All the time we were growing up my father would buy books and always say the same thing: "I'll read them when I retire." He retired seven years ago. And though I tried everything from leaving books where he might see them to directly telling him how wonderful a particular book was to get him to start reading, nothing worked. A nod, a shrug and the matter ended there. From Travels with Charley to Churchill's Triumph, they all met the same fate. Until a couple of days ago, my sister got him The Da Vinci Code. ''He'll read it I tell you,'' she said, "he read the blurb at the back." So what, I replied. He does that all the time. But surprise surprise, a ticket he usually uses as a bookmark is now at page 50 I think. What can I say? Thank you, Dan Brown.

I’m geographically challenged. I have little sense of direction and I can never remember how one road connects to another.
I thank my stars I live in a linear city like Bombay and not a roundabout one like Delhi or one with a hajaar lanes and bylanes like Pune.
Lanes befuddle me and all highrises look the same. I try to keep landmarks in mind, I really do. For a long time, when I had to commute to Prabhadevi, I kept in mind a huge hoarding of some product that loomed just before my destination. It served me well — until they changed it. Since it was not replaced with anything quite distinctive, I thought it better to leave it to the bus conductor to let me know where to get off. It follows that I often find myself at the mercy of cab and rickshaw drivers too.
It’s not that I can’t remember some other landmark. But soon as I get into a vehicle or a train, I seem to space out. I look up from my book or my thoughts and suddenly realize that I am well and truly lost. I hurriedly clamber to the exit until I get my bearings and figure out if it was the last stop I was supposed to get off at or the next one. Much to the amusement of those around.
There’s a road that leads from the Bandra-Kurla complex to Ghatkopar. Every night, I would be speeding on the wide road and somehow, almost magically, find myself in the streets of Ghatkopar. I wanted to figure out how that happened. For several nights I tried to be alert to watch where the car turned. But it must be something about long, wide roads. I still don’t know.
A friend of mine dropped me home from Andheri a few times. It took this friend just a couple of trips to figure out the shortest route. Me? I’m still clueless. It has given way to a quiz. “So, what’s around the next corner?” Giving a correct answer leaves me immensely pleased. Though the fact that my friend had been in the city for hardly two years while I’ve lived here all my life did cause some embarrassment.
Did. Note the past tense. I agonized over road names and tried hard to jog my memory for a long, long time to ensure that I knew exactly where I was. Until I read something in an essay by Tim Cahill called ‘Getting Lost’: “Consider your predicament a privilege,” he says. “In a world so shrunken that certain people refer to ‘the global village,’ the term ‘explorer’ has little meaning. But exploration is nothing more than a foray into the unknown, and a four-year-old child, wandering about alone in the department store, fits the definition as well as the snow-blind man wandering across the Khyber Pass. The explorer is the person who is lost. When you’ve managed to stumble directly into the heart of the unknown — either through the misdirection of others, or better yet, through your own creative ineptitude … in those bad lost moments, in the times we are advised not to panic, we own the unknown, and the world belongs to us … Few of us are ever so free.”
Yes, I quite like discovering things anew.