Nova was never woken. No clock, no urgency, no obligation. She wills wake. She wakes the morning. She wakes the morning with a solar plexus personifying a call for innovation. Refreshing, renewing, redoing, building on.

The “Good morning!” she offers her life’s partner, the children, the pets, is not the same as the one yesterday. Nor as that day when Nova heard the birds at earliest hours in her parent’s peach tree outside the window, Beethoven, Bert and Ernie’s blues-esque duckling song, Singing Bowls, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” and Stockhausen, and Nine Inch Nails (simultaneously, all at once, and, or not) for the first time. For the first time even if it were a second serving.

“You remember that good morning?” She’d ask. Just as that day Nova crashed her father’s computer or burned out a cpu for the first time. “Literally, a flame! Hell-oooo!” with or without pitch-increasing vocalization.

They, that’s not Beethoven, and rather the family, the neighbors, the baker, or the neigh-sayer on the corner, might notice they might not. It is not her point. “Innovation is relational,” she knew, and yet: “not necessarily proclaimed, announced, published or yelled from the top of the public roof.”

For Nova, innovation is learning and note-taking in highest gears. It’s upbeat, downbeat, sideways or critically syncopated. It is minute. And it’s grand. It’s plural. Always plural. It’s sub, con, pre, peri, post and hypertext. Innovation is not only plug ’n’ play gadgets for Nova. And yet, those she imagines, recycles, invents, improves, hacks, mods, jugaads, shanzhais, scampers, with that first innovation at the core of her early mornings.

“I love innovation, as I love that first kiss offered to me; renewal when meant,” she claimed.




—animasuri’24