Don't Get Into a Box

We hold unlimited possibilities

Two whole weeks have passed since my last newsletter post, which is unlike the pace I’ve tried to set this year of multiple posts a week. It’s been crazy busy. Last week, I recorded five episodes of Everything is Everything with my co-host Ajay Shah. This week, I recorded three episodes of The Seen and the Unseen. I was jumping from panic prep to panic prep.

In this post, I want to share with you a discussion Ajay and I had about the direction of our show. It stemmed from a disagreement about what the show should be — but we resolved it, and he was enthusiastic when I said I wanted to share our thought process here. We want you inside our black box.

But first, I want to talk about something that has become foundational to my thinking, and was germane to our disagreement. I believe that creators should never put themselves in a box — we have endless possibilities open to us, and we should remain open to them.

I spoke about this a bit in my intro to Seen/Unseen episode 372 with Manjula Padmanabhan — but let me elaborate here anyway.

Evil Box 1: The Box of Expectation

The first way we can box ourselves in is by shaping ourselves through the expectations of others. (The Looking-Glass Self is one good frame to use while thinking about this.) What happens sometimes is that we get an early success with something we do. The validation is so sweet that we continue doing more and more of that. Without our realising it, it becomes a trap.

For example, a band could have an early hit with an early song or album. They are then expected to perform it at every concert. They are expected to create more music like it. Your fans see you as one thing. Staying that one thing can bring you continued success. But what if your tastes and influences are growing, and you want to evolve as an artist?

Must you spend a lifetime performing covers of your old hits and pretending to be an earlier version of yourself?

Trying to break out of a box is dangerous. Consider Bob Dylan — to many, he is known for his early hits like "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'". They were written and released when he was in an early folk-inspired phase, and they were acoustic. Shortly after these recordings, he decided to turn electric, and the outrage was immediate. He had broken out of his box — and thank goodness for us he did. “Like a Rolling Stone” and a lifetime of masterpieces emerged from his decision.

The Beatles made a similar turn when they stopped performing live and changed their musical direction. It is a long and winding road from “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” to “Strawberry Fields Forever.”

Or consider the journey Mark Lanegan made from “Halo of Ashes” to “I'm Not the Loving Kind.” (I love both songs!) In fact, before we move on to my next point, check out this song!

The Pinkness of Jaipur

In 1876, Jaipur was painted pink to welcome the arrival of Prince Albert to the city. (Don’t ask me why; it just was!) Since then, it became known as ‘The Pink City.’ And this became a self-fulfilling title. People came to Jaipur expecting Pinkness, and more and more buildings, especially in the touristy part of the city, were painted pink.

I sometimes think about how this is a great metaphor for the box of expectations. (I spoke about it at length in this episode.) The branding of Jaipur — and its self-image, if cities can be said to have a self-image — led to path-dependence. Pinkness was normalised and became the norm — and even a rebellion against it could not escape it, because rebellions are defined by what they’re a rebellion against.

Similarly, if a young teenage girl in a conservative family is told that girls should smile more, will that forced smiling become part of her pinkness? If a teenage boy is praised for doing something macho, will toxic masculinity become his pinkness? If a particular view you express on social media gets you validation from a particular tribe, will you sacrifice nuance for the further approval of that tribe? Will dogmatic thinking become your pinkness?

Do you have a pinkness? You contain multitudes. Are some of them suppressed because you’ve put yourself in a box?

Evil Box 2: The Box of Form

The other box to beware of is the box of form. There are two aspects to this.

One, we grow up with notions of how there is a heirarchy of artistic expressions, and some forms are higher than the other. When I grew up, I believed that a book was the pinnacle of intellectual achievement, and I haven’t arrived until I write one. Today I know that with exploding possibilities, many other forms have equal value. Newsletters and blog posts create a flow of content that may be more valuable than a stock of content like a book. Even a longform podcast like Seen/Unseen can be a more effective means of intellectual enquiry than a book.

If you’re a creative person, you’re creative in any context. Don’t restrict yourself to one.

Two, there are forms within the arts that are restrictive by definition. For example, how many musicians have railed against the convention of the three-minute pop song or the 40-minute album? How many writers have looked at the 800-word limit of newspaper op-eds and thought, ‘But I have more (or less) to say’? How many filmmakers have lamented that they can either make a short film or a feature film, but nothing in between?

All those restrictions came about because of physical restrictions of the past that no longer exist. (For example, the convention for how long an album should be came about because of how much audio an LP could hold.) But today, we have the means of production in our hand, technology has removed these restrcitions, and we no longer have to stick to these ossified forms. We don’t realise this often enough. A songwriter’s brain may reflexively fit itself to a three-minute groove — but you don’t need to do that!

So avoid imprisoning yourself into any of these boxes. The world is full of possibilities. Sit back and think about them!

Is Everything Everything?

And now, as promised, I come to Everything is Everything. When I first thought of the show, I conceptualised it as Ajay and me just sitting and talking about whatever we felt like, whatever was on our minds, and applying different frames to it. Thus the title.

Once we got going, though, two things happened. One, we typically shoot five episodes at a go, so the possibility of being topical gets reduced. Two, because of the pressure of finding things to talk about for five episodes, we have often taken the easy option of picking something one of us knows a lot about. Ajay’s led episodes on subjects he knows deeply like UNIX, Ukraine, Oppenheimer, finance, Bruce Springsteen, the military, family firms and hiking. I’ve led episodes on pet themes like poker, productivity, cricket, statism, public choice theory, great liberal thinkers and agriculture.

The original idea of the show, however, was not for each episode to be an authoritative deep dive. It was for us to have casual conversations about whatever was on our mind, topical or otherwise. We’ve done a few episodes like this, of which the one on Declutter is a favourite of mine. We took up a subject none of us had thought about deeply, and riffed. I think it was a lovely conversation. We also did some storytelling episodes, all of which I love! Just imagination, creativity, thinking aloud. Check them out: Seven Stories That Should Be Films. The Reformers. Five Epic Stories That Must Be Films.

I made the following argument to Ajay: We should do more episodes that are freewheeling conversations. Every episode does not have to be an authoritative deep dive on something we have thought about for years. We will run out of that anyway. Fans of the show like the chemistry, the occasional collision of our different points of view, and most of all, they just like hanging with us.

Ajay had two counters to this. One, he felt uncomfortable talking about something he does not know inside-out. He is sick of so-called experts mouthing off on subjects outside their range of expertise. He doesn’t want to do that.

My response to that was that we don’t have to sound authoritative on subjects we don’t know well. We share our thought processes, our instincts and opinions, our journeys towards understanding something. We stay authentic, even in our uncertainties. No one is going to mistake that for the last word on the subject, and regular viewers will account for our inclinations and biases.

Ajay’s second counter was on the seemingly narrow subject of episode titles. When a viewer sees a title like ‘The Beauty of Finance’, she knows exacly what the episode is about. Not so when you see a title like ‘Halfway From Coal, Halfway to Diamond.’ Is that less of a reason to click?

I had two responses to this. One, regular viewers will hopefully binge everything anyway, and the subject is less important than the different frames we bring to whatever we talk about. Two, we had agreed to just be authentic to ourselves and not worry about what people want. Thinking too hard about the title is thinking too hard about the viewer. We should just focus on the kind of work we wanted to do.

We’ve already done many episodes of both kinds, and will continue doing so. But I think I got Ajay to agree to loosen up. (Or rather, we did, as the rest of the team, Nomsita and Vaishnav, also wanted a looser Ajay!) The next five episodes you will see (eps 40 to 44) were shot after our discussion.

Let me know in the comments here what you think of our discussion!

Meanwhile, here’s our latest episode, released yesterday but recorded in February, which is more the freewheeling kind.

The Surface Area of Serendipity | Episode 39 | Everything is Everything

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Illlustrations by Simahina.

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