
#
So when I was in class six and seven, backstreet boys were a big deal.
#
And backstreet boys are a big deal.
#
So spiked hair was a big deal.
#
Everybody had spiked hair and I had no idea how this works.
#
But I had classmates who used to come with shiny, spiky hair, like shining, glistening
#
and just staying there.
#
And I asked this classmate of mine how this works, like what are you doing to your hair?
#
And he just said, it's just water.
#
I just put water and then I come and I used to live an hour away from school.
#
I would take this matador bus, which would take a bunch of our students at 7 a.m. and
#
8 a.m. drop us off at school.
#
It was hot and it was a long journey.
#
And I would wet my hair just before leaving home and not dry it off and then go into this
#
bus and hope that it was like, obviously it did not stay this way by them in Calcutta.
#
It did not stay this way by the time I reached school and those hairstyles never worked for
#
And all those years it never occurred to me that he was putting gel on his hair and not
#
only was he putting gel on his hair, he was getting into an air conditioned car and then
#
coming to school and getting dropped off.
#
And I was taking a bus and all the air from outside and all the dust and everything was
#
and it never occurred to me that there was this huge difference.
#
And I kept feeling like I am not good enough.
#
The privilege of gelled hair.
#
Yeah, like I am not cool enough for this.
#
And the way that I can be cool, what is the armor that I can get?
#
How can I feel good about myself in this environment in which I feel inadequate?
#
And that was words, that was being smart and being intelligent.
#
So I loved these authors who made me feel this way.
#
I loved the twist of phrase that P.G.
#
Woodhouse would bring into a book.
#
I loved the kind of intelligent plotting that Agatha Christie would do in her novels.
#
And I would be like, yeah, if I can craft a novel like that, then somebody would read
#
me and be like, yeah, this guy's got it.
#
So I wanted to be those things.
#
And I grew up like that.
#
And I thought I wanted to be a writer.
#
But it never occurred to me that you can become a writer until I started blogging.
#
Even then it didn't occur to me that you can become a paid writer just by wanting to be
#
You can just do it and then you can keep doing it and then it will work.
#
It never occurred to me.
#
So what do you do for studies?
#
And my parents said engineering because I was good at science and that's what you do
#
if you're good at science.
#
I got really high marks and things like that.
#
I was quite self-destructive with all my competitive exams.
#
I forgot to send in the papers for my COMEDK, which is the entrance exam for Karnataka colleges.
#
And the day that your admit card is supposed to come, I open my drawer to find that the
#
check is still in my drawer.
#
I reached my AIEEE exam one hour after it had already started because I read the starting
#
So I did all kinds of terrible things and I got into only Manipal where I went for engineering.
#
I got this opportunity in second year to be part of this new group, which was making a
#
And this is, it's not Formula One, but it's called Formula Student.
#
So it's the college student edition of Formula One.
#
Formula One basically means that it's a race car competition with certain rules around
#
So there are rules of design, there are restrictions on engine size and all these various restrictions
#
that Formula One keeps updating.
#
And if you stick to these restrictions, then you're a Formula One car.
#
And Formula Student similarly has its own set of rules.
#
And universities all over the world do this, but no Indian university was doing it at that
#
We are not even an IIT.
#
I think IIT was doing it at that time, but not very well.
#
And it was quite audacious for us to do this.
#
And in fact, our teachers, my own teachers in mechanical engineering told me, what's
#
So why are you wasting your time?
#
Just get your degree, get a job, go, why you, what are you doing?
#
They wouldn't give us attendance.
#
If we had to take time off from class to do some work, we wouldn't get attendance.
#
We had to stick to everything and then on top of that, do this, which is a super non-supportive
#
framework and it was very difficult, but we really wanted to do it.
#
And I just got a kick out of learning things and being able to do things.
#
And we went to, we raced that car in 2008.
#
We went, we were the only Indian team in a group of like 60 universities from around
#
In Italy, we went to the Ferrari racetrack in Fiorano, and it's the name of the racetrack
#
And we were there in this town called Maranello in rural Italy and we raced our car there.
#
The next year we went to Silverstone, which is where the British Grand Prix happens.
#
We made another car there and that sort of liberated me from the restrictions of what
#
the education system was like because I was deeply disappointed when I first got to university
#
and I could sense that we're just faking it here.
#
They are pretending to teach.
#
I pretend to learn and then I say some things at a job interview and that guy pretends to
#
get it and maybe he gives me a job.
#
There's no real thing happening here.
#
I really have questions and they don't want to answer because why are you asking these
#
These questions are pointless.
#
They won't come in the paper.
#
And this jadedness really set in around authority figures, around the hoops that I have to pass.
#
So I was angry at my parents for a little bit.
#
I used to be like, you know, you asked me to be an engineer, but do you know what it
#
How did you decide that you want me to be an engineer?
#
Does it matter if I was a mechanical engineer or a chemical engineer or a computer science
#
It clearly, it wouldn't have mattered to them if I had gotten computer science engineering.
#
It's a completely different field.
#
The skill set is completely different.
#
And then that had me thinking about what does it take to be a computer science engineer
#
in India, to be a computer science engineer in India, because that is the top field.
#
You have to be really, really good at organic chemistry.
#
Does that make any sense at all?
#
You have to know nothing about computer science.
#
You don't have to know how to write even a single line of code to get a computer science
#
engineering seat in IIT, whatever the top IIT is.
#
You need to be really good at organic chemistry, though, because that's one third of the paper
#
that you have to get across.
#
So my particular gripe against organic chemistry is this, that why should I have to learn this?
#
Maybe I can still be an engineer who doesn't know anything about chemistry.
#
And lucky for me that I ended up in mechanical engineering and I had nothing to do with those
#
Mechanical engineering was perfectly suited to me because it perfectly vibed with my way
#
And it's completely accidental that I got it.
#
It's so wrong that it had to happen this way.
#
But this is how I learn.
#
I have to internalize these ideas that I read about.
#
The reason why I take notes is because this is how I learn.
#
I don't do the tuitions.
#
I don't have three hours every evening with lecturers and teachers after class.
#
So how do I learn at the first time?
#
I take notes while I'm in class.
#
And that process of taking notes is your first layer of teaching yourself.
#
And then you revise those things and then you get a second layer of understanding.
#
So I stuck with that through college.
#
And mechanical engineering is suited to that because mechanical engineering is about imbibing
#
And once you intuitively understand how things work, how thermodynamics goes, how designs
#
structures work, how loads fall, you can visualize all of these things.
#
And electrical engineering and all these things felt alien to me because I couldn't visualize
#
these circuits in my mind, at least.
#
And so it was a complete happenstance that I happened to become a mechanical engineer
#
and that it worked with the ways that my curiosity worked and that I got this chance to make
#
And because I got this chance to make a race car, we went to Europe a couple of times with
#
these race cars and we spoke to students from other universities.
#
And I found out that in other countries, people just do what they want to do.
#
This alien bizarre concept that you study what you wanted to study.
#
You have a curiosity and you take it.
#
And nobody tells you that you don't deserve to study here or that you don't have to prove
#
that you deserve to study in a good place.
#
So there's this thing I read much later, I think it's by Malcolm Gladwell.
#
He talks about these two models of education.
#
So either a modeling agency route or the army route.
#
In the modeling agency route, you have to prove that you're good enough.
#
And then they take you on and they make you a model.
#
In the army system, you get in and they make you into a soldier.
#
They put you through the grind to become a soldier.
#
You don't have to prove yourself.
#
You have basic qualifications, but you don't have to deserve to be there.
#
The way you have to prove your worth to be a model.
#
We kind of follow the former one in India simply because of our numbers.
#
We don't have an examination system.
#
We have a filtration system.
#
If you can get through this IIT-JE, then because of simply because now you are the top 5,000
#
because of this exam, you deserve to be in IIT.
#
This is not how you decide 16 year old is not positioned to say whether he wants to
#
be a mechanical or a computer science engineer or any of these things.
#
It's just utter nonsense that we do.
#
We tell people that they should choose what they need to do at this early age.
#
Then we berate them for not doing it enough, not committing hard enough.
#
And then if it turns out many years later that they made the wrong choice and they're
#
sad, then we berate them again for why did you choose it in the first place?
#
And how I think about it is that our entire country suffers from what I call the Abhimanyu
#
complex that we've all been taught how to get into this Kurukshetra from before birth
#
only that we have to get in and there is no other choice.
#
In the Chakra view that we have to get into it.
#
Nobody tells you what you're supposed to do once you get in.
#
Nobody tells you why you got in.
#
Nobody tells you how you're going to get out.
#
That is beyond conversation or debate.
#
And it really made me very angry when I saw this foreign university and how they do things
#
and I decided I wanted to, this is how I told my father that I want to get a real education
#
I want to, I gave these interviews.
#
I have an ex, I had an 8.7 CGPA.
#
I have all these projects.
#
I am the dean of our university of Manipal.
#
He held us up as an example to follow in front of everybody.
#
Things like this happened.
#
But I did not feel like an engineer.
#
I felt like I have faked it.
#
I know what work I did.
#
I know how little you demanded of me.
#
This is not an education.
#
I really want an education.
#
And this ties into another idea I have about finite versus infinite games, which maybe
#
you can broach it a little later.
#
So I went to the TU Delft, the technical university of Delft in the Netherlands.
#
I applied there because they had a great formula student racing team.
#
A friend and I both were kind of swayed by this idea of biomechanics.
#
And I got a little interested in the subject.
#
So we did our bachelor's thesis in Manipal together, which was working out how the structure,
#
the musculoskeletal structure of a knee joint, which has suffered from an ACL injury.
#
And that got us animated about the subject of biomechanics.
#
And I applied for a master's degree in biomechanics at the TU Delft.
#
I went there and that was my master's degree.
#
I spent two years in which I unlearned everything.
#
My model for this is that I demolished everything and I built a fresh foundation of knowledge.
#
And biomechanical engineering came under the umbrella of control engineering in a sense.
#
And now I think of myself as a control engineer.
#
And that term is super important to me.
#
And I am a control engineer even today that I'm an artist in many ways.
#
And I learned some very, very deep, profound, amazing things that I'm going to keep with
#
And yeah, so I did this master's degree and this whole time bachelor's degree, master's
#
degree, I'm writing my blog.
#
I'm drawing these webcomics.
#
I started the webcomic in the final year of bachelor's because everything was such a joke,
#
We weren't doing serious work.
#
There was so much free time.
#
And we were just messing, the kind of things we did to kill time.
#
So I started this webcomic just to make fun of my friends and make jokes about life because
#
And I can't do that kind of humor anymore.
#
So one of the reasons why that webcomic stopped was that I couldn't do that humor anymore.
#
And that was a very big moment in my life.
#
And I realized why I can't do that humor anymore.
#
And I'm writing and I'm writing and I'm writing and I'm doing this blog and I'm doing the
#
webcomic becomes from three times a week to once a week to once a month to once in two
#
months because my studies are taking up more time.
#
And what's happening is that I'm moving away from my world.
#
So I'm in this new place now.
#
And I think that I should talk about Bollywood because that's what I used to make fun of.
#
I think I should talk about Indian life because that's what I know.
#
And that's what my audience is about.
#
And that's what I should talk about.
#
But I'm moving away from it and it's getting harder to do it.
#
So I'm doing it less and I'm feeling angrier because I'm not feeling fulfilled.
#
After I finished my master's degree, I got offered a PhD program in the university.
#
And this was so my master's degree, my master's thesis was on the subject of what is known
#
Bimanual control is how you manually control your two arms or two legs.
#
So example, juggling or playing drums, things like that.
#
And I was studying how there are these various models of bimanual control, how the brain
#
So if you try to keep a beat 60, 60 beats per minute with your right hand on the, and
#
you can probably do a 30 beats per minute meanwhile.
#
So half of that frequency with your left hand.
#
But if you try to do 20, it would get tougher.
#
If you try to do 25 and 60, so they're not multiples, it becomes very tough because now
#
your brain has to do these crazy computations and it's very difficult.
#
You have to train yourself to do it.
#
You have to be a drummer or something like that who's put in the hours.
#
Then they can achieve limb independence.
#
Different limbs are not in order to process complex information.
#
What our brain does is it breaks it down into more like to reduce the processing load.
#
So if you try to keep these very, very discordant beats with two different hands and you're
#
not trained as a drummer, your hands will automatically fall into a simpler rhythm.
#
And that is your brain trying to be like, Oh, I can't do this, but this is a little
#
And I don't need to think about it too much because that kind of processing of two different
#
beats is very difficult.
#
It's a lot of processing power.
#
So let's make it simpler.
#
Why don't you do half of what this is instead of trying to do three fifth of what this is.
#
So instead of a complex beat, a slightly simpler beat, unless you train otherwise.
#
So my thesis was about trying to figure out how these models work and how the muscles
#
and the nerves and how they form this control model to describe this whole thing, feedback
#
and actuators and springs and dampers.
#
So a mechanical system to describe a biological reality.
#
This is what biomechanical design was about in my study.
#
It was about the marriage of mechanical idea, mechanical principles and ideas to describe
#
And it has applications in robotics.
#
It has applications in orthopedics and all kinds of assistive devices.
#
But mine was because I am this stupid person who's just animated by difficult things because
#
I chose the toughest one that I could find for my PhD, which was how do stroke patients
#
So let's do neuroscience.
#
And this led to this research project that was offered to me in my PhD program, which
#
was about stroke patients.
#
And the idea was to develop nice rehabilitation programs for stroke patients.
#
So stroke patients have a whole bunch of rehab programs, which are very general.
#
But what if we want to get specific?
#
What if we want to cut down their rehab time, therefore?
#
What if we know this person needs three months of one thing instead of one year of this other
#
thing in order to become normal?
#
We need to understand what is their deficiencies.
#
We need to have a number for those deficiencies.
#
So we need to quantify a lot of biological defects, quote unquote, or whatever the situation
#
And we need to have as many variables as we can get to describe the system and get the
#
numbers to where they need to be.
#
So we need a mechanical understanding of this system because mechanical systems have sensors.
#
Sensors give you numbers and numbers can be fit into equations.
#
We need equations and we need mechanical understandings of what's going on.
#
What happened in the brain?
#
How does that react to the muscles?
#
How do their arms move?
#
How do you describe this arm and its movement as various mechanical phenomena?
#
What are the numbers that are useful?
#
What are the eigenvalues?
#
So the eigenvalues are the least number of variables you need to describe something perfectly.
#
What are the eigenvalues?
#
What is the eigenvector and what is the values within them?
#
So these are the eigenvalues within the eigenvector.
#
So it's a process of what's known as black box system identification.
#
If you have a system that you can't open up, so it's a black box.
#
You don't know how it literally works.
#
You can only hit it and you can see what happens.
#
So you can put an input, you can get an output, and then you can be output divided by input
#
And then try to with intelligent inputs, try to figure out what is this system.
#
So we need to do black box system identification of a brain of a body that has been affected
#
by a stroke, a cortical stroke, and therefore has neuromuscular deficiencies.
#
And that meant learning a lot more about biology.
#
So project was in collaboration with the Northwestern University in Chicago, and I went to Chicago
#
The first time I went to Chicago, and I was vehemently opposed to it because I hated America
#
I thought it represents all the evil of the world and I don't want to be in America.
#
I'm not going to like it.
#
Chicago means guns and violence.
#
I got to Chicago during the first polar vortex of 2013.
#
The first three days were shut down.
#
Nobody went anywhere minus 45 degrees Celsius.
#
The first day that I stepped out, I fell in love with the city completely.
#
Chicago absolutely changed my whole life.
#
Everything I am today, everything that I've been able to do is because of that city.
#
And I went there only because of doing all these other random things that were not what
#
I really, really, really wanted to do.
#
They were simply things I was good at, and there is this joy of achievement you get.
#
And that's also a nice high.
#
I'm good at it, and I do it, and I get rewarded, and it's nice.
#
University system rewards are nicely set up.
#
You know you do this much work, you get so rewarded, and it feels nice.
#
You can feel good about life, and it carries you through to a lot.
#
So it brought me to Chicago, and I'm doing experiments with stroke patients, fascinating
#
I met somebody who used to train with Chuck Norris.
#
I met someone who was on the original 21 team, the MIT team that did the thing in Vegas or
#
So he has now had a stroke.
#
He would take 15 minutes to come from the door to the seat because he couldn't walk.
#
He would walk so slowly, but he had stories like he had real stories.
#
Now he travels to casinos all over the world in order to spot card counters.
#
He teaches people how to spot card counters because he's one of them.
#
This is the outlaw who's become the sheriff.
#
So this is how he makes his money, and he would tell me these stories while we were
#
doing nine hour long experiments.
#
It would take me half an hour just to unclench his fist because of the stroke, and it's so
#
But anyway, so I'm doing these experiments.
#
I'm having a good time implementing these ideas, figuring things out, but I'm feeling
#
creatively unfulfilled.
#
This is the first thing I said to my girlfriend on our first date.
#
We met in Manipal in the first year, and I told her one day I'm going to be a writer.
#
And she just laughed that, oh, you're an engineer, you're becoming an engineer though.
#
And there's no pathway visible.
#
How do you become a writer?
#
There's no pathway to becoming a writer anyway.
#
This is what I wanted to do.
#
And I'm always doing it on the side.
#
And what Chicago did was that after my experiments in the evenings, I would go to open mic nights.
#
I would write, because I've always been writing funny things, I did stand up.
#
I would go up on stage in front of a bunch of people who are not from my world, who will
#
not understand the jokes that I've always written.
#
So I have to say something new, and I have to say something that they will get and they
#
And sometimes I failed, sometimes I did pretty well.
#
Maybe they were being kind.
#
But I got this rush from it.
#
And the first rush was that I did it.
#
The second rush was that I was surrounded by people, some of whom were not very good,
#
but I would see them every night at this club or the next club.
#
Because Chicago is the world capital of stand up comedy.
#
Every night of the week, you can find a free open mic somewhere or the other as audience
#
or as a wannabe comedian.
#
And every night of the week, you can find it.
#
I would see these guys night after night after night.
#
I'm not doing anything because I'm nervous today.
#
I don't feel like doing it.
#
But this guy is going and he's not very good.
#
I know he's not good, but he's really doing this.
#
And I got this from America, that if you really want to do it, just do it.
#
And that's when I sort of understood what they keep talking about when they say freedom,
#
because I didn't get it before this.
#
Americans are crazy people.
#
They just do whatever they want to do.
#
They don't feel like misfits.
#
Like the word misfit, right?
#
The word misfit implies that you're supposed to fit because that's what Indian culture
#
Otherwise, you're a misfit.
#
And that's a bad thing.
#
What if there's no standard of fitting?
#
You can't be a misfit anymore, right?
#
What if there's no requirement to fit?
#
That's what America was like.
#
They'll just say anything.
#
People will be dressed in all kinds of ways.
#
People will be having these super dramatic phone call conversations on the bus, not caring
#
that people can hear them.
#
People are really being themselves on a stage, even if they are introverted in real life.
#
And they gave me permission to do the same.
#
I looked at them and I said, why am I not doing this?
#
Because I have a certain degree of privilege.
#
My girlfriend had started working.
#
She went to the US to study, to practice there.
#
And she just started working.
#
And she told me, why aren't you doing this?
#
You want to be a writer?
#
Why are you doing this PhD stuff?
#
I thought, no, I can't quit, can I?
#
But Chicago told me, yes, why can't you quit?
#
If you want to do it, you have to do it.
#
And I recognized that I have the privilege.
#
A lot of people want to do these things, but their circumstances don't allow them to.
#
Maybe they really need to earn next month's rent.
#
Maybe they really have big, big loans to pay off.
#
My PhD program luckily paid me nicely enough that I was able to pay off my master's student
#
And I had somebody willing to support me.
#
I felt like privilege was like this trampoline.
#
With the privilege came the responsibility.
#
How can you ignore the value of your privilege?
#
There are people who want to do this who are not able to.
#
You can do it and you want to do it, but you are afraid of how you will explain it.
#
I wanted to do something that I really, really, really wanted to chase.
#
And at the same time, with my studies, I had come to this idea that a PhD program needs
#
This has to be what you sleep, dream about, this is what you think about all the time.
#
I knew that honestly, I'm able to give this 90%.
#
I'm excited by learning, but PhD is not about learning.
#
You are now at the frontier.
#
You have to prove things.
#
And I am not as motivated in this field with the level of explicit mathematical knowledge
#
it needs, not an implicit understanding, but an explicit application of the knowledge.
#
And I am not enamored by that aspect.
#
I loved it while I was learning things, but now that I have to do further, I am not as
#
And I am surrounded by people who are excited by it.
#
All my fellow researchers, my fellow PhD postdocs, they were super enamored and excited and passionate
#
And I felt like I was faking it in comparison to them.
#
And that's not fair to them.
#
That's not fair to my professors.
#
And that's not how things...
#
Like I don't want my life to be about that.
#
So quite quickly, I reached this decision that this means that I'm quitting.
#
And I feel I've kind of always been like that.
#
Like I can't do something if I'm not...
#
Once I lose interest, I can't push myself anymore.
#
Like that's the day that I just stop.
#
Like just like how I stopped studying organic chemistry in class 11 and I paid the price
#
in my IIT, JE exams and all the other exams, all the organic chemistry sections are empty.
#
I didn't answer anything because I can't do it.
#
I told my professor I'm leaving.
#
I went home and I told my parents that I'm quitting my PhD program to become a writer
#
and to live with my girlfriend.
#
A nightmare for Indian parents.
#
Such a funny conversation.
#
So my parents are incredible people in this respect because they needed just a few conversations
#
over a week's time and they were okay with it.
#
They have empowered me a lot.
#
They have given me the permission to do things, to be myself, to even disobey is a permission.
#
Like I have never faced serious consequences for disagreeing with them.
#
I have never been punished in...
#
I have never been slapped or corporal punishment or threatened or intimidated.
#
So that also is permission and that made me who I am and they trusted who I am.
#
When I told them that I'm quitting my PhD program to be a writer, I could show them
#
400 webcomic strips that I had drawn.
#
I could show them dozens of scripts I had written.
#
I had written for a YouTube show at that time.
#
I had written six months for NDTV's Gustaki Maf, the puppet, six, seven minute puppet
#
show episodes they would have about current events.
#
I had so many blog articles and stories.
#
I had put in the work and I was telling them that instead of doing this in the evening
#
with two hours of time, I want this to be my race.
#
This is how I put it to them that everything is a marathon.
#
There's no overnight success.
#
Everything is going to take a lot out of me.
#
I want to be in the race that I want to be in.
#
I have understood which race I want to be in.
#
And at this point, it is wrong for me to continue in the other race simply with the idea that
#
My mother still sometimes says this to me, khatam to kar leta PhD.
#
And it's just ki I would have lost two or two and a half more years.
#
And once I knew that I don't want to do it, it's not good.
#
It's not fair anyway, and that's a different argument to others around me for me to continue
#
But it's not fair to myself to do this thing.
#
My girlfriend was working in Chicago.
#
We got married a few months after that.
#
I moved in with her and I started to become a writer.
#
And then I started on this journey that suddenly made me an artist.
#
But we can go into that.
#
I think I should pause at this point because I've been going on and on.
#
No, no, these are the conversations which are most delightful to me when I can just
#
Bunch of things I want to double click into.
#
But before I continue with your journey as a writer slash artist and all of that, a bunch
#
Firstly, what you said about education strikes a chord and many guests have spoken on this
#
I think Anirban Mahapatra was the last.
#
And in fact, the most popular episode of my show right now, overtaking my episodes on
#
Kashmir and CAA with Srinath Raghavan, is the one I did on education with Kartik Muralidharan,
#
which has just gotten to number one.
#
And there he speaks at length about how our system is set up for sorting, not teaching.
#
Exactly as you said, you just want to sort out who are the brightest kids and then whatever
#
And you see the successes of that, but don't realize that it was because they were incredibly
#
smart to begin with and you found them and not necessarily that.
#
You taught them something.
#
Earlier, you were talking about your cynicism and you've written a beautiful post about
#
this, which of course I link from the show notes.
#
But I want to read out a bit from that before I go on to my next question, where you talk
#
about how you discovered the power of being cynical.
#
And you write quote, cynicism was smartness, cynicism was pragmatic, cynicism was a way
#
I took pride in my cynicism.
#
It helped me fight off insecurities before the popular guys in school.
#
It helped me deal with my social inadequacies.
#
It gave me a sense of humor.
#
I won many battles with the sharp edge of my wit.
#
Over the years, I honed it to terrific sharpness.
#
In college, a professor asked me not to be over smart.
#
I asked him to explain exactly how smart I should be in that case.
#
He kicked me out of the class, but the rest of the students laughed and that was my win.
#
I made funny comics mocking the idiosyncrasies of my friends.
#
I wrote funny stories with elaborate dialogue and plots that pointed to the foolishness
#
of trying the inevitable failure of all action.
#
I made a lot of people laugh and so on.
#
And then you say in a later para, but one day I found the fountain of my creativity
#
After struggling for many months, I came to the conclusion that I had reached the end
#
of my tether with cynicism.
#
Cynicism is like a wall we build inside our mind, brick by brick.
#
We do it to protect what is most vulnerable inside us.
#
We hide that thing behind walls so others cannot know.
#
So they cannot mock us the way we mock them.
#
It shields us from people and also from other horrors of the outside world, pain and fear
#
and shame and rejection.
#
Nothing cannot breach these defenses.
#
Every year the walls grow higher.
#
Every morning you climb the ramparts and rain arrows upon the enemy at the gates, stop code.
#
Which is sort of a beautifully put description of a defense mechanism which many of us have,
#
which I think to some extent I also had when I was a kid where with your cleverness, you
#
know, it's like you don't know where you stand in the world.
#
So to hide the doubts of your own inadequacies, you adopt a superior position by mocking others.
#
And that's really easy to do.
#
And that's something that you see on Twitter all the time where everyone's standing in
#
judgment upon everybody else because that's easy to do.
#
It's an easy way to say, look, I'm so virtuous, I'm so good, I'm so right.
#
But my question is not about that.
#
My question is that in your writing this, there is tremendous self-awareness.
#
And one of the things I've realized about my own writing when I do look back is that
#
a lot of that self-awareness comes from writing about it.
#
That till the moment that you start writing and you start examining your childhood, you
#
are not aware that you were like this.
#
But then it becomes explicit.
#
Like in a sense, you spoke earlier in the context of your PhD program that you were
#
more towards implicit understanding and not explicit application.
#
And here it seems that by writing, you're getting this implicit understanding of your
#
own self and then just that understanding in a sense is automatically an explicit application
#
because you are changing as you look back on the older you.
#
So is this how it was for you as well that writing became also a powerful tool to understand
#
Because writing started to become difficult for the first time.
#
Why did it become difficult for the first time?
#
I reached this very profound understanding that I want to share.
#
It's simply put, the fact that other people exist, that's it.
#
I am not the universe and other people are not revolving around me.
#
They are actually real people.
#
Women are real people too.
#
I can't just make sexist jokes.
#
Other people have other skills and they might not be good with their words.
#
And this might be my superpower, so to say, but this doesn't make me powerful.
#
This doesn't make me a hero if I have hurt someone.
#
And this took time because initially this first phase of writing, the blogs that I wrote
#
from 2006 to 2010, the comics that I drew, I was the only person who existed.
#
I was the unfortunate one.
#
So everything was allowed.
#
So everything is allowed.
#
In the process of writing stories though, what happens is like these walls that I wrote
#
about that you quoted, these walls that you build up.
#
What it does is it encloses your world.
#
And I realized that if I want to write good stories, I have to feel real things.
#
I have to grow my world.
#
You can't grow your world once you've built walls.
#
You have to shatter those walls and then you have to accept everything.
#
You have to accept everything that comes, including the pain.
#
Cynicism helps to shield you from pain and from explicitly feeling pain.
#
But you have to welcome that pain.
#
You have to welcome sadness and you have to welcome feeling inadequate and processing
#
that as a human emotion that is valid and not something to be shunned and then let's
#
just make a quick repartee and then forget about it because look, I'm funny.
#
This process was important to go through because I wanted to be a good writer.
#
I wanted to be not a successful writer in the literal term.
#
I wanted to be a really good writer.
#
I wanted to do all the really great things and thereby get success.
#
But success was not the ends.
#
The ends was being really, really good.
#
And that means feeling this pain, letting this pain happen to you.
#
And I would read more things and I would read books and I would see people go through this.
#
So I remember reading Shantaram in which he talks about the process of grieving and the
#
And this is this big hulking New Zealand person who is talking about crying and talking about
#
crying alone in a room and hiding his tears from other people.
#
And he makes you feel it.
#
I wanted to not just feel it.
#
I wanted to make people feel it.
#
That's the kind of writer I want to be.
#
I want to be able to...
#
If people have heartstrings, I want to play them.
#
I want to be able to play music on other people's heartstrings.
#
I want to tug at them and pull at them and pluck at them at my will.
#
I want to have that power.
#
And that power means giving up control.
#
That power means shattering these walls and letting in the whole world.
#
Once I did that, the immediate consequence was that the first source of my humor, which
#
is pointing at other people and laughing, ran dry.
#
I couldn't be that cynical person anymore.
#
Cynicism had to be defeated.
#
I had to let the shields down.
#
And that was really important for me to become the kind of writer who could write the way
#
that you've read out, to be able to be self-aware like that.
#
So that I can write stories in which my characters are not self-aware, but are going through
#
The writer has to know so much more than his characters are allowed to know.
#
I think about this quote from a movie I saw.
#
I don't know if you've seen it.
#
It's called Superman of Malegaon.
#
So it's this independent movie.
#
It's about a bunch of filmmakers in Malegaon, which is, I think, in Maharashtra itself.
#
And they have Maliwood.
#
They make movies with a handicap.
#
They have no technology, but they want to make a Superman movie now.
#
So this is a documentary following these real people who are actually trying to make a Superman
#
movie, Superman of Malegaon.
#
And the documentary is called Superman of Malegaon because these people are the Superman.
#
And they are finding out what is a green screen and how do you do video editing for a green
#
screen and then doing it.
#
It's a fantastic movie.
#
It's on YouTube to watch.
#
Everybody should watch it.
#
It's a very profound movie and beautifully made, very funny.
#
But the writer in that movie, he says this thing that it's stuck.
#
It's seared into my brain.
#
He said that the best writer in the best of times can communicate only a tenth of what
#
he wants to communicate.
#
The rest of the pain he has to bear.
#
He will never be able to share it.
#
Not being able to share it is pain.
#
But even that emotion itself is unshared, has to live inside him ten times the emotion
#
of what he's able to put out.
#
So to be a good writer, it was my responsibility to take ten times that pain that I wanted
#
Another reason why I had to break down these walls.
#
In the effort therefore of trying to be a good writer, I realized what I was doing wrong
#
in writing again and again this character, these ideas and putting them out in stories
#
and failing, I realized what I was doing wrong before.
#
And that's where all of this self-realization came from.
#
A bit of the externalization is thanks to the fact that I lived in the Netherlands where
#
you have access to excellent recreational drugs, which help you with externalization.
#
But mostly it was the writing and the really wanting to be good, just good.
#
So there's this lovely word I came across in another of your newsletter posts from the
#
Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, and it's a word called Sonder, which is defined as, quote,
#
the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your
#
own, populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries, and inherited craziness.
#
An epic story in which you might appear only once as an extra sipping coffee in the background,
#
as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk, stop quote.
#
And this obviously speaks to that thing you said about realizing that there were other
#
And you've also quoted, you know, Satra in another of your posts saying, hell is other
#
people, which is something, you know, as an introvert, I completely get where that is
#
And I don't know if it's a moral dilemma or an existential dilemma or what category it
#
But when the time comes that you realize this and you realize this in a visceral way and
#
you realize that you've kind of been living your life as if you are all that matters and
#
everyone else is a character in the play inside your own head, it then takes moral significance
#
that you make them something more of a character, a mere character, that you see them as a flesh
#
and blood people as they are, you know, to invoke Kant's categorical imperative, that
#
you see them as not a means to an end, but as an end in itself.
#
And even if I remind myself of that, I wonder if I find it hard to do.
#
And at some level, I wonder if it's possible to do at all.
#
And with you, this kind of, I mean, you've probably thought much more about this because
#
a lot of what you are known for when people first hear of you, the whole sneaky art business,
#
is really absorbing other people as other people and letting yourself be the background.
#
So on the one hand, you are just conscious of other people, it's, you know, you're making
#
But on the other hand, you are the one observing.
#
It is what you are doing.
#
It is an act of ego, just assuming that something that you draw of other people add something
#
to the world or is meaningful and again, an act of ego and arrogance that you've also
#
written about eloquently.
#
So you know, so what are sort of your thoughts on all of this?
#
One thing that helped me to this realizations and regarding other people as real people
#
was also the change in my life circumstances.
#
So when I went to the US, I gave up a lot of things, right?
#
I gave up a previous identity.
#
I gave up the race that I was in, in favor of something new.
#
And I had to redefine these structures of my life.
#
One of the early silly little thing that I had was that I had lived a very nicely categorizable
#
life, like quantifiable life.
#
You could measure success.
#
This is the work I have today as a researcher.
#
This so much progress, I can measure it.
#
I can put a percentage term to it.
#
I can evaluate it as a monthly, yearly, six monthly basis and understand how well I did.
#
But as a creative person, how the hell do I find out what is a good day of work?
#
There are no numbers anymore.
#
There is no way to quantify, there are no good metrics.
#
For a time I became like really big on Google calendar, like putting everything back.
#
That is one year of my life, which is entirely on Google calendar, every single day, every
#
And I thought that would help, but it didn't.
#
But anyway, the point of this is that I was redefining a lot of life.
#
Life's understand, purpose, point, how I am, who I am.
#
And I was in this new world.
#
I was an immigrant in the new world.
#
Part of what also helps you to remain this, I am the only thing that matters in India
#
is, it's nice, it's easy if you're a male in India, right?
#
So if you go to another place where you're suddenly not the top dog, not at the top of
#
the pyramid, you suddenly see that, oh, there is this pyramid because now I'm not at the
#
I get to see up and there is people above me and I get to see also down sometimes.
#
And then I see, oh, wait, I am somewhere in the middle here.
#
So there is this whole structure here.
#
And this was another way to sort of, I needed to put myself somewhere.
#
I needed to see where I belong.
#
I needed to see who I am and what is this place.
#
It's another line of curiosity that came in, right?
#
So I'm, I want to learn things.
#
I want to learn now about this world that I inhabit.
#
So sneaky art started as my way.
#
One of the reasons it became this way was that I wanted to unobtrusively observe my
#
world to see what this world is all about because I was in these alien places.
#
While I was in Chicago for a few months, it was good.
#
One of the most beautiful famous cities of the world, buildings and tourist destinations
#
and all kinds of people.
#
You can, so much stuff for art.
#
And I'm a sneaky artist.
#
We kind of didn't go into how that started, we will again.
#
But just coming to this point is that I was trying to really just see how things operate
#
once I moved to Wisconsin.
#
I wanted to see now that I don't have these big tourist attractions, these obvious artistic
#
choices that you can draw here, it will look great.
#
Look, these amazing skyscrapers of Chicago, everybody will want to see it.
#
How do I find art now in this world?
#
It's a semi-rural town I was in.
#
I had no mental picture of, there were no people who looked like me around, there were
#
It was the start of the Trump years and I had all reasons to feel out of place and nervous
#
and like I don't belong.
#
I needed to find a way to belong.
#
And art became my way to sort of discover that.
#
And this helped me to see other people, to observe other people because I didn't, I couldn't
#
be obsessed with myself because I knew that I don't matter here.
#
So I was sort of helped by these adverse circumstances to reject my ideas of myself and to just see
#
because I desperately need to feel comfortable in this uncomfortable place because I'm such
#
I feel like an alien every day.
#
So I need to look at these people, I need to understand these people and I need to find
#
out the ways that they are not different, but the ways that they are similar to me so
#
that I can feel that we have a bond, so that I can feel comfortable about going to a cafe,
#
which has only people who look completely different from me.
#
Does the looking change you?
#
Like one of the things that I've noticed in myself and I think in a lot of people, but
#
it's there in different degrees to people is how much of the world is invisible or unseen
#
as it were to me that I go out on the street and I'm not even noticing most people, right?
#
And for you, one, I imagine that the just the act of looking and looking with the kind
#
of closeness that you must have looked would have changed something about you in some way.
#
Like in the context of podcasts and you're also a podcaster and we'll talk about both
#
of these in detail as we go along, both the public art and the podcasting.
#
But I do feel that doing these long episodes kind of forced me to listen much more and
#
therefore made me a better listener and maybe made me a better person on the margins because
#
I'm just listening more and I'm not, it's not all about me, me, me.
#
It's not about the ego.
#
It's not about always trying to interrupt to show how smart you are, but actually kind
#
of sit back and take it in and learn something.
#
So do you feel that in that sense that not just the looking also in the context of the
#
podcast, you also now do long episodes, which are more than three hours, the looking, the
#
listening, that they change the person you are, that when you look at, say the Nishant
#
who started drawing the web comics back in the day with the cynicism and the sarcasm
#
and the cleverness and the biting wit, and you look at yourself today where that cynicism
#
and sarcasm and biting wit are not there.
#
You're just sitting back and you're watching or you're sitting back and you're listening.
#
And do you think you're a fundamentally different person for that?
#
Yeah, it made me a much nicer person.
#
I am a very patient listener.
#
In fact, when I draw, I'm an even more patient listener because I don't interrupt at all.
#
So the best time to talk to me, if you want to say things to me, is to get me to start
#
drawing things because then I won't move for an hour and I'll be listening.
#
I'm sure this is a lesson your wife has learned.
#
This is the one pleasure she gets from the fact that I am likely to sit down anywhere
#
and start drawing, which is quite a problem when you go on vacation, that this guy just
#
takes out a sketchbook everywhere and then he wants a half hour over here when we could
#
be doing something else.
#
So it's a pros and cons.
#
But as I like to remind her, this is a good time to talk to me.
#
So being an artist, like the kind of artist I am, it has really made me very observant.
#
And you're right exactly that the way our life is right now, we don't give too much
#
attention to things because so many things demand our attention all the time.
#
There is not only things around us.
#
So if you compare to a hundred years ago, the amount of traffic, the amount of hoardings
#
and signals and people, all of these are things that require little, little bits of attention,
#
even just to be aware of them.
#
Then there's the phone.
#
Maybe it rings, maybe it pings, maybe it doesn't.
#
And there is the possibility that there is amazing stuff happening on Twitter right now.
#
So that maybe there's something I'm missing out on is also another attention requirement
#
in the back of your head, which you have to sort of drill down and bury deep into you
#
in order to neglect that maybe I should just scroll Instagram for a bit just to see maybe
#
something amazing is happening.
#
Even if it isn't, I sometimes feel that just this, those few seconds that I spend before
#
I launched the app, that moment of expectation is the joy.
#
That's a dopamine coming.
#
The expectation of the dopamine is the dopamine at this point.
#
So because inevitably there's nothing interesting on Twitter.
#
It aggravates me instead, but just the idea that maybe there could be, you never know.
#
Someone could be wrong on the internet and I could have to argue with them.
#
I could get this golden opportunity and just that microsecond is the joy in fact.
#
So being an artist has made me a better observer and it has helped me to drown out these noises.
#
So the only time I'm not actively thinking and overthinking, which I am apt to do, is
#
The only time I am not worried about where I am and what million stupid things are running
#
through my head, anxieties, is when I'm drawing.
#
I'm at complete peace, just absolutely zen.
#
I am a little bit nervous until I start to draw about where I am, are people looking
#
at me, et cetera, et cetera.
#
This is, I'm self-conscious.
#
But the moment I put the pen to the paper, I lose all of that.
#
Those moments are just so precious to me.
#
And I speak to urban sketches on my podcast and we talk about this experience and what
#
Because if you think about it, the idea that there are grown adults who spend their precious
#
leisure time walking around the streets, sitting with a sketchbook, drawing something, most
#
of them are not going to sell that art.
#
Most of them are not necessarily great artists, but they still do it.
#
The vast majority of the global urban sketching community, and it is a huge growing community
#
all over the world, the vast majority of it are not professional artists.
#
And those people absolutely fascinate me because they have a real articulated to themselves
#
reason for doing this and a reason that has nothing to do with an end, with another end.
#
It's not a means to, at the end of making sales or becoming an artist or becoming big
#
or sharing, getting 5,000 likes.
#
The activity is the end itself.
#
They are getting something from just doing this.
#
And that is the real joy that I acquire in my podcast as well.
#
And I get this from people that it doesn't matter how you draw.
#
What it looks like is so irrelevant.
#
Just that you spent two hours doing it is the joy of that two hours is the real value
#
that you really squeezed those two hours for everything.
#
So I look through my sketchbook now, there is the things that I drew.
#
So there is the things that I looked at, but there are the things that I didn't draw.
#
I look through a sketchbook that is two years old and I can remember sounds.
#
I can remember if I was listening to a podcast or if I was overhearing a conversation.
#
I remember the smells, I remember the temperature of the day, I remember if it was windy.
#
I remember what it felt like to be sitting where I was sitting, who was around me.
#
All these senses come rushing back.
#
It's as if I'm in this hyper aware state and all of those things are locked into that page.
#
And this is not just me, I'm not special in this.
#
This is a case for anybody who's doing this.
#
This is consistent with all urban sketches I speak to.
#
It's simply the act of doing this that does this to you.
#
The act of observation and the act of patient observation.
#
The value of giving not just your attention, but really giving your time to something.
#
It's become so rare, we don't even do that to the television we're watching.
#
We watch TV and we're also scrolling at the same time on our phones.
#
Most television is watched like that now.
#
But this is something because it involves your hands and your eyes and you have to be
#
You can't be doing 10 different things.
#
And it pushes you to engage.
#
And that is the most beautiful thing you can do.
#
And you find amazing art everywhere that you look once you start to do it.
#
Yeah, I mean, you called it the Zen state.
#
I guess people could call it flow or sportsmen could call it, you know, being in the zone.
#
And it's weird that I find it very hard to come about in the other things I do like writing.
#
For example, it's just very hard to get in the zone.
#
Most of the time it's just hard work and you kind of have to battle through it and get
#
But this kind of thing, just sitting and drawing something seems to me to combine two things.
#
One is that your mind is kind of empty.
#
It's not cluttered with other stuff happening.
#
And at the same time, it's very focused on what you're doing.
#
And at the same time, there's a physical aspect to it where your hands are kind of moving
#
And you point out that many of the people you speak to also experience the same kind
#
So perhaps if you don't think of it as art, you know, it's something therapeutic and useful
#
Is that what you'd say?
#
Well, so the word art is a very strange word.
#
So many people define it in such terrible, oppressive, prohibitive ways.
#
Art with a capital A, especially.
#
We would rather not do it because we don't want to be pretending like we can do it because
#
we're not allowed to do it.
#
Not anybody can just make art.
#
Who am I to just make art?
#
And I don't know if it helps to think of it like that, or maybe the key is to defeat this
#
terrible notion of what is art and, oh my God, am I an artist?
#
Maybe the key is to not think like this and to just own the word.
#
The definition of art is changing now so quickly because artists are able to reach so many
#
people and find success through so many channels on Instagram, YouTube, blah, blah, blah, TikTok.
#
So there is no one ladder.
#
There is no single definition.
#
This allows more people to own this term.
#
But what I'm trying to say is that I think the real purpose of art is just this.
#
Art is not supposed to be the job of an elite minority.
#
You compare it to writing, and that's a very interesting comparison because to me, writing
#
is fun after having done it.
#
It's nice that I feel great the rest of the day having got it out of me, but getting it
#
out of me is an excruciating process.
#
And I flip tabs and I do all kinds of terrible wrong things that Da Vinci could never have
#
done, but I'm doing them.
#
And when I'm drawing, I'm not.
#
So art is different from writing for me very much because the joy of it is in the doing
#
And the result does not matter.
#
I get the same joy from the drawing I do today as the drawing I did the first time I did
#
it when I went outside to draw.
#
I look at the drawing and it's not as good, obviously.
#
I've really become a much better artist in four, five years.
#
But the level of joy is the same, and it is very, very high.
#
Once you tap into this idea, the reason why this is a good exercise is not so that you
#
Never mind becoming an artist.
#
Don't draw all the time, don't ever think about ever becoming good at it or selling.
#
It's just a good idea to get used to this habit that some things are good just to do.
#
Some things are good just to do because spending time in a good way is a good idea.
#
Getting used to this notion that there are some things you can find joy from just in
#
doing them is a very useful notion because then you start to seek it in other avenues
#
And that is how you become a better person.
#
You start to understand that some activities can bring me joy.
#
Maybe I should look for some other activities that are similar to this, and you will find
#
For a while, running to me felt like the joy is only after the run.
#
But now the process of the run is the joy.
#
Even with aching limbs and everything, the time I spend running is beautiful me time
#
And incidentally, it is also you time because I'm often listening to your podcast while
#
But this idea, this concept that you should do things which bring you joy, it's amazing
#
how easy it is to get used to it once you do a few drawings.
#
And hopefully you carry it into other spheres of your life as well.
#
Yeah, I mean, it also makes me sort of think about the notion of joy, like I think a lot
#
of things that we take happiness from, we take happiness from looking back at them.
#
You know, we'll remember a certain time and we'll say, oh, I was happy then.
#
But the point is, if you were not in the moment then, then you were nothing.
#
You were not happy or sad or whatever shit was happening.
#
And now in the looking back, you're finding the happiness.
#
So there is a kind of happiness where you're almost forcing yourself to be happy.
#
You look back on that and say, oh, you know, I had such a lovely conversation with so and
#
so and, you know, and that makes you happy.
#
But then there's another kind of happiness, which is something that, you know, I wish
#
I could have more of in my life, you're just happy in the moment where the rest of that
#
shit doesn't matter with the narratives you build around yourself don't matter at all.
#
And I know what you mean by running, because like a couple of years ago, I was like 20
#
kgs lighter and I was running and stuff.
#
I remember running a 10k and I get some of that where initially, like I remember one
#
of the interesting things that made me, you know, stay with running after I got into it
#
was that every morning you might get up and there'll be many days where you think that,
#
hey, I don't want to run today.
#
But after you run, you're always glad you ran every single time.
#
There was not a single time that I regretted going out to run today.
#
You just know that after the run, you'll be glad that you ran.
#
And so I completely kind of get that analogy and does it then demand that you live a different
#
Like there is one kind of life where you're completely in the moment, you're drawing something
#
or you're running, or maybe you're playing an instrument or whatever it is, but you're
#
completely in the moment.
#
And there's another kind of life where you are focused either on the past or the future,
#
where, for example, you might be trying to sell your art, you might be trying to chatting
#
with a publisher and deciding publishing details, or you might be talking to an event organizer
#
and saying, hey, I'll come there and do this live drawing and all of that.
#
And these seem therefore almost opposed to each other than the purest form of living.
#
It would seem to me at one level is to ignore the hustle entirely and just do the drawing.
#
And you don't just do that.
#
You also do the other stuff.
#
In fact, you know, after the break, one of the themes that I want to ask you a lot about
#
is this sort of dual life that an artist like you lives where you're not just an artist,
#
but you're also a salesman of your own art.
#
You're also an entrepreneur of your own brand, right, which are all impressive to me.
#
You know, I'd love to be able to do the same things, but what are you really living for?
#
And at one level and not as in what are you trying to live for, but as a general question,
#
it would seem to me that you already have that what you're trying to live for, which
#
is just being present in that moment and having that joy.
#
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
#
I think the reason why I draw is the same reason why another urban sketcher who might
#
be a lawyer or an architect draws, we are getting that joy in the moment.
#
Maybe the argument would then be that it helps the rest of life to go by to know that you
#
have this source of pure joy.
#
You can do some other things just for the work.
#
You can do some other things for not the same kind of rewards.
#
You are getting your rewards or your nice dopamine from this one activity.
#
The Marwadi instinct in me is that of a salesman, but I hate it.
#
I don't like I get I get a kick out of it, but sometimes I feel like I'd rather not.
#
I hate thinking about money again, very wrong instinct considering who I am, but I hate
#
I hate thinking about money and I'm terrible at thinking about money and working with money
#
and investing and just horrible at it.
#
Never know how much money I'm carrying or what I should do with it, et cetera.
#
But being an artist, I get certain joys from this act of being an artist and that puts
#
me in a frame of mind where I feel like, okay, now I can do some of the work work things,
#
the quote unquote work things, which are not the same because I have done this and now
#
I want to take my business is being an artist, so therefore my business is again related
#
to the thing that I got joy from, which is my art.
#
But if I was not an artist, if I was just doing this, I feel like this would make me
#
simply a calmer person in the rest of my life.
#
I have this source for whenever I need pure joy, I get it from here.
#
Now I can get on with the rest of my life and get whatever else I get from that.
#
Let's take a quick commercial break now and after the break, we'll come back to the story
#
of your life and begin where we left off at Chicago.
#
Do you want to read more?
#
I've put in a lot of work in recent years in building a reading habit.
#
This means that I read more books, but I also read more long form articles and essays.
#
There's a world of knowledge available through the internet, but the problem we all faces,
#
how do we navigate this knowledge?
#
How do we know what to read?
#
How do we put the right incentives in place?
#
Well, I discovered one way a couple of friends of mine run this awesome company called CTQ
#
Compounds at CTQCompounds.com, which aims to help people up level themselves by reading
#
A few months ago, I signed up for one of their programs called The Daily Reader.
#
Every day for six months, they sent me a long form article to read.
#
The subjects covered went from machine learning to mythology to mental models and marmalade.
#
This helped me build a habit of reading.
#
At the end of every day, I understood the world a little better than I did before.
#
So if you want to build your reading habit, head on over to CTQCompounds and check out
#
New batches start every month.
#
They also have a great program called Future Stack, which helps you stay up to date with
#
ideas, skills, and mental models that will help you stay relevant in the future.
#
Future Stack batches start every Saturday.
#
Also check out their social capital compound, which helps you master social media.
#
What's more, you get a discount of a whopping 2,500 rupees, 2,500 if you use the discount
#
So head on over to CTQCompounds at CTQCompounds.com and use the code unseen.
#
Welcome back to The Scene on the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with sneaky artist Nishant Jan.
#
You know Nishant, I should have, you know, randomly cornered you somewhere and recorded
#
this conversation with you without your knowing it was being recorded.
#
Now that would have been sneaky and most kind of appropriate.
#
So you know, while digressing all over the place, we got enough through the linear journey
#
of your life to find you in Chicago, where you've, to locate you in Chicago, where you've
#
decided that man, I want to be a writer and you know, this pyramid is not for me.
#
I want to do the things that I love.
#
The universe has given me permission as it were.
#
And you move on to that.
#
Now that's writer and then you become a sneaky artist.
#
So take me through a little bit of that journey about drawing, like were you into drawing
#
How was all of that kind of working out?
#
So like most children, I was drawing and I was encouraged to draw, but also like most
#
children when they grow up, drawing is something that kids do.
#
Like we were speaking before, I started drawing these web comics, which were in my limited
#
I was doing stick figures.
#
They were quick turnaround.
#
Like I have a joke, I can draw it and realize it in 30 minutes and post it.
#
And Facebook in those days was very generous, not like the Facebook it is today.
#
I could reach my whole audience and I did fairly well for myself.
#
Now when I was at this juncture in Chicago, my idea was that I'm a writer and I'm a cartoonist.
#
And now that I'm doing this full time, both of these things, I owe it to myself to do
#
And I had ambitions as a cartoonist because I also read graphic novels and I wanted to
#
draw incredible deep things.
#
Basically I wanted to tell stories that stick figures could not do justice to.
#
I needed my figures to be recognizable.
#
I needed them to be distinct.
#
I needed to draw worlds that resembled actual worlds, not just have them suspended in white
#
So I needed to learn how to draw.
#
And I tried to do these different things I did.
#
Actually before I became an urban sketcher, before sneaky art, I did this thing on Reddit.
#
There's this subreddit called Reddit gets drawn in which people post interesting photos
#
of themselves and artists of various persuasions.
#
They make portraits and they post it.
#
You get upvoted and a lot of artists are there.
#
So as an aspiring artist, it is good because you see a reference photo and you see 20 realizations
#
of it in different styles.
#
And as an aspiring artist, if you contribute, you get nice comments, you get feedback.
#
It's a very thriving subreddit.
#
I drew maybe 400 portraits in like a year.
#
Like I would sit in one sitting, I would make five portraits in half an hour.
#
So quickly, quickly, quickly.
#
And this is a function of my inclinations that I draw quickly, that I wanted to do things
#
I didn't want to do layers and layers and think of it as lazy, but who you are sort
#
of informs the art you make.
#
And it's good to lean into who you are.
#
And I'll touch upon that a little later, but I wanted to be a better artist.
#
And I knew that this needs me to draw more and more.
#
I'm learning some skills from doing these Reddit gets drawn portraits, but that's not
#
Like I need to know how to draw cities and nothing is working.
#
I need to put in the hours and I don't know how.
#
So I needed to find things that I could merge together.
#
And Chicago was perfect for that.
#
I wanted to explore it.
#
Let's take a sketchbook and I'll have a reason to explore it.
#
So I will get this kick of exploring the city.
#
But the way to really look at it would be that I draw it.
#
So I will keep drawing because the idea is that I will go out with a sketchbook and I'll
#
look at things and I'll draw the interesting things I see.
#
So if I combine my love for this and exploration of the city with drawing, I'll build a sustainable
#
And eventually, surely I will learn how to draw.
#
Now one more thing I did in this pursuit was one rule I set for myself is that I will draw
#
And I had a fountain pen, which is the fountain pen I use today.
#
And I will draw with this fountain pen, not a pencil, because I have a perfectionist nature
#
or a very exacting nature and I'm very cruel on myself.
#
So I never finish things.
#
I just keep erasing and redoing.
#
And I needed to turn the page metaphorically and literally.
#
So fountain pen, ink on paper, no steps backwards.
#
Every line I draw is there in full contrast.
#
So I can only finish drawings.
#
And I can only draw again if I want to improve and draw more if I want to improve.
#
So this was a constraint I set upon myself.
#
Another theme I come in my podcast very often, and we should talk about it again, is constraints
#
They don't restrict you.
#
And I talk about how this manifests in different ways as an artist and how useful it is.
#
I'm walking around Chicago and I'm drawing things in my sketchbook with a pen.
#
Not very well, but doing it every day.
#
And I am a little, not ashamed is not the word, but it's a little ridiculous, I think.
#
It's too late for me to learn to draw.
#
And how am I going to explain this to anyone?
#
What if they look at me?
#
I'm trying to learn how to draw.
#
Like I'm a grown adult who quit his job and is now trying to walk around drawing things.
#
They laugh or I think they laugh.
#
I think one of the things people don't realize is that there is no such thing as a grown
#
We're all just winging it.
#
So, but when you make a nice practice out of beating yourself up, then all of these things
#
I'll go and I'll draw and I'll draw quickly and I'll just get out of there before they
#
So the first idea I had of sneaky art, the first definition I had of this word and it
#
has evolved since then.
#
So sneaky art 1.0 is that I am sneaky looking for art and I draw and within half an hour
#
before I'm conspicuous, I'm gone.
#
And I kept doing this and this is how I sort of learned how to draw better.
#
I merged it with the love of the city and exploring this city full of fantastic, crazy
#
And what happened therefore also is that I realized what are the things I like looking
#
What are the things that catch my eye?
#
And this is such a nice thing to learn about yourself.
#
Like, what do you find interesting as a person?
#
And I didn't explicitly realize it at the time, but this is such a fantastic way to
#
become an artist, to know what you want to draw.
#
All these years as a child and as a young adult, when I was practicing how to draw,
#
how to draw books, you have eyes with hyper realistic detail, you have body anatomies
#
in hyper realistic detail, you have birds and animals.
#
These are incidentally none of the things I can draw even today.
#
I can't draw birds and animals.
#
I can't draw hyper realistic eyes and feet and legs.
#
I'm bad at it, but I'm decently well-to-do artist who can't draw these basic things
#
because there's not a single way to become an artist.
#
And from doing it this way, from feeling like an outsider, forcing himself in, I chanced
#
I'll only learn if I keep drawing more and I'll only draw more if I draw the things I
#
And by doing this, I'm finding out, oh, these are the things I like.
#
When I flip through the sketchbook, I'm like, oh, this is what I look at.
#
Oh, this is what I look at.
#
Oh, this is what I found interesting in this space over here when I could have also been
#
looking at this other thing.
#
Actually what kind of thing surprised you about the way you look?
#
So this was to do with being an immigrant here, right?
#
So I'm trying to understand this world, how it works.
#
And I found the things that fascinated me were the people.
#
So you have this city where the temperature goes from minus 40 to plus 40, 80 degrees
#
of difference happens over the course of a year.
#
And no matter the temperature, these people go about their lives.
#
I came upon this understanding of what is a city.
#
So a city, if you think about it, has no reason to exist.
#
It has only one reason to exist.
#
A city exists because humans need things.
#
We want to get from A to B, so there are roads.
#
We want to get there efficiently, so there are buses on these roads and there are bus
#
We might need money, so there are ATM machines.
#
And sometimes we get tired, so there are cafes with coffees and there are places for lunch.
#
So all of these things are not natural things.
#
They exist because of human need.
#
And this is what I was understanding.
#
What is the way that people interact with things in their cities?
#
How do people live in a city?
#
What is the function of a city?
#
And how do people use these various functions to get about their day?
#
So I was fascinated by just the sea of humanity you see at a metro station.
#
These are all people from different social classes, different economic classes getting
#
into this train to go from A to B.
#
In this moment, we are all together.
#
We are all trying to do the same thing.
#
We don't know each other.
#
We are not looking at each other.
#
We are not speaking to each other.
#
We don't want anything to do with each other maybe.
#
But we are united in this common purpose and therefore this train exists.
#
I was thinking about how tall buildings are.
#
And a building is only tall if there is a human next to it.
#
So I came upon this set of questions.
#
Is a cafe a cafe if there is no person drinking coffee inside it?
#
What makes it a cafe is the person drinking coffee inside it.
#
I came upon this question when I was drawing a cafe.
#
Realized that it is until the point that I draw a person with a coffee, this is just
#
Is it a mug unless there is coffee in it?
#
It's just this thing made of ceramic.
#
We give it context and that is how a building is tall because humans are six feet or five
#
feet tall and a building is so many times taller than us.
#
That's what makes it tall.
#
At this point there's a lovely poem by Vijay Shishadri, I'll read out called Imaginary
#
Imaginary Number by Vijay Shishadri.
#
The mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed is not big and is not small.
#
Big and small are comparative categories and to what could the mountain that remains when
#
the universe is destroyed be compared?
#
Consciousness absorbs and is appeased.
#
The soul scrambles across the screes.
#
The scroll, like the square root of minus one, is an impossibility that has its uses.
#
So yeah, I remembered the mountain at the end of the universe.
#
Yeah, it's beautiful because I found myself thinking along these lines the more I did
#
these things that this exists because I am looking at it.
#
This has meaning because this random person came in here looking for a coffee.
#
So this person is integral.
#
If I want to say that I drew a cafe, I need to draw this person here who ordered the coffee
#
And this taught me more about myself.
#
Firstly, it begins without articulation.
#
You just look at something and you're interested, you find it curious.
#
So if you walk through a city, you observed a bunch of things, maybe you took pictures
#
of a bunch of things on your camera, but there is a filter here.
#
You take a picture already with the idea of, is this thing worth taking a picture of?
#
To me or to someone else?
#
You might think, is it something worth sharing on Instagram?
#
So again, you were immediately externalized to outside standards.
#
Is this worth sharing on Instagram?
#
Therefore, if it's not, I don't need to notice it.
#
I don't need to take a picture of it.
#
But as an artist, I was spending more and more time just without explicitly articulating
#
it, just trying to discover what excites me.
#
If I looked at something, I would tell myself, okay, give it 10 minutes and let's draw it.
#
And in the process of drawing it, I would discover what I find beautiful about it.
#
And therefore in the process of this repeated exercise, I would find out these are the things
#
And this made me a better person over time and I found this such a useful exercise.
#
So I did it more and more.
#
I did this project called 30 days of Chicago, every day new side of Chicago and every day
#
And I kept going after that even, like I just kept drawing more and more and more things.
#
And I posted something on Reddit, on the Chicago subreddit that I sat in this place and I saw
#
the beautiful skyline of Chicago, here it is.
#
And somebody reached out and said, do you sell prints?
#
And this was a very crazy moment for me because up until this moment, I was thinking of myself
#
as a cartoonist or a comic artist.
#
And the idea was that even if I draw well, the thing will sell because I will say something
#
witty or funny or profound next to it.
#
There will be a word bubble, there will be a dialogue, there will be a caption.
#
The idea that someone could want just the art for what it is did not ever occur to me.
#
And it was, it took me aback that they just literally just the drawing.
#
I just sat for half an hour.
#
You want that and you will pay me for it.
#
And after that, I got a few requests on Instagram and this thing kept happening.
#
And I came to this understanding that I was in this new place.
#
These people don't know me.
#
They don't care that I wrote for this YouTube channel in India.
#
They don't know that I had a blog.
#
What are they seeing me as?
#
If I keep calling myself a writer, cartoonist, they think I'm, what am I talking about?
#
They don't even understand it because they know me for sneaky art.
#
More and more people are knowing me for sneaky art and they don't know this other side of
#
I had to kind of rationalize that this reality that if people see, know me as only for my
#
art and they want my art and I'm selling art, do I get to use this word artist now?
#
This word held all these various meanings in my head, which I felt I wasn't qualified
#
I learned to accept it over time that I guess I'm an artist slash writer.
#
I also write, but I guess primarily I draw because yeah, that's what I'm doing every
#
I'm not writing every day anymore.
#
I'm just drawing every day and I'm getting so much out of it that I keep doing it.
#
Then we moved to Wisconsin and suddenly I was drawing in Wisconsin and there was not
#
So there aren't photogenic things anymore.
#
And now I discovered that now in a more concentrated form, my art is telling me who I am because
#
now those external things are gone.
#
They aren't Instagram worthy sites.
#
Hashtag Chicago can't be used.
#
Hashtag Eau Claire or hashtag Wisconsin is what I use.
#
Not so many people care about it.
#
I don't get the same likes.
#
So those external factors of choosing this subject are gone.
#
Now why did I draw this thing?
#
And I realized more and more that this is about me and this is about my artistic journey.
#
So I started doing it from a new perspective now.
#
Now I'm doing it because I'm in this new part of the world whose mental picture I only have
#
from watching that seventies show when I was a kid.
#
That's all I know what Wisconsin might be like.
#
And I feel like such a stranger.
#
And maybe if I draw things, I will feel a little more comfortable.
#
The only excuse I have for sitting in this cafe for one hour, not feel awkward and out
#
of place is if I have my sketchbook.
#
Sketchbook was sort of holding me there.
#
Observation was making me at that same time bond with people from a distance.
#
Like, yeah, I ordered that coffee.
#
They ordered the same coffee.
#
This is how I might have sat at a cafe with a friend the way that they are sitting here.
#
When I would go to the park in summer and I would see people sprawled on the grass and
#
I'm enjoying the grass in the same way and I'm watching them and I'm making a drawing
#
or something like that from a distance.
#
It made me feel all these common things that we have.
#
I might not have sat on the grass for an hour in the park if I didn't have my sketchbook.
#
I would just feel self-conscious out of place and I would leave.
#
But this sketchbook gave me the mandate to do this thing.
#
And sneaky art became this other thing then I reached sneaky art 2.0.
#
So this other thing was that sneaky art exists everywhere in plain sight.
#
It needs you to look for it.
#
Once you start to look at it, you see it everywhere.
#
It has to be believed to be seen.
#
It's not about me being sneaky anymore.
#
It's now about me being the observer who waits patiently for these magical moments to happen.
#
So I was looking for what I described as moments of accidental art.
#
So when you're at a cafe and two people are talking and right behind them someone comes
#
to place another order at the counter and this juxtaposition of three figures happens.
#
These worlds have collided.
#
Two people are at a cafe, they are talking to each other, that's two worlds colliding.
#
And then this other person comes and just from my vantage, my point of view, they make
#
Three people, one person standing tall, two people in the foreground and this triangle
#
Just from my point of view.
#
If I sat somewhere else, it might have looked different.
#
But just from this point of view, it exists in this beautiful artistic moment.
#
My job as a sneaky artist is to register this moment before it is lost.
#
So I make it my job now to walk around and capture these moments out of the relentlessly
#
changing flux of life in busy places.
#
These moments of accidental art.
#
So tell me about how your art itself sort of evolved through these processes.
#
Like one of your newsletter posts, I came across this pro tip where you write, quote,
#
to draw quickly, begin with what is most interesting, put it in the middle, then radiate outwards
#
for as long as you're interested.
#
And I'll, you know, link that post obviously from the show notes.
#
And there's actually a video where you sort of show yourself drawing, you put something
#
in the middle and you kind of radiate outwards.
#
At another point where you write about this phrase, which you use a lot in your posts,
#
tiny people, and you write, quote, there's a philosophy to drawing tiny people akin to
#
I strip away the layers of obfuscation and distill every person to their essential lines.
#
I remove all that separates them from me and leave only the things we universally recognize.
#
The art of tiny people brings us to the things themselves.
#
And then you have a link to a post which explains that.
#
So I imagine that at some level does it then involve trying to draw less, just getting,
#
you know, more minimal, trying to draw less, trying to capture the essence.
#
And then this also brings me to the question of like at one level for an artist, for a
#
visual artist, there is a pressure of fidelity.
#
How accurately am I capturing something?
#
Does what I am drawing look like the real thing in front of me?
#
But at some point, I guess this begins to shift towards just capturing the essence of
#
Because what is fidelity?
#
I mean, everybody's looking at everything in a different way.
#
You know, what do you see of it?
#
So how did your thinking and your art evolve around all this?
#
So you've touched on two points of like, these are two things that I use to inform my raw
#
So when I got into this business of articulating myself, so when I started the newsletter,
#
the idea of the newsletter was that every week I need to talk about my drawings.
#
But I need to get better at talking about communicating my art.
#
This was part of being in the business of selling art, which I started in Wisconsin.
#
And we'll go into that, rewind to that a little later.
#
But the idea of phenomenology then came to me because I'm reading about these various
#
And I read this book, which was recommended by our group, incidentally, it's called the
#
Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell.
#
And it's a fantastic book, which introduced me to the concept of phenomenology, which
#
is that learning to see things as they are and not through the way that we recognize
#
And this was something that philosophers did in order to see things without judgment.
#
But I realized that this is what I do as an artist all the time.
#
This is the way to draw difficult things, to not be intimidated by what I know it looks
#
So if I'm drawing someone's face, if I get into this loop in my mind of the nose, the
#
nose looks like this and I run through all these images of the nose in my mind, I don't
#
draw what is in front of me.
#
I draw what is in my head of what a nose should look like and my best representation of it.
#
So I have to do what is in front of me.
#
So I have to reject the notions of it that I had before.
#
I have to see it very carefully, but I have to not recognize it.
#
Therefore, I have to see the things as they are, not as I know them.
#
And this vibed with phenomenology in a beautiful way.
#
I thought it was just perfect how it synced.
#
That's why I sort of articulated it in this manner.
#
The minimalism, though, is a function of me.
#
I don't think that is a necessary prerequisite of art.
#
That is just me with my inclinations and my idiosyncrasies.
#
I'm a mechanical engineer, we optimize.
#
I want to say more with less.
#
I am a lazy person, I optimize.
#
I want to say more with less work.
#
I am a sneaky artist, I have less time.
#
So I do not have the luxury of drawing things with millions of lines.
#
Not to mention, I want to capture what is it that I'm interested by.
#
I want to capture transient human activity.
#
I can't afford to take time because it is gone and I'm going to capture it while it
#
is there in front of me.
#
So I needed to minimize my lines and I needed to say more with less lines because I needed
#
to draw those things very quickly.
#
So the idea of starting at a point of interest was crucial.
#
It's a case of form follows function.
#
I'm trying to draw these things.
#
I'm trying to draw a person who might leave any moment in a train.
#
I don't know which stop they'll get off at.
#
It could be the next stop.
#
What do I need to do in order to make this not a pointless drawing?
#
Why did I want to draw that person?
#
I'm going to start there.
#
This happened because I needed to draw quickly, but it therefore trained me to learn to spot
#
what it is that caught my interest.
#
Now I can explicitly immediately see this is what catches my interest because I've done
#
it half a million times.
#
I've done this with people.
#
I have looked at somebody, tried to draw them and they left and it was incomplete.
#
But I could see where I started and why I started there.
#
That is a good part of my artistic process.
#
I started at the point of interest, at the point of greatest interest so that even if
#
the person is lost, I have got something that I wanted.
#
Even if it's not a complete drawing, I have got something that I wanted from it.
#
This was, it satisfied my craving of having done that drawing.
#
So the speed is also a function of the situation.
#
The minimalism is also a function of the situation.
#
This idea of tiny people is a useful exercise in this.
#
So tiny people drawings are made at traffic lights.
#
I'm sitting in a corner cafe looking at people at a traffic intersection, 10 seconds.
#
Maybe if I'm lucky, I get 15 seconds, then they're gone.
#
How can I capture a human form in that little time looking, starting to draw, finishing
#
to draw and then they're gone.
#
All of this happens and there is no time for hesitation.
#
There is only instinct.
#
Ancillary effect of this is you learn to trust your instinct.
#
So I ask participants in my workshops to do speed drawing, not because speed drawing is
#
I don't want you to be speed artists, but I need you to be quick to identify what interests
#
I need you to be quick to identify over time, why it interests you.
#
And I need you to be quick at seeing.
#
You need to see faster.
#
You need to register more things at first glance.
#
And that these are useful habits, whether after that you take three hours or three weeks
#
to compose a piece, it doesn't matter.
#
But all these skills are useful skills for you to have, to be able to zero in on what
#
This will make you a better artist.
#
Don't try to draw these things that you don't want to draw.
#
There is no single standard of art anymore.
#
Just draw what you want to draw.
#
You look at my tiny people drawings, there are no feet.
#
I don't like to draw shoes, so I don't draw shoes.
#
Their legs end as stumps, so to say.
#
Style is also something that develops in this way.
#
Style develops when we lean into these things that are our idiosyncrasies.
#
So there's this quote that I share in my blog posts and my podcast often.
#
It's by my favorite musician, Miles Davis.
#
He says, once is a mistake, twice is an idea, three times is style.
#
So we think that as creatives, our job is to erase our mistakes.
#
By drawing with a pen, I could not erase my mistakes.
#
By drawing quickly, I did not have the chance to think about my mistakes.
#
I could only move forward.
#
And by doing this again and again and again and insisting on drawing what I care about,
#
I developed more ideas about what is it that I like?
#
What is it that I don't like?
#
If I have only 10 minutes, why should I draw the things I don't like?
#
What if I didn't draw the things I don't like?
#
What if I only drew the things I like?
#
Can that be a completed piece also?
#
I'll do it today and tomorrow.
#
Let's see what happens if I do it 50 times.
#
This is how you develop style.
#
These ideas reiterated so many times over so many pages.
#
Never stepping back, never editing is what developed into what eventually became my style.
#
And I honestly have thought about the word style for so many years.
#
And I've always thought it's too late.
#
You have style or you don't.
#
I can't develop a style anymore.
#
You have to be a genius to have your own style.
#
And I remember the first time I was with an urban sketches group in Minneapolis.
#
And someone said to me that, you know, I can identify your drawing immediately.
#
You have a distinct style.
#
And that's the first time it occurred to me that, wow, I have a style.
#
It came from following these first principles and which were all necessary to my inclinations
#
and my ideas and my circumstances.
#
That became what it became.
#
And that led to tiny people that led to understanding what draws me to tiny people.
#
The word Sonder, the ideas of existentialism, even the quote by Sartre about hell is other
#
That's such a beautiful, insightful quote.
#
And it's so important to me how that works.
#
Thinking about style is interesting.
#
Like just thinking aloud, it strikes me that look at one level.
#
All of us are exactly the same.
#
You know, what appear to be differences between us are differences of happenstance in terms
#
of slight tweaks in our genetic code and, you know, the circumstances around us, the
#
small differences in nature and nurture, as it were.
#
And therefore it could be argued that these differences might appear as weaknesses because
#
they don't fit in with whatever, you know, the average view of the world is, but seen
#
They are what make us unique, perhaps by accident, but they are the style, you know, the chess
#
tournament called Tata India just got over in Calcutta.
#
In fact, your home city, your hometown and your home city.
#
Bengalis everywhere will be mad at me.
#
We thought you're one of us.
#
The Blitz section was won by a guy called Levan Aronian and he was being asked about
#
the tournament where he was trying to explain that he played badly.
#
And he was sort of talking about how he played badly and he made so many mistakes.
#
He was being interviewed by this guy called Sagar Shah and Sagar asked him that, do you
#
feel bad about the mistakes you made?
#
And he said, no, I feel not bad about the mistakes I made because they're old mistakes.
#
And it's obviously a matter of concern that I'm repeating them, but I'm glad that they
#
are old mistakes and there are no new mistakes.
#
So the question that sprung to my mind was the one Sagar now asked that, aren't you concerned
#
that old mistakes are popping up again?
#
And he said, no, because I know them.
#
You know, they're familiar to me.
#
They are who I am in the sense that, you know, some people will have a knee problem.
#
Some people will have a back problem.
#
You'll have back pain once in a while.
#
You learn to manage it and you will not get worried if the back pain springs up because
#
it's part of you and you'll learn to manage it again.
#
But if some new problem happens somewhere, like you get a heart attack, then that's a
#
So if it's an old weakness, I don't kind of mind it because I know how to control it.
#
I've controlled it before, which struck me as a very profound point because my assumption
#
would have been that what you want to do is you want to eliminate the old mistakes.
#
And if you make new mistakes and you eliminate them after that, and it's a linear process.
#
But his point is once you settle into like, what is your style?
#
Your style is a way you think, given a form, right?
#
And if you think in a particular way, you think in a particular way, it is who you are.
#
I guess in your case, some of the things which would be considered style, like the minimalism
#
or, you know, drawing stumps because you don't like shoes, you know, others could look at
#
them and call them weaknesses and say, hey, you can't do hyper realistic eyes, but your
#
And these weaknesses would have pushed you, I suppose, into an area of strength where
#
you can just take one look and kind of locate the essence of something and put that down
#
quickly before the person gets up close.
#
So in my urban sketching community, there are many artists who this is another recurring
#
topic of conversation on the show, even in person with other urban sketchers, that you
#
can sit side by side with somebody on the same bench, look in the same direction and
#
draw entirely different things because of our inclinations, because of our skills and
#
because of everything being a function of the way you draw, right?
#
So like you mentioned, I draw quickly and somebody draws hyper realistically.
#
So what that means to me as an advantage part of it is that there are opportunities to draw
#
that occur to me that do not even occur to them.
#
I make drawings when I'm standing in a queue, like five minutes maybe, and we're walking,
#
but I'll draw quickly with a pen and I'll finish a drawing in that time.
#
But that's not even enough time for them to get out their things, get out their tools.
#
So that is not a situation in which they can draw.
#
Those are not subjects they can ever capture.
#
Only I can capture them because of the temporal nature of those transient nature of those
#
subjects and those scenes.
#
So there is the disadvantage that you can argue that, oh, the realism is lost.
#
You don't have the, you're not, you're not representing the reality in the same way.
#
I think that's entirely unnecessary as an artist.
#
And we should, let's talk about the end of art as it is called by Arthur Danto, who talked
#
I see the benefit as me capturing a world which is changing very quickly and me offering
#
something about that world in my style, in my way of seeing it, in my way of representing
#
it that does the same job.
#
Like I spoke once, episode 15 of my podcast is with this person.
#
He's a war illustrator.
#
So he draws in war zones.
#
He goes to Syria with a pot of ink and watercolors and a big board with art paper on it.
#
And he sits and he paints in a war torn country in refugee camps.
#
He went to the Eastern European border with migrants coming in, in Kenya with the economic
#
crisis he was drawing and painting there.
#
So I asked him this thing that you're doing, you're doing this stuff here.
#
What does it matter that you made a painting in Syria?
#
Like you couldn't have taken a photo.
#
You could have made a video.
#
You could have broadcasted live to everybody.
#
You could have made a TikTok video.
#
What does a painting matter in this time of multimedia content and instantaneous multimedia
#
You took an hour to make one scene.
#
What, like, why is that good?
#
His answer was interesting to me.
#
His answer was that people really look at a painting.
#
And I extrapolated based on what he said, because I had had thoughts like this as well.
#
And as a control engineer, I thought of information.
#
So if you look at a picture, a picture has a certain amount of information, color, shadows,
#
It captures everything in its point of view with an equal amount of focus.
#
Everything is equally focused.
#
Everything is equally detailed.
#
And we live in an age where we have access to all the pictures in the world.
#
You can't really shock anyone with anything.
#
Everybody's seen everything somewhere or the other.
#
So we have reached a level of jadedness with photography.
#
It's unfortunate, and it makes life very difficult for genuinely talented photographers.
#
But people are not impressed by photos anymore, the unfortunate reality of our time.
#
What a drawing does in this time.
#
What does a simplistic drawing like mine, or even his one hour representation, surely
#
he doesn't have the same details as a photograph, because he's perturbed by his situation.
#
He is not comfortable all the time.
#
Photograph plays an impact on, he's uncomfortable.
#
So how does that pan out in his drawings?
#
He's afraid of what's happening around him.
#
How does that pan out in his details?
#
He doesn't have the luxury of putting in the details like a fine art painting made over
#
So a lot of instantaneous momentary things are captured.
#
So it's not fully detailed.
#
But you don't need fully detailed.
#
What a drawing does, in my opinion, this is just me thinking out and why I feel like I've
#
sold a lot of art in person and I speak to people who buy my art in front of me and I
#
ask them why, and I'm building upon that feedback as well, is that incomplete information has
#
Incomplete information, which is a drawing, not a photograph.
#
My drawing is an ink drawing of certain shapes, no colors, no shadows.
#
So much information is lost, taken away by me.
#
What I'm offering is what I saw.
#
So it is again filtered by my personality and my skill level, no feet, only stumps.
#
So again, my inclinations, my abilities.
#
Incomplete information invites engagement.
#
People look at it and then they fill the spaces.
#
They look at it and they imagine the colors that will go there.
#
They look at it and they see that, oh, this is what you saw.
#
They know that it is your perspective.
#
It is not the objective truth.
#
So they don't feel threatened by it.
#
There is no insistence that this is the truth.
#
It is implicit that this is just what I felt, what I saw and how I drew it.
#
George, my guest in episode 15, he said, every illustration is biased towards its subject.
#
You could make a painting of Saddam Hussein, but the act of making that painting, the act
#
of drawing the contours of someone's face, getting the colors and someone's physique
#
and all of those things, it is an act of appreciation, not of the person, but simply of the thing
#
in front of you, the phenomenological thing in front of you, like not the person as you
#
And that is what communicates to another person when they look at a painting.
#
So this is a very powerful thing.
#
When you get somebody to engage, you buy time.
#
Time is the literal most powerful thing as an artist that I could want.
#
If I can get someone to spend time with something that I drew and they really look at it, that's
#
That's all that matters.
#
There's a quote by Kandinsky, do you know the artist Kandinsky?
#
I've heard of him, yeah.
#
So he's supposed to be the father of surrealism, I think, or maybe is it cubism, but I think
#
His quote is that, look at a painting and, and I'm paraphrasing, I don't remember the
#
quote exactly, but he says that, look at a painting and just lose yourself in it.
#
If it has, for a moment, taken you out of your world, if it has enabled you to move
#
in a plane that you had never seen before, what more can you ask for?
#
The idea being that what is the purpose of art?
#
The purpose of art is only to give us that moment where we are not in our world anymore.
#
For a moment, we are in another world.
#
It has these different rules.
#
My world does not have colors.
#
My world does not have precise shapes.
#
It's a nice release from their world.
#
It's a nice release from all this information that is always assaulting our eyes, a little
#
less information maybe, but maybe a little more to feel then makes it a little easier
#
to feel if you take away all this burden of information.
#
So I am very firmly against the concept of realism in art as this is just an artistic
#
inclination and this is how I feel this kind of minimalism adds value.
#
So to go by Kandinsky's quote, what artists had that impact on you that you looked at
#
their work and you got lost in their work?
#
So a lot of artists who I didn't understand, so someone like Dali or Picasso, I don't know
#
what's happening and this kind of fine art is interesting.
#
This kind of fine art is not, we keep asking too much from it.
#
We keep asking stupid questions like what is he trying to say?
#
These are all such wrong questions like, and I learned that they are wrong questions from
#
being an artist and all this time I would look at fine art and modern art and what is
#
That's not, that's not the question.
#
The job is just to experience it, to suspend judgment, again, the phenomenologist, to not
#
see things as they are, to just let it happen, whatever it is.
#
Just this exercise has value.
#
It doesn't matter what kind of art it is.
#
It doesn't matter if it's hyper realistic.
#
It doesn't take hyper realistic art.
#
So, you know, like people like Renoir, people like impressionists, not hyper realistic anymore,
#
but someone like Monet.
#
I was lucky enough to see some of the best art in the world, Van Gogh and Monet and Rembrandt
#
and Seurat who did pointillism.
#
And it's a different kind of appreciation.
#
You look at it from 50 feet away.
#
It looks like something.
#
You come closer and closer and closer and the resolution breaks because now you can
#
So the shapes aren't consistent.
#
Now you can see it as a mess of color and now you can understand it as that.
#
And then you move away again and suddenly those shapes resolve into things that you
#
So it's an experience how you like it.
#
Van Gogh is so important to me, not only for his art, but just for the persistence of the
#
He had colors in his mind that he was seeing that were not real.
#
He was seeing compositions that were not real.
#
He was seeing stars behave in a way that is not real.
#
And he was showing it to us in that way.
#
This job, the way the artist brings you into their world.
#
One of the artists really important to me is MC Escher.
#
And Escher played tricks with you.
#
He represented these amazing mathematical concepts in just graphical prints, woodcut
#
prints, the amount of work that takes.
#
And he's not even a mathematician.
#
The concepts that he's talking about, the things you understand when you become a...
#
So I sort of became a student of art in a sense in this way.
#
I don't know these movements of art that exist.
#
And I can't tell you Cubism from Surrealism or any of Dadaism, et cetera.
#
But I just know that I look at this thing, it looks interesting.
#
Let's try and find out what this is about.
#
I look at this guy and Egon Schiele is a tragic, interesting figure.
#
His figures, his people have these long extended limbs and these striking poses and colors.
#
And I want to know why, why did he do this?
#
So I try to find out more about him.
#
I find equal fascination in artists 300 years old and artists who I follow on Instagram
#
today because it's all art.
#
It doesn't matter where it's from.
#
If it has the power to move you, just enjoy that.
#
Enjoy being kicked a little bit out of your, out of phase.
#
So there's this interesting story about, you mentioned Surat and pointillism.
#
So he had made this famous painting called A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande
#
And there's an interesting story about it that it was at one point made into a musical
#
called Sunday in the Park with George by James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim.
#
And when Stephen Sondheim saw this painting for the first time, do you know what he said?
#
What a beautiful face, what a beautiful face.
#
Sorry, I had to get my one bad joke.
#
That is the famous painting of his that I saw incidentally.
#
Oh, that's a famous painting against yourself.
#
It's the one of the greatest examples of pointillist art.
#
But you didn't react like this.
#
I was too dignified to do that.
#
Maybe since we all construct our memories anyway, maybe now in your memory, when you
#
look back after 20 years, you'll be like, yeah, I've incepted this idea in my mind.
#
I've incepted this idea.
#
So now tell me a little bit about this act of painting in public.
#
Like I imagine that you've mentioned how like me, you're a bit of an introvert, hell is
#
other people, so on and so forth.
#
And just sitting down in public, doing something in public can bring with it great self-consciousness.
#
And this would be doubly so in this case because you're actually horror of horrors, drawing
#
people who are actually there, which can feel so intrusive if they see what you're doing
#
and it can be awkward with other people around you.
#
So how was that evolution within you?
#
Like once you started, would you just lose yourself in the drawing and forget all that?
#
Or did it take a period of time to sort of be comfortable in your skin and just relax
#
It was really bad initially.
#
I thought of it as escaping.
#
I thought of it as getting away with something which has a nice kick to it.
#
It makes you feel good.
#
You got away with something, but it's also, it's not necessarily positive.
#
You don't need to feel like that.
#
What really changed things for me was when I discovered what urban sketches are.
#
So I was doing this project, 30 days of Chicago, and like it's incredible, like the whole serendipity
#
of the moment, serendipity, is that I was walking down the street and I saw this poster
#
on a lamppost saying Urban Sketchers Symposium.
#
And that's how I found the word urban sketcher.
#
And I Googled it and I saw, oh, this is exactly what I do.
#
And I followed these artists who are urban sketchers.
#
I tried to go to the symposium and I realized that much later I would realize that tickets
#
get sold out within seconds.
#
The symposium was happening in, I think, a couple of months after that.
#
And I sort of gate crashed it.
#
So they have open sketch crawls.
#
They walk around the city drawing and I just walked along with them.
#
And I started talking to some people and I started looking at what they're doing.
#
Made friends, therefore, with Urban Sketchers and Chicago has a super generous, super lovely
#
chapter of urban sketchers.
#
Urban sketching, urban sketchers are a really cool community.
#
So the one big difference is there's no hierarchy here.
#
All kinds of artists that I've spoken to, interacted with, who are fine artists otherwise
#
and also urban sketchers have said this, have confirmed this for me, that usually in art
#
circles people are protective of their styles.
#
People are protective of what they do.
#
They're not so welcoming to outsiders.
#
There are gatekeepers, essentially.
#
You have to prove your worth to them.
#
But in this community, there is no such thing for various reasons.
#
There is no such thing.
#
And anybody speaks to anybody, anybody learns from anybody, the teacher becomes a student,
#
the student becomes a teacher for various things.
#
As I had the opportunity to do myself, I was an instructor at an urban sketching seminar
#
And one of the most prominent urban sketchers of the global community was one of my students
#
And I felt so self-conscious the whole time, but she said lovely things about how I spoke
#
to her and how I taught and later she would be a guest on my podcast as well.
#
So once I was with these urban sketchers and I saw somebody who's putting out a whole watercolor
#
palette on the ground, on the road, sitting down on the road with their sketchbook and
#
a jar of water and these brushes, everything laid out.
#
And it just seemed so silly that I was nervous about having a sketchbook and a pen.
#
Like again, I needed permission.
#
They gave me permission to do this.
#
They told me it's okay.
#
Really, really great artists do this.
#
And then I started thinking, of course, this is what Van Gogh must have done.
#
How else did he paint in the fields?
#
He didn't take a photo and go back.
#
He sat there with his things and he painted on the fields.
#
How did Rembrandt paint windmills?
#
Of course he had to stand there and do it.
#
There's nothing weird about standing and looking and making art.
#
This is how art is made.
#
And observation of the world is not copying this idea that I was copying and I was not
#
an artist also fell away with that.
#
So I gave myself this mandate to do it, that I am allowed to be outdoors.
#
I am allowed to look at people and to draw.
#
Nonetheless, at that time, I was still very conscious of it because I just, I don't want
#
And everybody who has ever asked me what I'm doing, whether they've come up from behind
#
at a cafe or I draw at concerts, so I drew the musicians and somebody looked and they
#
asked me what I'm doing.
#
It's always appreciative.
#
It's always positive comments.
#
People react positively to the act of drawing or painting.
#
They react in a way, again, this is an important differentiator from photography.
#
Photography, again, if you think of information, the way it captures everything, it is an intrusion.
#
It is perceived as an invasion of privacy.
#
There are ideas around how you can take photos of people, whether you can share it or not.
#
And they are valid ideas because you are really capturing their image.
#
In a sense, that old idea, the onset of photography, that you are losing a part of your soul when
#
someone takes a photo, I can see it making sense in a twisted way in this.
#
But a drawing is always perceived as an appreciative act, as a gesture of appreciation.
#
There's no evil intent.
#
There's no nastiness involved in making a drawing of someone.
#
And so I always got positive comments.
#
Nonetheless, as a person, I just don't want to explain.
#
Even the nice things, just the process of being like, oh, this is why I do it.
#
Oh, I'm an artist and this is what I do.
#
I call myself sneaky artist.
#
It's just a conversation I would rather not have.
#
I try to not speak to people.
#
This is odd from a podcaster's point of view, but I try to minimize the number of conversations
#
It's just who I am as a person.
#
I live inside my own head and I think too much.
#
So it's been interesting to do this while observing people.
#
It's been interesting to want to learn about people, but not speak to them.
#
And it leads to interesting artistic effects, like guests, subjects leave while I'm drawing.
#
So somebody else comes and sits in their place.
#
And so I've drawn half of one person and the legs of the other person.
#
That kind of stuff happens on trains.
#
Like I just do the head and then they left.
#
So okay, body from here, legs from here, hands from another place.
#
So part of your legs are stumps as we now know.
#
So it leads to interesting results.
#
So then what am I doing?
#
You know, am I capturing reality?
#
Because this is not a person that existed at all, right?
#
This person left and this is someone else's body and someone else's.
#
So this thing never happened.
#
So there was another sense of independence that came to me when I thought and I accepted
#
this thing that I don't need to be realistic and I can't be realistic because of the nature
#
And there's nothing wrong with that.
#
I am capturing a sense of a place over the course of time that I spend there.
#
So for example, I drew at a beach in Vancouver and I'm drawing 20, 30 people at the beach.
#
And by the time I draw someone on the left, they have walked on and I move on to drawing
#
someone on the right side of the page.
#
The left side of the scene has changed completely.
#
Those guys have left and gone home maybe.
#
Other people are sitting in different poses.
#
So I have never captured a single moment.
#
What I have captured is a sense of that place over the time I have spent there.
#
That moment never existed in singularity.
#
It is an amalgamation of things and that is a very liberating thought.
#
It lets you do more things once you realize you don't have this burden of needing to be
#
And realism is a thing that really it bores me.
#
I had ideas about it and then I read this about this essay by Arthur Danto called The
#
Like it's the whole idea is exactly what I had thought about before.
#
And I love it when this happens, you know, like I have conversations with podcasters
#
also and I like the moments not when they tell me something that I've never thought
#
As much as I like the moments when they tell me something I have thought about and then
#
just been like this is just me thinking what this doesn't matter.
#
But then they validate it and then I give it value again.
#
They again give me a little bit of permission to back my own ideas and I love those moments.
#
So The End of Art talks about this moment when Arthur Danto who is an art critic and
#
philosopher, he in the 60s sees Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes.
#
So Brillo boxes are these packaging boxes and Andy Warhol's exhibit is literally a
#
reproduction of that box in that same size with some other materials.
#
But what breaks Danto's mind is that how do you separate this from the real object?
#
What makes this art but not those real boxes art?
#
So he felt that now art has in a very particular sense art has ended and he tracks two narratives
#
He doesn't firstly he doesn't think of this as a bad thing.
#
He thinks this is a great thing for art and artists shouldn't think of this as a negative
#
thing that art has ended.
#
No, that's not what it is.
#
What he calls as the first narrative of art was when art had the responsibility of representing
#
And I have thought about this.
#
Why am I not realistic?
#
Because photography exists.
#
Why do I need to be realistic?
#
Photography exists and you can record the world as it is.
#
So I don't need to be realistic.
#
I don't need to compete with photography.
#
Why when they can do it, you can put a filter, it'll look artistic, do that.
#
This thing was that the first narrative of art was when it needed to be photorealistic.
#
Well, realistic because photos didn't exist.
#
And that narrative ended when photography became a thing.
#
Now art needed to find a new purpose.
#
And that's when all of these ideas of Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, Dadaism, all of these
#
were developed because now what is art?
#
Can I play with perspective?
#
Can I play with reality?
#
What is the purpose of doing this exercise?
#
And all these great artists delved into that.
#
And in his opinion, that narrative ended with Andy Warhol because now there was no distinction
#
between now what art is, is not about looking at it, but it's about thinking about it.
#
So now in his words, we had reached the age of art theory.
#
Art was art in a certain context.
#
So he was thinking aloud and saying, if Leonardo da Vinci saw this, Drill-O-Boxes, would he
#
If Michelangelo saw it, would he consider this art?
#
This is art only when you take into context the art of before and the movement of art,
#
and then you come to this meta understanding that why can't this also be art?
#
Sort of Andy Warhol is doing that thing that look at these Campbell's soup cans, why can't
#
this be art if you look at it?
#
And this only makes sense if you think about what else has been art before.
#
So we have entered the realm of art theory.
#
And this he called the end of art, the end of the second narrative.
#
And what happens now is so he distinguishes narratives from chronicles.
#
Narratives have a purpose.
#
They have a, so like a story of anyone, it has a beginning, middle, and end.
#
It has an epic conclusion, but chronicles simply go on.
#
My life is a chronicle, like even after a narrative of my life has gone over, the rest
#
So now art has entered this phase where it is free to be whatever it wants.
#
It does not have a narrative bound to it.
#
It does not have a duty to perform anymore.
#
It can be realistic if it likes, it can be impressionistic if it likes, it can dabble
#
in whatever direction, doing all kinds.
#
It is in the chronicle stage.
#
He's got a lot of critics because firstly, he talks only about Western art and then he
#
kind of rejects Eastern art and other ideas in the process, but this is a useful model.
#
Another thing I learned from control engineering, there's this quote that I had shared with
#
The quote is that all models are wrong, but some models are useful.
#
So these models are not completely self-sufficient, comprehensive models of the world, but they
#
can be useful within a context to understand something, to work in, to do something with.
#
And this has helped me do something.
#
So I have understood the purpose of realism, what it was.
#
I have understood why I don't need to be doing it and why I don't need to feel guilty about
#
So I can't draw eyes realistically, doesn't matter.
#
You don't need to do it.
#
The point is I'm trying to communicate and if I can communicate with two dots, I've saved
#
I've saved a lot of effort.
#
I don't have a lot of time from my viewers.
#
They are scrolling on Instagram.
#
I have to catch their attention.
#
So I am allowed to do these things.
#
And sort of this kind of studying of these rules backwards, these art theories and histories
#
It helps you own what you do.
#
It helps you inform what you do.
#
And I think it makes me a better artist to communicate this, to write about it, to share
#
it in my newsletter, to talk about why I'm doing what I'm doing and to share.
#
I describe my newsletter as sharing the journey of my self-education.
#
Because who am I to teach, right?
#
I'm no one to talk about art, but I am allowed to share my journey.
#
Sharing the journey of my self-education is also actually how I'd describe the seen and
#
Because everybody's trying to educate themselves, I guess.
#
That's why journeys like this strike a chord.
#
One of the things that has led to my unease with a fair amount of art is that it seems
#
like you can only appreciate it in a particular context, and that is often a context of some
#
kind of theory or politics that goes along with it.
#
For example, you know, Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, right?
#
Which is basically, for those who don't know, in 1917, Marcel Duchamp did a sculpture called
#
Fountain, which is basically a urinal.
#
And the point is that that work of art is only meaningful for someone who's steeped
#
in the theory and in the context and in that particular narrative.
#
It doesn't mean anything in and of itself.
#
Like if I come across that somewhere, I would just think, ki theek hai, aaj bahut hydrate
#
kar liya, let's give a little back to the world.
#
But it would not strike me as anything other than that, whereas I think there is, you know,
#
and I'm just sinking aloud again, that there is some art, and I don't want to make a value
#
judgment comparing these two, but there is some art which will stand on its own.
#
As we spoke earlier, as, you know, going by Kandinsky's quote, you can just look at and
#
I mean, a lot of poetry certainly does that for me.
#
I don't need to know literary theory to fall in love with a short story or be greatly moved
#
by a poem, even when I don't know what it means.
#
So what are sort of your, I mean, you've already spoken about definitions of art and, you know,
#
the thoughts provoked by this essay you mentioned, but in general, what are your sort of thoughts
#
Like what do you consider the best art that you've encountered?
#
And did it take prior education to appreciate it for what it is or does it just stand alone
#
on its own and it doesn't need that context?
#
About the fountain, for example, what do you find able to appreciate without prior knowledge
#
is also a function of the time you are in and who you are, right?
#
Like, so if I made these drawings and I showed them to Van Gogh, he might think, that's not
#
You're supposed to finish it.
#
I'll show it to Da Vinci and he'll think this is not art.
#
Like you have to, there's so much more to do and you haven't completed it yet, right?
#
And he'll show you in his notebooks how you can build a better race car than what you
#
Air powered or water powered.
#
So again, this is, my art is also a function of its time and I'll, being myself a function
#
of my time, I will look at it and think, of course, this is independent.
#
Just like someone in 1917 might have thought, well, if you showed them the fountain, they'll
#
be like, yeah, what a great statement because I am being forced to look at this other stuff
#
Except that I think even in 1917, 99.9% of people would have seen a urinal and not seen
#
Yeah, that's a fair point.
#
So I think about a lot of institutional ideas in this way.
#
Like, for example, I had this idea about this thought about philosophy, for example, that
#
you have someone like Nietzsche writing about what would become existentialism and you have
#
Sartre writing about it.
#
Are they leading a movement?
#
Are they articulating a movement or a philosophy?
#
Should we call them the inventors of existentialism, for example, or somebody else as the inventor
#
So how many people read Sartre then and how many people explicitly read him and absorbed
#
that philosophy and then became like this?
#
And how much was it an observation of the time that he was in and the way that the art
#
and the culture and the behavior post World War II or during the last years of World War
#
II was expressing itself.
#
So we give things these names, right?
#
And we give these movements these leaders.
#
But are they leaders or are they simply leaders in the sense of creators or are they leaders
#
in the sense of observers who articulated something?
#
So that's a very crucial point to me.
#
How many people read Schopenhauer?
#
How many people read Heidegger?
#
Very few people must have read Heidegger.
#
He's a very important philosopher.
#
So is he just a really important philosopher to other philosophers or did he have something
#
useful to say for all of us?
#
If he did, certainly it wasn't communicated by him to all of those people.
#
So I like the idea of philosopher as Isaiah Berlin kind of pointed it out by saying that
#
I'm a historian of ideas.
#
And this is the reason why I personally started to read about existentialism and Nietzsche
#
and all of these other people also that I want to see the chronology of ideas over time.
#
The best ideas that people came up with.
#
Like we are going through an era right now where there's a resurgence of Stoicism.
#
And Stoicism is 2200 years old, like you tell someone that and that's one of those mind
#
exploding moments that somebody, a Roman general 2200 years ago said this thing that matters
#
to me today, the continuity of human experience.
#
And what has kept that Stoicism alive over 2200 years?
#
Is it that Marcus Aurelius who wrote it?
#
How many people would have read him?
#
All of these things are a part of like, at least I think so, like they're a part of humankind
#
and philosophers and artists.
#
And these are just people who see it and they share it.
#
But these notions of rebellion, whether Cubism or Surrealism is rebellious, they come from
#
tapping into the psyche of the community and the culture that they're in.
#
So these things are incepted in this culture by the vast masses of humanity.
#
And then one person comes along and he represented on a canvas in one way.
#
But I don't think they invented.
#
So again, when I think about whether people would understand it then as art or whether
#
they would just say, yeah, this person is just making a urinal.
#
Like surely some people will see it as that.
#
But it sort of implies just that art has a bit of a learning curve sometimes.
#
You do need to know a bit of context.
#
You do need to be a bit erudite about it.
#
I don't think that's a bad thing.
#
And so this kind of is counterintuitive to how I practice.
#
You would think that if you're tearing down institutions, why won't you tear down institutions?
#
But there's a bit of both in me.
#
I feel like curators and institutions do an important job.
#
They do articulate these things.
#
Sometimes after the time, we needed these people for Van Gogh, for example, otherwise
#
maybe we wouldn't have known about him today, possibly.
#
Maybe we wouldn't have known.
#
But there's a bit of both.
#
I feel like when people talk about this kind of art and they say that, oh, but I don't
#
understand it and there is this other stuff that I understand and therefore this is better
#
than that other stuff, I don't know.
#
I feel like that learning curve and that delayed reward at the end of it also has its own value.
#
But it's not maybe a good entry point.
#
And it's never good if that is the art and other things are not art.
#
So we are in this beautiful place now where so many things can be art and there is no,
#
you can't be a gatekeeper because there isn't one gate to one thing.
#
You can be a gatekeeper to a certain kind of knowledge and that knowledge can still
#
have value, but there is other knowledge also.
#
I mean, I'm kind of conflicted about this, but just thinking aloud on, you know, if curators
#
or the art elites hadn't discovered Van Gogh, would we have discovered him?
#
The question is that it's much more possible that because of him, there are many Van Goghs
#
who didn't get discovered.
#
I mean, I just feel that this notion of depending upon elite curators and educators and theorists
#
is very dicey because if we lived in that world, honestly, I don't think you would have
#
come up and I don't think I would have come up.
#
Like if you had people curating podcasts and deciding what is kosher and what is not and
#
what is worth listening to and what is not worth listening to and there's no other access
#
to the masses, you know, I would have been lost and basically you would have had to be
#
But then this situation is a function of today.
#
You did need curators in the 80s, for example, to run All India Radio a certain way.
#
You can argue that sure, a lot of talent was stifled.
#
Simply there was no accommodation for all the talent either.
#
They couldn't have all become radio commentators.
#
That's driven by scarcity, that there is so much space to give and somebody has to determine
#
It is possible for us to be podcasters that we can say that now these curators are not
#
But when knowledge is on the internet and knowledge can proliferate and knowledge can
#
be preserved in decentralized ways, it's great.
#
But universities did a very essential function before because otherwise there is no chronological
#
assessment of how do you build upon knowledge if you don't have these few curators who safeguard
#
So we have shut people out, but that's a necessary sin almost in the interest of preserving and
#
in the interest of cataloging and moving things forward.
#
We have therefore come to this place where we can be like, oh, we don't need you anymore.
#
So earlier in the show, you mentioned your great revelation.
#
There are other people, which is a profound revelation to me also.
#
And I'll share another revelation, which I think is as startling and which you might
#
have come upon, but will certainly come upon later, even if you haven't now, which struck
#
me when you spoke of, they start to believe Stoicism has been around for 2,200 years,
#
as if that is a long time and the realization is that time is very short or time is short
#
because we shouldn't use the word very.
#
The older I get, the more I realize how quickly time passes.
#
Someone commented on Twitter the other day and I found it very perceptive comment that
#
when I speak of 30 years ago and this is a person who commented, when I speak of 30 years
#
ago, I'm thinking of 1970 and then I suddenly realized, wait a second, it's 1991.
#
Time passes much faster than we realize it.
#
Before we kind of move on with this linear narrative from which we keep deviating, I'm
#
actually going to do a flashback and go back to a phrase that you use earlier and ask you
#
to sort of elaborate on that, which is control engineering, where you spoke about how control
#
engineering felt so natural to you.
#
You immediately got it.
#
And how even after you cease to be an engineer per se, it's dominated the way you look at
#
everything and why it's so important for you.
#
I want you to go into this a little bit more because it's very fascinating.
#
And I also wonder if it has something to do with a bent of mind that involves getting
#
meta a little bit about things, getting to the first principles about, you know, like
#
I remember last year I was telling somebody something about podcasting who doesn't podcast
#
a person who just has a Facebook presence and rants about many things there.
#
And I was telling him about podcasting.
#
And obviously, in my excitement of all that I had learned, I was Jharoing Gyan and at
#
one point he said, that is so academic who listens to the pseudo bullshit.
#
And I was like, wait a minute, I'm actually a successful practitioner at this shit, right?
#
And part of the reason I think the show gets better is because I try very deeply to get
#
meta and think about all of these things.
#
The importance of listening, how you structure a conversation, you know, how you get the
#
kind of flow that you get.
#
And I sense that you look at things the same way in the sense you're trying to break
#
Why do I see what I see?
#
Why is my art the way my art is just that very profound point you made about your weaknesses
#
eventually turning into your style about constraints giving you freedom.
#
So tell me a little bit about control engineering.
#
And if this point is separate from that, tell me a little bit about this mindset that you
#
have and whether it's natural to you or you worked at developing it.
#
This mindset about just getting to first principles, taking that step back and getting a little
#
Yeah, I think they're both the same thing.
#
So the reason why I'm fascinated by control engineering is because it offers a way to
#
And there are reflections of it everywhere in my life.
#
And so control engineering breaks the whole world into systems.
#
So once you're a control engineer, you see everything as systems and systems which have
#
inputs and outputs and they function a certain way.
#
And by intelligently understanding or manipulating these inputs and studying the outputs, you
#
can understand why did that input turn into this output.
#
So therefore, this system must be doing this, this, this, this, this, oh, this system multiplies
#
all numbers by five or this system does two X plus five or this system adds so and so
#
feedback and it does this and that.
#
And it turns this into energy.
#
And with the 30% of you figure out these black boxes and the way to do that, the way to identify
#
systems that are black boxes is a very fascinating thing.
#
What are the structures that we have that we can put here and see if this holds true
#
How do we, why don't we try this kind of structure and see if this fits?
#
Where did these structures come from?
#
How did we learn about them?
#
This idea of isolating variables and controlling certain variables and then seeing how something
#
It's a very nice way to look at the world.
#
And I have an inclination to look at my world in this way.
#
And therefore I appreciated what I learned from doing this.
#
So I'll give you an example of why this was already something that I was thinking about
#
from one of my favorite authors of all time is Kurt Vonnegut.
#
And one of my favorite books by Kurt Vonnegut is Cat's Cradle.
#
And in Cat's Cradle, there is a fictional religion called Bokanonism talked about by
#
the prophet Bokanon and who lives on this island.
#
And at the start of the book, Bokanon says that this religion is for any person who does
#
not understand how a religion can be founded on useful lies will not like this book either.
#
So there is another quote in the start of this book in which he says something like
#
we all live by the Foma that make us happy and healthy and kind and wise.
#
And Foma is a fictional word amongst many in the book, which means harmless untruths.
#
So we all live by these white lies that make us happy and healthy and wise and kind.
#
And this is the basis of all religion.
#
It's a bunch of suspended delusions that we agree upon, whether with others or whether
#
just inside our own minds, but they help us make sense of our world.
#
The quote that I said before that was shared to me by a control engineering professor in
#
a lecture was all models are wrong, but some models are useful.
#
All models are wrong means all models are simplifications of the truth.
#
They are not the truth.
#
So something as simple as Hooke's law of elasticity, that extension X is equal to a constant.
#
So if you apply a force F, it is equal to a constant multiplied by X, which is the amount
#
of deviation in that elastic deviation.
#
So this is not true because it's a linearized simplification of a nonlinear reality.
#
There is many, many more forces that are little, little deviations.
#
Many things come together, but we can make a useful equation by within certain bounds,
#
thinking of it as linear F is equal to KX and it is super useful.
#
It is the basis for a lot of design, limitless number of applications.
#
Similarly, all of these basic laws like F is equal to MA and E is equal to MC square.
#
All of these are simplifications of very, very deep and profound things.
#
In a sense, they are all wrong because they are not exactly true, but some of them are
#
useful and therefore we should not discard them.
#
We should think about things don't have value only if they are absolutely true.
#
Things can have useful purpose in our lives, even when we know they are not true, simply
#
by our understanding how to use them within a certain context.
#
Therefore religion, therefore the role of fiction in life and you see the conflict of
#
If you tell someone that a certain epic or a certain religious book is fiction and they
#
take so much offense because fiction means it's not true and only true things have value
#
and that's such a narrow minded point of view that stories don't have value.
#
The most valuable things in the world are stories.
#
We all live, Elon Musk has a story of himself.
#
He doesn't have the truth of himself out in the world.
#
This is the source of his power.
#
All religions and all prophets have stories of themselves.
#
Nobody really wants the truth.
#
They want a nice story.
#
All political leaders have nice narratives and stories around them.
#
And we believe them even if we sort of think it's not true.
#
We know it's not true, but we know that our story is stronger than that guy's story.
#
So let's stick with our story.
#
So this understanding is very profound.
#
It applies in so many ways to all of life and control engineering sort of was the scientific
#
way for me to appreciate it.
#
I heard it and I thought, look, this applies to art.
#
This applies to history.
#
This applies to someone like Gandhi, for example, right?
#
Person with many flaws, so many detailed nuances that I don't know about.
#
And there are so many people who don't know about it, right?
#
But if believing in the myth of Gandhi as a peaceful leader makes someone peaceful,
#
makes them believe in nonviolence and not hurting other people, makes them believe positively
#
about the value of bringing people along and making a movement, isn't that lie way more
#
useful than the truth of maybe he's sexist, maybe he's casteist?
#
Someone could make an argument that let's discard that truth.
#
Let's forget, let's erase it from public memory because that lie is just so much more useful
#
And then maybe through this deification is of more use to society.
#
And it's something I think about a lot, like you are wedded to the truth as engineers.
#
You think that you're going for objective truth, but like, what does the truth matter?
#
Like engineering and science is just such a small part of the world.
#
Math is such a small, like tangible things are such a small part of the world.
#
And we engineers, we think, and this is the age of the tech bros, like we think that we
#
understand everything because everything can be broken into equations and creativity will
#
be broken into equations so that AI will become creative.
#
But we don't appreciate how many things are intangible.
#
Most of the world, most of reality is intangible.
#
Most of reality is only inside our heads.
#
It doesn't actually matter what someone did to us.
#
What matters is how we feel about them and that's how we behave with them.
#
So control engineering helped me to make sense of all of these things, incomplete information,
#
but can be still useful if you make it useful.
#
And I've talked about all the ways that it has helped me in non-engineering ways, but
#
it has also made it made me a better engineer.
#
It helped me find out so much about these complex things that are designed.
#
So for example, I worked on this system, which was like a later spray, like suppose you have
#
glasses on it and it's automated though.
#
It's not actually being held by somebody.
#
How can you design a system that will not let the glasses fall?
#
It will absorb the shock and it will react appropriately, like the way this lazy boy
#
chair does, like dampening and springing action.
#
So just those things, playing with things and figuring out how they work, it's such
#
a powerful, empowering thing to do.
#
And I just loved that thing and education by my goal with going to Delft to study was
#
I wanted to be a real engineer and they made me a real engineer, like they gave, they empowered
#
me and like that is just, it feels super great to have had that education.
#
And even if I don't quote unquote use it, all knowledge is always there.
#
So just to elaborate on the lazy boy reference, all guests who come to my home studio now,
#
They can either use a lazy boy or they can use a green soul gaming chair, which I have
#
And I mean, I use a green soul gaming chair, but the second chair is a recent addition.
#
So Nishant is the first guest to be offered that option.
#
And of course, you know, being from Calcutta, half Bengali like me can relate.
#
So Calcutta boys are lazy boys.
#
Calcutta boys are lazy.
#
There is something in the air.
#
So a couple of things, a couple of observations.
#
You know, I love that quote.
#
Firstly, I think I've actually quoted it earlier on my show.
#
And I first heard it from you, which is all models are wrong, but some models are useful.
#
And the world is complex.
#
In fact, the cliche on my show that we all contain multitudes of Whitman quote is a subset
#
of that of the world being complex.
#
And I completely get that, that we can never really get at the truth.
#
Nevertheless, I actually think in a historical context, and I've been discussing this on
#
my show a lot, that the truth nevertheless has value.
#
Like I know you were just thinking aloud when you spoke of Gandhi and you know, can we not
#
speak of the sexism and casteism and can we just speak of the non-violence and the satyagraha?
#
But I think part of the mistake that we made post independence was taking exactly that
#
view that let's kind of whitewash the things that have gone wrong in our history.
#
Kapil Komirati spoke about this very eloquently in his episode with me.
#
Manu Pillay agreed with him.
#
And he came on the show recently.
#
And the truth is what happened post independence was that our historians to avoid conflict
#
in present day society decided to paper over earlier periods of time when there was violence
#
by the Mughals and so on and so forth.
#
And Komirati's contention is that now there is a backlash in the other direction.
#
And you should just have let it play out and let society resolve its own problems.
#
We are mature enough to do so.
#
Because we have reduced things to binary good and evil, then this is the narrative now.
#
Now we are losing for that.
#
And I really think that it's important to acknowledge the truth that has a value of
#
its own while accepting it can never fully be reached but acknowledge the broad truth.
#
But also I just think that history should not matter like Gandhi yeh tha ya vo tha,
#
you know, all of these guys, you know, your Gandhis and Vajpayees and Nehru's and Savarkar's
#
I think discussing the people is irrelevant.
#
You know, Gandhi got it completely wrong on railways and doctors, both of which he was
#
Gandhi got it completely right on the means being more important than the ends and the
#
importance of peaceful non-resistance.
#
There is so much to learn from that.
#
And I agree with you that we should kind of look at the learnings and discard his bad
#
ideas while seeing them for bad ideas and acknowledging them that he had them.
#
So what it comes to is that that quote like all models are wrong, but some are useful.
#
The meaning of useful here with the asterisk is that some models are useful within a certain
#
context, within therefore an engineering control terms you would call within boundaries.
#
So these, this equation holds the Hooke's law of elasticity holds until this limit beyond
#
which it does not hold anymore because elasticity is lost.
#
So all of these equations, all of these systems work within variables being within these boundaries,
#
this variable and this boundary, this and that.
#
Similarly, so like, for example, like similarly it applies in social situations, right?
#
Like I have been a militant atheist before, like anybody who is religious, I make it my
#
I would make it my business to tell them why it's a foolish thing, right?
#
But what a pointless thing to do, like a waste.
#
So my grandmother is religious.
#
It makes her a nicer person.
#
And in that little context of her life, religion is a good thing.
#
And I needed to appreciate that the truth has its place or the absolute truth has its
#
place and the useful lie within a boundary, within a certain set of limits has its useful
#
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
#
That's why I think as one goes along with life and realizes that, listen, fundamentally
#
life is meaningless and sad and ends in death and we need to choose our delusions to get
#
by and some people have chosen religion and it's a convenient way to kind of get by.
#
And we need to be kind and appreciate that.
#
I think there is also this balance between fidelity to the truth and kindness.
#
And sometimes I think in some situations, you just need to not argue and just be kind
#
to the person, though I think that this invocation to kindness is often used by some people in
#
ideological context as appealing for, you know, when they don't want to talk about the
#
truth, that don't argue with what I believe, I will be offended and you have to be kind.
#
So I think that is another extreme we kind of should not go to.
#
Just continuing down this sort of control engineering mindset where you realize that
#
perfection is impossible because, you know, all models are false, you can only get useful
#
Does that also then lead to that notion of satisfying?
#
Like, you know, one thing that I speak about in my course is that whenever you do something,
#
there is that trade-off between getting it done and getting it right.
#
And my point always is that as an artist, don't think about getting it right.
#
Just think about getting it done.
#
And you can get it right later.
#
But especially when it comes to a first draft, just get it done.
#
The important thing is to get it done.
#
And you could also talk about this as a dichotomy between perfection and production.
#
And the irony here is that the route to getting it right is to get it done again and again.
#
And the route to perfection is through repeated production as you get better and better and
#
And therefore, is it a good quality for an artist to satisfy, like satisfy is a word
#
that is a combination term, combination of the two words satisfy and satisfies.
#
And what it means is you're satisfied with something that suffices, that you're not aiming
#
That's something that is good enough, you're happy to put it out there and just move on.
#
And it seems like by the nature of your work, the sneaky art, you've been forced by circumstances
#
into satisficing all the time, where you don't have time, the person will get up and go,
#
you just got to get what you can and then move on.
#
So do you feel that there is sort of deeper artistic value in this, for example?
#
Do you think about this?
#
Do you feel that this is a constraint or do you feel that by happenstance, you've been
#
forced into thinking this way and it's actually a good way to think, you know, like you described
#
earlier that, let's say that there is someone who wants to do hyper realistic stuff and
#
that person is standing in a queue and that person cannot take out their material, but
#
you can, you're always drawing, right?
#
And to me, that seems like a massive, massive, massive privilege that at any point in time
#
and I will tell my readers that he made a sketch of me while we were talking.
#
So what are your thoughts on this?
#
So I have, I put myself in this situation where my perfectionism could not get in my way.
#
Choosing to draw with a pen, choosing to draw quickly, choosing to draw things that are
#
transient, all of these things, perfectionism could not enter the picture.
#
It's not a player in this game anymore.
#
And I put it in front of myself consciously because I understand what my tendencies are.
#
I know what my evils are.
#
This is the mistake I always make and I need to not make it.
#
So I needed to be in a situation where perfectionism was not an option for me.
#
So I often think about this idea of the things we call constraints.
#
So it's a constraint that I have only one pen.
#
I can't use another color.
#
I can't use another line with thickness.
#
I can't represent so many things.
#
It's a constraint that I'm drawing quickly.
#
That is this idea that you should be free to do your best work.
#
You should have options so you can make the best choice.
#
But more and more I find that the best work does not come from these things.
#
The best work comes when there is a deadline, for example, because you have to finish.
#
Otherwise, the best work just stays in your head.
#
It never comes down on paper.
#
Similarly, constraints in various forms, if you just change your perspective a little
#
bit, they bring you great freedom.
#
Having the constraint of only one fountain pen, not a pencil, meant the freedom to finish
#
Having the constraint of time meant the freedom to draw this thing that is only there for
#
Having the constraint of being sneaky meant that I am not anymore drawing in conspicuous
#
Think about what a conspicuous spot is.
#
If you're in front of the Eiffel Tower, that's a conspicuous spot.
#
It's a conspicuous spot because everybody else is there, because everybody wants to
#
take a photo from that angle.
#
Therefore, it is the most photographed and the most often seen view of the Eiffel Tower.
#
By being sneaky, by imposing sneakiness on my art, I cannot take that option.
#
I will circle around it two or three times.
#
I will look for spots where nobody is.
#
Therefore, I will look for spots from where pictures have not been taken or not likely
#
I will therefore find something fresh.
#
It has given me the freedom to discard my first point of view, my second choice, my
#
third choice, and often my fourth choice, and therefore discover something that others
#
It has given me the freedom to find something original, quote unquote, because nothing is
#
really original, but it has given me the freedom to find something that others don't and to
#
show something that other people are not showing.
#
So I often think about this thing, about constraints and what we call constraints and why we try
#
to run from constraints, because constraints have given me so many different freedoms.
#
I'm only going to draw in this spot, and once I leave, I am not going to touch this sketch
#
Therefore, there is this essence of that moment here.
#
Some of these are incomplete, quote unquote, they're not finished works, but they say where
#
They are an honest record of that time, and that is a quality that they have because they
#
are never touched upon again.
#
And that is a quality that very few other things can have.
#
And as we explore this field of being creative entrepreneurs, being artists who have to create
#
this brand, all of these identities matter because all of these identities are useful
#
things to add value around your work.
#
So you mentioned the term creative entrepreneur, and that's kind of where I want to go next,
#
because it strikes me that in this modern age, there is much that is exciting about
#
But one thing that I feel a little unease at is that a creator is also expected to be
#
an entrepreneur, in the sense he's supposed to be the seller of his work, the entrepreneur
#
of his brand, be the guy pushing himself.
#
Your art in the way that you actually make it, that you produce it, is sneaky.
#
But the selling is the opposite of that.
#
You've got to go out on a limb and figure out how to get publicity and how to get your
#
Now, it turns out that at one level, of course, this is something that you figured out how
#
to do well, whether it came naturally to you or you worked at it, but you figured out how
#
to do well, but many people don't.
#
And it's kind of unfair that artists also have to be entrepreneurs in this way, in this
#
So it is possible that things can work out and you can become successful without thinking
#
of it in an entrepreneurial way, but that takes a certain amount of luck.
#
For most artists, you're constantly working, working, working to get your brand out there,
#
to get opportunities, to figure out how to scale, to figure out how to even gather the
#
first thousand true fans, as it were.
#
So tell me of your journey in that regard, because you've already described how you want
#
You give up that other pyramid of engineer, PhD, whatever, to be a writer, and then you
#
discover drawing and it's incredibly satisfying.
#
But from there to making it a commercial proposition to sort of actually make money from it and
#
make it commercially viable.
#
What was that journey like?
#
How did your thinking evolve?
#
What are the different routes that you explored?
#
So I registered Sneaky Art as a business when I was living in Wisconsin.
#
So I have business taxes that I collect and I pay as a business and I have business costs
#
and more formalized setup that happened at that time.
#
And I did it then because in Wisconsin, in this town of 80,000 people called Eau Claire,
#
Wisconsin, right in the middle of the state, 90 miles away from the nearest city, there
#
is this artist's market in every Saturday of summer next to the farmer's market.
#
So in the park where everybody congregates every morning from 6 a.m. to 12 p.m., a bunch
#
of artists set up stalls and sell their wares.
#
And having spent a year there, I decided now I want to sell my art.
#
So as non-sneaky as it gets, I have set up a stall with my prints and I am sitting and
#
people are passing by who are here to buy vegetables or to buy cheese or something.
#
And they stop and they look at my prints and they ask me what these are and I tell them.
#
It pushed me way out of my comfort zone, like firstly talking to complete strangers and
#
telling them what I do and why they should care for it.
#
Then putting a dollar value to my work and then convincing like the act of making a sale.
#
There is some element of convincing.
#
There is a pitch, even if it is something you give reluctantly or you don't at all.
#
But there is a pitch that needs to be made in some way, whether your art does it for
#
you or you talk a bit, at least helps to talk.
#
But I had to do these things which were uncomfortable.
#
But these things have immense value.
#
So from speaking to people who are there to buy vegetables, not here to buy art and getting
#
them to buy art, I learned things.
#
Firstly, from showing my work to people as a commercial artist, so I'm here to sell with
#
When I showed my work to people, I set up my stall in a very formal way.
#
Like I made sure I thought about the experience of somebody passing by and the experience
#
of somebody who decided to stop and walk in.
#
What would they see next?
#
What should they be able to pick up?
#
I thought about these things.
#
So what that does is it makes me think about my art not as the artist.
#
I have to externalize it.
#
I have to look at it dispassionately.
#
Why should they look at this piece?
#
Why should they look at that piece?
#
Is this going to be interesting to someone?
#
Why would they be interested in this?
#
Would it be simply because I enjoyed drawing it?
#
That can't be the criteria.
#
This is a useful exercise if you're an artist to get into.
#
This is a useful exercise if you're a creative to get into.
#
Even as a writer, you'd love your writing maybe, but you should think about the other
#
person who's going to read it and why should they give a damn?
#
Because there is so much they can do.
#
You can buy excellent cheese in Wisconsin.
#
You don't need to buy my art.
#
I had to price my art a certain way.
#
I had to put that dollar value.
#
And I thought about what is it that I want to be doing here?
#
What is my objective here?
#
What do I want to learn from it?
#
Is a win a dollar amount?
#
Tough to put a dollar amount because you don't know what's good, what's bad.
#
I can set $200 as a great amount if I make that much sale.
#
But how do I know that's good?
#
So I have to have some notion of something that is good to me.
#
So I set this benchmark for my first year, first summer that I was selling art, that
#
I want to sell art for as cheap as possible.
#
What I want to do is, so controlling variables here, right?
#
So I want to make as many sales as I can.
#
And I want to control the various variables around the sale.
#
One variable is, I don't want to spend so much money.
#
They are not here to spend money on art, right?
#
So I had to think of the minimum amount of money that someone would take out of their
#
pocket without a second thought.
#
What is that number in this place?
#
This is a rural place in Wisconsin.
#
Chicago, that number might be $20.
#
India, that Bombay, that number might be 200 rupees.
#
Calcutta, that number might be 100 rupees.
#
Wisconsin, that number, as I perceived it, was $5.
#
So my cheapest drawing needs to be $5.
#
My most expensive drawing can't be more than $20.
#
With this idea, I am controlling for financial hesitation.
#
Now this is not a factor anymore in this game.
#
Now the factor is only, do I want it?
#
Now I get to examine, do people want my drawing?
#
I'm not pricing anyone out.
#
$5, anybody can spend here.
#
And if they like my work, they might not buy the $20 piece, but they'll want to go away
#
Once you have them, you have them.
#
And they want to do something now.
#
Because once they're interested, they actually want to spend money.
#
They don't want to leave empty handed.
#
It makes people feel bad.
#
It's part of the psychology of spending money that you want to do something now.
#
What this did was, now I started to think, what is the space that my art can occupy in
#
What is a $5 piece of art?
#
It can't be a piece on a wall.
#
It has to be a small print maybe.
#
How do people use small prints?
#
Is it something that looks like a card?
#
Maybe a sticker for their laptops?
#
Is it something that maybe they can put in their wallets?
#
So what art of mine does that purpose?
#
I'm now thinking about my art in terms of how it means to someone in their life.
#
$5 is what they pay for it.
#
$5 is not what it means anymore.
#
Now that it is there, why would they want it in their life?
#
This is a useful exercise for all creatives also.
#
Think about what place do you occupy?
#
After one season of selling art in this way, I sold hundreds of prints this way.
#
I got many commissions.
#
Lots of people were super happy to buy it.
#
So a bunch of students came one time who didn't want to spend even $5.
#
For $1, I gave them two, three stickers.
#
And they bought sets of stickers.
#
Not because they could only afford it.
#
So somebody ended up spending $10 on stickers.
#
Not because that's the only thing they can afford.
#
But this is the way they want that art.
#
So I learned that art has many final forms.
#
I made a drawing in a sketchbook.
#
Now it can be so many different things.
#
It can be a print on a wall, like on fine art paper.
#
It could even be a fabric print.
#
It can be a digital piece that somebody buys to make as a wallpaper or a phone wallpaper
#
All of these are various ways that people engage with art in their lives.
#
We often dismiss people who don't buy fine art as Philistines or whatever, or they don't
#
But more people appreciate art than that.
#
People appreciate, like it is incumbent on the artist to think about the way that their
#
audience engages with art.
#
It is not the right approach, in my opinion, to make the art and then be like somebody
#
Somebody owes it to buy from you because you are so creative.
#
You have done your job.
#
That is, it's, I don't think in any field of work that is appreciated.
#
But in terms of art, it's almost made into a virtue because people don't want to engage
#
with this commercial side, which is ugly and demeaning.
#
And for a long time, it's been that way because we haven't had the tools of commercial engagement
#
Like somebody like Da Vinci and all the other big artists, they needed patrons.
#
At a time in Florence and Italy, they needed the Medici family to patronize all these artists
#
who became fantastic, great artists.
#
So you need to please this person.
#
Then he will put your work somewhere that hopefully other people can see it.
#
And then maybe it lasts the test of time, blah, blah, blah becomes a thing.
#
So over the last 20 years, that thing changed for us because of the internet.
#
First, there was no money.
#
You can put your art there.
#
You can put it on Flickr, whatever, whatever.
#
Then you can put it on Facebook and then you can make these business pages and then you
#
can put it on Instagram.
#
And now suddenly you have affiliate marketing and suddenly you can reach an audience and
#
build an infinite audience potentially and you can get money from a few people who decide
#
to endorse you, affiliates.
#
So brands and corporations who are like, oh, I'll give you a pen, I'll give you, you only
#
use my sketchbook, for example, use only my art supplies, my paints and tag us.
#
And we will then give you so much, so much.
#
And that works for a lot of artists.
#
And now we have reached a point where even the means of monetization are distributed.
#
You can gather small funds and micro payments from various, various hundreds of fans.
#
This is super liberating because like you mentioned with the blogs, for example, now
#
it's not 800 words or 1000 words or 5,000 words.
#
It can be micro fiction.
#
If you have the fans, if you have the people who care, then you get to define the terms.
#
Every artist should love that reality.
#
You are not bound to make a fine art piece on canvas, which is eight feet tall or something
#
You can do whatever you want.
#
You can make a product out of the piece.
#
You can make a product out of a cool photo of the piece, which is better than the piece
#
The experience of looking at art on Instagram is the experience you're offering, the thing
#
The experience of watching you draw through a time-lapse video of which I post many myself,
#
that experience is the product you are offering.
#
Really the final piece that I drew and how it turned out is irrelevant.
#
Just watching me draw set to some cool music on Reels or TikTok, that is the product.
#
I am giving you that beautiful 30 seconds.
#
You can replay it again and again and forever and enjoy it.
#
And many people do that.
#
They watch these videos again and again.
#
Again, huge freedom for the artist.
#
You can do whatever you want and you can reach people who are okay with that.
#
These freedoms come with the responsibility now that now you have to think about why they
#
should care because if you can do whatever you want, anybody else can also do whatever
#
Why should they look at your art and not the art of some person in, say, the other side
#
If you live in Vancouver, why shouldn't they look at someone's art in Australia?
#
There is a fantastic artist I follow from Australia who does beautiful time-lapse videos.
#
Huge audience, way bigger than mine.
#
And of course, people will follow her.
#
It's all the same, right?
#
I'm competing with her in a sense.
#
I could think that and then I could be like, oh, that's so wrong.
#
But that's not how this works.
#
The responsibility that comes to me is that how do I differentiate myself?
#
This is also a freedom I have, but it's part of my responsibilities.
#
I have to brand myself.
#
I have to talk about myself in a certain way.
#
Why should someone care about me?
#
Is it because I'm the greatest artist in the world?
#
So am I making it my business to compete with five million artists on Instagram?
#
Van Gogh, Da Vinci, Michelangelo never had this kind of competition.
#
They had to compete for the attention of one patron or two patrons or ten patrons only with
#
the people who are in that town or somebody comes from outside.
#
That's the competition.
#
Nobody has ever had to compete with so many people.
#
It's like an artist in Versova competing with everyone else in Versova for the attention
#
of the king of Versova.
#
In fact, even smaller, Yari Road, because the population in the town would be so much
#
But if he makes it his job to be on Instagram and thinks that now he's in competition with
#
everybody else who's on Instagram, then that's a losing battle again.
#
It does not mean that you're not good.
#
It does not mean that you don't deserve to make money of your art.
#
Surely the point is not that one person should make money of art, like only the person who's
#
So you have to demolish this whole structure why you is not about just how good you are
#
because that's a race you're not going to win.
#
Why you is a question now of other things.
#
Maybe it has to do with how you made your art.
#
Maybe it has to do with who you are.
#
Why should somebody in Versova care about an artist in Versova and not an artist in
#
You have to give them that reason.
#
They will like to know an artist in Versova.
#
But it is your responsibility to develop those reasons.
#
It is your responsibility to woo them and to do the communication job that does this.
#
So with these tools of monetization, these tools of distribution, these tools of audience
#
outreach, comes the responsibility that now you can do outreach, so now you have to do
#
You can monetize from anybody.
#
So now you have to think about what's going to monetize.
#
What art do they care about?
#
What kind of art do they care?
#
How do they engage with art?
#
What can you offer that somebody else can't?
#
So there's this idea, you know, of how we should originality.
#
There's no such thing as originality.
#
All of us, whether you're a writer or an artist, you're not original.
#
You are borrowing, you are begging and stealing and copying from everybody else before you.
#
And then you may be, if you're very lucky, you move one inch forward into something that
#
Maybe, maybe a very tiny fraction and then they move the whole thing forward for everybody
#
else after them to copy that very easily.
#
So I tell people, don't try to be original, try to be authentic.
#
There's a very subtle difference between these two things.
#
Authenticity is what you have that nobody else has because it is authentic to you.
#
Say what your journey is.
#
So tiny people, drawings matter to people because, not just because they're the best
#
drawings of people on a street, no, there are far greater artists than me.
#
It matters because of the story I make around tiny people.
#
That story is unique and that story gives value to these drawings that I make.
#
The idea that tiny people are a non-fungible moment in space and time, that these people
#
are a result of my observation from that street intersection that day while having that coffee
#
and looking in this direction.
#
And it can never happen again because those people will not be in the street at the same
#
time dressed that same way, the weather, my ideas, my inclinations, and my moods.
#
Even if you bring all of those things together, maybe I'll just happen to look at different
#
things then and draw different people because I drew someone and five other people passed
#
by also that I didn't draw.
#
Maybe I'll draw someone else.
#
This moment can never be replicated.
#
This drawing in this way, this collection of hundred people on this page can never ever
#
It is from this day on this location.
#
This creates value around what that piece is.
#
This helps people understand the significance of that.
#
And this is me talking because now I'm thinking about what do I think about things like existentialism,
#
phenomenology, what do I think about space and time and this idea of things coming and
#
This is me talking, right?
#
This makes it authentic to me that nobody else has.
#
It's not about the technical skill of my drawing.
#
So there is a lot of liberation in the idea of being a creative entrepreneur.
#
But we get bogged down in these things that, oh, I'll have to do things and I don't want
#
Like I just want to draw.
#
And as an outsider to art, I don't have much patience for this.
#
I mean, before we proceed, I think since we both mentioned Versova a couple of times,
#
we should give a shout out to our mutual unseen friend, Daddu, the founder, the 92 year old
#
founder of the Versova Mumblecore movement, which existed long before Versova did.
#
You know, the point you made is something that I tell people about all the time in my
#
That, you know, like I remember while I was teaching the podcasting course in the first
#
batch and somebody was like trying to figure out where is a hole in the market.
#
And I was like, dude, the point is there are more than a million podcasts.
#
Any hole in the market, if it exists, will be filled before you get there.
#
Interview podcasts are a dime a dozen, policy podcasts are a dime a dozen.
#
The hole in the power market is really you, you know, the only thing that makes a podcast
#
So you've got to be authentic to yourself.
#
And that being authentic to yourself is the only thing that works.
#
And it's a big enough challenge.
#
It's super difficult to do this.
#
But I think if you flick a switch, no, it's super easy.
#
You just have to flick that switch once, like all the vlogs I watch, for example, on YouTube,
#
they're all people who are authentic to themselves.
#
I know exactly what they're like.
#
Or if someone listens to my podcast, I would imagine they know exactly what I'm like, because
#
what you see is what you get.
#
You can't fake it for too long.
#
Even if you're on reality TV and a camera is on, you know, you can't fake it for too
#
Eventually, you will relapse into being who you are.
#
So I think that there's something in that.
#
And you know, you spoke about sort of authenticity being difficult.
#
And earlier, you had mentioned that whenever people in public find your drawing something,
#
they're only appreciative.
#
And I'm just thinking of what my instinctive reaction would be.
#
And it would also be appreciative, regardless of the drawer or the drawing.
#
And the reason for that would be that most of the ugly competition around us is people
#
constantly trying to project an image of themselves onto the world.
#
That's all that social media is.
#
It's just a constant battle of posturing.
#
And when someone is sitting lost in a drawing, what they're doing is exactly the opposite.
#
They're not projecting an image of themselves onto the world, but they're internalizing
#
something that they see and they're working on it.
#
And just that act itself, there's a certain beauty to it, which I kind of appreciate there.
#
So there is this mindset that on the one hand, you are seeking the zen-like state that just
#
going out there and drawing what you see gives you.
#
At the other end, there is a hustle, like in one of your poses also, the picture of
#
Like I think the Marriott commissioned you to do some paintings and they invited you
#
to this gig and you had a stall like thing where you're selling books and you're wearing
#
And again, that's not sneaky art.
#
It's non-sneaky selling.
#
And you looked at technology for that in the sense you're very active on Reddit.
#
That's been a part of your gig.
#
You've been thinking fairly deeply about building communities like through Discord and you've
#
been examining mechanisms like the buy me a coffee thing.
#
And you're completely right that the remarkable thing is that 20 years ago, as a creator,
#
I would not be able to reach my audience directly.
#
I would have to go through an intermediary.
#
There would be gatekeepers who would have the tools of publishing.
#
I think the blogging age made me kind of jump through that.
#
But even in the blogging age, even in the autees, while my readers would place value
#
on my work because they're reading it, they're spending time, time is money, I would not
#
be able to capture any of that value directly.
#
And the only way to capture it was in a very clumsy way where intermediaries say, right,
#
for the Times of India, they accumulate eyeballs, they sell advertising, a very small chunk
#
And the remarkable thing about these modern times is today that's changed completely,
#
as I've experienced over the last year and a half as you've experienced.
#
So tell me a little bit more about your feelings about what this new age holds for creators.
#
How do you think differently now about your art than, say, when you started?
#
So what is true today is something that even with the tech could not have been possible
#
Like you mentioned, say, 2005, 2006, you didn't have the means of monetization.
#
There have been services that have tried to do this before.
#
There's a service called Flatter.
#
And Flatter, the idea is beautiful.
#
The idea is that if you are a Flatter user, say you're a reader who reads a lot, you have
#
a Flatter account and you would put in $30 a month.
#
This is my patronage to various creators that I will find on the internet.
#
Wherever you go, you find a YouTube video, you see an article you like, if they have
#
a Flatter button, you click it.
#
And what it does is suppose you click 10 buttons over the month, it will split your $30 into
#
10 places and give it to these people.
#
If you click 500, then it will split it.
#
That's a fantastic concept.
#
Before it's time, I'm sure.
#
The trouble with that was it was before it's time.
#
For various reasons, it didn't work.
#
One was that you need to have a Flatter account.
#
So every person who wants to endorse has to sign up with this service.
#
Secondly, what happened was that the notion of microtransactions did not exist in the
#
So that needed many things to happen together.
#
That needs, firstly, it needs people to get tired of institutional content.
#
It needs people to be tired of what the algorithm is throwing at them.
#
So suppose all of this technology was possible in 2012, it would not work because people
#
were too enamored by Facebook.
#
What Facebook is throwing at them is still so fresh that why do I need to, like, what
#
I'm getting all this for free.
#
So many forces had to come align, in a sense, like so many stars had to align for this to
#
be the right time for this to happen, that we are wary of the algorithm.
#
We are tired of the kind of content that is thrown at us and we are seeing so much new
#
content and so many incredible formats and all these random creators creating something
#
extremely unexpected from so much, like all these TikTok creators, the kind of thing.
#
So people dismiss TikTok, right?
#
Just think what TikTok is doing to Instagram.
#
Instagram meant that if I make a piece of art, which maybe took me five months to make,
#
I make an Instagram post of it because that's the only place you can post.
#
And people are just scrolling past.
#
Maybe I get 0.1 seconds from somebody.
#
If they really like me, maybe they give me one second.
#
If they are absolutely in love with me, maybe they will read my caption.
#
TikTok, if you do a decent job, you are asking and you are getting 30 seconds of engagement.
#
You're getting 60 seconds of engagement because now you can make 60 second videos.
#
That is orders of magnitude more.
#
And all it needs is for you to engage in its format.
#
That same piece of art, if you just set it to music and after you made it, you just make
#
a video sort of moving over it and showing all its nuances to the right mood set by the
#
right song within a 60 second clip, suddenly you are getting millions of people to engage
#
with you for 60 seconds.
#
They are in it for this experience.
#
This is a result of its times and it is causing so much fantastic usage.
#
This idea that you can use a song and you can repurpose it to show art or you can repurpose
#
These are not envisioned by TikTok founders.
#
These are all things that innovative creators came up with to circumvent as they were thinking
#
But what they did was they charted a new path of things that are possible to do.
#
Then came this idea that, oh, I'll also imitate what this person did.
#
And then there was this idea, oh, now there are trends.
#
You do dances according to TikTok.
#
You do acts according to TikTok.
#
All of that became a thing because hashtags will proliferate.
#
So all of these systems, how they work organically to make things happen, it's never because
#
of one thing or one person or one idea.
#
It's because of all these various things aligning.
#
And as a creator today, all of these various things are aligning in beautiful ways.
#
So like I was saying before, I have little patience for people who say that I'm just
#
I don't want to think about the money because what you are saying is I want to go back to
#
I don't want there to be, I don't care about social media.
#
I don't care about monetization streams.
#
I just want to make art and I want some gallery owner to love me and then sell my art to people.
#
You are asking us to go back in time to those days and therefore you want to resurrect the
#
gates and the gatekeepers.
#
Your personal inabilities aside, I have no patience for that, I'm sorry.
#
Hopefully the future that we are thinking about, the future that we are starting to
#
see is not a singular idea future.
#
So hopefully that market will still exist and gallery owners will exist and curators
#
will exist and you will hopefully continue to make sales.
#
But since that is not the only market anymore, it will not be the way you envisioned it would
#
And I for one, I'm glad for that because it allows people like me to be an artist.
#
It allows people like me to be a podcaster and it allows people like me to reach 1000
#
true fans with a newsletter, things that would be impossible before.
#
So this is just a glorious time to be a creator.
#
I think it is the best time to, it has its risks because now that this idea is there,
#
what it does is it takes away this, the beauty of anonymity and maybe this is me being nostalgic
#
about what it used to be like, so maybe I'm wrong, but if you're a blogger before and
#
you don't have an audience, there is a certain phase in your life when you need to not have
#
You need to just like, so that cynical phase of me when I was making jokes and getting
#
things out, this got me in the flow of expressing myself.
#
If I was getting reactions then and people telling me, how can you make this joke?
#
How dare you or someone reading it and maybe not saying that, let's say nobody sends me
#
those reactions, but I know 5,000 people are reading it.
#
I might start thinking about, do I want to say this to people?
#
Should I say to people, what if something happens?
#
Someone self-conscious like me, if I had a notion of a vast audience, I would have trouble
#
So like flip side of thinking that you can get an audience if you do the right thing
#
is that you don't enjoy the time that you don't have an audience.
#
And I think a lot of creators and writers and artists should cherish the period when
#
they don't have an audience.
#
That's the time when you can put in like lots of work, not have a fixed image of yourself
#
because once you have an audience, they have an image of you.
#
And I just spoke, I recorded with somebody recently who did really well on Instagram
#
and she grew an audience to like 30, 40,000 followers.
#
And what that did was it chained her, it bound her.
#
Now she felt I have to give them what they want.
#
I can't do just what I want.
#
This drawing that I wanted to make, I can't share it because that's not what clicked last
#
So I have to do what clicked last time and things escalated and it became really bad
#
She got into depression and anxiety, suffered from a burnout.
#
And she had to kind of take these reins back in her hands.
#
And we talk about that in our conversation.
#
This episode is going to come out next week, in fact, that how important it is to engage
#
with the audience in a new medium.
#
So this is another aspect of the creator economy today, which is beautiful in that you can
#
take your audience from one platform to another and engage with them in a different way.
#
This is absolutely not answering the question you asked, but I see the internet as two kinds
#
of places as a creator.
#
So one is a place where metaphorically you cast a net, you catch attention and people
#
Twitter is like that, Facebook's like that, Instagram is like that.
#
But these are also split, they look at you and then they look away.
#
So you have one second at best to do something, play your trick.
#
And that trick is to take them to the other part of the internet.
#
These I think of as destinations.
#
This is your blog, this is your newsletter, this is your podcast.
#
And a small fraction of these people whose attention you catch will go with you over
#
They will hit that link and they will go somewhere.
#
But this is then your opportunity to engage with them on new terms.
#
So a lot of people are frustrated with how things are today that, oh, the internet is
#
such a terrible place for content and this and that.
#
But it's because you're doing things on Instagram that can't be done on Instagram.
#
You can't talk to people on Instagram.
#
That's not what they go to Instagram to do.
#
They go there to scroll and you are saying, don't scroll.
#
Zuckerberg is making them scroll, giving them dopamine for scrolling and you are saying,
#
You're making it an unpleasant experience.
#
They feel guilt whenever they see your post and therefore they avoid your post even more.
#
So you have to take them to that platform where they will engage with you.
#
So you must have seen this, like you were talking about how you were doing shorter form
#
content before because you thought there's no market for this, right?
#
But in fact, one of the first times we had engaged with each other on Twitter, you had
#
posted something about a short attention span and I had replied saying that I don't think
#
there is a short attention span and that later became a blog post I wrote.
#
I formulated further ideas from it.
#
Like I told you in that tweet, there's no short attention span because more PhD thesis
#
are written today than ever before and read more big books and big series are written
#
today and read by more people and more long TV series are binge watched.
#
So that short attention span is not true.
#
It's an observation bias because short attention span people make themselves known and float
#
to the top and occupy all, make a lot of noise because they have a short attention span.
#
That's a good point and I don't remember the exchange at all, which I will pretend proves
#
That was a mistaken way of thinking.
#
So this exchange sort of became the first lines of a post I wrote about how there is
#
not a short attention span problem.
#
There is a short attention span, but we misinterpret the symptoms and we misdiagnose solutions.
#
What we have is not a chronic short attention span problem.
#
What we have is a short consideration span.
#
And what I mean by that is the amount of time somebody will give you before considering
#
whether to give you more time because there are so many things they can do.
#
There are other YouTube recommendations, there are other websites, there's Instagram with
#
other things, there's Twitter.
#
I think that might be only true at the first moment of discovery, the first time they discover
#
I don't think it's true even after.
#
For example, if someone is reading an article, if you have a long chunk of text, they will
#
They'll do something else instead.
#
Yeah, but if it's Tim Halford, I'm going to read the full thing even if it's a long chunk
#
of text because it's Tim Halford.
#
So you have a prior notion of the reward that that person will give you for sticking with
#
But a lot of new readers will simply not do it because in today's time, there are other
#
things they can consider.
#
And therefore, maybe they need somebody to tell them who this person is and maybe they
#
need somebody to validate this person from before, somebody who respects tweeting this
#
person out and saying that, hey, this is worth your time, give it time.
#
And then they go to it, whatever.
#
But generally, a good writer who doesn't do things to recalibrate the consideration of
#
his readers is going to lose readers.
#
So there are many people who write newsletters now who say have a chunk of long text and
#
they don't get the readership.
#
And the good advice around it is that you need to every few minutes or every whatever
#
reading time, you need to give them another reason why they should keep reading.
#
I think this is this way of thinking is an example of a model that is useful, but not
#
necessarily the whole truth, because the way I look at the content I discover and the things
#
I listen to and typically a lot of it will come when a friend will recommend something
#
highly and say, hey, check this out.
#
And you know, regardless of my attention span or consideration span, I'll trust that judgment
#
But if it's someone whose work I'm familiar with, which is actually most of the content
#
we consume, or at least I consume, I'm not sure this would be necessarily an issue.
#
So you know, so here's the thing.
#
I was like number one to respond to what you said earlier, I can agree with you, like one
#
of my guests on the show in an episode I've already recorded, but will release next week,
#
But before this episode releases is also a former writer of Gussa Ki Maaf, which is Abhinandan
#
Sekri, who runs News Laundry.
#
And he and I were chatting about how if when we were 20, if we posted what we thought on
#
Twitter, we would have been cancelled for sure.
#
We would, you know, screenshots of that time would surface today and we'd be screwed.
#
Because you need this period of time, like you said, when you're anonymous, when no one's
#
reading you, when you can discover what you're doing, either in terms of your thinking or
#
your view of the world, or of your art and all of that, and that's incredibly useful.
#
But at the same time, like my blog, fortunately enough, right from the start had a pretty
#
big audience of AC and the unseen does today, though it's now lost in the midst of time.
#
But that was very useful for me actually, because that kept me going.
#
The fact that like people would write to me, you know, at my peak after I'd done five years
#
of it, like between 2004 and 2009, I did some five posts a day on my blog.
#
So I had 8,000 posts in that period.
#
And at my peak, I had some 20,000 views a day, which was a lot of which was responsibility,
#
which was that, you know, people would write to me and say that, hey, I live in New Zealand,
#
and I don't read any of the Indian newspapers.
#
I just go to India uncut and I see what's happening there.
#
And this, of course, was, you know, back in the day before social media really took off
#
before Twitter and all that.
#
So this was a great commitment device that I would write because I felt they were listeners.
#
The other aspect of this whole thing of artists needing to be salesmen is that, yeah, I get
#
it that these opportunities are open to you and you can't just say, rather do my art.
#
You wanted to reach someone you wanted to have an effect.
#
You want to do justice to the art that you produce and get it to its audience.
#
But you know, one issue that can emerge with that is that people then start depending too
#
much on validation, that they'll do something and they'll market it and they'll say, shit,
#
I'm getting 10 views, I'm getting 13 views or like Puneet Superstar and the earlier discussed
#
story, three views per video.
#
And then you say that I'm not going to do this anymore.
#
And that's disastrous because the advice I give young creators is that find something
#
that you love doing for its own sake and then just stick to it and don't look for validation
#
for a long, long time because creators tend to overestimate the short term and underestimate
#
And if you're constantly making your production depend on validation and validation will not
#
One because it takes time to organically build an audience and two because you will suck
#
Like I'm sure even your old drawings suck.
#
So you'll suck at the start.
#
You've got to keep doing it again and again to become good.
#
So I think it can become a bit of a double-edged sword.
#
But the important thing I would advise all creators and in a sense, you've lived this
#
with through your work is that bloody hell just do something you love.
#
That's a starting point, you know, and then shit happens around it, you know, you build
#
something organically and yes, you can have a marketing mindset, a sales mindset, figure
#
out how do I grow my brand?
#
How do I build a community around me?
#
But to me, all of those come later.
#
The first thing is that do something you love and if you love it, keep doing it.
#
That's the whole point of loving something.
#
And in fact, this is becoming easier today than before, because while we were still in
#
this earlier mindset that you need to appeal to these institutions that will sponsor you,
#
you needed to therefore become viral, like that was the only means of success.
#
And virality meant appealing to millions of people, which means a broad denominator of
#
people and therefore your work loses its unique charm.
#
So maybe you sacrifice on the thing that you enjoy the most in the interest of fitting
#
into a groove, which will go viral into formats that will go viral into styles that are trending.
#
So therefore I should do this.
#
And therefore it becomes less about your personal joy and more about these goals, which you
#
need to reach in order to be able to do it.
#
And then you sort of suspend your joy in the short term thinking key.
#
Maybe once I reach this audience, then I'll be able to do these things.
#
And then that never comes because the never-ending cycle, both of these points are true.
#
It's a double-edged sword.
#
So I was thinking about you getting 20,000 views in 2006, 2007, the circumstance around
#
that is so useful that there was no economy based on performative reactions.
#
Therefore, I mean, so now because there is Twitter, there is a whole reputational economy
#
based on reacting, virtue signaling and performative reactions to earnest content.
#
Maybe foolish, maybe wrong, maybe out of context, it is anathema even.
#
But whatever someone says, you are incentivized to take it out of context.
#
You are rewarded for taking it to the worst possible attributions to those words.
#
And whether or not you are right about it, there is a lot to gain from doing these things.
#
And this just, it's not that these people are bad people.
#
It's just that this algorithm is so rewarding if you do this.
#
And it becomes the way that they interact with other people.
#
Like I often think about why this happens.
#
There are so many people who, and you've spoken so much about, and we've talked actually together
#
about this kind of performative virtue signaling that happens on Twitter and why it happens.
#
It's because I feel like we are so, we've been thrust into this social media and nobody
#
is quite prepared for what it means that a thousand people will read what you are thinking.
#
And those thousand people are not in your locality, they are not thousand people like
#
you who have had your education or your various socioeconomic parameters, a match up, none
#
They are from entirely different worlds.
#
What social media is doing is it is throwing these worlds together.
#
These worlds are colliding, to use George Costanza's phrase.
#
And that makes George angry.
#
That's a terrible, unfortunate situation.
#
Someone is young on Twitter and they see somebody tweet something that hurts them.
#
Maybe Amit says something about someone that they idolize and they don't like it because
#
that's not Amit talking to his people.
#
That is this entity who has entered their world saying something about something that
#
they feel a certain way about.
#
And they don't have the wherewithal, the understanding or maybe the time and mental energy to put
#
Because this whole game is about reacting in your context.
#
You are reacting to your followers.
#
This is how Twitter works.
#
You are not saying something to the person.
#
This is why I like Reddit so much as compared to Twitter, for example.
#
You're not saying something to the person on Twitter.
#
You are saying something for your people to hear you say to that person.
#
So performativeness is not like this terrible thing they did.
#
Performativeness is what they have been forced into.
#
I respond to someone on Twitter, I typed out half my reply and I think, you know, my followers
#
Do I want people to see this?
#
Do I care to say this if other people are going to see this and then they'll follow
#
this thread and what will that say about me?
#
So I am being forced into a performance.
#
I don't want to see what other people reply to other people's tweets.
#
I literally just want to see people's tweets.
#
I don't want to see what they like.
#
I don't want to see who they follow.
#
I don't want to see who they reply to because sometimes you find out unpleasant things about
#
people you're speaking to also and you don't want to shatter that image.
#
I just want to know you as this thing.
#
I don't care to know more about you.
#
Please let's keep distance.
#
But Twitter doesn't let you.
#
It throws this performativeness and this really terrible situations at you.
#
And people are reacting to it.
#
Reacting is this privilege.
#
You know, like we live in a hierarchical country.
#
Like we were talking right at the start of this conversation about how the cynicism
#
meant putting someone down, right?
#
Because in a hierarchical mindset, that's the way you have value.
#
There is no objective value.
#
There is only am I better than this or am I worse than that?
#
So always we are trying to climb over someone else because that's the only way we can get
#
Like if I have climbed over this person, I am better than so many people.
#
If I can dunk on Amit Varma on Twitter, then I can in front of my crowd look smarter than
#
That does not take into account what Amit feels about it.
#
That does not take into account whether I misread or correctly interpreted what Amit
#
It does not care about these things because in his world, in their world, this person
#
is trying to climb a little bit higher.
#
And these things are sadly incentivized.
#
And these things, when someone gets the first chance to react to someone, again in a hierarchical
#
country, you don't get many opportunities to express yourself.
#
You can respond not only to Amit Varma, you can even respond to Amit Abhachan.
#
And you can make fun of what you put tweet numbers, ha ha ha, old man, and whatever.
#
Everybody's in that stage that I was in, that cynical stage, like nobody else matters.
#
I am the only real person.
#
These are all figments of my imagination.
#
All these other humans.
#
And I can behave in a way that I would never behave in real life.
#
In real life, I would never be rude to Amit Varma.
#
If I come across him, but Twitter hai kuch bhi bolo.
#
Twitter is giving you this license ki bol do kuch bhi, kyunki ha ha ha hoga thoda.
#
And then you can close the app and then you can go back to your real world.
#
These are not real people.
#
So it reinforces this mindset that you are the only real thing here.
#
I mean, two aspects of this.
#
And one is like you correctly pointed out, if someone feels attacked, these are different
#
If some worldviews are like religion, you know, if you attack somebody's God, of course
#
they will get offended.
#
So just as a question of politeness, I would not say bad things about somebody's religion.
#
But in a similar way, if you say something about that disagrees with someone's ideological
#
point of view or challenges that you're basically doing exactly the same thing.
#
So it becomes personal.
#
But what is worse, and I think Jonathan Haidt pointed to it that, you know, the seminal
#
moment in all of this and social media becoming toxic was the Facebook like button and the
#
Twitter retweet button, because suddenly that validation becomes a big deal.
#
And if there is one trend I absolutely hate about Twitter, it's about dunking on people.
#
You know, we should be discussing ideas.
#
We should be discussing things, policies, events, instead, we are dunking on individuals
#
Like I see so many people dunking on Chetan Bhagat, for example, by if you don't like
#
There's no need to, you know, why are you giving him space in your head?
#
You know, and frankly, my sense of Chetan Bhagat, and I think I shared this in clear
#
writing group that we're both part of today, is that, you know, beyond the point, the bottom
#
line is he's right about the elites, you know, he's gone out there and he's done what he's
#
He's writing books, he's changing the culture, no matter what we think of the books he's
#
writing or the way he's changing the culture, while we elites are sipping up in our coladas.
#
That's a different matter.
#
My point is that stop dunking on the guy.
#
If you think he's worth nothing, why waste your mind space on him?
#
You are correct about this, but you are correct because of a trajectory you have taken over
#
And these other people are on their own trips.
#
Remember, you are not real.
#
You are a figment of their imagination in their world.
#
There are other people.
#
If you spend enough time on Twitter, you stop thinking there are other people.
#
They are all various forces.
#
So you don't get to fight, say, fascism in real life.
#
But if somebody tweets about fascism, this is your opportunity to fight fascism.
#
So fascism being an easy one we can all agree upon, but any other idea.
#
So you said you wouldn't dunk on someone's religion, but there are so many religions.
#
It's not just religion.
#
It's not just Hinduism.
#
Virat Kohli is religion.
#
I've been attacked by trolls of all these.
#
I've been trolled by fans of all these people you just named.
#
And this is simply because you are not real in their world.
#
You are just this thing that has collided their universe and now it is behaving in this
#
way that they don't like.
#
If you were to say this in person, you would be a real person and they would react to you
#
I think at one level, see, some of the aggressive reactions come because you have challenged
#
the worldview and you're from another world and they respond to that.
#
But I think part of it also comes from whether they have a worldview or they don't have it
#
or they're pretending to have it or they're pretending to be part of a tribe.
#
Other incentives of Twitter and Facebook where you always want to raise your status within
#
And how do you do this?
#
You do this by abusing the people in the other group and abusing people within your own group
#
for not being pure enough.
#
Like you're kind of lucky you're not bigger than you are, otherwise there would be one
#
set of vokes attacking you for not showing women in your drawings because they saw a
#
couple where there weren't any women.
#
And another set accusing you of being a voyeur because you just had women in your drawings.
#
You can interpret anything, any way in bad faith.
#
And that's the problem.
#
So I would like to think that all arguments should be in good faith, you assume goodwill.
#
But if you assume that the other person is malicious and if you have determined that
#
you're going to attack them to show your own virtue, I think it's a problem.
#
And I don't agree entirely with what you say that they are not bad people in the sense
#
that inherently people aren't bad or good.
#
They're responding to incentives.
#
I think that's what I mean.
#
That I don't want to say they are inherently bad people.
#
They are just responding to these incentives.
#
But we have the same incentives, right?
#
I mean, I would think that at some level you have to judge a person according to their
#
These are, I see people being incredibly rude and abusive in a way that they would not in
#
I have seen people who know me in real life randomly abusing me on Twitter or saying nasty
#
things and I'm like, what is wrong with you?
#
You know, will you say this to me on my face?
#
There are two things that I very deeply agree with.
#
Both of them are statements of Sartre.
#
Existence precedes essence.
#
So your actions matter and that...
#
I didn't even say existence precedes essence.
#
No, you didn't say that.
#
You said that actions matter.
#
And then you said that good faith arguments are needed and not bad faith arguments.
#
And both of these things like judging people by their actions and being militantly against
#
bad faith arguments, it was very important to Sartre also.
#
And I absolutely agree.
#
Now, I don't want to suggest that the essence of people is good.
#
So therefore they are good.
#
I just want to say that people are in different trips and different phases of different trips.
#
I have reached this understanding that Twitter is not useful this way, but that's because
#
the rest of my world aligns in a certain way.
#
And I think this and I have this beautiful art that makes me appreciate other people.
#
So therefore I don't think of it in this way.
#
But so what I want to talk about therefore is that in this pursuit, I have discovered
#
And that's why I like Reddit so much more than Twitter.
#
And Reddit does these precise things differently from Twitter.
#
You can't be performative to your audience because you don't carry your audience with
#
You talk inside subreddits and therefore you talk within a context to a community.
#
You don't talk to your people.
#
You have to address other people.
#
So you have to acknowledge their reality and their existence in the real world.
#
And you have to obey the laws of that engagement in that subreddit.
#
And there are very strict rules enforced by voluntary moderators, which keeps things civil,
#
which keeps things relatively normal.
#
And what this does is the same kind of person who behaves a certain way on Twitter cannot
#
behave that way on Reddit and get away with it.
#
And people who are on Reddit have to engage in at least, well, there are parts of Reddit
#
where this is not true, but vast parts of Reddit, they have to engage in good faith
#
They have to respect the sanctity of a subreddit's topic.
#
They can't just bullshit around it.
#
It's disincentive, not because it's good or bad, because it's disincentivized, because
#
you will be downvoted into oblivion.
#
The like button on Reddit does good things.
#
The like button on Facebook does terrible things.
#
The retweet button on Twitter does terrible things because you use it to perform in front
#
Not even retweet, maybe the quote tweet button.
#
The idea that you just add a comment and then you put their thing and then it's like, oh,
#
this is about this and I'm dunking on them.
#
So that does ugly things.
#
Reddit has a cross-posting function, which is just about taking from one subreddit to
#
And that does not do that terrible thing.
#
It is a positive function.
#
It helps, again, bring attention back to the work of that person and how it fits the notion
#
of this other subreddit.
#
So for example, I drew a drawing and I posted it in r Vancouver and somebody cross-posted
#
it to r slash mildly interesting.
#
This is a mildly interesting thing I saw.
#
It added value to my work.
#
I learned, oh, my work is mildly interesting.
#
Since then, I posted on mildly interesting myself.
#
I went right to the top.
#
I am proud to say that I am among this year's top 10 most mildly interesting things on the
#
Now there is a degree to mildly.
#
I thought you'll at some point get promoted to extremely interesting, but no, I tried.
#
I posted to r slash interesting as fuck.
#
And people told me that you are not interesting as fuck, but you're mildly interesting.
#
You are mildly interesting.
#
Go back to where you belong.
#
I was told this and they are in fact, right in this case, I am happy to be mildly interesting
#
It brought me lots of fans and readers and hundreds of subscribers to the newsletter
#
So this this aspect of the internet, you know, understanding what is good, what is bad.
#
This also needs you to see the other aspects.
#
This also needs you to maybe you need to be in the business of putting out content of
#
Once you have shared an opinion, you feel vulnerable about it and you see how someone
#
Maybe you are less keen on destroying someone else's opinion.
#
But if you don't, if you're not in the business of sharing opinions, then maybe you have not
#
arrived at that understanding.
#
The trouble with Reddit is not that these people behave in this way.
#
The trouble with Reddit is that we are exposed to everything anybody does.
#
And this exposure, this idea that all these worlds are colliding with us is just fundamentally
#
Like it's it's just terrible.
#
It's bound to create these situations because it's not even malice, you know, like it's
#
Like celebration of trolling as a valid form of dunking on someone like people say, oh,
#
And like they don't see it as a negative thing.
#
They see it as a just shitposting or just like, yeah, whatever.
#
I did it for shits and giggles.
#
But I think like platforms like this are just terrible to be on because if this is the only
#
platform you're on, it makes you not see other people as real people, just as things for
#
Like the categorical imperative you shared, like they're the means to an end.
#
Why would you not send them to a gas chamber if things came to that then?
#
Because they're not real people.
#
They're not real people.
#
Let's move on to a bunch of final topics.
#
And first, you know, we've been speaking about Web 2.0 all the time.
#
Let's talk about Web 3.0.
#
Listen, so one of the things that I was looking forward to when you agreed to come on the
#
show was you promised to explain NFTs to me.
#
So the platform is all yours kind of what the fuck are NFTs?
#
Person disclaimer, I am not the best person to talk about it because I'm not fully on
#
I am sometimes enamored by them and I want to get into it.
#
And sometimes I'm disgusted by what I see and I want to have nothing to do with it.
#
But I have explored how I would enter it and I have read a lot and thought a lot about
#
So explain it as if you're explaining it to a lay person, which I'm sure many of my listeners
#
would be and which I'm extremely close to being myself.
#
So NFTs of course stand for non-fungible token.
#
Now just take it away from there.
#
The basic idea, what is non-fungible?
#
So fungible is like currency.
#
Suppose you have a 100 rupee note.
#
You can exchange it for another 100.
#
We have a 500 rupee note.
#
The 1000 and 500 were demonetized and we had 2000 and new 500.
#
I've been out of touch.
#
I'm very close to my 500.
#
500 rupee note can be exchanged for any other 500 rupee note for the same value.
#
Non-fungible token is anything that cannot be exchanged for something just like it.
#
It has its own unique value.
#
So non-fungible tokens have been mostly used in the term of art right now, but they have
#
So a non-fungible token can be simply your right to say an artist sells a non-fungible
#
token for something, something value.
#
And now that token gives you the right, works as a backstage pass to all their concerts.
#
As long as you own that token, that NFT, and hundreds of people might, you can go to all
#
their concerts and you have a special seat and you can always get a backstage entry.
#
So that thing does not have the same value always.
#
Its value will keep changing.
#
If the artist gets better, its value will increase.
#
It will be traded by other people.
#
Maybe I don't care about this artist anymore.
#
Why don't you buy it from me?
#
I'll sell it to you for $10 million because now he's the biggest artist in the world.
#
So this value is always fluctuating.
#
So that's what makes it non-fungible.
#
It's not easily exchangeable for just something.
#
There's no static value to it.
#
Now what it rests upon is your notion of the value of digital content in the digital realm.
#
Does digital art or a digital product have value in your life?
#
It takes a lot of meaning from games, for example, in lots of games.
#
If you are really vested in your character, what is called MMORPGs, Massively Multiplayer
#
Online Role Playing Games, you have various characters that you build over time.
#
They gain experience, they gain in these various medieval sort of setting universes.
#
They get all these items of clothing or weapons and you can set them up and you create and
#
you give them some kind of value.
#
Sometimes you have things that you can pay for.
#
You can get this clothing, which is like this, this, this, but you pay $5 for it or you pay
#
$10 for it or more like who knows, whatever.
#
But do you want to do it?
#
It's not really, you're not holding it.
#
You're not actually possessing it.
#
It's just in this realm, in this game, in this context, in this character, it's virtual,
#
but it can have real value.
#
It depends on how much time you spend on that game, how vested you are, what social networks
#
It can have real value to you.
#
If you could buy the blue take on Twitter, for example, that has real value, but it's
#
If you believe in the idea that virtual worlds can have items that have real monetary value,
#
then we are thinking about the ways that we interact with virtual worlds in the future
#
and web 3.0 and metaverse and all these ideas are about more and more virtual worlds existing
#
in our, in our reality, whether it's virtual reality, whether it's augmented reality and
#
what is the value of getting something over there and flexing it or using it in some way.
#
So this is where, this is what NFTs offer you in art.
#
At the moment, NFTs are art or writing or audio, NFTs are a way of associating with
#
an artist or a writer or a creator that you like because you own something that they have.
#
So it's almost like buying a share.
#
If someone could buy a share in Amit Verma, that share will always change in value, but
#
they buy it with the idea that now they believe in you.
#
Now they believe in what you are going to do in the future and they expect it to appreciate
#
They might never sell it, but they expect it to not be a money thrown down the drain.
#
Meanwhile, that money is money that you can use to become a better artist.
#
So let's look at it like this.
#
Let's say I buy a share in a company.
#
I buy a share in a company because there are expectations of, oh, its earnings will be
#
These will be the dividends.
#
You know, there'll be a resale market for my share.
#
It could go up, it could go down.
#
But what I hear a lot about on the internet and I'm trying to wrap my head around it is
#
that an artist will create an artwork which anyone can see and download, but they sell
#
the NFT to it, which one person will buy.
#
Now this is a digital artwork.
#
Anyone can download copies if they want and yet one person holds and has bought an NFT
#
So what special privilege does he get from the NFT apart from having the NFT?
#
Firstly, there's one aspect of the NFT world that says, oh, right clickers as they are
#
called right clickers are evil and that is, don't do it.
#
And we need to disable right click.
#
Some people are even doing that.
#
That's not something I believe in.
#
I think that's nonsense.
#
That's never going to happen.
#
You need to have value outside of this fact because the internet is not about not letting
#
other people have content.
#
Right click save is the essence of a lot of art I have absorbed and learned.
#
You're not going to disable right click save.
#
You're not going to disable screenshots and things like that.
#
That has to always remain.
#
It's the essence of knowledge and the promise of the internet that you are going to have
#
So it has to have some other value in my mind.
#
This kind of value is nonsense.
#
The demand for it is also nonsense.
#
But there are, there is other value being created around it.
#
Even an NFT of a blog post you wrote, for example, right?
#
So you have 10,000 blog posts.
#
Every week you write a newsletter post and every week somebody can buy an NFT of it.
#
That thing can, does not mean that nobody else gets to read that newsletter or save
#
that newsletter or print that newsletter.
#
But within a context, there is a place, there is a ledger where you are acknowledged as
#
the owner of that post.
#
I suppose I buy that newsletter's NFT, that post's NFT.
#
So I am acknowledged as the owner.
#
There is a list somewhere in which I am there and those other right click people are not
#
there or those savers, printers are not there.
#
That list can have value if you use it that way.
#
So if Amit decides that everybody who owns an Amit NFTs, we are going to all have brunch
#
The people who saved it don't get invited.
#
You are incentivizing people to buy that NFT and you are creating value around that NFT.
#
But I could achieve the same thing by another mechanism.
#
For example, I could say take a Patreon membership and all my members of this particular tier
#
get brunch with me and another particular tier gets whatever with me.
#
And I could do that also by that.
#
I mean, the point is, say I write a blog post and you buy the NFT for it.
#
You don't have the copyright for it.
#
You are not going to get revenues from it if I publish it in a book or something.
#
You know, you don't stop it from being published, you don't stop other people from reading it.
#
All that the NFT entitles you to is the ownership of the NFT, which only entitles you to the
#
ownership of the NFT, which only we can reach five hours this way.
#
And ownership of the NFT on that blockchain.
#
And then there are many blockchains.
#
Oh, so I can sell different NFTs on different blockchains.
#
On different blockchains.
#
So are there many blockchains?
#
Oh, so as an artist, Bitcoin is a blockchain, Ethereum is another blockchain.
#
And there are hundreds.
#
But most people are using Ethereum for this.
#
Well, for art, the most popular one is Ethereum.
#
And for other uses, the most popular one so far is Bitcoin.
#
But there is a lot of stuff on other blockchains also.
#
And the Dogecoin is another blockchain, for example.
#
And there's Solana and Cordana and whatnot.
#
This whole thing seems very perception based to me.
#
It is boasting value that, hey, I own the NFT of Amitabh Bachchan tweet number 8 million,
#
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
#
So at the moment in this nascent stage, it does have only that.
#
It doesn't offer very much more, which is one of the reasons why I am very skeptical
#
about a lot of aspects around it.
#
You don't really own it.
#
That is absolutely true.
#
You only own a place in a ledger.
#
That ledger can have value and that value can decrease and that value can increase.
#
Just like how a game works.
#
So this is part of my hesitations around this system also.
#
So just like how a game works, that thing, that armor that you bought or that sword you
#
bought has value in that game.
#
Within that game, there is a scarcity of that item.
#
So you are able to technologically impose the scarcity of that item.
#
Literally on that blockchain, that NFT is unique.
#
Yeah, but within the game, there is a utility of that item to me.
#
So there is a limited utility and there is a limited application.
#
Within that, there is some real value.
#
You cannot take it out of context.
#
I mean, besides bragging rights, what value would an NFT have?
#
It is entirely up to you as the creator.
#
You can give it various types.
#
You can decide that, guys, I am sticking to this blockchain and I am putting all my art
#
on this or my writings on this blockchain.
#
Because you also want your NFTs to have value, because you want people to buy it with the
#
idea that it's going to be something so that you get something.
#
The more value it has, the better it is for you because every time somebody...
#
So one key aspect of NFT contracts is also that if somebody sells it forward, you get
#
You get to put up to a 10% cut.
#
So most of the value that artists are making on NFT sales are resale values that they are
#
getting because they sold something like 10 pieces and then they became famous.
#
So then the value of those 10 pieces went up huge and then somebody resold it and then
#
they got like a very bigger...
#
That 10% turned out to be bigger than what they'd gotten before.
#
So that's how a lot of people are making value out of it.
#
So it is all perception.
#
You're absolutely right.
#
But a sense of collective delusion that we are all signing up to, within a limited context,
#
collective delusions have value.
#
I mean, in a sense, collective...
#
I mean, the currency...
#
Delusion is just a very dismissive way of me to say this.
#
I get that you don't mean it in a pejorative way and in a sense, a currency is also a collective
#
And in terms of a story we've sold ourselves or even a nation is a collective delusion
#
in one manner of speaking.
#
So I completely get that.
#
But obviously when you encounter something completely new, your initial instinct is distrust
#
and like, what the hell is this?
#
I don't want to fall for that.
#
I remember this old video in the 1990s where Bill Gates is on the David Letterman show
#
and David Letterman is saying, what the hell is this internet?
#
And Gates is trying to explain and David Letterman is, hey, if I want to find out the baseball
#
score, have you heard of a thing called the radio?
#
I'll turn that on and so on.
#
So whatever Gates says about the internet, Letterman has a repost and of course we know
#
what the internet became.
#
So I don't want to make that kind of a mistake.
#
Why are you excited about it and why are you apprehensive about it?
#
So part of the things that make me apprehensive are the early behaviors of a lot of people
#
And we were discussing this that any revolutionary new activity comes with the people who just
#
want to grab a lot of cash out of it.
#
So maritime trade, for example, started with piracy, but that doesn't mean maritime trade
#
is evil and we should not invest in it or we should not care about it or we should not
#
do maritime trade or if you are a trader of goods, it is essential.
#
But it started with piracy.
#
So you can't allow those early adopters to define things.
#
That is my answer to this apprehension also that they don't get to define it.
#
Maybe it can be redefined.
#
Maybe they do end up like a part of me.
#
The moralist part of me is that why should I enable them to make money?
#
Because if I use Ethereum, Ethereum gains value also as my contribution to it.
#
Any trading in this currency gives value to the currency.
#
And these people who are sitting on it will use it for nefarious things, which is being
#
Like a lot of cryptocurrency is used for terrible crimes and criminal activities because it's
#
What do you do with that?
#
But it has never been this easy for someone to hold 4,000 and for it to become 50,000
#
Elon Musk needs to tweet once and that 50,000 becomes 1 million tomorrow.
#
And then it can be used.
#
And then day after tomorrow, that 1 million can be brought down to 30,000 again.
#
So this kind of quick manipulation and globally impacting instantaneous quick manipulation
#
It just makes me feel a little iffy about the way things like for a decentralized currency
#
to be so dependent, so affected by the tweet of a crazy person is just ridiculous to me
#
that he can affect it 30, 40 percent in value.
#
What kind of insider trading must he be doing?
#
So suppose I own, I have large Ethereum holdings and I have large Bitcoin holdings and Dogecoin
#
holdings and Elon Musk is big on all of these things.
#
In a sense, I'm beholden to Elon Musk, his reputation.
#
If Elon Musk goes to jail, all of these things plummet.
#
Do I not want Elon Musk to go to jail for crimes then after if suppose he commits a horrible
#
crime in the future, anybody, any billionaire commits a terrible crime in the future, their
#
holdings of a certain cryptocurrency can have impact on my life savings.
#
So am I now their vassal in a sense that I don't want my overlord to be touched.
#
It makes me think that there is this techno feudalism that we are entering into with these
#
cryptocurrencies that we were beholden say until now with national currencies, you have
#
beholden to a nation state, right?
#
If that nation's collapses, then that currency also collapses.
#
But now cryptocurrencies are going to be managed by companies and venture capitalists and they
#
say decentralized, but I don't quite buy it because well, at least in this initial stage,
#
my apprehension is that that's a cover and the billionaires and rogue capitalists and
#
whatever these, you know, like I do, does that make me, does that make me their vassal?
#
Am I now beholden to them?
#
And that thought is very deeply unsettling to me.
#
One part of me doesn't want to invest in it.
#
The other part of me is like, I don't want anything to do with you.
#
I'm not going to help you.
#
I don't need to make money off of you.
#
Like you said, with Patreon and other avenues, I'll buy, why can't I do it that way?
#
Why do I need to do NFTs?
#
So a large part of my excitement with NFTs is that not necessarily that I have to do
#
NFTs, but that they are opening up people's minds to other forms of engagement and other
#
forms of value creation.
#
So the idea that value can be created by forming a community around a certain artist or an
#
And then it is expected that these communities will have these kinds of exclusive events
#
that sense a base value.
#
Once people internalize that this sort of thing is supposed to be worth a hundred dollars
#
Then they are open to paying you that money.
#
Like as soon as people understood that, oh, five dollars a month is something that is
#
done to support an artist.
#
Now I'm able to charge that money, five dollars a month, and many, many people are paying
#
me that and helping me thrive.
#
So I have so many ideas around the ways I want to create value around my art.
#
They are not bound to NFTs in my case, but NFTs being the hot thing that they are, mean
#
that many, many more people are likely to jump into it if it is offered as an NFT than
#
if the same thing is offered in another platform.
#
So then again, that tantalizes me that why don't I enter it because FOMO, this thing
#
Like I love playing games all of my life.
#
Life is just a bunch of different games and how we play these games and what games we
#
play and what are the rules we formulate and what are the reward mechanisms.
#
This is what the great kick of being an entrepreneur is.
#
You get to play games and you get to play what I call infinite games.
#
So finite games are the ones that have an end.
#
And so I used to play a lot of sports, like I used to play badminton when I was in school.
#
I played badminton for my college also.
#
And I have also been a computer gamer and I noticed this thing in all of these things
#
that I'm very competitive and I love being good at things.
#
So I was very good at badminton and squash and things, but I don't care if I lose or
#
Like it doesn't hurt me if I lose.
#
The process is a point, not the result.
#
I play infinite games, like I enjoyed the fact that I played for two hours today.
#
Maybe I lost five games.
#
I won three games, but I had a hell of a two hours.
#
That's what's fun to me.
#
So the process of playing is the joy and the win is nice.
#
But then next time I feel like I need to do even better, this person I can win against.
#
So maybe it's almost not so good if I win.
#
Like losing is a more useful trait than winning because it keeps you focused and enjoying
#
and learning and doing appreciating and, you know, getting into it with more vigor next
#
And so these infinite games are interesting to me.
#
And as an artist, I play infinite games.
#
I'm in the business of playing infinite games.
#
I'm figuring out my, not Patreon, but my buy me a coffee, my sub-stack members.
#
I call them sneaky art insiders because I play infinite games with them.
#
It sounds so manipulative.
#
Yeah, if you're listening to this, they'll be like, he's toying with us.
#
So the games are things like I share content with them that I have not put out outside.
#
So right now my podcast is just conversations I have with other artists, but now I'm doing
#
some more impromptu conversations with myself.
#
I am reading out stories that I'm creating around my art.
#
I am doing what I call postscript conversations.
#
So once these list of questions and ideas run out, the guest and I just sort of lean
#
back and we're like, oh, okay, how was that?
#
And you know, there's this very long goodbye, like, okay, let's talk later.
#
But there's one more thing.
#
And then you end up talking for a half hour, 45 minutes more.
#
So I call this a postscript and I record this also now.
#
And if it's nice, I share this with, so my insiders are my focus group with whom I played
#
what I call these games is that I share my vulnerable media.
#
I'm not so sure how it is.
#
I am not so confident in doing these things.
#
Please tell me what you think.
#
Like me talking just into a mic and telling you a story is not something I'm kicked about
#
sharing with my general podcast audience yet.
#
But with you, I will, because you are my true fans.
#
You really care about my work.
#
Another thing I'm doing right now, which has been really fun and very gratifying and coming
#
to the point of what you said about blogging with an audience.
#
So this is a small audience, my insiders, not my broad audience, but I am writing my
#
I share passages of my next book, which is going to be sneaky out of Vancouver, and I'm
#
going to self publish it, but I'm writing it.
#
And I, every month I share a new passage with them.
#
And what this does is it puts me on a monthly schedule.
#
Every month I have to have a substantial amount written.
#
It has to be about my art.
#
It has to be about Vancouver.
#
So I'm incentivized this month to explore Vancouver in some new way, which could add
#
And I'm sharing it with this audience that is paying me to read it.
#
They care about my work.
#
So they give me excellent feedback.
#
They tell me what they like.
#
They tell me what they didn't like.
#
And I'm open to all kinds of criticism from them because I know that they are coming from
#
a, they are vested in me.
#
Similarly about like, you could imagine, oh, if you have people who own your NFTs, you
#
know that these people really, they are completely vested in you because financially they're
#
like, NFTs will rise in financial value, the better you do.
#
So they are deeply incentivized to ensure your success.
#
You are almost recruiting a team to do PR for you also, because they are deeply incentivized
#
to always talk about your work because they own a part of your work.
#
And that will go up in value.
#
Just like a patron of old, like if they have a painting of yours, it helps them if you
#
sell paintings to other people also, because then their painting also goes up in value
#
or you sell painting somewhere else.
#
So similarly with my insiders, I'm playing these little games, which I'm enjoying a lot
#
and they give me feedback.
#
It's useful feedback and it makes me a better writer for my general podcast, for my general
#
It makes me a better thinker.
#
It forces me, it incentivizes me to put my thoughts in order.
#
And in a year's or six months time, it will lead to a finished book that I'll be able
#
In fact, I've, you know, I've almost by happenstance without thinking too deeply about this stuff
#
been kind of successful at building different kinds of communities.
#
I mean, there's a clear writing community, obviously, you know, more than 1500 people
#
have done the course, more than 800 people within that community.
#
So got to kind of revitalize that and do more things plus there's of course a few thousand
#
people who follow my newsletter, even though I've posted a handful of times.
#
So I really need to get regular.
#
And if you are listening to this and you're a fan, you know, if I start a Patreon club,
#
do let me know what you'd like to see there, you know, maybe inside interactions on each
#
episode, maybe sharing my research and work process, whatever it is, let me know what
#
you'd kind of like there.
#
All this is, you know, fun to think about.
#
Now you mentioned your writing.
#
So tell me a bit about your writing, because all this happened because you wanted to be
#
a writer and somehow you then became an artist and a salesman and a creator in the creator
#
economy and all of these things.
#
Tell me a bit more about the writing.
#
Is that something that still drives you something you want to do?
#
And what kind of book are you writing?
#
When I left my PhD program, I was going to write this book about a person who accidentally
#
goes back in time and realizes that going back in time is not such a romantic notion
#
He doesn't go that far back.
#
He goes back in his own life.
#
No internet is true in the story.
#
So there are consequences to unlicensed time travel.
#
That was the idea of the book.
#
That book has gone through five drafts since I left my PhD program, not full drafts even
#
60%, 50%, 40%, 40%, 30% Entire rewrites though, right from the start again, every time the
#
story has changed, it started as a first person narrative.
#
It changed to an outside narrative.
#
The characters have changed.
#
The premise has changed.
#
The ending has changed.
#
My idea for it, the scope of it has changed.
#
And I just find that it's very difficult.
#
This process of writing a novel is very unrewarding because how it works is that you write the
#
whole thing and then you go to somebody and they tell you if they like it enough in that
#
zeitgeist of that moment, whether it's worth publishing for them and you have to take rejection
#
from a bunch of people after finishing the whole damn thing, which is so difficult.
#
And then maybe two years later it gets out and then maybe you do all the work around
#
it and people are ready for it at that time and it sells.
#
So much work goes into this thing and it is dependent on so much luck and circumstance.
#
It is bound to so many failures that have nothing to do with your ability or the value
#
of your work that I just hate this system.
#
So my current plan is, and I don't get this with my other creative output, right?
#
So my podcast, I hear every week from people.
#
People tell me and buy me a coffee.
#
They tell me how they like it.
#
I have a discord around my art and my podcast, so I get to hear every week from people how
#
We talk on that and we interact.
#
My newsletter has an audience of true fans also, and then they get it every week and
#
thousands of readers who tell me what they think, what they like.
#
So I get this feedback.
#
I don't run on this feedback and like to your point before, we need to be self-motivated.
#
I'm very, very insistent on that, that the fuel has to be me.
#
It cannot be relied upon on other people, but this helps.
#
It helps you to think that you're not screaming into the void, which is what Facebook in 2014
#
felt like, just screaming into the void and nothing is coming back.
#
So my plan for now is that I want to continue to do this just like the way I decided that
#
I'm going to accept the title of artist because that meant that I'm not a writer first.
#
And I did that because what is my USP in this new country that I was living in Wisconsin?
#
My USP is that I'm making this art that nobody has seen.
#
Art is easy to appreciate.
#
It needs 10 seconds of time at most, and people are hooked.
#
Writing needs way more time before somebody is hooked, hooked, and you need to do a, it's
#
a far more difficult job.
#
So it gets me a broader audience.
#
And once you have an audience, you can do many things with that audience.
#
I do not like the traditional novel publishing route.
#
I don't like the system where I have to beg and plead for attention.
#
And after I have done my job, I have to now finish the job.
#
Now I have to desperately seek rewards for it and validation for it before those rewards.
#
How I want to do it is that I want to use my platform as a sneaky artist while continuously
#
writing fiction, nonfiction, everything, and develop my name, develop my brand, be somebody
#
who is in a more commanding position with their work to get that attention.
#
I don't want to have to beg for attention for my finished novel.
#
I want there to be a group of people who will care for it already, who are waiting to read
#
it, who will be willing to be beta readers of it.
#
That's the conditions under which I want to put in that much single-sided effort.
#
Because I know that the novel is not something that I want to share chapter by chapter and
#
I want to finish the whole thing.
#
Doing that means disengaging from a lot of other work.
#
I can't just also be doing it on the side.
#
I will have to take time to do only that.
#
And that means killing a lot of other momentum.
#
And I am not in a position that I want to kill that momentum just yet.
#
I want to keep this dream alive that my fiction novel will get published and I will be a writer.
#
Maybe it turns out to be unnecessary by the end and I don't end up doing it.
#
But this process right now of the reward mechanism and the way the art works, I make a drawing,
#
I post it, and I get dopamine.
#
My natural inclination is towards it.
#
I used to draw a lot of comics and I drew some long-form comics also.
#
And it was a very excruciating process for me.
#
And I want to do more of those things.
#
I have come to understand that that is not who I am naturally.
#
I am the kind of person who wants to do things once and get something for it.
#
And art, the way I draw, lends itself to that more easily.
#
It has a lot of value to a lot of people.
#
And by being a writer around it, I can create more and more value around it.
#
Like I was saying, my hope is that this lets me be a writer later with a little more ease.
#
And my hope is that once I taste this success, that I will be a little more amenable to rewriting,
#
re-drafting and the long-form work of putting together a novel.
#
You know, increasingly, I am like this whole sort of circle that you mentioned that you
#
finish the book, you go to a publisher, it gets published two years later.
#
And you know, when I look back at episodes that I read a year ago, I can't bear to hear
#
At the time, I might have liked them and I'll refer them to someone and say, hey, I like
#
doing this, but I'm not going to go back and actually listen to it.
#
Like honestly, Nishant, by the time this episode is out, it's out of my system.
#
You know, I'm on to new episodes.
#
That's the whole game for me.
#
And the other part of it is that what we've seen in all media is that intermediaries are
#
We don't need them anymore, right?
#
Creators are reaching their audiences directly, monetizing that directly.
#
Now at one level, the notion of the book as a 100,000 word, 150,000 word thing that you
#
publish in that particular packaging is, I think, the artifact of an earlier era.
#
That's number one, that writing doesn't have to be, you know, writing can be shorter or
#
longer or structured differently or sold differently, packaged differently.
#
But also publishing houses, I think, are largely dinosaurs, they're like the gatekeepers of
#
They're just like the art galleries that we kind of discussed, you know, often following
#
fashions of the times and being restricted by the tastes of the people who kind of happened
#
to be there, which, you know, might close out many groups of people, especially less
#
privileged groups of people, for example, who just might not have that entry point to
#
begin with and less privileged in different ways.
#
So you've experimented with self-publishing as well.
#
So what was that experience like?
#
Because when I was growing up in India, no doubt when you were growing up in India as
#
well, which was possibly a decade after me, self-publishing was considered, you know,
#
people looked down on it.
#
Like you couldn't find a publisher, so it's okay.
#
Calcutta had a famous self-publisher writers workshop run by P. Lal.
#
So the whole gig was that, oh, you couldn't find a publisher, so you got it self-published.
#
Yeah, so there is this, again, there was this hierarchy, right?
#
Because while there were institutions, the point of institutions is that they have perceived
#
There is this esteem and this prestige that comes with being associated with, say, Penguin
#
or HarperCollins or whatever names there are.
#
But that is falling apart in this new world.
#
Increasingly, people, in fact, cherish the independent creator.
#
They understand this idea of the privilege associated with having a publisher has reached
#
This idea that it's not all merit.
#
It's a lot of circumstance and it's a lot of privilege.
#
It's about networks and contacts.
#
Very often doesn't mean that published people are not good, but very often this is a factor
#
of these other things also.
#
And therefore, someone being independent is not inferior to a published person.
#
This is the crux of what has been absorbed.
#
And in fact, perhaps we need to value these underdogs who are putting out content thanks
#
to YouTube, thanks to Twitch, thanks to Twitter, thanks to TikTok also.
#
These independent people have created a market for independent content.
#
This is something that I really enjoyed.
#
I really admired because I have always felt like an outsider.
#
I didn't study English in like my bachelor's.
#
So I did not spend time around people who were writing all the time.
#
I didn't spend time around people who could tell me about the craft of writing.
#
I therefore later these people would end up joining publishing houses as editors or as
#
readers or as publishers or whatever various capacities of that hierarchy.
#
I don't know these people.
#
So therefore I have none of those contacts.
#
I'm not an artist also trained.
#
So I have no contacts in any geographical region with curators or gallery owners, etc.
#
So I'm an outsider in all of these worlds.
#
And the only way things have worked for me is with the latest technology of the time.
#
The social media worked for me at a time and now the creator economy media and the services
#
associated around that are working for me.
#
So after I sold art, the first season of selling art in Wisconsin in 2018, I thought at the
#
end of that season what I'm going to do next year because I was thinking that suppose someone
#
has put my art on the wall, how much more are they going to buy?
#
Even if they really like me, how much wall space will someone give me, man?
#
Like limited hair or why shouldn't they patronize other artists and like I'll run out of repeat
#
So now I need to occupy a different part of their home.
#
Literally this was the thought.
#
A book can occupy a different part of their home.
#
Book is a nice thing to keep.
#
Why don't I make a coffee table book?
#
And I just thought I'll make it because there was no way that I could I couldn't even imagine
#
getting someone interested in it.
#
But this is what I did to really understand the process.
#
I went to this writer's workshop in Chicago and this was not a workshop to teach you to
#
write, but this was a workshop about pitching to literary agents.
#
And America has a very thriving independent publishing industry as well as the traditional
#
and many different scales of it.
#
So there are small publishers, there are larger medium and larger publishers also.
#
So all of these processes are therefore very formalized and it's very good to be a new
#
person getting into them.
#
So I got a 20 minute session or maybe it was a 10 minute session with a literary agent
#
and she just loved what I told her.
#
And I took some samples of how my book might look like I printed out 10 pages and I showed
#
this is what I want my art book to look like.
#
So she was an instant fan.
#
She said it in so many words that you've absolutely got me like I'm in, but I don't think this
#
should be traditionally published.
#
And this was around the incentives of traditional publishing.
#
And I think every writer, like we are talking about whether you want to write a book or
#
not, every writer should also think about what is the reward of traditional publishing
#
to them and then to the publisher.
#
So a publisher will publish if they can see a financial reward, which comes from thousands
#
It doesn't come from hundreds of copies.
#
It depends on like the large costs associated with their work.
#
Then they have to time it so that they can promote it.
#
So it has to fit into their calendar, which has involves other authors and other things
#
and things that they might perceive are competing with your book.
#
So do they want to promote two things that might eat into each other?
#
So now suddenly you are locked into a competition with someone that you don't intend, you don't
#
even know, but simply out of virtue of being associated with a publisher you are.
#
So my circumstance in Wisconsin was that I want to make a book about this town in Wisconsin.
#
The population is only 80,000.
#
My largest market is 100,000 potential and 100,000 market doesn't mean 100,000 people
#
10% of this market will buy the book if I am lucky.
#
So most likely I have hundreds of copies to sell.
#
Who cares which publisher will care about that?
#
No publisher will care.
#
But this doesn't mean that there are no rewards in it for me.
#
The act of putting together a book is a fantastic learning exercise.
#
That's a reward for me.
#
The cost of self-publishing and then the profit of selling all of those books, that is a financial
#
There is a reputational reward in having a book.
#
It's something that I bring along to various people.
#
Like when I give podcast conversations, I carry the book and I give it to podcast hosts
#
before and then they look at it and they feel nice and then I feel nice and then they keep
#
it and it occupies a space on their shelf.
#
That is a reward for me.
#
That is a non-monetary, but it is a very significant reward if I occupy that space in someone's
#
I guess book owned by Amit Verma could be in the category of the Twitter accounts that
#
are followed by the Prime Minister.
#
So she asked me to formulate a non-fiction book proposal and a non-fiction book proposal
#
has these various criteria that you fulfill.
#
Firstly you have to, so a fiction book proposal needs a full book manuscript, but a non-fiction
#
book proposal does not need that.
#
It needs two chapters and an introduction and a table of contents.
#
So my book doesn't have chapters because it's all art.
#
So I just thought, okay, 20 pages and a table of contents or whatever, whatever the format
#
is as I imagine and I'll write the intro.
#
So that I needed to do and I needed to think of it as what the final product is going to
#
Then another aspect of this is of preparing a book, a non-fiction book proposal is that
#
you have to talk about your audience.
#
Who is your target audience?
#
Not only that, oh, everybody who loves art, no, geographically, age wise, socially, various
#
interests, numbers, use numbers.
#
My audience is the kind of people who buy this kind of book, which sold 5 million copies.
#
My audience is people ages 30 to blah, blah, blah, living in this part of the world.
#
The population census number is this.
#
So this is a, again, a dispassionate way to look at your work.
#
It asks you to do this.
#
Secondly, pitching like this means that suddenly you start to see who does it have value for.
#
Why is this not my audience?
#
Why is this my audience?
#
What can I do so that this is also my audience?
#
Suddenly you're thinking not of changing your art, not of changing your craft, but of how
#
How do I get these other people to be interested?
#
So Eau Claire has a university.
#
So there are parents of students.
#
Why shouldn't the parents who live maybe in other states or other towns, why shouldn't
#
They should also care about this book.
#
How can I make my book so that even they are part of my target demographic?
#
Another part I had to write was your competence.
#
Why are you the right person to write this book?
#
Traditionally, nonfiction would be say politics, economics.
#
So you would have to cite your degrees or your experience to say that I'm an authority
#
In this case, it was an art book.
#
So I only had to say I'm an artist.
#
This book is from the perspective of somebody who has spent two years in this town and is
#
So I am the only person who can write this book effectively because now I have changed
#
what this book is also about to suit why I am the only person to write this book.
#
Again, this slightly shifted.
#
What does this book mean?
#
How am I going to later talk about this book to people?
#
How am I going to present this book to people in the introduction?
#
That also shifted slightly because I had to figure out why I am the most appropriate person
#
to write a book of art about Eau Claire.
#
No, this is because it is a book of sneaky art about Eau Claire from somebody who is
#
not of this town and is trying to understand this town.
#
Therefore, the only person who can write it is somebody who is not from this town and
#
who makes art like me, sneaky.
#
So I sort of created these circumstances around it.
#
And then there are a couple of other things you're supposed to write in a nonfiction.
#
It's roughly a 20 page proposal, but I filled out the whole thing, didn't send it to anybody
#
because by the time I wrote it, I concluded that self-publishing is what I need to do
#
because there's nobody who's going to care.
#
500 people will buy this book.
#
There are three bookstores here.
#
These numbers don't matter to them.
#
So they will not be interested, but that this book needs to exist because I want to occupy
#
a new part of people's home and I want to create something and I want to see what it
#
And all of these processes are amazing learning experiences around making a book.
#
So I went to an independent press in the neighboring city in Minneapolis and they do independent
#
So what they do is that they have a formalized process of how to put this together.
#
There are a bunch of six, seven meetings on different topics, but they get you in touch
#
with a designer who might be skilled at the genre you are aiming at.
#
And then there are associated fees for these various meetings, for this various things
#
that they will do for you, like getting you an ISBN listing, et cetera, et cetera.
#
The designers fees, the feedback and all the various interchange and meetings you'll have.
#
So finally, printing, deciding on what quality of pages you want, deciding on what size you
#
Should it have a hard cover?
#
Should it have a jacket?
#
I made all of these calls myself.
#
I want my book to be a square book.
#
I don't want it to be long or tall.
#
I wanted to have a hard cover with a dust jacket and I wanted to lay flat so that if
#
I have these spreads, two page spread drawings, I want them, someone to be able to put it
#
flat on their coffee table and see it without having to hold it.
#
And I want to have that.
#
So I was thinking about user experience around the book.
#
How will they regard a book of art?
#
How will they keep it in their house?
#
If it can lay flat, it can be left flat.
#
Maybe they'll leave it as an open page.
#
That might be interesting.
#
They can flip the page every day.
#
So this thing stuck in my head when I would later sell the book, I would tell people this
#
that look, this book lays flat.
#
Every day you can turn the page and then 100 days you will have 100 pieces of art to look
#
at because it's 112 odd pages.
#
This again became a way for me to sell this book.
#
Again it became a way for me to create value around this book.
#
It became a way for me to see value around my art and my book and my work.
#
And what was the process?
#
Like where did you sell it?
#
How many copies did you sell?
#
And most importantly, can this model scale?
#
Like I understand for one person doing an art book in a particular location, you can
#
But what are your thoughts on self-publishing in general, like how far along has print on
#
I keep telling young writers who want to write articles for Indian Express or Times of India
#
and all of that, that don't do that because for a number of reasons.
#
One is that you will not be writing enough because the gatekeepers won't approve you
#
enough and you need to write a lot to be good.
#
Two, your pieces will all be dispersed.
#
If you want to build a community of your fans, you can't do that.
#
Someone will read your piece in TOI and will say, oh, what a good writer.
#
But then, you know, whereas if you just write in a newsletter, if they like what you do,
#
they can subscribe to you.
#
You build a community of your fans, your work isn't dispersed, it's in one place.
#
But that's what those kind of writers, whereas, you know, are there possibilities where is
#
print on demand advanced enough that people can, can someone write a bestseller today,
#
an actual bestseller, bestseller, without going through a publisher, just using Amazon's
#
print on demand, for example.
#
So for example, how I did this was that I printed 500 copies, we reached a number for
#
It was roughly $10,000 at that time for me.
#
So roughly $20 per book, I decided to sell it at $30 because I wanted to put it at the
#
lowest price point that this town is not rich, that they'll buy it, but I'll make some profit.
#
I broke even very quickly, not only the book, but when I started selling the book, the associated
#
prints and things like that, within two months, I broke even with my 10,000, I made a lot
#
I did the job of distributing it myself also.
#
So the marketing job, once you have the book, how were you, there are lots of advisories
#
on this, by the way, you can then so many resources, beautiful resources, reach out
#
to local bookstores, local gift shops, tell them you're going to do a book launch.
#
They will give you the space and they will take a cut of the book and you can call your
#
I had people drive two and a half hours to come to buy the book from me.
#
It was unreal when this person said to me that I drove 200 miles just for this, just
#
to buy the book from me.
#
Someone you didn't know before.
#
They came from 200 miles away because what I was offering was, and again, a little sales
#
I offered people that anybody who buys a book from me in person, I will draw a portrait
#
And then in the first page of the book, this is my thank you to you for buying from me.
#
Art should not be like, Oh, I only draw when I'm in, so I don't believe all that stuff.
#
And look at the self-improvement aspect.
#
The more I draw people, the better I get.
#
I want to get better at drawing portraits.
#
Hey, let's draw portraits, stand for me.
#
I'm talking to them for five minutes while I draw.
#
These people would become repeat customers.
#
They will buy every book of yours.
#
Many of them commissioned me for art afterwards that I love this drawing you made of me in
#
I want you to draw a family portrait for me that I will send out as a Christmas card or
#
So this is how I formed a bonds with them.
#
I had real conversations with them.
#
Tell me about your life.
#
What brought you down here?
#
How are you doing today?
#
Like what, what, which cheese are you going to buy next door?
#
So the experience around this doing a launch event, being an introvert and doing a launch
#
event, super difficult, but you need to do this, right?
#
You need to push out of these companies.
#
You can't be locked inside your comfort zones.
#
I have held this idea with me for a very long time that, you know, everything good is outside
#
My comfort zone is my coffin in a sense.
#
Like I'm just comfortable here, but this is not the place for me to exist.
#
Even if just a little outside, I have to be outside it.
#
Who's comfortable in a coffin?
#
No, it is not comfortable in a, I get your point.
#
You're making separate points.
#
It is my comfort zone and it is a death of me.
#
This is where everything finishes.
#
So doing these things gave me so much confidence.
#
Like I know that in Bombay, in Delhi, in Calcutta, in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, in Chicago, USA,
#
in Vancouver, Canada, I can do an event anywhere and I can get a hundred people to come to
#
look at me, to talk to me, to listen to me, and I can talk to them.
#
I did a presentation, PowerPoint slide of the book, and I talked about my book for half
#
I answered questions, all impromptu, because I need to go through this exercise.
#
I need to go through this tough stuff that I don't know how to do because then I will
#
So it was so good to do this, like so much value, monetary value is there.
#
And this is a monetary value that you will not get as a traditional publisher.
#
You will get your advance against royalties, but they don't tell you your sales.
#
They don't tell you, like you don't find out until you hit a big number that there
#
are royalties coming to you.
#
Who knows how much transparency there is?
#
Who is to ensure there is honesty in this system?
#
So what this does in my case is, now it's been two years, right?
#
Like you mentioned, two months after podcast release, you will have moved on, right?
#
I have a hundred copies left of my book.
#
I have purposely not sold them, because the more time I keep them, the more they increase.
#
And today I sell that book of $30 at $50, because the value has, my value has increased.
#
So the last copy you have will be like a couple of million and Elon Musk will buy and you
#
will say, I have never called him a fool.
#
So I will always hold on to the last 10 books for this reason.
#
They will, this will be my first book.
#
It's always going to have more and more and more value.
#
Today I'm selling according to my worth.
#
So my worth right now for the book is $50.
#
Next year it's going to rise again, inflationary times, unfortunately.
#
But my point is that I am always incentivized to sell this book.
#
But outside of this particular example, so now when we are talking about scaling and
#
you're talking about other things.
#
So firstly, I want to put it to you that the idea of scaling again brings us back to the
#
You are talking about having value as a writer.
#
Value as a writer does not exist in the printed form alone.
#
Let the printed book never scale.
#
Let it always be 1000 copies.
#
Let those 1000 copies be like the first edition of Charles Dickens.
#
Let all the second and third and fourth editions exist digitally.
#
Because that's where your audience is reading.
#
There are now on that's actually not true because people thought Kindle will kill print
#
Certainly, but that's turned out to be not the case.
#
No, no, I'm not saying that there is no money in the other thing.
#
I am saying that you do not have to subscribe to that model as the only way to make money.
#
I'm saying that if you don't want to do traditional publishing, it's not that now you can't make
#
money if you don't scale.
#
There are many ways to make money without scaling in printed form.
#
But what if a wannabe Chetan Bhagat comes to you and says, I want to scale, which is perfectly
#
There's nothing wrong with it.
#
So then there are so many people doing it on Amazon.
#
There are so many now more services coming in also, there are umpteen ways to do it.
#
And it's working out really well for lots of artists, lots of writers.
#
Another thing people are doing now is they are they are serializing fiction also.
#
So Substack is incentivizing this as well.
#
And a lot of people are.
#
So the model is that suppose you have 50 people who pay you $5 a month.
#
So $250 a month for one chapter every month, you will end up making by the end of the book,
#
you will make more than you would have gotten as an advance.
#
And now you have printed copies that you print yourself to sell to more people.
#
Meanwhile, these true fans are your PR.
#
There are lots of you will end up making more money this way than you would with a standard
#
advance as a first time author.
#
And then all sales are your sales.
#
Like the biggest point to me is that once you lose track of these numbers, you don't
#
want, why would I go to a launch event when I'll never see royalties?
#
Like why would I do like I will lose interest and I will move on to my next book.
#
But with the book I have, I always want to sell it because it's my money.
#
That makes me very proud.
#
It comes with my inclinations and my personality.
#
Maybe there are people who just simply don't want to indulge in these factors.
#
And for them, the traditional path will always exist.
#
It doesn't have to be one or the other.
#
The beauty is that now there are options and options are good for everybody because once
#
serialization starts to work, once independent people explore formats, then maybe publishers
#
also these, the dinosaurs also decide that okay, let's do something new because this
#
has been proven as a working model and that becomes good for people who do the traditional
#
Maybe they have more flexibility.
#
They haven't been able to do 150,000 words, they are doing it small, maybe that works out.
#
So I feel like it's, it's good times.
#
Like I think it's, it's, and it's good to play games.
#
So I just tell people like you should play games.
#
Like don't put such a high premium on the act of doing something on the written word
#
Like I'll only draw if I have my canvas and if I have all my paints.
#
You're a creative person.
#
I'm chatting with a publisher friend of mine who, an editor at this large publishing house
#
got a CEO on a call with me because they wanted to kind of think about the creative economy
#
And I spoke to them for an hour, gave them a half an hour presentation and all my thoughts
#
And it's very interesting how open they were.
#
And my central point was this, that publishers today to move into the new age need to not
#
think of themselves as producers of this particular kind of packaged good, but need to instead
#
think of themselves as custodians of creators who possess enormous knowledge, enormous insight,
#
and that can find many more outlets today than it could in the past.
#
And it doesn't have to be this 200 page printed book or even a Kindle version of that book.
#
There are so many other ways to look at it.
#
And my sense is that the publishing industry as we know it today will not exist 20 years
#
It will have morphed into something else entirely.
#
And some people will adapt and some people won't.
#
So let's see how that goes.
#
Now, speaking of, you know, before we come to the end of this, I think this is going
#
to be the longest episode on the show so far.
#
We are crossing five hours.
#
So here's the thing that we've spoken about how the old model is breaking.
#
But it seems to me that a lot of the new model is on shaky, tenuous ground because it is
#
dependent on these massive internet platforms, which are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, which
#
also have big issues with them, which behave in arbitrary ways and which can make or break
#
I know this is something that you've kind of spoken a lot about, feel strongly about.
#
Can you elaborate a little bit on this for me?
#
So about the nature of the big mega corporations.
#
Well, yeah, so I had a I had a comics Facebook page which had 30,000 fans at one point of
#
And Facebook decided that they want my money now.
#
So I would post a drawing on it.
#
I would post a comic on it and it shows you how many people have viewed it.
#
And the number just plummeted to like 100.
#
If I did well, maybe 200.
#
Then it started plummeting to like 50 and lesser numbers like that.
#
So I would pay money into it and it would suddenly reach 10,000 people.
#
And the next day, if I posted again and I didn't pay money, it was back to 50 people.
#
So I quickly realized that firstly, like they're just extorting me.
#
And no matter what I do, I can't actually just succeed anymore because they know they've
#
Now they know that I have nowhere else to go.
#
And this sort of thing really, it puts my back up, you know, like I'm not going to cooperate
#
So I just I gave up that Facebook page.
#
I stopped putting money into it.
#
Like I just like I lost fans and whatever.
#
But what also happened was that I found that it was a no-win situation because not only
#
are they taking my money and then giving access to fans, but the only way I know who they're
#
giving access to is also them, opaque metrics.
#
I have no way of knowing if 10,000 people saw it.
#
It's just what Facebook is saying to me.
#
Facebook can say anything.
#
Its idea, it changed its definitions of views to impressions and it changed the definition
#
of what impressions meant and then it changed how it started counting videos and it changed
#
who it would show it to and whether they were relevant to it or not.
#
All of these things changed very, very, very quickly and in arbitrary ways.
#
And what that does is like, you feel like you don't know what works.
#
You end up chasing after, you're trying to chase after a herd.
#
You see something that has gone viral and then you're like, okay, I have to do this.
#
And then you try to do that.
#
And maybe it works for you.
#
Maybe it worked for you once.
#
It doesn't work for you the second time.
#
And these are deeply unsettling things because it completely messes up the momentum and the
#
If they feel like they need to be someone else tomorrow and they need to be that person
#
again day after tomorrow, and if they take a week, then they've lost because the momentum
#
has to stay and it has to be quick and it has to be funny and it has to be shorter.
#
All of these format changes, style changes, this changes, that changes, it's very oppressive.
#
And it was just the most terrible way to do work.
#
At that time, they still hadn't implemented these policies on Instagram.
#
So Instagram was a super good medium and they had already bought it, but they hadn't done
#
And I think 2017 onwards, they started messing up Instagram algorithms as well.
#
So I know so many artist friends who have massive followings, but they can reach maybe
#
10, maybe 10%, like if they're very, very lucky, they reach 10% of their audience.
#
And a large part of the audience is bot accounts and those bots are also allowed to freely
#
proliferate even when Facebook knows that they're bots.
#
So you're in this game where now that they have complete control over the marketplace,
#
they're making you jump invisible hoops to reach an audience that they tell you exists,
#
but you have no way of actually knowing exists.
#
And you're creating so much value for their platform, but you're not getting anything
#
Instagram exists because photographers put photos, really high quality content, artists,
#
cartoonists without a second thought, they switched to videos that from now it's reels.
#
They abandoned everybody who made Instagram what it is just overnight.
#
It wasn't a journey we're on.
#
It wasn't a weaning away.
#
It was just now it's this deal with it.
#
I don't like, there's a lot of reasons why it had to be this way.
#
Photographers are doing this, audiences care about videos, but I agree with it and I disagree
#
with it because I don't know how valid it is to say that when you are the only people
#
that they can get access to things from.
#
If you only do this, then of course they can only see this now.
#
For you to say that this is something that you're getting from the audience is a little
#
unfair and it's not so easy to make that statement while it may be true.
#
So a part of me says that maybe this is how it is and people need to deal with it.
#
I think the next step that I'd like to see with these platforms is allowing users to
#
choose simple versions of algorithms.
#
Like at one level, I get that there is a timeline, there is limited space on that timeline and
#
therefore they have the power to determine what goes there and one day they decide to
#
On another day, like Facebook, for example, like I post there because it's not even a
#
very public thing is for friends and family who never see my post because I don't post
#
a picture, I post a link.
#
So links to any site automatically the algorithm ignores, which is fine.
#
It's kind of known to me.
#
But what would be great is if users can choose which algorithm they want to decide the content
#
So if I am an Instagram user and I only want to see reels, that's up to me.
#
If I only want to see people I follow, that's up to me.
#
If I only want to stay in my echo chamber, that's fine.
#
But if I want diversity, that's fine.
#
You know, rather than this one mega algorithm, this kind of control back to users is what
#
Whenever you go to a subreddit, you get to choose from so many different characteristics.
#
You want to see what's new.
#
You want to see what is the top.
#
You want to see things that are hot right now.
#
So then that can be something that is one day old.
#
And next to it is something that is 30 minutes old.
#
You get to see things in chronological order.
#
You get to see things that are controversial.
#
So they have not been they have almost as many downwards as upwards.
#
You get to sort of customize the algorithm in different ways according to how you want
#
Giving this power to the user is a very big thing.
#
And this is something that these giants don't do because their revenue model is based on
#
controlling the feed and showing you ads and taking you on this journey that they want
#
So this giving power back is something that's antithetical to that idea.
#
But this is why it's the reason why people are jaded.
#
It's the reason why people keep scrolling.
#
It's the reason why attention is falling.
#
And it's also the reason why people are exploring new media now.
#
So podcasts are here because people are not getting conversations in other places that
#
And newsletters because we want to read.
#
We want to give it time.
#
But simply the platform doesn't support it.
#
And inbox is still chronological so far.
#
A greater level of personalization maybe by 2030.
#
So before we end this effort, listeners who are wondering how we got together to record
#
in person, Nishant came all the way from Vancouver to Mumbai just to record with me in my home
#
He came to India and then he came to Mumbai too.
#
And we're having this recording.
#
But I'll end the episode with a standard question I ask all my guests.
#
Recommend some books for my listeners and indeed for me.
#
Books that shaped you, that changed the way you look at the world.
#
Or even books that you are so excited about at this moment in time that you want to stand
#
on a table and scream to the world, read this, read this, please read this.
#
Fiction has been a big part of my life.
#
And I think we do such a disservice when people say that fiction is less important than non-fiction.
#
Stories are the most important things in the world.
#
So the latest really cool fiction I read was Ted Chiang's Exhalation.
#
Those stories and the futurism of his stories actually has wedded me to the idea of certain
#
inevitable technologies more than any amount of non-fiction newsletters that I would read
#
advocating or pitching those technologies.
#
Because once you have a story telling you something, then you can see the world and
#
then things become more concrete.
#
So that's a new thing that I read that I really want to recommend.
#
But I think everybody in the world should read Kurt Vonnegut to be a better human.
#
I think everybody should read Slaughterhouse Five and Cat's Cradle and Sirens of Titan
#
and Breakfast of Champions and all his other books.
#
He's just simply one of the greatest writers ever.
#
We all grew up on British fiction in India.
#
Kurt Vonnegut taught me that you don't have to say very much to punch someone in the gut
#
or to really just move them beyond anything else.
#
You can do it with one paragraph with five word sentences.
#
Another author who did this to me like just unexpectedly brilliant and insane and crazy
#
was Joseph Heller for Catch-22.
#
And I think everybody should read Catch-22 because the world is absurd.
#
And if the world of Catch-22 seems absurd to you, then reality is a little bit more
#
And some of the greatest passages that I've ever read in my life are from Catch-22, including
#
there's this one passage which there's a character called Dunbar.
#
He is trying to do boring things and I'm paraphrasing.
#
I'm not quoting at all.
#
I'll just tell you what happens.
#
Is that this other character is telling him, why are you doing these silly, boring things?
#
And he's saying that I'm trying to stretch time.
#
And he asks him why he's doing that.
#
And he says, because I'm very old.
#
And he's like, you're not old.
#
We're in the air forces.
#
They're in the air force and a second world war.
#
And he says, how much older could I be at my age?
#
Every time we fly, we are close to death.
#
How much older could I be at my age?
#
And he tells him that a long life, the only way that he sees to have a long life is to
#
fill it with boring moments and dull moments.
#
So he does dull and boring things.
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And the other guy says, but then in that case, why would you want such a life?
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And Dunbar says, what else is there?
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And Joseph Heller in Catch-22 does this to you.
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He gives you these ideas, which just take you apart.
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Suddenly, they just break you down completely and you understand so much.
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So everybody should read that.
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Graphic novels are super important to me.
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I think Alan Moore is one of the greatest people alive.
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And everybody should, especially now, everybody should read V for Vendetta.
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Everybody should read Watchmen.
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It's so important with our ideas of what heroes are.
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In nonfiction, I think I've read some interesting things this year that I really liked.
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I've always wanted to read philosophy, but I find it very difficult.
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And so I reached out to our writing group and I asked for ideas for ways that I could
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read about philosophy without reading the work of philosophers.
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They recommended At the Existentialist Cafe by Sara Bakewell.
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And that was a brilliant, brilliant book.
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And I tell people to read it.
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The other big book that really mattered to me and which makes me think about, so this
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idea of the worlds that we were talking about in Twitter as well, comes from Francis Fukuyama's
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identity and the way that we perceive ourselves, the tribes that we think we belong to and
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we want to belong to, and the idea even of not belonging to a tribe.
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So even how I feel like you see yourself, like you want to not associate with tribes.
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And that is also a consequence of this age, giving space to that idea in our minds.
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And I have felt that for the longest time in my life.
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But that book, and I have felt this way, that I don't want to have allegiance to any tribe
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and I don't want to have any labels that people can stick on me.
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But that book allowed me to think about why other people are in other ways and what are
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their motivations and incentives.
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And that was very useful to do.
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I love reading about history.
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I read William Dalrymple's The Anarchy recently that I loved, but also Roman history.
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So I read Tom Holland's Caesar, which was the time of the Republic being in danger and
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becoming a monarchy in lots of de facto ways and the five Caesars who ruled, the family
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of Caesar that it became, the house of Caesar, and how that played out for like 200 years
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It has a lot of lessons for us and it's riveting and fantastic, like the kind of things that
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Fantastic recommendations.
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In fact, speaking of Fukuyama, his two volume book on the evolution of the state, it's just
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mind blowing if you haven't read that already, but takes a lot of time to get through.
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You remember Sergei Bupka a little before your time, 1980s pole vaulter, won a bunch
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So what Bupka would do is that he broke the world record and then he broke the world record
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Now, the funda was that his sponsors or the Soviet Union or whatever would give him a
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bonus every time he broke the world record.
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So he would make sure that he doesn't break the world record by too much so he can break
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it again by a little bit.
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So what we have done is we have broken the world record for the longest scene on scene
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episode and we could easily talk for another five hours, but I'm thinking that, you know,
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you want to have another.
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Let me, otherwise it'll be very hard for me to do a 10 hour episode with someone else.
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So, you know, let me have the satisfaction of breaking this at some point as well.
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So thank you so much for being so patient.
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Thank you for having me.
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Like I wanted to tell you at the start, what you've done is a very terrible thing that
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it took me half a decade to get over my imposter syndrome.
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And just by inviting me to this podcast, you have brought it roaring back.
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I'm going to have to deal with the ramifications of that for several months.
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It should be the other way around.
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And I think we're both at that stage when this should not matter.
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But having said goodbye to you, I'll also end it with what will be a treat for my listeners
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One of your favorite writers reading one of your favorite poems, here's Charles Bukowski
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There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out, but I'm too tough for him.
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I'm not going to let anybody see you.
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There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out, but I pour whiskey on him and
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inhale cigarette smoke and the whores and the bartenders and the grocery clerks never
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know that he's in there.
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There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out, but I'm too tough for him.
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Do you want to mess me up?
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Do you want to screw up the works?
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You want to blow my book sales in Europe?
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There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out, but I'm too clever.
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I only let him out at night sometimes when everybody's asleep.
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I say I know you're there, so don't be sad.
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Then I put him back, but he's singing a little in there.
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I haven't quite let him die, and we sleep together like that with our secret pact, and
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it's nice enough to make a man weep, but I don't weep, do you?
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If you enjoyed listening to this episode, head on over to the show notes, enter rabbitholesatwill.
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All of Nishant's work is linked from there.
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You can follow Nishant on Twitter at Sneaky Art.
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You can follow me at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
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You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in.
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Thank you for listening.
