Minimal: Dreaming of a Phone that Does Less

By doing less than most modern conventional smartphones, the Minimal Phone promises to give you back some of your life. I want the Minimal Phone now!

Much as I hate to admit it, my life has been taken over by my smartphone. I’m a slave to an innocuous, 6.5-inch slab of glass and metal. It’s a pocketable supercomputer that allows me to make phone calls (both voice and video calls), access emails, take photographs and instantly share those with whoever I want to, send and receive text messages, photos and videos, make and receive payments instantly (I hardly ever carry cash these days), do all my online shopping, help me navigate across the city, book cabs, flights and hotel rooms… the list is endless. The sheer range of things that a modern smartphone will allow you to do is nothing short of astonishing.

I was a tech journalist until the early-2000s and used to write about computers and technology. This was 25 years ago and if someone had suggested at that time that there would, in the future, be a small, pocketable device – a 'smartphone' – that would allow you to do all of what I’ve mentioned above, I would have probably thought the idea quite preposterous. After all, I was still going to a PCO (anyone remember those?) to make international calls in the early-1990s, when I was in Bareilly. By the late-1990s I had moved to Bombay, started working as tech writer for CHIP magazine and subsequently started using a Nokia 5110, my very first mobile phone. Making and receiving calls was still prohibitively expensive back then, and I used that phone sparingly. Gradually, call rates dropped over the years and the ancient 5110 was replaced by the sleek little Nokia 8210, but usage was still restricted to only making and receiving phone calls, and sending and receiving text messages.

Going to the Movies: Then vs Now

Both, the kind of movies I watch and the way I watch those, has changed completely over the years...

I haven’t been inside a movie theatre in… I don’t know, maybe 16-17 years. I do watch a fair number of movies, but most of the time that’s on my PC monitor, a 27-inch LG unit, with the PC itself being hooked up to a pair of powerful Edifier stereo speakers. And since I’m usually the only one in our house who watches the movies I watch, this setup works just fine for me – I don’t really feel the need to get a 65-inch TV or visit a movie theatre. But it wasn’t always like this. Allow me to explain.

Ducati Monster 821 Riding Impression

Though not the most powerful Ducati I've ever ridden, the Monster 821 was still a lot of fun

Over the years, I’ve had an opportunity to ride various Ducatis, including the hardcore 848, Hypermotard 1100S, Monster 795, XDiavel S and Monster 821. The 821 I rode in 2016, when I was working with Auto Tech Review magazine. Here is the piece I wrote about the bike at that time.

 Launched way back in 1993, the very first Ducati Monster was the machine that kick-started the ‘streetfighter’ segment in Europe, which has now become very popular. Designed by Argentinian industrial designer, Miguel Galluzzi, the first Monster was powered by a 900cc V-twin borrowed from the Ducati 900 Supersport, and had a steel-tube trellis frame that was based on the Ducati 851 superbike chassis. With more than 350,000 units of the Monster having been sold since 1993, the bike remains one of their most successful products for the Italian company and there have been many iterations of the bike over the last two decades. Coming to the 821, let’s take a look at the suite of technologies underlying this Monster, which make it an excellent sportsbike.

Book Review: Arriving Today

I looked up my order history on Amazon and the first thing I ever ordered on Amazon was on 28^th September 2014. That first order was a book, Dan Walsh’s These are the Days That Must Happen to You, which I quite enjoyed reading and which I still have in my small collection of books. That year, I placed a total of five orders on Amazon, all of which comprised only books. Since then, over the last 10 years, I have placed close to 1,100 orders, comprising books, clothes, shoes, watches, mobile phones, chocolates, cookies, headphones, power banks, random toiletries, chairs and tables, cupboards, air-conditioners… the list is pretty much endless. 

Whenever we need to buy something – almost anything – for the house, my wife and I automatically default to opening up the Amazon app on our phones. More often than not, we don’t even think of visiting local malls and markets – buying on Amazon is just so much easier. But I have to admit, I’d never given much thought to what buying on Amazon entails in the context of what happens behind the scenes, in terms of the global supply chain that kicks in when we place an order online, and the mind-boggling logistics that need to be worked out by ecommerce companies in order to get our orders delivered on time. And that is exactly what Christopher Mims tells us in his book, Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door - Why Everything HasChanged About How and What We Buy.

In Conversation with Dick Powell, Designer of the Rotary-engined Norton F1

Above, from left: Richard Seymour and Dick Powell, designers of the legendary rotary-engined Norton F1, a quite unique motorcycle from the early-1990s, which still has its own dedicated fan base today

Dick Powell is co-founder of Seymourpowell, a well-known UK-based design company with a formidable portfolio of work. Set up in 1984, Seymourpowell has designed everything from cordless kettles mobile phones, cars, trains, planes and, yes, motorcycles. Along with the other co-founder, Richard Seymour, Dick Powell designed the rotary-engined Norton F1, an iconic machine and one that I’m a big fan of. Back in 2016, I had an opportunity to do an interview with Dick Powell and ask him a few questions about the legendary Norton. Here are some excerpts from the conversation.

Land Rover Defender 110 Driving Impression

The Land Rover Defender 110 looks good, drives well and costs the earth!

I had a chance to drive and review the Land Rover Defender 110, back in 2021, for Man’s World magazine. I’m not really a huge fan of SUVs and fast, sporty cars (like the Audi S5, which I love so much!) are more my kind of thing. Still, for what it’s worth, I quite liked the Defender 110 and enjoyed the experience of driving it - more for its sheer size and road presence rather than its driving dynamics. Anyway, here is the article I wrote for the magazine.

What’s an SUV? That isn’t always an easy question to answer these days. Buyers across segments don’t seem to want cars anymore; everyone wants an SUV. So, of course, every car wants to be an SUV, which is why you have softroaders, crossovers, compact SUVs, SUV-inspired hatchbacks and more. Marketing types everywhere know a good idea when they see one; take a regular hatchback, jack it up a bit for slightly increased ride height, slap on a bigger set of wheels, bolt on some plastic cladding on the sides and on the wheelarches, add an extra dollop or two of chrome, give it a fancy new paintjob and a cool sounding name, and there you have it, a brand-new SUV for the unsuspecting masses!

Ducati XDiavel S: Italian Easy Rider

The Ducati XDiavel S remains one of the most beautiful motorcycles I've ever ridden

It’s hard to slot the Ducati XDiavel S into a specific segment or category. Is it a sportsbike? A cruiser? Touring bike? The reality is, the XDiavel S is a machine that dares to defy segmentation – brimming with cutting-edge engineering, design and technology, it’s a bike that looks like a cruiser, has the engine performance of a sportsbike, and with its adjustable ergonomics, it’s comfortable enough for long-distance riding. Even the handling is not too bad, as long as you keep in mind this isn’t exactly a Panigale.

I got to spend a few days with the XDiavel back in 2017, when I was the executive editor at Auto Tech Review magazine. Here’s what I wrote about the bike at that time.

Off the Shelf: The Rise and Fall of BooksFirst

Back in October 2022, I started working on setting up a new website, BooksFirst, which I finally launched in December that year. This website was supposed to be a useful, interesting online resource for people who love books. Or, more specifically, non-fiction books. And the objective was to go beyond just book reviews, book excerpts and book launches – regular books website stuff. I’ve always been an ardent reader and had, over the years, developed a keen interest in the book publishing business and how things work in publishing. And so, with BooksFirst, my objective was to find interesting stories from the world of books and publishing and bring those stories to the world. The site featured writers, authors, journalists, illustrators, designers, photographers, librarians, book publishers, book retailers and many others who were simply passionate about books and reading. They had an eclectic selection of stories to tell – about their work, about the book(s) they've written, about the books they read, about the authors they like – and I did my best to bring those stories to fellow book lovers.

The Cooking of Books: A Literary Memoir

‘The strangely enduring and occasionally fractious friendship that developed between the famously outspoken historian [and book author] Ramachandra Guha and his reticent editor Rukun Advani is the subject of this quite eccentric and thoroughly compelling literary memoir,’ says the publisher’s note, about The Cooking of Books: A Literary Memoir, which was published by Juggernaut Books earlier this year. ‘Built around letters and emails between an outgoing and occasionally combative scholar and a reclusive editor prone to private outbursts of savage sarcasm, this book is never short of the kind of wit, humour, and drollery that has been strangled by contemporary political correctness,’ it adds.

We are told that the Guha-Advani relationship, which has survived ‘forty years of epistolary exchanges and intellectual sparring,’ started in Delhi in the early 1980s, a time when Guha was still an unpublished Ph.D scholar and Advani a greenhorn editor with the Oxford University Press (OUP). ‘The relationship grew and blossomed through the 1990s, when Guha grew into a pioneering historian of the environment and of cricket, while also writing his pathbreaking biography of Verrier Elwin. Over these years, Advani was Guha’s most constant confidant, his most reliable reader. He encouraged him to craft and refine the literary style for which Guha became internationally known – narrative histories that have made vast areas of scholarship popular and accessible,’ says the publisher’s note.

Publishing industry veteran, Sridhar Balan, who joined the Oxford University Press in 1985 and spent close to two decades working there, shares his own memories of OUP in the context of Guha’s memoir. Balan, who worked alongside Rukun Advani at OUP and was witness to the exchanges that took place between him and Ramachandra Guha, writes about their working relationship in his own inimitable manner, which is a joy to read and, as a review of the book itself, provides an excellent primer to what you can expect to read in The Cooking of Books.