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growing up in singapore in a hindu family i never really understood our religious practices until i went to my grandpa's village in india and witnessed the moon and the night sky and the bewitching quality of fire in absolute darkness https://t.co/NYB2R4iDWk
Yesterday during partial eclipse a friend mentioned it was weird that the city still seemed at full daytime brightness despite 95% of the sun being covered. Fun to see how our senses being logarithmic to external stimuli -- not linear -- shows up in everyday settings
in singapore it's like this, the city makes the temples seem small, unimportant, irrelevant. i remember even as a kid thinking "this feels like playing with dolls" https://t.co/6gS9zhjESp
doing some reading into tamil history and I'm reminded of the last time I visited the madurai meenakshi temple with my parents in 2016. it was quite a moving and eye-opening experience. most hindu koyils in singapore look like this. it's always contextualized by the city https://t.co/6lJWWiVGqo
whereas, if you live in a small village in india, even the tiny local temple is a pop of color, light and sound amidst a vast wilderness. the institution would also function as a social and cultural centre. this is very hard to properly appreciate/understand in modernity imo https://t.co/CehG6NF949
i've been sorta stewing/researching/feeling a piece about this for years, idk if it wants to be an essay or maybe even a novel. there's something to be said about how technocapital is the new god that has relegated the old gods to the periphery https://t.co/jMMZRDaEPl
In contrast, in singapore, where I'm from, the schelling points are gopurams of glass and steel. that tower is *literally* called CAPITAL TOWER. if I wrote this into my dystopian sci-fi hindu cyberpunk novel, my editor would smack me for being too literal with the imagery https://t.co/bZmiQiMODj
my personal life is very much intertwined in this tension i made my offerings to the internet gods since i was a kid, and in my case they literally feed me, pay all my bills. i get to talk to people all over the world thanks to the internet https://t.co/Dp1EajvkVo
a great lil pixar short from 2015 does a really nice job of capturing this clash with a cute synthesis conclusion, where sanjay receives help from his ancestral deities and is eager to give them an aesthetic update in his language of action figures. but really the bigger thing– https://t.co/h61MMOgrz1
is sanjay-the-creator's choice to convey his story through the power of CINEMA. it's the obvious choice we're on track to a world where everyone has smartphones, everyone has internet, everyone has access to media... https://t.co/0610GU9t4k
i got a lot more to say but im tired lol. everything is connected, it's so big, it's so wild, there are multiple past cycles to study and evaluate, and an incredibly effervescent chaotic time of change to navigate ahead of us
@visakanv have thought about this a lot too, and in the shift to technocapital, a careful examination of the questions of "what was lost; what was gained?" is important. Along several levels: the material, the relationship/social, and others. It wasn't all good, wasn't all bad
@visakanv this "pick and choose" thing is considered dangerous, dilettantish if you're very young but with solid principles and some introspection under your belt, making your own way is practically a duty at some point (consistently surprising tho how much angst syncretism attracts)
@forthrighter yup i think we're in the same boat here people are always angsty in the moment but if we examine the past more closely, everything we take for granted as "how it's always been" went through layers and layers of syncretism, remixing, etc to suit the circumstances/context
@visakanv that's the paradox of syncretism; you shouldn't do it and yet the evidence of it constantly being done is everywhere. How I resolve that paradox is that it's good advice to warn apprentices against it, and journeymen masters ALWAYS have to learn which rules to bend, break
@visakanv you & I both like music and man, 3-chord ACDC rock has its place for beginners; rules & forms, they give a skeleton to creative work when it's not yet experienced to know that ... skeletons can be anything, in any form. But crippling to beginners to try to hand them that
@forthrighter analogy from cooking and music: if you get excited about the idea of doing "fusion" because you think fusion is intrinsically good, you'll probably make awkward oddities and monstrosities rather: eat/listen/read widely, immerse yourself in everything, and make what feels Right