Reflections of a Survivor

I was tagged by Mathew and Dhanya. The rules of the tag are that you must write 8 facts about yourself and then tag another 8 innocents. You asked for it, so here it is:

1. I have never used or owned a laptop. I am planning to buy a laptop to improve my productivity. It will help me in continuing my work uninterrupted during power failures (which is quite often) and during thunder and lightning (which is also quite often).
2. I have never owned a mobile phone and my total talk time on the cell phone is under 30 minutes. I belong to the pre-mobile phone era, and on any day prefer the POT (Plain Old Telephone) to the fancy mobile phones.
3. I have never used or owned an iPod or any other portable music systems; not even a Walkman or Discman. I hate all sorts of portable music systems. I hate headphones and all equipments that need headphones. But I love music and have an excellent collection of old Malayalam and Hind movie songs, Western, Carnatic and Hindustani classical music and soft and soothing instrumental music. I prefer to have music in the background when I am writing or reading. But when I want to listen and enjoy music, I prefer to sit with the lights off and blinds closed and listen to the music with my eyes closed.
4. I am interested in a wide variety of topics—from technical to fiction, philosophy to photography, cooking to cartoons, teaching to learning, writing to publishing, medicine, automobiles, and the list goes on… Some of the skills that I wanted to learn but failed to master are playing a musical instrument (violin and piano), drawing, sketching, and painting, new languages (Spanish, French, Latin and Japanese) etc. Some of the skills I did not want to learn but had to master are coding, typesetting, indexing, copyediting, etc.
5. I write for a living and read for living. At any time, I will be working on at least 2–3 books and reading at least 1–2 books. Also, at any time I will have at least 5–6 book projects in the conceptualization, research, content development and other pre-writing stages. Also I will always have a reading backlog of more than 20–30 books.
   Some of the books that I can read any number of times are Asterix, TinTin, Sherlock Holmes, Artemis Fowl, Harry Potter, and a number of novels, technical and books on English language. Some of my favorite authors are Friedrich Nietzsche, Sun Tzu, Khalil Gibran, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Richard Bach, Joseph Heller, J.T. Edson, Jeffrey Archer, Clive Cussler, Robin Cook, Frederick Brooks, Steve Mcconnell, Watts S. Humphrey, and many others
6. I love pens, pencils, notebooks, spiral notebooks, writing pads, etc. I have more than 30 pens and thousands of pencils. I particularly like yellow pencils with the eraser at one end and have hundreds of them. I also like color pencils and sketch pens (but I hate crayons). My favorite pen in my collection is the Mont Blanc 75^th Special Anniversary Edition Le Grande Fountain pen.
7. I love cooking and good food. I am an excellent cook (even though not as deadly as Mathew or as good as Anjali). But these days, all I do is armchair cooking—giving directions. I have an excellent collection of cookery books. I used to be an excellent bartender (at college and during the various parties) and used to make and consume a lot of cocktails.
8. The last time I saw a movie in a theatre was in November 1993. I saw it at the Casino theatre, Madras. The name of the movie was The Scent of a Woman. I loved the movie, especially the Oscar winning performance of Al Pacino and equally heart-warming performance by Chris O’Donnell.

I am not tagging anyone. But if someone who has an interesting life and equally interesting things to say about them, please go ahead and take the tag…