Not exactly an easy day but several good things happened. Made some strong headway in the editing work. Didn't go to Subko but had good sleep and some nice chats with a few people in the online book club. To avoid mental clutter, I made a couple of swift decisions. I had to explore some option for work but with the editing assignment over the weekends and the volume of other regular work, there isn't time to take on any more. So I said no. That could be a sign of maturity. Because I want to keep some time away for reading and other reflective writing. Now, I am observing some patterns in the type of talent existing in the industry.
I am getting the sense that while the baseline has dropped considerably - in terms of skill, foundational education, and maybe even attitude, geography could play some part in the scouting and location of talent. Tier 1 cities are near useless. But smaller towns and tier 2 cities at least have people with ambition. There is a sense of kinship with the work that can be nurtured. But location and age aside, the one big thing that makes a difference is whether people read in their free time or not.
I had suspected this correlation a while ago but I could have been biased. But it is more and more clear now - people who read for pleasure can get aligned with a project expectations quicker. So, of course, all of us instructional designers read. But transactional reading does not give you that same mental limberness as reading for pleasure. Because for pleasure there is an expansiveness of cognitive faculty - you pick up one book because you liked the cover, you picked another book because the story or plot appealed, a third because you were interested to try out a genre - that dipping and sipping of uncertainty with reading is what you need in complex, sticky projects. I would say that is what you need in any project if you are responsible for written communication but one can get by in some types of assignments by only being a transactional reader. For others, you need a certain juice that comes from reading without an agenda.
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In other news, I have been thinking about China. Something about that country inspires deep respect in me.I understand that they are our enemy neighbors but compare to the other enemy neighbor that is a nuisance and a horrid, petty one at that, China at least is a worthy detractor. I was thinking about this huge cultural emblem of beauty and finesse that Japan has - all ikigai and tea ceremony and beauty and wabi-sabi and what not. But it's as if the world has forgotten about the Nanking rape - that ghastly brutal rapes and killings by Japanese soldiers of Chinese people - women, children, and men - in the most foul ways possible. Women's and men's genitals were chopped and cooked and dined on even as they lived. What kind of ugliness and brutality lives within us? And all this and now when book clubs recommend Japanese literature, it's about the trageies of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki variant. Those were brutal too - but it's as if Japan gets to tell its story and show its wound because of who its enemies were. They were taken on by America and if you have America as your enemy, you at least get the media to record and tell your story. But what about the Nanking rapes? Was that documented in pop-culture or fiction or plays or Hollywood movies? I often wonder how did China rise? I don't know too much besides the reel highlights of Mao Tse Tung and the Great Leap Forward and all that - but how did that country which had one whole generation wiped off - how did they rise? India supplied opium to China in the 17th or 18th century I think. And one whole generation got drugged and addicted and useless - one whole generation of a country of that size! How did they get back on track? How are they winning Olympics and setting up education policies like the 2035 education policy that is centered around AI and the human mind's ability to focus. How? In some of the companies I have freelanced with or worked on extended projects on, we can't even follow file naming conventions or checklists? How did that company overcome a nationwide addiction, dismantle ideologies and philosopies to accomodate Buddhism, Confuscionism, Taoism to Abrahamic religions like Islam and Christainity to Communism, etc. It is...immense...I would like to study more about this.
I did not know how complicit India was in the opium trade. It is very painful to know that we did that to another country - addiction destroys families in ways that generations can't recover from. Better to go and break a house or something.
But the Nanking rapes - how do we reconcile belonging to a specie that can do that - to its own?
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Anyway, as the line by D.H. Lawrence goes: 'We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.'
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