Lonely Planet, Amethyst, Parks

July 31, 2011

This isn’t the common name for it, since a Google search doesn’t seem to throw up the link I want, but there’s a Lonely Planet Curse: as soon as Lonely Planet (or, to be fair, any major travel guide publisher) lists a restaurant/ hotel in their guidebooks, it starts getting an influx of tourists. Since it now has a captive market, the place in question lets service standards slip, raises prices to white-people levels, and earns the lasting ire of the locals over there. I think Adri rants about this often.

I was at Amethyst in Royapettah today and I suspect it may be suffering from the Lonely Planet Curse. It was certainly full of white people, and at least one table had a French couple reading an Inde de Sud guidebook. If anybody’s seen the latest South India guidebook, can they verify this?

The Lonely Planet Curse would explain the averageness of the food and coffee there. It’s not bad – it’s just meh. I wouldn’t refuse to go to Amethyst ever again because of bad food, but I’d never go there for the food. The desserts are still very good, though. The lemon curd cake I had today was fantastic. So was the banana bread, but then I am biased when it comes to bananas. People who are going to go ‘Haun!’ or ‘TWSS!’ in the comments, here is a pre-emptive ‘Shut up.’

But the thing is, you don’t really go to Amethyst for the food, which is just a bonus. The reasons to go to Amethyst are:

  1. You are a corporate whore who still wants to pretend to be a hippie
  2. You want to gawk at all the hot people or posh people or actual hippies there
  3. You want to buy nice presents for your darling girlfriend
  4. Amethyst is lovely and you can sit and wander around among plants, fishponds and cats

The new venue is even greener than the old premises in Gopalapuram. They’ve planted pineapples which haven’t come up yet, and have a huge melon (or perhaps pumpkin) patch, as well as brinjal plants. Delightful. I was there last week as well, and I sat in the verandah to write and blasted out almost a thousand words in three hours. As a place to just sit down and write, the Amethyst verandah pwns my guesthouse room, my office, and five star hotel coffee shops (which I tried last year). Though to be fair, doing this writing-on-the-verandah thing during the July monsoon is probably far more comfortable and far less hot and sticky than doing it in May. But even then the green cover would probably help.

So it’s partly the air of artsy hippieness that surrounds Amethyst that keeps taking me back there (and telling other people to meet me there)  and partly the greenery. But I realised that the hippies come there because of the other hippies and the greenery too – so fundamentally it’s the greenery. It’s the third greenest place I know in Chennai – the first two are the IIT Madras campus and the Horticultural Society.

However, I never invite people to meet me at IIT Madras (unless there’s already a quiz on there, but let us not delve into these boundary conditions) or the Horticultural Society. As is my wont, I mused why this is so. After all, with such wonderful greenery, why not invite people to meet me there?

After due consideration, I realised that this is because our social norms – especially in India –  demand that we combine socialisation with consumption. We either meet at coffee shops, where we consume coffee – or restaurants, where we consume food – at the movies, where we consume images – or at malls, where we commit wanton consumerism in general. Thus, most people who adhere to social norms will not go to a place merely because it is green. On occasion, I have suggested to people that we meet at the Horticultural Society or the (Delhi) zoo, but I am not quite as beholden to social norms. (As Bernard Woolley put it, this is “an irregular verb. I have an independent mind. You are an eccentric. He is around the twist.”) Anyway, either they never agreed or the one time someone did agree, the zoo was closed. So it goes.

I further reflected that changing social norms would be difficult and time-consuming, whereas getting parks to add a restaurant, or a small cafe, or a gift shop would be comparatively simple. In fact, many Delhi parks have done this. Deer Park has Park Baluchi, Lodi Gardens has the Garden Restaurant, and the Garden of Five Senses has something whose name I cannot recall at the moment. The only trouble is that these are all high-priced, and there are no lower price alternatives. The parks have street food hawkers outside, on the footpath, but none inside. As far as I know, Chennai does not have anything at all inside its parks, but growing up as I did five kilometres away from both Deer Park and Nehru Park, Chennai’s parks seem ridiculously tiny to me, and I suspect that they wouldn’t be able to squeeze a restaurant or food court in.

In an ideal situation, parks would have restaurants, cafes, small shops, and other such things to attract people for whom greenery was not sufficient motivation. Which is most people, when you come to think of it.

And then finally I remembered that somebody had already written about this, in 1961.

Certain qualities in design can apparently make a difference too. For if the object of a generalized bread-and-butter neighborhood park is to attract as many different kinds of people, with as many different schedules, interests, and purposes as possible, it is clear that the design of the park should abet this generalization of patronage rather than work at cross-purposes to it. Parks intensely used in generalized public-yard fashion should have four elements in their design which I shall call intricacy, centering, sun, and enclosure.

Intricacy is related to the variety of reasons for which people come to neighborhood parks. Even the same person comes for different reasons at different times; sometimes to sit tiredly, sometimes to play or to watch a game, sometimes to read or work, sometimes to show off, sometimes to fall in love, sometimes to keep an appointment, sometimes to savor the hustle of the city from a retreat, sometimes in the hope of finding acquaintances, sometimes to get closer to a bit of nature, sometimes to keep a child occupied, sometimes simply to see what offers, and almost always to be entertained by the sight of other people.

 (The Death and Life of Great American Cities)

Jane Jacobs, ladies and gentlemen. One of the twentieth century’s leading badasses. You’d be well advised to read the whole thing – all 448 pages of it.

Leave a Comment » | Consumerism, Food, Society, Travel | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht

Flathunt

July 8, 2011

My career path this year consists of not being at the factory (located fifteen kilometres outside Kanchipuram) every day, but gradually shifting into a sales role, so that I’m either at the office in Chennai or travelling and meeting customers. Therefore, I am looking for a place to live that is not too far away from either the Bangalore highway or Chennai proper. This sort of narrows my choices down to Porur (or possibly Maduravoyal, though I haven’t tried that yet).

Apartment-hunting in Porur has not been fun. Everything advertised seems to be an old house with a floor on rent, not an actual flat. Well, not really. I did find two listings for flats in Shantiniketan West Woods. When I called, they had already been sold out. Oh sigh. All other apartment buildings seem to be still under construction. Oh sigh.

Unfortunately, the buildings that do exist and are available don’t seem to want me. I’m not Brahmin, not vegetarian, and a bachelor.

Now vegetarianism within the premises is easily done (I can always sneak off outside to thulp meat) and as an Arya Samaji I am technically more Brahminical than most Brahmins – so faking Brahminism is not too difficult – though it will involve the poonal, which I am assured is both uncomfortable and unsexy. That only leaves occupying the flat with a family, which presents more complications. My father will be there a week in a month, but I get the feeling that landlords are looking for something more permanent. There is grave danger here that I will have to resort to sitcom/ romcom style madcap hijinks and hire actors to play my wife and kids.

Actually, looking at how widespread landlord antipathy is towards singletons, I’m surprised that this isn’t already an underground business, with HR managers in Bombay and Madras whispering to new joinees about very convincing actors at very reasonable rates. Oh wait, that would require HR to do something useful. Silly me. But maybe the cool mentoring manager that every organisation has.

What makes the pro-family-anti-singleton bias particularly annoying is that it has two levels of irrationality. First is the prejudice against behaviour associated with single people – wild partying, getting members of the opposite sex over for sexytimes (what happens when landlords learn about gay people?), and all night poker parties. And the second is the assumption that all single people are up to these nefarious activities Against Our Culture, while the minute you get married you stop.

I mean, I can’t sympathise with a bias against premarital sex or drinking, but I can understand that people have one and want to enforce it. But in that case, why not specify no drinking or no sex when you rent out the flat, instead of a blanket ban on single tenants. There is some serious ‘All men are mortal. Socrates was mortal. All men are Socrates.’ thinking going on when you ban single people.

I have a dream. Actually I have two dreams.

The first dream is that one day I will be rich enough to buy a flat that has previously refused to rent out to me because of my bachelorhood,and then rent it out to the most horrifying possible tenant. Say, a drinking, smoking, North-East-Indian, hard-rocking tattooed Muslim with a succession of girlfriends, all of whom visit him. That’s right, blaggards, you could have had a sober young Punjabi tenant who got up to nothing worse than really bad puns when you had the chance, but you blew it. Pay the price now!

The other dream is a little more subtle, and will actually screw around with their prejudices instead of reinforcing them. Once again, it’s to buy a flat in an apartment complex otherwise full of uptight people *cough Iyengars cough*, get on the owners association, and pass a resolution to only let out flats to families. And then, for tenants, find a married couple that is Brahmin and vegetarian, but also one where the couple are swingers and throw loud and ostentatious orgies every weekend. This should hopefully cause permanent brain meltdown among the neighbours. It will be awesome.

I am still about seven megarupees away from bring rich enough to do this just for the lulz, but as soon as I am, I will let the internet know about it. Once that happens, if you are looking for a flat and fit either of these profiles, please let me know.

Until then, I am throwing myself on the mercy of Chennai brokers. Wish me luck.

 

1 Comment | Arbit Fundaes, Domesticity | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht

Barriers to Style

March 15, 2011

A few months ago, I vaguely resolved to become a well-dressed person. The chain of thought leading up to this momentous decision was something like this:

  • I ought to have  really stylish visiting cards
  • Hmm, but if I have really stylish visiting cards I ought to have really stylish card cases too instead of yanking them out of my wallet
  • And if I’m going to have four different sets of cards for four different social contexts, I’ll need lots of pocket space
  • So I really ought to get a summer blazer to carry my card cases in style
  • If I’m going to wear a summer blazer, I might as well make sure all my clothes are that good
  • So I ought to be well dressed

Neo-Edwardianism is mighty! For twenty-eight years my mother has tried to convince me to dress well, and I could not see what the point was. And yet, the humble calling card led to a chain of thought that made me revise my entire outlook on being well dressed. Unfortunately, while my intention has changed at last, the outcomes have not. I remain slobby. There are three major hurdles on the path from wanting to be a natty dresser to actually being one. These are:

  1. I don’t know how
  2. My waistline
  3. My budget

I shall now elaborate on these three hurdles.

I Don’t Know How

A quote from Cryptonomicon is apposite here:

It is trite to observe that hackers don’t like fancy clothes. Avi has learned that good clothes can actually be comfortable–the slacks that go with a business suit, for example, are really much more comfortable than blue jeans. And he has spent enough time with hackers to obtain the insight that is it not wearing suits that they object to, so much as getting them on. Which includes not only the donning process per se but also picking them out, maintaining them, and worrying whether they are still in style–this last being especially difficult for men who wear suits once every five years.

So it’s like this: Avi has a spreadsheet on one of his computers, listing the necks, inseams, and other vital measurements of every man in his employ. A couple of weeks before an important meeting, he will simply fax it to his tailor in Shanghai. Then, in a classic demonstration of the Asian just-in-time delivery system as pioneered by Toyota, the suits will arrive via Federal Express, twenty-four hours ahead of time so that they can be automatically piped to the hotel’s laundry room. This morning, just as Randy emerged from the shower, he heard a knock at his door, and swung it open to reveal a valet carrying a freshly cleaned and pressed business suit, complete with shirt and tie. He put it all on (a tenth-generation photocopy of a bad diagram of the half-Windsor knot was thoughtfully provided). It fit perfectly. Now he stands in a lobby of the Foote Mansion, watching electric numbers above an elevator count down, occasionally sneaking a glance at himself in a big mirror. Randy’s head protruding from a suit is a sight gag that will be good for grins at least through lunchtime.

The scenario outlined in the second paragraph quoted above – good clothes, made by an expert, and delivered to you without you having to actually worry about how they appear is so aspirational it’s practically the stuff of high speculation (but then Neal Stephenson is a science fiction writer). Alas, in the real world, I have to figure out whether something looks good along with being comfortable or not.

This is tremendously hard. Being colour co-ordinated is just one problem, and even that can be solved with a brute force method – restrict all colours to white, blue, grey and black. But then there is the whole issue of fit. My mother hates a pair of my jeans on the grounds that they make me look weird. I can’t even conceive of jeans changing the way I look. These are matters beyond my understanding, like Things not from this world, but between.

Ahem. The point is, I don’t get which colours go with which other colours, and what cuts and fits are right for me. In fact, I don’t even get whether cuts and fits are the correct concepts that apply here. I suppose this may be learnable, and fear that it isn’t.

My Waistline

For the past five years, my waistline has been oscillating between a size 32 and a size 34. It keep buying size 32 trousers in the hope that I will get back down to size 32 some day, but this has never happened.

Never happened yet. For the incredible dreariness of the food at the Kanchipuram guesthouse ensures that I eat only what is necessary to keep myself going. A year and a half ago, size 32 trousers started fitting. This year, the waist itself fits comfortably and the problem is more with the slight roll of flesh that is squeezed up and out over the trouserline. That too shall pass. I have an exercycle and I’m not afraid to use it. Except when I’m really sleepy. Or I’d rather eat. Or write. Never mind.

My Budget

At an abstract level, being well dressed is an attractive idea. But when it comes to taking action, I find that all things being equal, I’d rather be rich than well dressed. This creates problems. When I have to buy clothes, I pick the cheapest possible option, even if a more expensive option will actually be more durable and thus more value for money. (On the note, see the Vimes Theory of Economic Injustice.) I make up for the lack of durability by stretching the item in question beyond its usable life. This isn’t always a conscious decision – as a corollary to point one about not knowing how, I may not even know that something is actually beyond its life – this is usually pointed out to me by my mother. With great exasperation and vehemence. Sigh.

There are sales, of course, but they come only twice a year, which means I have to buy a year’s worth of clothes with two months discretionary expenditure budget. And since they usually come in the months when I’ve already spent the budget on air tickets or some similar big-ticket item, I end up not making use of the sales at all.

The solution to this would be to set aside money every month, hold it in reserve until a sale happened, and then take advantage of it. And thirty kilorupees a year would probably comfortably cover my wardrobe requirements. Even if I decided to go all out – suits, summer blazers, dress shirts, multiple pairs of formal shoes, and so on – setting aside five kilorupees a month would probably cover everything.

Unfortunately, for two years now my monthly budget has been designed so that I don’t actually have five kilorupees to set aside. If my income rises to a point where I do, my first instinct will be to start a new mutual fund SIP. There are only two ways out: iron will power to keep the money aside for clothes and not savings, or to become so rich that I start making my investments in multiples of ten kilorupees and five kilorupees don’t register mentally.

I see a long, hard road ahead.

3 Comments | Arbit Fundaes, Consumerism | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht

On Chequebooks

February 19, 2011

I used to work for Standard Chartered Bank, and so my salary bank account was with them. Even after I left, this continues to be my main account. This was partly because I already had mutual fund installments set up to be debited from it, and I was too lazy to go through the rigmarole of shutting them down, and starting fresh ones from a new bank. There is a moral here in how excessive paperwork prevents customer churn.

Anyhow. Right from the time I got the StanChart account, I faced a fair bit of mockery from people like Skimpy and Swami about how difficult it was for me to find ATMs, how I would never be able to pass a cheque in a small town, and so on and so forth. These days, the situation has flipped. My StanChart account is actually more convenient than an HDFC or ICICI account (perhaps not SBI).

This is because of three reasons:

  1. Debit cards and credit cards are accepted everywhere regardless of issuing bank, so the gap between an HDFC and a StanChart is closed.
  2. My balance and assets under management with StanChart have built up to a level where they give me unlimited free cash withdrawals at any bank’s ATM in India. So the ATM gap is closed.
  3. The major problem with StanChart is that cheques are only payable in forty cities in India (and that counts Gurgaon, Panchkula, Secunderabad and so on as separate cities). But now that electronic funds transfer is widespread, that doesn’t make much difference. You can just take someone’s account details and wire money to them instead of going through the nonsense of sending a cheque, having the recipient carry it to the branch, deposit it, and then wait three days for clearing. And – this is the best part – StanChart gives free EFT. HDFC and ICICI charge 5 rupees for every transfer.

(On the other hand, I have to pay Rs 250 to receive a foreign currency remittance. This will continue until I reach the truly rarefied echelons of private banking. Oh sigh. Then again, I don’t know if ICICI and HDFC manage to sting you for this too.)

Now as several people on my twitter timeline have pointed out, this is remarkable lunacy. Charging for electronic transfers and keeping cheques free encourages people to use cheques instead of EFT. This wastes:

  1. Paper
  2. The time of the guy receiving the cheque
  3. The time of the people working at the branch and operations back offices, who’re now processing cheque clearing when they could be doing something better with their time

This may be because ICICI and HDFC think that the convenience is worth 5 rupees per transaction. Moreover, there are so many old people who’re forcing them to maintain branches anyway, they might as well fleece internet users until the older generation dies off. The five rupee EFT charge is just the latest in the list of ways in which the older generation is screwing over the younger generation (other, more severe examples include fiscal deficits, ecological pollution, and tiger momhood). Or it could just be because they treat internet banking as a profit centre, their product managers are determined to show revenues somehow, and nobody on top has made the connection between EFT charges, people shifting to cheques, and higher operations costs. Which it is, only someone from the banks can tell us.

Assuming we lived in a sane world, everyone used internet banking, and actual cheque operations could be brought down to a minimum, the fees would actually reverse. You would have to pay to use chequebooks (oh, and I think ICICI and HDFC also charge for additional chequebooks in a year or something, while StanChart doesn’t. Snort.) while EFT would be free.

In such a world, cheques wouldn’t serve a functional purpose as much as an aesthetic one. You would give someone a cheque if you wanted to make a ceremony out of handing them over (white) money. Actually, this is already done with the giant cardboard cheques at cricket matches and quizzes, but I was thinking of something more understated and classy.

Because of the huge back office costs a bank would incur in maintaining cheque clearing operations, cheques would become ridiculously expensive, like annual fees on a top-of-the-line invitation-only credit card. Probably more expensive, honestly. They’d be offered only to really rich private or premium banking customers, and as such would be really good-looking cheques. They wouldn’t be the ostentatious prize ceremony cheques, but regular sized cheques on really nice paper – thick and creamy, with lots of embossing.

They would be to electronic funds transfer what a Vacheron Constantin mechanical movement timepiece is to a quartz digital watch: very good-looking and made just as functional at ridiculous expense. You could draw them out of a coat inner pocket and sign them with a fountain pen, and the aura wouldn’t be ruined by low-gsm paper. Or, for that matter, say “I say, Ram Avtar, be a good chap and fetch me my chequebook, would you?” They would be neo-Edwardian cheques.

Of course, none of this will be possible until electronic funds transfer becomes ubiquitous. But then it is only good and proper that modern technology brings about neo-Edwardianism.

5 Comments | Arbit Fundaes, Business, Consumerism | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht

Neo-Edwardian Calling Cards

May 27, 2010

The Art of Manliness blog recently (well, actually, a couple of years ago) had a post on how the Victorian custom of calling cards had died out, and lamented the fact:

During the heyday of calling cards, using a business card for a social purpose was considered bad manners. Today, while business cards are great for making business contacts, they still aren’t really suited for social situations. They probably have your work number and work email, and not much else on them. Think of all the times you meet someone you’d like to see again. Handing them a business card is too stiff and formal.

While this is true, a Victorian-style calling card will not fit all the situations we are confronted with in our modern world. This is a common failing of the Victorian aesthetic, which emphasised form over functionality. To achieve form and functionality, we must turn to Edwardianism. And since this is the twenty-first century – Saivite neo-Edwardianism.

What does this involve? Among other things – taking advantage of technology. To abandon Victorian straight-lacedness and adopt the more genial and creative values of the Edwardian era. To respond to problems with appropriate solutions and not with an arbitrary code of etiquette. Just as King Edward himself changed fashions to suit his waistline rather than change his waistline to suit his fashions, so too we must change calling cards to reflect the situations in which we will use them. And in this era of desktop publishing and printing on demand, that means a visiting card or calling card for every situation.

I can think of cards for at least six different situations. These are:

  1. The visiting card your employer gives you, if you are working as a salaried professional (or even a professional working on commission, come to that). You have no control over this. The email on it is your work email. The phone number on it is your company phone. And unless it’s your own company and you decide the logo and card design and suchlike, there is not much you can do to customise this. All one can do with this sort of card is to accept it and move along. Back when I was a salaried yuppie, I tried for three months to get cards printed in which my designation was ‘Corporate Ho’ but my boss refused to approve anything except ‘Associate Purchase Manager’. Then I moved to Bombay, where I was in the Corporate Head Office on a project. It finally looked like I could get away with a business card that said ‘Corporate H.O. – Special Projects’. Alas, because it was a special project I was working on secondment in a business unit that was not actually my cost centre, and nobody could decide who would pay for my new business cards. Before things could be sorted out I had quit. Such is life.
  2. The visiting card you make for yourself if you do freelance work and meet people to pitch to them. So if you’re a consultant or writer or photographer looking for clients, you have a website that shows your portfolio or lists your past work and satisfied clients, and your visiting card includes that, your dedicated email for freelance work, your LinkedIn profile, and a dedicated mobile number for this. A dedicated mobile number may seem a little extreme, but it’s three thousand rupees extra at most. Or you could put a dual SIM phone. What is there?
    The card then reads:

    Aadisht Khanna
    Quizmaster
    www.aadisht.net/quizzes

    or

    Aadisht Khanna
    Writer at Large
    www.aadisht.net/portfolio
    99808 26537

    I met Shefaly last year. She’s a freelance consultant, and she got her business cards printed by Moo. They were plain back with only her website address in white text. Very cool.

  3. A visiting card to give to shops and restaurants and sales agents and suchlike. It’s useful to get marketing offers and freebies, but not at the risk of subjecting yourself to spam. The solution is simple – create a dedicated email address for all your consumer transactions, and use that whenever you have to fill in a feedback form or purchase order form. If you want to be really ninja about this, you could get a dedicated mobile number for this as well, and use a cheap-ass Maxx Mobile that you’d switch off when you didn’t want to be disturbed with assorted personal loan offers. And then you can put the dedicated shopping email and mobile number on a visiting card, and drop it in the bowl whenever a shop or restaurant invited you to do so to get special offers. If you wanted to kick it up a notch, the card could include your monthly free cash flow, so the shop would know when not to bother sending you offers on things you couldn’t possibly afford.
  4. If you’re single, a visiting card to give to interesting members of the suitable sex. This card would have your name, personal phone number and email, and perhaps a link to your facebook page. To make it more effective, it could include a short testimonial from your best friend, or a description of your attractive qualities. Like “Consumer Banker of Repute”. Or “I drive a VW Polo”. Or “Skilled kisser. References available.” You get the idea.
  5. A card which you attach to presents or cash envelopes. This sort of card is actually wildly popular in Delhi. Actually, we take it for granted so much that I was astonished when Namy Roy and Muggesh asked if it was a Dalhi thing. This is a Dalhi innovation that works, and which the rest of the country should adopt. This card usually contains your family name (or the names of everyone in the family), the house address, and nothing else.
  6. And of course, a personal visiting card; with your personal phone number, personal email id, links to your blog or twitter id or facebook page, and so on. Your address, if you’re comfortable giving that away. If not, you could leave enough white space to write it down for the people you did want to give it to.

Visiting cards are only the beginning. To really unleash the neo-Edwardian aesthetic, we would abandon Facebook walls for personal email and even handwritten notes when possible. Handwritten notes in turn would call for personalised stationery, which too should be customised to purpose as much as the visiting cards described above. A world in which we send letters on high-GSM cream-coloured paper, with custom embossing depending on who you were writing to and why, is a much better world than the one we have today. We should do our utmost to create this world.

5 Comments | Arbit Fundaes, Domesticity | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht

Not Wasting Food

July 2, 2008

Love Food Hate Waste has five tips on how to save money by not wasting food (via). Although the list has been designed with a UK audience in mind, some of the tips hold equally well for us junta sitting in India. For example:

Tinned beans, frozen vegetables, meat and fish and dried fruit, nuts, pasta & noodles, rice & grains, are all essentials with a long shelf life – meaning you will always have the ingredients standing by to pull together a delicious meal or to jazz up your leftovers. The trick is to replace items once you have used them up. It helps to keep a note stuck on the inside of the cupboard door – scribble down items as soon as you have finished them and check it when you write your shopping list.

…

Planning your meals is one of the most effective ways you can cut wastage and food bills. Start by checking your fridge, freezer and store cupboard so you don’t shop for things you already have.

(Love Food Hate Waste)

When I was in Bangalore, not planning my meals in the morning could lead to disaster. I would forget I had fruit or salad lying in the fridge, and then eat dinner out near office assuming there was nothing at home to prepare. By the next day, the salad would have spoilt, and I would have wasted the salad as well as the cost of the dinner out. Sticking a list of what I did have on the fridge door every weekend would have helped in the planning meals if I’d checked it every day and planned my dinner and breakfast according to it.

On a related note, it’s time to bring up another rant about refrigerators (people who read my mailing list know I do this often). Picking a refrigerator is fraught with peril. You’re always trading off convenience with expense and a tendency to waste.

I positively hate manual defrost refrigerators. If the light goes for extended periods (as it does so often in India) you wind up with a huge puddle on the kitchen floor. If you forget to defrost, whatever is in the freezer gets iced over and you have to go at it with a pickaxe. And I’m too much a twenty-first century types to remember to defrost the thing myself. That’s the fridge’s job, dammit!

Now unfortunately a frost-free fridge comes in large sizes and so uses more electricity than the manual defrost ones (in addition to being more expensive to begin with anyhow). The large size also means you have a tendency to throw stuff in there and then forget it’s there – as I did with my salads.

Fortunately, there are mitigants. You can cut down on the wasted electricity by filling the freezer with water bottles so all that energy goes to some use. And sticking a list of what’s in there on the fridge door could help you avoid forgetting it.

Extreme geekiness alert: In fact, if you wanted to truly power-use your fridge lists, you could create an individual Post-it for every item, and flip the Post-its around so that what you were planning to use in the evening would be right on top. The only way to be even geekier is to have a laptop in the kitchen and update your fridge MIS on an Excel sheet (or Google spreadsheets for that matter) as you remove stuff from the fridge and eat/ cook it. Sadly, my kitchen in Bangalore was too small to allow this. But I recommend it highly – a laptop in the kitchen also means you can download recipes.

The stuff I’ve written above does assume that:

  1. You do your food-buying-and-preparing yourself, instead of leaving it to your bai. Given how much people complain about the quality of their domestic help, they damn well ought to do it themselves instead of leaving it to their bai.
  2. You’re a relative newbie when it comes to managing your kitchen, and you haven’t internalised obvious stuff like remembering what you have already.
  3. You actually have a kitchen (so many people in Bombay just take dabbas and heat them) and give a shit about running it properly.

What with current trends of urbanisation, corporatisation, sararimanisation, growing numbers of young migrant professionals, growing salary demands of bais, yada yada, I think the number of people fulfilling the above conditions will grow. This is my yumble contribution to them. Maybe, I should set up a post/ page for useful kitchen tips.

Leave a Comment » | Domesticity, Food | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht

I Want!

February 27, 2008

The coolest bookshelf I’ve ever seen: 

Limited by space, we melded the idea of a staircase with our client’s desire for a library to form a ‘library staircase’ in which English oak stair treads and shelves are both completely lined with books. With a skylight above lighting the staircase, it becomes the perfect place to stop and browse a tome.

Words cannot describe the unspeakable awesomeness. Click for photos.

(Link via del.icio.us from Anand)

1 Comment | Books Movies and Music, Consumerism, Domesticity | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht

The Underpants of Homer

February 4, 2008

Although my quest for superhero underpants remains unsuccessful, I have discovered the next best thing: Homer Simpson underpants.

They’re electric blue boxer shorts with ‘Doh!’ and ‘Donuts’ speech bubbles. Sadly, they’re also 300 rupees a pair. Sadness comes.

Leave a Comment » | Consumerism | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht

The Underpants of Power

January 15, 2008

Bangalore Central now has Spider-man, Noddy, and Pokemon underwear for sale. Tragically, only in children’s sizes.

This is most discriminatory. Why do only kids get to have superhero underwear? I want superhero underwear too. Though I’d prefer Saint of Killers or Bigby Wolf on my underpants. Commentors, please refrain from making jokes about Apollo and Midnighter.

(Incidentally, the Underpants of Power was a concept used in a strip comic which got discontinued within almost a year. I’ve forgotten the name. The main character was a little girl who lived with her widower father. Her best friend was a nerd and there was another spoilt-princess character. Does anybody remember what this was called?)

Leave a Comment » | Books Movies and Music, Consumerism | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht

Lebensraum

December 18, 2007

My flatmate has moved out and I now have the entire flat to myself. This means that I now have an empty bedroom to play with. What exactly to do with this is an interesting problem. A number of alternatives have emerged:

  1. My father has suggested supplementing my salary by going into the flesh love hotel trade, and renting the spare room out by the hour to young and amorous couples. This would incur investment on a new bed, and some manner of decoration, but would eventually pay for itself.
    The question is how long the payback period would actually be. When I was in Shanghai in spring 2006, my utter lack of Mandarin meant I ended up checking in at the Motel 186 on Zhoujiazui Road instead of the one on Dalian Road. The Zhoujiazui Road Motel 186 was very much in the love hotel category. The biggest customer segment was university students who would take a room for an afternoon.
    The problem is that university students pinch their pennies. So two or three couples would take a single room. If Bangalore customers are as bottom-of-pyramid as Shanghai customers, the internal rate of return would be far too low. Better to put the money into a fixed deposit instead of buying the bed.
  2. More practically, I could just shift furniture so that one room becomes a bedroom and the other becomes a study. This sounds good, but it would make carrying the laptop to bed more difficult. Right now all I have to do is remove the USB cables for the printer, the hard disk, and the mouse, and pull it two feet to the bed. So this must be considered carefully.
  3. I could convert it into a storeroom, except that I don’t have anything to store.
  4. Religion. Old time religion. Construct an altar in the empty room in which I can sacrifice small furry animals and infants. I would have to give my maid a salary hike to deal with the extra mess, though.
  5. Or, I could go with the nuclear option. If I sell all my mutual funds, and take on an insane level of debt through personal loans, I could generate enough cash to fill the room with playpen balls.

Leave a Comment » | Domesticity | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »