Is Life Funny?

"If life doesn't make you laugh, you didn't get the joke."

In 2016. A year or so after having gone blind, I decided to do something called a chilla. This is an Indian Classical music practice where for 40 days you isolate yourself and only practice. No phones, no contact with the outside world, just you and music fighting it out. There was a saying, you either burn in the fire or you get cooked to a delicious meal for the world to enjoy when you do a Chilla. However it was 2016, so I had to modify the rules just a tad bit. I did isolate myself but I came home for dinner everyday and slept at home. So I guess I had an hour or so of contact with my family. I allowed myself access to listening to music as part of me being with music. Finally, I allowed myself one book I could read through this 40 day period, which happened to be Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts.

The quote above is from that book, or at least what I remember of it. Somehow this quote has been stuck in my brain ever since. I guess I did read the book twice through in those 40 days. As I have been planning to restart my musical practice more seriously, I have been thinking about my time doing the Chilla quite a bit. While my life doesn't allow me to take 40 days in isolation at the moment, I am trying to build up to a 24 hour practice session by the end of April. So that would entail slowly increasing the time I spend practicing till I can go for 24 hours. However, all Ludacris ideas aside, this quote came back to my mind as I was thinking back.

My whole life has been such a crazy series of accidents. Its been me saying I am about to do something crazy and impossible and in the pursuit landing somewhere completely different but still exciting. In a lot of ways 16 year old Eshaan would not recognise the person I am today. Which is probably a good thing because 16 year old Eshaan was an idiot and I am still trying to rectify his bad habits. But the core of the matter is that it is actually really funny. I was scripting a new youtube video for my Blind Point Of View Channel, and I had to stop and laugh out loud. 10 years ago, I did everything in my power to not be "The Blind Guy." For the brief time I was in The Srishti School of Art, Design & Technology, everything I made was judged from the lens of "A blind guy made this." This made me run in the complete opposite direction. Now here I am today, fully embracing the fact that being blind is part of my identity whether I care or not. I don't even know what it was to be honest because as recently as last year I debating whether I should be using the fact that I am blind in marketing/other dumb things. This really took me back to being in srishti and not wanting to make any art because I wanted it to be judged for what it was, not for how I made it. But then we get into the crazy territory of is the process art?

Regardless, over the last year or so I've tackled the question a lot and the reason why Blind Point Of View Exists is because if anyone is going to tell the story of my blindness I guess it should be me. But this is so FUNNY! The whole time I fought as hard as I could to not be perceived differently, heck when I am setting up meetings with new people I almost never tel them I'm blind till I meet them. Now here I am.

I guess life isn't as serious as we often make it to be? I guess that was my obligatory blind sage wisdom for this post. But seriously, take a second and aggressively smile for 10 whole seconds. And when you're done, ask yourself, why did I just do that?

As always you can hit reply to this email, I loved all the responses I got last time, they made my day every time I read them.

And if you want to check out Blind Point Of View you can click here.

Much Love, Eshaan.