About a Kindle

A few days ago on the bus to work a woman came and sat next to me. A few seconds later she had pulled out a questionnaire for me to respond to about my reading habits. Now the reason she had managed to lasso me into this little project of hers was because I had a Kindle in my hands. So absorbed was I in the book that it took her a second calling to get my attention.

As she pounded me with questions on my reading and sought my feedback on the device I found myself grappling for the right answers. In the few minutes we spent interacting I surprisingly found it a challenge to surmise what the Kindle has really done for me over the last few months. I did give her a gist of the deal eventually but after much reflection thereafter I knew I had to pen my thoughts properly on the subject.

It was perhaps either happy coincidence or just plain destiny. Earlier this year, around April, I was pondering over whether or not to buy a Tablet PC (this was when iPads and RT Surfaces were plastered everywhere in town trying to seduce you into their lair). The one question that kept bugging me was this – Why do I need one?

The answer, regardless of the rationale, invariably was settling on just one word – to read. But to read what? And how often? If by reading I meant magazine articles, data hurricanes from social networks and the chronic email check syndrome then my android phone was plenty sufficient for that. Then why did I need a Tablet? Well, I would justify, for lengthier reads, long type articles and such (whilst still being able to access the same assortment of online information as I was already doing on my phone). Somehow that still looked precariously insufficient for an investment which would undoubtedly be a bulky one.

It was during such a season of thoughts that I ran into the Kindle Fire HD. As I watched their made-to-please commercials featuring happy people sitting in sun drenched living rooms and cozily reading a book on their device my gut feeling was that it looked great. Along with connectivity to social networks it even had a full blown video streaming app with NetFlix using which entire movies and television shows could be watched. I could surf the net, check my messages, share cool stuff on Twitter and yes, also read books. Yes – this looked and felt like the device I wanted. The plus was obviously that it was cheaper than the other Tablets I had seen (definitely the iPad!). A Tablet but also a cool reader for my long reading purposes. That dilemma resolved I signed on to Amazon, looked up the Kindle Fire HD and hit the “Buy” button.

There were a lot of factors I would come to realize much later but when I went to the next stage of buying the device and having it shipped to me an error message greeted me. Was it that my card was not processing properly? No. Was it that I had accidently selected something else instead of the Fire? Nope. Turned out at the time Amazon could not ship the Fire to Denmark. A deep disappointment fell over me like a silent curtain. In fact, the Amazon page went on to tell me, the only device I could order was the less fancy, basic touch screen type, black and white, non-social media connected model called PaperWhite.

I spent almost a week brooding over this bizarre turn of events. I had the money, I had the will and just when I had thought my decision had been the right one fate was throwing me another curveball with this technicality. I looked at the commercials for the PaperWhite in an effort to rationalize the incident somehow. Yet my initial thoughts were that of grief. It didn’t do anything except allow you to read books! No connection to FB or Twitter, no surfing online (except the Amazon’s store) or no popups to tell me something I had shared was being retweeted by some big names on Twitter. In fact, and the sunshine of the possibility began to ascend in my psyche’s skies, it was a device with absolutely no distractions.

For the longest time whenever posed with the query – Do you read? – I had always answered back “Oh yes! I am an avid reader!” But for the last couple of years the word “avid” had sort of become untrue what with me barely finishing one novel in six months. The only things I would read were the bursts of profundity on Twitter or the regular sites I would visit to get my daily dose of updates in fields of my interest. Was this the same as reading proper literature? Hardly. The effects of such a lifestyle became more evident when my vocabulary was filled with terms like TIL and WTF. What sort of an avid reader was I whose immediate refuge for an argument was an acronym? Something had gone woefully wrong. No – I had to fess up. I was not an avid reader. In fact I was barely a reader at all.

A few weeks later when the PaperWhite showed up I began connecting the dots. Its unassuming down to earth look caught my admiration right away. No fancy 3D buttons with a light halo on their foreheads. No decorative icons to sift through and definitely no familiar symbols of distraction like a W of Wiki, a T of Twitter and an F of Facebook. Not having access to this W-T-F was perhaps the first step to escaping the short term bursts of my knowledge bank.

I spent a day getting familiar with the minimalistic interface. The device was quite light to hold, big enough to read a page but small enough to push inside a jacket pocket and most importantly had a fantastic light setting which made reading text in any type of visibility easy. One of my biggest apprehensions of digital display has been the degree of ease with which black and white text can be read effortlessly on it. The PaperWhite, as it became evident quickly, was brilliant at this.

I have had it now since early May 2013 and just as a self-check exercise I made a list of all the books I have managed to read on it thus far.

The Home and the World
The Great Gatsby
Love in the time of cholera
The Canterville Ghost
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Americanah
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Murder as a Fine Art
Straw Men
We Are Here
The Shining
Misery
The Prophet
Psycho
Fight Club
Gods, Sages and Kings
The Man Who Knew Infinity

And currently “A Murder at Rosamund’s Gate”.

So that means 17 books and 18^th in progress. I also did read an offline book – For The Love Of a Son – on a long haul flight to India which I did not include. But the idea that reading as a habit has kicked in big time needs no further proof. So seven months and 18 books – averaging between two to three books a month. That to me comes closer to being an “avid reader” than the one book per six months ritual I had going on for the past couple of years.

Not being able to order the Fire HD version of this device quickly seems like a divine act of providence now. Somehow, knowing myself, I suspect I would have succumbed to the familiar allure of dings and popups once more despite being in the middle of a really good book. This short attention span habit I have developed has been a big reason behind me reducing the amount of books I was reading in the pre-Kindle era. The android would constantly remind me of an alert that had to be attended right away thus making the whole act of having to carry a book everywhere that much less of a priority. I cringe to think of the times I spent an entire year on a 400 odd page novel without even getting past page 50. Why? Too many distractions. Too many sources of quick validation.

Now, does this mean I am never going to buy a book ever? Of course not. Nothing can replace the look and feel of a really good book. So yes, I will continue to invest in books but only after they have passed the “Kindle test”. If I read it first on the Kindle and it happens to be one of those classics that are impossible not to own a hard copy of then yes – my feet will find their way to the nearest book store. But until that happens I look forward to completing more books each month in a consistent effort to get back to the sane habit of reading.

And for this I thank Amazon for not shipping the Fire to Denmark at the right time in my reading life.

..ShaKri..

First tweet from above 30000 feet!

Dear reader,

So it has been a long time since I've posted anything. Loads of reasons. Primary ones being the lack of anything interesting or share worthy happening as work piled on and on relentlessly. Things, however, took a charming break today as I, en route to a workshop in London for a week, discovered that Norwegian air offers (on some select flights only so far but they are installing it on every one of their flights this year) free wi-fi for its passengers. Once the flight took off and the passenger seat belt security sign went off, I couldn't wait to try the service via my smartphone! And boy was it cool. Shared the news on my twitter account and doing the same here. Was such a magical feeling when the tweet got successfully posted from over 30000 feet in the air. A memory I will always cherish.

Link for the tweet I posted from air below:

http://twitter.com/#!/shakwrites/status/86677586486362112

Hoping the rest of the year continues to bring such awesome moments by the dozen. For now, this moment remains etched as by far one of the best this year.

Still no country for Ekalavya

A picture, it is said, is usually worth a thousand words. I sometimes feel if that were literally true how much time and effort would have been saved for mankind by just displaying pictures to one another all the time instead of writing multiple paragraph emails explaining something. I recently read an article on Twitter that discussed the possibility of limiting any email to up to 3 sentences to avoid email overload. Not a bad idea, I felt. Except if the writer decides to get creative with where the full stop would go. Give Salman Rushdie this challenge and he might write an entire short story with just those 3 sentences! No wonder that verbose gentleman is not on Twitter.

But I digress. So the reason I mentioned pictures was because of the photo you see attached with this blog post. Yes, it is my thumb and yes, it is hurt. The cause for this injury, given the popularity of the spot, is a culinary incident involving a tricky knife. Whys and hows of the accident are quite irrelevant here. No sooner had a band-aid been placed to remedy the cut than it struck me of how invaluable the thumb was, is and shall remain. The only difference being, back in the days of royalty it was used to demonstrate mastery at shooting arrows while now we use it to, well, do pretty much everything from punch in the keys on our mobiles, game controllers and iPods to spacebars, gameboys and remote controls. Yes, the king of the human finger collection (with the middle finger being an interesting exception) seems to be the thumb.

The accident also reminded me of that popular tale from the Mahabharata where a lowly tribesman named Ekalavya gets so good at archery that he almost defeats the pampered poster boy of the Pandavas – Arjuna. Sly maharishi Drona then, having seen how invaluable the thumb would be for a million more generations, decides to ask Ekalavya to sacrifice just that as part of his guru dakshina – the thumb. This, of course, is a tale from another world but it made me wonder if something similar could take place in today's day and age. A dedicated student might definitely end up submitting his beloved mobile or mp3 player to honor his teacher but would never follow Ekalavya's example and slice off what appears to be the real trigger to all comfort in the world – the thumb (or any other finger for that matter).

This cross referencing of a thumb's critical role from the days of the Hindu epic till this day seemed like an interesting thing to explore. Now that I have done that, my next attempt would be to actually try and attempt the 3 sentence formula for an email the aforementioned article was recommending. Would be tricky at first, I am sure. But hey, I bet everyone were equally alarmed when Twitter said it was only going to allow 140 characters for a message! That is going pretty well so why shouldn't this catch on as well, isn't it? A definite thumbs up from me!

Ouch.

New hues of old parenting!

Danny, a friend of mine, was shocked out of his wits when he overheard his 7 year old daughter lash back at her 8 year old male friend over an innocent game of house play one day. It was one of those moments Danny had never imagined he would ever be required to confront. Sure – children being children, they always complain to one another, bully themselves into tears and eventually become friends again. But this was a ground so alien, that he had never expected to even see it, let alone being asked to tread upon it. And this made it extremely scary.

The backdrop was simple. The boy had managed to con the little girl into a false move during the game and needless to say, the clever girl had called him 'stupid head' for doing so. When the clueless fellow asked her what made her think he was a 'stupid head' – and reader, get ready for this one please – she had promptly responded without batting an eyelid– 'Cos that's what boys are! Cos boys got your G-spot up in your bum you know!'

A large cloud of extremely ghoulish clouds of questions and confusion immediately exploded over Danny's otherwise calm head. Two instant reactions followed – a) he promptly asked the boy to leave as he came up with some flimsy excuse and b) he quietly walked into the kitchen to share the story with his wife and hopefully come up with a proper course of action (if there was one!) to what the girl had just said.

As I heard poor old Danny share this episode with us, I couldn't help think about how extremely critical it has become today for parents to be one step ahead of their kids. There is a revolutionary paradigm shift that is happening with kids these days and with each passing day it is becoming impossible to ignore. Just look around you, anywhere, and you see kids embracing technology (nay, knowledge!) in a way that has redefined the expression 'information is wealth'. It now seems that every kid barely into his/her teens has an account on FaceBook, a video blog on YouTube, an iPhone hooked onto a Twitter account, a MySpace profile and at least a dozen email addresses. Why, Stuti, my wife's niece who is barely 2 years old knows how to use the DVD player on her father's laptop! She knows how to operate the remote control for the TV and heck, she even knows what to do if the computer says 'Low on Battery'. It is seriously amazing how much today's children are absorbing each passing day. If anything, this is also a wake up call to those of us who still believe in the 'traditional methods of parenting' that we were subjected to as children.

Now, as much as all this sounds like an alarming situation, the truth of it is we cannot really stop it. In fact, we should not. A kid who has the privilege of formal education today also is entitled to all the opportunities out there to enhance their young minds. It is an era where children, just by sheer association, are able to distinguish what works and what does not. One look at the talents showcased on TV and it becomes clear that kids are at least 10 times more smarter and braver than we were at their age. It is only natural of course, given that each generation evolves into a better species. But then there lies the challenges for us – current and future parents – that will create benchmarks through which our kids will grow. This is where a mature discussion, an open platform for transparent conversations, a clear understanding of how to approach such an open-source and readily available universe of data – all this takes automatic priority. Gone are the days when a father would just shout at the child or beat it and the kid would succumb to sheer physical strength. Today's kids speak with so much more maturity that it is extremely important that our response to them are equally sane. Snapping back at them with a 'Shut Up! You don't need to know that!' will, I am sorry to say, not suffice. This shutting off method will not only distance you quickly from your little one but also manage to undermine your authority as a parental figure. If you are asked a mature question, answering it responsibly seems to be the new mantra. Of course, anyone who has seen 'Taare Zameen Per' hopefully knows what I mean.

Today's kids understand logic, they question meaningless radical behavior, they speak their minds without fear – as Danny's kid ended up doing. Yes, there are threats there too. Questions like 'Where did she hear the word G-Spot?' and 'How does she know where men have it?' and 'Why does she connect that to being stupid?' - and a dozen more will arise. But that is where we, as parents, will either take the route of conversation or ostracize the child for using the word 'bum'. A change, I am sure, won't be easy for most of us who were brought up in knee deep orthodoxy. But if not attempted, might end up ruining the life of our kid's future.

As technology continues to open doors, it has now become essential that parents follow suit. The fine line between loving your child rotten by buying him/her all the latest gadgets and educating him/her well enough to know how to use them, has to be walked upon with care. One mistake could prove to be fatal. The hues of parenting are changing shades fast. We just need to be sure we know which colors to show our kids and when.

As for my friend Danny, he did have an impromptu talk with his daughter who told him she had heard her school mates chatting about it. Apparently some kid who was being bullied at school in the US had posted a video of himself on YouTube where he was venting his frustration and had inadvertently mentioned that '...I am not stupid 'cos my G-Spot is in me bum...!'

That was when Danny decided he needed to pick up some new books on today's parenting. He is currently going through his third book.

Good grief!

My suspicions of this dark yet inevitable moment had finally come true. All those sporadic seeming instances of winking back I had received over the months had now culminated into one lethal, ill-timed of course, concoction that was determined to cajole the one thing I hold dearer than life itself – my cozy routine. Ah! The pain! From the shackles of silence comes that euphoric chant rising itself to horizons new and showers down several generous drops of sharp, needle-like, moments of absolute misery.

But let me start from the beginning. It all started a few months ago, when the initial signs occurred. Right from the moment I had suspected a possible battery problem to the moment I actually saw my laptop’s monitor finally blink itself to blackened death – I had always known I would be caught on the wrong foot. And so settling down in an exuberant anticipation of a much awaited four day weekend, the zeal of idling away my time browsing absolutely meaningless junk on the Net was just so tempting! Funny videos! Chat! StickCricket! Email! But then, somewhere between the hours of 11 and 12 on Happy Day Number One – poof! Initially I felt that the laptop had gone into ‘hibernation’ (I am always amused at how we humans have successfully transformed our lives to start thinking of a computer as just another organ vital for our petrified existence) and tried tapping meaninglessly on the fading mouse pad. Nothing. No light. No more winks. The much looked forward to odyssey of getting on that ship to ‘Nothingness’ for four glorious days had suddenly found death – an abrupt and unceremonious one at that. A death that, like any other, needed to be dealt with appropriately. And so – I underwent the five classic stages of such grieving – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and of course, acceptance.

Denial was the easiest. As I rapidly packed the laptop back into the case and my steps earnestly got into eager-to-please slippers, I was sure that the local Tech Shop-wallah will definitely say something like ‘O! Just a case of burnt out backlight! Leave it with us and you can pick it up in a few hours.’ Ah yes. The beautifully composed orchestra that was playing my favorite tune already in my head – ‘Your laptop is going to be fine. Everything is A-OK. Just a few hours and your life will be back on track!’ But no. Not only was I told that they did not service adhoc laptops not bought from their store (mine was bought Back Home in the summer of 2006) but they also mentioned that this sort of work would take at least a week. Bah! I spat at their ridiculousness and headed off to the other Tech Shop I knew was sure to bail me out of this quicksand I had inadvertently walked into. Nothing there. The store was closed. Long weekends for business too? Shameful! Shameful!

Anger followed. I was mad. Very mad. ‘F#%K THIS!’ I found my lungs croaking out. ‘This dumb stupid F#$* had to die on me NOW! Just at the start of this sunny, delicious and decadently laid out array of free time! Noooo….!’ I stormed back to my apartment steaming in fury. That phase lasted about an hour. Well alright. Maybe two. Few more switches were turned on as I panicked and tried to coax the screen back to life. Breathe damn it! Breathe!

Humph. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Just the iterative scheme of helpless black outs.

‘Alright God’, I said finally giving up. ‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do here. Since this unexpected curse has been cast upon me, why don’t you make my weekend even brighter and sunnier, so that I just forget about this f—king piece of s—t that died on me…’ and some such. A prayer was uttered and a blessing was requested. Bargaining had taken place without so much as a whisper.

After a solid four hours – it finally began. A viciously depressing wave of helplessness. A sense of immense loss and vicious disconnection. A sense of being alone on an island like that fellow on ‘Cast Away’ without even a freakin’ basketball for company!

I sat watching some God forsaken television show for a good thirty two minutes. Yuck! It was so bad I had to unplug the power cable of the tube just to avoid encountering any more flavors of its ghastliness. I tried flipping through an old copy of a colorful ‘Jughead Double Digest’. Ho-hum! Well…the same gibes by that crowned goon with his arms loaded with hamburgers and other equally gluttonous gastronomy. I tried drowning myself with Rushdie. Gawd! Do I hate myself? Why on Earth would I subject myself to Rushdie to kill time? Reading him will only make me more confused about what I was doing to begin with! (Well, of course, cynicism aside, I must admit that he has written some bearable work.) Yet – depression continued. I slept a lot more than I normally do. At times it was weird to have had a deep slumber between 4:22PM and 4:37PM. I began to wonder if even time had started playing games with me! All this on Happy Day Number One – 3 more days to go!

And then came the final inevitable stage. I made up a routine of long well cooked meals, some well placed siestas, a strict regime of reading Rushdie after all (well, yes. I had only one novel I hadn’t read yet and that was ‘The Moor’s Last Sigh’) for about an hour, some chosen tele-watching and yes – a walk to the metro station and back. Slowly, but surely, I tiptoed my way patiently until Tuesday.

Phew!

First thing Tuesday morning I ran to my colleague’s busy feet and explained my hapless scenario and the ordeal of a computer/Internet/life-less existence for the past four days. Thanks to his generosity I am now able to document this grief-laced past using an external monitor. Sure, it’s slightly uncomfortable to type on the laptop and watch my words on a bigger, much bigger, monitor but hey – it finally brought me back my nothingness right? Cheers to that!

Smiles.