Face off!

My last post, along with the responses it elicited, has gotten me thinking about communication in general, and the idea of “staying in touch” in particular.

The last decade saw the birth of a new cyber-beast – online social networking. Myspace, Orkut and most popularly, Facebook.

Facebook was a hit not only with generation Y, the 1990’s born teenagers, but also with Gen-X who were in their late twenties or early thirties, having clocked sufficient time into the working world to be disillusioned with it, and nostalgic for childhood friends and playmates. I and my peers gobbled up Facebook whole, lured by the possibility of finding out what happened to long-lost acquaintances from school. A case of the proverbial cat that got, frankly, murdered.

I too managed to find friends from way back in Kindergarten, but was surprised to see that conversations never went beyond “Helloooo!!!” and the pro-forma glossing over of 20 odd years of detail. After that, there is little else to exchange. Your long-lost friends can't think of much to say, and you are hardly inclined to respond. And so they just sit on your friends list for years, privy to your personal information, status updates (read naval gazing) and photos of you tagged by someone else in idiotic albums that you wish you could burn.

In the meanwhile, Facebook will take you on a roller-coaster ride of security breaches and leaked private info leaving you jittery and squeamish about what said breach might mean for your data.

Now, let me point you to the biggest flaw in the plan. Nostalgia has emotional value precisely because it remains nostalgia. The mind does a terrific Photoshop job of the past and lets you play over and over again in your head only the nicest times, in slow motion and soft glow lighting. Finding out that your free-spirited playmate from grade school who went on papaya raids with you ended up a dumpy wash-out with a spouse s/he hates and children s/he wishes s/he never had, really curbs your enthusiasm. I’m now nostalgic for nostalgia. It felt wonderful to miss people and wonder how they fared.

What rubs the rage in is when papaya girl posts insipid kitten pictures as her profile picture, adds idiotic status messages about a roof that leaks or worse, inanities like "Life is a flower, sniff it" and drivel like that.

You, unlike me, may not be a sensitive soul, and may not mind these grave assaults on your sensibilities, but wait until your boss wants to "friend" you on Facebook. It is likely he is a much older man, new to the various delights of the Interwebs, and unlikely to have grasped the fragile and half-formed etiquette that governs social networking realms. He will send you a friend request. You will quietly decline it. He will send you another one and follow it with two emails and a phone call asking you why you've not accepted his request. If you were raised in polite society you are hardly likely to say "Why? Here's why: my last "family emergency" involved beer and a beach in Goa, and my idiotic friends have plastered tagged pictures all over Facebook. That's why."

If you are still unfazed, remember that eventually and inevitably, your aunt Saroja whose son bought her a computer so she can chat with him on skype from Madras to Milwaukee "for freeee!" will discover Facebook too,  and that's about when you realize that the dog now bites, and must be put to sleep.

To be fair, my relationship with Facebook was also professional. In the past two years, I helped run the social media marketing function of the online retail start-up that I worked for, and learning to acquire, maintain and manage a fan base was a huge learning experience.

Dynamic interaction with your buyer group is marketing gold. If you have something to sell, especially to young people, Facebook is your best friend.

Now that I don’t work for said firm any more, have nothing to sell and would like my nostalgia left alone, it is time to kill and bury the beast.

When I announced my exit, I was flooded with inquiries of how on earth I would stay in touch. I sent a “going-of-the-radar” message to Facebook contacts I wished to keep, and wrote them my email ID so they can E-MAIL me news, like we all used to in the simple olden days.

Twitter I continue to hold, but that is because twitter allows me to follow topics, and not just people.

I am now trying to forget the awful things I've learned - like how that kid from 8th grade, a boy of sparkling wit and intellect has grown up into a sad old schmuck who changed his name to suit numerology, so his new name now has 3 vowels repeated eight times.

Interesting read: "Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed"

Many thanks to Suvarna for finding this article on manufactured lifestyles. Here's an excerpt:

"The perfect customer is dissatisfied but hopeful, uninterested in serious personal development, highly habituated to the television, working full-time, earning a fair amount, indulging during their free time, and somehow just getting by.

Is this you?"

Read the entire article here.

How does a minimalist eat?

Here's a sweeping statement that I'll stand by: Simple foods simplify life.

A minimalist eats uncomplicated food. And when you break that down, it turn out to be vegetarian. I am by no means an advocate of vegetarianism, and this is not the arena to discuss the ethical issues behind meat and animal products.

But when it comes to minimalism, vegetarian food wins, here's why. (I would throw half of these reasons out of the window, but the other half is good enough.)

But before you vegetarians start gloating, vegetarian food does not automatically amount to minimalist eating. If your precious plant produce needs hours of prepping, needs to cook for half an hour over LPG fueled fire, simmering with spices flown in from 7 different states before it can be consumed, there's hardly anything simple about it, is there.

I am talking about raw foods. Locally procured, simply prepared and freshly consumed. Minimal time, effort and energy from plant to plate, and minimal digestive effort by the body.  Could you do it?

I am a big foodie, but I think this will be my year to start out in the sattvic, simple diet direction. It is not a forced decision, in fact it is not even a decision. Especially with my strong yoga practice these days, I notice the digestive load that complicated foods put on my body. (I mean even home cooked foods - fry 7 ingredients, grind with coconut, simmer with odds and ends that have been soaking overnight. The worst culprits are our starchy, nutritionally pointless breakfast items)

The myriad health benefits manifest themselves rapidly, and I spot the first effects in my yoga practice. There is so much more focus, I'm able to go deeper into postures and hold them for longer. The mind is clear and quiet.

I don't know how this will evolve. Right now, I'm eating raw food a couple of days a week, whenever possible. Going forward, I'll step up RF to alternate days, slowly easing into the system till cooked, complicated foods are like dessert -  an occasional, enjoyable treat. May take years though.

Lest you should think this is something of a fad diet, think about how sad it is that we now think of simple, straight-forward food as a fad. This is not any kind of diet plan. This is a lazy man's dream, a way of simplifying your life in one fell swoop. Think about it - no sweaty kitchen time, no complex recipes to remember, no stocking of dozens of ingredients, no expensive fuel to buy, no digestion pills to swallow after meals.

The RF menu is surprisingly wide open:

i. Practically any vegetable you can manage (Think beyond carrot and cucumber, you! tender green beans are great too. As is cabbage, radish, turnips, tomatoes, onion, capsicum, tender leaves of all greens like spinach. Actually, experiment. Try a snake gourd. You'll be surprised how many vegetables taste rather nice when raw)

ii. All edible fruit you can lay your hands on

iii. Sprouted pulses. Any pulse. Buy it whole, soak and sprout. Spritz lime juice and chow.

iii. All edible nuts and seeds. Include coconut in nuts, and in seeds, sesame, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds.


To take a minimalist approach to food, just think about how, and how much, you can reduce the number of steps it takes to get the food from the plant to your plate.

What will they buy?

To me, being rich is being debt free, owning a home, and having an independent source of income.

Assuming you are a small family with the first 2 conditions met, simple math tells me that a couple of crores in a nationalized bank will fetch you 18 lakhs per annum (@ 9%, today's average interest rate), that is at least a lakh a month post tax. Your income will be permanent as long as you have the sense never to touch the capital, so you have no obligation to save (beyond a set-aside to cover inflation) . And 1 lakh of spending money is a LOT. Even today, even in the big cities. No?

So what is the deal with people chasing thousands of crores, especially through illegal means? I agree there are people who like, and are entitled to, a large and lavish lifestyle. But what can you buy with 6000 crores most of which is hidden in untraceable "benami" accounts?

Really. serious question.

Sadiq Batcha's walls had affirmation notes that read: I will be the richest man in the world.

Bernie Madoff stole something like 75 billion dollars. Seriously, what was the plan, man?

Addiction? Something like Kleptomania? Food and money - we never think of the people who abuse these two as addicts who need help.

Interesting read: Why Are Easy Decisions So Hard?

Thanks for this link, CK!

This article is primarily about cognitive neuroscience, but I found it very useful because it explains the reason why complications creep into everyday decisions about simple chores. It helped me understand some of the modern factors that might inhibit one from cultivating simplicity as a life practice.

Here's an extract of particular relevance to this blog:

Jonah Lehrer says:

"In essence, my basic decision-making flaw is that I tend to treat easy consumer decisions (toothpaste, floss, shampoo, laundry detergent, etc.) as if they were really difficult. Although I know that every floss will work well enough, I still can’t help but contemplate the pros and cons of waxed versus unwaxed, spearmint versus wintermint. It’s an embarrassing waste of time, and yet it happens to me all the time.

Why do I do this? Why do I squander so much mental energy on the mundane purchases of everyday life? I think I’ve found a good answer.

I recently stumbled upon a working paper, “Decision Quicksand: When Trivial Choices Suck Us In,” by Aner Sela (University of Florida) and Jonah Berger (Penn). Their hypothesis is that my wasted deliberation in the drugstore is a metacognitive mistake. Instead of realizing that picking a floss is an easy decision, I confuse the array of options and excess of information with importance, which then leads my brain to conclude that this decision is worth lots of time and attention. Call it the drug store heuristic: A cluttered store shelf leads us to
automatically assume that a choice must really matter, even if it doesn’t. (After all, why else would there be so many alternatives?)"


Read the full article here.

Traveling light

I am gone all of next week, and I love to pack. By the way, packing is another opportunity to put minimalism into practice.

In general, I am a light traveler and am proud of my packing skills. That said, I still always find myself carrying stuff that I never use on the trip. It is surprising how you think that while you haven't used that balm/spray/gel in a whole year, you'll somehow need it on the 3 day trip.

The last time D & I went away on a vacation, we went with one medium size day bag - rather a largish laptop backpack, and that was for the two of us, for 8 nights. And I still found that I had carried things that I didn't use.

Our entire luggage for the last 8-night getaway, and my wonder slippers

This time, i am trying to pare things really really thin.

Over my years of traveling, I have developed some beliefs about holiday travel:

1.  No matter how long your trip, you don't need more than 3 sets of clothes, including what you wear for the journey.

Use hotel laundry (your lordship), or like me, carry a detergent bar and a brush, wash and dry clothes overnight, every night. You can pare that number down further if you are carrying jeans. You'll of course add 1 pair of location specific clothing - swimwear, warm wear etc depending upon where you are going. On my vacation (to warm locations), I carry 1 pair of jeans, 1 cotton trousers, and a maximum of 3 T-shirts or the exceptionally soft mull fabric cotton tops (why? because they fold away into the size of a hanky, taking up no space at all. I could stick a folded top in a pant pocket. My current mull tops are from pricey fabindia though. I must find the fabric, must keep checking in at the new handloom store)

2. If you need to pack a pair of footwear, you are such a diva.

My travel staple is a pair of flat rubber/foam slippers from Bata (see below) that are as comfortable as bathroom slippers, but look marginally better. They cost me Rs. 170 in 2009, and have been to at least 5 short and long getaways with me since then. Great for beach - wet wear, and I can walk miles in them with no discomfort.

My travel slippers from Bata (sorry for the poor photo quality - my mobile cam is no good)

3. Toiletries - it is worth investing in a set of small travel bottles

If your trip is not longer than a week, then the toiletry supplies that you need is limited. Chances are you are either lugging the entire 400 ml bottle of shampoo / conditioner / moisturizer, or you are buying overpriced "travel-size" packs from the brand. Instead, find little plastic bottles from around the house, or go ahead and buy cheap little plastic vials, label them and fill them up from your bottles at home. (while shopping, cheap is the key factor - plain white plastic bottles will do - this is not an occasion to go shopping for tupperware) You save space in your bag, fit into the cabin luggage fluid allowance, have less weight to carry, and you don't end up over-paying for the pretty but pricey travel-size packs.

I agree that bath gels are convenient for travel (if your hotel doesn't give you soap), but I prefer to bring well used bar of soap with me that i can finish on the trip.


4. Tricky bits:

The important thing about non-basic toiletries is that often, we think of a vacation destination as a place to re-invent ourselves with some kind of a makeover - you imagine yourself doing things that you wish you were doing back at home (diligently groom, preen, polish). Chances are, you won't do anything differently. I see vacations as a time to run on economy mode, not on turbo mode. Scale down, scale down!

Moisturizer.

Think think think. Do you really need to carry that bottle? Do you moisturize at home? Is you vacation destination drying? Won't a tiny bottle of coconut oil do? (Parachute's travel bottles for about 5 bucks a pop is lovely, and I am sure the other coconut oil guys have them too)

Sunscreen.

I really, really don't know about this one, and am planning a whole post about sunscreens. Frankly, too much fear has been drilled into me about sun exposure and skin cancer, but I have a hard time believing that the ridiculously suspicious looking list of ingredients on a bottle of sunscreen is harmless for you. Like Tequila says in the comments section of this post, cover up. Wear longer sleeves, carry a hat or an umbrella.

To my vacation next week, I will cow down and carry a bottle of sunscreen, although my last trip still gave me nasty sun rashes even after using loads of sunscreen. But this time, i am carrying full-sleeve rash-guards, so there will be lesser exposed skin. I will still use the damn sunblock though, because of the skin-cancer brainwash. A propos, I wonder if those who tan really quickly and turn very dark have a lesser exposure risk. My skin behaves like those  photochromatic spectacles that no one seems to favoe these days - turning very very dark, very very quickly. I like to think that that somehow reduces my likelihood of burning or sun related problems... I must look it up.


Hand creme / anti-wrinkle creme / similar snake oils:
Oh come on.

My one travel indulgence, though, is a book.


I'll let you know how my extra-light packing attempt goes.Do share your thoughts/experiences/tips on traveling light.

Here we are.

This blog has been long coming.

In this blog I hope to build minimalism and simplicity-oriented content about everything from food, fashion and health to shopping deals and DIY projects. This blog is not about saving money; rather, it is about seeking value.