Awkward Conversation Loop

Proust, Sarson, Smells & Memory

During a conversation with colleagues, I was talking about how the beautiful, pungent smell of sarson tel involuntarily triggers childhood memories.

Just a whiff sends me back to my train journeys in second-class compartments where snack-sellers would walk by in the aisles, peddling their wares in newspaper cones. One of the snacks was jhalmoori, the East Indian equivalent of the ubiquitous bhelpuri.

Jhalmoori, unlike bhelpuri, tends not to contain the delicious red and green chutneys. It's purpose is to have jhal — spice. It is soaked in mustard oil whose sharp smell drowns out the assorted smells of the chanachur, chilly, diced potato, peanuts, onion, and sometimes coconut.

The taste of the oil and raw onions sting the tongue, but not enough to stop you from going for another palmful of the assortment.

My colleague Princy James then pointed me to these words by Marcel Proust in Remembrance of Things Past:

When from the distant past nothing remains, after the beings have died, after the things are destroyed and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, yet more vital, more insubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of everything else; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the immense architecture of memory.

Yet again I had recalled the taste of a bit of madeleine dunked in a linden-flower tea which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long await the discovery of why this memory made me so happy), immediately the old gray house on the street where her room was found, arose like a theatrical tableau…

Do you experience these involuntary memory triggers too?

Is it just me or...

# ... do bankers really have the limpest handshakes?

# ... is shopping for groceries the most relaxing, therapeutic activity of the week for other people too?

# ... is the world suddenly full of babies? They're everywhere - on my Facebook timeline, in the malls, at restaurants, smiling out of billboards, smiling out of the windows of the cars passing me by. They're everywhere I look. It's like the whole world around me suddenly developed baby fever.

Abdul Kalam on Facebook

Seriously. "I am not handsome but I can give my HAND-TO-SOME". Really?

Also see: Gandhi's Facebook Talisman

Online Media in India

This graphic was inspired by this, and includes ideas from the original.

Click for full-sized image.

Email Acronyms, Revisited

Whenever I get bored of reading jargon-filled emails at work, I imagine those acronyms mean something else — or, are euphemisms for underlying annoyances.

TTYL (Talk To You Later) - Ta ta, you losers.

ASAP (As Soon As Possible) - As Slow As Possible (often turns out to be true)

IMHO (In My Humble Opinion) - I'm Humble. Occasionally.

FYI (For Your Information) - F*** Yourself, Idiot.

WRT (With Respect To) - Wearing Red Thong (this works beautifully at times)

It's fun re-reading those mails with these acronyms.

Earth-quakes & Human Reaction

In continuation of yesterday's theme, here's Seth Godin pithy take on what our reaction to earth-shaking events says about us:

1. The first thing that happens after we encounter an earthquake is to wonder if anyone else felt it. The need for group validation is widespread and happens for events that don't involve earthquakes as well.

If those in the tribe feel something, we're likely to as well. That's why people look around before they stand up to offer an ovation at the end of a concert. Why should it matter if any of these strangers felt the way you did about the event? Because it does. A lot. Social proof matters.

2. Organizations are busy evacuating buildings, even national monuments. Even though experience indicates that the most dangerous thing you can do is have tens of thousands of people run down the stairs, cram into the elevators and stand in the streets, we do it anyway. Why? Because people like to do something. Action, even ineffective action, is something societies seek out during times of uncertainty.

Is it just me or is this actually a good description for what's happening in India right now?

Omkara Revisited

Please tell me this song isn’t about performing a BJ.

Vacationing In Tirupati, And What I Like & Dislike About Organised Religion

I’m wary of crowded places, hot weather and long queues.

Add ill-mannered security guards. And priests who’d make Atilla blush. Blend them, and you get Tirupati.

Yet I had to go. Family tradition. It’s something we do after marriage.

I kept pushing it away for two years. And then, the trip materialised and our family headed for the seven hills.

It was my sixth trip to the place. I don’t remember going to another holiday spot – religious or otherwise – as many times.

At first, there’s much to like about the place: the climate’s pleasant, the locales are clean and green, there’s spicy, piping hot, slurpacious Andhra food. And the datacard works too.

Then, the darshans happened.

There are several types of darshans you can make at Tirupati.

The cheapest option will leave you standing in queues several kilometres long. The slow, painful barefooted drag to the lord’s chamber takes many hours, sometimes more than a day.

Then, there’s the VIP queue, where you have to pay a higher-than-usual ticket price. But you are spared the queue and taken straight to the sanctum sanctorum.

Right before they reach the business end of the darshan, all these queues merge. Then, another wave from this sea of skinheads prepares to hit the lord’s chamber.

There, just as the devotees reach the chamber and get a second’s worth of his glimpse, they’re pushed away by the security – swiftly, rudely – to keep the queue moving.

All those hours in the sun.

For one second’s worth of darshan.

Two seconds, if you’re lucky.

Three, if you hold your ground and don’t let them push you.

It doesn’t stop there.

After this, people queue up again to make donations to the ginormous Tirupati hundi.

This queue is much shorter. But one thing doesn’t change: right after you’re done dropping your money in the hundi, the guard – probably fully aware that your donation helps pay his salary – pushes you away. All over again.

After this, you pass a gallery where overweight priests sit behind a glass wall with currency notes strewn around, waiting to be counted, or be pinched.

I’m an atheist. But what I truly like about organised religion is that it’s a fantastic, recession-proof, all-weather business model.

Its consumers fear abandoning it. Its proponents milk it for its dogmatic worth. And the product itself – The God – has irreproachable manners of pleasing or displeasing its followers.

My heated back-and-forth with some priests and guards would mean I’m not going back to any place of religion in a hurry.

However, if I can, I’m definitely going to set up a temple in every corner of the country.

My First Strand of Gray Hair

My Xth CBSE Hindi syllabus had this chapter about a middle-aged man expressing his bittersweet feelings after he noticed the first gray strand on his scalp.

His feelings got my goat. I was 15, and had already begun graying.

My first gray strand appeared when I was 14. The second didn’t take too long after that.

At the peak of my hormonal pandemonium, just when I was supposed to experience the highs of youth, I was dealing with my first sign of aging.

I don’t know — it was probably the hard water. Or my diet. Or maybe that I think too much. Way too much.

By 18, it was a full-blown epidemic. The temples, the scalp, the back of the head — the grays were gaining ground.

I might have been 19 when I had my grays coloured black — something I resorted to, once in a while.

What made matters worse that my hairline receded too. From worrying about premature graying, now I was thankful to have hair at all.

After college, I was admitted to a journalism school. Before I joined, I thought it’d be best to get my hair coloured to look my best for the first day.

A month after a joined, when the colour faded away, I realised half the class was gray.

That’s when I knew I was at the right place. And I never worried about my grays since.

Regulating the Indian media

I have just one thing to say to those people who want the government to regulate the media: please throw away your cable connection and promise to watch Doordarshan for the rest of your life.

How Oriyas Nickname Their Kids

Take a consonant. Any consonant.

Take a vowel. Any vowel.

Form a two-letter word using the two.

Say the word twice.

Congrats. Now your kid has a nickname.

Hain?

हैं?

This word is put to several uses by the people of Delhi.

“Hain?” - sharp, to the point, almost like a jab, with both eyes wide open, eyeballs about to pop out.

“Hainnn?” - with eyebrows arched, maxillary central incisors all visible, representing their dislike for what they’ve just heard.

“Haaaiiinnn?” - Long-drawn out, representing their unwillingness to try and understand what you’re saying. Commonly used by babus with paunches at government offices, especially after lunch hour.