Heartcrossings

Learnt a great new word from reading this essay by an self-confessed over-involved dad - 'dadolescent'. Turning that gender neutral would give us parentolescent. Over zealous parents must have existed since time immemorial but only when the average number of kids in the household came down two or less did its full force come to bear. Today's parents will pull words out of Vanity Fair magazine while waiting in the dentist's office to prep their kid for the spelling bee, nearly fall off their seats in their enthusiasm over their progeny's efforts on stage or on the playground with decibel levels to match. They will bore friends and family to tears by recounting the latest and greatest on their child's impressive roster of accomplishments every time they get an opportunity. Enrolling kids to everything imaginable and possible is another venerated sign of adequate parenting and peer pressure to outdo the soccer mom next door is real and oppressing. You begin to seco...

McDonald's may even sue the OED to take McJob out of the dictionary but that will likely not help the cause of the word itself - a McJob will remain a McJob complete with all depreciatory connotations until the nature of a McDonald's job fundamentally alters. Its interesting how a word after being around for a while acquires a life of its own and not even purging it from the dictionary will kill it. In fact, the use McPower to bully OED would make the McJob even more Mc (if there is such a thing). Taking the OED by the horns may be one thing, but the power of the masses these days is vested in Wikipedia where a McJob after a disclaimer about neutrality is described thusly: McJob is slang for a low-paying, low-prestige job that requires few skills and offers very little chance of intracompany advancement. Such jobs are also known as contingent work . The term McJob comes from the name of the fast-food restaurant McDonald's , but is used to describe any low-status job - re...

At dinner time today, I was telling J about how I never saw a computer or a television when I was her age. She giggled "That sounds like Abraham's Lincoln's time" and asked "Did you live in houses when you were young ?" I figured she must have learnt that early man lived in caves. I said "Yes, that I did". She sighed in obvious relief "Thank goodness". In J's world view very little separates my childhood from that of Cro-Magnon man's. Maybe the advances in technology over the last few decades have been impressive and significant enough to close the gap between Paleolithic times and the pre-Internet era to a several thousand years instead of several million years. Reading this essay about fountain pens made me nostalgic for those days from so long ago that it seems like prehistory to my child. I could not agree more with the author when he says: In times of Biros and BlackBerrys, it may well be tempting to dismiss the fountain pen ...

Nice blog post about the perils of using social media for politics . The one saving grace is that the "offending" ad is context sensitive and will most likely go away in a bit to be replaced by one for Jenny Craig diets maybe leaving the readership part confused and part amused. One hopes amid all the noise and confusion, Obama is still able to reach out to his constituents. Another one a about why its an amazing stroke of good luck to be caught burgling in Austria and be imprisoned. The prison cell is beautiful ! However, gaining admittance is no cake walk: And even if you’d like to go, the place is booked to capacity: 205 “prisoners” at the moment. It’s probably harder to get into this place than it is for a woman to join the Vienna Philharmonic . A story about use of social media gone very awry. In which a man in goaded into cyber-suicide by the mobs in a chatroom. This would be a repulsive modern day version of a gladiatorial combat where spectators will be satisfied wit...

When her mother named her Jacaranda, the in-laws were not pleased. What kind of name is that asked her mother-in-law scornfully. Chandni would have been the right name for her. The girl was born on a full moon night. But Jacaranda she remained. A large part of the first three years of her life were spent at her cousin Rahul's home. Rahul was three years older than her and was delighted to have a baby sister he could spoil rotten. From being a self absorbed and a somewhat spoilt brat he turned giving and generous willing to share everything he had with her including his precious toy train. He would save the snack his mother packed for school and bring it home to feed the then toothless Jacaranda. He adored his Little Sister more than anyone else. The next ten years Rahul and Jacaranda met only twice. Once when their grandfather passed away and the other time when their uncle got married. Even at sixteen Rahul found his little cousin just as adorable as she was as a baby. He still wa...

If your music does say something about you , chances are the verdict changes over time. The music you liked as kid or a teen is not likely to be what you enjoy as an adult unless it is of sentimental value. Social psychologists (two of them, at least) have jumped head first into the waters of music research, learning that our music says a lot about who we are, and that we can make pretty accurate judgments about what people are like based solely on the music they like. Should that be true all it would take to understand someone would be to have them share their iPod playlist or find out where they tend to gravitate on musicovery . Sounds overly simplistic but it is usually hard for people with completely different tastes in music to find much common ground in any other area.

Reading the tell tale signs of commitment phobia in women was no epiphany for me. I have almost all of them and generally suspected that I have a great fear of getting into a bad situation - once bitten, twice shy and all that. Of the ten on the list, I identify most strongly with 4,5,8 and to some extent with 3. 1. You have a long and elaborate list of requirements for your ideal mate. 2. You go from one short-lived relationship to the next. 3. You have a habit of dating "unavailable" men. 4. You consider your married friends’ lives boring and think they settled for less. 5. You stay in relationships that are rocky and offer little hope of commitment. 6. You back out of plans at the last minute and have trouble setting a time for dates. 7. You cultivate large networks of friends at the expense of a single romantic relationship. 8. You have a lot of relationship trauma in your past. 9. Your career is very important to you and you often choose work over relationships. 10.You ...

Instead of making the most of small spaces as these winners of the smallest coolest apartments contest do, I choose to leave spaces empty wherever possible. For years now, I have lived a minimalist extremist life - paring away everything that can be lived without which as it turns out leaves very little behind. In return there is a permanent state of rootlessness and detachment from the places I have lived. Like a traveler in transit, I am always prepared to pack my bags and leave. My friend Estelle has a very tiny apartment and chooses to make it as cozy as possible. Every last detail is attended to until house turns into home. She has been a nomad for far longer years than I have and yet unlike me at every stop she attempts to plant roots. She will reach out to her neighbors, get to know the community and for as long as she is there act like this is where she will be for the rest of her life. She often asks me why I don’t try a little harder to make the transient state more comfortab...

Archana became a window at the age of twenty four when her daughter Rashmi was a year old. From the comfortable life of well placed civil servant's wife, with a fleet of domestic help at her beck and call , she and her child had to become a burden on her brother's family - or at least that is how she viewed her situation. The widow's pension was decent but not enough to afford independence. She had no education to speak of and could not hope to find any reasonable employment. Rashmi grew up with her cousins in her uncle's household as her mother made herself indispensable in the kitchen. Archana got along very well with her sister-in-law and considered that a blessing. Her brother pushed the kids hard to study and make good grades. At twenty five Rashmi got married to Sameer, her sweetheart from the college years. It was the early 60s and recession in the job market had made it impossible for them to aspire for more than their low paying jobs at a nationalized bank. The...

Geraldine Bedell’s essay on what makes the modern woman happy makes for very interesting reading. There are a million ways for women to find short term happiness in today's world but finding true and long term happiness is not as easy. As Bedell says : Most Indo-European languages make some distinction between short-term pleasure and more persistent happiness (so in Italian, for example, between gioa and felicita) and it is the latter - not the passing moments, but a single and lasting state - that seems so elusive. Choice overload causes both fatigue and confusion. When taking a multiple choice test, it is easy to pick one out of three and have a fair chance of getting it right. With fifteen options it is much harder. Likewise with several hundred channels to choose among when you want to watch TV for a half an hour. Women want to keep their choices, retrogression to an earlier, simpler, choice-less time is not even an option. Just like going back to one hour a day of state run T...

Piyali graduated from JNU at twenty two. Delhi had been her first taste of freedom from the cloistered ancestral home at Ballygunge, Calcutta. Her parents were readying to get her married and had already lined up a few prospects for her to meet. Piyali was soft-spoken, pretty, light-skinned and "slightly plump". In her Bengali milieu she would be considered perfect wife material. So when she announced that she wanted to take the GRE, the family was a little perplexed. Mother blamed father for letting her go to JNU when she could have just as easily gone to Jadavpur. Had she been home, they may have been able to find her a match by now. She arrived in New York to attend an obscure school mainly so she could live in the city. When it came time to find room-mates her cheapest option turned out to be a man in his forties, who had recently gone back to school full time. Her parents did not learn of the rather unusual living arrangements but then neither did they know much about h...

I love the utter simplicity of paper prototyping for user interface design. I've seen wire frames scrawled on white board, done in PowerPoint or Visio and using sophisticated modeling tools but never in paper cut-outs. Given the inherent fluidity of business requirements and short time to market whatever your tool, it should lend itself to change relatively effortlessly and with input from several sources. Paper sounds perfect for this. I also like it that : you can also use paper prototypes to run a technology-free design meeting: turn off your laptops, stop checking your e-mail, and focus on the task at hand . Getting all hands on board for the duration of a design session is incredibly hard with so many e-distractions. You end up burning the hours and producing documentation that does not represent the team's best output. Working with real things like paper, scissors, pen and glue stick is likely to increase involvement with the task at hand and also aid problem solving - k...

Priya's comment on my blog post Toxic Wife got me thinking. She wrote : .. God knows few men are protective of their wives these days, with women being pressured to be all and do all. Let's not lose those few :) As women get into formerly male dominated careers, earn more than their spouses and balance career and motherhood with what appears to be consummate ease, the pressure is on them is to continue "to be all and do all". Men don't see a need for them to protect and nurture someone who clearly has no need for either. The traditional husband role becomes more symbolic, titular and ritualistic rather than real or necessary. Back in the day, the man of the family expected to have his wife wait on him after he got home exhausted from earning a day's living. Today's wife will often make enough money to raise a family and have plenty left over, help the kids with their homework and still have time to set a hot dinner on the table. A man in her life who wa...

Ran into this old news story on TOI about the enticement used by malls in Pune to lure shoppers. Trade the trash gathering dust in your home for shopping coupons. This is like a perpetual motion machine, shopping propelling yet more shopping - you just have to start the event in motion and the rest takes care of itself. Since controlling consumerism is not too realistic, this is a good way to recycle the excesseses of consumption. The model seems highly likely to work in America where the average household is fighting a losing battle against growing piles of "stuff" no one needs. Community colleges offer courses on clutter management. While emptying the contents of an average self-storage unit can fuel a whole lot of shopping by way of junk redeemed for coupons, retail bussinesses and credit card companies would rather shoppers spent money than barter old goods for new. Thanks to eBay, closets do pay for themseleves if they carry a bunch of designer and limited edition labe...

HBO's Addiction documentary is about the real nature of addiction and how it is a brain disorder that can be treated with medication. It also shows how popular stereotypes about drug addicts stand in the way of their recovery. Instead of being treated like any other patient with a medical condition, they are isolated and discriminated against.It is no surprise that insurance companies want to wash their hands off addicts as quickly as possible leaving their condition untreated and making them vulnerable to relapse and even death. When it comes to teenage addicts, it is often a foregone conclusion that it is the result of significant parenting lapses. Not only does the addicted teenager become a social pariah, the family is viewed as lacking in some fundamental way. The story of addiction, the struggle against odds to overcome has in it a lesson in society's inherent Darwinism. It lionizes winners and shuns losers and leaves them behind to fend for themselves believing that to ...

When Sejal met Sajid in their college cafeteria, the spark of connection was instant. At eighteen, these things tend to be strong and overwhelming. She was studying English Literature, and he was doing Economics. After that first meeting, where most notably Sajid said something so funny that Sejal splattered a mouthful of tea on his shirt as she laughed uncontrollably, they could not have enough of each other's company. Sajid's dad supplied auto parts to car and truck makers around the country. His only other sibling was a kid sister ten years his junior. His father was waiting for him to finish college so he could help out in the business. Both Sejal's parents taught at a local college - one History and the other Math. Her two older sister were married with kids. When they first started skipping classes to go to the movies, it was more in the spirit of truancy than romance. The spark had been felt but not recognized for what it truly was. They had quickly become best frien...

Back at Sheetal's baby did not have to love disco to party hard and into the wee hours along with their parents. They believed children were always better served being with their parents irrespective of circumstances than left behind with baby sitters. They did not endorse the western world view. I never understood what part of Bharatiya Parampara these folks so zealously supported leaving six and seven year olds unattended at the bar so they could mix left over drinks wily-nily with their soda and run upstairs to their rooms to play video games. Sheetal and Jay are hardly an exception. A lot of desi parents tow their children along like body appendages wherever they go. As the parents, chat and drink till 4:00 a.m., the kids fall asleep bored and exhausted all around the house. Saturday mornings don't start till one in the afternoon. All around me, I see elementary school kids dressing and acting like teenagers. Childhood used to be a brief yet beautiful bridge between infa...

For years my grand aunt had a shabby little sack in which she kept her wedding jewelry. The sack stayed buried under a pile of coal in the backyard. In her backward coal-mining town, getting a safe deposit locker was not an option. A lot of people kept their valuables at home and not surprisingly burglaries were commonplace. Some of us in the family knew her secret hiding place and I thought it was disingenuous of her to share - what if someone overheard and decided to raid the coal bin one night ? Reading about the iceberg lettuce safe reminded me of her. Though her gold never got raided, it had to be sold to make ends meet. By the time she died there was nothing left to hide in the coal bin. Somehow, it always sounded like the wrong thing to store gold jewelry the way she did. Feng Shui experts would doubtless attribute that to her declining fortunes by way of diamonds turning to coal in the figurative sense at least.

When MIT first made its courses available for free online , it seemed to the beginning of something big and path breaking. In a few years online home work help for American students from Indian tutors would become common and post 9/11 the immigration process would become such a theater of absurdity that a lot of Asians students would prefer to go home after completing their education in America. More recently, Asians with years of experience in the IT industry have started to return home along with their school age kids. For a lot of kids growing up in Asia, a placement in an Ivy League school continues to be the stuff of dreams. How tos on the subject have been written to become bestsellers. The lucky few that get a full ride to school or are rich enough to pay their way can make that dream come true but for many of the equally meritorious the price tag is an impossible hurdle between them and their destination. Given the combination of circumstances, the logical next step seems that ...

Life Support is a story about a former cocaine addict who is also HIV positive who is trying to reach out to the community so they don't repeat mistakes she made and have to learn the hard way. She hands out condoms and literature whenever she meets someone who she thinks may be living dangerously. In a way this is a coming of age story. Though you never see Anna Wallace as a young person, you get the impression she must have been passionate and driven about whatever her heart was set on doing. In her youth, that may have been cocaine, now it is motherhood and activism. Whereas in youth her abundant energy worked destructively, the combination of age and a losing battle with the AIDS virus helped channeling it positively. She is a devoted mother to her second child and tries very hard to make amends with her first born whose custody she lost due to her drug addiction. The new Anna is nothing like the old Anna but family and friends who knew the person she once was are unwilling or...

Anil came to the US five years ago from Nasik in India. He had trouble speaking without lapsing into Hindi words to fully express himself. Often, his American co-workers lost him mid sentence of what sounded surprisingly English-like. He was just above 5 feet tall, dangerously underweight, wore clothes that were bought for really cheap from roadside hawkers back home. His watch was a trusty Titan and shoes Lakhani. When his mother called from India, he would ask his boss for permission to speak to her. Just another code coolie, he tried very hard to blend in because fitting in was not a realistic goal. In three years, he had blended a good deal. The gallons of whole milk had given him several extra pounds. He had also come into a raggedy Corolla, an apartment he shared with just another room-mate and not five as it had been at first. The Indian footpath brand had been supplanted by Wal-Mart. He no longer lapsed into Hindi while at work. The desis who had been around for much longer tha...

I have been meaning to read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle for a while now. Finally, found the book and some time to read. It was love at page one that grew stronger as Murakami warmed up to his theme which interestingly is about nothing really but a lot of connected events and people who come and go out of each other's life like they were part of a design grander than any of their individual selves. I loved the language, the pace which never slacked or quickened despite many long soliloquies and distracting side plots. In the end, like an expert puppet master Murakami always managed to pull all strings together in to feed his central theme - about a couple who loose a cat and then in a while the woman leaves the husband. The end of each chapter was a perfect segue to the next. Yet towards the end, the expanding universe of characters seemed to dilute the essence of the story. It started to feel contrived as if the author was testing the limits of adding more twists and introducing fe...

Reading about the toxic wife syndrome reminds me of two women of my acquaintance. Deepa is still with her husband and Katie has left after taking him to the cleaners. For Deepa it just made more sense to stay than leave because she would have a hard time fitting in the desi mileu where having an affluent husband and two kids is what makes her so welcome. Losing the married tag would convert her into a pariah right away. It is not worth it for her. Katie's been married before and can be married again so having a nice chunk of change while she scopes out the next prospect is not a bad deal at all. The largish wedding and anniversary diamonds were all set in platinum and that was just the beginning of all things lavish and supersize about her way of life. Both these women fit the trophy wife bill to the tee "Domesticated, docile yet dazzling" They stayed at home, had nannies raise the kids while they shopped and partied, lived in suburban McMansions and ofcourse their h...

There is a fine line between clinginess and healthy dependence and often the one who is accused of the former thinks they have the later. The partner thinks otherwise. It could be attributed to difference in perception and opinion sometimes blatant double standards. There is also a contextual basis for the categorization which makes it even more complicated. Reading the article, made me think of my former co-worker Janet. We stayed in touch long after we stopped working together. She was fun to hang out with and sometimes stopped by at my place after work to taste some Indian food. She loves doing things for people she cares about and often with great pomp and circumstance as she has done for both me and J. While we have been good friends, I find myself taking an almost perverse satisfaction in counting how many times, I have allowed her to get away with completely unacceptable behavior. It is like if I let this pass, I will know what else she may be capable of, it will help me unders...

This article on the corelation between month of birth and increased risk of certian mental disorders appears to draw its inspiration from astrology as the title suggests. January and August seem the two safe months of the year to be born. Being born between April and May is clearly not a good idea which is bad news for all Taureans. It makes for interesting reading whether or not you believe there is any truth or scientific basis to any of it. The March Hare was mad for a reason.

My friend Nishi bought me a copy of Vikram Seth's Golden Gate when we were in the third year of engineering college on a trip home to Delhi for summer vacation. In my little town, it would take another five years before it hit the bookstores and I was eager to find what the buzz was all about. Three years ago, when we started at college, Anand and I had felt the first spark of connection, chemistry or what ever it is that gets mistaken for infatuation when really it is love. Around the time when I finished reading Seth's book and was still recovering from its mesmerization, Anand had finally summoned the courage to acknowledge that he felt something very special for me. Even after having known all along, it felt wonderful to be told the self-evident. Anand had been inspiration for prose and poetry like no else had till then though few have since. Maybe he set the right forces in motion. Seth's sonnets made me think about love and the bitter sweet suffering that comes with ...

Art that makes you think has undeniable value even if provocation of thought comes through controversy as is often the case. Fusing bullets with crystal to create jewelry is unconventional but falls short of being labeled unethical like bio art . Both are about "social reflection, conveying political and societal criticism". The defining line that separates one from the other is the use of living cell and tissue as material to create works of art. When PETA says "We're all in support of creativity but we're opposed to all suffering ." they are in denial of the fact that most if not all art is derived from suffering. From the child labor involved in bangle making in Varanasi , to the Afghan refuges in Pakistan toiling in inhumane conditions to create Persian rugs to the Dali and Picasso wannabes starving to feed their passion, the theme of sadness permeates all art. Even the story of Thomas Kinkade and his uber happy paintings of light has a darker side . S...

Love the idea of a rollable display . There is already a cellphone only as big as lipstick . The state of the art should not be too far away from producing a gadget that combines a mirror, powder compact, lipstick, rollable display for WiFi internet access, mp3 player(naturally) and cellphone. The size of this thing should be should be small enough to fit into a pretty beaded evening bag. It would the only thing a girl would need for a night on the town. If they could do what Cartier's done to the USB flash drive , then she could just wear it on a chain. With a nail file and tweezers thrown in the mix, the device would be a Swiss Army Knife that a girl can covet.

I When love left from crossing the threshold, tears were withheld anger poured like rain instead. warm, bubbly frothing indignation outrage, betrayal – a heady cauldron marking their callused course through the bone and sinew of me II Somewhere where the road winds into the Chesapeake - suddenly sand and foam, lonesome tufts of wild grass wave at the sea. I would want to steep in the water knee deep invite the breakers to knock me down laughing silly. Oh ! was I a dreamer. My womb was quiet with longing. It did not feel the tickle of sand in my toes, know of fine cracks in my happiness. When the sun tumbled into the western sky, we headed back home – carrying on my lap shells, pebbles –beachcomber me, destined to search infinity for one last rainbow colored hope. III They are holding hands like we once did, laughter fires the dream in her eyes like they once did mine. His speaks a foreign tongue she does not know to read like I once did not know to know you. I smell Organza over Pour H...

A few weeks after J's infamous Stardom Week, my neighbor called me one evening to see if J and I might want go to school to watch her second grader's performance. Their class was staging a musical. Her youngest one goes to Mrs H's class with J and the two are good friends. So we tagged along with Terri and her two girls. The parking lot was packed as was the auditorium. In the sea of white, a few oddities like myself stood out like sore thumbs. We so did not belong here. Near the stage armies of camcorder toting parents stood in readiness to catch their kids in action. After a few false starts involving a malfunctioning microphone, the performance finally got under way. A year ago, my friend Chloe had invited me to watch a musical at her daughter's school. This is a private school and the ages of the kids who were performing ranged from 6 to 16. It was amazingly well done and the crew could pass off as professionals. Watching the 7 years olds at J's elementary scho...