Introduction

Hi. I’m a first-year college student in Chennai, India. I really wanted to start noting down my thoughts but kept on not doing so. That’s why I decided to start a blog; it motivates me to write down my thoughts.

It took me a long time to start one for the simple reason that I couldn’t think of a name. Eventually, I came up with this one, because of the fact that life is a completely subjective experience, so what one person writes about life is probably not exactly what life is like.

My major interests in life are books and movies, and I often like finding out how good one is before actually deciding to spend my time on it. Obviously, I look for reviews. I, however, found I had a major problem with most reviews I first found; they treated art as an objective thing whose faults and strong points can faultlessly be enumerated, refusing to learn from generations upon generations of earlier critics who ruthlessly panned artists we now call geniuses, not to mention the fact that other critics are saying entirely different things. Once, for example, when I was reading reviews of Diary of a Bad Year by J. M. Coetzee, I found that the reviewers were split into two groups: one that said that the essays in the book were important in themselves and one that said that they were important merely as a part of the book. Though the latter group was especially smug about having escaped the oversight of the first, I found it irritating how unbelievably cocksure each and every person was about his/her view of the book.

Yes, to an extent, it is true that art has objective qualities. Shakespeare is certainly better than Jeffrey Archer, though I personally haven’t figured out an objective reason to say so – the only reason I can think of is that Shakespeare’s got depth; but depth is all about perception, so I’m pretty much stuck. But then I’m eighteen and allowed to be both clueless and wrong, as long as I’m open to learning(though it might be noted that I’m allowed to be so at any age).

Of course, now I have found a class of reviewers that review pretty well and taking into account subjectivity, and it is in the tradition of these people that I hope to be.

Hope you like it.

Where the subtitle comes from: