Heartcrossings

J picked today's theme for us to write about . To reflect on these two quotes. "Readers may be divided into four classes: 1) Sponges, who absorb all that they read and return it in nearly the same state, only a little dirtied. 2) Sand-glasses, who retain nothing and are content to get through a book for the sake of getting through the time. 3) Strain-bags, who retain merely the dregs of what they read. 4) Mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who profit by what they read, and enable others to profit by it also”       -Samuel Coleridge "Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking."   -Albert Einstein I have at different times been a reader of all four stripes Coleridge talks about.  A Sponge when the book was an interesting and fast paced read with very little food for thought. I may have paused at a turn of phrase or two but not nearly long enough to absorb. A definite ...

An old scarless wound twelve years in the healing, lost its sting this morning. The summer day balm to the soul. My life's  orb a surprise rainbow in the evening sky. Holding the family close,   I counted my blessings. Poems that J wrote

Home is and will always be India for me - at least that is what I tell myself. DB assures me I am delusional to think that and I can ever merge seamlessly after so many years of being away. That nostalgia is easy to indulge in from a distance and reality will be too jarring to stomach. He says, I would be better served to allow emotional roots to spread where my physical roots have for a while -  reconcile with having those from my native land severed. When I read articles like t his about the life of women in India , I understand why my longing for India has been limited to the idyllic days of my early childhood growing up in a semi rural places where the community looked out for the safety of all children.My home spread into my neighbors' yards and beyond the into the small neighborhood. We ran free and wild until dusk all summer - I long for those days because they have not existed in my life since. The longing for India is for the country of my childhood and not that of my yo...

Seven Databases in Seven Weeks takes the reader through Redis, Neo4J, CouchDB, MongoDB, HBase, Riak, and Postgres. Though this is a sampling platter focused primarily on NoSQL databases (Postgres being the exception), the information packed in each chapter requires the reader to be fully engaged and participative in the learning process. The material is not suitable for those without a strong technical background - the occasional dabbler like myself will find themselves drinking from a fire-hose.  If my goal was to start working in these databases right after reading the book, I would be disappointed - not because the material is lacking but because I lack the required background. That said, I learned enough about to understand what business problems each was best set up to solve and that was a great outcome for me. The challenge would be to convince a client to try something non-traditional because NoSQL was a better solution for their problem. Then there would be the questi...

Reading this article about Oprah's Indian debut reminded me of the when Slumdog Millionaire was released. Any number co-workers wanted to know if the depiction of India in that movie was realistic and if people really lived "like that". I give locals wide latitude since they have not had reason or opportunity to understand other cultures -  it stands to reason that they have a very limited world view. That was the first and possibly the only movie they have seen set in India. Their media consumption while copious does not enable a better understanding of world history and geography. That said, I humored the endless stream of Slumdog questions tried to educate them about India the best I could. The author's disappointment with Oprah stems from holding her to a higher standard - well traveled, informed and articulate does not always translate to cultural awareness and sensitivity. Besides she has to cater to the population that makes her the success that she is.

Nice article on the value of waiting instead of rushing even when time is of the essence. I have learned this lesson the hard way in my life. During my eight years as a single mother, I did not consider stopping or even pausing was an option. To that end, I did not take any time off from work unless there was an urgent need and the only vacations we had were around a long weekend. I wonder how many more years I could have continued like that before I completely broke down. When DB and I got married, the first thing he forced me to do was to pause. Come home from work and pause to freshen up and drink a cup of tea. On a weekend pause to sleep in, on a weeknight pause from cooking dinner - the list was endless. I resented being told to change and have my long established routine interrupted by so many "unproductive" pauses. I fought tooth and nail to have it my way and he refused to back down. I am glad to report that DB prevailed in the end. In the last two years, I have lear...

When I shared the news of Marissa Mayer becoming CEO of Yahoo with J, I was hoping to illustrate a couple of things -  that women can break the glass ceiling in the technology business and reaching a career pinnacle does  not have to be incompatible with motherhood and family life. What I had failed to factor in, is the obsolescence of Yahoo for kids of J's generation. It is an "old people" website as far as J is concerned and that being the case, the impact of the Mayer news was significantly diminished. I would not be surprised if the exact opposite of what I had wanted to achieve happened. J probably took away that a woman still can't land the sweetest gigs in technology. I don't think she is old enough to understand that it being hired into that position while pregnant is a pretty big deal even if the job is at an "old people" company.   So much for trying find a positive female role model to inspire a tween.

A poem J sent to a well known children's magazine has been accepted for publication. She wrote this soon after DB and I got married and was in large part an outpouring of pain - she was having a hard time adjusting to a new way of life and the presence of a man in our home. We were talking today about how pain produces some of the best writing and J said "Then I will never be a writer - I haven't known as much pain as most people" I thought that was an interesting observation being that J has actually gone through quite some upheaval in the last  ten years of her life. It turns out that she met a girl L, at her dance camp whose parents have been divorced twice and remarried. She has to divide time between two blended families and deal with adults being uncontrollably angry a lot of the time. She has clearly shared quite a bit about her life with J. It was only a few weeks ago that J was complaining how she always had a schedule and there was not enough free, unstr...

I have been watching the progress online education has been making in the last several years and feel optimistic it will be a viable complement to brick and mortar education by when J is ready for college. That said, I am always eager to hear what the punditry has to say on the topic . Not sure where to place my bet exactly, but I do believe that the rising cost of brick and mortar institutions will force even the most deserving students to go online. They will be the force that levels the playing field. If an institution does not lower its selection criteria for the program that will be delivered online, there is no reason why it would not be viewed at par with the classroom version. The other factor to consider is the freedom online education allows the student. They could be apprenticing in their field of work and become better prepared for the job once they graduate. An online student's gap year would not have to be a net loss in education. If the market accepts an onli...

Those of us who were adults before the internet and wireless devices became woven into the basic fabric of our lives, have experienced the slow change in how people converse with each other. Increasingly no one has the undivided attention of the party they are conversing with - the devices and the steady beat of new information pulsing through them have everyone in their thrall.  This FT article on the lost art of conversation   talks about the writer's experience at a workshop on " “How to have a conversation”. Turns out that there is no easy answer to the question. The observations participants make about "what has changed" are very interesting. The two I could most relate to - The Blackberry is the third person in conversations between two people ;  Google and Wikipedia have made it impossible to have a good old fashioned argument. There was value in having an argument back and forth on a subject that neither party had complete knowledge of. You got to us...

Having consulted with clients on useful social media KPIs,  I am all too familiar with the tendency to look on the number of Facebook Likes as the most tangible measure of success. For one thing, it is quick metric to share up and down the food chain. No one knows exactly what a Like is good for but assume if there are large numbers of Likes, it has to mean something good and positive. They must be doing something right to be Liked that much. Based on such blind faith in the power of being well Liked, clients expend a disproportionate amount of energy trying to bump up those numbers at the cost of ignoring what might really matter. As this BBC article points out , the Likes can be generated by bots with malicious intent. The analyst now has the the task of flagging the fake Likes from the "real" ones. After all that is done, the question that still remains to be answered is - are the Likes representative of engagement with and advocacy for the brand ? If that cannot be me...

I have been looking for the perfect book to bridge J's journey from childhood to adolescence. The books I read when I was about her age were the ones I first tried to get her interested in. It turns out they don't quite resonate with her. The generation gap has become a gigantic gulf since we started living our lives in internet years - our age adjusted world views are so far apart that I could be  a character from her history text book. Then this summer, I got her A Tree Grows in Brooklyn from the library. She approached it tentatively  (as she usually does when I suggest that she read something) but after about twenty pages, she was completely hooked. She can now be found at all places at all times reading the book. If J is not to be seen or heard for some time, she is reading the book. This is exactly what I had looked for in the book that will help her make the physical and emotional transition she is making. She goes into middle school this fall - yet another of man...

I was out to lunch with some co-workers yesterday afternoon. The restaurant we went to is located in the hippest part of town - a place that had been open farmland until a few years ago. There are some nice stores in the area and folks were complaining about how frustrating it was to come shop here on a weekend - the roads were crazy busy and parking was a nightmare. This is the demographic that will be thrilled if Amazon's same day delivery model proves to be a success. I hate going out to shop myself and and don't mind waiting for a few days for something to be shipped to me if that saves me a trip to the mall. Amazon's current offering works just fine for people like me. But those that need the instant gratification of bringing the thing home as soon as they have paid for it have much to look forward to with what Amazon is trying to do.  The sub title of the article reads, " How Amazon’s ambitious new push for same-day delivery will destroy local retail "...

I read Grammar by Tony Hoagland many years ago and it was interesting to revisit the lines that I loved then to see how more poignance the years had added to them. we've all tried to start a fire, and one day maybe it will blaze up on its own. In the meantime, she is the one today among us most able to bear the idea of her own beauty, and when we see it, what we do is natural: we take our burned hands out of our pockets, and clap. Back then I had appreciated the context of Maxine returning after a weekend with her boyfriend. Reading this today made me think  about some other ways a woman can be emanating the "perfume of fermenting joy". A grandmother basking in the sun with her grandkids, the loves and grand passions of her life behind her, a life well lived, many dreams fulfilled - that should smell like "fermenting joy" too.

An errant breeze veers a little off center as two rivers rush to join at the mouth. They turn gently away from where they will turn one. The waves break against each other, cobalt against ivory until their fury is spent. The   meander embraces the breeze.

Much to late to the party but I finally got around to reading Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation . My workplace is predominantly thirty and under and Bauerlein advocates not trusting anyone in that age group - presumably their dumbness makes them a little dangerous. In my experience, the fundamental difference between "them" and the rest of us lies in how we get our information and how we process it. I don't know about them being spectacularly stupid - their ability to navigate the online world effortlessly is an asset in our line of work. I learn about nifty productivity tools and applications from them all the time. That said, my interaction tends to be fairly one dimensional so I was curious to see what Bauerlein had to say. For a book with such a provocative topic and such a lot of good material to use for a thesis, I was amazed at how hard it is to read it. I was looking for a well thought out essay. This book makes abrupt jumps between statement, refere...

Reading this Pico Iyer piece on cathedrals and their role in our lives , took me back fifteen years to the last time I had the privilege of listening to a monk discourse on the relevance of the Bhagwad Gita in our modern world - our daily lives.  A large number of devotees had gathered there that afternoon to listen to him. Having arrived there very early, I had the opportunity to sit down and enjoy the tranquility of the ashram along with a few others scattered around in the large hall.  Iyer says of Saint Patrick's cathedral in NYC : It was the frame that gave everything else definition. Ever since, I’ve made it my practice to step into that great thronged space whenever I return to the city, to remind myself of what is real, what is lasting, before giving myself to everything that isn’t. A chapel is the deepest silence we can absorb, unless we stay in a cloister. A chapel is where we allow ourselves to be broken open as if we were children again, trembling a...

I joined DB and J this weekend to watch the Wimbledon final matches. Unlike them I don't follow tennis (or any other sport for that matter) and have no strong allegiances to teams or individuals. So when I came in midway through the women's finals, I saw it as a contest between the experience of age and the exuberance of youth. I wanted Serena Williams to win because I am able to identify more with the mellowness of age than I am with youthful exuberance - I remembered a time many years ago when I rooted for Steffi Graf against her much more seasoned opponents - the triumph of youth over age was a vicarious victory at the time, and one I was not always able to achieve in my own life. For two days in a row experience trounced all that is unstoppable and indomitable about youth. I felt sorry for both young people - defeat is never easy and youth certainly does not cushion the landing. I am not a sports fan and understand nothing of the psychology - but I wondered if people root f...

Standing in line waiting my turn can be a very calming experience if I am not racing the clock. Such was the case this past 4th of July when we stood in line for a ride on the hot air balloon and at local park. Children were devising impromptu games everywhere along the serpentine queue. Adults milled around the crowd, chatting with friends and neighbors who were also there waiting. I took my time to people watch -  a great way to kill time when electronic devices cannot distract. The half a dozen desi families were easy to spot in this largely homogenous crowd. Most had very young children and some had visiting family from India.  They either kept to themselves or interacted with the other desi family they had come with. I am by now used to the fact that desis avoid making eye contact with another desi they have not met before. Family from India is another matter - they will happily strike up a conversation with any desi unless they are steered away from doing so.  W...