Light Years Ideas Of The Week — #003 (Happy Independence Day 2024 India)
My top 10 ideas of the week (Aug 2nd week 7th-15th 2024)
It’s been a lovely week with a lot happening. This week’s ideas piece comprising — ideas that shape the universe — has been a bit delayed because I‘ve been travelling. I always love solo travel, and this time I hit the road to visit a hill station destination I hadn’t been to since my schooling years — Panchgani. I vaguely remember a Scouts camp we went on to Panchgani back when I was in my early teens. We slept in tents against the backdrop of a stunning view & played games & did our tests to earn badges as part of the Scouts program.
So it was great to wind down & relax to a stunning view of the valley from the hotel I was staying at. Playing guitar by a bonfire, and being closer to nature & I managed to squeeze in a tiny bit of work as well, but just generally relaxing ahead of the start of the new football season. A perfect getaway before Independence Day (I went early to avoid the rush of people getting out of the city on 14th & 15th).
This week’s picks are slightly heavy to start yet balanced by the end but worth checking out. Here are this week’s picks of Ideas on Light Years…
So my travel-logue aside, I managed to find an online movie-logue which according to me is the ultimate movie recommendation platform. It’s called Letterboxd & it’s got a ton of cool features. From rating, reviewing & keeping a diary to making lists of the films you watch, Letterboxd is a social network for filmmakers, film buffs, enthusiasts & everybody who enjoys the art form of cinema. I covered its features in a detailed article on my Medium. But in case you can’t view the article because it’s paywalled, Letterboxd is my ideal destination to find new films to binge on. Letterboxd has some great discovery features & if you follow the right accounts of filmmakers & people who work in film or critics, it’s your gateway to some staggering cinema. You can follow my profile on Letterboxd here. Create an account — it’s free.
Coming to why my Medium is paywalled, the biggest news emerging this past week was that the Medium Partner Program went live in India as of 6th & 7th August 2024. It was quite an excruciating wait but the MPP is now active in good ol’ Bharat Mata. For those of you who aren’t aware Medium is a micro-blogging website just like Substack & the Medium Partner Program allows you to earn off your articles based on views, reads & engagement from members. If you haven’t already, you should become a “member” of Medium to get access to a world of ideas & perspectives written by people across the globe. It’s free for free articles but costs just $3 a month (240 INR) to get access to member-only articles (with unlimited reading). For those of you who want to write & get your perspective out there, you can join the MPP & start building your own Medium blog & profile(You have to be a member to join the MPP). I’ve been blogging on Medium for a few years now so I’m looking at making anywhere between $500-$1000 a month with my articles as things progress (This is apart from my regular gigs in writing & music). My biggest advice to you if you’re just getting started is to focus on the quality of your articles — the reads, followers & income will come. You can find me on Medium here.
Medium has a lot to offer, and it’s quickly becoming the best place to get interesting takes away from traditional media companies & platforms. This article about how Nike made a huge blunder by analysing the implementing strategies based on measuring & interpreting the wrong data was intriguing. Nike lost $25B in market cap and the stock price tanked by 32% because of this strategy. As its title suggests, it highlights the limitations of the ‘data-driven’ approach to D2C selling which we’re seeing implemented by major companies & how making a mistake with data can have serious repercussions.
This particular post was based on another post by an EU-based entrepreneur I follow on Linkedin named Simon Høiberg. Simon runs a SaaS startup (or a couple of startups) in the EU but in his revelatory post, he reflected on the numbers when it came to his income before & after taking the leap into entrepreneurship. In his post, he stated that he was earning $300,000 a year as a freelancer & now several years since taking the business plunge to create a start-up or two he makes exactly the same amount of $300,000 after expenses, employee costs & tax, give or take. This post was eye-opening & dovetails my older article reflecting on the extinction of the 9 to 5 giving way to the gig economy. In the time & effort it would take to build up your start-up ground up & wait for it to turn profitable & make $300-$500k a year you could accomplish the same without the hassles of starting an enterprise by building your personal brand & portfolio. With the right profile, portfolio, skill set & choice of industry, you can make as much if not more by just freelancing working several gigs, instead of going through the rigours, risks & difficulties of starting your own business. This shift to the “gig economy” is what LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman thinks will contrive to occur in the next decade. You can read the post & my take on it here.
This article on AEON was very very interesting. It explores how our ancestors, despite not having the means to share their knowledge other than stone carvings, parchment scrolls & hand-written documents (which also dwindled in the past) managed to pass knowledge & skills over time to other succeeding generations. The researchers suggest that there’s some amount of “tacit knowledge” that is passed through our bodies from generation to generation(I don’t know how much of that is genetic). Of course, we now have the internet(which could become obsolete in 1000 years & ahead) but think about how our earliest ancestors passed on farming, hunting, mathematics & other skills & knowledge with minimal availability of documentation. “How do these practices persist if the paths of transmission are so brittle? How has anything at all been transmitted without physical records?”, they add. Research suggests that this is in the form of ‘bits’ passed implicitly through our bodies over evolution & time which the authors who’ve written about ‘The Cultural Transmission of Tacit Knowledge’ explore at length.
If you’re a fan of a great film score, I’d absolutely recommend watching the German film ‘All Quiet On The Western Front’. Composer Volker Bertelmann produced arguably one of the greatest film scores ever for this movie. It’s got several instruments involved in different parts of the movie & it’s highly experimental (check out my favourite ‘Remains’) but oh my word what a score! It’s staggering. Bertelmann also won the Oscar for best score for the movie. It’s a phenomenal & groundbreaking bit of composing. Of course, I’m an upcoming composer so I study these things & I love Hans Zimmer’s work, but this is officially my favourite score ever composed even better than John Williams & Morricone. Here is Bertelmann dissecting his process for scoring the film in a short 3-minute video.
I’ve been gorging on & reading Christian Loffler’s AMAs (Ask Me Anything-s) at length on Reddit for a bit now. It’s so fresh to hear & understand the process of an artist you truly resonate with and admire. But this video released a few weeks ago by another artist duo I like a lot called ‘Two Lanes’ live in Malaga, Spain is just so soothing. This is the music I aim to make, to give you an idea of the kind of sound I’m aiming at. This kind of sound but with my own spin & imprint on it. It’s a lovely set, and I would like to play & record a set in similar surroundings somewhere down the line too.
Another bit of a set is this jazz performance by GoGo Penguin that dropped a few months ago. It’s some brilliant soothing experimental jazz. GoGo Penguin are definitely another of my favourite bands in the experimental jazz space like Bad Bad Not Good (What is with these band names!?). Anyway, it’s perfect for a binge listen & I think with the set above by Two Lanes & the composition before that, it’s diversified enough & smooth sounding enough to play back to back, especially on Independence Day here in India.
Since Independence Day is almost upon us. I was talking to my sister & discussing random stuff since it’s a national holiday tomorrow. I found out she hadn’t watched the classic 90s film ‘Independence Day’ starring Will Smith which is such a legendary classic 90s sci-fi action flick— it’s about an alien invasion & the human race fighting back. I’ve maybe watched it over four or five times in my teens. So I recommended the film to her to watch tomorrow on 15th August. Here’s an iconic & inspirational speech by the actor who plays the President Of The United States (he’d be a better POTUS than the current runners) along with a real neat score to the scene. It’s a classic film from start to finish. Go watch it!
Finally to end on another inspirational Independence Day notion. I actually did some digging & sampled a poem by Rabindranath Tagore called ‘Let My Country Awake’ which he wrote for Indian independence on the last track from my ambient LP ‘Music For Motion’ that released last year. I entered the words of the poem into an AI-text-to-speech converter & it made for such a perfect end to my album. The track is called ‘Translation’. Wait till the end of the track for the poem. I hope you like it!
Thank you for reading & checking out the links! As always, stay tuned for this series called ‘Ideas Of The Week’ every week on my publication Light Years! The fireworks have started right now in Mumbai, so Happy Independence Day 2024 India!
You can check week #002 here:Light Years Ideas Of The Week — #002
·It’s week #2 of curating — ideas that shape the universe — here on Light Years. First off, I’d like to encourage you, yes you, who’s reading this article to start your own Substack. Just click the button below :) Start writing today! Use the button below to create your Substack and connect your publication with Light Years by Gaurav Krishnan
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