Heartcrossings

A most timely find for this time of year - vacation options for single parents . I have experienced some of the same challenges that this column talks about. Feeling slightly odd to be the solitary single parent family in a " sea of two parent families " or at least bigger families with relatives standing in for the absent parent. If J and I travel somewhere it feels as if we merely teleported ourselves while still sitting on the living room couch. The scenery is new and different but nothing else is - something remains missing from the vacation. Unless we have friends traveling with us, the time off does not have the rejuvenating effect I look for. I used to wonder if that was just me seeking what I don't have at the cost of not appreciating the many blessings that I do have. I would chide myself for not being able to live in the present and enjoy what the moment has to offer and get frustrated at not being able to quite do so. It is very comforting to see that I am not ...

I have had a Twitter profile for quite sometime how but had not been using it. As with a lot of people, I had not grasped the point of micro-blogging. Then I read this interview with Michael Lapp . There were quite a few new things I learned. Some of the more interesting questions (and answers) : In which the concept and potential of @names is explained in 140 words or less MS: Will @names on Twitter eventually become as highly sought after as .com domain names? R: It's ironic that @names are simply reversed email addresses that drop the domain name. The concept of @names is much bigger than Twitter. Uninterrupted tweeting can be a good thing if you know how to use it. MS: Has Twitter ever been a nuisance? When (if ever) do you turn it off? R: If Twitter is annoying you then you don't understand Twitter. The only way to find out what Twitter is all about is to kick the tires yourself. MS: How do you make your friends and family understand why you use Twitter? R: I've given...

Who Does She Think She Is ? by Pamela Tanner Boll is an eloquent and often heartbreaking testimony by five women artists on finding their true selves as creators of art while meeting (or failing to meet) societal expectations of women as mothers and wives. While a male artist is allowed (and indeed expected) to have his entire existence defined by his art, the standard is very different for a female. Unless she decides to eschew having a home and a family, she is required to be a wife and mother first and create her art in any spare cycles her other responsibilities leave her with. To do otherwise is usually met by censure from both her partner and the world outside. Janis Wunderlich is a mother of five who does everything a typical suburban soccer mom does and then she has a second life as a sculptor feverishly creating works that she must haste to get out the door lest the they come in harms way in a five kid household. Her life and art beg the question how she does it as much as wh...

A few days ago, a vendor took a bunch of us out to dinner. The group consisted of three single women and myself and two married men. After a few drinks, everyone was feeling mellow and and two of the ladies got talking about ex-boyfriends. Most of the stories were downright hilarious - it is what hindsight and the passage of time often turns heartbreak into. As they shared, the ridiculous nature of their once romantic relationship became painfully obvious. They laughed and we along with them. The third woman, the youngest in the group, was not quite as forthcoming but an occasional reference to a former boyfriend did come through. The men shared no such stories but they prodded the women to sharing more once they had begun. I have seen this theme repeated in many social gatherings involving men and women who are good acquaintances but not really friends. The girls will talk about boys they had once been with. Little things at a dinner table will trigger memories - the one who made a m...

Good to know what your email response time tells about you - even if you don't agree with the findings, it would make little difference if the vast majority of people did. For better or worse, you would be viewed and judged through this collective lens. When it comes to email and work, I find my response time being inversely proportional to their distance from me in the food chain. The higher up they are, the quicker is my reaction with a couple of exceptions. A major snafu or a bellicose customer would usually take precedence. If there is a query with a binary or simple answer, I will respond right away no matter who it is from so I don't hold up whatever the other person is trying to get done. It is generally believed (and even observed) that women are on the average better at multi-tasking than men are. So it should come as no surprise that they are able to respond to emails faster and also continue with their other tasks. It may not as the pundits are saying : But such a s...

Used to be that women in third world countries had to tolerate abusive and even violent husbands because they lacked the wherewithal to leave them. They had been married so their parents would need to feed one mouth less. It just would not work economically for her to go back home with or out without kids even without the huge amount of social pressure such a move would bring in its wake. When I read this article about divorce being the latest luxury in America , I had to wonder if recession if deep and long enough would turn the clock back on the emancipated women of the West by a couple of hundred years . But as with every cloud, thanks to the creativity of divorce attorneys even this situation has a silver lining. If you are too broke to split up and go solo, you could at least sign a "cohabitation agreement" which is defined thusly: A cohabitation agreement includes an understanding of each partner’s responsibilities for financial issues, a projected date of separation, t...

I 've often had good luck following Nancy Pearl's book recommendations for kids - which is to say I enjoy reading them but J (the intended reader) liking them is a whole different matter. She will pronounce an opinion on the book after having read all of five lines of Chapter 1 on Page 1. More often than not the book is cast away unread. If I can coax her to read just a little more to see if she may end up liking it, and she reaches the end of Chapter 1, chances are she'll stick with it to the point that I will need to peel her away from it. So, off I go looking for recommendations on contemporary children's literature and have more than 90% of my discoveries summarily rejected. My most recent casualty has been Half Magic by Edward Eager described thusly : Jane and her sister are having a very boring summer. Yet, everything changes after Jane finds a coin on the street, which grants wishes. The only problem is that only half of the wish comes true. She realizes that he...

There are many phrases containing the word desi that can lead you from Google search to my blog and some of those them can also lead you to one called Desi Manifesto (not terribly PC or censored but definitely worth checking out). So, I found this blog while checking my site stats some time ago and wrote to SI to see if he and his compadre/s might be interested in doing an interview. They were gracious to accept the invite and here goes : Me: Why a desi male manifesto and not something more gender neutral along the lines of what can brown + curry do for you ? desimanifesto: We want to talk about the shared experiences of Desi Men. There are plenty of "well rounded" blogs out there and frankly, they are a little boring. None of them really speak to our experiences and they never allow their commentators to really say what's on their minds. We needed a forum for our stories especially when you don't have a lot of Indian friends locally. Me: When you say our expe...

You don't need to have lived in or known about Singapore to enjoy Wee Li Lin's Gone Shopping . No matter which part of the world you live in, chances are the Gods of the shopping mall have extracted from you life more than they have given in return. And if that is true, this is a movie you must watch. The cast of characters in Gone Shopping are creatures of the mall - it has come to be their natural habitat though not always of their own volition. There is Clara Wong, the wealthy lady of leisure who has given up her prescription medicines in favor of retail therapy. A shoe when she does not know where is going, a bag when she is feeling sad and so on - she is familiar with her ailments and what it will take to numb the pain when it strikes. Then there is the Renu, the eight year old kid who has been abandoned by her parents in a mall and learns to survive there not unlike a rat would giving new meaning to the phrase mall-rat. We see Aaron and his cosplaying girlfriend reach rel...

For those of us who need to feed their blogging habit, almost anything including the 5th sentence on Page 123 of an random book, can be turned into a meme waiting to be blogged and tagged about. That being the case, you wonder if memes do nothing more than trigger loggorhoea and then spread the contagion by way of tagging. But every once in a while in this cesspool of random ramblings, one may find something of value and originality - a thought worthy of a pause and ponder and god forbid an impulse for yet another blog or tag. So we keep feeding each one and other ideas that have been regurgitated many times over hoping someday that the typing monkey hordes will co-author a Shakespeare .

User experience is one of those greatly overused and little understood technology cliches. When I hear usuabilty experts fold forth, I am often reminded of a story from Hitopadesa - The Tale of a Brahmin and Three Rouges in which brahmin is parted from his goat in three easy steps with the moral being you cannot please everyone and to trust oneself. The brahmin in the story could be the entity who concieves the product, the goat which is mistaken to be a dog is the product itself and the three rouges stand for the many kinds of users the creator of the product tries to please in vain.  Just as the brahmin and his goat part ways, so do the intent and concept from the product. Some users will be pleased and others won't - there is always a fourth and a sixth rouge who does not agree with the rest of them. Instead it would be nice to see an user interfaces adapt to the preferences of the user unintrusively, become this comfortable old shoe that you always find yourself slipping into....

It was somewhat surreal watching the stock price of my current client plummeting like there was no bottom all day yesterday. By late afternoon, the otherwise upbeat marketing types that sit in cubicles around mine, were mulling credit default swaps, sub-prime mortgages, derivatives, foreclosures - the whole enchilada of economic woes that defines these times. Clearly, everyone felt anxious and no one was quite able to focus on their job. These things are contagious. I found myself carrying it over to another building where I had a meeting. My co-worker there had until then been buried under deadlines and had not paid attention to the stock price. When I mentioned it, his disbelief gave way to pessimism and fear. It was not a very productive meeting with everyone talking about what all this means to our lives, homes and jobs. We were feeding into each others' fears and worries until the sum of all our negativity leads us into a situation where we have real reason to panic. I wonder ...

In terms of news this is really old, spun through endless cycles and wrung completely dry. But nice essay on the increasing permeable gender roles and parental identities specially in the aftermath of Thomas Beatie (The World's First Pregnant Man) childbirth. Ellen Goodman says: ..what made Beatie tabloid fodder is that in a he/she world of opposite pronouns and sexes, he represents the trans in gender, the mind-spinning possibility that gender is not either/or but both/and NY Times columnist Guy Trebay notes in his column He's Pregnant, You're Speechless : Partly a carnival sideshow and partly a glimpse at shifting sexual tectonics, his image and story powered past traditional definitions of gender and exposed a realm that seemed more than passing strange to some observers — and altogether natural to those who inhabit it.

This David Brooks Op-Ed column in NYT Harmony and the Dream is steeped in cultural biases glossed by the thinnest sheen of scientific evidence to support his point of view. While there may something about cultural influences on how people think and behave, Brooks fails to discuss the more important questions of the day - what happens when collectivist cultures turn individualistic ? What forces come into play and how does it transform who participate or are impacted by such a change ? Conversely, what happens when individualist urn collectivist ? Also, in large, complex and heterogeneous cultures like China or India how the different parts of it - on a varying sliding scale that ranges from highly individual to highly collective work in concert. Those would far more interesting themes to write Op-Eds about. Clearly, that takes more than stringing together a bunch of off the cuff borrowed observations and call it an article as Brooks is prone to doing.

Reading this article on college girls wolf-whistling at construction workers had me thinking about my college days. Back in the day, girls represented less than ten percent of the class in my engineering school so we had very little strength in numbers. With that kind of skewed ratio, we inevitably received a lot of undesired male attention. It took us some growing used to the crude commentary on our anatomies and the constant bust level staring of the self-styled Lotharios who lorded over the campus. A lot of these guys had come from the remote backwaters of India and were around women in an urban setting for the first time. To them, seeing girls in form fitting tee-shirts and jeans was like being in a strip club for the very first time and they behaved accordingly. Yet every once in a while, us girls had our comeuppance. We would be on our way back from college to the ladies hostel and there would be this one guy walking down the street. The agent provocateur in our group, I will ca...

I know a couple of women who are aware that their husbands are cheating on them and yet choose to stay on in the marriage, children and all. My first instinct used to be to question the wisdom of their choice - specially for what it meant for the kids. A girl who grows up seeing her mother demurely accept being abused and humiliated may not grow up to seek or demand any different from the man in her own life. The boy would likely not learn to respect women if he did not see his father respect his mother - specially if his mother did not reject being disrespected. The mother forms a very important female leitmotif in the lives of her kids whatever their sex. It becomes important then for her to become an example of what she would not regret them emulating. As for the woman herself, once she lowers the bar that low for how far out of line her spouse can step without jeopardizing their marriage, chances are, her husband will stop at nothing - he now has carte blanche to do exactly as he...

Over the years, I have learned to be wary of anyone who has Dilbert accessories in their workspace be it a coffee mug, a calendar or a strip stuck at a prominent location in their cube or office. It makes we wonder about what it is they are trying to say (and to whom) without really saying it and why it is so important. My concerns are slightly alleviated by static material such a mugs, posters or scotch-taped strips from circa 1993. It signals (to me) in the best case, that they've said their piece and have worked it out of their system since. Day to day, they go about their life at work just like the non-Dilbert people - they are not getting all steamed up in a pressure-cooker whose safety valve happens to be Dilbert. In the worst case, they have one very important thing to say and they want to make sure they are heard. Dilbert is the voice of their dissent. However, when the material is dynamic and frequently refreshed, it gives me more food for thought and I might add, concern....

Reading this article in the Economist - Praying for Health , reminded me of my abortive attempt to read Jared Diamond's book Gun, Germs, and Steel . A friend had recommended the book and his short summary of the book's central themes sounded interesting. Diamond's book is not made for easy or even enjoyable reading. If you can push yourself hard enough, you might get through it and get something out of it for your troubles. But if you are attention span challenged like I am, you'll be lucky to make it to page fifty. The Economist article cites the following conclusion of two researches Corey Fincher and Randy Thornhill : The two researchers also looked at anthropological data on how much people in “traditional” (ie, non-urban) societies move around in different parts of the world. They found that in more religiously diverse (and more disease-ridden) places people move shorter distances than in healthier, religiously monotonous societies. The implication is that religiou...

Found this little gem via Mefi - a blog that reads like very well-written short story, but this is not exactly fiction unless you count email exchanges with a Craigslist spammer real. You have to read the blog in its entirety to savor this adventure but the tag line tells it in brief : My 45-day quest to convince a craigslist scammer to write me a poem-- and how she lost her mind and tried to become my friend I found it interesting to see the person emerge from inside the scammer, the lies, distortions give way to poetry even if plagiarised. There is a corn field of opportunity out there for anyone with literary aspirations these days all from the comfort of their couch. Todays writers don't need to fight wars and live to tell about it, or relocate to the South Pacific to create a volume of stories set there. They don't even need to hang out at the bar and listen to streams of consciousness pour out of dead beat drunks. Replying to emails from scammers and other strangers hangi...

I think it was in the book Lost on Planet China by J. Maarten Troost where I read about how, the center of gravity of the world of technology has shifted to China. Or it could be that I had read that somewhere and Troost's book reminded me of that line. Whatever the source, I figured it would be hard to argue that contention and as a suitable next step, it would only be prudent for J to learn Mandarin – the sooner she got started the better. However, in my neck of the woods, no one acts like the axis of their world has titled far east. The edge of the world and the boundaries of our county coincide quite nicely even today. In a sense, I am living in a time wrap so a friendly reminder about the true state of the world is always welcome. Then a few days ago, I read this update on my Linked In homepage. I am interested to co-develop these Chinese IDN domains into directories with an Indian entrepreneur that would like to market Indian services in China in Chinese. It is a moment of...

Eric Haseltine describes what makes a good liar or a good spy in this article on the science of lie detection : Who makes a good spy or a good liar? I don’t think there’s any one answer to that. Being a good actor, being a good poker player. Being a good con man. Con men are people who are sociopathic, who do not feel remorse, and who are very attuned, strangely, to other people and can read them very well. If I know what you really want to hear and what is in your heart of hearts, your fondest desire, because I’m good at reading you and I’m street-smart about assessing you, then I can feed you what you want to hear. A good con man does that. A good magician does that. You also have to have a good memory. That description fits a lot of players I have encountered in my life. Most of them are more than averagely smart and engaging conversationalists. When pressed for specific information about themselves or asked questions about their past, they will offer a slew of data but even the m...

Interesting NYT article on why America is becoming less Republican . Author David Frum writes : As America becomes more unequal, it also becomes less Republican. The trends we have dismissed are ending by devouring us. He talks about how inequality and home is directly proportional to equality between nations - they both rise or fall together. The family revolution coincided with another: a great shift from a national to a planetary division of labor. Inequality within nations is rising in large part because inequality is declining among nations. A generation ago, even a poor American was still better off than most people in China. Today the lifestyles of middle-class Chinese increasingly approximate those of middle-class Americans, while the lifestyles of upper and lower America increasingly diverge. Less-skilled Americans now face hundreds of millions of new wage competitors, while highly skilled Americans can sell their services in a worldwide market. A much older article corrobora...

John Updike is one of my very favorite writers and I am specially indebted to Hugging The Shore for introducing me to some of the best books I've read. With Updike's guidance on traversing a crowded (and to me, mostly unfamiliar) literary landscape, I no longer felt limited by the narrow confines of my small town existence. Each time, I read a book or an author recommended by Updike, the more I came to depend on his judgment. So, it was with a great deal of anticipation that I picked up Due Considerations . To say the least, I was hoping to be introduced again to a fresh crop of literary talent from around the world, writers and works Updike had not been able to give consideration to before. But more than that I was hoping to hear his own thoughts about anything he thought worthy of consideration. While his reviews are as detailed, informative and insightful as they have always been, often he comes across as a little too kind to be critical or perhaps he has deliberately chose...

This Business Week article on the leaking of GMAT questions (a part of a series I have been following for some time) is reflective of the kind of bathwaterism that bedevils any large enterprise public or private. Instead of trying to go after the root cause of the problem, the solution is the punish the effect and everyone who was tainted by it. This is akin to covering chicken-pox with concealer instead of preventing it by inoculation. The users of the service as several of the commentators point out did not necessarily know that it was illegal and to that extent going after them retro-actively does not really help plug the hole through which the questions are leaking. Would it not make sense to use much more sophisticated technology to select the questions for the test and also deliver a customized and adaptive version to each test taker based on the sum total of all their academic and non-academic credentials. Needless to say, the use of a wide pool of geographically and culturall...

I have found an answer (at best) or an animated discussion (at least) for almost anything related to J's education I've ever had to look for online . The problem at hand is a timed math test that her brand new second grade teacher is giving the kids. It appears that her brain shuts down under the twin pressures of time and competition. J is not a tough kid by any stretch of imagination and this timed test business is really pushing it. My well-meaning neighbor recommended that I intervene so the teacher does something to ease her troubles but I figured, this might be an opportunity for her to toughen up a little. After all, the real world has plenty of aggressive, pushy people with really big voices and she'll need to survive and make herself heard above the din. Even as I made that decision, I was troubled by it. What if J needed more help coping with this than I thought she did ? Was I making the right choice by throwing her into the melee and having her learn to swim on ...

I have absolutely no appetite for horror flicks and only watched this movie because it was billed as black comedy. Parents is not a movie anyone like me should watch late on Saturday night - it is very black alright but there is nothing remotely comedic about it. The story pivots around the idea that the most horrible things are possible and happen behind the facade of comfortably conventional. What struck as different about this movie is how the bizarre story unfolds - there is nothing Stephen King or Night Shyamalan about it and yet I was not able to sleep all night. The two other movies I recall having this effect on me were American Psycho and Hannibal but then I do my very best to stay away from the horror genre. I am not sure what one should expect in true dark comedy but this was clearly not what I had counted on. I would have been able to deal with something like The Virgin Suicides . If visceral reaction is a measure of success for a horror film this one scores very high at l...

Nicholas Carr in his Atlantic Monthly article asks if Google is making us stupid. My instinctive response to that question was yes and I had not yet read Carr's take on the matter. He concludes his case with : as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence. When you combine the fact that we use Google to help us navigate our way through our huge off line memory and indeed don't use our brains as a repository of information and facts as we did in our pre-Google days, net-neutrality becomes that much more important. Without it, all the talk of a flat, interconnected and convergent world where the geeks from Estonia, Mali, Silicon Valley and Shanghai have a level playing field will not amount to much. The guy with access to the express lane and superior content will be information rich and the rest will turn into the digital have-nots who can no longer count on Google to supplement ...

There is something inherently poignant about leaving a movie half-watched (I was watching it on television when some unexpected guests showed up) ten years ago to see it again now. When the movie in question happens to be Suraj Ka Satvan Ghoda and you've had in those ten years, some life changing experiences that question the very nature of love, poignance does not even begin to describe the experience. In the interests of full disclosure, I am an unabashed Shyam Benegal fan and love the poetry of Dharmvir Bharti. With the two coming together in Satvan Ghoda, it would take little else for me to be bowled over. Without giving the plot away, the story is explores the nature of love and morality through real life stories told by Manek Mulla, the protagonist to a group of his friends. There are tenuous links that join the lives of all the characters who feature in the stories, some obvious others not quite. Each sub-plot can stand on its own strength but bringing them together results...

A few days ago, Survivor Corps sent me this mail : I f you haven't heard, Russia has been dropping cluster bombs on innocent civilians in the Georgian republic which has killed and wounded many innocent people. Survivor Corps is one of the lead organizations in the movement to ban cluster bombs and to assist survivors of this terrible weapon. I've put together this social media news release which explains everything. http://banclusterbombs.smnr.us I would be grateful if you could blog about this very important subject, it would help many people. I am very glad to help get the word out and hope my voice and that of the many other little people in cyberspace gets heard over the din of corporate 24/7 news networks. An NYT op-ed column gives me hope though. Frank Rich says : But now that media are being transformed at a speed comparable to the ever-doubling power of microchips, cable’s ascendancy could also be as short-lived as, say, the reign of AOL. Andrew Rasiej, the founder o...