When This is Over (For a Given Value of Over)

May 10, 2020

I exited lockdown about five days ago, after at least thirty days of not leaving the house at all – and more of not leaving my neighbourhood. I was at my family home in Delhi when flights started getting canceled, remained there when the Indian lockdown began, and have been here since; with no fixed date on when I can reunite with my wife (in Singapore) or with work (outside Kanchipuram).

That’s been more than enough days spent locked down to realise that even once lockdowns are lifted, perhaps even if or once we have a working vaccine against Covid-19, things will not go back to how they were before the outbreak started immediately. They may never go back at all, or it may take years for that to happen. The businesses we relied on may have gone bankrupt during the lockdown. Workforces which fled for their villages may not come back, and probably definitely won’t for the same wages or living and working conditions. Flights and travel could become rare and expensive luxuries once again.

It’s also been enough days for my mood to change from day to day about the same thing. Sometimes, the memory of being able to walk to a cafe brings about immense melancholy, and sadness at not having done it since the middle of March1. And sometimes, it brings about immense excitement at the prospect of one day being able to do it again.

The past month has had me trying to focus on the excitement of doing something again, or something new; rather than get melancholy about not doing it at all. I haven’t always succeeded, but I’m trying to get better at it; and listing those things down in this blogpost is a further attempt at that.

Things From Before Lockdown that I Hope are Coming Back

  • Stepping away from work to stretch my legs and have a coffee or a snack while people watching or writing something.
  • Chocolate and cheese being easily available.
  • Travel, and being able to fly to another country within my disposable income
  • My company’s sales growth
  • Online shopping of “non-essential” goods. Being stuck at home for a month with very little work is a great opportunity to do home improvement projects. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to get parts.
  • Being able to take public transport without any fear of catching something

Things that Started in Lockdown that I wish would stick around

  • high fuel taxes
  • farmers being allowed to sell produce outside mandis
  • being able to see the stars in night at Delhi. With skies clearing up; Castor, Pollux, Procyon, Sirius, Regulus, and Arcturus have been visible every evening. Out of the planets, only Venus seems to be in the northern sky for now.
  • being able to see birds in Delhi. My family house’s trees have been hosting bulbuls, mynas, and parakeets in much larger numbers than any time in the last ten years. There are also more cheels, though they prefer to sit on genset chimneys, and I’ve even spotted a rufous tree pie and a yellow-footed green pigeon for the first time ever in Delhi.
  • Social video calling, especially group calling. I spent my twenties without reliable internet, and never got into the habit of using Skype for calls. Then the pandemic came along, and turned video calling from a benefit to a necessity for work. But in the process, friends and family scattered across the world discovered it, and now regular group video chats are happening with people who I was struggling to remember to call in the pre-pandemic life.

New Things That I Hope Will Emerge After the Lockdown Ends

  • Face masks becoming part of every day wear and etiquette, the way that they did in South Korea after the SARS epidemic.
  • And leading on from that, facemasks as stylish as the South Koreans’. Chennai adopted the camo-print earmuffs so enthusiastically ten years ago – will we get something similar with face masks? We can hope.

What I Worry Won’t Last after the Lockdown Ends

  • Chennai. I love the city, but first the floods, and now the coronavirus have exposed its vulnerabilities. But I don’t know what will happen next. Nothing, so that it continues to lurch from disaster to disaster; suburbs taking over, or British Raj style “knock down the diseased slums and shift everybody”.

Which of these will actually happen? I don’t want to say; because the last few weeks have had a parallel outbreak of people making predictions, most of which are suspiciously on the lines of “After the pandemic, people will end up doing what I used to do before the pandemic” or “After the pandemic, people will realise that my social and political views were correct all along”; and I don’t want to go down the same path. The lists above have been a confession, not a prediction; and I’m happy to wait and see.

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Posted by Aadisht

Small Aubergining

August 21, 2019

Many years ago, before the 🍆 emoji gave it a double meaning, the brinjal’s greatest nonculinary achievement was to be in the catchphrase of Meera Syal’s grandmother character in the BBC’s British Asian sketch comedy series, Goodness Gracious Me.

The sketches aren’t online, alas, so I’ll summarise quickly for anybody who hasn’t seen them. The grandma, in any situation where somebody is buying something – informs them smugly that she can make it at home for nothing. All she needs is an ingredient, another ingredient, and a small aubergine. The situations range from supermarket shopping to fine dining, to Masterchef, and eventually to a heart transplant.

I now propose that we honour this frugal grandma by using the term ‘small aubergining’ to describe a particular sort of shopping. That is, to spot some sort of clothes, jewellery, handicrafted accessories, or similar on an international website; to then roll your eyes at the first world prices, and finally, to take a screenshot or printout of the said product to your local tailor, jeweller, or carpenter and have them duplicate it at Indian prices – that is, practically nothing. Bonus points, or the term ‘advanced small aubergining,’ if you don’t even take it to a local craftsperson but do it yourself.

For example, a British lady is selling covers for A5 notebooks on etsy for $17.63 plus shipping. They are extremely nice covers, but my mind revolts at paying that much. So I small aubergined these covers by taking an old pair of jeans to a tailor in Hauz Khas market, who turned them into four covers for just 500 rupees. Like so:

 

Yes, the notebook sticks out a bit, and if the cover could have had a zip or button or other fastener it would have been even better, but I’m considering this an early prototype. The point is that I found a First World Solution on Etsy, and small aubergined my way into paying Third World Prices. It feels amazing.

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Posted by Aadisht

Pastry and the Progress of Civilisation

June 26, 2018

On the weekend gone by, I was attending a class on how to cook Hokkaido Cheese Tarts and Xiao Long Bao, the famous and delicious soup filled dumpling. The class was a birthday present from my darling wife, and as birthday presents go, has been the best one since she got me Ticket to Ride, which continues to provide hours of fun to this day. In time to come, the ability to make xiao long bao or cheese tarts may provide more cumulative pleasure and meaning than Ticket to Ride. But why speculate? For now, I shall write about the insights I gained during the class.

As I went through the class, the teacher pointed out that xiao long bao, for all its fame, does not have particularly exotic or expensive ingredients. It’s made with flour, minced pork, gelatin, and the same seasoning ingredients – sesame oil, vinegar, soy sauce, and salt and pepper – as are found in any East Asian chicken. The only really unusual ingredients are yeast and gelatin, which are procured easily enough. The reason you have to pay almost a dollar a dumpling, said Ms Tan, is that making the dumplings is both time consuming (you start the night before by adding yeast to the flour) and highly skilled; and that restaurants have to scour China to find skilled dumpling makers. Xiao Long Bao, she said, was all about the people making it, and not about what they were making it from.

This, I realised, is an interesting parallel to my older aunts’ and uncles’ idea of a good time. But as I thought more about it, I also realised that it is brought about by dramatically different circumstances. Let me elaborate.

My older aunts and uncles, all born before 1947, started adulthood as post-Partition refugees in Jammu and Delhi. Those were bleak years, not just for refugees, but for India as a whole. Material luxuries were scarce, or didn’t even exist. Automobiles and telephones were on a waiting list. Fruit and butter were major treats. But even with fruit, variety was limited; and so the treat was more to have a lot of a single kind of fruit, than to have many different kinds of fruits.

The thing that wasn’t scarce in those days was people. And so for my older relatives, their idea of luxury involves people doing work for them. The more work, the better. For my bua, bliss is having her driver drive around in the rains with no destination in mind. The driver, who has to control the car in miserable weather and driving conditions, may disagree. But anyhow. As they – and India – became richer, they started treating themselves to newly available material goods as well, but never quite lost the habit of thoroughly enjoying themselves by getting other people to do the work on their behalf.

Today, the situation is dramatically different. Free economies, free trade, and internet shopping, among other things, mean that we are spoiled for choice when it comes to material things; and they all cost much less thanks to the Chinese manufacturing miracle. Smartphones and motorcycles are within everyone’s reach! There are five different kinds of grains in the market. The fruit shop has fruits from all over the world, and farmers in Uttarakhand are now growing zucchini. What a cornucopia!

The trouble with cornucopias is that if everyone1 can have a smartphone, a smartphone ceases to be a signal of status and wealth. So if displaying your status and wealth is important to you, you can’t really do it with material things; unless you get really rare and exotic material things. Or, you could buy things which require something else scarce to make them – that is, skills. Such as xiao long bao.

So, sixty years ago, when money was limited, but things you could buy with it were even more limited, the only way you could show off was by buying labour. Today, money is widespread, things you can buy are even more so; and so the only way to show off is again by buying labour. What a full circle, and what a sandwich generation it makes those people who grew up in the 1990s and early 2000s and could impress others with laptop computers or automobiles.

This is possibly overgeneralisation, but I think there’s another difference between buying labour in a scarcity era and in a post-scarcity era. In the scarcity era, you paid for conspicuous waste, like having five domestic servants run around to find your glasses; while in the post-scarcity era you pay for conspicuous skill2 like folding the perfectly symmetrical dumpling. Which brings us back to the class.

At the end of the class, I can testify to the importance of skill. Making the dumpling dough is easy enough, and the stuffing is even easier. But picking out the perfect quantity of dough, rolling it out into a flat disk that’s thinner on the edges, and then folding the disk into an aesthetically pleasing dumpling are skills that take probably take months of practice to get right. Frustrated at my fumbling efforts, Ms Tan frequently took over the doug rolling herself, and the bun folding even more so. About twenty dumplings in, my folding technique finally became adequate, if not good. It was hard to overcome habit and heed Ms Tan’s advice to do the folding right rather than do it quick3.

During the class, demonstrating a method of squeezing out dough, and noting my Indian origins, Ms Tan told me that it was the same method as would be used in making pratas. Too embarassed to admit that I have never made a paratha by hand, and buy frozen ones from packets when forced to make them for myself; I merely nodded; but this observation, coupled with her comments about xiao long bao being all labour and skill and not material cost, made me remember a classified advertisement that had gone viral a few years ago.

I’m not sure if the classified was real or a photocopied joke, and I can’t even find the image any more, so I’m describing it from memory. It was in Tamil, and listed several job openings, along with the salary offers against those openings. Beginner software engineers, or something similarly white collar, were being offered 8000 rupees a month. A parotta master (or perhaps it was a dosa master) was being offered something much higher – ten or twelve thousand rupees a month. In general, people were amused at a blue collar occupation making much more than a white collar occupation. Further commentary, if any, focused either on the utter commodification of IT skills, or on pointing out that domestic and cooking skills were actually in very short supply and worth paying for. But it was only on Sunday that I realised that Douglas Adams too had made a pertinent comment on the situation, many years before the classified had come out. It is this quote from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series:

The history of every major Galactic Civilization teds to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question ‘How can we eat?’ the second by the the question ‘Why do we eat?’ and the third by the question ‘Where shall we have lunch?’

So yes, a parotta master making more than a software engineer has a lot to say about the dignity of blue collar jobs, the commodification of coding skills, the changing demographics and economic fortunes of South India, and our tendency to carry around too many expectations. But at a very big picture level, it also suggests that South India, as a civilisation, has started the transition from Inquiry to Sophistication. Hurray!

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The Propensity for Narrative

September 15, 2017

One of the most interesting books I’ve read in the last seven years has been Geoffrey Miller’s Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behaviour. For many years, I have been somewhat restrained in expressing my fascination with this book. This is less because of the dubious reputation evolutionary psychology has (and evopsych underpins the book), and more because Miller’s conclusions so precisely matched my own thinking (which did not even have the backing of evopsych) that I was unable to decide if I was a genius or if Miller was talking something so banal that I thought of it too. Anyhow, that (along with laziness) explains why I am writing about this book almost six years after having first read it.

In Spent, Miller makes the case that all of modern civilisation and consumer capitalism is the outcome of our genes’ desire to pass themselves on. We want to have sex, and therefore we want to attract mates, and therefore we want to signal how great we are, and in the process we buy things which we hope will signal said greatness.

Today we ornament ourselves with goods and services more to make an impression on other people’s minds than to enjoy owning a chunk of matter—a fact that renders “materialism” a profoundly misleading term for much of consumption. Many products are signals first and material objects second.

Miller says that when you come down to it, there are only six unique traits which we actually signal: intelligence, openness to experience, conscientiousness, agreeableness, stability, and extraversion. Meanwhile, brands and their managers themselves catch on to our desire to signal these traits and tailor brand images to associate them with particular traits. So, for example:

  • The Economist associates itself with intelligence
  • Mountain Dew associates itself with openness to experience
  • Life insurance companies, especially in India, associate themselves with conscientiousness and stability (but to be fair, what else will they associate themselves with)

To some extent, this association may actually have a basis in the product itself. At other times, it exists only in marketing communication (really, just how much will 15% sugar water that looks like urine make you more open to new experiences?). But howsoever strong or weak the connection, at some point consumers will take it seriously.

At about the fifteenth chapter, Miller gives up description and takes up prescription. And that is what this post is really about. Everything until now has only been background. (Sorry.) Miller says:

… buying new, real, branded, premium products at full price from chain-store retailers is the last refuge of the unimaginative consumer, and it should be your last option. It offers low narrative value – no stories to tell about interesting people, places, and events associated with the product’s design, provenance, acquisition, or use.

He continues with a long list of things that buying premium products fails to accomplish, but what I’m really interested in is the point about narrative value. On which note, let’s skip a few paragraphs in the same chapter, and go to Miller’s parable of a high powered lawyer who decides not to read GQ, drive to Neiman Marcus, and buy shirts; and instead:

… he could have driven to the nearest thrift store, used its logical arrangement of stock by garment type, size, and color to quickly identify some interesting shirts, tried them on, picked one, and bought it, in a total shirt-purchase time of about one hour. If his wife doesn’t like the shirt, no problem: it only cost $5. It could be burned impulsively on the barbecue to display his respect for the wife’s superior aesthetic judgement, and she would love him for it, and they could have connubial canoodling for two whole hours, and he would still come out ahead. Plus, the whole episode would make such a great dinner-party story.

(Incidentally, the above paragraph illustrates the appeal of Spent. Even if its argument is claptrap – and I have still not been able to find a reason why the argument is claptrap – the writing is so deliciously self-assured and sardonic that you will love the book despite its claptrapness. But back to narrative value for now.)

For many years, amazed at how much Miller and I thought alike, especially when it came to the bit about narrative value, I used to feel dismay and frustration watching people buy expensive brand name products that had little underlying utility, and brag about them with little underlying justification. This would be more sharply triggered with some product categories than others. Flooring, for example, is a product in which this rankles even today. Why buy Italian marble at Rs 650 a square foot, when tiles do the job at Rs 110, or when red oxide gives you the opportunity to talk about how you once read Amulya Shruthi’s blogpost about it and were utterly carried away by her reminiscing.

With other types of consumption, my reaction was more amusement and derision than frustration and rage. Luxury handbags, for example. I have once had the privilege of hearing a Bavarian thatha who manufactures glue rant ferociously about how useless the quality of these handbags is. And to this day, seeing people talk about Hermes or Louis Vuitton bags makes me giggle as I recall that rant, and mentally thank them for spending so much money to bring that back for me.

But, to really, really get back to narrative value. After three years of either rage or amusement, I began to wonder about why people could not see this for themselves. And I then began to wonder: what if some people simply do not have the capacity for narrative?

After all, we are living in India, where so many, too many, parents react in horror if their children reads “storybooks”, or anything other than assigned textbooks. There is also the disturbing push to see the Mahabharata and Ramayana as literal history instead of inspired and wonderful fictional fantasy – and that means that any attempt to build upon  or remix the narrative will be seen as ruining the story instead of improving it. But even if you think that these explanations are rubbish, do consider the possibility that something – Twitter, TV news, the Gods know what – is leading to people having lower and lower capacity for a deep narrative – and that as their capacity drops, the only narrative they can absorb are shallow brand identities like “Italian marble = made it in life” and “iPhone = pinnacle of usability”. And thus luxury marketing marches on.

Tangential points have arisen during the writing of this post that are perhaps too big to be footnotes:

  1. If you take Miller’s point about signaling at face value, the troll tactic that accuses you of ‘virtue signaling’ whenever you talk about feminism, human rights, or some such becomes both additionally tiresome and easily refuted. The correct answer to being accused of virture signaling then becomes: “Yes. And your point is? Signalling virtue is what has allowed us to leave the savannah, invent agriculture, start the Industrial Revolution, and bring about the gigantic improvement in longevity, health, wellbeing and prosperity that has culminated in you barging into my replies. So what is your fucking point exactly, and do you imagine that your barging into my replies is anything other than your own attempt to signal audaciousness and knowledge?”
  2. The value I place on a good dinner-story is so high that it has led me to maintain grudges against family members that have run for up to fifteen years (and counting). My motivation for this is that making up with said family members would, at best, give me a decent relationship with somebody extremely boring at best and annoying at worst. But carrying the feud on lets me tell stories about it for the amusement and entertainment of friends and family members whose presence is actually enjoyable, and with whom the relationship strengthens and deepens by sharing such stories and judgement.
  3. The Discworld, of course, takes the narrative capacity up to an extreme, and runs primarily on the power of narrative and less so on the laws of physics. If you accept Miller’s thesis, then conspicuous consumption of branded merchandise is the anti-narrativium. Jaguar and Jimmy Choo are therefore the agents of the Auditors of Reality.
  4. Punjabi pop music, in recent years, has been severely namedropping brands associated with such conspicuous consumption. That needs a blogpost in itself and I hope you will hold me to writing it.

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Posted by Aadisht

Real Estate and Travel Fetishes

May 16, 2015

A long time ago, somebody on Twitter shared an article (possibly on medium) about how, instead of looking forward to your next vacation and a life full of travel, you should make your career and life so fulfilling that you never wonder where your next vacation is going to be. Unfortunately, I forgot to bookmark it, and can no longer find the link, but I am certainly one of those people whom the article was chiding. Sadly, despite all my cool product development projects at work, I still get more excited by the prospect of travel.

In my defence, it is easier to share the excitement of travel with friends, family, and loved ones, than it is to share the excitement of developing a flame-retardant conveyor belt.

But, looking at my Facebook news feed, I certainly get the feeling that the scolding in that missing article had a point. There are so many people who seem to give off the impression that all that their life is missing is a vacation to somewhere cool and undiscovered.

That’s Facebook. And then there’s advertising on FM radio in Delhi.

Delhi radio is chock full of advertisements about buying apartments (and also commercial real estate sometimes). And the vast majority of these advertisements feature emotionally maudlin husbands or wives or children crying (or as Jagadguru used to say, crying up and down) about how miserable their lives are, and how the new real estate development can magically solve all this misery.

I find the radio advertisements far more awful than my Facebook feed, though that could be because of two sorts of bias:

  1. Cringing at what my friends say on Facebook would be awkward because they are my friends
  2. I share the hankering after travel but don’t see the point of buying real estate, to the extent that I roll my eyes at people who do (especially in India). This is probably the result of reading all those internet pop science articles about how experiences make us happier than things. (For an enjoyable pop science book that takes it a step further, I recommend Geoffrey Miller’s Spent, of which I really ought to write more in another post.)

But even with this bias and the previous excuse, I have to admit that both the hankering after travel and the hankering to own real estate are a sort of cargo cult which imbue either vacations or houses with magical powers. To wit:

  • All my problems will be solved if only I have a 3 BHK in which everyone in my family has a room to themselves and covered parking!

or

  • I will achieve remarkable insights and self-knowledge if only I travel to all the spots on this list of 25 places to see before I die!

Although I know many remarkable people who are free from either of these fetishes, the people I know personally who do suffer from this all seem to fall in Category 2 rather than Category 1, with minor exceptions like my bua (who does not so much believe that all her problems will be solved by buying real estate, as that everyone’s problems will be solved by buying real estate, and indeed that the source of marital discord is in living in rented accomodation). I know very few people who overlap, which leads me to suspect that these are mutually exclusive (perhaps because of that experiences versus things dichotomy).

This acquired relevance a while ago, when Gradwolf and I were discussing this article about online dating for rich people, and he was wondering what the entry qualifications were for such a thing. It was then, that I had a flash of insight and realised that to join these gated singles’ networks, the deciding factor was not how much you earn, but how much you spend and on what.

That is, if you are the sort of rich person who gets excited about buying a 3 BHK flat in Greater NOIDA (West), Floh and A World Alike will probably regretfully decline to let you in. But if you are the sort of rich person who travels to vineyards in Tuscany (or at least Nashik) and posts pictures of it on Facebook, they will probably welcome you with arms wide open.

This is potentially the source of the next class civil war between the different types of rich people.

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Posted by Aadisht

Ten Minutes in the Kitchen

October 28, 2014

My blog is at risk of sounding like a paid promotion for Philips. A day after writing about buying Philips LED bulbs, I am now writing about their new ad campaign to promote self-examination for breast cancer. Rest assured, though, that it’s just a coincidence, and do consider that I have been blogging so little that I don’t think Philips would even bother paying me.

Anyway. I saw the campaign being mentioned on social media about a week ago, at which time I quickly scrolled past. Then I saw a print ad on the weekend, and successfully ignored that. However, this evening, I heard a radio spot, got intrigued, and came back to look for the video spot. Here it is. It combines some of my favourite things: communicating without speaking, yuppie couples, and kitchens.

The radio ad I heard this evening isn’t quite as impressive. For starters, the husband in the radio ad seems far less competent. Unlike his counterpart in the TV ad, he can’t just make food by himself. He calls up his wife to ask for the recipe for dal. This left me wondering:

  • Why on earth do you need a recipe for dal of all things?
  • If you have to call up your wife to get instructions for making dal, don’t you end up wasting almost as much time of hers, and possibly more, as you save by making dal?
  • Seriously, why couldn’t he just look up YouTube, any of the multiple food channels on television, a cookbook, or just search the internet for a non-video recipe?
  • Will this incompetent chap who doesn’t even know how to learn how to make dal eventually follow in the noble footsteps of Samar Halarnkar and Max da Vinci and become a married man in the kitchen on a frequent basis, or is he just going to do this whenever his wife needs to self-examine?
  • What about lala couples who have domestic help to do all the chores anyway?
  • What about ladies who are widowed, have husbands who are living away from them, or aren’t married at all?

And, along with all of this, well, good for Philips India, but what made them decide on this good cause in particular?

I suspect that the whole point of the campaign is not to get more women examining themselves for breast cancer (though that would be a nice and positive side effect if it happened), but to get more husbands doing chores (which is valuable for its own sake and would also be excellent if it happened).

Now, telling husbands to do chores only for ten minutes a month may not seem like a lot as far as the wife is concerned. There is of course the possibility that the husbands will discover (to their own surprise) that they like doing things for their wives on a regular basis, or even that they enjoy doing the chores for their own sake. (Don’t knock that last possibility. Ironing is extremely relaxing.) And even if they don’t really enjoy it, maybe husbands will do it out of sheer competitiveness if they see other husbands doing it and bragging about it. Let us wait and watch.

Why, though, does Philips want husbands doing household chores? What’s in it for them?

My conspiracy theory is that they are not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, a desire for less breast cancer, or a desire for more equitable marriages; but to sell the household appliances they make. What Philips is probably counting on is that husbands who have never done chores before will, once finally exposed to actual housework, realise what their wives have been going through and then rush to automate all these tasks as much as possible. Having realised the difficulties involved in getting ironed clothes, warm daal, or clean floors, they will at long last get better tools to achieve these, and immediately purchase mixies, vacuum cleaners, air fryers, or steam irons; to name but a few products in the Philips India range. Meanwhile, their wives, who had been wanting better equipment all this while but couldn’t convince them, will probably roll their eyes, grumble a bit about how long it took for the husbands to wake up to reality, and afterwards, hopefully, enjoy the benefits of increased automation, even if not the benefits of their husbands doing the work regularly.

If my conspiracy theory is correct, clearly somebody at Philips India is extremely subtle and patient in expanding their market size. Respect, I say. Respect.

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Posted by Aadisht

What I Did On My Diwali Holiday

October 26, 2014

These are the lampshades in my parents’ drawing room:

2014-10-23 13.57.10

 

As you can see, they are shaped like pitchers. To put a light bulb in or take it out, you have to get a ladder, lean over the lampshade, and extract or insert the lighbulb from above.

Unfortunately, since the lampshades are open from above, this means that dust keeps falling into them. This is what the lightbulb looks like when you take it out:

2014-10-23 13.57.19

 

Look at the crust of dust on the base. Ew. And that’s just the bulb itself. The inside walls and bottom of the shade were even more gross. It doesn’t really come out clearly in photos just how disgusting they were, so I’ve not put any photos here. But it was awful. Some of the shades had a year’s worth of dead insects resting at the base – moths and honeybees that had flown too close to the light and had their wings singed. CFLs are better than incandescent bulbs, but still generate enough heat to knock out a small insect.

This called for a day of cleaning. These were my tools:

2014-10-26 13.31.35

Two toothbrushes, paper napkins (I really need to get a roll of kitchen towels for this house), and a bottle of Hawaiian white rum (made in Moradabad).

2014-10-26 12.41.29

I’m so posh that I only drink imported liquor, and use the Indian stuff only to clean things with. Jokes aside, this was a bottle that hadn’t been opened for about eight years, and when we did open it, we found it had gone bad. Since then I’ve been using it to clean bicycle gears, window panes, and on Diwali, lampshades. The dark part at the bit is sedimentary dirt.

After some trial and error, I found that the ideal way to clean the lampshades was to first brush inside with a dry toothbrush to dislodge the dirt, then dip the other toothbrush into the ‘rum’, and brush inside the lampshade again, and then to wipe the dirt off with a paper napkin. Since this was probably the first time the shades had been cleaned in a couple of years (if not more), this is what the napkin looked like at the end of cleaning two shades:

2014-10-23 14.07.13Eurgh.

I eventually finished cleaning lampshades for about half the house, which took at least ten tissues, and replacing blown out lightbulbs (where nobody had realised they were blown out) with new ones.

By the end of this, the combination of new lightbulbs and cleaner lampshades meant that my parents’ home was much better illuminated. Coincidentally, all this happened on Diwali, but I hadn’t planned it that way. It just happened to be the first holiday where I had free time at home since the time I bought a ladder to do carry out this exercise.

Anyway, the entire exercise taught me two things. The first is that some lampshade designs are far better than others. If the top is closed instead of the bottom, the lampshade stops being such a dust trap. For example, these lampshades in my parents’ living room turned out to be much easier to clean:

2014-10-26 14.13.56

Unfortunately, this design comes with problems of its own. Specifically, since you have to screw the bulb in from below instead of above, you can’t hold it from the base. So, if you’re doing this with an Osram CFL, you have to hold the bulb by the lamp instead of the base, and in this position you risk cracking the glass.

 

2014-10-26 14.06.12

This damn thing is flimsy as hell. Which is why I’ve now ordered thirty 7W Cool Daylight LED bulbs, which give even better illumination (particularly after the lampshades have been cleaned), for a third of the power consumption. The cost of the bulb is of course slightly alarming, but considering in Delhi I have to pay almost seven hundred and fifty rupees for a not even great cheeseburger, I can rationalise the purchase price to myself by not eating out for a few weeks. And, of course, for the next few days, until my Amazon delivery lands up, I can go around telling people ‘पूरे घर के बदल डालूँगा!’

The best design, of course, is the panel that goes into the false ceiling and then is protected from the elements. Which brings me to the second thing I learnt.

The second thing I learnt is that protecting your electrical fittings from the elements is particularly important in Delhi. To live in Delhi, is to wage a constant, losing war against dust.

Where does this dust come from? I’m not sure, but I’m guessing these are the most likely candidates:

  • The Thar desert, from where it’s blown all the way to Delhi because Delhi, Rajasthan, and Haryana have no forests to act as breaks. This is what I remember being taught in school. Perhaps it’s accelerated recently.
  • Unburnt particulate matter from all the cargo-three wheelers that I see making cargo deliveries in Delhi. Seriously, I see these only in Delhi. In TN, everyone uses the Tata Ace, which I think is far more reliable, even if not necessarily cleaner. I have no idea why the switch to Aces hasn’t happened in Delhi.
  • Or maybe it’s just all the clean car and truck engines, that despite emitting very little particulate individually, just overwhelm Delhi when all taken together,
  • Construction sites where sand hasn’t been properly secured. You see this all over Delhi. People by sand by the truckload, dump it on the road by the side of the construction, and then let wind blow it away. It’s horrible in Gurgaon, but Delhi is pretty bad too. Construction has skyrocketed in the past few years, thanks to Metro building, flyover building, and house reconstruction all over Delhi after building byelaws were changed to allow you to have four floors and parking instead of three floors. Anecdotally, the last type of construction is the most indisciplined when it it comes to just dumping stuff on public roads and not storing sand safely.

The battle you face in Delhi then, is only proximately against dust. It’s ultimately against widespread small-scale assholery committed by people not giving a shit about keeping their construction sites clean, picking up after themselves, or tuning their engines, because what the hell, it’s more of a problem for other people than themselves.

I fear that this (along with Delhi’s traffic, people bursting crackers, and people littering) are all prisoners’ dilemma problems, except with ten million prisoners instead of two. Which means that the best course of action is not to wait for a solution, but just get the hell out of Delhi (again).

Unfortunately, that may not be feasible in the short term. But then in the short term, I can keep on changing my home’s bulbs, fixtures, and lampshades. And maybe, just maybe, the extra cleanliness and reduced maintenance will give me the money and peace of mind to come up with a miracle solution to the problem of dust.

 

1 Comment | Delhi, Domesticity | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht

Calibrating Expectations

June 22, 2012

June has been the last month where I get to live in my own place (well, until I make new arrangements in either Delhi or Chennai. It’s complicated.) As a result, I have been making the most of it by inviting as many people over as possible and socialising like there’s no tomorrow (this will actually be true sometime between Sunday and Tuesday).

This means that over the past couple of weeks, many, many ladies have complimented me on how I have such a nice flat for a boy, and how it’s significantly superior to the usual bachelor pad. Success!

This success, I feel, has two contributing factors. The first is my stellar bai, Viji-amma; and the second is how my furniture has calibrated visitors’ expectations.

Right now I have beds with mattresses (and bed linen!), closets (these came with the flat and I didn’t buy them), a basic dining table with basic chairs (and a tablecloth!), and a speaker system propped up on a packing box. This means that my flat is significantly nicer than a bachelor pad where everything is kept on the floor. At the same time, there isn’t enough furniture that people start thinking of it as a family house that is either ill maintained or lacking in soul. That’s quite a sweet spot.

Had I remained in Chennai and continued to furnish the flat one major purchase at a time, this would have meant that at some point I would surely have entered a sour spot where it would be furnished just enough to raise visitors’ expectations to “family home” instead of “bachelor pad” and they would have gone away clucking in disapproval and wishing they had booked a hotel or met up in a restaurant instead. Oh Amma! After that, I would have to struggle for a long, long period; spending more and more time on cleaning and more and more money on furniture, linen, and decor before these new expectations could be exceeded. But then life is stern and life is earnest.

The important question, of course, is – at what point do expectations jump from “bachelor pad” to “family home”? One guest suggested that it is when the first sofa comes in. This seems very likely, but surely there are other things that could cause the expectation jump.

I think a more general solution is provided by the Cushion Rant from Coupling. My (arbit of course) hypothesis is that the minute you have anything that can be covered with cushions – be it a king sized bed, a sofa, or an ottoman; the expectations change.

If this is true, then the solution is to buy furniture in a sequence where the things that can be covered with cushions come last. So you first get single or queen sized beds so you can sleep, then a dining table so you can eat, and then a study/ work desk. Finally you get the sofa, and cushions along with it. I fear, however, that the cushions are necessary but not sufficient. Much more research needs to be conducted in this.

Leave a Comment » | Arbit Fundaes, Domesticity | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht

Saving for Marriages

April 8, 2012

I am at Kanchipuram today. This is due to dire circumstance and not by choice. My car is being serviced (this involves spare parts from Europe and so will take a month), and so I couldn’t drive back. The driver is on holiday for Easter (hey, Happy Easter, everyone!) and so he can’t drive me to Chennai and back in another car. And I could take the bus except I am not very enamoured of taking a bus to T-Nagar and then an auto to Velachery in the April heat.

All right, that last bit is laziness, not dire circumstance. Be that as it may – due to a combination of laziness and dire circumstance – I am spending this Sunday at the guesthouse in Kanchipuram instead of my flat in Chennai. This also meant that after a very long time, I read the Hindu Business Line, and specifically its Sunday personal finance agony aunt column.

The letter in today’s column featured a goal which features almost every Sunday:

For my daughter’s graduation, I would require Rs 10 lakh in 2021 and Rs 10 lakh for her post graduation. I wish to create a corpus of Rs 12 lakh for her marriage by 2030. For her marriage, we have 30 sovereigns of gold and 2 kg silver.

(The Hindu Business Line: Investment World)

Before I get to the financial matters, let me address the language. As an editor and grammar-bigot, there are two things about this which make my eye twitch:

  1. It uses ‘would’ instead of ‘will’. This appalling misuse is clearly notrestricted to North Indians.
  2. It uses ‘marriage’ instead of ‘wedding’.

Using ‘marriage’ instead of ‘wedding’ actually makes me twitch twice as much, because I have no way of realising which the letter writer actually meant. Did he want to have twelve lakh rupees to spend on her wedding? Or did he plan to give her twelve lakh rupees as a sort of nest egg to accompany her through married life?

If he did mean wedding, that makes me twitch for another, non-grammatical reason. I wish that just one Sunday, somebody would write in to the personal finance advice column and proudly announce that they were saving purely for retirement and that if their kids wanted a big fat wedding they had better pay for it themselves or elope.

This whole saving up so you can afford a big wedding thing must be one of the leading causes of misery in India. So much present consumption foregone, and all it accomplishes is to put the bride and groom through even more stress. Haakthoo.

6 Comments | Consumerism, Finance, Language | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht

The Backpack for All Eventualities

November 5, 2011

Last night, I’d gone for a jazz concert by these guys. Unfortunately, due to heavy rain in Chennai (which may be a byproduct of the legendary #chennaisnow) , almost everybody in the audience came late. The organisers solicituously delayed the concert until everyone could come in. While this was nice of them, it meant that the concert ended late too. And since I also thulped dinner in Chennai, I couldn’t leave the city until a quarter to twelve. Eventually, I reached Kanchi at two in the morning. On the bright side, I now know that Tuscana’s Espresso is the real thing.

All this meant that I am now facing the day on three hours of sleep and a really badass espresso, and will have to leave work early to catch up on sleep. Had I stayed the night in Chennai and driven back in the morning, I would still have missed work (though in the beginning of the day, not the end), but not messed up my sleep cycle. But the prospect of having to sleep in my jeans, and driving to Kanchi without showering and changing held no appeal, so I did the night drive.

All this could have been prevented – admittedly, at inconvenience to either a friend or my wallet – if only I had carried a change of clothes, pyjamas and toothbrush, despite not planning to stay the night. I tweeted this as a note to myself this morning, prompting Nitin to advise me to learn about and join the Every Day Carry lifestyle.

I googled it, found the Wikipedia page, and have almost been weeping tears of joy since then at finding people who have formalised preparedness and elevated it into a lifestyle. These are people who make paranoia work for them.

Basically, Every Day Carry is the list of things you carry with you all the time, so that you’re able to deal with adverse circumstances or not miss opportunities. Since everyone is going to worry about different problems, and want to be prepared for different opportunities, everyone’s EDC list is going to be different. I’ve had a vague all-time-carry list, but I never formalised it quite this way – I shall, now.

My EDC list is currently:

On Person:

  1. Cellphone and Case Logic sleeve with combined belt strap, lanyard and  carabiner
  2. Car keys with a USB flash drive on the keyring
  3. micro-USB cable
  4. Earphones
  5. Stationery Case (described in next section) with belt strap and carabiner (but the carabiner is jugaaded onto the belt strap, and doesn’t have a dedicated strap… I should learn to sew)
  6. Wallet (also described separately)

Stationery Case:

  1. Uniball fine tip pens in eight colours
  2. Permanent marker
  3. Highlighter
  4. Mechanical Pencil
  5. Eraser (not visible)

In my Wallet:

  1. Driver’s License
  2. PAN Card
  3. Hospital ID cards
  4. Cash and debit card
  5. Credit card with enough of a credit limit to purchase a full fare ticket to Hong Kong (in case Naxalite revolution breaks out and I have to flee India)

In my Backpack:

  1. Emergency socks (in case it rains and my feet get soaked, so that I can quickly change socks and prevent a cold)
  2. Passport photos (you never know when you need them – actually, the USB stick on my keyring has a soft copy of my passport photo, and scans of my ID proofs and credit cards too)
  3. Writing notebook
  4. Work-related notebook
  5. Letter writing notepaper and envelops
  6. Postage stamps
  7. Spare stock of visiting cards
  8. Rubber stamp
  9. Chequebook
  10. Hard disks

In my car:

  1. Phone cradle and charger
  2. An umbrella

 

All this was before last night’s annoyances and this morning’s EDC epiphany. Based on the last twenty four hours, I have realised that I should also carry, broken down by location:

On person:

  1. Pocket sized notepad
  2. Swiss Army Knife (I used to carry one, actually, but then it got confiscated at airport security and I gave up. I need to restart. Hanging them on my keychains prevents the airport confiscation problem – the car keychain doesn’t move cities, and I have to remember to pack my house keys in a suitcase during transit.)
  3. Contraception

In car:

  1. Overnight bag containing:
    1. A change of clothes
    2. A toilet kit with (at least) a toothbrush, toothpaste, and deodorant

In my backpack:

  1. an LED flashlight
  2. a supply of AA/ AAA cells
  3. an AA/AAA cell mains charger
  4. a spare phone charger
  5. A raincoat (if it fits – otherwise it goes to the car)
  6. A jacket (again, if it fits – otherwise it goes to the car) – in case the dreaded Chennai snow strikes
  7. A first aid kit – bandaids, antiseptic, ibuprofen, and throat lozenges at the very least. Possibly also anti-allergens.
  8. Spare stock of prescription medication
  9. Kindle (which I will have in January, whee!)

 

What’s your carry list?

6 Comments | Consumerism | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht

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