1st year Report Card

Over a yr in NY now - submitted below, my take on "The City (..so nice, its spelt twice; New York, New York" - in case, you missed the 1st time I threw that quote out - Al Pacino in Devil's Advocate):

What amazes me: subways have beeen around for 101 yrs? They haven't changed much since, have they? :) If you get a chance, check out the obsolete switching mechanism at the W4 station, F line, platform end - whoaaa..

What still amazes me: forgive me for being trite - the diversity - more than being a melting pot, its a place where you can maintain your own identity, without trying too hard to fit in.

What amuses me: the number of grumbling single people living in a City culture which encourages being single (people stay single in NY only because they *want* to). NY claims to have 1.8 million single women to 1.4 million single men. As I like to extrapolate, if I was the last single guy in the City.. :) ..I'd have 400,001 women to choose from!

What I'd wish was different: cleaner? NY is the 2nd dirtiest city in the US..behind Chicago..

What I admire most: parks in NY - for an island so small, supporting that many people, with such a high density, to make the effort to make sure there are enough parks and greenery around talks volumes about planning. I'd love it if powers-to-be in Bangalore keeps like this in mind as it goes about merrily expanding at a maniacal pace right now.

What I've enjoyed most culturally: Indie movies* - have gone berserk in the last year. Top pick would definitely have to be Born Into Brothels, with Old Boy, Black Friday, & I Heart Huckabees right up there.

What I want to do more of: Off-broadway theater and indie music concerts - nothing like the live thing. Any day, prefer theater to movies - should get plugged into this a lot more - looking for like-minded people.

Favorite NY spot: Union Square - to stand there in the middle and look around, gives me the goose bumps - its my "can you believe you are actually in NY" spot.

Top did-you-know about NY: the breadth of Manhattan is just 2 miles - 2 miles!! That's it! And the length is 13 mi - still not much..

Favorite quote: NY is like a yarn of wool - one wonders how something that is wound up in so many different ways stays put as one ball. Think I read this in some Park Slope newsletter. I can also think of so many things that are so wrong about Gotham City, infrastructurally and otherwise, but it keeps sprinting along somehow..

Favorite Personal Quote: (which I often emplot to annoy people in other parts of the country) Every city is a wannabe (and gonnabe) New York; the latter gonnabe bit - when any city "advances" this much, I believe it will look something like this.

What next: move from wonderful Park Slope, Brooklyn to New York, New York

* - to digress, what qualifies for "indie movies" - anything that includes people doing lots of drugs, tons of sex, brooding a lot qualifies for decent indie movie; unless of course, its foreign. If its foreign, its got to be great, no questions :)

Google destroys everything it can't index

That was an Onion article a while back - not true, don't worry. But it bothers me that google now searches through blogs. Not me, but many maintain blogs to establish an unknown identity online - they'll just have to out-think the google PhD's now to stay anonymous.

I don't trust gmail - it scares me that my emails are being "read through" to drop ads on the side, meeting my "preferences". I read somewhere (as always, forgot *where* I read it, no it wasn't onion :)) that google is the new Microsoft - the company everyone loves to hate in silicon valley - google didn't endear themselves to me by making my blog accessible to anyone who searches for "bernoulli ashes" (don't ask me why anyone would do that :))

"Oh, so what did you think?"

Have succumbed twice to this fad of reading the most popular book doing the rounds - the last time it was Da Vinci Code, now it is Freakonomics - everyone either just read it, has an opinion on it, is meaning to read it, saw someone reading it - no exaggeration, last wkend, traveling with it in hand, I had 4 strangers make conversation with me about the book (and considering 3 of them were women and 2 of them good looking at that, gimme more of these books! :)).

It's a quick page-turner, easy-to-read, interesting book. The authors accumulate huge amount of statistics, plough through the data aloud with the reader, and arrive at an often-unexpected conclusion that leaves me raising an eyebrow sometimes. My favorite pieces were the one on the clinical dismantling of the Ku Klux Klan and the "audit report" (and such functioning financials) of the Black Gangster Disciple Nation accumulated by a very brave, certain, Sudhir Venkatesh. The analysis to prove teachers cheat too was nicely done. The pieces on abortion (being a never-before-cited reason for crime rates falling in the late 90's..yes! - most quotable piece from the book though..) and parenting left me a tad unconvinced.

Its also one of those great cocktail party books - picture this - wine in hand, art in the background, impeccably dressed in black, exhausted talking about weather, war, Katrina, and the President, now what?..Freakonomics; eliciting the response, "oh, so what did you think?"

Random indeed...

Over the last few hours some quotes/lines that stayed stuck in my head..

The highest tree catches the strongest winds - Peter Roebuck, Ashes 5th test preview
Emotion is the absolute enemy of rational thinking - Stephen Levitt, Freakonomics
Cancel my subscription to the Resurrection - Jim Morrison, The End
They share a drink called loneliness, but its better than drinking alone - Billy Joel, Piano Man