Toothpaste Driven Cars

25 Oct 2020

Part 1: Of my many nemeses (really should be 'nemesi'-more on this later), drawing has been one of the biggest. Although I've been in environments where I've been actively taught how to draw, or been required to draw since 2011, I've never actually enjoyed the activity. It's been frustrating, and has thwarted me on multiple occasions. Inspite of the immense pressure both externally and internally, I have never quite figured out how to draw well, let alone enjoy it. However, there's been a few rare occasions, when everything falls into place, and I get into the flow of drawing. The drawing is still terrible, but I enjoyed the activity of drawing, and felt how wonderful it is. It's a high bandwidth activity, which enables me to express my thoughts in a way language never could.

Part 2: Something I do enjoying doing very much, is speculating and thinking of alternate worlds. What would the world look like if ________? Some may call this day dreaming, but it's an immensely useful activity as it leads to the discovery of inights and ideas that we may not encounter otherwise. As Einstin said, "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." It's quite freeing to think out of the constraints of the world we live in, and helps me think laterally. Unfortunately I simply don't get to do this enough. All this thinking doesn't lead to anything if it's not documented and explored well. I've been meaning to approach this with rigour in order to create something meaningful and perhaps useful.

Part 1 + Part 2: Toothpast Driven Cars

One of my favourite authors, Roald Dahl had a knack of stretching my imagination and helped me be more creative. He would often break rules, upto and including creating new words as he felt the need to. His non-conformity was magical, and he did whatever he pleased. This is something I need to imbibe in my own work and practice. The joy of doing things often goes missing, and I need to recapture it. In his book, 'BFG', the BFG has in his possesion a dream called "I is inventing a car that runs on toothpaste." Even though I read this book more than a decade ago, this line stuck with me. I would often wonder what the world would look like if that dream was in fact a reality.

Dream from BFG

And so, this being as good a time as any, I started speculating and drawing with no pressure to succeed or create anything productive. I used MindNode to write down my speculations, and started sketching some of those speculations on some rough paper using a sketchpen. I tried to be a little free in my speculations, keeping real world limitations to a minimum to see how much I could possibly stretch it. Some of the speculations were perhaps too speculative, while others may be a little too close to reality.

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