cheeni

They over promise and under deliver. What exactly do they promise anyway? Gillette's multiple (tending to infinity) blade system is very explicit in forwarding the theory of a closer, smoother shave - the number of blades supposedly has a linear relationship to the closeness of shave. The aloe strip counts for something I suppose.

On the other hand, most advertisements for electric shavers are about the shavers being better than the competition or the previous generation of shavers - look, I can be washed with water, no look I can also lube the skin while shaving, and no look I can run for 90 minutes without a recharge.

What I really care about is the closeness of the shave and the less irritable the experience the better.

No electric shaver ever seems to want to take on the traditional twin (multiple) blade system head on in a contest of smoothness or comfort. That must say something about the efficacy of these beasts. So why do people want electric shavers? I ask this because I have one, and I have no idea why I got it in the first place. Well, it was kinda cool and you know man toy like.

This post started out as a comment to kadambarid's post. Since it has become outrageously long for a comment I've decided to make it a post instead.

I used to shop at Blossoms in Church street, Bangalore a lot because of the discounts. No such luck here in HYD, in fact the book shops here don't have what I want most of the time. Despite this I seem to pick up book(s) every other week from Crossword. It doesn't help that S also loves her books, so we have this perennial space jam for our books.

During my relatively impoverished college days in Madras I used to browse through books in expensive stores like Odyssey that had open racks, air conditioning and seating, and then shamelessly head to a deep discounting wholesale book store which operated more like a pharmacy and hand in a list of books I was ready to buy. Occasionally I'd feel very guilty and buy a book from Odyssey as well. Funnily, I only read books about computers and hackers at this stage in my life. Right now my bookshelf doesn't have (m)any of those books. Yes, life is indeed like a box of chocolates! My father keeps reminding me occasionally that there are two giant cartons of my books on programming and systems that are taking up a lot of space in their store room in Madras. I always dodge the question. In truth, I don't know when I'll ever get around to reading them again. I hate throwing away books, even books I know I won't read much anymore. Not even the books on accounting, marketing and law from my undergrad days that stopped being interesting to me over a decade ago.

There was this unfortunate time that I had to literally throw away my books. I was relocating back to India from the US, and I had sold or given away most of my belongings, but I was hanging on to a few books anyway. I suspected I was over the luggage limit, but didn't realize by how much, until I began checking in. The overage charges for the luggage made me swoon, and I knew I had no logical reason to hold onto the books. What I'd save in overage charges could buy me three times the number of books I was carrying. I was really sad, but I had to leave my heaviest books next to a garbage bin at O' Hare. I hope someone saved them, and it didn't end up in a landfill.

A couple of months back I picked up about 15 books from Strand in NYC on a whim, and I had to buy a separate bag to carry the books back to HYD. They weighed a ton, and I wasn't even headed back to HYD directly, I had to stop over in Zurich. I rued the day I visited Strand because the books weighed the most, and I had to carry my bags up 6 floors to the apartment (they don't like elevators in CH). Of course it's another matter that I couldn't resist grabbing a few more books in CH to make my journey back even more miserable.

I'd only partly read a library copy of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon a long while back, and it's bothered me ever since. I wanted to fix that, except the main Strand store didn't have any copies, but their annex branch in Wall Street did have a single copy. Predictably, the next day after dinner in Brooklyn, I changed two trains and had the last copy safely in my hand.

I was reading Salman Rushdie's "Enchantress of Florence" around this time, and his frequent references to "Babur Nama" started in me a hankering to read it. Quite coincidentally I came across an English translation of it the next Sunday morning at the Borders near Penn Station. Having just missed my train which pulled away just as I was entering the platform, I had decided to cancel my Sunday plans anyway. So I plopped down in a chair and over coffee and bagels almost finished reading Babur Nama right there in the store. It must have taken 4 or 5 hours.

I find I don't need to finish reading my books all the time. I'd definitely like to complete reading a book, but sometimes I'll lose interest half way when I have a sense for the plot, or the material bores me. In the case of Babur Nama, it was a bit of both, a diary, which is really what it is, gets repetitive after you've read most of it.

http://cheeni.net/books is a somewhat outdated list of books that S and I have collected over the last two or three years. I know it doesn't account for our latest two shopping trips, and it is missing numerous titles, but it does give some idea of the state of affairs. This list is mostly for myself; I look at it occasionally to find a book I haven't yet read, or to ask myself how all of these different books have shaped my thinking, and who I am.

What I'd really like to do is take a reading vacation. Pack all my unread books, and take them with me to some quiet beach or forest hideout and start reading. So far I've only done this for a week at a time, and that's hardly enough to even get started. Perhaps I'll get the chance to do it for longer, like maybe a month of long walks in the country, quiet time with the books and the solitude of nature.

I've done this kind of thing once before, when right after grad school I had a few months of idle time waiting for my work permit. I didn't exactly start out planning to do so, but I went through 75% of the IMDB top 250, and many other movies that weren't on it. Watching 3 movies a day sometimes, it got pretty obsessive. I also did other stuff during the period, but this is the only remarkable activity I remember now. Let me tell you that watching that many critically acclaimed movies in an already depressed state of mind (because of the work permit delay) can actually be still more depressing. Given that most of the best movies are an enquiry into human values, this isn't very unusual.

I don't know much about philosophy. I know more now, than I did back then, but reading philosophers isn't yet a favorite activity of mine. No surprise then, that looking deep into the meaning of all these movies, I independently came up with the concept of nihilism. I was quite convinced about the pointlessness of life, and the chaos that is human existence. I don't think much about it now, even if I self realized the concept, because believing in nihilism makes life very difficult.

I hope a reading vacation won't do the same, but I suppose that depends on the books I pick :-)

I love the American public library system, but for it, this sort of a movie vacation wouldn't have been possible. I wouldn't even need to buy books now if we had similar libraries in India.

I'd like to follow that reading vacation with a writing vacation. A long month of walks in the country, quiet time with the word processor and the solitude of nature. Perhaps I'll even produce something publishable!

S egged me on to write something instead of being the constant critic. Critics are the lowest form of life apparently. So here goes, a short story...


"Kamala...", began Rukmini Atthai, calling out to Amma while sitting down from her morning walk with her ipod, the latest gift from her son in Florida.

"I notice you have new neighbors, are they North Indians?"

Amma didn't usually like Atthai's visits, too nosy she said. Irritated at Atthai's discovery Amma replied, "Yes, I've heard they are Gujaratis, they can't speak a word of Tamil. They decided to leave because of all the violence you know, not at all like the South."

Atthai nodding glumly, added, "Yes, yes, Madras is becoming cosmopolitan. These days, one must learn to adjust. After all, it's not like we can stop them from coming..."

"Anjali kanna, stop doing that all the time" chided Atthai at her grand daughter who was busy on her cell phone, texting friends back home. Anjali was visiting from Colorado which Atthai's other son called home. India seemed to bore Anjali, she was the archetypal ABCD.

"Anjali, have you seen our family album?", offered Amma, eager to be the hospitable host. "Let me show it you, it'll be interesting" she said, as she pulled the album off the shelf. "This contains all the photos of our family - six generations in one album".

Amma was the family historian, she always knew who had married whom, and the names of all the nieces, and nephews; cousins and cousins of cousins. Atthai was no light-weight in this department either, so stuck between the two stalwarts, Anjali was assured an in-depth immersion into the genealogical by-lanes and back-alleys of our family.

After feigning interest for the first couple of pages, Anjali began to get genuinely curious. "Oh, this is so cool", she exclaimed, "wait till I show this to friends back home".

"Paatti, who is this?", asked Anjali pointing at possibly the oldest photograph in the album. A faded black and white of a stern figure in a black coat, white fronded dhoti, and a turban with a zari border as broad as a man's palm. "That, kanna", said Atthai with obvious pride "is my great grandfather, one of the first Indian lawyers to be admitted to the bar in the Madras Presidency".

"Patti, do you remember the names of all our ancestors?", asked Anjali, caught up now in the pace of things.

"What are you saying? Of course Patti remembers, how can she forget, aren't we the descendants of Neelakantha Deekshatar?", declared Amma. Despite everything she said, Amma loved Atthai, or, at any rate, at least the lineage.

"Neelakanda who?" said Anjali quizzically.

"Neelakantha Deekshatar was the greatest vedic scholar of his time", "it is said that there was no one to surpass him in vedic knowledge in all of Saurashtra", explained Atthai and Amma in turns.

"Word! What is this place, Sow-rah-shtrah?"

Amma and Atthai looked at each other, and then at Anjali.

"That, dear, is where we originally migrated from, 600 years ago, we couldn't stand the violence", said I, emerging from behind the newspaper. "It's called Gujarat these days."

The office here in Zurich is awesomely cool of course, maybe you've seen pictures. What is absolutely coolest here is the orange juice machine. Not only is it mechanically cool - it's also got oranges that taste great.

I wondered about this the last time I was here, about a month or two ago. You see the oranges here taste exactly like the ones back home in India, not at all like the pale blandness of American oranges. No, the orangensaft here is rich in taste and color. Orange here really means orange, not pale yellow.

My theory at that time was that maybe orange plantations in India started with seeds from Europe, you know due to the history of European colonization. But, I maybe wrong, India is actually the 4th largest producer of oranges in the world, so maybe, just maybe I am actually drinking the juice of Indian oranges.

Wondrous oblivion...

P.S. Look up this movie by the same name, rather nice.

On Sundays and holidays Zurich wears a deserted look. The shops are closed, the streets are empty, there is practically no one around. The only shops that are open are in the many Railway stations that dot the city. The Swiss Railway system among the best in the world is very central to the Swiss lifestyle, and I don't mean just for the transportation. Today is Whit Monday, a local holiday, and so I had to visit a railway station (translated english link) to withdraw cash, shop for groceries, grab a sandwich and a magazine. Luckily I knew of this beforehand, else I'd have gone hungry for a couple of days.

The Swiss lifestyle forces health upon you. The (guest) house I am staying in is less than 1000 square feet in size, yet it has 5 bedrooms spread across 4 floors. I stay in the loft, so when I need to use the bathroom I descend a floor, when I need a drink of water I descend 2 floors, when I want to use the washing machine I come down 3 floors, you get the picture. Bear in mind that this is a decent sized house around here.

So, I am shopping at Migros, the grocery chain that's open on holidays, and I hand the checkout clerk my credit card. She throws me a look of scorn like I'd just insulted her ancestry. There are two reasons for this, as far as I can tell - first, there was a swipe machine on my side that I hadn't noticed, so maybe she thought I was refusing to pull my weight - you know, treating her like she was my inferior. Second, and more importantly, Switzerland maybe the banking capital of the world, but their credit card system sucks. A cab driver told me that it takes 2 months for cash to be credited to him when he accepts a credit card. I also wonder if the privacy angle isn't somehow playing into this.

Anyway, I wasn't getting away that easily from this clerk. I find that there's no one to bag my purchase, ok, so that's fine. I reach for these ridiculously thin and tiny plastic bags and I can feel the scorn-meter rise once again for being an environmentally insensitive jerk.

It would be an exaggeration to say that Switzerland is a friendly place to foreigners, but I don't suspect it's xenophobia.It's just that they have a very elaborate societal system, and a lot of rules, and foreigners are n00bs who break these rules.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7351713.stm

Free Tibet! And shame on you, Delhi...

[Update: Link fixed]