Personalization

... I am a big fan of that. Where ever I am, I mean places like my home and work desk, bear a touch of me. It will be something that I like, it will have something that tells about myself. Plain white walls and bare desks are not of my type. It alienates me, makes me feel cold and unwanted.

So what's all this about? It says that people who are of type A personality love to have warm, inviting atmospheres. Their work cubes have extra chair(s), pictures and things that create a charming environment. As I am one of the copy-book examples of Type A personality, it is quite understandable that places I frequent would bear my impression.

The first thing I had in mind, days after we moved to our first house was that we need to paint the walls. Again, a type A trait is that we hate to delay things and we hate to delegate work as well. So I jumped right in the painting thing and pulled Arnab in as well. As a result, our house is now well painted - cool shades where that looks nice, warm shades in places well lit by our good old sun, accent walls (I *love* accent walls, they give a totally new meaning to the room) and the like are put in place. Decorating the house is my passion. I love to look at magazines for inspiration and then think and balance the look of our house to our own personalities and then get the furniture and other decorative items in. A huge Victorian four poster bed would not only look humongous in our master bedroom but it will also be absolutely out of shape with our lifestyle and our own personalities (and looks). A sleek model with straight edges would serve much better (and be easier to dust).

Same for the decorations. Big candle stands, decorative metallic or terracotta items would not match our simple house. Nor would a Persian carpet look good with the faux leather couches (not to mention that May uses the rug as her scratching corner). IKEA and Walmart serve much better in that respect :-)

My old desk at the famous Denman Hall (my dorm)

The other thing is my work desk. I spend a third of my day at the work desk so a gray, dull and uninviting place would not help much in lifting my spirit, especially when the sky turns overcast and the sun gets down at 4. So, I put nice looking stuff here. Apart from my desktop with two monitors that take up most of the space and a laptop on a dock, a BlackBerry, a PlayBook and an iPhone all fitted to their own charging pods, a desk phone and two (or sometimes three) headphones/ear buds (eternally entangled), whatever desk space I could glean, I have a bright yellow flowering plant, a tiny violet fake flowering plant, little tiny clay animals bought from a road side vendor in Calcutta, photo frames and a red floating sand clock that brings a little color. My coffee mug is dark blue and it says - everything tastes better with cat hair in it! (To which a colleague commented, "yes, as long as you don't start throwing up hair balls.") Another coffee mug with pictures of myself, family, friends (Arnab's first gift to me) is being used as a pen stand. The walls are filled with pictures of fuzzy animals and I have a WWF calendar with big bright colorful pictures too :-)

It's all about myself (once more) but that's the thing right? If I am the one who's going to spend time here, why not get the environment to something that I would like to look at and live in?