Art of Abstraction

All the world's a stage,


And all the men and women merely players….-Shakespeare.

Many a times I have dreamt about writing pithy sentences like this one. A sentence that conveys many feelings into the mind of a reader. People have written volumes about this particular sentence I mentioned above. Ph.Ds are awarded just for the analysis it. In my opinion, Shakespeare simply travelled to future to get hold of one of this thesis and removed all the unwanted sentences from it. That is the art of abstraction. Refining and fine-tuning your work till you get rid of all the distractions. The process of iterations to chisel away everything but the single message you want to give. I am ashamed to write even a single sentence when I think about the works of such great writers and philosophers. It is good to be self-aware so that I will not burden this world with my mediocre creations, except you, the unfortunate one who wander into this blog to read it.

Abstraction of a bull by Pablo Picasso

In science abstraction is not always a desired character. We scientists want the details, all of it. But too much redundancy in a work is not a welcome feature either. But for pretty much everything else in life we should practice Zen-like simplicity. The art of sloughing off everything that is superfluous and gaudy. I recently stumbled upon Picasso’s abstraction of a bull. The first picture is a bull with all the details. The last one in the series is nothing but few swashes of pencil, but leaves not doubt about what the painter has in mind.

I wish I could write at least a single sentence event remotely as elegant as written by those masters. It is an aspiration that may remain just as it is.