JIMAN CASABLANCAS
The co-founder of Tarik Jeans and public relations impresario finds beauty in “the new normal”, giving way for new passions in film and music to soar.
“It’s amazing the things that I do to entertain myself during this partial lockdown. But I guess to get used to ‘the new normal’, you must first know what this new normal is. For one, my sleeping pattern is completely screwed. I would sometimes find myself sleeping at 4am because I was reading old travel brochures that I found in my room. And I’ve been watching TV. When you have no place to go you don’t mind spending 45 minutes sitting on your favourite chair watching a zebra chew a leaf. With limited supply, I’ve just been eating strange food that’s already in the fridge. Then there are things you don’t even realise you ate—an odd combination of foods that has no business being together. I pondered on all this and concluded, this new normal sucks. And when the second phase of lockdown was announced, I made a vow that things have got to change. I started writing and sharing my past articles using social media. I made Spotify playlists of different genres of music and shared them with my followers as well. For my denim brand, Tarik Jeans, I created a PSA campaign called Poskad Untuk Rakyat to send the right message to Malaysians on the current situation of the Covid-19 pandemic. Slowly but surely, a productive routine starts to take shape. I would spend the first half of the day with conference calls, checking on the situation of my kettle farm in Kuala Pilah, and responding to e-mails while the second half was mainly focused on exploring my creative spunk. I thought the time was an appropriate one to revive a sharing session called Trigger Thoughts using Instagram Live as a platform. With guests like Bront Palarae, Amy Search, and Puan Ruhaiyah—the voice of Doraemon, Trigger Thoughts has managed to capture decent eyeballs with its aspirational content. I’ve also been working on a movie script in collaboration with another writer and have managed to co-wrote a lyric to a song by Ushera which was performed for the first time on Riuh’s In Your Home Concert series also via IG Live. In short, I’ve just been digging into the many facets of creativity that I never knew I had in me. The new normal is a state of mind. It is what you make it to be.”