Existential coffee-making.

Idle query: Had Jean-Paul with his pipe clenched firmly in his teeth stood in front of a microwave oven to make instant coffee and peered myopically at the seconds ticking backwards on the LCD clock dial, would he have cracked the existential riddle: pre-reflective consciousness, free will and whatever else it might be? I doubt it. Any attempt to describe, understand, historicize the thing-in-itself – coffee in the making, LCD clock marking time backwards, etc. – Sartre would have termed "reflective consciousness". By the time the coffee was ready and the micro beeped its customary warning, his concentration would have been broken and he would have hurriedly pressed the open button. After which the aroma would have completely shattered the spell of his existential reverie. Actually, my whole staging of his hypothetical thinking process is faulty, as you must have noticed. Being a true Frenchman with an Algerian mistress who later became his adopted daughter, Jean-Paul would probably have insisted on the real thing. No instant stuff, merci beaucoup. "I put instant coffee in a microwave and almost went back in time," wrote a bloke called Steven Wright. http://www.notso.com/wright.htm. “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,” is the fifty-first line in the lament – er, love song – of another curious bloke called J. Alfred Prufrock http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html who earlier on in the poem (line 34) shows a distinct preference for “tea and toast” and a scant 45 lines later (line 79) changes his fickle mind in favour of “tea and cakes and ices”. He keeps reiterating his strong leaning toward tea in lines 88 and 102, though. This leads us to an important question worth pausing and pondering. Why should the treacherous teatotaler (who may or may not be a teetotaler) have access to a coffee spoon even if the scoundrel professes to use it only to measure out his life with? http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html. Pray tell, after a reflective sip of instant coffee.

Playing cards.

I’m in the habit of playing solitaire and other games on my PC. I play them not to kill time but, as I had seen my father do it, to take my mind off the work I’m doing so that my subconscious (or, working mind, to use a Ramesh Balsekar term) has a free hand to spark off the ideas I’m seeking. Come to think of it, playing cards have played quite a role in my childhood. I used to watch my father, a lawyer, working on his next day’s brief in the evening suddenly interrupting his work to play a hand of solitaire before returning to it. And, every Sunday, there would be an afternoon session of my father and his five friends to play bezique non-stop for several hours. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bezique. They would sit down cross legged on the carpet in the sitting room of our third floor flat in Khetwadi and squabble among themselves like kids. It was all good fun and cups and cups of tea. Again, on a Saturday every couple of months or so, another circle of my father’s friends met to play bridge for tiny stakes. These sessions were held by rotation at every member’s residence, I reckon. My father only hosted a session but never, to the best of my knowledge, attended any meeting held elsewhere. At the Saturday sessions, there used to be light snacks like potato wafers and salted cashew nuts in addition to tea. In retrospect, it is interesting to compare the bezique group with the bridge group. The former was a Pathare Prabhu gang made of people who belonged to our own caste and lived within easy walking distance of our house in areas like Opera House and Thakurdwar. The latter was a motley, cosmopolitan crowd and the ties, I suspect, must have been forged during my father’s working life as a public prosecutor and a presidency magistrate before I was born. The bezique group must have been the outcome of my father’s youth in Navi Wadi and Thakurdwar. The lack of snacks being served to them, I attribute to the huge lunch the reputedly bon vivant Pathare Prabhus would customarily have on Sundays. There, however, used to be a tray of ingredients to make paan, betel leaves, supari, cardamom, cloves and so on. Both the groups continued to meet, if memory serves, till I passed out of high school in 1952. Old age and death spare nobody, not even weekend revellers.