Skip to main content

The Good Idea Law

                                                        Art by Ananya Ravikumar
Ahem.
Some time ago, I came up with a hypothesis.
After testing it multiple times under different conditions, I summarise my findings in the form of  the following law:

“The influx of ideas times the desire to write is inversely proportional to the time available under normal conditions and is inversely proportional to the square root of time available when an unpleasant but important deadline approaches.”









I give a report of my experiments to verify the same:

Experiment One: The Keeping of a Diary
Upon re-examination of several years worth of diary entries, the beginning
“Dear Diary,
I’m supposed to be studying <insert boring subject> right now…”
has been found to occur most frequently.

Experiment Two: Writing before an examination
Before an exam, my mind is flooded with ideas and it is with great effort that I keep myself away from the computer and in front of the textbook. 
However, sometimes the writer cannot be restrained. The poem ‘In Another Life’ (see previous blog entry) was written on the night before an exam (at 1 am to boot).

Experiment 3: Writing on a holiday
Writing when I have the time to do it never gives the same level of satisfaction and produces unsatisfactory results.

Experiment 4: This post
I think this post is weird enough to confirm that my law is valid. if I’m not writing before an exam, this happens.

Comments

  1. If you're wondering about the mathematical accuracy of this post, I must point out that this law is valid only for t >1.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thoughts from lonely days

Some nights before I started to write this in mid-2022, I dreamt that I was in an aircraft that was plummeting to the earth. I was not surprised by this dream - less than a week had passed since a tragic plane crash in China. What did surprise me was that I had continued to hope that the plane would right itself until the very end. So when I woke up, breathing hard, still alive, what upset me the most about my nightmare was not that the plane had crashed, but that I had not made peace with my death in those final moments.  I've spent a lot of time thinking about death in the last two years; many of us probably did as we anxiously watched counters on dashboards, each uptick marking the end of another human life. On nights when my overactive imagination conjured up terrible scenarios, I protected myself by taking a mental step back and reminding myself that death was inevitable. But creating distance made me feel guilty. Was it not wrong to feel anything less than all the sadness I...

Hot Potato

 _ ____ is like a hot potato  I don't want to hold it  It's too big to throw away ____ is  like a hot potato  I hold on to it  So you don't have to  ____ is like a hot potato  Watching you hold it Still hurts somehow ____ is like a hot potato  I throw it at whoever's around When I can't hold it any longer ____ is like a hot potato  It will cool in time If ____ really is like a hot potato  Maybe we should pass it around  So when it cools,  Our hands are reddened,  but still whole  And we could make a salad  - Ananya  10th December 2024

On Bangles and Car keys:

We remember and register the strangest things. Lots of  Indian women who drive wear bangles and own a set of car keys. When I was younger and anxiously awaiting my mother’s return from wherever she’d gone- the sound of those bangles and keys was what I would listen for.When I heard the sound of her fumbling for the keys, I would rush to the door to greet her ( as I grew older I would do the opposite- turn the TV off or shut the novel I was reading and run in). But whatever the response was to the keys and bangles, I would always know they were my mother’s.  I may hear other keys and bangles, but somehow, they always sound different. To this day, that sound means ‘mum’s home’ and thus, even today, I cherish it.