The Business of Newspaper Cutlery

This post of Scott Adams about newspapers becoming extinct in the near future got me thinking. Nope, not about the pace of technological development or the future of the publishing industry but about the very nasal presence of the moongphali waala (peanut seller).

Now the moongphali waala is a very typical character in many Indian cities. This chappie sells hot roasted peanuts and groundnuts. You will find this chappie at bus stops, railway platforms, the more enterprising ones on the train. They'll be dispensing warm peanuts and groundnuts at Re. 1 or 2 a cone. This snack caters to the millions waiting on bus stops and railway stations, for trains and buses, tired faces that look temptingly at the auto rikshaws and cabs that pass by slowly, trafficking their wares to the bus-travellers. The moongphali (also called sengdana) is a quiche snack that fills an empty stomach at a cheap price.

The great thing about eating moongphali from the moongphali waala is not just the warm groundnuts and peanuts, sometimes even offered with a spicy topping of raw onion, thinly cut green chilies, some red chilly powder and a sprinkling of chaat masala. Its what you get after you finish your snack. Not just the contended feeling of a full stomach but the added mystery of "whats the cone made of today?"

The cone here is the perfectly shaped paper cone that holds the peanuts. The making of a perfect paper cone is itself an art. The seller's deft fingers shape and twist and turn the paper into a perfect cone in less than 3-4 seconds. It is typically made of a piece of old newspaper, and in the case of a seller whose business is doing well, its made from the glossies. The mystery comes from the fact that you never know what piece of newspaper has been used to craft that particular cone.

In Mumbai where I have devoured hundreds of moongphali cones, the newspapers varied not just in content but also in language. You could get Hindi, Marathi, English, Gujarati, Urdu, or even Tamil or Bengali. You could get a political news update, a stomach churning crime story, a story on the education system or a glossy on the newest scandal in Bollywood. It could be from last weeks or last month.
Thus for the princely sum of Rs. 2, you not only got a full stomach but your own little news widget on a platter.

It was the perfect way to spend the waiting time. Eat your fill and then squinting in the light of the street light, devour the contents of the used newspaper. You never knew what information you would learn. What forgotten piece of history would leap out at you from the annals of newsprint. And not only did you learn something new or got reminded of something long forgotten but you got to look at it with the fortunate backing of hindsight. So you probably knew what happened just after that piece of news had happened. Or how it affected other events in history. If it was a bit of sensational news, you would probably think back to where you were when you had first heard it.

Through the stages of evolution, the newspaper cutlery practice has diversified to cones of larger diameter that resemble large soup bowls. These are used by the bhel waalas - another important character in the lives of road side eaters.
Here you normally can't read the newspaper after eating because it normally gets soggy because of the chutneys. However the piece of newspaper is very useful once you are done eating to use as a tissue paper to wipe the remanants of chutney, spices, lemon juice off your fingers.

Though these examples leap to the mind, newspapers are used on the roadside to serve vada-pavs , dabelis, bhajiyas, samosas and umpteen other road side delicacies.

Now, as experts toss around debates on the extinction of newspapers, I cannot but feel fear about what will happen to the roadside vendors cutlery options.

Footnote: Yes, I know, bowls made of leaves or expensive and boring paper plates are often used as a substitute, but these are normally found at the more upscale road-side vendors. And tell me, what leaf bowl or paper plate can ever substitute a bowl/ plate, reading material and tissue paper all rolled into one?

Road Safety

We were celebrating Road Safety Week this last week in office. I had made these posters for the occasion. (No. They are not on public display. I had made them for a poster making competition which now seems to have disappeared)

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Drive safe.

Lost in translation

Have you ever read
Poetry from foreign writers
Have you ever understood
the beauty in the translation

Have you ever figured out
Award winning latin poetry
That you insist on
reading in english

Have you seen the
depth in emotions
Of a black sky, or a radiant moon
Over another land

Do you connect with
the feelings in another language
expressed so clumsily
In your own

Then why do you assume
You understand me
When all other beauty
Is lost in translation?

Will you be carrying any luggage with you, ma'am?

The grating sound of the squeaky wheel on the concrete shook him from his reverie. He shook his head and smiled, as he saw her trying to get the luggage trolley over some bump on the ramp. She turned and grinned at everybody, as he thought of all the times she'd always turn to give him a last look as she boarded a bus or got into a car or left a room. And she looked at him again with that same look. That mixture of mischievousness and childlike innocence. That same confident belief that we'd meet again soon. Only this time the confidence didn't mask the fear in her eyes.

The struggle to not give way to her emotions was evident as she gripped on tighter to the trolley. And the grin became wider. After some meaningless "bbyes" and "keep in touch" and "i'll call" and "mail me" she turned to walk towards the entrance to the airport.

He stepped forward and took the haversack off her shoulder. He hugged it and started to walk with her towards the entrance.
There was about half an inch of air between arms as they walked and the space seemed to be charged with electricity. Only she knew that it wasn't science but the silence that explained the tingling on their skins.

They stopped just before the entrance luggage screening. He held out the haversack straps and she slid her arms into them. He straightened the twisted straps on her shoulders and put his palms on her shoulders.
They stood there for a minute too long. Her voice cracked as she turned and said "Well, you take care of yourself."
He was about to say something. Something that would explain everything he was trying to say, when the security guard said, "Will you be carrying any luggage with you, ma'am?"
She turned back and in a firm voice said,"No. I'll be checking it in."
And walked towards the x-ray machines, never to turn back again.

To my fan club

For the benefit of my enormous fan base of ummm...1...2...right, 2 readers, I wanted to take time out to explain the drastic change in the look of the blog.

I'm sure that they don't really care either. But do I really care that I might alienate the 2 people who actually appear on my Google analytics-blog statistics..no sirree!...(especially when one of those 2 people is me.)

Anyways, now for the profound psychological reasons for altering the look of my blog. After careful study of the piece of thin white paper that comes with my tranquilizers, I consider myself a bit of a guru in the matters of the mind. So I realize that there must be deep psychological implications of this shift. Probably something that can be traced back to my nursery school days and that weird red haired man who used to walk by our building everyday.

So I spent an adequate 4 days pondering this move.

And I realized there are indeed deep seethed reasons.

Allow me to explain. No?
Well I'm going to anyways.

Firstly my blog went plain html last Friday. So all my award winning stuff was now displayed in times new roman with a plain white background and bright blue links.

I knew immediately, that my blog was was sending me a signal about something in my life. Again there were murky psycho-babble waters to be explored here. (Am i mixing metaphors? Or is this just a result of mixing drinks?)

As any good pseudo-techie should, I signed out and signed in again.
This normally works.
It didn't.

I then switched off and switched on my PC.
This always works!
Oh, mother of blogs! It didn't.

So I decided to go deeper and solve it with good technical skills.
I turned off the PC and went away. Came back and started it on Monday.
I mean, the problem should have gone away. That's how I live my life too, by the way.

But horror of horrors, I was still faced with eerie whiteness.

Now, I was convinced that either I was overdosing on my tranquilizers (and hence the calm quiet whiteness. This could also explain the tweety bird noises in my ears) or there was indeed something wrong with my template.
(I like to take my time before I arrive at obvious conclusions)

Now I again followed my book on "Pseudo-techie protocol for dummies".
I went to the Edit html window and spent valuable minutes scrolling up and down the html code.
After a few minutes of scrolling up and scrolling down again, I was quite satisfied that I had done the mandatory "debugging" of the code.

And that's when a light appeared.

Actually it was the ceiling lights reflecting off my colleagues watch.
And the light shone on the Template tab.

So I silently copied my old template, saved it, bid a tearful goodbye to it and changed my template to the new and now very popular template (so much so, that its actually attracted one more person to access this page).

The clever reader(s?) of this blog might notice that I'm now posting on a white background too.
But that's just because the effect of the tranquilizers and the shining lights have caused various colours to appear in front of my eyes.
So I'm no longer sure about what colour I am actually posting on.

However my "Tranquility through Tranquilizers" Guru assures me that this new template has positive energy and will flood my life with positive vibes (and my blog with comments??).

Thus with reasons of psychological metamorphosis and technical ingenuity, I present to you, my new template.

May the positive energy flow into your lives and blogs.

It's Vikram Kamat's Birthday!

...and the world is celebrating it!

Happy Birthday Juiceburps

No, I'm not a lunatic explanation: Its my friends birthday. And the mad hatter told me that I must celebrate his birthday by putting up banners.

Well, apparently Google has done it for me. :-)

This blog wishes you a great day dear...

And thanks you for all your comments and encouragement. :-)

Beep Beep - 7:15 AM: Put on Clothes

There are now innumerable ways in technology to set reminders for oneself. You can set reminders on your cell phone. With alarms without alarms. You can set the same reminder twice or thrice on the same day. You can set appointment in your Outlook calendar. You can place desktop post-it notes. You can set out your tasks on Google desktop. In the new Office 2007 version, you can use Windows calender ( similar to Outlook calendar) to lists tasks and set reminders. You can desktop calendars and clocks to show you the date and time.
You can make birthday lists. Anniversary reminders. You can have reminders send to you for 9:30 pm - "Pick up wine and flowers on the way home". You have birthday calendars online which you can repeated hound your friends to list their birthdays on. Orkut shows you their birthdays.

Everyday technology gives you more and more ways to remind yourself.

And everyday you forget a little more.

It seems to me that as technology gets upgraded, the wonderful tool we have called memory seems to get downgraded.

A sense of destiny

Do you ever feel a sense of destiny
A farwaway dream that you can almost touch
Do you see a road, an image of you travelling
A sense of goodbyes and new beginnings

Do you ever feel a sense of different tomorrows
Of being somewhere else
Do you see strangers conversing
That bring a promise of a new happenings

Do you ever see a dream of standing in tomorrow
And having beautiful memories of today
Do you see new people in new places
That remind you of those here and now

Do you know in your heart
That a future awaits you
Do you see a bright clear image
In the random reccesses of your mind

Do you feel like you are going somewhere
Without knowing where
Do you feel it in your gut and in your soul
Do you have, a sense of density

I’m glad you danced

The white lights blurred as I felt my eyelashes go wet. You are wearing a white dress with a deep back. His hand rested on the small of your back. Your head on his shoulders. He’s wearing a smart black tuxedo.

I thought back to times when you refused to get out of the corner. When the music played, and the crowd danced, and you sat in the corner and tapped your feet. When everybody looked at you standing, aloof, beautiful as ever. When we searched for that light in your eyes, that had been missing for so many months. And you never once looked back into anybody’s. Shying away from making eye contact.

Then one day a boy came and sat next to you in your corner. He didn’t say a thing. Just sat next to you silently for as long as it took you to say something. And then something else. And you talked. Really talked to him. And as you sat and talked, you didn’t even realize when he put his hand gently under you elbow and led you to dance floor.
By the time you realized, you were already standing holding his hand on the dance floor. And then you wondered whether to rush back to the corner. But the hand you were holding seemed strangely comfortable and you felt very much at home. You’ll danced to what will now forever be known as your song.

And today as I see you with your arms around him swaying to the same words, all I can say is, I’m glad you danced.

His Spectacles next to the Bed

I could see his spectacles lying on the table next to the bed. The alarm clock said 5:45. The sky was turning pink as I watched it. He still slept like a child. His right leg pulled up to his chest, his left outstretched below it. The left ankle peeking out from below the bed sheet. ...more