A year after blogging about the usefulness of honks in India, the quietest of motor vehicles may soon come with an added safety feature. (I’m in no way inferring causality here. These are just two blobs on my event calendar.) This piece of news fascinates me in that it reflects our dependency on the sounds around us—we have grown reliant on the purring of a car motor as a gauge of its distance to us.
I remember that as a kid, one of my daily games was to guess who was …

On the streets of Mumbai, “Ok Honk Please” is inscribed on the back of most trucks carrying goods. The traffic here is mad. There are no lane markings on many major roads—travelling 5 cars abreast? If there’s space, why not? Where space allows, U-turns are made; trying to make a turn but you’re on the wrong lane? Just stop the car in the middle of the road and wait for the turn opportunity to arise. If the street’s jammed up, why not drive on the free lane that’s meant for …

Do you make your parking decisions based on the ins or the outs? In Japan, much like in Singapore, parking lots are designed for “butt in” and most drivers do park “butt in”. The desire for safety when one leaves a spot (as opposed to the convenience of “head in,” which most American drivers seem to prefer) seems to be the common reason among these “butt in” parkers. Here in this parking lot, the “head in” parkers seem to have gone against the regulated traffic direction.

How do you determine if your food is fresh? Our expectations of fresh food seem to have extended beyond live animals to expiration dates, and now, see-through packaging of dried food. In the home of instant noodles, cup noodles with clear caps are not yet the norm. But with the option of looking into a cup of dried noodles, what exactly would you be looking out for? Freshness? The correct number of condiment packets?