VED VARUN
WHAT FELT
REAL?
Something that felt real to me, is that I learnt to accept silence as acknowledgement and something human. This happened not through one moment but an amalgamation of moments. An idea not being responded to, a joke not being laughed at, an absence not noticed, etc. “Giving leadership is also leadership” lies in this value’s periphery. I became considerably louder this half of the year, and not for any good reason or motivation, but just to be different with different groups and people. Its fascinating to see different peoples’ perceptions of who you are, sometimes its made first hand, through what they’ve experienced of your behaviour around them, but sometimes its through word of mouth. In both instances, it has the potential to be dead wrong. “When I saw you in first year, I didn’t want to work with you because I thought you were too smart and wouldn’t want to work with me” — A person whom I thought wouldn’t want to work with ME because I thought they disliked my seemingly apathetic demeanor. It turned out to be a joy to work with them in that group. Sometimes feeling like the imposter because over time I started talking too fast and fumbling over my words, and how articulate I find myself to be with the written word is not what was manifesting in what I spoke, but it made me also appreciate those moments where someone just “got” me. I’ve also noticed that I’ve almost never had a “bad” group experience unlike most of my peers, I’ve surely had strong premonitions about certain groups but when I faced the situation eventually, because anxiety was never a reason to change things, things felt better, and I laughed more than I was ever annoyed, and I’m grateful for that.
DON'T ACCEPT
THE BRIEF.
One aspect of the way I work is thinking of an ideal state that might stray beyond the project space and to then extend the boundaries rather than compress an idea. In our Live Industry Project, we worked on creating a rehabilitation solution for disabled military veterans. What I was most proud of, and what I feel most represents my growth, is not accepting the project brief verbatim. Disabled veterans to disabled veterans and servicemen, rehabilitation expanded to not just physical but also emotional rehabilitation. LIP made me realize how different disciplines come together to do the same thing very differently and in their process, we see how they were taught to do something. We are slight slaves to the way we learn, which shows when we disagree with someone else, looking something like “No you’re wrong” -> “Okay but also..” I chose veterans because even though my dream of being an airforce pilot is not permissible by my body, I still feel emotionally connected to the defence space. I don’t fully understand it because I wouldn’t call myself patriotic, but I am one to chase valor and prestige, in any walk. So even though we couldn’t directly address emotional trauma, maybe ill pick it back up later.
HOW DO YOU WORK?
ONE WORD.
Pick the word. His word, verbatim, is: Erratic.
Erratic. Part of the reason I like splitting up work and doing it on my own time is because I can’t with a straight face explain that my 4 hours of coffee breaks and staring into nothing, slaking, is a part of thinking that I simply cannot, and do not want to do without, before I produce good work. The deadline approaches makes me alive, pressure makes my mind race faster and at this point rather than trying to spread out my work across days, I’ve accepted that I’ll start a few hours behind the deadline which lets me decompress the entire span of the prior 5 days when everyone is freaking about not starting yet. Ambiguity also doesn’t faze me as much anymore because most ambiguity doesn’t get cleared with more questions, sometimes things are ambiguous by design and the more you prod them before you’ve reached the correct stage in the process, the less sense it will make. As Queen Elsa of Arendelle once said, “Let it go.”. I predict that some of my erraticity is going to be bleeding into collaboration now, especially with people I’ve worked with before. I’ve already noticed how some of the recent teams I’ve been a part of, have been more fitting to be referred to as “teams” and not “groups”. I see myself as the product of lots of personalities I’ve come across, and sometimes I see my behaviour get adapted by others that way, and that makes me feel accepted, and that to me, is the silent acknowledgement that I’ve grown to love.
WHAT WON'T YOU
PUT DOWN?
I want to carry forward not giving up, a bit of a tangent from whatever we spoke about in the three parts prior, but one of my favorite parts about having the freedom of our process and end results as students, is that we can carry out the kind of work that would fall under a low impact high effort square of an efficiency matrix, but that low impact could change one person’s whole life, and that’s who I want to fight for, valiantly.
Valiantly.