I am a toilet person.

It’s amusing and mildly embarrassing to read that line I have written above, but it is the truth. I am a toilet person because this is the space where for those 15 minutes of crapping you have the license to be cut off from the world. You don’t have to answer calls, reply to e-mails or feel guilty about reading a book when you should be working. It is this solitary haven that you can escape to whenever nature calls, in a world populated with far too many people.

I have been cautious with admitting this fact. I think I have only subjected two people to this thought so far, both of whom reacted with contorted faces of disgust. But I now have validation!

From Natural Novel by Georgi Gospodinov (not necessarily a literary genius but endlessly imaginative and bloody entertaining). Excerpt from what seems to be a dinner table conversation between 3 people:

‘In your toilet at home you can go at any time, even if you don’t need too. You can stay for hours, read a book or read cartoons. You can simply rest your chin on the palm of your hand and think. No other room gives you such privacy. This is the most important room, you know. The most important room.’

… ‘Those are private rituals, for your eyes only. Because nobody sees you there. I don’t think even God looks at you.’

And other insanely funny stuff including a diversionary chapter on the Great History of the Toilet and reflections like:

‘When I was a kid, I went to the village movie theatre and wondered why nobody ever went to the toilet. All those Indians, cowboys, entire Roman legions (LOL) and no one took a shit or peed.’ [Stuff in parentheses added by me.]

Lest you be dissuaded from the book, it is about a writer getting a divorce. The above and several other topics are just the protagonist’s thought diversions.

In my attempt to find a relevant photo for this post, found these two hilarious ones:

And a Flickr group on toilets! http://www.flickr.com/groups/toilets/pool/

I’m back! After several days – I’ve finally managed to unlock my mind again – to toss out those pointless nuggets of wisdom to the world and causing much embarrassment to myself. What had happened? I don’t know – guess I had gotten stuck into the work routine rather intensely – refusing to give myself that time to reflect and contemplate. I had become too cautious of what I put out there giving up the opportunity to make a fool of myself. So what changed? After several months I finally downloaded a couple of podcasts from the Stanford Entrepreneurship Corner and listened to Jeff Housenbold – the CEO of Shutterfly and Tom Kelley from IDEO. Tom’s talk was fantastic and woke me up. Guess I need to do this podcast and random reading thing as often as I used to. As Tom says – treat life like an experiment.

So what’s this one about? It about Schadenfreude. The happiness that humans experience upon others’ misfortunes. You’ve always felt it – but did you know there was a word for it?

A very common feeling, which unless you’ve actually heard the word – making it an identifable part of the human condition – is otherwise followed by feelings of guilt and remorse.

I think it’s fascinating that words exist in other languages which actually capture something so succintly, and in another language you need a full sentence to explain it. It’s just make the very experience immediately relatable because when you know there’s a word for it – you know that you’re not the only one experiencing it.

Of course we all know Deja Vu. I remember reading this fantastic book by Milan Kundera called The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (which I now intend to carry with me to Goa and reread) – which has a short story called ‘Litost’. Litost is an untransalatable Czech word that ‘represents a state of torment caused by the sudden sight of one’s misery’ – Kundera says that he finds it difficult to imagine how one can understand the human soul without it. More on it once I’ve reread it.

Any Hindi words?

My year.

Businessweek has published a list of what they feel were the best books on innovation this year.

http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/12/1215_best_design_books/index.htm

My wish-to-reads: A book which talks about doodling as a management tool, Clay Shirky’s book & Groundswell on Social Media, and Numerati – data from your web browsing being used to create highly customised products. Also a book on Pixar which gets an honorary mention.

When you have a small company, you should celebrate every little victory with aplomb. I just realised that we haven’t spent enough time compiling mentions of iTasveer in mainstream media. While digital media is a Google search away – conventional media is more difficult to collate after a point in time – and to be honest – still holds more charm than being covered by a blog – there, I said it. An attempt to collect some stuff that I remember.

NDTV [Sometime in 2007]

An amusing interview done at IIT Delhi which required at least 3 retakes of us looking at a flying plane (a cheesy shot supposed to indicate ambition).

PC World [May 2007]

The Best Website for Photo Printing ! :D

IBN Live [August 2007]

http://ibnlive.in.com/videos/47739/sites-for-printing-pics-online–hottest-search-engine-goes-desi.html

itasveer.com – ‘The Champion’!

There was another story, which I had found on a competitor’s blog – also to be tracked down.

HT Business [Around June 2008]

Have to track down the article.

Indian Express [October 2008]

‘Photo shop’

Post to be updated – as and when I locate a story.

Having made one prior post on credit sequences, I am now doomed to notice and be affected by them for the rest of my life (which is a good thing mostly). Recently watched Wall-E and was completely blown away by the mini works-of-art that populate its end credits.

Their closing credit sequence traces the history of human evolution (re-evolution actually – with help from the robots) – with animation drawing upon the style of painting across generations – you have Egyptian Hieloglyphics, Rennaissance (or the art fool that I am thinks it was) and more – mindblowing. The following credit roll has an ATARI style retelling of the entire Wall-E story. Funky stuff.

Oh and don’t miss the the animation clip about the magician and his rabbit which preceded the movie. Besides being absolutely hilarious – what’s even more interesting is how they have played with the modified physics  – the fact that the the hat serves as a portal to the rabbit and vice-versa. It reminded me of the PS3 video game Portal.

Some links to go: http://abduzeedo.com/7-beautiful-title-credit-sequence-designs

http://theamericanscene.com/2008/07/01/tas-walle-symposium-entry-iv-exit-art-for-a-film.

Just noticed – Veerle Pieters – kickass Belgian graphic designer – also made a post on movie credit sequences as part of her inspiration series.

Ad seen for Amity scholarships on Facebook.

The ad linked here: http://www.amity.edu/scholarships/

Also observe the nifty strategy to save clicks and advertising money – “Click only if you are brilliant” ! Hahaha.

Yay! I successfully set up port forwarding on my internet connection. I was finding it a bit tricky since I use a wireless router – and all the guides I had found specified how to do it with your DSL modem.

In retrospect, it should have been quite obvious, but I guess most things are once you have done them. It turned out I had to set up two forwards, one on my modem, where I had to specify the IP address of my router, and the other on the router where I had to specify the address of my computer. 

This article helped: http://lc.netcomm.com.au/nat.html

So did this tool: http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/open-ports/

Bessemer venture partners has an interesting page with a list of companies they did not invest in, which went on to become really successful. The bit on Google is hilarious.

http://www.bvp.com/Portfolio/AntiPortfolio.aspx

Link via http://www.venturehacks.com

As all the new year wishes sound stale and delayed, Crashpodel comes back to life and decides to blog again. What has been happening? It’s all been a daze.

This post was supposed to draw upon a memorable/depressing Vegas trip, to lazy days at bro’s house spent thinking about work, life and love. But, I am leaving it at that and making this post a back to blogging – ‘Hello World Again’ equivalent.

All the rest shall follow – hopefully in actions, if not also or alone in words.