Find your taste, and bring the world upto that level
The beautiful song “Haan ke haan” by Monali Thakur has the lines
जो नहीं है अपने बस में
क्यों खाए निभाएँ वो रस्में
आ चलाएँ नई रस्में
एक दूसरे के पूरे कर सपने
Does it irk you when you hear these lines? The wordings sound a bit off to me. Anyway.
I sit at the dining table in my sister’s apartment, eagerly waiting for her to finish making the breakfast. For the last 10 minutes, she has been arranging sun dried tomatoes evenly over avocado bread. And she was up early on a Saturday gathering ingredients and reading recipe books. I couldn’t care less about the presentation of the food, and was secretly wondering if I should have settled for peanut butter with bread and still feel the same satisfaction.
A friend recently recommended some esoteric songs to me. Songs that I would never find myself even if I tried. While listening to the songs, I couldn’t help but wonder how one is able to find and appreciate a niche song. What does it mean when someone calls a song heavenly? It’s not that I don’t listen to music enough to have a preference. My Spotify had 100 hours of listening time last month, but Ishq Hai was half of it. Perhaps I’m musically deaf, and I will never be able to feel songs the way my friend does.
Many of my friends invest and talk passionately about the stock market, crypto, or real estate. I can see that they know something I don’t. I even consulted a wealth advisor once, who very passionately showed me graphs of compound interests as if he is the one inventing it. The excitement in his voice as he changed the interest rate from 12 to 13% and updated the graph was nothing short of watching someone do art. When asked about my opinion on investment, I repeat what my father tells me -- “that the market is inflated, and will correct itself” while I wait for my savings to depreciate in fixed deposits. It’s something I don’t quite grasp—or rather, feel—despite reading Peter Lynch’s One Up On Wall Street. My takeaway from the book was that the very few vacations Peter took in his long and successful career were the days the stock market tanked, which made his vacations miserable but perhaps a very fun story to tell. What a life!
Coming back to the song, I couldn’t let go of the feeling that something was wrong. Why is the word रस्में repeated in consecutive lines? A few weeks later, while driving, the interview of Monali came up on the radio, where she confessed that she sang it incorrectly. The original lyrics was क्यों खाए निभाएँ वो कसमें instead of क्यों खाए निभाएँ वो रस्में but the producers decided to go ahead with it because the song came out beautiful.
What do these disconnected stories have to do with anything? They all have something in common. A person demonstrating taste. What is taste exactly? An intrinsic understanding of good and bad. An ability to cut through the noise and find out the rare gems. An ability to look through something deeper than others. An artist looks at a painting and it evokes a storm of emotion within. An intrinsic map to navigate the territory and find the good spots—something others don’t have access to. Taste is an internal compass for quality. Nobody taught you which music is good, which authors to read, or which businesses are better than others. You somehow had it intrinsically.
A project we were working on at Tailored AI got delayed by a month. In order to fire-fight, I asked a member of the team to take it forward. The aim was to get the bugs fixed, and get it to a working stage as soon as possible. Two weeks later when I had another look, I saw the codebase completely re-written. That was perhaps unnecessary, as all we needed was to get it functioning and deliver it quickly. But the person took it up and rewrote it in an elegant way. Taste.
People with taste are artists. They don’t approach their work with mere utility in mind but with a pursuit of perfection. You can recognize their passion in the way their eyes light up, the way their voice lifts when they speak about something others might overlook. The goal is to discover what you have taste in—to refine it, to cultivate it—and to share it with the world in the most authentic way possible.
Go find your taste, and bring the world up to that level.