If you have been following this blog through the last year, you may recall that I spoke of developing an anti-AI art app to protect traditional arts from being devoured by AI.
And then, for a while, there was silence.
And it wasn’t because I abandoned my vision or didn’t want to invest efforts into it… it happened because I was myself clutched by the fangs of Anorexia.
I have barely been able to eat 3 meals a day and I am losing weight at an alarming rate because of that.
I am getting better as of late, hence I have the energy to come here and write this post.
So what does this mean for the app?
It means there may be a long delay before I can bring my vision to life. I am really sad about this because this app is the need of the day, but I have to first fill my own cup before I can build and water a garden around me.
I am sorry for the delay, and I love that you all resonate with the vision just as much.
Hoping for a speedy recovery and a speedier “back to work”
I am pretty sure a bunch of you are going to roll your eyes when I say that it’s coming, and rightly so. But I have a fair reason behind the delay.
Last few months, I fell into such extreme of a burnout at work that I started having one breakdown a day. I have finally slowed down now. Scaled down my business operations and started spending more time away from social media, so I feel better.
I am giving myself another month to just be before I jump into the career pivoting plans I have visualised for myself.
I am so grateful for your patience and apologise for the delays in the app launch.
I didn’t see the burnout coming, but I know in my heart that the pause is taking me to the right place in life.
It took me longer than I anticipated to re-read the book, partly because I wanted to ensure my opinions were not biased by personal experience, and also because we were celebrating Diwali in India over the last 1 week and the festivities were just too vibrant to miss.
Now that I am back to work, let’s talk about a book that left me super conflicted, Gone Girl
I remember picking this one up in a bookstore. I was late to the bandwagon. I’d lost my reading habit for a couple of years, but every reader-friend I knew kept pushing Gone Girl at me. The movie had already made the rounds, and while my letter-loving heart always despises the nuance lost when a book becomes a film, I also knew: if a story is movie-worthy, it had nuance to lose.
First, what I loved. Gillian Flynn writes with razor clarity; every sentence so visual it might as well be a camera angle. To create a world from the first line is a rare skill, and Flynn pulls it off. Her characters are not sculpted to be “types.” They’re messy, human, and culpable in very ordinary ways. They make bad choices and, crucially, they retain the EQ to feel the consequences of those choices. Even Amy, for all her ferocity, displays flickers of regret after the havoc she wreaks, small, dangerous human moments that make the book compelling to read.
Now the parts that left me restless. While the prose is state-of-the-art, the moral architecture of Flynn’s universe felt thin. Amy’s performance is brilliant, terrifying, and operatic, but I never quite found the emotional scaffolding I needed to believe her full transformation. Flynn offers us hints (parental manipulation, the “Cool Girl” myth, public expectation), but I wanted deeper cues; an interior wound big enough to explain the scale of Amy’s cruelty. Without that, her actions read more like a spectacle than an inevitable unspooling.
Nick’s character felt different in kind: flawed, cowardly, deceitful, but recognizably human. Flynn seems to level moral parity between the two, yet because Nick’s darkness is mundane and Amy’s is almost mythic, the ending lands oddly. Their reunion, after all the lies and violence, felt less like an incisive comment on the normalization of toxicity and more like a brutal, unsatisfying punishment, especially for Nick. He’s manipulative, yes, but not monstrous enough to warrant what the story asks us to accept.
Perhaps that anti-climax is intentional: a mirror to how real lives become entangled, corrupting love until it looks indistinguishable from control. Or perhaps it’s a gap in the emotional logic. Either way, Gone Girl is a study in craft that left me admiring Flynn’s precision while craving a little more moral weight. It’s terrifyingly smart, culturally seismic, and imperfectly humane.
Have you read the book yet? And if yes, do you resonate with my take?
Let’s talk in the comments below.
In the meantime, I will get to my hunt for the next book to review.
In the last post [Bringing a Writer Back From The Dead. Part-1], I mentioned how I am working to come back to writing. That process won’t be complete without becoming a reader again. In the spirit of that, I am starting a short month-long series called ’31 Books of October’ where I will be sharing 31 book reviews on this blog. Starting with my all-time favourite, How to Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
There are a few books that you read once but you carry with yourself forever. How to kill a mockingbird by Harper Lee was that book for me. Harper Lee’s style of writing is drenched in romantic sweetness of magnolias, the peace in the creeks of a porch swing, and the glee of a buzzing town, and yet somehow she has managed to portray the seriousness of the political themes at hand without ever breaking the spring-like lightheartedness of her writing.
The story is told through the eyes of a young girl, Scout Finch- a child who is innocent and yet undeniably truthful at the same time. A child who understands the importance of comprehension but acknowledges the innocence in her perspective too. Another important character is Scout’s dad, Atticus Finch who is a lawyer and a man with an unbiased view of justice. He is seen defending the character of a wrongfully accused man who found himself in the crosshairs due to racism present in society. In her book, Lee also explores other politically important themes like feminism and economic divide.
What’s impressive about the book is not just Lee’s understanding of the subjects at hand and her sensitive portrayal of the related truths, but also the tact with which she delivers her messages, without sacrificing dialogue economy or becoming didactic. Harper doesn’t tell you what to think, she asks you why you think what you do.
While today most of her questions have already found their answers, and the right answers have already become a core part of our belief systems, one can tell how this book would have changed the world 15-years ago with its release.
It is writers like Harper Lee who have shaped the society we live in, and I am grateful to have read her work.
I would love book recommendations and suggestions about what I should review next. Feel free to drop them in the comments below!
I will see you tomorrow with the book review of Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn– a very popular book that I have always had a few questions about. Stay tuned!
Here’s something a lot of people don’t realise about creativity.
When a creative child grows up to join the society in its race to riches, they often leave behind the very thing that made them- art.
They start looking at the world through a lens tainted with digits and graphs, fail to defy the statistics of being a person, and join a herd so that a random business can predict their behaviour and cater to their indifferent problems which, to them, seem very alienating.
But what a lot of people also fail to realise about a dead artist is that they keep coming back to life every few years,
Like an immortal gasping for blood to keep its own running,
Like a warrior hoping for a battle to resurrect its sword,
Like a dead flower waiting for a poet to find them.
What they also fail to realise is that such an artist, when brought back to life, doesn’t return without an absolute crumbling of the foundation they falsified for the rest of the world.
So what happens when one world falls to reveal the art behind it?
What happens depends on the courage the artist was buried with;
Some rebuild a new lie to seem ‘normal’
Others abandon the race forever, pick up the pen, and never look back.
If you have been following me for a while, you might know that I used to write a series called “When I walked through” in the beginning of my blog. This was also the series that helped me go viral.
Once the security measures are in place, you will soon receive an email from the sender [email protected] about the app being live.
I am sorry it has taken me longer than two weeks.
And that I haven’t been active here to share updates more often- but I have been spending every waking hour outside of work to make sure that this app takes birth as it should.
So if you haven’t been in touch with my blog lately, you may not be aware about this- I am building a 100% free (for lifetime) art community that is my attempt at preserving traditional crafts in the era of AI.
In my last post I shared how I was confused about the platform I should be using for this app. I am happy to share that I have an answer.
I will be building a custom app myself.
Reasons?
1. I don’t want to host the community on a social media platform knowing that they may not be comfortable for people from all walks of life.
2. A lot of these apps are servants of the algorithm and art should not be under the pressure of trying to be ‘trendy’
3. I have a Physics Hons. degree that has no relevance in my business career, but I know I didn’t learn how to code in complex languages for nothing.
So here we are.
I have already started building the app and it will be ready in 2 weeks.
In the meantime, I am creating an email list of potential members to provide timely updates regarding the process.
From The Quill 