Month: July 2022

Temperature!

I am old enough to understand the joke as well as the system used in the past for measuring temperature. India went metric in 1956 and since then we have used only the celsius for measuring temperature. I distinctly remember the struggle that we had in converting the measures to understand distances, weight, currncy etc.

The first sentence refers to the score of top scoring students in our public examinations.  Since I was mostly a back bencher, I was more often than not in the bottom set of scores.

The joke here takes me to another peculiar development in the last few decades.  In our time we were comfortable with percentages.  Now we keep reading about percentiles.  This I think, is a significant change in preparing our young to be super competitive.  Quite whether this is the right thing to do to them or not, I do not know.

What do you think?

 

Priceless Existence.

I can totally relate to the message in this image. There are some hyperactive friends of mine who keep wondering how I can be such a couch potato and this blog post is for them. Not that I expect them to understand but, this is my explanation for their puzzlement.
I must however add that I am not much into snacking but instead, into solving crossword puzzles and reading.

How about you dear reader?

Memory Trigger – Detective Fiction.

I got this cartoon strip earlier today which triggered off a long forgotten memory of detective fiction.

I don’t know how many of my regular readers will remember a character called Mike Hammer. He was a detective in novels written by Mickey Spillane. I think that I have read all Mickey Spillane’s novels as during those days, there was no television or diversions other than cinema and willy nilly one read. Since I was also travelling a lot, I used to buy books in railway station book stalls and was quite well known in some of them.

There were other writers too but, this particular opening that Snoopy uses is a classic Mike Hammer one if my memory serves me right.

It is a pity that he stopped with just a few stories of that particular genre. He was very entertaining and easy to read.

Have you read Mickey Spillane? Do you think that the criticism that he got from the regular literati was justified?

Small Pleasures.

A few days ago, one of the crossword puzzles that I was solving had this clue – “Tea and ——-“.

It took me a while to figure out the solution as I tried English habits like scones, sandwiches etc before I struck gold and made it “Tea and Biscuits”

This one little event that morning took me on a long nostalgia trip to my field selling days when, customers would insist on getting tea and biscuits for me. It was not unusual for me to end up having perhaps around eight to ten cups of tea and around twenty biscuits during a day in the field. Youth took care of digestion problems but the memory took me to this particular brand of biscuits that somehow seemed to be the only one on offer everywhere.

It has been many years since I had the pleasure of having tea with Parle G biscuits and so I decided to try that combination again and requested my son Ranjan to get some Parle G biscuits and,  he very generously got half a dozen packets. Since then, I have been revisiting the good old days every afternoon with my tea. Every time I do so, many forgotten memories come rushing back of people and places.

Do you dip biscuits with your tea? If you don’t please try. It is bliss!

The Conformist.

Terra is the latest one among many on social media to share this image on her blog post.

After reading her post, I went to check just how many books I have in my collection remaining to be read.

I found that I had eleven in my Kindle and thirty hard copies yet to be read. One more landed up this morning making it thirty one.

This trait is called Tsundoku in Japanese! I have blogged about this phenomenon before and have mentioned some other bloggers who too suffer from this affliction.

I am now determined not to buy any more books till I finish reading all the books that await my pleasure.

Please wish me luck.

Do you too suffer from Tsundoku?

 

PS:  One of my very few regrets in life is that I never learnt Japanese. They seem to have words for just about every quirk in human life.