Despite being in Mrs A’s reading list from college and his turning up (often tucked away into uncanny corners) in commercial bookshelves everywhere, I’d delayed picking an Oliver Sacks book up, thinking I’ll find one in a library someday or technically ‘borrow’ one. Vintage Sacks is from SPLRC (of the DiceyDewey’s fame). Sacks makes chemistry (of the trivalent-bond-and-isotopes kind) feel deeply personal. (The chapter is titled Stinks and Bangs.) I wish chemistry textbooks from my literature-starved hostel years were written with such love and sense of adventure. In twenty-twenty-perfect-hindsight, I think the textbooks (the NCERT ones in two-colour offset [1]) took things too seriously and forgot test-tubes over bunsen burners were also supposed to be fun in mysterious ways. (This is a well […ish] description of Sacks’s description of test-tubes-over-bunsen-burners.)

I’m about to head to Vijayawada for a re-run (hardly; same river, not twice, all that) of the typography course and think this divine-ish intervention calls for a much more end-products-unknown approach for it to balance out the dashes-dots-spaces-pedantry.

In an excerpt from Uncle Tungsten, Sacks footnotes Euler’s thoughts on lights, colours and (inevitably) music.

The nature of the radiation by which we see an opaque object does not depend on the source of light but on the vibratory motion of the very small particles [atoms] of the object’s surface. These little particles are like stretched strings, tuned to a certain frequency, which vibrate in response to a similar vibration of the air even if no one plucks them. Just as the stretched string is excited by the same sound that it emits, the particles of the surface begin to vibrate in tune with the incident radiation and to emit their own waves in every direction.

I’m so going to find a way to shoehorn that into a lesson on the black-on-white-and-readallover typography landscape.

1: Their managing science textbook diagrams with just two colours (often a sedate palette at that) wasn’t particularly amusing then. Wish I could say I was entranced, etc., but in reality, I was stuck SunTzu-ing my way to entrance exams like almost everyone else.

I’ve had this phone since 2012. The 7-year itch is a good self-deprecating joke to go back to, for lack of material isn’t exactly uncommon but I realised it was no small feat on an email thread to V. The phone was a Diwali gift from Co (I had started working there after the dip) and was light-years ahead of the Nokia I was wielding to scare dogs away on my way back home in the ill-lit streets of SushantLokPhaseOne.[1] It is—technically—not the same phone in Theseus-terms; I’ve replaced the screen twice (Once on my own for INR 500; an achievement I wish I had a certificate to show off for. I’d moved out of the hostel-with-the-neighbour-with-a-pentalobe-screwdriver by the time that broke again.), taken the camera module off after short-circuiting the flash innards riding to Wayanad in the rain, with the second screen broken (and not taped over like in the scan here) and the phone soaking up water in my raincoat’s pocket. In the beginning, I could do serious damage (or so I fantasised) with just the phone and a fruit-branded ecosystem. The photos looked alright with heavy-handed Instagram filters but it was the scan-for-processing that worked like a charm. Tethering the thing to the Mac was flawless and I could go from sketch to vector in a matter of minutes.

Thanks to being so far out of the OS update loop, I was getting two-three-even-four days of life from a full charge. It had essentially become a Nokia if one were to discount its breaking often in the last couple of years. Except for the orientation-challenged 30-pin connector, it was perfect for a low-tech lifestyle in spite of the smartness bits. As a phone to make calls and type properly punctuated, smart-quoted text messages with, it delivered way more than what I had come to expect from seven-year old electronics with screens on them. Yet, I was dreading the day the thing finally needed replacement not because we had fallen in love. I do believe it is perhaps possible to feel quasi-mystical connection with things, especially when they have known intimate stuff about your choices for years. While it is somewhat (…) true that I am too much of a cheapskate when it comes to undoing purse-strings over anything other than upgrades to bicycle-parts that don’t really need them, I was also dreading the loss of street-cred (no?) and facing the possibility that the next phone might not last as long as this one. Plus, how long do I wait before markering the figleaves out of the selfie camera from the inside?

I’ve made the switch to a more (…ish, at least) modern thing with a lovely greyscale view doodad that I switch out of only to make sure the colour bits still work. It is thinner and taller and wakes up when lifted and given scritches with love. Or maybe I am mixing this up with Miss K on that last one.

Now, hold my Sambharam while I congratulate self variously over apparent frugality and finally being able to superswipe people on Tinder.

1: Diwali, light-years, ill-lit, Phase One. Stop reading if you aren’t laughing hysterically already.

Dried moss (lichen) on the rock makes it super-grippy[1]. The climb up is easy, in-spite of the fixed-gear ride leading up to it and my being out of breath (not planned) and water (planned cockiness I now regret). Lying down on the pockmarked summit (it isn’t a sizeable climb; just a sizeable climb right after a ride and unfortunate decisions) rewards one with a breathtaking third-floor-terrace-view framed for the most part by coconut groves long overdue their general grooming. (That does remind me of the aerodynamics of riding a bicycle while bearded but that tigress we shall address later.) It is near-silent, except for the faraway beats of a song being played at some wedding reception (today is one of those weekends after an astrologically well-endowed week and it shows) and the odd Bullt misfiring in the distance. (You are never far from a motorcycle in these parts, remote as the parts are.) I can hear the birds—most are crows heading home, some bats waking up—flap their wings. It is an odd sound; something you don’t want to expect as BGM while attempting to contemplate life, the multiverse, rising price of gold, etc. I grew up in a house near this rock and was denied late-evening visits till I was old enough to ride a bicycle without people waiting along the road as if it was leTour. It was a fuller rock-formation ‘back in the days;’ many homes got built over solid foundations since then and what is left of the quarry is a cricket-badminton-coconut-drying field in the non-rainy months. The niches left in the rock-face where boulders were blasted out make for a gallery worthy of ticketed entry. Some brilliant, harmless village-funds-redirection makes for ample lighting post sundown—when someone decides to get the Panchayath to fix the LD-Resistors on the electric-pole LEDs. The LEDs are not in the mood to work today. The scene is hiplessly un-lit. The only shop (down the rock along the gravel road; the blue tarpaulin in the photograph) in these parts is shut (the shopkeeper is a shout away, and it isn’t like there are no motorcycles around for a trip to the town). My new-old phone—after seven years of missed application updates and broken glass—is good at stitching panoramas. I remind myself throwing away the little green paper pieces was worth the effort and then quickly re-seal the waterproof pouch.

It starts to drizzle. Spray-and-pray in terms of hitting crucial electronics. Dried moss assumes oil-slick-consistency when wet. It glistens in rainbow colours. It starts redefining slippery. I think up scenarios where I am variously stuck on top for the night (no big deal, apart from it not being voluntary and my having heard foxes on other nights), slide down the rock-face face down (big-deal), run down yelling nothing (big-if-true-deal), etc. The clouds pass and the rain fades, not before my khakis burst into irregular polka dots of cold and start speaking clingon. There are many things worse than a shower that prematurely drops the mic, including having to slide down a rock-face, face down, etc. I am thankful of the polka dots and the added motorcycle-silence the rain brings with it. The bird-wings flap louder and the sound echoes against the concave rock-face. Ungroomed coconut trees let go of some leaves and coconuts in the wind. There is enlightenment in the air.

The ride home is slower, for there are no fenders on the #F00 and for the NR450 is awaiting its warrantied fate at the bicycle shop. (They haven’t called yet, despite the enthusiaashaan and promises to transcend customer-support timezones.) The motorcycles are out again and drain the puny backup front-light on the #F00 in their holier-than-thou beams.

1: Grippy, unlike the Supacaz tape that left me 5x poorer than the normal ones. Consider this my official review and stay away from them if you are hovering over an add-to-cart button somewhere on the internets.

On-camera oversaturation—with the Vivid Velvia film simulation mode—on top of a by-monsoon oversaturation. Shot on the battered Fuji X20; there is some poetic justice left in that.

I overestimated how much reach the calipers needed and wore the decals before moving back to the one-brake-life. The (geared and adequately clad in brakes) FC sees more of the road these days, yet it is so much nicer to break into a sprint on the #F00 when all you have to worry about is how far it will take for the braking to kick in.

Once you get over the SPLRC-C librarians’ own P2C2E way of dealing with Dewey’s Decimals, and one in every ten books with a live moth eating Rorschach patterns into its innards as you grapple with the expertly repurposed cardboard box for a cover, the shelves start to proffer gems like ‘Tower of Birds’ every other time you decide to drop by for new books.

Printed in 1989 by the USSR-state-owned Raduga (Rainbow) Publishers, Tower of Birds was an unexpected (as all things chanced upon at SPLRC-C tend to be) find that turned out to be full of sedate, often quirky tales of man versus (not really) the super- and otherwise natural. ‘The Piano Tuner’—the first, seventeen-page story by Viktor Kolupayev[1]—reminded me of Schickler’s short ‘The Smoker’ and set expectations just right. (A certain somebody may have scanned the pages if you can’t find a copy somewhere.)

For a chance find, the stories were appropriately overwhelming. That (alone) is not what made me fall in love with the book though. For a book that tiny (from an L*W point of view, not from a thickness one), it is produced with attention lavished to details most others would consider ripe for cost-cutting. (It is perhaps a Russian culture-thing and I am attributing great intent to it.) The book’s text-block is printed in black, except for the page numbers in green. That is a major oddity when nothing else of note—neither the titles nor the book’s half-title—is printed with the same green ink. The margins are lavish for such a small page size; you never run out of thumb-room as you fight the undulations of a packed state-bus over half-full potholes. One other thing that reminds you of potholes is the terrible justification; seven words per column is a recipe for major waterways in the text-block.[2] The colophon credits the designer[3] appropriately and does not make that seem an afterthought. The signatures are numbered (this is not the norm, even for Raduga’s own books I checked later at the library) for some reason. I don’t see that information being useful to anyone other than perhaps the book binding machine. To top things off in true socialist fashion, there is an honest appeal to the readers to share their comments on the book, at the very end.

Edit: Look at that contents page! It is beautifully—if a bit awkwardly around P278—typeset with one font at one size and two styles. Outside of a classroom, I’m a sucker for the one-face-one-size technique. Sadly, it lacks true italics (and oldstyle numerals, if we are at it) and the tabulation is a bit wonky, but its heart is in the right place.

If this is/was propaganda, this is propaganda well-made.

1: Kolupayev was a Mathematician/Bionicist(?) before he started writing SF at the age of 33.

2: The choice of type and the setting positively sucks, if you’re pixel-peeping. I guess the stories and the intent cloud my judgement.

3: Look for Gukova’s foldout books on the website.

No-fluff guide to digital typography. Great books too. Link.

Numbers on the way to the studio. That 6 up top is so lovely it demands its own wall; the counters work way better than the ones on its bottom, about-to-fall-over-backwards-twin. I love how the E above is visually corrected to some extent; there is lot to feel good about on this middle-of-nowhere wall. A well-considered instance of hand-painted letters—where the artist gave enough figleaves about not just the nonexistent brief but the letters’ brief encounter with the nonexistent reader as well—is a joy to walk by and get stuck staring at as you wait for an ill-timed train to be signalled past. Those moments are pockets of joy in an otherwise mundane walk alongside Kozhikode’s version of rush-hour-traffic.

Not sure why the area code to the left (95) needed to be a sans-serif. I’m going to call -929 one of these slow moving days of unannounced power outages and figure out what happened.

The house next door—with the STD Booth and huge red letters bleeding allover the alcoves and fixtures that once held coin-operated red telephones—is being torn down.

Baloo Chettan in the flesh. Single colour offset on fairly cheap paper.

Subimal Misra, Two Anti-Novels. It is odd—and perhaps ill-fitting in a told-you-so way—that this this the page I end up scanning for a post.

Last week, my favourite word was ‘affectation.’ I liked how it bounced off the tongue coupled with a self-serving sentence used sans-prompt, erupting in a vulgar display of itself. (Having a favourite word-per-week is definitely not a thing.) I was using the word in real- (spoken) and imaginary- (also spoken) -life situations with no rhyme and/or reason.

(Riding) Fenderless in the Rain

Clad in inappropriate (not!) flannel, head held at a specific angle w.r.t the nose-bridge, the posture helps signal smugness at riding fenderless mid-monsoon and/or slows down the ingestion of bugs past the great moustache-beard barrier reef. It is practically wind-tunnel-level aerodynamics. It also sends a steady, thin stream of superfine dirt—that the front tyre (all insignificant 25x700cs of it) picks up—deep into your nostrils. The flannel isn’t absolutely necessary, but why be reasonable now? The bits of dirt that miss the target are finer than the bits that do, obviously, and make a beeline (because it stings; not because beeline sounds better) for your eyes as if adding insult to injury is the only thing that makes a fenderless ride in the rain capital F Fun. It is like asking a good-looking, well-dressed person to shovel dirt onto your face with a shovel designed to be laughably narrow and ineffective otherwise. Picturesque in its absurdity, the whole gymnastics unfolds as if it is being captured in a non-existing live-feed tethered to some fancy art-gallery along the beach. The spectacle is indeed sublime.

A bus speeding over a small stream (that was by then flowing over one side of the road and into the paddy field on the other side [only to cross right back, meeting up with a culvert ahead; talk about picturesque v/s pointless]) washed me thoroughly to kick things off. Impromptu road-showers thanks to speeding automobiles are alright as long as they wash off and don’t leave oddly coloured testaments to the state of state-PWD ten minutes past the event; indignation one can take, as long as it doesn’t permanently (for the day) scar. I don’t really blame the driver much; I would do the same weaving dangerously (as opposed to slowing down like sensible folks) past people—too caught up in their heads to realise a speeding bicycle can join them disastrously on their leisurely diagonal strolls to cross the road; it is the only way to conserve precious momentum on morning commutes. I have had people look at me riding straight ahead on an otherwise clear road, decide there was no way a bicycle was going as fast as it obviously was, and proceed to leisurely start crossing the road. Much indignant grabbing of the brake levers ensues, followed by a round of what Gurgaon has taught me by way of the language of righteous road rage.

The bus driver was perhaps simply done with downshifts for the day. He was—perhaps—saying things like “ride off the road, scum” or “weeeeee…” with that perfect splashy arc he delivered. Emboldened by the free shower (and after spitting out as much of the mud and water as I could) I continued the (by then) already ill-fated ride to see where the rain had performed a great unification of the football field, the paddy fields lining it on two sides, the road along the field(s) and the stream flowing—also along the field(s)—across the said road. The water had receded thanks to breaks in the rain, leaving a ruptured water pipeline sprinkling its innards into the the stream, a sorry bunch of plastic water bottles caught in the branches doing their to-fro dance on the surface and puddles pockmarking the field in parts where hopeful driving school students would otherwise practice fine automobile calligraphy (H-s and eights in endless practice loops). I’d noticed the evening-out of geographies the day before on a trip to a relative’s place. It was too late to stop and smell the hibiscus then. It (the smelling) was now fully on, through dirt-clogged nostrils that made no difference to the overall experience.

The plan thus gloriously beaten up and trashed (by the free shower and puddles), I propped the bike up (drive-side) against a boulder and sauntered along the stream, upstream, till it was not fun anymore. The local bottle-openers had gathered beyond a bend in the trail and if there is a group that gives r/privacy a run for their money… The paddy fields—beautiful in the setting sun over a layer of rain—trick you into believing there is plenty of light left in the day when it takes much less dirt-painted eyes to see pothole shaped objects on the road and elsewhere. The ride back was full of surprises. By the time I turned into the newly resurfaced road linking our friendly neighbourhood ‘tourist’ route with the one that I commute on, there was no way to tell if a bump travelling up the wheels meant I was riding over a snake or a fallen twig. (There was one way which I wasn’t too keen on following through.) This road was what I used to bomb on less worthy bicycles before people built houses at either ends and fixed whatever was left after rocks and chasms and fallen overripe jackfruits were erased. Unaccompanied by an adult, those ‘sessions’ passed for major adventure in the days before successful BSNL recharges, Bult trips to Ladakh and blogging on weekends. On a less rainy day, I would’ve picked the longer, traffucked route via the town center over this steep (both ways) one but it wasn’t a less rainy day.

Riding (fenderless) in the rain is Fun.~ Do not let me tell you otherwise.