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Quote by Ehsan Sehgal

“One can see the world leaders, in two categories; to dictate others or to be dictated by others.”

Quote by Ehsan Sehgal

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Ehsan Sehgal

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“Nutmeg." Claudia grabbed the bottle and screwed the cap back on. The story was still filtering through me when a new scent exploded forth. "Orris root," Claudia said, tapping the new bottle on the table. "Am I going too fast for you?" "No," I lied. "Good." Linden blossom. Tonka bean. Benzoin. The smells came at me, little glass missiles fired across the table in rapid succession. "The point is speed and precision," Claudia said. She pushed a stack of papers toward me, the pages divided into rows and columns. "Put each scent in a category. Fresh, floral, woody, spicy, animal, marine, fruity. You need to recognize them instantly, without thinking." The bottles started again, and the world turned into charts and rows, filled with an onslaught of strange names. Litsea cubeba. Frangipani. Neroli. Tagette. Orange broke into pieces, became pettigrain, bergamot, tangerine, mandarin, bitter, sweet, and blood. Pepper was black, green, or pink. Mint was winter, spear, or pepper.”

“By the end of the day, I'd reached the point where I could sense the category of a scent almost before the bottle was open. Fresh was quick and cool, never warm. Floral was soft and seductive, the kind that kept its clothes on, showing only an ankle or a shoulder. Spicy bit your nose, woke you up. Woody sent me to the island so fast I couldn't stop the tears from filling my eyes. I couldn't wait to start combining them, creating something new. Victoria was right- this was a language, my language, and I wanted to write.”

“When we see beings as belonging to a particular group, for instance, we start to believe there's something fundamental and biological that unites all the creatures in that group, that there's some invisible essence that makes a dog a dog and a cat a cat. We do the same thing with humans: if we are told that a category is important, we infer that the people in the people in that category share a fundamental essence. We essentially them. And the more a category is emphasized, the more we think its members have a unifying thread.”

“Without reduction and categorization we simply could not survive. And so, when considered in the strictest sense, the point is not to live without categories, rather to first liquify established and malignant categories on order to then to helpful sense categories and interpretations that will open up the cognitive space of putting for interpretation and action.”