Working lunch

Is a restaurant ever justified in telling people to get off their laptops?

Ever since I began to earn enough money to pay for restaurant meals, I have enjoyed the experience of going out to eat with myself. In the pre-smartphone era, I would take a book along, try and bag a window table, and graze for a couple of hours while entertaining myself with a spot of people-watching interspersed with reading (with some sneaky eavesdropping on neighbouring tables providing some food for thought!). When I stopped working in an office, and got a bit stir-crazy writing in the solitude of my study, I would often head out with my laptop to do a bit of writing while grabbing a sandwich and coffee. And more recently, it is my smartphone that keeps me occupied, whether it is answering emails, scrolling social media, or just reading a book on my Kindle app.

 

I have done this sort of thing for decades, all over the world, in restaurants both expensive and cheap, fancy and fuss-free, and I have never been made to feel that I was making a nuisance of myself, by working on a laptop, an Ipad, or even my phone. So, it came as a bit of surprise to read on X that a restaurant in Delhi had told a female single diner not to work on her laptop as she waited for her meal. This being X, there were heated opinions on both sides of the debate, with some saying that restaurants had the right to ban laptops and others – like me – saying that such prohibitions should be stated upfront and not sprung on guests after they have ordered. 

 

Of course, restaurants have the right to lay down rules about what guests are allowed (or not allowed) to do. Equally, guests have the right to vote with their feet and not go back to restaurants that make them feel unwelcome. But the more I thought about it, the more the laptop ban made no sense. The argument goes that if you allow people to work on laptops then the ambience of the restaurant changes and it becomes like a co-working place. But given how technology works these days, you can do the same kind of work on an Ipad and a smartphone, so why just discriminate against laptop users? And if you are committed to not letting your restaurant turn into a co-working place, then are you going to police your guests’ smartphone usage and make sure that they are not actually doing any work while they wait for their entrée to be served? 

 

And what would be allowed and disallowed? Is it verboten to answer emails but responding to a Whatsapp message is fine? Is scrolling through Instagram allowed but working on a presentation forbidden? A book is ok but Facebook marketplace is not?

 

Frankly, this makes zero sense. And if you ask me, rather than police the use of laptops at the table, restaurants would be better off ensuring that people use their devices with due consideration to others. I have lost count of the number of times I have sat at a restaurant while people at the next table watched video shorts or listened to music clips without the benefit of headphones. Instead of banishing laptops, how about we prohibit noise pollution like this? 

 

Now, that’s a ban I could get on board with. 

 

Just say no

What would be your deal-breaker when it comes to dating?

The headline read: “Why I won’t date hot women any more”. The New York Post article was about Dan Rochkind (described as an “Upper East Sider with a muscular build and a full head of hair”) who, after spending his 30s dating model-types had, at 40, settled for a ‘softer beauty’, getting engaged to Carly Spindel, whom he described as someone “you can take home and cuddle with”.

So, why did Rochkind give up on “hot women”? Well, since you didn’t ask, it was because “Beautiful women who get a fair amount of attention get full of themselves. Eventually, I was dreading getting dinner with them because they couldn’t carry a conversation.”

I know. It seems a bit rich when a man who is superficial enough to choose his dates on the basis of their looks complains about how they aren’t great conversationalists (it would, of course, never occur to him that perhaps he’s not interesting enough to make an effort for). Not to mention the putdown of his future wife, who is “beautiful” but not quite a “swimsuit model”. Clearly, this guy is a keeper!

But whatever you think of Rochkind’s delusional dating rules, there is no denying that there are some types (and that goes for both men and women) that are just not second-date material. And here, for those of you still in the dating pool, is a random sampling, based entirely on my own prejudices. Feel free to add your own.

·      * Those who spend the evening paying more attention to their smartphones than to you. If your date is more focused on Instagramming the food, tweeting about the bad service, Snapchatting with friends, or simply checking on news alerts, rather than engaging with you, you need to ask for the bill and get the hell out of there. If he or she can’t be bothered to focus on you to the exclusion of all else for a couple of hours over dinner, what hope is there that things will ever get better? Yes, that’s right, none at all.

·      * Those who are the heroes of every story they tell. And they just can’t seem to stop telling those stories. How they saved the boss’ life at the last presentation. How they carried the day in court despite being pitted against the best litigator in town. How they ran the marathon with zero training. And so on and so tedious. One evening of this is quite enough; why sign up for another?

·      * Those who can’t seem to stop name-dropping all the rich, famous, powerful and influential people they know/are related to. Her uncle is married to the sister of that famous Bollywood star. He went to school with the current chief minister’s younger brother. Her sister is married to that famous TV anchor. He plays golf with one of India’s leading cricketers every Sunday. It’s a safe bet that those who seek proximity to power and fame to bolster their own self-esteem, don’t have very much of it in the first place. And unless you want to sign up for endless evenings of ego-massaging, get the hell out of there.

·      *  Those who keep banging on about the elite school or college they went to and sneering about those who went to lesser institutions. If, in adulthood, you are still defining yourself and deriving your self-worth from where you studied, then clearly the best years of your life are already behind you. Not to mention that you’re a bit of a snob.

·      * Those who show zero interest in your life. If your date doesn’t bother to ask even basic questions about you – which books you like, what kind of music you listen to, or even, where you grew up – then it is clear that a) he or she is not that into you or b) he or she is completely self-obsessed. Either way, you should cut and run.

·      * Those who are constantly nasty and snarky about their exes. Everyone is entitled to be bitter about their break-up, but it is never a good sign if someone is compulsively rude and derisive about someone they went out with. For one thing, it shows that they are not completely over that relationship – feelings still linger, even if they are only of rancor. And two, it is a pretty good indication of the treatment you will receive if things don’t work out between you two. Stay only if you are willing to take that risk.

·      * Those who are rude to waiting staff. If someone is rude to the waiter or busboy, that is pretty reliable indicator of how they treat people who have less power than them. And being a bully is never an attractive look, no matter how attractive they may look.

·     * Those who order a salad and then steal half the fries off your plate (or self-righteously turn down dessert only to demolish the chocolate cake you order).

     Either these people have no self-control or will power, and you don’t want to get involved with someone who can resist anything but temptation. Or they are downright delusional and believe that calories don’t count if they come off someone else’s plate. In which case, this delusion is bound to extend to other areas of their lives. Best steer clear.

Life, camera, boredom

If you photograph every moment as being ‘special’ then soon there will be no ‘special moments’ at all

Have smartphone; will take pictures. That seems to be the motto everyone lives by these days. So, no moment of our day goes undocumented, no meal is eaten before first being captured on camera, and everyone from pets, children, spouses, friends, lovers, passers-by, get photographed several times in the course of a day. If we are on holiday, things tend to get completely out of hand, as we chronicle every moment as it happens, just to be sure we are not missing out on documenting something really important. And that’s not counting the selfies, the self-portraits we take obsessively, day in and day out.

And it’s not as if these pictures just live on our smartphone memory cards. The process isn’t complete until every image (except the unflattering ones that are deleted instantly) is posted on some social media platform or the other for your friends, family, colleagues, and complete strangers to ‘like’ or ‘favourite’, or respond to with a gushy comment or two.

I really have no problem with this. If taking pictures incessantly and sharing them with the world is what rocks your boat, then go right ahead (though I hope you won’t mind if I avert my gaze discreetly). But I do wonder if in this mad race to let no moment go unrecorded, we are losing out on something that all of us deserve: those special moments that are captured on camera and trigger off happy memories every time we see them.

My generation has plenty of those. There are the grainy baby pictures taken by the proud dad in the first flush of parenthood, which still evoke a smile even though the composition often leaves a lot to be desired and the picture quality has deteriorated over time. There are those photos that freeze-frame our awkward phase, as we pose for the school photographer at a Teacher’s Day or Children’s Day function or even at the annual prize-giving ceremony, and which our children giggle at snidely. There are the honeymoon pix, immortalizing the fashion of a decade that style forgot, which make us wonder: ‘Did I really wear that? What was I thinking?’

But for all their cheerful amateurism, their potential for embarrassment, their sheer cheeziness on occasion, these photos are like a window into a more innocent, happy time, when there were no filters to make everything glow, when realism held its own against fakery and photo-shop. These pictures still have to power to move us, whether it is to laughter or tears, joy or sorrow. They are little vignettes of our past, which unlock memories that we had thought lost forever.

Will that pleasure ever be available to Generation Cameraphone? After all, how special can any one memory be if every single one of them is immortalized in a photograph? If every moment is seen as special, and worthy of being frozen on camera, then is any moment truly special? If you chronicle every living moment does any one moment remain memorable?

The truth is that pictures tend to lose their power and poignancy when there are so many of them that your primary emotion is of being overwhelmed by sheer numbers. And going by the way everyone tends to go bonkers the moment they get access to a cameraphone, we will all soon be completely swamped by pictures of our every living-breathing moment, lovingly altered by a flattering filter. But none of them will have the ability to truly move us, because while familiarity may not breed contempt it will certainly engender boredom on a colossal scale.

So, we may well be the last generation to have our memories encased in photo-albums that are pulled out at family reunions, and laughed and cried over in equal measure. The ones who come after us will have seen it all on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Whathaveyou, and been bored out of their skulls in the process. The last thing they will want is to look at another picture. And if they do look at it, their first instinct will be to mouth ‘like’ and move on, instead of reliving the moment it freeze-frames.

What they will have is gimmicks. A series of selfies shot every day for a period of ten years, put together in a time lapse, to show how a cute little boy/girl grew up into a moody/handsome/sexy grown up. Travel pictures manipulated to show rainbows even when none appeared; landscapes digitally altered to show hues that don’t exist in nature; and of course the wonders of photo-shop applied indiscriminately.

But all this trickery will not be enough to create the immediacy of the photographs of another time, those that were special for being taken only on special occasions, those that had meaning because they captured meaningful events, and those that live on forever because they encapsulate the best moments of our lives.

As for us, I fear that we will soon become a society that misses the wood for the trees. Or, in words that Generation Cameraphone can understand, a society that will miss the images for the hashtags.

Phoning it in

Could you bear to switch off that smartphone; or are you too scared of missing out on that important work email?

Say what you will about the French – admit it, the words ‘rude’ and ‘snobbish’ are hovering close to your lips – you have to admit that they have life sorted. They eat loads of butter, cream and cheese, wash it down with red wine, smoke a cigarette afterwards, and still remain thin and healthy (the rates of heart attacks here are among the lowest; what the rest of the world calls the French paradox). They work the least number of hours in the week (35, since you ask) and yet have a standard of living that rivals the best in the world. And it is a country in which even a Monsieur Flanby (French for ‘wobbly custard’) like Francois Hollande can have the most ravishing women fighting over him. What’s not to love, right?

And now, apparently, things are getting even better for les Francais. News reports last week had it that their labour unions had negotiated a new deal with the employers associations, according to which employees would no longer be expected to answer or even look at work emails outside of office house. So, while the rest of us wage slaves are anxiously peering at our smartphones just in case the boss has mailed us about (yet another) work emergency, the French are faffing off, sitting at a café, smoking a Gauloise, sipping an aperitif and wondered what to cook for supper.

Well, okay, I exaggerate. Like all things French, there is a bit of hyperbole and myth making going on here. (And yes, French women do get fat and their kids do throw food around.) It turns out that this ‘agreement’ only applies to people who don’t work the 35-hour week, and they are required to steer clear of work emails for 11 hours at least (the 6 pm deadline beaten to death by the media was a figment of the over-active imaginations of some reporters and columnists).

But all of this begs the question: if you were asked – indeed, required by law – to put away your smartphone for 11 hours and not even sneak a peak at it to check if something had gone catastrophically wrong at work, could you do that? Or would a part of you always be nervously wondering about what you were missing? What would be more stressful for you at the end of the day: staying connected with work or cutting yourself off completely for a period of time?

Speaking for myself, I have to admit (a bit shame-facedly) that the first thing I do every morning, and indeed, last thing at night, is check my emails. And the very thought of being parted from my smartphone, even for a couple of hours, makes me panic just a little.

And I suspect that it is much the same for most people in our hyper-connected generation. Staying in touch, staying connected, and remaining available for work throughout the day (and night) has become a part of life for us. And even if we resent the hold our workplaces have on us thanks to our smartphones, like Pavlov’s dogs, we have become attuned to clicking on to every email that pops into our inboxes, and typing out a reply right away. Anything less, and we feel that we are slacking off.

There are those who maintain that being hyper-connected actually allows them to take more time off than they could in the pre-email and pre-smartphone era. Now at least it is possible to leave office early enough to take your kids for a game in the park and deal with out-of-work-hour emergencies on the phone. It is easier to go off on holiday for a couple of weeks without worrying about what will happen in your absence, because you can always check in virtually every day. And working from home is now a genuine option in a way that it never was before.

But in a world where work is only an email away, is there any way to genuinely switch off and relax? Is there any way to enjoy some real downtime without worrying about what’s going on at the office? It is even possible to carve out some personal space when it is impossible to get away from the professional sphere?

Well, there is only one way to find out. Switch your smartphones off before you start dinner with the family. And switch them on only after breakfast the next day. If you still have a job by the end of a week, then you may be on to something!