All I want for xmas is a bookshelf

It's Christmas morning in Delhi so festive greetings to you, both my blog readers! A cursory glance under the little decorated tree in the corner of my living room tells me that I'll be getting a lot of books this year (which, frankly, I do every year. When, oh when, will someone buy me a fluffy Higgs Boson particle? I've been dropping hints since July). Now, I love getting books... they're the gifts you can open again and again... but one thing I am in desperate shortage of is a bookshelf.

So I've been gazing longingly at the Toxel.com blog, which has pictures of some wonderful and wacky bookshelves from around the world. There are some amazing ones, shaped like pulses and trees, and one that makes your books look like they're levitating in mid-air. Check it out and, if you're feeling generous Santa, I would like one next Christmas.

The Snovel

Indians totally love acronyms. In fact, just this morning I, a NRI (non-resident Indian), went to the NCUI (National Cooperative Union of India) in the NCR (National Capital Region: in other words, Delhi), in a CNG (compressed natural gas) autorickshaw. For a long time I thought this was just because people liked sounding clever, but this week I wondered whether it might actually be because Indians like their sentences to be as short as possible... The reason for this epiphany was the following text message that I got from some anonymous marketing company:

"Read a Novel and that too on SMS. First time ever. Subscribe to 'Deaf Heaven' by Pinki Virani. SMS Snovel to 51234 at only Rs.30"

Yes, a snovel! The Urban Dictionary describes a snovel as "an occurrence when a person is laughing to such an extent they forcefully exhale nasal mucus accidentally" or the "act of shovelling snow". But now it has a whole new meaning. If you like Twitter, you can now read an entire novel in digestible, tiny text message form. Apparently, Pinki's book comes in three daily installments over 30 days. Needless to say, I won't be subscribing. Call me old-fashioned, but I like my novels normal length.

But the big question is, what next? If I slip into a coma I could wake up fifty years from now in a world in which nobody even uses words anymore: just emoticons and punctuation marks. It's enough to make you snovel.

A woman's place is in the lab

It will come as a surprise to nobody that women are not particularly well-represented in the sciences (except medicine). In fact, when I was at university, I was the only girl in my college in my year reading engineering. This is a problem that needs to be fixed, and as always, women themselves are fixing it... one of the ways is through brilliant organisations like the UK Resource Centre for Women in Science, Engineering and Technology.

This month the UKRC invited me to write a little blog post describing my work as a science journalist -- so please read it and leave a comment if you can. In all honesty, it's always been a source of niggling regret to me (and my dad) that I didn't become an engineer after I graduated, choosing instead the life of a reporter. I think that's part of the reason I decided to go into science journalism rather than some other niche (it's not science, but it's close enough)... Believe me girls, I have interviewed enough scientists now to know that there is no better life than that in the lab.

What do tigers and vultures have in common?

Last weekend, a couple of adventurous friends of mine arrived from London to go tiger-spotting in the wilds of India (Ranthambhore in Rajasthan to be precise). They only had a couple of days and I was convinced they wouldn't even get to see so much as a tail. The chances of spotting a tiger in India these days are close to zero because centuries of poaching have left them almost extinct. So imagine my surprise when they sent me this photo above... Now, I don't know whether they just pulled it off Bing Images, but they insist they have loads more like it. And while it's not irrefutable proof that tiger numbers are on the rise, it is stunningly beautiful anyway.

At the same time this week, I learned that tigers aren't the only endangered species in India: Vultures, which used to be quite a common sight in Delhi a decade ago, picking at dead animal carcasses around the city's famous monuments, are now rarely to be seen. In fact, in another decade, they could go the way of the dodo.

It's like the case of the missing bees - nobody really knows why these birds have disappeared so suddenly. Some say it's the choking pollution (which, frankly, is endangering me as well), while others say it's pesticides. Sad thing is, vultures don't make quite the cuddly poster animals that tigers do. Nobody's going to start a charity to save the vulture, are they? And which child is going to adopt a vulture? It might feel a little uncomfortable, but carrion deserve our love too.

From the past into the future

I'm a big science-fiction fan, but I really don't like real-life futurology. It might be fun, but it's almost always wrong (worst of all, futurologists never have to worry about being wrong because by the time the future comes, everyone's forgotten the predictions anyway). And if you read any magazine regularly, you're bound to have read at least one special issue on the 'future' -- what's going to be hot or trendy in the coming years. To be honest, it's usually just a desperate attempt by editors to look cool and ahead of the pack without doing much work. I admit, I was even asked to do an item for BBC Woman's Hour last New Year, predicting what would be the big scientific trends of 2009.

But just imagine we could look back at these predictions and see which ones came true... Wouldn't it be interesting to be able to see what people thought the world would be like now, say, 20 years ago? Well, Will Wiles, a writer and editor at Icon magazine, has done exactly that. In 1989, 11-year-old Will saved a copy of an Observer supplement looking forward to London in 2012 and, remarkably, he still has it. He's kindly uploaded the pages from it onto his Flickr page, and it's a fascinating glimpse into people's hopes and fears for the future: "Crystalline telecommunications spires spike a new skyline ... Sony World Bank polysteeple overshadows the NatWest Tower, now a block of flats." and, says Will of the other strange guesses, "London is no longer the capital - and why are blimps so seductive to futurologists?" To see which of the Observer supplement's predictions were right and which were wrong (most of them), check out Will's brilliant blog.

Man versus machine

One of the unique features of Indian society is its servant culture. Pretty much anyone with their own home and a middle-class income will have someone to clean for them. If you're a little higher up the scale, you will also have someone to cook, wash your clothes, and possibly even drive your car for you. Unskilled labour is so remarkably cheap (for example, a cleaner for an hour a day for a month can easily cost less than a meal in an ordinary restaurant), that this has also meant there's been no demand for labour-saving machines. After all, why invest in a fancy new washing machine when you can have a person do the same job for practically nothing? It's almost like ancient Rome: India just wouldn't run without its legions of servants, because nobody has the equipment or knowledge they need to do anything for themselves.

But society is changing, and as wages rise and servants become scarcer, India is finally replacing man with machine. A piece in The Economic Times shows that people are returning to their own kitchens, with retailers selling such things as luxury coffee machines and dishwashers. The remaining exception is on building projects and municipal work sites, where you can still see hordes of men and women (and sometimes also children) mending roads and building houses by hand - with hardly any modern construction equipment at all. It is slow, back-breaking work... but as far as most corporates and government agencies are concerned, people are still cheaper than concrete mixers and cranes.

Come, be an Indian student

Education is important to Indians. So important, in fact, that the country has an entire industry to help students go to universities around the world, especially to the United States. Millions of Indian teenagers dream of slick American campuses and state-of-the-art facilities, and only a lucky minority of about a hundred thousand get to go. But when the annual survey of international students came out this week, there was one unexpected statistic: The number of American students choosing to come to India to study has gone up to 3,000, from about 700, five to ten years ago.

Yes, I know, it's weird isn't it? The question is, why? I don't want to be an academic snob, but US universities are generally far better equipped and more creative in their teaching methods, not to mention sans dust, mosquitoes or stifling bureaucracy. Nowhere in the world is more developed that the States... But then again, India is much cheaper and the educational standards are very high in some places, plus this country is fast becoming a global superpower, which means that job opportunities for graduates may even been better than in the US. In fact, I was at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi the other week and I met one French engineering student who is here for a year, and she absolutely loves it. She says she actually chose Delhi out of a list of top-ranking colleges around the world. So there you have it.... Maybe one day even Indian students will choose to stay.