Vichara Announcement: I Make Videos Now
Auspicious 300th anniversary of the first performance of Bach’s Magnificat!
For a while now, I haven’t liked identifying as a “writer.” One reason for that almost everyone is a writer. A schoolteacher is a writer who writes on a chalkboard. A staffer on Capitol Hill is a writer who writes, who knows, moderately important memos. A mathematician is a writer who writes mathematical proofs and papers. A startup entrepreneur is a writer who writes pitch-decks. Another reason is that almost all “writers” today actually write very poorly and usually not very interesting things. Especially in India, where there are lots of people who happen to identify as “content writers” and “copy writers” with pride, saying you’re a writer means you may receive admiration—genuine admiration, the kind that people who think it’s really cool to be able to write clean and compelling marketing copy give to people who can write not even that clean and compelling marketing copy.
My endeavor is philosophy—which is actually not my endeavor, because the term bears denotations that I don’t think really get at what the essence of the endeavor is; the (post-)Sanskrit darshana (Wikipedia/Wiktionary) gets at what I’m called to do better. But call it what we will, it’s not something that necessarily requires the medium of text. Text is useful and appropriate for certain functions. But ideas can also flourish by being conveyed in other forms.
So I’m now going to try to make videos accompanying each installment of text that I add to this project here. Here’s the first video, which sort of retroactively accompanies the previous post, and like it did, outlines my overall project in brief, explains its importance and gives some context for it. I’ve edited that post to link to it as well, and in the future, will be releasing the text and video together.
As I say in the video, writing will serve the purpose of substantive, precise and rigorous treatments of ideas. Speaking—and putting up videos of the speaking—is the way to hit the main bullet points and give a big picture overview of the message. Or as I also compare it to in the video, in writing one can give a detailed and thorough picture of the forest, including an account of all its trees and how they add up; the videos then play the role of a low-to-medium-resolution map of the forest, pointing out its highlights and conveying the gist of its topography and core features. I tend to write long, and that won’t change; I hope to keep the videos anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes.
The writings here I intend to keep to philosophy. But the philosophical framework developed here necessarily entails certain viewpoints regarding concrete matters of the world. I may also use the audiovisual medium to share opinions regarding politics, economics, geopolitics, culture, etc., which I (probably) won’t do in Vichara. To the extent that I want to share such opinions in writing, the place I’ll be doing that—regularly now!—is on my Twitter: @I_are.
That’s the plan. In keeping with what I wrote last time, efforts have been in motion to create the presentation—now in the written as well as spoken word—of the actual ideas that I’ve been developing and that I wish to unfurl in methodical fashion, and within a few days, you should receive the first chapter proper of this unfurling.