Category: Books / Reading

Peeves!

This series of posts has been inspired by Nick who suggested that I list my peeves. He calls his, “Petty Peeves” but, I prefer to call mine just peeves. Since my peeves will need explanations unlike Nick’s one-liners, I will use more than one post to list them all.

Let me start with my morning peeves. The first things that upset me are these:
My morning pastime of sitting out in the veranda with my mug of tea, gets spoiled by various thoughtless people.
1. Talking loudly on cell phones just outside my garden sitting atop a two wheeler with its engine running ranks the topmost.
2. Impatient sounding of horn to get a traffic jam cleared because some idiots do not know how to part or are in the process of offloading passengers near a restaurant near my home.
3. Noisy vehicles of all kinds with deliberately made so or defective silencers.
4. Vehicles with extremely loud music being played leading me to wonder if the driver and passengers want to listen to music or want to show off to people outside.
5. Cars with barking dogs with their necks outside the windows leading other dogs being walked to bark too leading to total cacophony.

The next are once I am inside and see folded newspaper pages to highlight advertisements like the following.

Reading the half page as shown in the first image, turning it and then folding it to read the rest of the paper is very annoying.

The stretched out piece of one page to encourage the reader to go to the page to open it to read advertisements, at least in my case, has exactly the opposite effect. I swear to myself not ever to buy the product or patronise the institution advertised.

Full page advertisements of ugly looking politicians selling their candidacy or constitution for whatever reason is another no no for me. Here too, that politico will never get my vote.

Next peeves will be unsolicited phone calls either selling something or scammers who must think that I am a moron.

Closely followed by those are SMS messages and WhatsApp messages of commercial nature which annoy more than create interest.

More to follow.

Lottery And Regrets.

I was quietly sitting on my recliner and reading a book last evening. My DIL was lounging on the sofa and catching up with her messages on her phone.

She must have read about this lottery winner which has been doing the rounds in all our media here the last couple of days.

She suddenly asked me “What will you do if you won a lottery like the auto driver did?”

I reflected for a while and said, “I will put the money in the bank and spend some of it in sprucing up our home and leave the rest for the two of you.”

DIL – “No going to see all the grand children in the family and of friends all over the world, no vacationing in exotic places?”

I – “No dear. My travelling days are over as you well know. I have seen my share of exotic places and modern mass media enables me to be in touch with everyone all over the world. I am now in my comfort zone and am quite content.

I don’t think that she expected that answer and the chat ended there.

This little chat however reminded me of a book that I had read some time ago. While reading the book I could well relate to the dying regrets that the author writes about and even at that time I had placed myself in their position and wondered whether I would have the same regrets and had come to the conclusion that I would not.

The five regrets are:

1.”I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

I believe that I did.

“I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.”

I never had to work hard anyway! And I am not being facetious. Things were different during my working years.

“I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.”

While I did not, till about my late teens, I changed when I started regular salaried employment and performance linked incentives, and was able to express my feelings without being afraid of the outcome or the reaction of others.

“I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.”

I have, and continue to do so. The longest lasting friendship that I have is with my Primary-School-mate who lives now in Mumbai and many others from my high school and business school days as well as others who came into my life due to my career, travelling and blogging.

“I wish that I had let myself be happier.”

I have been very fortunate that apart from the sorrow of the death of family, friends and pets, I have not had many occasions to be unhappy. I have been and continue to be quite happy, perhaps even to the bemusement to some others.

How would you rate yourself on these five parameters dear reader?

Decision Making.


Yesterday I started reading a book which was gifted to me by a friend and a statement caught my eye. “A Professor in a School of Management who has written a book on Decision Making, was offered positions in four different organisations and consulted a friend on which one to choose. The friend smiled and said, “Why ask me? You have written a book on Decision Making.” The Professor responds, “But, this is real life!”.

As it happens so often in my life two things happened one after the other after having read that little vignette.

A class mate from Business School is visiting Pune and, my two classmates residing now in Pune and I met up with him over tea at my club last evening. During the conversations, we naturally talked about our two years at the school and some of the faculty members.

Some Alumni have collected funds for instituting an annual award and the visiting friend suggested to a local friend, an academic, that he should suggest a criteria to decide on awarding a gold medal to an alumnus. This led to some hilarious discussions on decision making and naturally no conclusion could be arrived at.

This morning I received a clip via WhatsApp which led me to an interview with Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank fame, which too talks about decision making which I am sure will amuse as well as rile some readers.

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?

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.