Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Coexist

Driving home from the airport after a 10-day trip to East Asia, I stopped at my local grocery store to buy a gallon of milk. On the car whose spot I ended up parking in, I saw the bumper sticker (see picture above).

I liked the sticker for a couple of reasons. It is a very creative example of the use of display fonts (also known as interpreted or visual fonts). I am always amazed by the ability of our minds to easily fill in letters of the alphabet where they don’t exist. What I like about this example is that all letters are in interpreted font (granted, the ‘e’ is a bit of a stretch).

Though I am not very religious, I very much like the underlying message. At the most basic level, isn’t coexistence the only option available to all of us?

Seeing this sticker very close to home, right after a long trip served to remind me of well known truism: I didn’t have to travel many miles to places far away to see things. I just had to keep my eyes open.

1 comment:

  1. Theres a poem Tagore wrote on Amartya Sens book I think, when Sen was at Shantiniketan as a kid. I remember the thought and not the poem, but it goes something like this.

    I wandered the world, through many oceans, ...
    But when I returned home I realized that all the beauty I was looking for
    I found on a drop of dew in my garden.

    Something like that, I cant vouch for a single word above to be in the poem, but only the thought.

    Your experience reminded me of that.

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