Abhijit Naskar's Blog - Posts Tagged "growth-mindset"

I teach myself when I need to learn something,
I correct myself when I make mistakes.
No two year old shaped as 40, 50, 60 or 70,
Has the maturity to provide me moral guidance.

I taught myself electronics when I fell for it,
I taught myself music in my youthful high.
I taught myself languages in sheer obsession,
I taught myself aeronautics when I wanted to fly.

Critics mail, I should add “biggest ego” to my bio,
I thank them all for an astounding revelation.
If I actually behaved befitting my capacity,
Half your legends will lose their reputation.

You only see the tip of the ice-berg,
Fullness of the Himalayas you’ll never see.
I chose to put many of my passions aside,
One path, one mission – one answer to calamity.

The biggest requirement of learning is to know your limits of the moment. Let me elaborate with an example. Alongside my mainstream works, I have wanted to create complete works in turkish and spanish for several years. And few years back, with my rather limited experiential understanding of both languages, I even took it upon myself to do so, but I got stuck on the very first page. Why? Because it is one thing to pen occasional gems in another language, and totally different to release an entire work in that language. I was ready at heart, but not at brain. So, instead of writing whole works in these languages, I simply made turkish and spanish a joyful addition to my mainstream work – however the original linguistic and cultural intention kept reflecting in the titles of works, such as Aşkanjali, The Gentalist, Gente Mente Adelante, Mucize Insan and so on. It was not until late 2023 that my brain finally caught up with my heart, and delivered the first complete original turkish and spanish Naskarean works to the world.

Know your strongholds, they’ll take you far. Know your shortfalls, they’ll take you farther. Strongholds help you enhance your predominant capacities, whereas shortfalls help you unfold new possibilities – they help you unfold new vistas of human endeavor.

If your perception doesn’t evolve with time,
It’s not a sign of conviction but cowardice.
So in this sonnet I take it upon myself,
to correct my own early follies.

In one of my early works I called America,
“a great country, built by great people,”
while the harsh humanitarian fact of earth is,
America is a terrorist nation, built by criminals.

I once naively asked to ‘appreciate the soldiers’,
while unintentionally undermining peace-activism.
That one line has been eating me alive, until
in 2023 I declared, “military is legal terrorism.”

Own up your follies, use them to sharpen your conviction.
Mistakes acknowledged are the beginning of illumination.

The first few minutes of my first
stage talk were absolute disaster.
First few books were mere intellectual
commentary, lacking in original Naskar.

Don’t beat yourself up for the
follies of your early years.
Doesn’t matter, you made mistakes,
what counts is, you outgrew your errors.

If a life claims a flawless history,
rest assured, it’s a concoction of lies.
Flawlessness is mark of lifelessness,
to be alive means to be battered by cries.

Mistakes are the cornerstones of clarity,
they wire your unique perception in place.
Absence of error is the end of living sanity,
to fabricate your past is to obliterate yourself.

The pen is my paradise,
the pen is my grave.
Everybody has all the answers,
I seem to have only questions.

Good thing, I don’t know how to write,
methods are obstacle to my madness.
I’m vast enough to contain the world,
asylum pills don’t work on pilgrim brains.

My pen never runs out of ink, because
the pen is an extension of my anatomy.
Madness is the first sign of sanity,
oneness is the seed of infinity.

Stereotypes are sanity of the jungle,
prejudice is sacred in the animal kingdom.
Flags are the poison, cosmos is (my) kin –
I am no stereotype, I am the Prototype Human.

How will you know if you
can speak another language?

If you can curse someone
on impulse without memorizing,
you got the language in your gut.
If you can console someone in pain,
the language nestles in your heart.

No es necessario que hablar guapisimo,
solamente necessario que hablar amable.
All those pedestals of language levels,
a, b, z, and what not, are elitist garbage.

Chase after form,
and you’ll miss the soul –
throw yourself into the soul,
and neurons will regrow.

Forget grammar, forget vocabulary,
let the language seep into your bloodstream.
In a world infested with medal-seeking mules,
stand odd, stand ablaze, a drunken pilgrim.