Human faces and relationships

I have been too lazy offlate to post regularly on the blog. Especially the post I wanted to do on human face symmetry as requested by Janet.

However to compensate for my delay, I will mention a method suggested in the book “Creative on the Right Side of the Brain” which helped me make a leap very quickly in drawing human faces.

When we draw anything, we have to “Draw what we see“.

Why is this difficult?

Because our left brain has stored symbols for everything. When you try drawing “eyes” of a human face, instead of drawing the “eyes” that you are seeing, you end up drawing the “stored symbol” of your left brain.

How can we overcome this problem?

While drawing a face avoid naming the parts of the face. Once you start naming the parts of the face, the “verbal” left brain takes over and reproduces stored symbols. We need a shift to the right brain, that does not contain any stored symbols.

How can we avoid naming parts of the face?

This is a brilliant technique. Just reverse the portrait and then draw the human face in the portrait. When you reverse a portrait, automatically you will not be able to name the parts of the face. So the “verbal” left brain becomes silent. The right brain slowly takes over. The right brain is adept at seeing the big “picture”, proportions and details. It is these three qualities that you need to draw a human face. A good sense of proportion, details and the big picture.

What you can do?

Take a picture of your choice. Reverse the picture and then just start drawing the picture. The shift to the right brain is miraculous. You lose the sense of “yourself”. There is no “me” involved when you shift to the right brain mode. Infact when I was drawing like this I experienced a great sense of calm, peace and sense of “timelessness”.

Hope you find this tip beneficial. There are many such tips in the book “Creative on the right side of the brain” by Betty Edwards. It is a book worth having.

Relationships:

In a discussion last week about human relationships, my brother quoted a beautiful analogy told by “Barry Oshry“

Every human relationship is like a “dance“. Each step you make, determines the step of the partner in dance. When we change our dance steps, the steps of your partner change too.

To illustrate this let me give an example from my own family. My father and his second younger brother had some conflict a few years back. My uncle stopped all contacts with our family due to anger. My father was very upset. So both my dad and uncle were doing the “same” dance. The dance of blaming one another and finding the other person’s fault.

But then one day, my dad decided he has to put an end to the whole conflict. So he told all of us to get into the car and we went straight to that uncle’s house. My dad went up to the uncle and asked “sorry” and hugged him. All the conflict and hard feelings vanished in a minute. My uncle infact started weeping for having hurt my dad. What happened in this case is, my dad “changed” his dance steps. When dad “changed” his dance steps, my uncle had no other option but to “change” his “dance” too.

This has been the most valuable lesson I have learnt from my dad and has been explained beautifully by Barry Oshry in his “dance” analogy

Me Talk Pretty One Day

I had a 3 hour flight journey ahead and asked bro to suggest me a good book from his library collection. Bro suggested “Me Talk Pretty One Day” by David Sedaris. I was like “Well, the title sounds kind of stupid”. Bro replied: “Read it and then get back to me”.

At the end of the book I did two things:

1. Hit myself in the head for not reading this book before. Yes, its totally brilliant.

2. In love with David Sedaris

Brutally honest, funny, witty, f*&^&*^^%*$ brilliant — These are some of the adjectives I can use. But more than that the book opened me to a whole new way of thinking. We are all trapped in a “traditional” mode of life. For instance, if I say I visited Paris, the first question would be “Did you visit the Louvre or the Eiffel Tower?”. However when you read the chapter of the author’s visit to France, not only was I laughing loud in the aircraft, it made me pause and think.

The book is auto-biographical. The author talks about his family, his inability to understand science and arts, his phase of “drug” addiction, his boyfriends, his life at Paris. Each of the experience is made into a chapter. He is so honest about being gay, having a problem with speech, drugs, alcohol, smoking etc.,

While I was reading the book, I would go like: “Wow, this has happened to me so many times but I was always shy to admit it”. I was laughing out loud almost continuously while reading the book.

“Me Talk Pretty One Day” — One of my favorites Also, I would like to meet a person like David Sedaris. His ideas, his humour –> “wow” (Did I say I was in love?? )

The past week

So here am back after a short break to give some updates.

Alice summer camp:

The Alice summer camps got over last week. It was a wonderful experience. The last week, Alice was taught to middle school children. The surprising fact was the middle school children were much smarter than high school children and could pick up Alice too quickly.

This could be because of the following reasons in my opinion:

Children in the middle school were extremely curious, asked lot of questions, did not accept anything that they did not understand and had the willingness and interest to learn something new.

That week there was a high school teacher who was part of the camps. It was very surprising that the high school teacher just could not understand Alice. Why was that so? I noticed that elders ask very few questions. This makes the learning process very slow. Why does our questioning ability come down with age?

Learning to read and write Tamil:

It is kind of embarrassing to admit this, but I do not know to read and write Tamil properly. In our childhood, my mom tried her best to teach us Tamil at home. But being the lazy kid I was, I never went beyond learning the vowels and consonants in Tamil. Mom gave up her effort after a few days. 4 years that I spent in Bangalore as a child, we had Kannada as a compulsory second language. So I had learnt a little of the Kannada script. Since Telugu script is very similar to the Kannada script, I could pick up Telugu script pretty quickly. So I knew to read broken Tamil and Telugu. However, my mom always keeps saying that it is good to learn to read and write one’s own mother tongue.

Hence I have started taking online tutorials in Tamil. I am making pretty good progress.

Here are the two sites am following as of now:

http://www.unc.edu/~echeran/paadanool/unicode/

http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/plc/tamilweb/

Tirukkural:

The Thirukkural is one of the ancient Tamil texts written by Tiruvalluvar. It has 1330 “Kural” or couplets. The Thirukkural is divided into 3 sections as follows: aram(virtue), porul (realities of life) and inbam(pleasures experienced by a man and a woman in the course of their relationship). The three sections are further divided into 133 chpaters where each chapter has 10 “Kurals”.

I have decided to write and learn 1 chapter per day. It is sort of difficult for a beginner like me to read and write the Kural. But am doing my best.

Inspiration: One of Dr. Abdul Kalam’s favorite book is the Thirukkural. He had mentioned in his book “The Ignited Minds” that the Kural has been his moral support all through his life. And since I was learning to read and write Tamil, I felt I will do a good thing by reading Thirukkural.

More info on Thirukkural here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tirukkural

http://www.scribd.com/doc/2516968/Thirukkural-with-Meaning

Anandamath:

Last week I re-read the book “Anandamath” written by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. It is the book where the song “Vande Mataram” was published for the first time. The story of the book is about a group of Hindu monks-turned-warriors who renounce all their material pleasures and start a rebellion to end the Mughal rule in India. Though I do not really agree with a lot of thoughts presented in the book, the book is nonetheless a classic worth reading. The book deals with a myriad of themes like love, lust, renunciation, God, knowledge, courage, devotion, work, duty, patriotism. One of the books which is on my favorites list

Currently reading:

Reading the book “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Bronte. I really loved the preface of the book. Will discuss the book in detail once am done with it

Upcoming posts:

On Janet’s request in the previous post to write more about the symmetry of the “face” in drawing I was thinking of writing a whole post on that. It would be really interesting. So will come up with the post soon.

Health updates:

I really started paying attention to the “food” I eat after coming to the US. In India, I would eat any kind of junk without giving it a second thought. But after coming here I feel the need to keep track of my diet and make sure that I eat only “healthy” food. Thinking of maintaining an online journal of my daily eating habits. Because when I keep a record I will make sure to stick to the “healthy” eating part.