Consider the song- "Waqt Ne Kiya kya haseen sitam"- Geeta Dutt's beautiful voice and SD Burman's melodious tune substantiates major portion of this song. SD used minimal instruments to support the song. Minimal, but just the right ones. Anything more would only create noise.
Hrishikesh Mukherjee was an amazing storyteller in the 1970s. Consider the song - "Ab to hai tumse, har khushi apni", composed by SD Burman from the movie named "Abhimaan", directed by Hrishi da. Not just a melodious tune, the lyrics beautifully express Jaya's feelings, while the visuals portray the agony of Amitabh. All but in 3 minutes with minimal settings, the stage is set for the next chapter of the story where Amitabh's jealousy begins to deteriorate his married life.
Such expressions use minimalistic approach in art that advocates stripping unnecessities while focusing on essentials. This approach, dubbed as "Less is More" is effective in every form of expression, be it art, professional presentations, writing or storytelling. By delivering the message in less time, using minimal resources, it leaves the canvas available for more fruitful creation.
It is said that brevity is the soul of wit. So it must be of effective narration as well. I find Ted Talks to be an epitome of how typical presentations must be. Succinct, yet succulent. The more substance one includes in lesser, thoughtfully chosen words, allows more value to be delivered in lesser time, making the expression effective and captivating.
For same reasons, web series these days gather more audience than traditional TV soaps. Apart from the flexibility the former offers to view from anywhere and anytime, the content density over time keeps the audience glued to the devices.
At work, we find a lot of professional PowerPoint presentations that are noisy. Details crammed into a single slide hardly allow the audience to consume what is offered. Same goes with performance dashboards where cluttered graphs and numbers that create more confusion than clarity.
Paintings with the right use of colours in limited proportions appear more beautiful. Homes with subtle interiors that allow more light and space seem to be more soothing and inviting.
Expressing yourself effectively, through minimal and simple words, is an art worth embodying in today's professional world.
Our choices of social health should also be based on a "Less is More" approach. As a generation whose social life primarily dwells on devices, we feed ourselves with more knowledge than what we can digest. Limited but useful knowledge distillates into mindfulness and wisdom. Excess of anything creates chaos and noise. Overuse of social media seeps in the Narcissistic Personality Disorder, urging us to expose more of ourselves to gather our happiness in the form of likes, shares and comments. The dopamine rush thus experienced is equated to that experienced through narcotics addiction. More begets even more leading to suffocation. We gradually forget to make ourselves happy with smaller pleasures and overfill our minds with content, not letting it wander freely to flourish creativity.
No wonder the need for Digital Detoxification is growing fast. Until that becomes a habit, it calls for explicit self-restraint to suppress the urge to show off what you have. It's the brake you apply on your own selves when replying to social media messages and binge watching. Less, should be more.
"Less is More" is an attitude where we naturally gravitate towards what is necessary. It does not mean sacrificing necessities or being too frugal on resources. It rather means using only what is essential to create value and discard the rest. Anything less than what is just enough would make it deficient, while anything more would be excess.
This attitude makes you realize that it's not worth wasting your time and energy (essentially the MOST important resources) on situations where brevity can allow time for other important things that matter. It's time to declutter and shed the excess, and thus realize that less, should actually be more.
