I dream of a library…

Growing up, my first library was the local kirana(grocery) store that used to keep a big stack of Hindi comics like billu, pinky, chacha chowdhary, phantom, commando Dhruv etc.

Characters from my first ‘library’ books!

Then from 2nd grade onward it was school library, where I got introduced to Noddy, Ruskin Bond, Enid Blyton, Nancy Drew, Heidi, black beauty, little women and many more. That was also when the nearby book club had Tinkle, Champak and Chandamama. In junior classes we had to sit on the ground around a low table and in senior classes there were proper table and chairs… I so looked forward to library period, half an hour of stories! 🙂

We read in a F or an E?

Reading pattern: F? E? C?

I’m sure content managers must be aware of this fact, but for me it was an interesting find! I have recently started working on a blog on volunteering and I was reading a few articles on what and how do people consume content online. I didn’t quite care about SEO for Lime ‘n’ Lemony or even Weekend Kitchen but for Volunteer Weekly I wanted to know at least some basics. Keywords, meta-description, analytics, web master tools etc were all bizarre buzzwords until now! Anyway one of the studies that fascinated me was that we read a website in a F!

It comes from Neilsen Jakob’s eye-tracking study. What it means?

1. We first read in a horizontal movement, usually across the upper part of the content area – forming the letter F’s top bar
2. We then move down a bit and read across in a second horizontal movement which is typically shorter than the first one – forming the lower bar of the letter F.
3. Finally we scan the left side of the content vertically, thus forming F’s stem.

I was relating it to the way I read all the academic papers also. Most often we used to read the introduction and conclusion and would scan through the rest of the article, reading the heading and sub-headings and would read another one or two sections that would have the analysis. I guess that would make it like an E! and if time was really short we would entirely skip the middle.. making it a C pattern! 😀

Anyway however we read, I guess the point is to put important things right in the beginning! 🙂

Another interesting thing which a web-designer friend of mine told me was on the width of a website – he told me that 980px (or 960px) is the ideal width for a webpages, because that is the width the eye can read without moving from left to right. Any bigger than that and you can’t read it in one go.

Isn’t it interesting how different fields bring out human behavior! Do you know of any other such study? would love to read about them 🙂

Writings from the past

Look I found my mother’s old diary!

I was inspired to write this post after reading Michelle’s Pieces of the Past. They have this beautiful bed and breakfast in Virginia, steeped in history. And they keep adding to that history. I always love her antique shopping pictures especially the tea-sets!

My find is not as exciting as Michelle’s who found letters that are more than 100 years old. But I found my mother’s old notebook :). I don’t know how old it is; and mummy also doesn’t remember when she wrote that but on page there is a number – 8.9.84 – which I assume is a date, so the notebook is 28 years old.

Yellowed pages, torn edges, dog corners… I opened the notebook with such curiosity as if I’m going to unravel some mystery or learn something new about my mom :). What excited me most is that it has recipes! 🙂 There are recipes like Apple Butter, Mango Jam, Orange Squash, Almond Syrup, Tomato Ketchup… More inspiration for My Weekend Kitchen! Mummy didn’t even remember she had a notebook like this until I showed it to her…actually because of the recipes, she might have lent it to my maasi and it was she who gave me this notebook during my last trip to Delhi.

Mango Jam, Orange Squash and many more…

Apart from recipe what caught my interest were the last few pages where she has done her household accounts..

Monthly household accounts
100 School fees; 100 Bank; 200 Ghar ka Samaan; 162.50 Milk; 45 Dance; 15 Taxi

I’m sure since taxi was a luxury it got mentioned in the monthly accounts and the bus fares did not.. Also I learned that didi used to go for some dance classes (Since I was only 3 at that time, I realized the fee must be for didi). At one place it’s also written ‘Mrs Pareek 25 Rs; Sawairam 14 Rs’ Maybe I should remind her that she has to either take from or give back this amount to them!

With our generation usually maintaining everything in e-documents, I really feel sad that our children will not have the pleasure of finding and going through diaries of their parents that have yellowed with time. That they would actually be saying ‘Look I found my mother’s old blog’!

If you liked this post, you might also want to read my other experiences of discovering old things 🙂

-When I discovered my Grandad’s old journal and learnt that he wrote shayari!

-On ‘actually’ ‘physically’ writing something. When was the last time you wrote at length on a real piece of paper?

Every time I hit that “publish” button…

Today my mind was on fire with ideas of things to post about on this blog.. and I knew I had to jot those ideas down else I will soon forget them. During my recent visit to Gurgaon, I saw my sister still carried a diary in her bag which she used to write random thoughts that came to her mind during the day.. When I asked her “Why don’t you use your phone for that purpose”; she replied saying “because I feel I should write otherwise we never actually write down anything”. And I totally agree with her, a lot of times I feel I’ve forgotten how to write.. Once when I was in 4^th standard I had come 3^rd in a calligraphy content in school and right now I’m ashamed to tell that to anyone because if they see my handwriting now, pple will say I’m joking!

So I decided to write down those thoughts in a diary.. and I knew I had a new, small handmade diary somewhere. While searching for the new diary, I found an old treasure!! I found my travel journal during our Brazil and Europe trip in 2008. It was so much fun reading those entries now; it was almost like revisiting those places.. I was back in the Rio carnival dancing to samba tunes; I was back in Brussels tasting amazing chocolate flavours at Pierre Marcolini; I was back in Paris being astonished by the Greek gods and other exhibits in the Louvre.. Oh! I can’t express the joy of reading the diary again :). Anyway, so it was during that time that I had finalised the idea of this blog and I actually have an entry on the day my blog went live.. I smiled on reading that entry.. how excited I was …just like a child who has found a new toy :). Here’s the first entry that I wrote about this virtual diary in my real diary almost 4 years ago!

 

Even to this day every post on this blog is an excitement for me…. Every time after hitting that publish button; I have this anxiety that whether people will want to read, what I wrote? Whether what I wrote is good enough? Writing didn’t come naturally to me and that one of the reasons why I wanted to start a blog because I wanted to learn it! Earlier I used to spend a lot of time over each post, trying to get the language correct but now it’s become easier… I guess it does get easy with time. I realised it’s okay to make mistakes in language as far as you are writing something that you want to share… that you would like to read if someone else had written it on their blog.

How do you feel when you hit that ‘publish’ button on anything? Would love to read your experience 🙂

I’ve forgotten how to write…

In my school, we used pencils until Std V and then moved on to fountain pens from Std VI. We wrote on ruled pages. The English notebook had four sets of lines in earlier grades to ensure that we write letters in proper proportions. I don’t see those notebooks anywhere now (unless you specifically look for them in the calligraphy section)..instead I do see grid notebooks. Guess they solve the same purpose. I remember how we had to copy the sample handwriting our teacher provided and she wouldn’t be satisfied until every curve was in place.

Good Handwriting. Something that was the norm has actually become an art now. First with the coming of ball pens and later the most common culprit of spoiling all things good and old – the computer (or more precisely word processor!).

The last time I wrote a real letter was in 2000, when email was not so common (at least with my parents’ generation) and phones were expensive. We may say technology has brought us closer, made ‘staying in touch’ easier; but it surely has taken away the personal touch. (This somewhat relates to my earlier post of an ‘online hug’). Emails have replaced snail mails, e-cards have replaced real cards, picture messages have replaced postcards.. I no longer feel the need to check my ‘snail’ mailbox because I know it would be a phone bill or a credit card bill, which would anyway come via e-statement as well!

But I’m digressing from the real reason of this post. So I have my exams in 20 days and they are each 3 hours exam requiring us to ‘write’ some 12 pages of social policy stuff. All theoretical and requiring lots and lots of writing. So my supervisor advised that since the last time I gave an exam was 6 years ago and that too a quantitative one which didn’t need so much of writing, I should practice giving a mock exam at home and just answer one question for an hour. Me like a very obedient student wrote and I was shocked first at my handwriting and second by the fact that my wrist was hurting so badly that writing with the same speed for another 2 continuous hours was almost impossible. Though one comforting thought was that its legible and I think that’s what they care.

I look at my supervisor’s comments in the margins of my paper and I can’t make heads or tails out of it. I literally had to take it back to him to decipher. There are jokes about how only a chemist can understand a doctor’s writing. Somewhere, during the great inventions and innovations we lost the art of handwriting, because there no longer was a need for it. The only analogy I can come up with is that man lost his tail during the evolution process because it was rendered useless. Soon signatures will also become redundant (they have already started to be replaced by digital versions or passwords). Fountain pens have become a thing of past or those very high end ones which are no more than style statements. Chalks are no longer required in classrooms; everyone uses Microsoft PowerPoint for giving lectures. Will kids now, not know how much fun throwing chalks was?

My mom has a BIG box full of letters, which my dad wrote while they were courting.. and I just have an envelope with some cards and few letters because we belong to the email generation and calling is no longer expensive 😦

Ironically, diaries have made way for blogs!