Hi, I'm Vaidehi.
I'm an environmentalist, a feminist and animal lover. I write and design stuff too!
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002 Temple
My family only considers one temple in Singapore as ours – familiar, comfortable, and meaningful. It has been central to our everyday geographies through the years – my mother teaches yoga there thrice a week; blessings for new cars, houses, birthdays, and anniversaries have all been sought there. I love the different ways the Ganpati is adorned every day, and the shehnai songs of the priests. The warm stone floor as we circle the temple, the patch of damp grass in the courtyard. The mingled smells of jasmine, coconut and oil lamps. Peaceful, beautiful and inspiring - everything a temple should be.
ice kachang on Flickr.
So, I was very awesomely and generously given an iPad for my birthday, and for the past week, I’ve been having a lot of fun exploring all the nifty stuff it can do. This was a little doodle I did in the Sketchbook Pro app. ♥
We moved office today, and this is my little goodbye ode to the first place I worked in after graduating, and a beautiful office and setting that set a very high standard for how I define “workplace” and “office”. I also wanted to kick off a new writing project, called “Hundreds and Hundreds”, which is basically where I aim to write a hundred 100-word snippets about things that mean something to me. Here’s #1.
001: Moving Office
Thank you for the squirrels, cats, the monkey that climbed into the rafters, and the family of bats that lived there. For the babies and puppies I’d see every day. For the dead butterfly, it taught me life is short, and to live lightly.Thank you for when a cute boy had lunch with me on his birthday and ate my too-minty chocolate mousse. For the moonlit picnic we had three years later. For the ukulele man. The bamboo grove. For the magical misty fairy-tale during the monsoon, and a sparkling wonderland during Christmas.
For this, and so much more.
I came across this on the Guardian homepage today - the “A Room for London” project is a one-bedroom designer hotel, erected on the roof of the Southbank Centre along the Thames, London.
This stretch of the river is inspiring enough as it is. Give Jeanette Winterson the opportunity to spend a few days in the hotel, observing and writing, and the results are bound to be sheer magic. Listen to her essay on her experience staying in this hotel, here.
Makes me want to go back to London.
“Hey beautiful. I want to give you all my love… and I understand that as bell hooks says, that includes care, affection, responsibility, respect, commitment, and trust.”
Oh, Gael. :D
Meaningful advice at a time when I’m struggling to figure out how to fit everything that’s important to me into the 24 hours I have each day, and feeling lousy about my inability to do so in general. #1, #2, #4, #6 are particularly relevant.
Also, in case I haven’t said it yet, my love for Merlin Mann’s brain literally knows no bounds. ^^;
Rules of engagement. I think I may need to make these a wallpaper or transcribe them onto a Post-It or something.
Remind me about it tomorrow, OK?
[via girldefective: iateabee]
I am a woman going mad. I am a woman hallucinating. I imagine I am huge, raw, a giant. When I am a giant I go out with my sleeves rolled up and my skirts swirling around me like a whirlpool. I have a sack such as kittens are drowned in and I stop off all over the world filling it up. Men shoot at me, but I take the bullets out of my cleavage and I chew them up. Then I laugh and laugh and break their guns between my fingers the way you would a wish-bone.
First stop: the World Bank.
I go straight to the boardroom. There’s a long hardwood table surrounded by comfortable chairs. Men in suits are discussing how to deal with the problem of the Third World. They want to build dams, clear the rain forests, finance huge Coca-Cola plants and exploit the rubber potential.
They say, ‘This is a private meeting.’
I start at the top end and I pick them up one by one by the scruff of their necks. Their legs wriggle in their Gucci suits; I’ve got nothing against the suits, lovely material. I drop them into my sack, all screaming at once about calling their lawyers and who do I think I am and what about free speech and civil liberties.
When they’re all in the bag, I leave the room tidy, throw in a few calculators so they won’t be bored, and off we go.
Next stop: the Pentagon.
I smash through the maximum security doors, past the computers, the secrets, the army of secretaries, and burst into a band of generals and lesser lights talking about defence and peace and how to eliminate the nuclear threat by ordering more weapons. I listen carefully while they tell me with the patience of a mother to a defective child that if we don’t have enough force to blow up the world fifty times over, we’re not safe. If we do, we are.
I say, ‘Your own statistics show that, if three percent of the Defence Budget were spent on the poverty problem in the United States over the next ten years, there would be no problem, you’d wipe it out.’
They look at one another and give little indulgent chuckles and turn back to work. I have no choice. I grab them by their medals and drop them in the bag. One of them pokes his head out of the top and says, ‘You should be arrested. What you’re doing is dangerous!’
And then…
I snatch world leaders from the motorcades, from mansion house dinners, from embassies and private parties. I throw them all in the bag and we go on foot to the butter mountains and waine lakes and grain silos and deserts and cracked earth and starving children and arms dealers in guarded palaces.
I force all the fat ones to go on a diet, and all the men line up for compulsory training in feminism and ecology.Then they start on the food surpluses, packing it with their own hands, distributing it in a great human chain of what used to be power and is now co-operation.
We change the world, and on the seventh day we have a party at the wine lake and make pancakes with the butter mountain and the peoples of the earth keep coming in waves and being fed and being clean and being well. And when the rivers sparkle, it’s not with mercury…
Excerpt from Jeanette Winterson: Sexing the Cherry. pp. 121 - 123.
She wrote this in 1989, but Jeanette Winterson was way ahead of her time. Love this passage from Sexing the Cherry, an altogether wonderful, amazing book.
The Pirate Bay is truly an international community. The team is spread all over the globe - but we’ve stayed out of the USA. We have Swedish roots and a swedish friend said this: The word SOPA means “trash” in Swedish. The word PIPA means “a pipe” in Swedish. This is of course not a coincidence. They want to make the internet inte a one way pipe, with them at the top, shoving trash through the pipe down to the rest of us obedient consumers. The public opinion on this matter is clear. Ask anyone on the street and you’ll learn that noone wants to be fed with trash. Why the US government want the american people to be fed with trash is beyond our imagination but we hope that you will stop them, before we all drown.
Having actively started to think about the possibility of doing my own thing one day, and what I could do by myself to make a living, I think I’m going to incorporate this very important criterion into my plans - pajamas mandatory. :D BOO corporate slavedom.
GOOD MORNING. I HOPE YOU’RE NOT ALARMED BUT MY LOVE FOR YOU HAS BEGUN TO MANIFEST AS A SMALL CLOUD OF SLIGHTLY DIFFUSED LIGHTS THAT HOVER IN THE AIR ABOUT MY BODY. IT APPEARS THEY WILL DANCE WHEN YOU OPEN A TIN OF WHISKAS.
… WOULD YOU LIKE TO MAKE MY LOVE LIGHTS DANCE?
Last one, stopping now. ^^;
HEY.
HEY DRUNKY.
HEY, DRUNKY, SERIOUSLY. YOU CAN’T SLEEP HERE.
SERIOUSLY, THAT’S MY TOILET BUSH AND I REALLY HAVE TO GO.
Adorable! :) This whole blog is a ray of sunshine in a day of internetting that otherwise made me want to stab things indiscriminately and vigorously.
I fell in love once, if love be that cruelty which takes us straight to the gates of Paradise only to remind us that they are closed forever.
Jeanette Winterson - ‘Sexing the Cherry’Made more wallpapers. :)
More resolutions (2560x1440, 1366x768, 1280x1024) available on my flickarr.
Texture credit: yunyunsarang on deviantart.
Quote inspired by this tweet from thingsweforget.
The No. 1 Creative Habit
In a word: solitude.
Creativity flourishes in solitude. With quietness, you can hear your thoughts, you can reach deep within yourself, and you can focus. Of course, there are lots of ways to find this solitude.
Felicia Day—actress (…)
Day says makes “sure to be creative first thing in the morning, before doing anything for the outside world, really sets the day up for me. It makes it feel that creating is my job, not answering emails.”I’m not a morning person person by any stretch of the imagination, but I like what she says about being creative first thing in the morning. Its kind of like stocking up on happy vibes before heading off to a job that may not be exactly what you want it to be. And when you step into work each day, you’d have that knowledge that there is something out there that’s entirely your own, that you made and have complete control over.
And in a world where more and more things are out of the control of the individual, that knowledge is so important and precious.
Sometimes I look through my news feed and imagine all the wonderful people committed to various causes: animal welfare, feminism, anti-death penalty, anti-censorship, anti-racialisation, all marching together peacefully, their status updates turned to real placards in their hands. Someone makes a speech, quoting a line from Chaplin’s ‘The Great Dictator’: “The hate of men will pass and dictators die; and the power they took from the people will return to the people and so long as men die, liberty will never perish.” One can dream. But dreams like these detain me, in spite of my best efforts, in Singapore.
Facebook status update by Alfian Sa’at
And yet, things seem more hopeless and bleak than ever.
Made a wallpaper a while ago, just thought I’d plonk it up here. It’s at only one resolution right now, but feel free to lemme know if you want it in other sizes. :)
Call me what you wish
and no matter what that is
I will call you home.Daily Haiku on Love by Tyler Knott Gregson (via tylerknott)
What a beautiful haiku. :) Reminds me of the ocean.
Walmart, Target, Hanes, Macy’s Linked to Jordan “RapeFactory”DO NOT SUPPORT THESE COMPANIES
If you haven’t seen the recent reports.
Ugh, stomach-turning stuff. This is how our clothes and other products remain so cheap. What’s a “steal” for us is actually stealing a whole lot more from other, less empowered groups of people. Capitalism is just a fucked up, exploitative system that not only breeds, but also rewards scumbags like this. And all we can do is “stop buying clothes from these companies” to do our bit to help the situation, rather than smash the managers’ fondling, groping fingers to a bloody pulp with a rusty hammer; and those of the government officials who turn a blind eye to this, too. If you have the stomach for it, some interview transcripts are available in this report.
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
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