Category: Simply Living

Another week

On Monday, when I met some students who evaluated our product, I wondered what made them stand out from the rest of the graduates in the field. And I found one answer in what they were doing at that moment: interacting with people in the industry. Industry exposure is an area Indian universities need to focus more on.

On Tuesday, a day that ended on a sad note, I learned of Leela’s sister’s unfortunate condition. Tragic and extraordinary. Tragic not just because of the sudden turn of events for the worse – how one’s life can change in so short a time! – but also because of the manner in which Preeti first contracted her illness. And extraordinary because of the strength and resolve that comes across in an account written under those circumstances. I was reminded of one of Leela’s older posts where, recounting the remarkable attitude of her friend Ro, she wrote: “People with the real problems are busy counting their blessings.” Those words were in response to someone else living through a difficult time; now Leela, passing through a very difficult phase herself, shows no trace of self-pity – instead she is counting her blessings, seeing beauty in human compassion, expressing gratitude towards all her well-wishers. Remarkable, in every way.

On Wednesday, while waiting for the dentist to come and fill the cavity she had cleaned a little while ago, I thought of how her daily work consisted of helping patients – her customers – by solving their problems. Over a career spanning a few decades, this is what a dentist does: solve problems, day-in day-out. And how different we in the software industry are, where the general tendency – among developers in product-based companies – is to create products and (preferably) leave the problem-solving part (labelled “maintenance”, as if it were inferior to “development” of new products) to someone else. Another difference: being a dentist implies independent work throughout (where growth is defined in terms of the number of customers you serve, and the depth of your expertise in your area of specialization), while working in a software company implies working in a organizational hierarchy (where growth is linked to your position in the hierarchy, so you would rather climb up the hierarchy than specialize, a tendency that results in most programmers nurturing dreams of becoming a manager). I then wondered to what extent these attributes – like “independent contributor Vs player-in-a-hierarchy”, which are closely linked to one’s personality – are considered by someone deciding on a profession. At least, I never thought of such aspects back then.

On Thursday, when I was finding it hard to concentrate in the afternoon, I was reminded again of how the language barrier can at times act as a shield. An year ago I could work undisturbed sitting in the midst of a few German colleagues arguing passionately over a technical matter: the background noise made little sense unless I concentrated, and I was shielded by my lack of understanding of the spoken language. Now-a-days, as the barrier gets smaller each passing week, I can no longer easily summon the weapon I earlier possessed: sentences spoken within earshot make sense and trigger a reaction, and it takes a effort not to listen, not to get disturbed.

On Friday, while watching Swades again on DVD, I was struck by the distinctive character portraits, a feature it shared with Lagaan. And to me, at that moment, those portraits seemed to convey that there is always a place for everyone, true to one’s nature, and how important the place is depends on which world you view the place in, on whose story you view the character in. The postmaster who wants to bring Internet to the village, the dhaba-wallah who wants to open a dhaba next to a freeway in the US, the colleague at NASA who works on a complex project involving satellites – all have their unique places within the story. Their role may be small, but that is only because the movie is Mohan’s story. Had it been the story of the postmaster, his role would have been magnified. Find your unique place, the movie seemed to tell me, and don’t lose sight of whose story you view yourself in.

Saturday diary

It was a damp, cloudy morning; traces of overnight rain were visible on the street and car windshields. The neighbourhood green had turned glossy, and all this morning freshness made it seem, for a moment, like Kerala. I picked up the newspaper from the letterbox and returned inside.

Few things can match the leisure that seeps in as you settle down on a Saturday morning with the weekend newspapers on your lap. While weekday papers are full of news that ring with a tone of immediacy, pages of the weekend edition – with essays on art, culture and society – convey a quality of slowness and relaxation, as if in writing these pieces journalists were taking a break from their regular news-articles. You would not notice the difference if you hadn’t read the weekday editions; a weekend acquires its quality of leisure from the busy week gone past.

After breakfast – toast with cheese and tomato slices, and grape juice – I drove to MacroMarkt, a nearby super-market. I had to collect a few digital photo prints ordered some weeks back, and since this was my first attempt at using this channel (of uploading photos to their website, and later collecting prints from the store), I approached an attendant. He was an old, bespectacled man with a shock of white hair, and the warmth in his “Was kann ich für sie tun?” made me forget for an instant that he probably repeated this line a few dozen times each day. I asked where I could collect my prints. He appeared surprised, and replied that photos from film-rolls were all kept “hier” – he took me to the section – but added he wasn’t sure if this was what I was looking for. I thanked him, and after a small search found my prints. When I crossed him on my way out of the section, he wanted to look at my envelope. He then read aloud the letters “Online print 10er Format” and smiled, nodding to himself, perhaps happy he had learned something new this day.

The drive to Heidelberg reminded me – yet again – of how rapidly Spring had covered all traces of Winter; it seemed difficult to believe that this green landscape was snow-white only a few weeks back. Does Spring lie hidden in the earth, waiting to burst forth? Or does Winter, tired of making nature shiver, recede on its own accord? I had written of the sudden and beautiful transformation brought about by a snowfall; this changeover into green seems equally quick, and beautiful. How dull life would be without seasons.

The sun had slowly broken through the clouds, and I found Heidelberg wearing its best outfit: streets filled with locals and tourists in summer clothes; a lightness in the air; a spring in every step; gaiety all around. The charm of this city can never wear down.

At the library I returned my books – with a fine – and borrowed a couple more. I usually spend some time reading in the library, but on this day I wanted to be outdoors (one does not get many sunny weekends here). I walked over to the edge of the Neckar, and sat on one of the benches with a nice view of the river. There were some kids playing football on the stretch of green in front. Further ahead a group of canoe enthusiasts were preparing to enter the river. A pair of geese flew across a little above water, wings skimming the surface. A couple took photographs with the river as background. Cyclists, joggers and pedestrians crossed by, sometimes leaving snippets of their conversation behind:

“…auf der anderen seite…Neckar…”

“…I almost brought the roof down….”

“…ich weis nicht warum…”

I sat there for a while, enjoying the sun’s warmth on the back of my neck, reading and looking around. It was a lovely Saturday.

Losing a fortune

My dear wife Colours said goodbye to me yesterday. Don’t get it wrong – she was only leaving for the U.S, to visit her parents for a week. And if you are wondering if this has anything to do with the change in the template of this blog, you couldn’t be closer to the truth. The blog template reflects my present state – Colourless.

Last week I cancelled my subscription to the Fortune magazine. It was a tearful experience. The online cancellation form indicated that Fortune was sad to lose a customer like me, and asked for a reason for my cancellation. The reasons listed were the usual formal ones (couldn’t they think of something like “My dog doesn’t like the taste of the magazine” ?), and unable to find one that applied to me I chose “Other” and clicked the “Submit” button. They weren’t satisfied. The next page displayed a large box with a message that repeated their sentiments on losing a customer (They really regretted anything wrong they might have done to me, the message said) and invited me to write an essay on why I wished to cancel my subscription. I wrote, briefly, that my local library had recently subscribed to the magazine (which was a lie, of course; they had been getting the magazine all along), and clicked “Submit” again. This brought me to a page with another message that described how much they regretted breaking this relationship, and how much they would miss me. If I still wished to go ahead with my cancellation, the message said, I could press “Confirm”. I thought for a while – a few weak moments – and then, summoning all my determination, I clicked “Confirm”.

I slept little that night, thinking of a Fortune employee verifying if any library in my vicinity had recently subscribed to the magazine. I expected a mail next morning that informed how pleased Fortune was to revoke my cancellation since my reason had proved false. It’s been a week since cancellation, and I have received no such mail.

The real reason for my cancellation was hidden in a stack of old magazines I spent sifting through last weekend. Among them was an old copy of The New Yorker – dated June 2001 – purchased at an airport in the U.S. As I browsed through the magazine, reading some articles and looking at the cartoons, I realised how little of good journalism had come my way of late (my failing, of course) and how satisfying a few hours with The New Yorker would be, each weekend. The decision was made in that moment: Fortune out, The New Yorker in.

That copy of The New Yorker had an amusing “antidote to ‘The Elements of Style’ “. It began: “The reader of the fifth edition of ‘The Elements of Style’ will find many of the rules changed from the previous edition. The elementary principles have been modified as a result of the recent discovery that a talent for composing complicated prose early in life can stave off the onset of dementia or Alzheimer’s later in life, or, at least, make it much more difficult to detect – a fact that writers can ignore no longer.”

The article went on to list a few new principles of composition. It suggested that people should employ fancy words, should use “the fact that”, should express co-ordinate ideas in different form, and should not underwrite (“Rich, ornate prose is hard to digest, fattening, and sometimes nauseating, but it is very, very good for you”). It also gave some examples; here’s one:

“The Mother Superior tried a little harder to explain to the pretty dissappointed (but not really that dissappointed) Dick that Sister Jane, perhaps for her own good, had been sent kind of far away.”

I have a copy of the fourth edition “The Elements of Style”, but this fifth edition seems to hold much promise. I wonder when they’re publishing it.

Nothing much, really

This morning I woke up at 6 (you’re reading a diary, remember?). The intention was to take a walk in the nearby woods (you remember my last walk in the woods, don’t you?), as the weather had turned surprisingly warm since last week. But when I lifted the blinds I saw a gray sky, quite unlike the clear dawn I had gotten used to since last week. I decided the weather was not good enough, and settled down instead on my sofa with the Financial Times weekend edition. One columnist there was urging people to restore the tradition of wearing hats, another spoke of his encounter with Kasparov (who viewed the world of politics like a chess board, with Freedom playing White against Communism, Fundamentalism etc), and yet another described a meeting with our good old Khushwant Singh (who apparently regrets having missed many opportunities “of seducing women because I didn’t have the nerve. Some of them were more than willing, as they told me later…” Now that, I told myself, is one regret I must not have to reflect upon during my old age, looking back at these youthful days filled with opportunities).

But seducing women demands an amount of time and energy I presently do not have, so I’ll put it aside for the moment. Life@work dominates most of life right now. And when things at work turn busy for both wife and me, a pattern emerges: we eat out every other day, disorder reigns at home, wife skips her piano lessons, I skip my chess sessions, and each night I barely manage to read a page from a book on the bedside table before dozing off. Leisure is word that belongs to a different century, surely.

One idea behind that walk into the woods was precisely that: to experience leisure and solitude. There is a pond in the middle of the woods where you can sit on one of the benches bordering it and gaze into the stillness of the water, a stillness disturbed occasionally by the wind. After a while you realize that your mind – occupied with nothing other than observing the swaying branches of pine trees reflected in water – is reaching a similar state of stillness. In summer, when the wind is warm enough, you could sit there for hours doing nothing.

The birds no longer visit our backyard: the yellow bag hangs empty. (The red one is full, but I found that it hangs on a branch that has no branches nearby – so only a hummingbird could access it, but we don’t have those here.) Last weekend a sparrow-like bird with yellow feathers came by several times, along with its mate (the other birds seemed to come alone, but those of this kind always came in pairs). It seemed to be very sensitive to its surroundings: even small movements of my camera would make it fly away. The others weren’t like that – they pecked at the bag blissfully, unmindful of a someone nearby clicking away. In all, I spotted six different kinds of birds; suddenly I find myself curious to know more about them (the names seem to matter, after all!).

There’s nothing much else to say, really. I’m off to the barber now, and will be working for rest of the weekend. And you surely don’t want to hear about my work, do you?

Visiting places

It had been a while since they had travelled anywhere. They wanted to, but couldn’t; they never spoke about it. On this Saturday evening, she suggested a walk through town: let us pretend to be tourists, she said, and picked up the camera. He didn’t see the point, but agreed.

Afternoon rain had followed morning snowfall, and although the slushy streets made walking difficult, the sky was clear and the air fresh; it seemed like a new place after all, she said.

Around a corner, she pointed to the church tower at a distance: that looks interesting – we must walk towards it.

It was the town’s only Protestant church, one they crossed each day driving back from work, and yet, from this street at this hour it seemed unfamiliar. Was it the light, he wondered. Or was it the snow?

On hauptstrasse, boys were throwing balls of snow at people passing by, who stopped, glared at them for a while, and went on their way. Unruly kids, she remarked. Those in our town are so well behaved – things are so different here.

He played along (he’d realized that one only had to look at things anew), and added that this main street looked more modern than the one in their town. She looked at him, surprised and elated, and he noted he hadn’t seen that glint in her eye before.

Soon they reached the church, whose tower rose majestically against the backdrop of a blue sky. He took pictures; passers by looked at him the way people look at tourists in a not-so-touristy place, wondering why were they visiting this town at all.

In a parking lot next to the church he spotted graffiti on a nearby wall. They walked towards it to get a closer look, and stood for a while examining it the way curious people look at murals in museums and churches.

The walk back was through familiar territory: they returned along the same route, seeing things they had seen moments earlier, but from the opposite direction. A small bulldozer-like vehicle that hadn’t caught their attention earlier looked impressive this time, standing alone in a vacant plot.

Back home, they sat down and looked at the pictures they had taken. It was a nice town, they agreed, and decided they should visit it more often.

Seeing

Last Tuesday I took the bus back from work – I normally drive or walk – and along the way, as I looked out into the street flanked by houses with snow covered rooftops, there was a flash of memory from my first days in Germany. For a moment – fleeting, but intense – I experienced a sensation I’ve almost forgotten: a mixture of awe, wonder, fear, confusion and chill I felt all at once those early days six winters ago, when I first arrived here.

Such moments are rare; the mind now finds the surroundings familiar, the eyes no longer gape in wonder, the stomach has forgotten the sensation of fear in a foreign land and the ears rarely turn pink with cold. Yet, there is something I can never get used to: the transformation of the landscape after a snowfall. All that was gray, green, brown, black, pink, purple turns into white: bare trees are covered with white streaks, as if painted by delicate strokes of a master; leaves covered with snow look like outstretched palms offering a scoop of vanilla; footprints on snow suggest a mystery, asking you to follow; streets, houses, cars, buses, entire villages, fields and mountains all blend into one form: that pure, powdery, soft, sugary substance called snow.

Bikeinsnow

* * *

Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is, among other things, about seeing. In one chapter, she speaks of a game she indulged in during childhood: “..I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone to find…..I was greatly excited at the thought of the first lucky passer-by who would receive in this way, regardless of merit, a free gift from the universe.” She now looks for such gifts herself:

“There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But – and this is the point – who gets excited by a mere penny? If you follow one arrow, if you crouch motionless on a bank to watch a tremulous ripple thrill on the water and are rewarded by the sight of a muskrat kit paddling from its den, will you count that sight a chip of copper only, and go your rueful way? It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get.”

* * *

You may have heard of The Gates in New York’s central park. If you haven’t, you can read about it here. And here. And here, here, here, here and here.

If you have heard about it all, and even seen it, you may still want to read The Gates Blog.

Whether The Gates is a work of art, or merely a modern monument glorified by many, is a debate that matters little. What matters is what The Gates has done to people. Those who had forgotten the art of seeing seem to have recovered it (The Gates to awareness?), and those who were aware and sensitive are now seeing new things, new dimensions.

Someone long ago had said: Do not mistake the description of a thing for the thing itself. And yet, there are times when the description of a thing acquires a weight of its own, perhaps greater than the thing itself, and while memory of the thing fades the power of the description grows until all that remains are words and images. The Gates will soon disappear and pass into history; one cannot say the same of its descriptions.

Random jottings

Writers often like to come up with reasons why they write. Susan Sontag, in an introduction to a collection of essays I’m currently reading, writes:

“And one becomes a writer not so much because one has something to say as because one has experienced ecstasy as a reader.”

Perhaps there are as many reasons to write as there are writers in the world.

At the German class, my fellow classmate is of a different mould. Last week, in a session where we were asked to stage a mock interview on the topic of reading habits, he answered one of my questions with the German equivalent of “I am against reading novels”.

I thought he had got it wrong in German; I suggested that to say you are against something is to imply it not only for yourself, but for everyone in general. Did he really mean that?

He said he did. He thought it a waste of time, reading works of fiction: “It takes too much time; people ought to be spending it more constructively.”

“Watching movies?” I asked. In an earlier class he had expressed his liking for popular Bollywood cinema (and at the same time conveyed his dislike for movies like “Monsoon Wedding” and “Bend it like Beckam”).

“Sure.” he replied. “It’s good entertainment, and it doesn’t take too long.”

Our German teacher was surprised too, I noted with relief. He asked if this distaste for fiction would make him keep storybooks away from his children.

“I wouldn’t encourage them to read storybooks, but if they insist I wouldn’t stop them.”

It is a language course, yes, but I also learn tolerance.

NgWe recently got the first copies (they sent the January and February editions together) of the National Geographic magazine. Late last year my wife and I decided to take up their reduced-price offer for first-time subscribers, and we had been waiting since some weeks for the yellow-bordered magazine to appear in our postbox. When it did, there was no yellow border; the magazine came wrapped in a brown envelope.

I remember being fascinated by the National Geographic since I was a child. My grandfather was a subscriber, and I spent a good part of our annual visit to his home flipping through its pages, gazing with marvel at the wonders of nature. As a teenager, I sometimes dreamed of working for the magazine, travelling to distant lands with a camera and a notebook and coming back with unforgettable pictures and mysterious stories from strange lands.

The first two editions have carried the same charm. It is also a humbling experience to contemplate the vastness and variety of our planet, and to recognize how little of it we have seen or know about. And for someone who is constantly in touch with the world of information, it is a reminder that there is a different world out there: composed not of bits and bytes but of atoms and molecules that make up our natural environment.

I have only one complaint: the magazine smells of paint, a chemical odour so strong it keeps distracting me while I read. But, I tell myself, you get used to odours in objects you love; which woman ever loved the first scent of her man?