I can never write much where when I spend a lot of time with other people, being social. I guess when most things I want to say have been said to people there’s not much left to put up here. I’m growing increasingly bored of talking to real people.

It’s been four months since my birthday and (what seems to be) my last birthday gift arrived yesterday. After being alive for 26 years I can tell you that sometimes birthday gifts don’t arrive on your birthday. Since all my gifts are here I felt obligated to take a picture with all of them in it and update you on the state of my birthday wishlist.

Here are the gifts, in (approximate) order of arrival:-

1. The set of New York City cards from Surabhi: It made absolutely no sense that she gave me these before going to New York but it’s a sweet gift nonetheless.
2. T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism: I gifted this to myself just in case the rest of you failed to deliver. I felt like I needed something hardcore. I’ve read about a third of it so far.
3. The electric guitar strings from Anil: No, the guitar itself is not a birthday gift. There’s no way I could include the strings in the picture without the guitar itself. As you can see I’m already putting these to use. The guitar is a loan from Arvind while he’s off studying to be a Business Administrator. I guess it would be a gift if he never took it back.
4. Dan Mangan’s Nice, Nice, Very Nice from Kitu: This really is a beautiful album. I suggest that you listen to it if you haven’t already.
5. The Portal 2 Companion Cube Ice Tray: This is another gift from me to me. I found this when looking for awesome birthday gift suggestions to give you people. When I found out that nobody was planning to buy it for me I decided that I must have it no matter what so I bought it for myself. It makes the friendliest weighted companion ice cubes you’ve ever seen.
6. The beautiful bottle of Mezcal from Apeksha: I have no idea what Mezcal is like but I’ll be finding out soon. It has a worm at the bottom of the bottle. I’m not yet sure how I feel about that.
7. Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down from Ann: I just started reading this yesterday and it seems quite fun. I can’t remember the last time I read a book written by a Brit.
8. 2 Packets of Vietnamese coffee from The Murd: Yummy. This completes the gift collection
9. There was the bottle of Cafe Patron that Lokur got me but there isn’t really anything left of that to take a picture of.
10. I’m terribly sorry if I forgot anything. Four months is too long a time for my ageing memory to accurately track.

I’m bad at multi-tasking. Unless I’ve had an overdose of coffee I would be much better off doing one thing at a time. And that’s only because if I have had an overdose of coffee there’s nothing you can do to constrain me to one activity short of putting me in a straitjacket. I’m bad at multi-tasking, and this is a difficult thing to say with surety because we seem to be a generation of people who think they were built to multitask. We’re surrounded by televisions and laptops and tablets and smartphones that scream out for our attention all the time.

I’m immersed in the internet. Trying to keep the internet out of my thought-space on a normal working day is almost as hard as trying to hold breath in my lungs. The last time I did something uninterrupted for more than an hour was probably years ago. I’m so deeply addicted to multi-tasking that I don’t even want to tell you how I plan to make it better right now. I only plan to conduct an experiment, to see how much of a difference not being distracted all the time can make. I plan to spend 2 hours off the grid everyday. Fine, we all know that’s over ambitious. I plan to spend 90 minutes 3 times a week, not counting Sunday, off the grid.

This can be anytime after 10pm, so I have to make sure that I finish work by 10pm on these days. And if I want more, then I can easily spend 4 to 6 hours off the grid on Sundays. This will be 90 minutes where I turn off the internet and my phone. No TV either, but I can use a computer if I want to, as long as it’s offline. I know I should ideally turn the computer off too, but computers have music and audio recording software and lessons on music theory, or whatever the latest thing I want to learn is.

I worry that I know almost for sure that I’m a less interesting person than I was three years ago. I’ll let you know how this goes.

Note: I wrote this post quite a while ago but it needed editing and I was too lazy to edit it and post it until now.

I had to go to work on Diwali but it was not as bad as working on normal days because I got there and back much quicker since there was no traffic, and also perhaps because we had some beer with lunch. I got off the bus home before 8 pm yesterday which usually never happens even if I try to leave at 6 pm. Since I had some time to spare I decided to go to the Landmark book store to find a good book to read. The books section has been getting smaller for years now. It used to be about 80% of the store but after making space for all the stationery and music and movies and games and gaming consoles and kids toys the real books take up only around 30% of the store.

I’ve always loved looking around at book stores and even though I do it rarely, it invariably makes me feel better when I’m bored out of my mind. I’ve gone to Landmark and bought books knowing nothing about them in advance and having read only a page or two and the summary on the back. More often than not, I’ve liked the books I picked this way. There are, however, two or three books that I bought impulsively and have never really tried reading. Bookstores are also one of the few places where I feel like I can start a conversation with absolutely anyone. As long as they’re browsing the right sections, of course.

One time when I was similarly bored out of my mind and quite broke, I went to Landmark and decided to read an entire book at the store without buying it. This Landmark, like most other bookstores has a few sofas and a few people sitting around on the floor reading books so this isn’t that hard to do. I also wanted to (and still want to) read an entire book in a bookstore just as an accomplishment. I looked in the Literary Fiction shelf and found a small-enough book titled “A Slipping-Down Life” which was about an introverted teenage girl who gets infatuated with the singer of a rock band she likes or something like that. It seemed to be interesting, lighthearted, and pretty much what I needed.

I picked it up, found a sofa that would be out of people’s way and began reading it. It took a while for me to get comfortable and I’d initially move my legs each time anyone passed by even though they had enough space to walk. After a few pages, I didn’t care anymore. I stayed there for about an hour and a half and read about a fifth of the book. I’d have to come back four more times if I stayed for the same amount of time, or just twice if I stayed for three hours to finish the book. Disappointingly, I went back only a month later and I never found the book again.

I’m sure it’s not there anymore because the Literary Fiction section is now less than a third of how big it used to be. The Indian Writing section is huge, and in a way I guess that’s a good thing. The Religion section seems to be about the same size of what it used to be. Science fiction is now just one bookshelf. Literary Fiction and Science Fiction is where I spend most of my time in a bookshop, excluding the bestsellers section. At Landmark, this is now an approximate total shelf area of twelve-by-five feet. And even here, more than half of the books or authors are ones I’ve heard of before. I’ve seen more impressive collections of books in people’s houses. The possibility of finding an awesome new random book to read is greatly diminished. So yesterday I came back home empty handed and today I ordered a friend’s recommendation, “We Need To Talk About Kevin” from Flipkart so I should have it by Saturday.

A trip to Landmark still makes me feel better when I’m bored and they still have just as many sofas and people sitting on the floor and reading. It still does everything it used to do except its primary function, which is that I can’t go there to find a new book. I wouldn’t buy a bestseller because I can almost certainly find someone to borrow them from. I don’t buy books to keep them partly because I’m broke but mainly because I have no place at home to keep books. I read them, and then tell my friends about the ones I like and then tell them to borrow them if they’re interested. I need a bookstore to find a book because if I already knew what I wanted then I’d just order it online. I guess that’s the root of the problem, bookstores can’t be as profitable as they used to be now that everything’s available for cheaper online and so they sell other stuff as well. I guess the only way I could preview books in even remotely the same way before buying them would be if I bought an ebook reader. It would be awesome in a way. I could find authors online I’d never find in a bookstore. It’s just a little sad that I can find a new book, and separately have the experience of going to a bookstore, but I can’t have both together anymore.