Yet Untitled 094 - "Here comes my Chinese Rug"

Thoughts on Success, Being Invisible and Being Seen

Dearest Yet Untitler,

Ever since I experienced ‘success’ with something I had worked on, this is what it has felt like - I was thrown into a chaos of activity - of visibility - for a few moments and then it was done. Things quickly returned to the humdrum, back to the life from where I could once again observe others’ successes, this time with a little more insight.

Look ma, I’m in the papers! From Bombay Times, at the launch of my new Amazon show “Ziddi Girls” along with the rest of Amazon Prime Video’s new slate. c. March 2024

It’s a funny thing, this ‘success’. I suddenly like I’m in everyone’s line of sight. I’m not, really - not everyone’s - but I certainly feel like I’m suddenly more seen than usual. I become hyper-aware of this - watching how I’m being seen becomes an obsession. As the days pass, I wonder - is everyone still seeing me or have they stopped? It also has me wondering - what of me is being seen? The good parts or the bad? It’s immensely distracting and not peaceful. But it is a thrill; again, not in the best and most sustainable of ways - it reminds me of feelings associated with drugs.

I always find listening to Iggy Pop’s song “Success” sobering. Here are the lyrics. In them, he’s meta, he’s ironic and banal all rolled into one. Listening to this song always takes me away from any over-fluffed pride or thoughts that suggest I may have “landed”.

Another thing I find sobering is this particular writing by the Buddhist monk Nichiren Daishonin:

“Worthy persons deserve to be called so because they are not carried away by the eight winds: prosperity, decline, disgrace, honor, praise, censure, suffering, and pleasure. They are neither elated by prosperity nor grieved by decline. The heavenly gods will surely protect one who is unbending before the eight winds.”

Cautioned by both Iggy Pop and Nichiren Daishonin, I’m reluctant to linger in this land of success even when I find myself in it. I keep thinking, ‘it’ll be over quickly anyhow, so can we hurry it all up please?’ But I pause a moment and tell myself - boy, before you move the hell on - take in the smells, sample the wine. Didn’t C.P. Cavafy say in his poem Ithaka:

May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can...

So, before I exit back to my humdrum life, I’ll use the chance to think more about what it means to be here, the place where I currently find myself being seen.

One thing I like about this place is having access to those to whom I was invisible before. Some of them are pretty interesting. I’m glad for the chance to talk to them.

Remembering what it felt like when I went to the Emmy’s. NYC, c. 2019

I do not take it badly - being regarded as invisible. I know it gives me room to breathe. I know it gives me peace. And I don’t hold anything against those who didn’t see me earlier. Perhaps it was I who - by thinking I was invisible - remained unseen, untill I believed that I was not invisible anymore.

Either way - however I may have arrived there - I can feel I’m in the land of new possibilities. There’s a certain synergy to this being pushed forward suddenly. Is this good or bad? I’m prompted to ask the surfer who suddenly sees a big wave coming at them.

Ananya and Aahana, waiting for the big wave, Maldives. C. 2021

In a previous instalment, I had written about ‘Hiding and Showing’:

Yet Untitled 028 - Hiding and Showing

Here I want to talk about hiding and being seen - and shuttling between the two states. Perhaps ‘hiding’ is a better, less diminutive word than ‘invisible’. Someone else - Austin Kleon - has written eloquently about this phenomenon, referencing the filmmaker Ritesh Batra who asked the question - “How do I hide and still be found?” Kleon has a masterful understanding of how the internet offers us possibilities of presenting ourselves when we need to in healthy and nourishing ways - it’s all in his lovely little book “Show Your Work”.

I like what Batra provokes about the desirability of both states - this ‘being found’ and ‘hiding’ - perhaps this is what I mean about when I speak of ‘success’ and its inverse.

I also like what a wizened old Iggy Pop offers in this Jonathan Ross interview about ‘brinkmanship’ - being able to pull yourself back at the right time. Of course he’s talking about precarious living, and I’m talking about the heady land of success and being seen. But the implication is that there’s some treasure to be found on both sides of hiding and being seen and we can benefit from moving between the two with awareness, and a bit of…daring?…caution? I like this implication of danger when we look at the phenomenon from a Iggy Pop-ian lens - don’t linger longer than you have to.

But what of those who are in real deep?

Jacob Collier, who I have now written about extensively in this newsletter, started out small, making music in the room he grew up in and sharing it with the world on YouTube. One day, Quincey Jones, recognising his genius, sent him a message and after that Collier’s life became very different. He was in, likely for good.

As I learned from this amazing podcast interview, as his career blossomed, Collier became clearer and clearer that one of his prime purposes in life was “to make the world sing in harmony”. It’s very interesting to me that Collier was doing this even before he was successful - experimenting alone with layering different expressions of his own voice one top of each other, as he does in this video below; a far cry from doing things with the world.

Ten years on, after tremendous success, he’s essentially doing the same thing, but at an enormously elevated level, making audiences of tens of thousands achieve musicality that they may never have dreamed of as possible coming from them. Here’s him pulling off an unbelievable feat with an audience choir in Rome.

I participated in one of these audience choirs when Collier performed in Mumbai. It’s a deeply moving experience and I hope you get to experience it one day. But it blows my mind that this audience choir routine of Collier’s is a version of something that he was doing when he started with his rudimentary multiscreen videos alone in his room - not famous yet; not successful yet!

He says in the podcast:

It took ten years for me to realise: this is my voice - it’s the voice of others. It’s when I can offer whatever courage I have to you to use your voice. That’s me speaking. That’s me singing. So now I feel like I’m playing the whole world as a musical instrument.

There it is - his prime point: making the whole world sing in harmony. That’s what he’d be doing, even if success hadn’t come.

My friend Anurag Maloo the mountaineer, one of the stars of YU #092, also found himself in the eyes of the world after his miraculous rescue from a crevasse while descending from the treacherous Annapurna peak in Nepal. Going by what I gather from our short but deeply memorable conversations since we met earlier this year at the Jaipur Literature Festival, Anurag was, even before his rescue, busy building value-creating communities that worked for sustainability. Now after receiving his second life from Annapurna - after he’s in - he’s doing the same thing but in an ever bigger way, just like Collier. I’m watching him with great curiosity, admiration and anticipation.

At our third, wonderful meeting. Mumbai, c. March, 2024

‘Success’ can be heady, but those sensual perfumes that Cavafy speaks of are window dressing. I think the bigger and more exciting question is what we can do once we are in that elevated land; how we can further the things we’ve always wanted to do.

Cavafy says later in his poem’s end:

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

- From ITHAKA by C.P. Cavafy

Being seen: everything that it does for your sense of worth, seems to me (at the end of writing this instalment) the most impoverished part of success. If I may be so fortunate as to tread upon Collier-land one day, it makes me very excited to even think about some of the things that I might be able to do then, following his and Anurag’s lead.

I’ll leave you with that exciting thought, wishing you success at everything you’re fighting for.

Lots of love,

V

PS. Drop me a line if this instalment evoked anything for you. Do you see success differently? Tell me. I want to know!