be heard!
Check out www.beheard.ae … I saw a series of outdoor hoardings advertising it while driving along Beach Road this morning. I first had an idea for a website just like this about a year ago – but did nothing about it. 
It’s such an excellent way to have your finger on the pulse of a region! People can post questions and answer them anonymously. The yes-no answers are available for all to see. You can look up results of overall respondents and also split by gender, age and ethnicity. I’m so excited to see this in effect. Not only is it a good idea, the site is well-designed.
Anyone aware of who the originators of this website are? There is no webmaster or contact information. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s The National that’s behind it, but I could of course be wrong. I’d so like to know either way!
new year resolution
I have always been too impressed by intelligence / wit / talent in people … to the point where I forget to notice how empathic (or not) they are. This year, I will begin to change that. See I have come to believe that kindness – towards yourself and others – is the beginning of wisdom. Okay, I know. Not only is it beyond mid-January, I am old enough to know this already. May sound pretty basic, but this psychologist is just about getting it. Better late than never!
ramble free
Feel the need to write today. About nothing specific, just to write.
I wonder what the act of writing does – psychologically. While you are writing, there is a heightened sense of belief in your thoughts, a strengthening of conviction in your feelings. There is also an evolution of existent thoughts and feelings that might not ordinarily occur.
Most important for me: there’s a withering away, whether fleeting or lasting, of self-doubt. And the thought of creating a starkish black and white, from your typically thousand shades of grey, is nice. After that, you glide back in to a kind of cognitive twilight from where you came.
The twilight is neither a dark nor claustrophobic one. In fact, it is a space without boundaries – quite different from the world of words. There are no letters and no word is set in stone. Thoughts are malleable, grammar has little to say, vocabulary is only as big as the next word, and you are free to place commas (or not) between a myriad visuals. It’s that one place where there is utter freedom of thought.
While that freedom does not vanish when you articulate something, there are certainly great constraints put on it when you do. Suddenly, you are limited by something inane – like the last preposition you used or your resistance to the semi-colon. Sometimes there comes along a metaphor; it lets you roam a bit more easily.
All this, of course, happens as you write. After you are done, there is that sweet sense of accomplishment for having been a composer. No matter how the composition turns out…
end of an affair?
I’m a devout CK One girl. It’s the only fragrance that I simply cannot do without. Sure, there’s been a fling here and a flirtation there, but my relationship with CK One has lasted many years. I made an exception for CK in2u (For Her) recently – although I quickly realized it comes nowhere close to my one true (unisex!) love.
I’m in advertising and so it’s often tough for me to be seduced by brands – I work on the strategies that underlie them after all. But CK One is one of those rare brands that I’m intertwined with somehow. I love much of the advertising as well. In a sense, the brand – like a strong brand should be – is a part of me. So when I see the “limited edition” bottles Calvin Klein puts out once in a while, it makes me a bit sad. And less loyal.
The CK One Summer and CK in2u Pop lines look awful. So much so, I honestly don’t care about how it smells. Why CK would dilute/taint their brand this way, I’ve no idea. These colors are unacceptably garish; give me the classic, clean, minimalist feel of CK any day. No CKitsch please!
If their strategy is to seasonally expand the consumer base (with younger folks?), then CK should consider whether it’s putting (older!) loyalists at risk of switching. Shouldn’t brand aficionados be tripping all over themselves to acquire a limited edition? Maybe they’re taking the brand from somewhat niche to totally pop…
Or maybe, just maybe, I need to find another with which to move on! Ah but I might have to stick it out with the One for a bit. I think I’m still in love. =)
cadillac
I saw the Andy Walo Trio play at House of Blues in Los Angeles, and haven’t been able to get this song out of my head for a year. It’s called Cadillac and you can find it on their Myspace Music page. There’s something about blues-rock that I can throw myself in to. (It’s not as self-indulgent as either just blues or just rock – gives you more of a chance to get out of yourself and in to its groove.) But don’t let me trivialize this tune as merely a good distraction. It’s great! The gimmicky get-back to the main riff is totally awesome, each and every time they do it.
tell the story
I’ve been reading about writing, if only to procrastinate.
I find it hard to actually sit down and begin to write a story. Except for a short one I wrote in Austin, which was fun but not particularly good if I may add, and the odd composition in school, I have not delved in to fiction very much. You see the scientificist ( 
) in me won’t allow it.
Excuses, excuses.
So I came across a tips-for-amateur-storytellers type website out there. It said: Open a book at random. Write down the first sentence you see. Now tell the story from there.
Here goes then.
The loneliness was still there, but it was getting louder and easier to dance to.
Wow.
ditch it
I’ve grown certain that the root cause of lack of fulfillment – and the sense of futility that goes with it – is fear. (Needless to say, I’ve been in a contemplative phase for the last couple of weeks.) To live life with authenticity is tough, especially in the smoke-and-mirrors world this often is. And underneath the fear of being true to yourself lie the fears of failure and rejection. They make us give in to the status quo, to not speak our minds, and to not bring to any situation what we might uniquely bring, in their absence.
It is very early on in our lives that we become afraid of being wrong or looking stupid or feeling inferior. These are very real and very human fears, and once they set in, discovering who we really are becomes an uphill battle. We lie to ourselves and others, we hide and we hurt, we deny and we demean. We all do; it’s not a question of if but how much.
Now consider the flip side. Is courage the absence of fear? Seems to me it’s more like courage is simply the acknowledgment of fear. Once you admit to a fear, it tends to lose its bite, which is liberating. You gradually become free to be aware, free to not unthinkingly conform, free to be and believe in yourself. (One of my great fears is of being perceived as too idealistic and only very recently have I begun to confront it.)
I recently came across a related and rather neat quote by Nietzsche: Fear is the mother of morality. That got me thinking about how rarely we find ourselves doing what feels right – not what we are told is right, or what is generally considered right, but what intuitively feels right deep down to us. If we could make more of a habit of it, then we might have no use of the so-called morality that often leads to brashness towards ourselves and others. I deeply believe that being gentle is part of being brave, and requires even more of those proverbial guts. Think not just about us as individuals, but also about how we behave collectively – for example countries that are at war…
I know I am rambling, guess it’s because I’m not used to doing this. I tend to avoid getting too personal on this blahg – perhaps in the fear that I will be judged as childish and over-emotional or even worse as boring. (All this fear, my being a psychologist notwithstanding!) But this is how I feel and this subject is at my core. So hear hear then, here’s to facing fears. Slowly but surely, even if just a fraction of one at a time. Good night. =)
think like a kid!
We sometimes use a cool creative tool to brainstorm at work. Basically, you each pull one of a pack of cards. (Every card bears a different anecdote and an associated technique.) Then you play the role that the card suggests within the team for a bit, until it’s time to pull the next card. It’s a fun and remarkably useful exercise! Here is one I especially like…
grim
I was on vacation in South India this last week. My cousin and I traveled a few hours from Mysore to a beautiful resort in Coorg. Coffee plantations, elephants roaming free, lush greenery, and plenty of rain-induced relaxation later, we decided to return by bus. It was a charming ride through tiny villages that made me feel connected with India again after years – even as we were at times tossed a foot off our seats by monsoon potholes galore!
That was all until about a hour and a half in, when we heard a sickening crunch, as we rumbled through a village called Kamalapur. The bus ground to a halt and there it was, plain for all to see, a 4 year-old kid splattered on the street. Words cannot describe the feeling and I will – for my peace of mind and yours – omit gory details.
What was almost more disturbing was the reaction of the villagers. They gathered around in hordes within minutes, all looking for someone to blame. Apparently, drivers of all vehicles involved, whether directly or not, were considered criminals. The driver and conductor of our bus simply ran away in a jiffy. Perhaps they thought escaping in to a neighbouring village would be safer than facing the wrath of the mob that had gathered. And what a mob it was! A buzz spread through our bus; we were strongly advised to get away as soon as possible, owing to a good chance that the bus would be stoned by people provoked before the arrival of cops. We left and walked a few kilometres down the highway, where we eventually hitched a ride to the nearest town.
What I could not get past is that, in all this, the remains of the child were ignored, with no one to simply cover him up with a piece of cloth. In fact, it seemed like people wanted to keep the terrible sight there, in order that the anger that was seething would not wane. Were the incident to be covered by a foreign press, it would be easy to portray India as a brutal land of ignorant people. We somehow could not blame the dirt-poor and vastly uneducated villagers for their reaction however. All we could hope for as we brisked ourselves away – on the eve of Independence Day no less – was more of a drive towards literacy.
cute cubed
In a google search for “the role of design in branding”, I found this totally cute video on youtube. Amazing art direction!
PS: My favourite parts were the dicing of the Rubik’s cube and the shaving of the Post-it notes, but really all of it makes you smile. :)
