Ashish Vidyarthi Instagram – All of us operate within a playing field; and each of our playing fields has a perimeter. When we kick the ball out of that boundary, we consider it to have gone out of bounds…and depending on the ‘game’ we’re playing, it could even be a foul! For the University lecturer, teaching and shaping young minds…For the architect, designing spaces…For a chef, it is about cooking.. For the nurse, caring for the infirm…The accountant it is monies and the accounts of a firm…  the list of the defined boundary with slight variables goes on. Now imagine playing games within a fluid boundary line. Imagine discovering that there are other valid playing fields beyond ours, where others are playing their games… That is perhaps when we realise that our aspirations and abilities need not be defined or confined by the lines we draw around ourselves. That we need not be defined by the ‘envelope’ that we inhabit. That is when we push the extremities of our playing field, and stretch the lines ‘enveloping’ us and in a way limiting us. So when I, the ‘Hindi’ film actor, also started to work in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Bangla, Malayalam, and 10 other languages, what I was doing was pushing the extremities of the ‘space’ that defined me. What that did was to open up my playing field, turning it into a larger game… Now through Avid Miner, for the past few years I am pushing my ‘enveloping’ actor’s cloak further to also include the playing field of a ‘communicator to corporates ’. As one pushes one’s extremities, one also needs to up one’s game. For the larger the field, one’s preparedness over a larger area needs to improve. It means that as our extremities become enlarged, the areas over which we need proficiency grow too. For me, it is a logical movement of the learning, hungry, inquisitive mind… Pushing the envelope is a re-imagining of our abilities. As we re-imagine what we intend to do, increasing possibilities open up for us. In essence what we’re doing here is creating possibilities for playing new games in vaster arenas. So let’s keep playing bigger games and stretching the extremities of our playing fields… This exercise will help us remain relevant