Heartcrossings

J and her friends learnt some basic Japanese thanks to Miss W, their teacher at daycare from Okinawa. There was nothing formal about her method but all the kids learnt quite rapidly. She had taught them songs about colors and numbers besides the Japanese equivalent for commonly used words. Soon after Miss W left, the kids started to forget what they had learnt from her. A year later J does not have the slightest recollection of Japanese. The early exposure to a foreign language had an unexpected side effect (maybe it is entirely expected and I am uninformed) - J wants to learn other languages besides English. She is eager to relearn Bengali, sing along with old Hindi songs and speak Spanish because her friend Anna knows how to. I got her the Language Tree DVD - Spanish for Kids from the library hoping she could learn from it. J is an anachronism in her day and age given that there is not a TV in the household or any electronic toys. The occasional DVD she watches on my laptop is the s...

If it impossible to characterize exactly how a drug does what it does why is a copy any different from the real thing since copy reproduces the behavior of the real thing faithfully. ..while it might be feasible to say what a new drug does, after extensively testing it in clinical trials, it's not possible to say exactly what it is. And if you can't describe the exact structure and essential nature of the original, then, naturally, you can't say that something else is an exact copy of it. To a lay person this describes the efficacy of herbal remedies that have been around forever but cannot be characterized or synthetically replicated by "current analytical methods". Not surprising that these hard to define biopharmaceuticals the article describes are "complex proteins derived from living organisms, cultured from cells in a laboratory". I would rather go with the Golden Seal than a half-baked attempted at playing God in some high-tech lab.

The case for why bicycling may end up costing the environment more than it saves it from is interesting. The main argument being : Human-powered transportation can substitute for trips by single-occupant automobiles. This substitution has a direct and immediate benefit of reducing energy consumption, even accounting for the latent energy content of the food required for human power. A substantial increase in the use of human-powered transportation would engage a substantial number of currently sedentary people in physical activity. Physical activity by previously sedentary individuals increases their longevity, and therefore their overall energy consumption. In the grand scheme of things it seems better for people to consume energy freely, live unhealthy lifestyles in a polluted environment and die early. Once dead they cease to burden the planet entirely. This line of reasoning is akin to domestic situations involving an eighty year old matriarch who is in the pink of health. She is ...

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link and everybody knows that except management levels in the organization that are too high up to be mucking around in the weeds. As it turns out very often the weakest link is buried deep in the weeds. A familiar problem pattern I have encountered at almost everywhere I have consulted involves an Excel macro on steroids trying to stand in for a missing workflow automation, business process management or in some extreme cases business intelligence tool. For a operation running out of the CEO's basement that would be easy to justify - getting any fancier is too expensive to be an option. When a company with a few billion dollars in revenue and in possession of state of the art technology allows an Excel macro to feed into business critical applications, it does not make as much sense. Particularly when instead of going after the root cause a dozen Big 5 consultants are brought on board to business process reengineer. I have tried to understa...

Dear Sheila, I wonder if you remember me. We met at Vaishali's a couple of years ago. I am the photographer dude that was in the States on an assignment for a museum and you had said "You must be our desi Ansel Adams. Code coolies are dime a dozen but a professional photographer is like wow" How have you been ? Take care, Arun. Hey Arun ! What a pleasant surprise. In response to my "wow" You had said "I am merely a digital archival coolie. Soon the likes of me will be dime a dozen too" What have you been up to ? I remember our discussion about finding "the one" and how our criteria made them more elusive than they needed to be. I continue to seek and am yet to find. How about you ? Ciao, Sheila. Dear Sheila, Nope I have not met anyone yet. Like yourself, still single and looking. The women in my city - they don't want to live here. They all want to go abroad and settle there. Then there is this influx of westerners coming to Bangalore for...

..he was one of those men who like to be observers at the own lives, any ambition to participate in them being considered inappropriate. It will have been noted that such people observe their destiny much as most people tend to observe a rainy day. Thus ends chapter 4 of Silk by Alessandro Baricco. All I can say of the book is that true to its name it glides smooth as silk and weighs nothing at all. You finish reading it too quickly and wonder if there were messages in it that you missed. One of the lines that I revisited was about observing one's destiny like one might a rainy day - I wanted to understand that parallel more and how it applied to my life. I have observed a rainy day in many different ways. In the carefree years of childhood, it meant being able to walk through puddles on the way back from school, drenched to the bone. As a young girl in love for the first time, rain could make me dreamy and bring on an urge for poetry. The clouds, a mighty army, march With drumlik...

An online ad for HSBC bank, I saw on MSN recently shows a young woman traipsing into her room with a pair of distressed jeans she has just bought. While she is out, Mom comes in and shakes her head sadly at the state of the jeans. The next scene has her working on the sewing machine repairing them. It does not take much imagination to figure what happens next. There comes a time when children no longer speak the same language as their parents – a pair of distressed jeans can be high fashion or clothing in state of serious disrepair based on point of view. There is no happy medium where these divergent interpretations could meet. In a similar vein, Sarah Hepola writes about her father who speaks a tongue only her mother can understand . Generation gap has always existed except with accelerating pace of change in a connected world we risk falling out of step with our children much faster and much further apart. Any time I feel challenged by J, I try to go back in time to when I was her a...

For the seriously cine-addicted, movieoke may be just the thrill they have been waiting for. Anastasia is a filmmaker living in New York City, who originally hails from Los Angeles. The idea for Movieoke came from a 25 minute film that she wrote, directed and starred in which features a character who could only speak in movie lines. Whereas that character ended tragically, having become completely alienated from society, Anastasia used the same structure to create Movieoke in order to achieve the opposite end: bringing people together based on their love of movies past, present, and future. The character from the film the FAQ references to reminds me of a flower seller (as opposed to a florist) in my town in India where I grew up. Back in the day, Anil Kapoor was still hero material and this flower seller looked like they had been separated at birth. The signature hair style, moustache and gait only added to the effect. When he had an audience to indulge him, he out Aniled Anil Kapo...

A few weeks ago, I signed into a long forgotten, half-way abandoned Yahoo account. There was a whole bunch of spam and I was about to empty the contents of the Inbox when I noticed what appeared to be a long e-mail thread. The names were exclusively Desi and appeared to be real. After reading a few messages, I realized that my id had been inadvertently included in the class of ’92 mailing list of a well known engineering school in India. Reading some more, I noticed the absence of any females in the group – I should have clued into that sooner given the frequency of risque humor and the terms of endearment that people employed to address each other. The only time the group curbed its enthusiastic use of expletives was when someone announced the birth of a child accompanied by pictures of the infant. The politics, psychology, physics and metaphysics of the Zidane head-butt was discussed for several weeks. Of course, I did not see the point given India does not make it even to the qualif...

I have to admit I was daunted by the size of A Fine Balance . I like finishing the better part of a book in one sitting which could last up to six to eight hours and then return later to finish what it left. Tentatively, I started to read. I could not get past page three and was not even sure I wanted to return. Many months later, I borrowed it again and yet again failed to make it past the first few pages. Despite being a laborious read there was an unmistakable tone of authenticity about this book that made me persist. It was good thing because the third time proved lucky. I made it past the ten page barrier with grim determination. Chapter two and beyond flowed effortlessly. My experience with reading this book reminds me of childbirth. It is a horrific struggle to bear just under nine dols of pain, you feel like your body can take no more and yet it is just a little bit more that leads to deliverance and joy of motherhood. Despite the use of Bollywood-ish flourishes, this is a book...

In their book Two For The Road Jane and Michael Stern write: A quarter-century ago, the American landscape was very different from what it is today. We feel 150 years old to admit that when we started hunting for roadfood, there were no Wal-Marts, no Kmarts, no Home Depots, no Targets, no Outbacks, no Olive Gardens, no Red Lobsters, and no Starbucks. There was fast food, but it wasn't everywhere. This was a good thing. Every place we went looked different. Today a lot of Connecticut looks like Arizona, which looks like North Carolina, which looks like Illinois. It is possible to crisscross the country and never eat, shop or stay in a strange place. This is not a good thing. When I first came to America, I rejoiced at every opportunity I had to travel. Unless it was an unreasonable distance to drive, we drove and the standards for reasonable were quite unreasonable. Today I would fly instead. As much as I longed to see and discover new places, the utter uniformity of America soon d...

Last week was insane at work. Any time I got a chance to breathe, I counted the days, hours and finally minutes left to the weekend so I could get some rest. As luck would have it, J came down with a fever on Friday evening on our way back from an open-air concert. At first I wondered if the high decibel noise (80s rock is not Js' most favored genre) had made her ill. It was more serious than that and the weekend, as my old buddy Than would put it, was "toast". At times like this, I wish there were a few more of "me" so the sum total of "my" work could be spread around more equitably. Maybe if I wait a few more years my wish can come true . I am already jealous of the generation that will spend its days reading for pleasure while sipping martinis on the beach as their android selves took care of mundane chores like working to pay the bills. Neros of the future could be fiddling as Rome burnt and be none the worse for it - they could blame it on androi...

Reading this essay on the relation between music and memories (specially those having to do with love and heartbreak) got me thinking about my own musical nostalgias I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Whitney Houston) - About fifteen then, maybe younger. It was A's birthday party. I was one of the last arrivals and he played this number to time with my coming into the living room. He was too shy to ask me for a dance and it did not help that our friends teased him mercilessly. The song brings back memories of an innocent, happy and carefree time. Tender Hands (Chris De Burgh) - The college years. P hummed the song sometimes almost absently long before he actually told me how he felt about me. He lent me the album and "forgot" to take it back with great deliberation many times. When he finally took it back, he gave me a mixed tape -the first of many. We had in a sense graduated in our relationship. Wild Women (Michael Learns To Rock) - The second job after school in a small bo...

Sheila met Anmol through a mutual friend Gagan, who thought they'd "click" at least as friends if not more. The introduction came about through e-mail since they lived on opposite coasts. Anmol was a Jersey transplant now firmly rooted in San Francisco. He told her almost right away that moving back east was out of the question. He liked where he lived too much to consider that. She wondered at her friend's judgment about the anticipated "click". He was fifteen years older, the highpoint of his weekends was his Netflix queue and he talked about an imaginary social life peopled with unnamed "friends" with whom he did a bunch of "stuff". So nebulous and angst-ridden were his accounts that Sheila wished he would not trouble himself on her behalf to choreograph a "life" that he did not have - it embarrased her. Yet he made her ponder about her condition. He showed her who she might become fifteen years from now if she remained a cre...

It is Indian summer this year and mangoes have been plentiful. I hope this is a sign that the fruit turning mainstream instead of being exotic and tropical (read expensive). It has been years since I visited India and I sorely miss the cotton dresses that I do not have. The bandhni and mirror work gypsy skirts, the Madras cotton blouses. I find myself craving pure white cotton nearly all the time which unlike the recently proletarianized mango is still obscenely expensive. Seeing the "Made in India" tag tells me exactly what the markup is and what the "real" cost of this name brand shirt is. It brings to mind pictures of poor exploited women and children toiling away in sweatshops for a pittance - I used to know a woman like that once. Her husband was a wastrel and content with the family miring in poverty. The woman wanted a better life. She snipped extra thread from designer jeans other women had sewn ten to twelve hours every day. She was just an apprentice witho...

Who knew that lessons learnt from a dolphin trainer could save a woman's marriage . She recommends that women be like trainers of exotic animals to get their husbands closer to their notion of perfection and in as such easier to love. Enlightened trainers learn all they can about a species, from anatomy to social structure, to understand how it thinks, what it likes and dislikes, what comes easily to it and what doesn't. For example, an elephant is a herd animal, so it responds to hierarchy. It cannot jump, but can stand on its head. It is a vegetarian. Translating that lesson in the context of her husband Scott, she says: The exotic animal known as Scott is a loner, but an alpha male. So hierarchy matters, but being in a group doesn't so much. He has the balance of a gymnast, but moves slowly, especially when getting dressed. Skiing comes naturally, but being on time does not. He's an omnivore, and what a trainer would call food-driven. I can vouch for the efficacy of ...

Considering the per square feet density of desi programmers and testers in my current workplace, one would find it impossible to believe that these jobs are now extinct in the US and are almost completely outsourced. Some other places I have consulted in the recent past had likewise a mind boggling number of them - and all of these are well regarded Fortune 500 companies. I wonder where Gartner et al go to get their numbers and make predictions . Most often these are offshore resources of the outsourcing vendor brought onsite to fulfill supposedly "tactical" objectives. The client usually has no role (or interest) in the interviewing and hiring process of these individuals. Their requirement is more like " 5 testers and 10 programmers required for 10 months onsite to work on X project at $xx an hour". The vendor goes about procuring the 15 bodies and ships them over to the client. Barring a few exceptions, the average competence levels of these resources, is serious...

It started with me picking up some ripe looking mangoes for really cheap. They were only tentatively sweet and positively tart around the seed. Seeing that they were quite useless as fruit, I put a couple of them into the pressure cooker along with some celery that was lying around the fridge, added an over-sized pinch of turmeric and dash of salt and let it steam. I had no idea where this was heading when I left for work. Upon returning in the evening, I found myself craving for something devilishly spicy - must have been wearying of my bland everyday fare. The celery, mango and turmeric combination had turned into a bright yellow, pulpy mass - quite a promising candidate for gravy. My thoughts turned to a tray of mixed seafood that I was going to make a paella with and the red Thai curry paste bought a few weeks ago. Soon the seafood was sautéed with curry paste, grated coconut and then cooked in the gravy. In the middle of my clockwork existence, this was a total surprise of a dinne...

I was listening to a story by Kevin Kling on NPR about weaving the land into stories and history. Talking of his home in Minnesota, he says "I love my home but I often feel like I am more of a renter than a part of the earth". Kevin Kelly makes a similar point in his blog. He challenges our knowledge of the piece of land we live on and how it interoperates with the rest of the earth with a set of 30 questions. Except for three, I could not answer any other. I guess I must be in the majority - very few people seem to have got 25 or more right judging from the small number of comments. I found all the questions thought provoking and my complete ignorance all the more so. I fared only marginally better when I took the quiz in the context of the town in India where I grew up. Kling is absolutely right - we do have the attitude of a renter and not an owner. To think that after years of learning about the wars waged by Ghenghis Khan and the Harappan civilization I could not answe...

When I first started working, someone much older and wiser had taught me the importance of a) not allowing situations at the workplace to cause aggravation and b) in event of (a) happening despite best faith efforts, not bringing the aggravation home. I have for the most part been quite good about following both rules. The last week however posed quite a challenge for my resolve. F used to be an ordained minister before he turned into a technology professional. A bad career transition by all accounts given his repulsive personality and total ineptitude at all things technology. The only way he knows to get any work done is to rave and rant at people causing them public humiliation. One woman I know was reduced to tears and had to leave a meeting when he did his thing to her. How he manages not to get laid off is a matter of much speculation and there are several "interesting" theories around that. I have one of my own. This week was my turn. I think I fared a lot better than ...

I was thirteen when my father found a copy of The Fan Club lying around in my room. To him it represented ultimate decadence of my literary tastes. I remember being amused at how he walked out in a huff to consult with my mother in the kitchen in exaggerated undertones. To his credit, while he expressed disapproval over a lot he rarely ever embargoed anything. So, that summer I was reading a lot of Thomas Hardy and Lawrence Sanders instead of working on my math and science like he would have preferred - Sanders in defiance of parental authority and Hardy because he completely enthralled me. I continued to consume a combination of literature and "trash" (as my father called it) voraciously through my teens and think it turned out to be a good thing in the end. J and I have been listening to Teasure Island on CD the last few days. I am not sure how much (if anything) she follows of the story but I am more hooked than I was the first time I read it - a few years before the infa...

Today, I was asked for my opinion on a matter that people assume I have some "subject matter expertise" on. Presumed knowledge like a little of it can be a rather dangerous thing. Juthica is a very attractive 28 year old with a charming personality- the kind that could be described in a desi matrimonial ad as "exquisitely beautiful" and not be overstating the case at all. She is an accomplished Hindustani vocalist, frequently performs on stage, has a masters in microbiology and teaches at a well known university in India. The family is affluent - her father's business is prospering. Her only other sibling is a younger brother who is attending a premier engineering school. Most importantly, she has always been the model daughter - a source of pride, joy and comfort to her family. Yet the parents are very concerned about her. They have not been able to find her a husband yet and its been eight years since they first started match-making. Much to their confusion an...

It was a lovely summer day yesterday and I took the road less traveled with J on our way home. It wound through the countryside verdant after the recent rains. Our drive took us past a quaint church, an old tavern, a craft shop and finally a thrift store where we made our stop. An old man on a rocking chair sat in the porch. He welcomed us warmly and we were his only customers. There were kitchen things, books, lamp shades among an assortment of curious odds and ends. Almost everything was very old. J spent her time skipping up and down the old wooden stairs while I browsed through the books. Paperbacks at 25 cents and hard-covers at 75 cents. I picked up one about the healing power of herbs. The old man rummaged through his pockets to find 75 cents to return for my dollar and thanked me profusely for my business. On the way back home, we stopped at Bath and Body Works lured by the bright sale signs. What a complete contrast to the run down thrift store. I bought a deeply discounted ...

Recently, while talking about the importance of focus in achieving goals with someone, I was asked to recall one instance in my life where focus had made no difference to my real objective but at least lead to serendipitous discoveries. From the time my friend M convinced me to try online dating, I must have interacted with a couple of hundred men – many of the "interactions" lasting only a couple of e-mails. I always had a good idea of what I was looking for. Given the lessons learned from being married before, I also knew what was negotiable and what was not. I was painfully aware of my limits and limitations. In time, I grew focused in my efforts to find "the one". Instead of waiting to be contacted by men who clearly did not get what I was all about, I took initiative. If a man could not put together a blurb that held my attention for thirty seconds chances of finding a lifetime of bliss with him were minimal. I had created a well-defined sort and filter criteri...

I had read Anna Karenina in my teens and watched the movie this afternoon. Ofcourse I remember the famous opening sentence "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." That had set the tone for the rest of the book. It was a spectacular read - the kind that teaches you life lessons unawares. Having grown in experience since my reading of the book, I was able to relate to the story at a more personal level as I watched the movie. Like Anna I have been mother trapped in a loveless marriage only I was fortunate to be able to escape it along with my child. A Count Vronsky will irrupt into a woman's well-ordered life, dare her to follow her passions instead of convention. He will persist tenaciously until she gives in. Tolstoy's depiction of Anna's inner turmoil is relevant even in modern societies where woman don't face the censure and reprobation that Anna did. For the brief period of time that there was a "Vronsky" in ...

She wilts over the phone absent form here. I mean not to pry on her private grief but linger longer than I should. I watch her body quaver as words choke soundlessly within glass walls . I want to tell her I have been there. Like her diminished by pain. my insides hollowed out, gone about my day like a shell without a soul. But life returns in the end. It gives back more than it takes. I walk on, wondering about the rest of her day, about how she will soldier on like nothing happened. Had I not seen her when I had, I would not have known how she had died just a little bit .

Its not every day that extra-large mosquitoes make news and trigger nostalgia. There is a thunderstorm outside and when the monsoons set in back home. To complete the picture, I have a Lata Mangeshkar CD playing in the background and dinner is all the way Bengali - just the way J likes it. Anyways, "super-mosquitoes" don't impress me much. I've grown up seeing much better than what they only now have in Athens. They should get some researchers over to the Kolkata suburb where my grandparents once lived. If memory serves right, the mosquitoes were about as large as bees and noisier. After each monsoon, they seemed to mutate to become even more vicious and virulent. Children did their homework sitting under a mosquito net - this was before the mosquito coils became popular. We as a people have a thing for mosquitoes - we have seen their teeming millions up close and personal.

Last evening J watched Super Size Me along with me. Except for a couple of four letter words there was not much else that I had to worry about for her. I figured it would be a good lesson for her on the perils on eating fast food. She was very impressed by the scene where two doctors perform a gastric bypass surgery on man. When I was her age, something like that would have made given me cold sweat and I would have had nightmares. But J apparently is made of sterner stuff. She watched without batting an eyelid and slept like a log. This morning J asked me write on a piece of paper "I am going to eat McDonalds for 30 days" and "Super Size Me" below that. Soon after, a surrealistic drawing appeared below it. It depicts a woman who ate at Burger King for 100 days, a man who ate at McDonalds for 1000. The way to tell the two apart was of course the size of the tummy relative to number of days of binging and the big hoop earrings on the woman. They look totally blissed ...

J has learnt a lot of objectionable things from other kids at daycare. Since I have no control over the elements she is exposed to, I have decided it best to allow her to bring everything home and demonstrate to me what she knows. There is no censure or reprimand. The rules of engagement are Mommy will decide if something is good or bad. If it is good she can take it outside home, but if it is not but J still wants to say or do it she has to keep it home until she gets over it. The latest entrant into her repertoire is a particularly crass booty shake. J knows she can shake her booty all she wants at home in front of Mommy but this show does not go on the road. She has been quite happy with that arrangement and is slowly weaning out of it too. However, there was some residual and lingering discontent as I found out this morning. "Guess what Mommy" says J excitedly while eating her breakfast. I know from experience this is one of the J-epiphany moments. She has just figured so...

This has been a wonderful Tennessee Williams weekend. Watched The Roman Spring Of Mrs. Stone and Baby Doll - ended up loving the second movie. Without showing anything explicitly sexual, the movie manages to be highly erotic. The sensual gives way to comic relief seamlessly and without any loss of tension - a very odd and interesting genre. By today's standards it would be considered pretty bland fare and would likely not merit even a PG rating. However, in its time religious organizations in America denounced it. Young audiences are so blasé today that the erotic suggestiveness of Baby Doll would escape them and in as such they would fail to appreciate Elia Kazan's artistry. It is like the palate's inability to appreciate the nuances of haute cuisine after being subjected to junk food for a long time. Our standards of decency have probably devolved. We are so desensitized by graphic vulgarity that we are no longer titillated by mere suggestion. It was redeeming for me that...

A cure of buyer's remorse is at hand. Actually better - with a data enabled phone at hand the remorse can be prevented. Not quite the silver bullet yet as the author of the CSM article points out. Scanbuy, however, does have a few shortcomings. Not every cellphone is compatible with the service. And spending too much time on your cellphone conducting price searches can be costly, depending on the terms of your cellphone contract. Other people who have reviewed Scanbuy have written that many retailers use proprietary bar-code systems that don't show up in any of the search engines used by Scanbuy - at least not at the moment. But as I mentioned earlier, some people see bigger things in Scanbuy's future, particularly working with the search industry's 800-pound gorilla, Google. To have such technology turn mainstream and prompt a buyer to go elsewhere to buy the tomatoes they are eyeing in one store sounds really nice. It would also be nice to be able to input a shopping...