On handcrafted tokens

O.G Variar Bakery, Guttahalli, 1955

My mother’s father was the O.G who started O.G Variar Bakery, house-and-auto-hold name in Old Bangalore and beloved favourite of Rajajinagar-Malleshwaram natives. Orunkara Govinda started the bakery after years of pushing a cart around the streets of Guttahaali, after many nights of learning from the bakers around him making biscuits and bread by hand.

There is something invaluably grounding in doing things by hand, perhaps more so now in the age of tokenized will. This is especially true when the doing is a craft, like writing or baking. A craft demands constant exercise, for there can always be more judgement and discernment applied. The discipline of exercising taste with real appetite leads to a refinement in character that is hard to achieve by any other means. You can just do things, yes, but doing them well takes practice.

To practice is to say - I am not doing this for the outcome, I am doing this for process.

In writing, to focus on process means to practice not caring about how your writing is received by your audience. You do not want your practice of writing to be skewed by imagined and real imaginations of the reflexive reader. But doing this when your readers are encountering you algorithmically and on platforms bent on commoditising your expression, means you will feel a shudder, or an inertia, before you board up you words and ship them. And as the algorithm learns you, and more likely, you learn from the algorithm, the reading of the future shapes your writing in the present, pressing you into coarse legibility and dulling the novelty of your obscurity.

There is little escape from this harness of the experience-expectation loop.

This can be scary. To put yourself out into the world semi-raw, to worry about whether you are original or interesting or correct enough to be worth the (apparently) scarce resource of attention, to know that you can never truly know whether you are a poem that god knows by heart, this gets to the very seam of the human condition. To write, in your own hand-earned words, is to go tummy-up to reality.

And then, the task of writing with discipline, consistently and religiously, not caring if your words may merely ricochet off satellites and screens into the void, and to practice knowing that where they land was never the point. To know that it is the act of learning to whittle your neuronal forest into benches and fences and bridges, and maybe someday, a home, a cabin in the mountains with a hearth and an armchair and a sense of having arrived without a need to pack up again, that this is why it is worth doing, why it was always worth doing.

So don’t stop handcrafting your tokens. Words, like bread, are best hand-made.