The Art of Waiting (and it's use in elevators!)

Acting can be called the art of waiting and then reacting. I am good at waiting; whether it is waiting at the traffic signal or waiting for a friend at a bus-stop. I am sure (in fact I bet) all of us have waited for a fair portion of our lives when those seconds are added cumulatively.

There is in fact a strange joy and sense of impending excitement in waiting. So many times when I'm waiting at the traffic signal (which happens a lot in Bangalore) I observe the surrounding with an entirely new perspective. A lot many times the stillness of a traffic signal instills unknown corners of my mind.

Instead of honking or cursing the driver in front of me I decide to wait for the light to turn green (which eventually and always happens). Somehow this waiting time manages to give a chance for random thoughts to blossom. A melody or a line or a revelation is common for me at the signal!

I wonder what is it about waiting that is providing such fertile grounds to imagination. Ain't the answer simple? Maybe it is, here are couple of the reasons I see:

-I am letting go of my thoughts and not holding them.
-I am being patient and letting thoughts wander around.

Now connecting this loose end of my post to what I said in the beginning about acting. Almost all actors have described acting as first and foremost as the art of listening. Isn't listening in a way waiting for other to finish and at the same time focusing on his/her words? It's being patient with the other person.

It's about time to extract a "practical" advice from all this blathering I've done so far - next time you're rushing to enter the elevator, just wait for others to get out and then get in please! Don't rush, waiting isn't bad for who knows when the lightening would strike.

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

Carl Sagan

Comments

Scuba Diving 36 feet deep in Goa (Surreal but Nice!)

"Surreal but nice" that's what Hugh Grant's character managed to blurt out, mesmerized by the beauty of Julia Roberts (in the movie Notting Hill ). And this was the exact thought that was running in my mind as I was rising from a depth of over 35 feet under water in the Arabian Sea near Goa, India. I had just finished my first dive (rather second dive of my first dive) with grouper fish, tailor fish - and many more - knelt at the bottom of the ocean floor and touched a ship wreck that sunk more than sixty years ago! It was a surreal experience that has left me with a feeling of self-satisfaction as well as endless curiosity. The two feelings very rarely take a house together in my mind. Probably the last time they shacked up together was when I got an admit for my Master's from State University of New York . The feeling of gliding underwater among the fishes, water pressure trying to burst your ears drums, flying over huge boulders of rocks under sea; like an un...

The debate on Times Now Summit 2022 between Salman Khurshid, Dr. Vikram Sampath, Sai Deepak, and Pavan K Varma showed how disconnected the left, right, and the middle are from each other. We all know these 'luminaries', as Rahul Shivshankar, Editorial Director & Editor-in-Chief @TimesNow introduces them. How left and right do not apply to Indian political viewpoints is a matter for another time, therefore pardon my use of the western paradigm of left and right for the rest of this blog post. Times Now Debate, 2022 We all know Sai Deepak through his YouTube debate with Asaduddin Owaisi (Sai Deepak in fact moderated the debate) a few years back. And since then he has authored a couple of books on the historical context that surrounded the drafting of the constitution of India between 1946 to 1950. His first book on India, that is Bharat forced us to rethink colonialism and introduced an entirely distinct scholarly way to look at middle-e...

What is Vulgar Propaganda?

Nadav Lapid called the movie 'The Kashmir Files' a propaganda movie while making his comments at the International Film Festival of India 2022 held in Goa last month. I'm not going to talk about the resulting controversy and eventual apology by Mr. Lapid. He was not only disrespectful of the freedom of speech of director Vivek Agnihotri but conducted his jury duty unprofessionally by taking a political stance. I'm only interested in the accusation of propaganda that Mr. Lapid so casually hurled at 'The Kashmir Files'. The Kashmir Files What is propaganda? The best definition that I could find is available on a website called https://disinformation-nation.org/how-propaganda-works/ where it defines propaganda as 'an agenda' to promote a specific cause or ideology to a 'targeted audience' and a 'massaged message' which may alter or omit the facts. Propaganda can take various forms of communication to propagate the agenda. And especially...

Reaching There

Search This Blog