What’s in your bag?

Thomas Carlyle once said, “Man is a tool-using animal. Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.” Tools are what we use to accomplish our day’s work. When I step out of the house I do it with my bag which has all my tools. I love my them and have always been interested in knowing what tools others use. I feel what we carry in our bags can tell a lot about what kind of a person we are. In this post I examine the tools & bagis I use (to carry them).

Bags: At any given point of time I’ve atleast 3 bags with me – a backpack, a laptop shoulder bag and a messenger bag. I use the shoulder bag & backpack interchangeably to work and the messenger bag on weekends, offs and holidays. I also take the backpack on short personal trips. It can easily fit-in two pairs of clothes.

• Workday Bag: I’ve always loved good bags but to travel in Hyderabad, survive on these dust and pollution ridden roads you really need sturdy bags and for the last ten years, Samsonite bags have never disappointed me. They are the best, most durable (literally last forever) and easily available in India (though not cheap). I graduated from it’s backpacks (in college) to laptop messenger bags (in office). I’ve one quibble though – they are heavy – even their empty bags can sometime weigh more than a kilo. I love bags with many pockets. Luckily Samsonite bags I use have enough pockets to scratch my itch of organisation.
• Weekend Bag: The messenger bag I use is from the Finnish company Golla (not Samsonite). I did have a Samsonite bag, but my friends started teasing me that I looked like a bus conductor with that bag, so I stopped using it before someone could actually mistake me for one. Two years back when I bought my iPad, I saw this Golla messenger bag in the Apple store which was perfect for a day travel in the city. It was stylish, reeked of quality and had just enough space to cram my stuff to get through the day.

Tools: Similar to bags, I have two ‘gear’ setups – one for my regular work day and another for weekends.

• My workday gear:
  • Laptop, charger & mouse
  • iPhone 6 Plus & charger
  • Kindle Paperwhite & charger
  • iPad Air 2 & charger
  • Moleskine notebook
  • Lamy Safari fountain pen & ink cartridges
  • A ballpoint pen (backup to my ink pen)
  • Bose in-ear headphones
  • HP 8 GB thumb drive
  • Visiting Cards
  • Wallet
  • Keys
  • Medicines
  • Tissues
• My weekend gear:
  • iPad Air 2
  • iPhone 6 Plus & charger
  • Kindle Paperwhite
  • Bose in-ear headphones
  • Moleskine
  • Lamy Safari
  • Visiting Cards
  • Wallet
  • Tissues

Worth mentioning:

• The laptop I carry is Dell (the one given at work). Since I do a data intensive work working with a mouse is most efficient and though this laptop has a battery back up of 4 hours, I need to charge it atleast once to get through the day. For personal trips I take my Macbook & charger.
• My iPhone is by far my most used and important device in my life. I consider this my pocket computer, given all that I do with it. It’s in my bag while commuting and in my hand once in office or home. I’m too attached to it and might actually throw a tantrum if you try to separate it from me. Though my 6 plus runs for 1.5 to 2 days on a single charge, I feel comfortable having it’s charger around.
• I moved to eBooks last year; after dilly-dallying for years, getting the Kindle and reading on it finally clinched the deal in favour of eBooks. Though I don’t need a Kindle charger with me all the time (single charge easily lasts for more than three weeks) I keep it anyways. Sometimes though when I get frustrated with everything ‘e’, I replace my Kindle with a paperback.
• I’ve carried my iPad on & off with me. There are a few apps which are just more powerful on the iPad than on the iPhone (like Omnifocus) and reading on the iPad is a superior experience (comics anyone?) thanks to the gorgeous screen and the super light weight of the device. For a person who reads something or the other for 90% of his waking time carrying an iPad just makes sense.
• Though I’m almost a digital convert, I miss writing. Getting a good notebook in India is tough. Yes, we do get regular notebooks but they lack personality. The only manufacturer of note that puts out quality books is Nightingale. Though I’ve used Nightingale diaries over the years, I never cared for their notebooks. I’ve always wanted a Moleskine. I’ve seen people go ga-ga over the brand on the internet so wanted to use one to find out what the fuss is all about. Now, I finally have one – a lovely nondescript leather bound hardcover plain notebook with an elastic strap to bind the pages together and an expandable pocket. The book reflects the care the manufacturer put in bringing the book out. I now use it as my ‘waste book’ (on the lines of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg) – a place to write, doodle anything without reservations (isn’t that the point of writing on paper? to do so without limitations of any technology/app?).
• I shared my love for fountain pens previously on my blog and ’used to carry them with me all the time. But, since the time I moved to digital tools I started using them less and less. And, being fountain pens they started to dry-up in want of use. Another reason I stopped using my fountain pens was because they’d inevitably scratch while using and that would break my heart. These being costly pens, I kept finding reasons to postpone using them. But, I needed a good pen that could sustain a day’s pressure without breaking (my heart). Being a design buff, I settled on Lamy Safari – a beautifully designed (or should I say engineered) pen for everyday use. With this pen and Moleskine, I hope to use analog tools again in conjugation to my digital setup.
• Another long time tool I’ve used are my Bose in-ear headphones. I’m not an audiophile but can recognize good sound when I hear it. After hearing the sound of water drops at the starting of ‘taal se taal’ song from the movie Taal with these headphones, I became a fan and haven’t ever found the need to defect.
• The only two items missing from my backup, which I plan to buy this year are a card reader and a powerbank.

A friend who saw this post said she couldn’t believe I carry so many items with me. How many do you carry? Did you ever check? What does it tell you about yourself? Care to share, dear reader?