Mental Excursions

The world can’t resist Black Friday! Cartoon: Ladysmith News Much like Valentine's Day and Mother’s Day, two festivals India has adopted with suspicious enthusiasm, Black Friday too has quietly found a foothold in India. For the uninitiated, it was yesterday, the last Friday of November, the day after Thanksgiving Thursday in the United States. Because most global retail giants are headquartered in the USA, their shopping rituals inevitably drift into our markets. Thus begins their unofficial kick-off to a nearly month-long Christmas shopping marathon.    The name might puzzle you, black usually denotes sorrow, loss, and calamity, but here companies claim they spend the whole year ‘in the red’ and only on this miraculous Friday do they crawl ‘into the black’ with profits. No wonder they announce discounts so heavy they should come with a doctor’s note. According to some historians, the first Black Friday in the US traces back to the financial crisis in 1869 when two financ...

Signboards: Genius, Goofs, and Giggles Signboards are meant to be looked at and it is presumed, obeyed. Sometimes, they feel like the work of a creative genius and stay in our minds for long; other times, they lodge there for all the hilariously wrong reasons. And somehow, these wrong ones always turn out to be more eye-catching. After a few months of collecting such gems, here is a little gallery for you to enjoy, and occasionally shake your head and wonder where was the designer’s mind. First some great ones: The mind is a quiet parachute: closed, it rests; open, it rides the winds of imagination and discovery. Seen in a school in Vancouver, Canada. Evergreen Lake in Colorado,USA When your water is this clear, you don’t just tell people, you show them. Such a gentle way to say: pause, prepare, then proceed. Just loved this sign!   Order this way, adventure that way —  depends on today’s personality. Designers can be artists or eggheads. Above: Split it, read it, pond...

When Words Go on Strike Last week I skipped writing. No, I was not unwell or travelling or roped into one of Mani’s projects. I just sat in my chair, my mind full of muddled thoughts like ingredients in a witch’s cauldron, simmering, even as it drizzled outside with a sudden drop from a humid 34 degrees C to a wet 18°C degrees. The only issue or problem was, the words had gone on strike. It was as if they got sick of me and said, “Let’s bunk class today and go on chhutti (holiday). Why? Because normally, every Thursday I begin my two-day twelve-hour writing ritual- practically a job (unpaid yet immensely satisfying): research, reading, writing, deleting, rewriting, photo-hunting, editing, formatting, and then convincing Mani that this final draft really is final. (Is it ever?) Then it is released on Saturday, looking perhaps clean and effortless, like those people who claim they ‘just put something together’ when they turn up in a perfectly colour-coordinated outfit. B...