Zen and the Zen of Motorcycle Something
→ February 27, 2026 | Reading time: 6 minutes | Permalink
It’s been a while since that last semisuccessful attempt at wordplay in the post title. I say ‘semi’ only because I am a prime-ish example of how humility works etcetera and not because it was halfbaked-slash-unoriginal in a semifulfilling way. Anyway.
In other news, post much trepidation (brand-appropriate), hesitation (just appropriate), and calculation (GST-appropriate), we brought home a Himalayan (the 450 in Kaza Brown) the day before Onam last year.
I was a fan of the 411 from the day it launched and had been drooling over first-second-third-hand market listings ever since. Post turning 36, watching reviews back to back wasn’t doing anything to calm down the good-old early midlife crisis. I decided to go take a test ride. R was more than fully supportive of the thing and did a stellar job of keeping her concerns from showing.
The bike was heavy and I am not as old as I was when I first rode all the 500s in Gurgaon. I could feel the weight before the first test ride but not during. That supershort ride — through horrible Whitefield-Bengaluru traffic — sold whatever was left to be sold, and got me into the typical longwinded waiting game that is the backbone of an RE-buying experience.
I took one more longer test ride loop midway through the long wait just to be sure that the first impression wasn’t just wishful thinking etcetera. This time I chose a less trafficky day and the loops-around-town were lovely. The test-ride bike wasn’t in the best of shapes yet the engine-gearbox-suspension trio worked like butter over abrupt slowdowns and huge-ish speedbumps.
I am an equally huge fan of the older Himalayan hillrange wordmark and absolutely hate the abomination that sits atop the new 450’s tank. I asked D for the old vector file so Welpac could help me deal with the daily pain of having to look at the crossbarless capital As messing up that nice offwhite volume. That conversation helped in other ways too; D’s call to the higher ups at RE helped cut my wait time really really short. The ASM was nice enough to call multiple times to make sure the delivery happened sooner and the dealer was a little surprised it did. I kind of embarrassed R with my PDI/PDF shenanigans (thanks to TBHP) but all was well.
RE has managed to build the machine well. I am not used to their bikes having this level of finish or refinement and that is a welcome change. The Himalayan sits happily at 4–5K RPM and makes a lovely drone on revs. (This is new, coming from the low-rev-loving vibey C350.) Almost all the weight sits on top but that makes itself felt only in parking lots and awkwardly slopey traffic stops. (Of which Bengaluru has many fine examples to throw at you.) I managed to drop it once on the way to JCRoad over a pothole-at-a-90-degree-turn as the ground gave way and I had to slop for the turn. I’ve set the stock seat height to its lower setting. With that and the front footpegs folding out of the way when walking the bike through slowmoving traffic, there isn’t as much tiptoeing as I thought there would be. I watch out for potholes and low kerbs now.
Post the first service, went on a ride on the OMR–KGF stretches touching 100 and all was well. Except for all the wind hitting the helmet and all of that getting a little noisy. I’ve since upped the windshield to the touring version but haven’t tried hitting a hundred. I don’t think I am a fast rider anyway. I do look forward to some tricky uphill-downhill geography though. It will be lovely to ride to Wayanad on the twisty estate roads.
I’m keeping it a single-seater till R is fully A-OK with riding pillion. (And generally otherwise.) It is a bit tricky to refuse pillion-ride requests but I’d have it no other way. There are two Rynox Stacker (10L) bags on the tank rails and the straps for a third 30L one on the back seat, permanently. I love front-mounted panniers in general; on the bicycle there are two Ortliebs on the front forks when I am carrying cargo. I think I’ll eventually get the OEM pannier stays and switch the Ortliebs over to the 450, though.
The volumes are clean in a different way (than the 411, which I loved for how unassuming the shapes were). The little details (though not as refined as some of the other everyday machines) are lovely. The Kaza Brown colourway has the nicest stickerwork of the lot (also because there isn’t a lot of it). I’ve grown to prefer as little visible branding on the products-slash-tools I use, even as I admire boldly plastered well-designed logos on everything else, from packaging to stationery to T-shirts. Even the LCD instrument cluster does a good-ish job in presenting the information needed clearly. I think this is one of the most usable — and therefore, best — LCD layouts out there on two-wheelers today. In the analog speedo mode. In the analog speedo mode the layout takes the best parts of actual-analog clusters and complements that with really straightforward typography and colours. I wish they’d picked a monospaced face for numbers though. (It irritates me to no end when the numbers jump around as they update. On the Indie’s instrument cluster, we stick to all monospace mainly thanks to that being segmented LCD but the decision wouldn’t have changed even if it were a TFT. Lots more on that soon.) I’m ordering an AOOCCI or something for GPS soon; the navigation integration via the RE App is a gimmick at best and the lag catches up with you when in unfamiliar parts of the city.
The bike makes me want to ride more, and admire it whenever I am off it. R knows I intentionally forget grocery-list-items so I can go for another short ride. It makes me feel younger and happier on even the commutes through office-going pedestrian traffic. There are days when the Tabebuias are falling onto the windshield and sometimes hanging on to the tank-rail bags. Those days I reach the studio with a smile in my head and happy to take on some new marketing bullshit.
V took this photo in the River parking lot. He has — appropriate for a product designer — a good eye for composition and good taste in vehicles. (Committed to a cafe-racer-ed Husqy even in Bengaluru’s moving parking lots.) We’ll soon go for a ride together I hope.
Tagged: hardware objects motorcycles
→ August 19, 2025 | Reading time: ~1 minute | Permalink
Got this split keyboard a few weeks ago. Haven’t been able to use it well enough to reach a good enough WPM. But I am typing this post on it to keep the spirit well connected. This is a completely new and different way to access letters, and that slows one down a fair bit. (As intended.)
It is a Sofle V2 that M from the IMKB Discord built. There are blue Gaterons under the Orthilinear keycaps from Meckeys. The TRRS cable is the weakest link in this daisychain. Looking forward to getting a custom one soon. The rotary encoders work as brightness and volume knobs at the moment.
Last week R had a muscle spasm and it was really bad. She couldn’t move at all for three days. We took an (ill-decided) ambulance to the diagnostics center and that ride was all kinds of horrible. She’s back to walking — with some pain sometimes, but walking — thanks to physio and pain meds. The whole ordeal made us appreciate the good parts of life and realise again how bad most of life is for most people. More on all this later.
Input and KadalaCurry We Believe
→ April 29, 2025 | Reading time: 3 minutes | Permalink
The Orbit makes mouse-movements fun. Makes me want to download IOGraph again.
There is a near-divination-like quality to how the forefinger-middlefinger-trackball operates. I pretend (in my head, I’m not that confident yet to be seen as an odd character at the business-casuals-weekly-standups-type workplace setting) to be dealing with bezier-spirits and calling on them to help deal with filled-to-the-brim layouts and unwieldy InDesign files and curves that change direction without telling you.
I bought this on a whim, having decided to experiment with input devices. My tool-use had gotten boring towards the end of last year. Now every trip to the menu bar feels like a mini-adventure.
It is not as accurate as the Logi Lift. Or perhaps I am not as accurate with it as I am with the Lift, yet. It is predictably inaccurate, though.
I have come to appreciate predictable inaccuracy after living with the Huion-with-its-own-mind for almost a year. The inherent newness of the trackball-led mousing is the only reason this device ‘feels’ inaccurate — is what I think. And that is something one can learn to deal with. It is like knowing how a certain hardware component has its quirks (predictable quirks, even if temperamental) on a device (or a tool or a vehicle) that you use everyday. (Podimol has a heavy clutch that needs a gentle pulling-out every 3/4 presses. That has now become muscle-memory and works well. The front brakes on my FourCorners sqeal once evry two/three rides and needs me to keep the lever half-pressed — like I am autofocusing them — for half-a minute so they stop.) The Orbit needs lasersharp focus working with bezier curves and text editing or anything that involves x-and-y-axes movements at the same time. The general accuracy one needs to work with for such tasks naturally maps to moving the trackball. It is nice how that trains your hand to be sensitive to small movements, too. Unlike the Huion, the Orbit doesn’t randomly ‘jump’ pixels at will especially when you are hyperfocused and making precise small movements. The clicks are not tied to the cursor movement, so the little jerks-on-click are no longer a thing.
The tablet feels actively hostile while the trackball feels like a challenge one needs to (and can) step up to.
The best use-case for the Orbit (or any trackball device, apparently) is with multiple displays and a less-than-ideal desk setup. The mouse doesn’t need to move around for the cursor to move, leaving a lot of area on the desk free for junk-accumulation and ‘research.’ Or just junk accumulation called research. The Orbit covers a lot of screen real estate with simple short flicks of the trackball and scrolls independently with the the scroll wheel. (The scroll wheel isn’t as fancy as the ones on an MXMaster or even the lift — no free-flow-scroll, no ‘weight’ to the scroll for it to ‘feel’ like quality — but works reasonably well with finer control than a typical vertical wheel.)
What I miss are the customisable buttons. Unlike the Lift or the tablets, there are no ‘extra’ buttons to help with ‘reverse/forward’ or ‘sideways-scroll’ or ‘snap-to-grid on/off’ on the Orbit. There is a two-button combo one can activate via the KensingtonWorks software, but that means leaving yet another input-tracker running in the background all the time.
→ March 14, 2025 | Reading time: 4 minutes | Permalink
Last week, our noname snap-off cutter broke. I tried prying its locking mechanism open to see what it was that’d stopped working. After a bunch of misguided bruteforce attempts, I remembered patience and coconut oil. It took a while to pull the parts apart and pull the stuck blade back in, yet the disassembly did not offer any clues to fixing what was clearly broken. The mechanism inside most retractable blade cutters is a simple folded piece of metal that works like a spring (when it does) and keeps the blade from sliding in when it isn’t meant to be. The one inside this noname sample looked rusty; a shadow of its former flexible self. After a few futile attempts at revival I gave up and started looking for the easy way out via the epitome of twentyfirstcentury fixes to almost everything: one-day-express-delivery.
The Stanley 0-10-018 arrived today as I was helping wrangle some text into shape (and cracking some too many lame jokes over G-Meet) for River’s Copy Guidelines. Thus it took another five hours before I tore into the packet and this beauty presented itself. (Ru had come to visit for this was Holi-eve. We drove her home since Uber had other plans.) The Stanley opens unlike most cutters (that I have had the misfortune of acquantance-ing) into two halves as you loosen the yellow turnkey. The two halves grip the blade in a vice-like strong hold when in use. When not in use, the closed halves make sure the blade doesn’t accidentally slide out on its own. Each part has lovely detail. The metal feels substantial against your palm in a way that ‘industrial’ products only can. (I’m reminded of the Peacock Teal Green Classic 500 from ten years ago. The metallic flakes in the paint perhaps helps.)
The thing itself is chefskiss-well-built but what caught all my attention was the namesake packaging all of this was holding on to. The cutter holds — showing off its formfollowingfunction — the die-cut piece of plastic between its (the cutter’s not the plastic-piece’s) heavy metal halves, with a tiny blade-drawing sticking out with its tongue firmly in its cheek. This was delightful to look at, made even better by the almost absurd volume-contrast between the content-slash-object and its ‘container.’ To top the cherry, the only way one could take out this piece of ‘packaging’ was by unscrewing the two halves and pulling, teaching one most of the ‘how-to’ in the process. That, in my corner of Tabebuia-carpeted Bengaluru, is what we call brilliance. The piece of paper/plastic itself is well-crafted. The material choice (neither paper, nor glossy plastic), the illustration (all-business, no frills), and the copy (all information, no discombobulation), and even the subtly round-cornered die-cuts; everything — everthing — works well together to make you happy.
I’ve had an Olfa Circle Cutter since Paldi. I’d accidentally got smitten at Roopkala one day and eventually cut a lot of circles out of foam board for multiple exhibitions I was freelancing for. (I had no idea circle cutters existed. I had no reference for how much they cost.) We recently ‘invested’ in an Olfa cutting mat via Goodwill Enterprises. I have slowly come to see value in spending time and effort on well-built (and in this case, well packaged as well) everyday tools. I realise it was always money — and the lack of it most of the time — that delayed this realisation.
That conveniently, bitter-sweet-ly, brings me to March of 2014. We started working out of #6BCB eleven years ago. KL11 is eleven this month. I managed to print some basic T-shirts from Decathlon a couple of weeks ago and been cycling through the colours everyday. (To the understandable annoyance of R who got me a tasteful thrift-stored MUJI coord set via Janpath last week.) The brand team at River surprised us with a layercake today. As usual, we (M and I) were caught somewhat lost in the moment and the photo-slash-video-graphic evidence is telling. That too (not our lack of obvious reaction, but their gesture), made me happy today, among other things/people.
Grateful, etcetera.
Tagged: objects
The Stuff of Liff Versus the Liff of Stuff
→ July 29, 2024 | Reading time: 3 minutes | Permalink
I asked R to photograph some print samples for a thing I’m doing. Then it was a low-ish moment of recognising how the world has moved on from one-frame compositions to everything-moving compositions as a way to showcase work. I was looking at type contract, expand, and move in splines around 3D rendered figurines over fields of Fuchsia and IK Blue. I asked R if I have gotten too old, too dated for what is considered nice work today in the field. It was a moment of self-doubt that I’m not too used to sharing. As she recalls (correctly) I’m (was) fairly arrogant when it came to work in general, and detail in particular. So, this was new and uncomfortable. I was looking at all the recent stuff I’ve made and the tools I’ve made those with, and realising that the scope has shrunk from when the foundation studio wasn’t a distant memory coated in LGBs and pencildust. The scope has shrunk, and the fun has too, perhaps. I don’t know whom to blame. I don’t think I hate the daily stuff I work on, even when it is largely insignificant and ad-hoc and automated and plain. I find joy in figuring out small things for small ends. I obsess over details perhaps as a way to establish a misguided sense of control and purpose. I don’t read as much as I used to. I don’t actively listen to music the way I used to. I can’t remember the last time I rode the bicycle not to work or to run an errand.
We had a lovely dinner today, with H and a bunch of experimentally coloured cats for company. We ordered a lot of stuff because all of it was lovely. The place was not quiet but well furniture-d and open. We spoke about many things and books and people and places. I went down my go-to rabbit holes about significant teachers etcetera. (On that note, the faculty page at IIT-J’s Design School has a link to a Google Form. It has these two sentences. “Some teachers can have a lasting impression on us. They can inspire us with their thoughts, their stories, their respect and care for us, or some such action…” and “What did you like about them? How did they inspire you? What was special about them? How were they different from other teachers? Did they only teach or did they become friends?” I think that is an awesome way to find people. I was looking at the website after sharing this year’s material- and reading lists for the TDM course. The folks there — Ga and Pr in particular — have managed to do an excellent job of planning stuff, again. In contrast, I received a call on Friday from one of the NIDs for a BGD course early next month. Facepalm indeed.)
I’ve put an alarmingly short list of tools together. There is little variety. The list used to be much more eclectic and fun, especially in the software department. Now it is an apple orchard with few interesting species in between. I’m not sure if it is a sign of things stabilising over time or a sign of too much overtime.
Tagged: objects
→ April 11, 2024 | Reading time: 6 minutes | Permalink
I rode the Indie home and to places around WF for the past few days. Took the scooter to regular-mundane daily tasks and took it on dedicated test-rides in the night after the traffic thinned. (The photo looks like a potato-quality spyshot but that is just because I am awkward at taking photos in public. Even when it is early in morning and the only three people outside the chicken stall are more interested in other more pressing everyday stuff. R couldn’t take pictures because of the hurt leg and we are left with this crappybara I’m constantly apologising for. I even had to content-aware-fill the eff out of a piece of crumpled newspaper somewhere in the bottom left corner. See the bird-droppings on the seat above the pannier mounts? That is how ‘stock’ the vehicle was running. We’ll fix all this soon. Let R get well soon.)
The scooter rides really well, planted to the ground as if it were a car with nice suspension. (Reminds me of podimol in many nice ways.) The last time I felt this amount of ride-refinement was with the Thunderbird 500 back in GurgaonOfTheFlatRoads[1]. Like all EVs, the torque is instant and it is fun to make the motor spin up on open roads. (The whine is divine.) The range anxiety is real (started most of my rides with under 50% charge and that is not a nice thing to have running in one’s mind or flashing in the instrument cluster) and reenacting the charging sequence reminded me of trying to memorise a particularly longwinded hydrocarbon in class twelfth. That — despite how my marksheets turned out — is not a memory I’m particularly interested in revisiting everytime the chariot runs out of juice.
The Indie is a beautiful machine with a lot of well-intentioned details. We’re working on the second version of a small part on the vehicle and it is nice to see assumptions from version one fail faced with the three-dimensional experience of riding the Indie and having to charge it at the shared bays in the HQ parking lot. Looking forward to making some small significant (and above all, friendly) improvements soon.
I also did some impulsive helmet buying. Unlike my usual matte black-grey-white-with-stripes palette, this one is ‘colourful’ to say the least. R was surprised and went on to say she doesn’t recognise me anymore. I know she wasn’t talking about the second (tinted) visor-lette having come down over my grin-painted face. But the point remains noted.
There was a particularly busy traffic situation near Brookfield where I stopped next to an RE (a Bullet 350 with the golden 3D logo on the tank; not the retrofitted abomination that passes for decals at RE these days[2]). It was nice. Was happy and talked to R about it when the traffic situation let me get home sunburnt.
In other news, showed myself the proverbial door at the current temporary office this morning (before getting thrown out ceremonially perhaps; my ego wouldn’t have been able to take that fall after all the serendipitous traffic-light spotting of beziers). Looking for a tea-break friendly room and working from home till that materialises. After all these years wringing pixels behind oddly angled screens held together with velcro and bulldog clips (and sheer force of will to continue making a reasonable enough living), a proper workspace is something I’ve come to care the most about (after certain other things in life, ofc) and it is not okay to compromise. There was something that S wrote about that I wanted to discuss here. Will soon. Context.
There is a lot of work to finish. Some of it is exciting. Some of that exciting work is tweaking carpet designs in the middle of the day and tweaking them again much later. Some of that exciting work is mundane out of context but take a lot of patience and craft. (Like putting vehicle loan options and terms and EMIs in handout-friendly A5 cards. Or a 3-by-9 cm newspaper ad for hiring store staff. This last one I had so much fun with.) We are looking for capital G graphic design people to help do some of that boring/tedious work that needs an unsustainable level of attention to detail, fairly advanced typography/gestalt chops, and a lot of empathy and humility. If this sounds like I’m trying to glorify tedium and perfectionism and all those ideals that usually work against people having a life, apologies. I have heard what Carson had to say about graphic design saving the world. Also read this Nick Asbury essay on ‘purpose’ and fully agree. None of this work is ‘noble’ in itself but are good opportunities to manipulate form and order in service of someone’s experience. (Send in a PeeDeeYeff CV via hello-at-kl11-dot-in if still interested. Know that we expect a significant amount of fundamentals-in-place-ness and an unconditional willingness to work on many many many versions of things; we too do this. We also pay fairly well while being sufferable bosses.)
1: The difference is that I did not want to get one for myself immediately then, given how smitten I was with the Classic with the upswept silencer.
2: I wonder how the current B350 tank graphic even passed the basic-est of reviews. Can hear Mr. D grind his teeth everytime one enters my line of sight. I believe crapfest is the most family freindly technical term to describe that waste of materials and space. Like how a friend’s new boss describes stuff, I must start saying ‘shambolic’ and ‘gargantuan’ and suchlike.
→ September 17, 2020 | Reading time: ~1 minute | Permalink
Kerala Govt. Lottery Ticket from 1987. Hand-drawn-to-fit text with a variety of pen-angles (Pre-paid and 5 at 0, Date-of-Draw at a confused -45) and a tastefully divided horizontal-space. That Lubalin-esque 9 just begs to be folded in half.
Tagged: objects