the brook

I was home for just a weekend, but no trip home is complete without a walk on the beach, which thankfully happens to be just a hop, skip and jump away from my house. The first thing to catch my attention was this fellow, whose name was Nilesh and he happily agreed to be photographed.

The message on his t-shirt stopped me short. He lives in the slums seen in the distance, and in his hands is a piece of cloth - he was collecting those he could find so that his parents could sell them off later and make some money.

Seeing him, a lot of kids came around asking to be photographed. At many places in the world, photographers need to know their rights because people consider photography an invasion of privacy, but in India it’s more like photographers’ duties.

Mumbai dogs are pretty smart.. evolution and all you know. Need skills to survive in the city.. so they seemed not only perfectly aware that I had a camera but were really interested in having their picture taken. This one actually came right upto me and had his shot taken inches from his face. Maybe he thought I’d get him into Bollywood.

And of course, there’s always beach cricket virtually anywhere in India. The way this fellow missed a pull shot though, it’s almost like he was playing for the India team.

Small things, but it all adds up to an undeniable fact - there is no place like home. When I came back home, I saw the sunset from my window - I’ve seen a thousand times, yet it’s always different.

When I’m trying to publish a research paper, write code, make an argument, or even write a blog post, keeping it simple is one of the best ways of making an impact, not to mention being understood. Yet, as I and no doubt all of you - have often discovered, the process of creating simplicity is anything but simple. In our mind, information is usually hopelessly jumbled up - and whats worse, that jumble makes perfect sense to us at that particular moment in time. Yet it’s clarity fades when other people are presented with the same data or indeed, we ourselves look at it after some time has passed (coders know what I’m talking about).

John Maeda does a very nice job in this (”simple”) 100-page book telling us what the elements of simplicity are, and along the way offers many inspirations of why achieving simplicity is worth our time, effort and thought. On first reading, some of the principles he espouses are actually quite obvious. It’s just that we never bother to apply these principles when we design anything.

Of course, the book is extremely relevant to anyone thinking of any kind of major design, be it publishing or product design. But I found his laws applicable in a very generic way as well, even to something all-encompassing as living life - we do so wish for a “simple” life, don’t we? And I’m pretty sure that something like the well-agreed on principles of something like software development can be derived more or less directly from his laws. I’d suggest multiple readings of the book - you tend to go through 100 pages in a flash, and to really appreciate it, you need to think about the things he says more than once. John Maeda maintains an interesting companion website at lawsofsimplicity.com where he offers more insights into simplicity.

Rating: 4 / 5

I guess everyone knows this, but I’ll say it anyway - nobody does humour like the British.

The book is a diary of one Adrian Mole - a man with two failed marriages and with a kid from each, who somehow ends up making the worst possible political, emotional and financial choices. His genius lies not only in having absolutely no idea about what to do with his life, but also in lacking the will to implement any good ideas that he might run into by accident. Yet even though he’s such a goof, the one thing that “he” manages brilliantly is to document his life with words so funny that it literally makes one laugh out loud.

In the introduction to one of P. G. Wodehouse’s books, the writer talks about the two laws of writing humour - one, readers won’t laugh at anything unbelievable; and two, give them something delightful enough and they’ll believe anything. The delightfulness of Adrian mole almost makes one swallow one’s disbelief at his talent for self-expression tied to his obvious goofiness.

There are too many funny quotes to quote, but the one I remember most is his justification for paying £60 a month for 200 cable TV channels while being mired in debt: “A man of my intellect cannot afford to ignore global culture.” Priceless as Adrian’s greatly overdrawn Mastercard.

After reading up a bit about Sue Townsend and the other Adrian series, I see that the books always have a political angle. There’s a lot in the book about the war on Iraq - Adrian’s devotion to Tony Blair’s sincerity is oft-mentioned, and yet comes into question as his eighteen year old son is sent into battle in Iraq, which lends the book an almost serious tone at the end. Yet it’s extremely well presented and doesn’t detract from the book.

Great reading, gave me a lot of laughs; and a few moments of reflection.

(The reflection part is just me - those who know me know that I’m a nutjob who can’t read even a product description on a website, much less a book, without trying to extract some meaning out of it)

Rating: 3.5 / 5

Occasionally I get the feeling that the universe is actually a sentient being. Like today, when I ate at Taco Bell after a really long time; the first packet of Fire sauce in my hands had this quote on it: “Ahhh… we meet again.”

Events like these greatly increase my belief in my favourite quote - “No doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.” Taken from Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata, but popularized (among people I know, at least) by a very similar quote in the movie Harold and Kumar.

In other news, I’m off to India for the long weekend, where reliable sources (read: Mom) inform me kaju rolls and the first mangoes of the season await.

I think I’ll skip breakfast and lunch today; for tonight I dine in heaven.