I think aesthetics are like paradigms. They start developing as soon as we are born, the things we see, the emotions we feel, the colors we taste, the smell we hear. Like paradigms, aesthetics mostly changes and adapts itself to the environment and to the society.

While working with various designers and clients, I seem to notice that the less you know about design, the more your individual aesthetics sense comes to the forefront. For example, a couple of years ago a client of mine was quite adamant to use the color red in his poster which was for his spa.

It seemed to clash with my tinted aesthetics sense – databases of colour theory knowledge – using peaceful soothing blues to denote peace, calmness; lighter shade of blue would also reflect pureness, lightness and tranquility. But how was I to convince this client?

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Let’s assume for a second that you know Portuguese and dislike a loud mouth named Galvao and wish to say “Shut your mouth, Galvao”! Not only do you wish to say it loud and clear, you wish to circulate it to the millions of Brazilian brethren who also hate Galvao with a passion. The three words in Portuguese are Cala Boca Galvao.

You strategize that Tweeting it will create a huge momentum that will, hopefully, help shut Galvao’s mouth.

And why is Galvao so despised?

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Many companies tell us to reduce the verbosity of their documents; they are placing a higher emphasis on tables, charts, data visualization and info graphics. They want stories to be told through visuals. And it does seem a more memorable way to express and help retain information which is otherwise just a series of numbers – or mumbo-jumbo to most of us.

Parsing data, showing relationships between variables, expressing timelines in a meaningful manner and showing crowd behaviour in dynamic displays (such as the rising popularity of key words in a search or data displayed on maps) is an art. It can be entertaining as well as educative. But above all, it must communicate what is critical to the consumer of the data. Often, designers and content management folks miss the point. Especially because today it has become simple to visualise data using the tools tucked away in PowerPoint or Keynote. Who isn’t a PowerPoint or Excel commando in today’s world? But they all turn out yawn-inducing visualizations of data.

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Taking risks allows you to challenge yourself. But there are all kinds of risk takers, impulsive ones, and calculative ones to name a few. The calculative guys are those who have been to school, the impulsive ones are well, like gamblers. Once they have made the first kill, they can’t stop. It is the same spirit that rules the entrepreneur. They are not afraid of failure, they have to start something and they will continue to throw the dice, risking everything.

The exhilaration of the adventure drives them to challenge all odds and eggs them on to test new limits. And they begin to enjoy the challenges, like serial entrepreneurs who are continuously testing new grounds. One can understand how easy it is to get addicted to this new high of challenging the known for the unknown.

Embracing the unknown doesn’t mean giving up the familiarity of home to embrace the jungle, but to feel the exhilaration it brings in order to be rejuvenated, energized and be born again and, to look at life in a whole new perspective.

Like when I went in search of a tiger in the jungles of Corbett. Did I find my tiger? May be, may be not, but I surely came back burning bright like a tiger who is the king of the jungle.

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Tweeting, what’s that? Texting? Not allowed. Orkut? Banned. This is the scene in undergrad Journalism schools in Bangalore where students are more media savvy than their teachers. A few days ago I was at a Journalism Students Forum in one of the undergraduate colleges in Bangalore. The topic under discussion was “The Role of Media in Social Change.”

Media experts went on a historic tirade about the role of print media in India’s freedom struggle, and about Television serving packaged news. But they seemed completely clueless on the impact of social media. Had they heard of Obama winning the elections using social media? If USA is too far away from their mind, had they heard of the pink chaddi campaign back home that left the communal rascals shamefaced and democracy had won, thanks to New Media.

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