Field Notes from the Self - Fragments, feelings, and the quiet courage to look within.

Got into a lunch discussion about newspapers, more specifically about how we end up paying for newspapers that ultimately land up at the old-newspaper-shop ( pazhaya paper kadai ). I have been brought up on the ‘ reading newspaper is a good habit ’ thing in school, moving to the ‘ reading newspapers is desirable/essential/paramount to success in CA exams/ MBA interviews/ placement interviews ’, later in life. I have always been a supplement reader; be it Young World on Saturdays or The Sunday Magazine on Sundays (both from The Hindu stable), Siruvar Malar on Fridays and Varamalar on Sundays (from the Dinamalar stable), or The Metro Plus or more recently, Chennai Chronicle and Chennai Times . I am also a big fan of tabloids – I used to look forward to the free tabloid that you could pick out at the London tube stations (can someone remind me the name); I still look forward to flying out of Mumbai in the evening, I love the Mid-day . Ergo accounts for my 15 minutes tea-breaks in early a...

Came across this page, courtesy Dhanno. http://www.rediff.com/money/2008/jul/23look.htm A follow-up article by Rediff: http://specials.rediff.com/money/2008/jul/24slide1.htm Interesting! Wanted to post some analysis - blogger aint cooperative. I cannot paste tables. So retaining my original post

1. I do not like to punch in daily attendance, or make an entry in the visitor's ledger everytime I have to visit someone on another floor, but I do expect people to follow systems 2. I expect people to do their share of work (based on agreed norms), but wince everytime someone reminds me to pay my telephone bill, when I know I ought to have paid it online but have forgotten 3. I do not like it if people make derogatory remarks about women drivers, but everytime I encounter a bad driver, and it turns out to be a woman, I'm like ' That explains it! ' 4. I do not have a problem racing past the signal after it has turned yellow, but swear at anyone who does exactly that ( people have no patience these days! ) 5. I do not have a problem taking my son to school fifteen minutes late (because of my own laziness) when I know they will turn him away, even though they have never done that, and I would hate the school for it when it happens 6. I hate to be kept waiting, either for...

Read Arghya's sequel to my previous post here . Agree with him on several counts - Definitely about Clockwork Orange, one of those movies I could not proceed beyond 10 min (if I cannot get interested in the first 10 min in a movie, I cannot get much further beyond); another in that league is Memento . Agree more so on the snobs about the camera angles and obscure references - these are interesting points, agreed. A movie with a different screenplay is definitely worth watching - the chronologically non-linear ones are my personal favourites ( Pulp Fiction), so are technically sound movies. Different camera angles are interesting too (a recent good movie I watched was Anjaathey); however it should be remembered that these are only supplemental to the storyline itself. The plot itself is a hygiene factor, everything else is just to glide the story along. If the plot and the screenplay aint captivating enough, it takes a lot of patience to appreciate the other aspects.

Read that Midnight's Children wins 'Best of the Booker' . Don't know what to think - either I am stupid to not appreciate the ramble of Salman Rushdie, or the poll is made up, or God forbid, it is a problem with all Booker-winning books (if this one were the best, I shudder to think of the rest). I was always of the opinion that one should avoid (like the plague) award winning books and movies. This opinion started with the Sunday afternoon regional language feature films (national award winning feature films) screened on Doordarshan. I do remember one particular movie that I watched when in school. The movie opened with a dark shot of a porch (its called a mitham in Tamil) in a rural Tamil house. Let me take a slight detour to explain this location - it is a rectangular area (a square is also a rectangle right?) typically in the middle of the house, at a slightly lower floor level than the rest of the house. This is flanked by cylindrical pillars. The reason this po...

Have you thought about how our memories of people are time-stunted (is there such a word?) at what they were when we last saw them? How many times have you had to say - S/he was not like this when s/he was in college ten years back ? Or as a response to They are such a happy couple ; you retort with oh come on, we know how they used to be when they were seeing each other. We tend to do this all the time about siblings, and relatives and friends that we are not in constant touch with. This one I am sure all of us must have been at the receiving end of - Ohh you have grown so much! I remember you used to be this tall, this would be followed by a vivid narration of some of the things you did back then that you would pray the earth folds in before you hear them being repeated in front of an audience. We all know people change, we change, we mature (or otherwise) as the days and years catch up; yet we sometimes fail to acknowledge that the same could happen with others we know as well. We e...

This post is not for you if you have feet that can sport dainty looking sandals with thin straps, or stillettos that show off a lot of feet skin, or for that matter, anything apart from closed shoes. For the less fortunate rest of us, here's a godsend. I picked it up from Foodworld, and I love it! Take it from me - I have a perennial problem of dirty looking feet, I mean the dry skin makes it white and scaly and of course, ugly. I have a bottle of moisturiser on my worktable to keep my feet lookable. And I have tried several things: olive oil/vaseline petroleum jelly are good, and reasonable effective, but you can't apply them during the day unless you want to feel sticky and attract a lot of dust, or during the night if you don't want to end up with oily bedsheets. Normal skin moisturisers (in the recent past I have tried St. Ives intense moisturising Aloe and Chamomille lotion, Marks & Spencer Hand & Body Lotion, our own Vaseline Body lotion) are very simply ineff...