Heartcrossings

I was meeting my friend E after a very long time. Since she had relocated, our contact has been limited to occasional phone calls and even fewer emails. So when she happened to be in my neck of the woods on business, we were excited to catch-up. In a segue from my comment about lack of reliable music reviews and my growing unfamiliarity with the scene, E went on to music from the 70s. That in turn brought back memories of her teens, having sex for the first time and such. By her own admission, E has had a rich and varied love life - something she has mentioned to me earlier with more regret than pride - or that is how it seemed to me. That evening she said something I had not heard before "I suffered from low self-esteem and insecurity well into by 20s and 30s. The only way I knew to feel good about myself was to be wild and free. I needed men to tell me how beautiful I was, how much they desired me so I could feel I had some value. Nothing else did it for me. I was willing to ...

Between age three and four, J had gone through a period of defiant behavior. She simply did not want to follow instructions and would do her best to annoy me. It was a little game of testing boundaries to see where the yield point lay. I started off by ignoring her hoping that things would resolve themselves that way. Instead she upped the ante some to ensure that she had my attention. I changed strategy at that point and decided to talk through it (as difficult as that was given her age at the time) - being mad at her was just making things worse. So using a variety of ways ranging between halfway sensible and downright idiotic, I was able to rein J in - for the time. I did not want to push too hard fearing that she may clam up completely or would have no spirit left. Defiance is back again these days. It will be over small things. I view it as her way to assert her identity as different from mine and one she wants to define independent of my guidance - and there is absolutely nothin...

Ever since I read this hilarious Jerry Seinfeld quote on lipstick "Where lipstick is concerned, the important thing is not color, but to accept God's final word on where your lips end." in the book If Ignorance Is Bliss Then Why Aren't There More Happy People ? Smart Quotes for Dumb Times , putting my face on in the morning before leaving for work has not been the same. I find myself smiling stupidly into the mirror sometimes I have even burst out laughing. I am among those who have graciously accepted "God's final word" on the said matter but there are those who find it harder to do so. I have a lot more troubling settling on the right color for the place, time, occasion and outfit. Seinfeld's word is hardly the only or the final one on lipstick ."Beauty, to me, is about being comfortable in your own skin. That, or a kick-ass red lipstick." said Gwyneth Paltrow. There is a certain timelessness about women's relationship to makeup (inc...

This article in n+1 magazine on dating is an excellent read. This was my favorite part : Dating presents itself as an education in human relationships. In fact it's an anti-education. You could invent no worse preparation for love, for marriage, than the tireless pursuit of the perfect partner. Keep Looking, says dating. You're Not Done Yet. What About That One? And That One? Dating, like the tyrant, seeks perfection (within a certain price range). Whereas the heart, like the eye, can only cling to imperfections: her funny stride, and the way her voice breaks, child-like, on the phone. And so the dater, self-baffling, seeks what the heart cannot understand. In one paragraph, the author captures the essence of what is wrong with this process and why it is inherently frustrating. The cost of dating math is worth pondering too. When a man acts ever so cheap on the first date and takes a woman to lunch at a low end pizza chain, she wonders if he may not be that into her. Chances a...

When I read this TIME article on the trend of American expats giving up their US citizenship because of unfriendly tax laws, the first comment I saw happened to be from a desi sister, Manali Rohinesh. Once you get past the high rant quotient of her observations, the truthiness in some of it is undeniable. Since it is buried deep now, I am quoting it here in full : This should be like a final wakeup call for all those Indians who have gone to the US after 1991 - i.e post liberalisation in India. I can't think of a stupider move made than a decision to go there just when your own country is at the cusp of growth and progress. This is a country where the middle class consumer power is on the rise. This is where entrepreneurs - when given the right impetus - are creating little pockets of prosperity while the US has Enron, Worldcom, Arthur Anderson, Merrill Lynch et all to thank for their joblessness. Where are all those ESOPs now and some Indians are dumb enough ...

The idea of bringing a bazar or souk to you couch is a very interesting one. The more interactive and immersive the experience, the better for the customer. Imagine having a virtual reality application that gives someone the feel of walking through a crowded marketplace in an unknown country - even without being able to purchase, that might be worth spending some money to enjoy. This does seem to be an idea with some legs. As the virtual and real worlds confluence more and more, travel will lose a lot of its charm. If one could experience it all and not have to expend money and energy to get there, it would take more than just visiting a place to get something out of it. Used to be only some parts of a country were popular tourist destinations and the discerning traveler would go elsewhere and have a memorable experience. With technology where it is today and headed for in the future, finding those pristine, unknown nooks will become more and more difficult. Part of the travel experie...

I was reading The Selfish Gene - 30th Anniversary Edition recently and went over the battle of sexes chapter a little more closely than I had in my initial reading. I wondered what Dawkins would say of courtship rituals in the world where connections are mostly made online and there is room for both males and females to court any number of prospects at the same time. The theoretical maximum only subject to how many suitors a man or a woman can juggle simultaneously without losing their sanity. According to Dawkins of an extended courtship period benefits both the man and the woman for different reasons - specially where the woman was more coy than fast and the man more faithful than philanderer . Such a pair in today's world could be checking out a number of other suitable matches within a long courtship window and still not become fast or philandering - they would merely be doing due diligence by checking out the offerings in the market. There seems to be no great benefit accr...

Reading this article about naps and dreams being able to boost learning would be ever so helpful in my teens when day dreaming came very easy as did napping for hours on summer afternoons where the only respite from the heat was somnolence. That was also when I had mastered the fine art of zoning out during the most boring classes with my eyes wide open while sitting at the desk closest to the teacher. It was more typical for the malcontents, troublemakers and such to cluster as far away from her as possible. This I realized was poor strategy. If you wanted to sleep right through a class, you had locate yourself in the general vicinity of the most irreproachable kids. The enterprising neighbor who sat at the desk next to mine, put her time to good use by snacking out of the lunch boxes of the kids who actually paid attention to the teacher and took copious notes that the rest of us would soon borrow. Like me she no use for what was been taught and had been astute about choosing her de...

Lately CEOs have become synonymous with over-compensation and insinuations of incompetence and worse. Reading this Silicon India article about renting CEOs for short durations made me pause for thought. This is the individual who is entrusted with the stewardship of the company and is responsible for its future and direction. How someone brought in for a six month stint can realistically deliver on all of that is hard to fathom. If leadership at the top changes a couple of times each year, how does the rest of the organization possibly keep up ? Each individual will bring to bear their own management style and biases but by the time everyone else has settled into a good operating rhythm it becomes time to do things over - and in a different way. Even churn in middle management ranks can cause a havoc in the trenches. If indeed, a contract staff of CXOs are able to keep things humming along just fine and the organization on the whole does not miss a beat during transitions, it would be...

Somewhat lengthy but interesting interview with a self-confessed book pirate . The parts that made the most sense to me were : Just because someone downloads a file, it does not mean they would have bought the product I think this is the key fact that many people in the music industry ignore – a download does not translate to a lost sale. Folks like me who depend on the public library or second hand book stores for their reading needs, would be very unlikely to buy a new book at retail or even slightly discounted prices. If it were easy enough we may browse a book on-line but we would not have bought the book even if were not there to read for free. To that extent the argument about each download being a lost sale is not valid just as this book pirate notes. I think most of the filesharing community feels that the record industry is a vestigal organ that will slowly fall off and die – I don’t know to what extent that feeling would extend to publishing houses since they are to ...

Unless you are a woman all of whose girlfriends are married, chances are that you often find yourself listening to someone who is going through relationship problems and wants to share their woes with you. Over the years, the common theme I have seen come from these outpourings is one of feeling extreme emotional vulnerability. This state of mind is particularly confusing to a woman who views herself as liberated, open-minded and a free agent doing as she pleases without being beholden to societal expectations of her gender. Fifteen to twenty years ago in India, it was not commonplace for women to be in a physically intimate relationship before marriage. That has since changed. Those who moved west at the time were able to bring such change into their lives even earlier. "Empowerment" to live freely came to both only at different times in their lives. Up to this point, it all sounds good. The girls no longer feel like their net worth in the marriage market is dependent e...

Learned a new word today while reading this article - mesofacts. Mesofacts are the facts that change neither too quickly nor too slowly, that lie in this difficult-to-comprehend middle, or meso- , scale. Often, we learn these in school when young and hold onto them, even after they change. As an example, the author cites the count of the number of elements in the periodic table. As it turns out, it is up by ten since the 1970s. So if someone went to high school back then, they would have this fact wrong by now. That may not appear to be very significant specially for those who have no use for the periodic table in their day to day lives. The author explains why the knowledge of mesofacts is important specially in today's world : Our schools are biased against mesofacts. The arc of our educational system is to be treated as little generalists when children, absorbing bits of knowledge about everything from biology to social studies to geology. But then, as we grow older, we a...

Micheal Cook of MercatorNet has this nice article on men's liberation - the wave of the future, a view of the post-feminist world if you will. Each time I read an article about how the of the modern school system is not serving boys as well as it the girls, how the male of the species is getting left behind and not being able to catch up, I feel sad for today's boys. Obviously if one gender is left behind, it will eventually hurt the one that is forging ahead. The comments on the article make for interesting reading. One of them talks about repeating the same mistakes that the feminist movement did with this idea of liberating men. Both are good ideas until the implementation and interpretation go wrong. The notion of being equal and different is a hard one to master or apply - a problem with any kind of gender liberation. It is possible for a woman to become too "liberated" to remain appealing to a man.Similarly,an over-sensitive, male stereotype defying man migh...

A client I consulted with recently embarked on a large project with the primary aim of driving more customers to their on-line store and making the buy process easier. There were some social media features thrown in for good measure. The idea being everyone's doing the Twitter and Facebook thing so we should throw our hat in the ring and hope for the best. A hundred thousand followers on Twitter in Week One seems about the right number (entirely without basis though) so let's target that. Turns out that reality falls far short of that and everyone is left wondering what they did "wrong". The idea of using reaching their customer on their mobile devices seems too far-fetched idea to the powers that be. In a sense they are trying to replicate an e-commerce success story from a decade ago at a time when the world has moved on to other things and will continue to do so. By when the project rolls out into production, the vision would have become out-dated and irrelevant...

Once I had exacting standards to call someone a "friend". These days, I use the word more freely and irresponsibly even. The gravitas associated with friendship has greatly diminished over time and more people are now contained within its orb. The woman I met for lunch last week, is a friend after a fashion. If you consider similar life experiences and the common need to share with and relate to another human being whose suffering resembles your own - that probably falls into the realm of friendship. Yet, there is no larger context around this connection and when we part ways, it would be no more significant to either of our lives than scooping out a handful of water from the ocean might be to it. That afternoon as we shared stories from our pasts, we were confidantes and friends in a way we might hardly be with others in our lives. We both felt better knowing that the emotional upheavals we had gone through, the times when had questioned our sanity and when we had thought...

A few days a ago, I was telling my mother how difficult it is for J and I to get used to having food cooked by yours faithfully after a break of six months. When my parents visit, mom takes over the kitchen and what a huge difference it makes to quality of our lives. It is not as much about the recipes she serves but her attention to detail and her amazing creativity. The lack of produce options in the local grocery stores does not bother her. She will come up with ways to take what she is given and make something delightful with it. And she is able to repeat this feat every single meal for the entire duration of her stay. Yet, her life is hardly kitchen bound - she has a variety of other interests and makes time for them in her day. Cooking and me have had a strange relationship - full of crests and troughs. I was a competent cook even before I hit my teens. Once I was allowed in the kitchen more, I was able to put my own spin on traditional Bengali recipes in a way that was often...

Boredom and children don't make the best companions. As lot of a parent's time can be spent in trying to keep boredom out of their child's life. Yet there are times when it impossible to keep boredom at day and kids come up with interesting strategies to cope with it. A few weeks ago, J and I were at standing in a long queue someplace. There is nothing to do except wait for our turn so J decided to find a way to occupy herself. She started to breathe out in the direction of the bushes that were planted along the path. When I asked her what she was doing J replied "I am giving food to the plants" A few days ago J had observed that all people on the planet will die if they keep cutting down trees as they are doing now "There will be no oxygen left for us to breathe". She has been learning how plants make their food and that lesson came handy in alleviating boredom while standing in line - waiting. Whether alone or with their friends, I have found kids ...

A few weeks ago, J helped me write short synopses of her five favorite books from last year for a post I did for Saffron Tree . I have blogged several times about my undiminished sense of wonderment in the American public library system. That is possibly the first thing I loved about this country and it continues to top the list.All the books I ever owned were hand me downs from relatives or friends who no longer wanted them or bought really cheap at second hand book-stores. It was just not the done thing in my family to go off any buy books "randomly" as my mother would like to say. The first question she would ask if I wanted to buy one was "Will you read it a second time ?". If the answer was no, purchase was out of the question. While there was still such a thing as the USSR, every year there would be a Soviet book fair in my town and that was the time I could buy a few books. My parents allowed this "indulgence" mainly because they were so cheap. T...

J eyed the hot food bar at a grocery store in my neighborhood longingly and asked if we could take some home for dinner. It was a colorful, varied and attractive assortment of food so I could see how she may have been tempted. We were both tired and more than a little hungry at the time. She could not wait to taste it once we got home and I arranged a small portions of everything we had bought on her dinner plate. After a few mouth fulls, J scrunched up her nose and said "I don't like it one bit. It's not what I thought it would taste like. If I eat any more of this, I'll throw up". From extreme anticipation and love, it had gone to that must distaste and rejection within a few minutes. I could help but feel amused at the dramatic change of heart. She asked me to fix her a very simple Bengali staple for dinner which I did. This is the second time, J has fallen prey to food presented in a way that looks tempting and found out that appearance and taste can be quit...

It is always fun to learn a new word that's not yet a buzz word in the IT business and specially when the learning comes through a well-written article like this one . The representative examples of the use of kairos in the context of web design and user experience are great but the use of Comcast as an example of effective use to Twitter to address customer complaints put my brain in shutdown mode instantaneously. If that is kairos in action, I would much rather not know more about it less try and put it to use myself. Having suffered greatly at the hands of Comcast's customer service (really, they should call it something else that better describes the third degree they put their people through thanks to their astounding levels of cluelessness) one time too many, I simply could not get past this line and read the rest : Notice that Frank is not giving an obsequious “I’m sorry” or an insincere “You’re right.” He listens to the customer’s viewpoint, concedes to some aspects...

Reading this article about American universities outsourcing the business of grading the work of students to call centers in India left me rather unsettled.When applied to education, the implications of outsourcing can be quite insidious - it is amazing that the students are not up in arms protesting. They are paying a huge sum of money for the privilege of being educated in an American university by the professors who physically teach them there. The expectation should be that they get what they are paying for – the professor’s time and attention. The notion that a real TA can be swapped out with a virtual TA because the two are not that different is wrong in more ways than I can count. However, that is probably the first argument the proponents of this system will make.One might argue, a student could likewise outsource their “monotonous” assignments and free up time to gain real world experience (which is what their future livelihood will depend on) and reduce their student loan ...

I suffer from a chronic inability to follow any recipe and that becomes a problem if I want to bake. J knows to expect the worst when I take it upon myself to do so. If anything, J has come to realize that her mother can be very persistent and does not give up on something just because she has failed at it twenty times in a row. Persistence and the capacity to spring back from failure, I guess are qualities that don't hurt anyone so it's a good thing for J to observe and hopefully emulate in other areas of life. Except in this case, J is left with the unsavory job of eating the charred cake, rock solid bread or cookies that don't resemble any kind of cookie she is acquainted with. That can be a steep price to pay to feed somebody's persistence habit though mulishness might be the more appropriate description of the condition. Recently, I was able to turn out a decent spice cake minus a recipe - a first in my life. J's friends loved it and despite her initial reser...

Anyone who has felt frustrated by not finding an answer to their specific problem in a long list of question answered in a website's FAQ section will agree with Stephen Gracey's post on FAQs - what they are good for and not. If the site is designed right and with feedback from users as the author recommends, the common queries should go away.Should thousands of people be asking the same question without content in the site that makes the answer self-evident, a FAQ is not the solution to the problem. The high frequency question could be treated as an opportunity for improvement instead of a quick band-aid style fix by shoving it into the FAQ section. Gracey suggests the following to ensure questions from users are being tracked and addressed in a meaningful way : Are there, in fact, any questions users ask frequently? Don’t just add them to your FAQ in the name of completeness. Sort the questions into piles. Look for common words. Count the frequency of occurrences. As soon...

I was walking home after dropping J off at her friend’s house. Other than some chores, I did not have much to do that evening. So when N, my neighbor asked me over to join her in her balcony for a drink,the timing was perfect. N teaches physics at a local college and is a single mother like myself. Her son is getting ready to go to high school this fall. At forty something, N is very attractive and in great shape thanks to her workout discipline. If you’ve spent any time with her you would not fail to notice the bracing sense of humor and a sharp mind. When conversation turned to relationships (she has recently parted ways with a boyfriend of a couple of years), N mentioned some of her challenges. She does not have the time to meet people “off-line” the good old-fashioned way. When her family or friends try to set her up, the pressure is too high for things to go well - plus she hates it when people "check in" after the date to see how things went.She does not want to have ...

Not sure if this will wow gamers but as a non-gamer, I found the ability to create my own Media Monster , pit it against another one and advance to the next level very interesting. I lost a couple of fights and won some but my Monster continued to make net positive gains. Not sure if that was by chance or my deliberate design. What was best, I could leave the fighting on cruise control, get some chores done  and come back in a bit and check the outcome. My biggest problem with gaming is that it needs me to be an active (and captive) participant - I don't have the patience or the focus to do something like that. I would have never known to associate Verbatim (last I knew they were making floppy disks) with something ever so cool.

I have given up my daily dose of technology blogosphere these days. Unless they have anything other than iPad apps to talk about, there is nothing for me to read there. Clearly, the iPad has come some ways from the time tech observers and commentators had mostly disparaging things to say about it to now when (thanks to the apps), the iPad will change the world past recognition. As with everything else the punditry comment on in haste these days and recant at leisure, it seems like they got this one wrong and by a wide margin. My good friend K who is a die hard Apple aficionado fully intended to buy the iPad even after every negative review he had read or heard. K apparently got it right. He believed that the device was like an empty scratch pad, the apps people built for it would determine if it became a success - no different than the iPhone. To that extent, a less than perfect virtual keyboard or an over-size bezel did not bother him too much. The potential will become evident over...

As much as we might like it, some things from the past refuse to cleave neatly from our lives. My friend L came out of a difficult and loveless marriage with two young children a few years ago.Her ex decided to move back to India leaving L and the kids to fend for themselves here in America. L believes the decision was motivated mainly by the fact he did not want to take responsibility for any of them. They had been married for five years at before the end came and had known each for a couple of years before their marriage. Her ex has recently remarried and L has a steady boyfriend. It would seem dispersed fragments of everyone's lives have come together after a fashion and there might be peace and renewal yet. There is only one small snag. L has found out from a friend who knows both her and her ex, that he has not told his new wife about the kids he had with L. He has created an alternate reality of his past life with L. According to that narrative, those children don't exi...

The need for a novel to have universal and international appeal is a subject close to my heart. I have blogged about how writers from non-English speaking countries are often pushed to pander to the sensibilities of their English speaking readership at the cost of the art and craft of their writing . This post by Tim Parks on the global novel and how it fails to deliver addresses this issue : As a result of rapidly accelerating globalization we are moving toward a world market for literature. There is a growing sense that for an author to be considered “great,” he or she must be an international rather than a national phenomenon. This change is not perhaps as immediately evident in the US as it is in Europe, thanks to the size and power of the US market and the fact that English is generally perceived as the language of globalization, so that many more translations go away from it than toward it. However, more and more European, African, Asian and South American authors see themsel...

After she had brushed her teeth and was ready for bed, J remembered something she had forgotten to tell me. All conversations in this vein particularly when is she sleepy, begin in the middle. She does not care to provide any context and dives right in. It is up to me to connect the dots and make what I can of it. "There are this girl in fifth grade who said this morning Justin Bieber is hot" J said. The point of this anecdote from what I could tell was the use of the word hot in the context of a boy - a turn of phrase J was previously unfamiliar with. Clearly, she had caught the drift of what the fifth grader had implied but did not agree with her assessment. Yet J felt all grown up in having learned a novel use for the word hot and wanted to share that with me. I ofcourse had no idea who Justin Bieber was and assumed it was a kid in her school. "So do you think he is hot too ?" I asked J as I did the dishes and she said "I think he's more dumb than ho...

Letterfu and Map Envelope are two lovely ideas on the theme of writing a real letter. Map Envelope in particular brings the power of internet technology to bear on an activity that pre-dated it for centuries - that of sending a postcard from one's travels. As easy as it is for people to create online albums of several hundred pictures from their vacation, it is still a pleasure to receive a physical postcard, with a foreign postmark and stamp. The last one I got was from my friend D a few years ago when she and her husband visited Puerto Rico and I still have it. Among other things, it tells you they took the trouble when they could just as easily have sent an email. Anyone who has written and received actual letters, is likely to have a collection of tapes - mixed and otherwise. Creative Barn has neat way to put them to good use. Even fifty years ago, a person's entire childhood could comprise of less then ten photographs and their entire collection of music a couple of...

"I can't stop thinking about you" read a text message from MJ, five months after their last and what to Sheila had been their final meeting. Just one short, terse sentence yet it reverberated in her mind her all night long. That was the thing about MJ - a feral intensity that broke down all barriers and challenged her resistance to him.  She decided it was best not to respond and allow her inner turmoil to subside. As much as she wanted to move on, she could not help thinking about him almost constantly. In a sense, she felt vindicated he suffered just like her. She chided herself for behaving like an infatuated teen-ager and forced herself to take interest in other men, more plausible relationships than what she had (or not) with MJ.  She wanted for him to stay or leave with finality but he was much to flighty to make decisions set in stone. He thrived on whimsy and impermanence because they were to him synonymous with romance. While talking to Vibha one weekend, Sheila ...