Oorjit Sethi's Blog

You always hear stuff like, “Oh Netflix movies are so generic and done a million times” or “commercial music is so bland”. And you usually tend to agree. “Yeah, sounds about right.” But how do we judge art? What is good art? Is it what those 10 panelists decide at an awards show, or those other ones sitting behind a screen? The most obvious, simple, and irritating answer to a person who needs one: everyone has their own taste. We’re all tuned to a different frequency and therefore will decide on contrasting palettes to judge. It’s a fact and cannot be debated. But this is also the most boring answer. So what’s the next best option? Usually, those 10 panelists don’t seem qualified to judge anything. After every Academy Awards Show, those guys get a lot of hate for picking the wrong movie. Always. But the fact is, they kind of are qualified, aren't they? Theoretically, the judges should have been chosen based on how many movies they have seen, just so they have a giant sample size to...

  When I enrolled for the Maker’s Asylum program, I thought it was going to be a run-of-the-mill course where I learn skills one on one and that’s that. Something technical and structured to be crossed out in my resume-to-be list. But the room I walked into wasn’t a generic bedroom. It was a chaotic one, with beauty in every corner. More than that, it was a community. A place where curiosity wasn’t just encouraged or developed, it was water’s placeholder. The first few months were online. Tutorials, o ne-on-one mentorship, skill tracks. It was all exciting, sure. I was learning to solder without burning myself, building IoT prototypes I had seen in Spider-Man movies, and getting a feel of trying to model houses in CAD. But even in those early Google meets, there was this quiet energy. The mentors didn’t just want to complete the modules. They wanted to explore   and learn with me. And that attitude was contagious. Then came the residency in Goa. That’s when this thought cross...