Monday, August 21, 2006

Wanted

We need a new cell phone. Il Professori gave us hell this weekend (in an NRI accent, "Tum India ka beggar log is type ka phone leke kya ukhaadta hai" and so on...) for not having a fully functional phone. He showed us his. It looks like the Starship Enterprise's command console. We are more modest. Desired specs below. Will our readers (numberless as the sands of Araby), please help us find one?

Brand: Nokia
Type: Monoblock, candy bar, whatever...
Camera: NO!!!
Connectivity: USB, Infrared, Bluetooth
Java/J2ME: MIDP 2.0, CLDC 1.1 device, with decent max JAR size and RAM
Misc: Pluggable, extensible, memory type things; a decent size (500+) address book; FM radio; battery life; speakerphone and so on.

Dream phone: E60. Costs upward of Rs. 19,000.

6233 will work fine too. Except that it too is pricey. Rs. 14,000 types.

The 6230i is a recent entrant in these sweepstakes, but not sure what it costs.

Finally, the ideal value-for-money phone would've been the redoubtable 6021. Unfortunately, they don't make this phone, or anything like it any more. [Note to self: Send booby trap with thermonuclear warhead to an address in Finland.]

Help!!

PS: Under duress, we're willing to relax the "no camera" restriction. Bleah.

PPS: We're dangerously on the verge of dropping this whole Nokia obsession and getting the muchly delicious looking Motorola SLVR.

Sunday, August 06, 2006

A Poem

To His Lost Lover
    -Simon Armitage

Now they are no longer
any trouble to each other

he can turn things over, get down to that list
of things that never happened, all of the lost

unfinishable business.
For instance ... for instance,

how he never clipped and kept her hair, or drew a hairbrush
through that style of hers, and never knew how not to blush

at the fall of her name in close company.
How they never slept like buried cutlery -

two spoons or forks cupped perfectly together,
or made the most of heavy weather -

walked out into hard rain under sheet lightning,
or did the gears while the other was driving.

How he never raised his fingertips
to stop the segments of her lips

from breaking the news,
or tasted the fruit,

or picked for himself the pear of her heart,
or lifted her hand to where his own heart

was a small, dark, terrified bird
in her grip. Where it hurt.

Or said the right thing,
or put it in writing.

And never fled the black mile back to his house
before midnight, or coaxed another button of her blouse,

then another,
or knew her

favourite colour,
her taste, her flavour,

and never ran a bath or held a towel for her,
or soft-soaped her, or whipped her hair

into an ice-cream cornet or a beehive
of lather, or acted out of turn, or misbehaved

when he might have, or worked a comb
where no comb had been, or walked back home

through a black mile hugging a punctured heart,
where it hurt, where it hurt, or helped her hand

to his butterfly heart
in its two blue halves.

And never almost cried,
and never once described

an attack of the heart,
or under a silk shirt

nursed in his hand her breast,
her left, like a tear of flesh

wept by the heart,
where it hurts,

or brushed with his thumb the nut of her nipple,
or drank intoxicating liquors from her navel.

Or christened the Pole Star in her name,
or shielded the mask of her face like a flame,

a pilot light,
or stayed the night,

or steered her back to that house of his,
or said 'Don't ask me to say how it is

I like you.
I just might do.'

How he never figured out a fireproof plan,
or unravelled her hand, as if her hand

were a solid ball
of silver foil

and discovered a lifeline hiding inside it,
and measured the trace of his own alongside it.

But said some things and never meant them -
sweet nothings anybody could have mentioned.

And left unsaid some things he should have spoken,
about the heart, where it hurt exactly, and how often.