We all use a plethora of gadgets/devices in our day to day life. Many of them are unnecessary, yet we bought them for myriad reasons — impulse, peer pressures, et al. The excitement eventually wears off with these and you are only left with buyer’s remorse. My apartment is sprinkled with these things. I frequently end up buying pens that I don’t use after a day. I once bought a very high end Desktop computer believing that I’d be a gamer some day! I bought a guitar after listening to the ever enchanting chura liya hai tumne.. — the only time it makes a sound now is when the maid picks it up to clean the surface under it! I bought an iPhone… enough said.
However, out of all such abundantly redundant things, you’ll find a few that give you utmost joy every time you use them or see them — like the tiny, scaled model of the Ducati Scrambler sitting on your desk. They bring in a paradigm shift in the way you do or look at things. Here I am listing the three such devices/gadgets that I adore and make me feel delighted for having bought them.
Let me at the outset state that I am not an audiophile. I do listen to a fair amount of music at work mostly to drown out all the cacophony around me. I used a pair of Sennheiser earphones for this purpose. They sounded great. At least, I thought so till I bought a pair of Bose earphones on an impulse. Listening back to back to Vasundhara Das go Rabba Rabba… on them made me see the difference loud and clear, literally. It’s like you watched the Tansformers and for a long time thought Megan Fox was great. And then, you saw Salma Hayek in Bandidas! With the Bose being so good at what it delivers, I end up actually listening to music more than using them as a gadget to filter out office noise! Even the prosaic BBC Radio 1 podcasts sound so much better with them.
In the times gone by, a typical book reading cycle of mine, as with anyone else I’d imagine, began with me stumbling upon a reference to a book/books over the web or a friend telling me about the cool new books he/she had read. I’d then look up for them on Flipkart, place an order and of course wait for them to arrive. The entire process would typically take about two to three days. By which time, sometimes, I’d lost interest in the book or found some others that appeared more exciting. You may ask why not just go to a bookstore and get the book on the same day? Well, as any self respecting spoke in the wheel that the modern economy is, I like buying stuff Online. Also, there’s that tiny little thing about me being enthusiastically lazy!
Enters the Kindle Paperwhite and it changes everything. Now, when I find some interesting book through the usual route, I first look it up on, archive.org or on gutenberg — the sources of all the wonderful things on Internet. Or else I just buy it on Amazon. So, from knowing about a book to start reading it happens in about thirty minutes now. This has drastically increased the amount and frequency of my reading times. The added advantage with the Kindle is, of course, the ease of carrying books. You no longer have to carry just one book on your travels. Instead, you can carry your entire bookshelf with you wherever you go. Dandy, ain’t it?
I am a sucker for watches. And words. And wheels. And wom… Wait! This isn’t going well. Let me start again.
I love watches. I have a few of them, mostly, gifted by kind and generous friends. Couple of them are quite expensive too. I take turns wearing them and all of them bring an unhindered satisfaction every time they are on my wrist. However, the Seiko 5, has taken this to a whole new level and it’s not even quarter as expensive my other watch.
The beauty of the Seiko lies in the simplicity of its design and the purity of its engineering. First of all, it has a mechanical movement. I love mechancial watches because they involve such brilliant engineering and technical craftsmanship. So many moving parts encased in a small, beautiful package while keeping the precision of movement and accuracy of time keeping is sheer ingenuity. Then there’s that Seconds hand with it’s smooth, sweeping motion — what’s not to like? To make it more delightful the one in the Seiko is a self winding type. So all the energy that the watch needs is sourced from the wearer’s hand. After knowing this, one of my friends compared it to the Fitbit watch and concluded that, while the Fitbit tells what you did, the Seiko tells you to do something. Guess which is better for fitness!
You may ask, now that with the Seiko on board, do I have a buyers’ remorse for my other watches. Well the answer is simple: one can’t get enough of words and watches..