About Me

A few things about me.

1. I love reading.
2. I love buying books. My home is totally inadequate to house the books that I want to keep. If you get to visit my home sometime you will find that the books overflow from the shelves to the floor. If you have read the Agatha Christie play ‘Witness for the Prosecution’ and can remember how the main character Leonard Vole’s home looks like – books occupying every inch of free space, from the bookshelves to the floor to the dining table to the telephone stand – you know how my home looks like.
3. I tried making a list of my favourite books, but after sometime I realized that would be impossible. Some of my favourite books from recent years are ‘Ex Libris’ by Ann Fadiman, ‘Of Human Bondage’ by W.Somerset Maugham, ‘The Elegance of the Hedgehog’ by Muriel Barbery, ‘Dandelion Wine’ by Ray Bradbury, ‘Narcissus and Goldmund’ by Hermann Hesse, ‘Forbidden’ by Tabitha Suzuma, ‘Night Train to Lisbon’ by Pascal Mercier, ‘When I Lived in Modern Times’ by Linda Grant, ‘The Language of Flowers’ by Vanessa Diffenbaugh, ‘And Then There Were None’ by Agatha Christie, ‘When Eight Bells Toll’ by Alistair Maclean and ‘Beyond a Boundary’ by CLR James.
4. My other great love is movies. I was a compulsive theatre goer, but these days I prefer to get the DVD and watch the movie at home. This means that I rarely watch new movies but frequently watch old ones – sometimes ones which no one has heard of. I love nearly all the movies that I watch. That is how much I love movies. I made a favourite ‘arty’ movie list sometime back. In case you are interested, you can find it here.
5. I love music too. Though my taste in music is not sophisticated or well informed. Two of my recent favourites are ‘No Hay Problema’ (by Pink Martini) and ‘Gnossienne No.1’ (by Erik Satie).
6. I love coffee. I used to be a tea drinker when I was in school, but my mom introduced me to coffee then and I have been addicted to it ever since. I love Ann Fadiman’s essay ‘Coffee’. It is an ode to coffee lovers.
7. For a compulsive coffee addict, I like tea too. But I like my tea with spices – cardamom, ginger, cloves – and with milk and sugar. Tea connoisseurs will frown at me.
8. I love learning new languages. I have tried my hand at learning French, Chinese, and Russian – each one for a few years – with varied levels of success. I also tried my hand at learning Italian, Spanish, Ancient Greek and Latin with a lesser degree of success. I discovered that whenever I learnt a new language, I was an absolute star at the beginner’s level, but as the course became more advanced my learning petered off. However this hasn’t managed to diminish my love for learning languages. The three languages I know well are Tamil, English and Hindi.
9. I love exploring the nitty-gritty of languages. For example, in the previous point I debated with myself whether I should use ‘petered off’ or ‘tapered off’. I wanted to use ‘peter’ but I also knew that ‘peter’ is more commonly used with ‘out’ as in ‘petered out’. But I still went ahead and used ‘petered off’. I don’t know whether that is grammatically correct. But I like doing things like that.
10. I love watching TV. I know what people say about TV – that it makes one dumb – but I love it. I mostly watch sports and TV serial reruns. Sometimes I watch reality cooking competitions too.
11. I don’t watch news on TV. I also don’t really read the newspaper for the news. I occasionally read the op-ed columns but I take all news and analysis with a pinch of salt. This is because I haven’t found a reliable objective source of news and analysis and I find that most news and analysis is only a point of view.
12. My favourite sports are cricket and tennis.
13. Some people who are not cricket fans say that cricket is a boring game because the longest version of it runs for five days and there could be no result in the end. But I like cricket precisely because of that reason – because it is a microcosm of life and has its ebbs and flows with no definite ending. My alltime favourite cricketer is Viv Richards. I don’t think we will see the likes of him again. My favourite cricket novels are ’24 for 3’ by Jennie Walker and ‘Netherland’ by Joseph O’Neill. Two of my favourite nonfiction books on cricket are ‘Beyond a Boundary’ by CLR James and ‘The Art of Captaincy’ by Mike Brearley. 
14. I follow tennis grand slam events from their second week, starting with the pre-quarterfinals. I think tennis is the greatest individual sport invented by humans. My favourite tennis matches of all time are the Wimbledon ladies final between Steffi Graf and Jana Novotna in 1993 and the Wimbledon men’s final between Roger Federer and Andy Roddick in 2009. I backed Jana Novotna and Andy Roddick in these two matches and cried when they lost. I love backing underdogs, but it is heartbreaking most of the time.
15. I love TV serials. My favourite TV serials currently are ‘Packed to the Rafters’, ‘The Big Bang Theory’, ‘Grey’s Anatomy’, ‘Two and a Half Men’, ‘Mike and Molly’ and ‘Revenge’. In the past I have also liked ‘24’, ‘Parenthood’, ‘Rizzoli and Isles’, ‘Raising the Bar’, ‘Necessary Roughness’ , ‘Friends’ and ‘Star Trek’ (the original series). One of my favourite characters from a TV series is Brick Heck from ‘The Middle’ who likes reading thick books and being left alone. That sounds like me
    
16. I enjoy travelling but I do it occasionally. I am too lazy to be bothered about the planning part – getting tickets and travel documents, getting up in the morning before the sun has risen and rushing to the station / airport – it is too hard. But when the bug bites me, I am a passionate traveller. Before I travel to a new country I do silly things like reading the whole ‘Lonely Planet’ guide to that country and reading novels by writers of that country. I would like to visit Argentina and / or Spain some day.
17. I like trying new cuisine. My favourite cuisines are Indian and Chinese but I have favourites from other cuisines too – Italian pasta and ravioli, Russian blini, Ethiopian Injira, Spanish omelette, French crepe, Middle Eastern bread with vegetable curry.
18. I don’t have a pet, but I have always loved dogs. I would like to believe that this love is mutual. In recent years I have started loving cats too, though it took me quite a while to get there, as cats are more demanding friends.  
19. Books, movies, music, TV, sport, coffee, travel, cuisine, dogs and cats – I am not much different from anyone else. I am just a regular guy.