Author Archives: Hartek Sabharwal

Day One of my Project Runway training

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Learning to sew with Beverly was a delightful experience. She had us do a video conference with her mom, who was an actual seamstress. I’d never met an actual seamstress. We learned a few basic stitches. The coolest one is the blind stitch, where you needle through just one or two threads in the original fabric for each stitch, for a virtually invisible end product.

I had actually tried my hand at stitching before this event. I bought two sweatshirts from H&M, and they both split around right down the seam. That’s fast-fashion for you. It really is a huge waste and awful for the environment. I didn’t want to give up those clothes, so I watched a few YouTube videos and got the job done. It was time consuming, but it’s also kind of fun to work with your hands and super rewarding to tug hard on your finished product and have it stay together. Following along the YouTube videos, though, was a mess. I had to keep rewinding and I would yell at the internet people for doing clearly convoluted moves in a blink. So it was much nicer to try it again with Beverly walking around to help us and show us exactly what we did wrong. I hope to use these skills so I can repair my clothes more often. And also get on Project Runway, Thu 9:30/8:30c on Bravo.

 

The Time That I Actually Stepped Off Campus

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Doing this event was one of the highlights of my semester. It was held at this church in Ithaca. This was my first time ever in a church, and it was amazing. The architecture was gorgeous. I sat in the pews taking it all in. I was impressed by the turnout too. There were a few women wearing their hijabs. There were young kids, working adults, and senior citizens. It was really cool to see all these people from different backgrounds coming together. I think that age is an especially underrated dimension. I read that weekly church used to be the main way that kids interacted with people older than them, and now that doesn’t really happen anymore. I feel like I would like to know adults outside of just my teachers and family.

My job for the food part was holding the bag, weighing it, and adjusting the contents to get the weight just right — I think around 80 grams was the goal. I took our pipeline very seriously and tried hard to avoid being the bottleneck. I was pretty proud of the job that I did, and I’m glad that we ended up overshooting our target number of packages.

Parts of the event left a bad taste in my mouth, though. It felt like we were playing a game. Is it really the most efficient thing to ship boxes and boxes of raw ingredients to Ithaca, NY, have volunteers bag as much as possible for a single weekend, and then send it all back, and ship that out to Haiti? Certainly factory machines already do the mechanical work that we were doing in the food processing industry. Or, why not just send the food itself to Haiti? Was this all just so we could feel like we made a difference, because just giving a donation doesn’t feel satisfying enough? Either way, I don’t want to discount the organization or the work that we did. Whatever it is, it made a difference, it got some people in need fed.

The Tour of the Johnson Art Museum and My Journey to Become Cultured

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Just before this event, my professor was telling us a story about the time he got back from visiting Ireland. He told his friends that he didn’t go to any of the museums, and they were appalled. He broke the intelligentsia code. I thought a lot about this because I wasn’t sure I really liked museums either, and I felt bad about it. I hadn’t even gone to the Johnson, and it was ten minutes away.

So this event came at a good time. Our tour guide is an art professor at Cornell. He had some interesting insights. It seems like you almost need to be a full-on historian to understand art, to know all the social movements and wars and cultural trends, to understand what odd little antiques exist in the paintings, to understand the different ways of life that inspired different scenes. I did feel that some of the things he said fit into the stereotypical overanalysis of art.

Looking around the Johnson was amazing. They have some fantastic pieces there, including one that I, an art philistine, recognized: The Goose Girl by Adolphe William Bouguereau. After the event, I got to see this interesting musical performance on the first floor. It is to my understanding that the Johnson comes with new exhibits every so often, so I would love to catch the next time they have something new.

Yes, and…

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I was a part of the Introduction to Improv, taught by 3 kind members of The Whistling Shrimp improv comedy troupe.

I’ve done improv workshops before, and I thought they were a blast. It’s hard to think on your feet, but it’s a muscle that needs to be trained. No one wants to have a conversation about how was your day, how are your classes every time you meet someone. I think you need to spin up something interesting now and then.

It reminds me of one of my all-time favorite shows, Key and Peele. Those two truly mastered the format of the skit, and while it isn’t exactly improv, it’s related. I remember Keegan-Michael Key said in a video one time that the most important rule in improv is to never contradict the other person. Think, yes, and… If your improv partner says, let me take you on my mule, don’t say You don’t have a mule! Work with the new premise.

The members of the troupe emphasized that we just have to play the games, not be funny too, but I really tried for both. I juggled an invisible baby. I pretended to be an insecure magician. I matched my partner’s volume in the activity where we essentially had to communicate by loud shouting. That might’ve been one of my favorites. As a quiet person, it’s incredibly freeing to scream as loud as you can. There aren’t really many opportunities to do that in normal human society.

This event was a blast, and I’ll be sure to catch The Whistling Shrimp’s shows the next time I hear about them.

The Time That Photographer Patricia Wall Took A Picture of My Face

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I signed up for the professional headshots mini-seminar. When I walked into the room, I thought about how much some people have at stake with this simple little picture. The other Rose Scholars were dressed super formally, their hair styled neatly, the curvature of their smiles thoughtfully calculated. The subtle cues in that little picture on LinkedIn could make all the difference for whether a recruiter reached out to you.

It’s unfortunate because all this prevents the job process from being objective. Pictures inevitably enable our unconscious biases to take hold of our decisions. You see a person’s race, how well tailored their suit is, and you make assumptions about their personality.

We can’t really do much to change the system when we’re unemployed though, so I strongly appreciate Photographer Patricia Wall helping us get these photos anyway. It must have been a painstaking process to edit all those photos. I suggested that she just use Snapchat filters, and we had a back and forth about which filter might work best, but she ultimately decided not to go this route. I also asked if we could change the background, which was a solid gray color, to a jungle setting. I thought this would make my headshot a lot more dynamic and exciting, which could be appreciated in the tech industry.

My headshot also taught me that I’m lifting my chin too high, apparently all the time.

I watched Sorry to Bother You and it was a masterpiece

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The movie was incisive, genius, and unlike anything I’ve ever seen. I loved how they used elements of fantasy and magical realism to satirize our society. I think I read an article two years ago that called it heavy-handed, which dissuaded me from watching it then. That was a terrible decision. The movie doesn’t try to be subliminal. The main character is Cassius Green, for “cash is green.” It just about tells you what it’s trying to say. It’s not about you feeling special for figuring out the puzzle.

One part that especially resonated was when Cash crossed the picket line, telling his friend that he supported his cause, but it had nothing to do with him after his promotion. I could see myself in that. I support people fighting for their rights from afar, but as someone with little to fight for, I don’t engage in their struggle. I’m content to do my part and uphold the status quo.

The movie also takes a dig at reality TV shows that basically involve humiliating poor people for prizes. I thought this was really important. I used to watch a lot of Ellen, and I think about how often she’d given someone in need $10k, and film their emotional response, their tears for ten minutes. She’s helping, but it feels predatory. We implicitly want them to play our game for the money, we want them to perform, to jump up and down, so we can feel good and think about occasional generosity and not why this person should be in such a desperate state to begin with. I guess.