On Learning to Pay Attention
On Learning to Pay Attention
An essay about how the podcast 99% Invisible taught me to be aware about my surroundings.
Hello !
I’ve often recommended 99% Invisble the podcast on the Listening Chronicles series. A few weeks back, I had written an essay about what that show really means to me. After some technical delays and procrastination, it is finally published. The essay you’re about to read was first published in my alma mater’s student magazine. You can check out the magazine (it is a lot of fun to read) and my essay too.
Pokémon has finished its 23rd season. This new series is called Pokémon: Journeys, and Ash along with Goh travel back to the regions that Ash had already visited. At least, that is the basic premise. I don’t follow it as much these days but I could still tell you all about the different regions Ash is going to end up visiting.
Growing up, I was heavily invested in the world of Pokémon. I knew the different areas in each region, I knew all the names of Pokémon, I knew the origin stories of each of the legendary Pokémon. I would be able to tell you on which routes you would be able to capture a particular type of Pokémon, I remembered the names of characters, I knew the history and geography of the Pokémon world better than I did of the city that has been my home for over two decades in the real world.
This seemed to be a characteristic trait of mine. As a teenager, I was extremely oblivious to my surroundings. It continues to be a work in progress - some of my friends still call me a blockhead. I was always fascinated by and curious about worlds which I didn’t reside in. I was rather indifferent to my own reality.
I can say now that this really isn’t the case. There were a lot of factors that changed my perception from total indifference to one where I am trying to pay attention around me. I’m going to talk about one of them; of how this particular factor taught me how to be aware, helped me alleviate my biggest fear and made me appreciate and feel better about our existence.
According to my Google Search records, I started thinking about podcasts around the time I was preparing for the 2016 CLAT. My elder brother was listening to Hello Internet by CGP Grey (a great YouTube channel), and at some point he shared the link of a TED Talk. I was in a TED Talk phase at the time, and immediately decided to watch it.
The title is Why city flags may be the worst-designed thing you’ve never noticed | Roman Mars
It was unlike any other TED Talk I had seen. Roman Mars, the person giving the talk, was sitting down and had some high-level DJ setup in front of him. He was the host of the 99% Invisible Podcast and he was going to deconstruct an episode about flags as the TED Talk.
Before I move on, I urge you to watch this. It’s one of my all-time favourite videos, and that one clip captures everything I’m about to say from this point onwards.
That clip was the first time I changed my view about podcasts from a random online radio show to something more. I immediately started listening to some of the shorter 99% Invisible episodes and I was hooked to the idea of podcasts, and 99% Invisible itself.
Roman Mars and the team at 99% Invisible are people I owe quite a bit to, in terms of how my thinking was shaped over my time in law school. I was a kid who found joy in worlds beyond mine. While I was curious to some level about my surroundings, it was 99% Invisible that accelerated this process.
The show started off as an insight into the design that is often ignored by us and remains unseen. It was about the stories behind the architecture, or urban planning of cities. Soon though, it became a show about all of the things hidden from us that seemingly ensures that humanity is able to operate. It’s an unusual podcast about the patterns, designs and hidden histories that pervade our human lives, and how we often take this for granted. The podcast has evolved from the host, Roman Mars being the only person talking about a particular concept, to becoming a form of beautiful narrative storytelling with a group of people.
Each episode is deeply engaging. It is amazing how throughout the course of every episode you are able to vividly imagine the kind of design they’re talking about through only audio. You are able to relate with the people in the episode (guests, producers, experts etc.) and each episode is structured to be an intimate exploration of the world around you. At the end, you’ll always be left in deep thought about what you just heard.
In the process of talking about design that is hidden from us, there’s actually quite a bit to cover. From elevators and revolving doors, to explaining how the world began to standardize our clothes into L, XL, XXL. From explaining the way speech bubbles work in comic books to telling you the story behind the placement of QWERTY on the modern keyboard. There’s an entire episode on the color of a NBA team’s jersey. It’s not just purely about design. Many episodes tend to cover culture, technology, sounds, history etc. These stories cover the ghosts of the past and present that walk around you.
In the Valley of Fallen, Roman Mars and team tell the story about a monument in Madrid. Franco, the general (and dictator) who ruled over Spain from the end of their civil war till 1975, was buried in this particular monument. This episode isn’t just a regular story of an old mausoleum because the monument is also a mass grave of the tens of thousands of other bodies buried in the basilica. Many were victims of Franco’s security forces, murdered during the height of the civil war. You learn and get to listen about the complex and heartbreaking history surrounding the civil war and the efforts of groups in the country to remove other symbols, pillars and reminders of the Franco-era dictatorship.
There is an entire spin off series (Articles of Interest) dedicated to exploring the origin of the things we wear. What’s the origin of pockets? Why don’t women’s clothes have them? Why is the western world obsessed with diamonds? What was the reason that jeans were dominantly the color of blue? Why did it become the norm to wear suits as formal wear?
It is this range of episodes that never fails to amaze me. It’s been over a decade since the podcast started and there’s not one instance where you would be able to point out and say, this episode was 100% boring.
I started listening to this podcast rather irregularly while I began law school. In law school I was often faced with a constant barrage of thoughts around the future.
I would hear exaggerated stories of how people who graduated from college while entering the real world, would focus only on one aspect of their lives. They wouldn’t read, listen to, watch or do anything apart from legal work. They would be drowned by the monotony of our labour.
This added to my own internal pressure. My worry in the first few semesters of college was that my ability to explore my curiosity - the things that I wanted to geek out about - would always be to my detriment in the so-called real world.
I remember being stuck in a confusing place of prioritizing and adding value to the knowledge I consumed. If it didn’t benefit me in a debate competition, then it was less valuable. If it didn’t contribute to the growth of a “skill”, it was less valuable. If it wasn’t related to being a lawyer, then it was less valuable. I was constantly evaluating and reevaluating my choices and associating tangible value with those decisions. I’m sure that benefited me at times, but when you do it all the time, it becomes overwhelming. Not only is it overwhelming, it made me forget the life I was living in NLUJ. In an older post, I had written about how my focus in college for a while was just surviving and getting through a semester. I felt the weight of having to decide a singular path quickly. I kept moving away and deprived myself from the spark and fervour college had to offer by being lost in the box of my constant evaluations.
It was in moments like these that I would listen to 99% Invisible. Roman Mars’ soothing voice (I bet you will not be able to find someone with a better voice), would guide me along with an exploration of something beautiful, crazy, mundane, innocuous about the pale blue dot we reside in.
Those episodes would remind me that it is okay if I’m not constantly evaluating what I’m doing. I slowly began to appreciate my surroundings a bit more. In listening to 99% Invisible, I was leeching off the producer’s curiosities and approach to life. I was taking from them their interpretation of the chaos around us and how they made sense of it. I was learning how to pay attention and care about where I am now.
In college, the exploration of curiosity is always constrained by the subconscious fear that you’re wasting your time in this pursuit. My biggest fear was that as I graduate from law school, I would be restricted to one kind of path, and that I would forget what it means to be curious. That I would forget about what it meant to care about something apart from labour.
This changed gradually. I was attempting to embrace my curiosity unabashedly. I learned to pay attention to my friends’ interests which were different from my own and I was not avoiding delving into my random, quirky and “less valuable” thoughts.
I tried to appreciate the smaller aspects of law school too and consciously made an effort to not fall into the trap of my evaluations. The sound of me walking across the football field of our college, the effort that the gardener puts in taking care of the flowers on our campus, the courtyard between two hostels, our mess arc, the weird design of the Gazebos, the majesty of Mehrangarh’s walls, the Jodhpur sky and the blue old city – I would’ve noticed none of these things if not for 99% Invisible teaching me to care through their episodes.
Everytime I listen to a 99% Invisible episode, I’m reminded again of the wonder I had as a kid towards worlds beyond ours, except this time, I’m paying close attention to the hidden brilliance of our own.
As I was listening to the last season and final episode of Articles of Interest (the spin off series from 99% Invisible), Avery Truflleman is thanking all the people who made the show possible. She talks about how 99% Invisible has “changed my philosophy on the built environment and the things people make and use. Thank you, thank you, thank you for filling my world with wonder.”
It seemed okay to stop, hit pause and gawk at something. To marvel at that font, or think about that logo, or the sound of the leaves crunching while you walk. Really, it was okay to be amazed by anything. With each episode of 99% Invisible, I’m like a kid again, and I have this pure excitement of learning something new and something wondrous about the reality we live in.
Thank you so much for reading !
Let me know what you thought and don’t forget to share it with your friends. I’ll be releasing some more posts soon !
Take care,
Nirmal Bhansali