Glass Floor

There used to be the notion that if you were smart and worked hard, there was room at the top for you in America. Many of us immigrants came to the country believing this to be true - there were success stories that illustrated this as possible. 

One of my elderly relatives was toiling away is an obscure banking job in India back in the 60s with no prospects of growth or change. He had great attitude and hustle but that would not get him anywhere in Kolkata back in the day. 

He immigrated to the States. Started out as a bank teller, worked a large number of side gigs including catering, event planning and owning some fast food franchises over time. He also moved up in his bank job and retired a senior executive. Both his kids went to highly selective colleges and are doing well for themselves. P had lived the American Dream and was an inspiration for family and friends in Kolkata.

Just about everyone who had a relative in America could tell you such a story. For kids like us back home, it confirmed what we believed to be true and we wanted to take our chances as well. I have seen many of my peers rise to levels they could not have aspired to in India. They were smart, industrious and also happened to be in the right place and the right time. The doors indeed opened for them in America and meritocracy prevailed. 

I am afraid, those were likely the last doors to be opened and our kids may or may not have been able to squeak in. Unlike P's kids where it was a foregone conclusion that they would go to the best colleges and experience a tremendous upward mobility because they were good enough for it and their parents had worked hard to get them there, today that is far from the case. I believe there is a lot of truth to this Huffpost article.

Brute Force

What the father of AI said in 1978 may not be that far from the truth even today

Near the end of the research stage of his career, in 1978, McCarthy had to give up on his purist idea of ​​artificial intelligence: “To succeed, artificial intelligence needs 1.7 Einsteins, two Maxwells five Faradays and the funding of 0.3 Manhattan Projects,” he resignedly recognized.

Instead of harnessing the prodigious intellect of the luminaries John McCarthy listed there, in today's world we throw the Amazon Mechanical Turk to prepare large volumes of test and training data so the AI may become smarter over time. It's not hard to see why that does not end up happening. We are not quite solving the need equation that McCarthy had so succinctly proposed. Instead we are hoping a million monkeys at the piano pounding away will wrap up Schubert's Unfinished Symphony one of these days.

Our brute force efforts at teasing intelligence from machines have certainly lead to hyper targeted marketing, rampant invasion of privacy, learning our preferences only to trap us into bubbles we cannot escape. I am not sure that is the AI McCarthy was dreaming of when he came up with the idea.

Witch Hunting

In his book How to Stop Time Matt Haig writes 

"‘People believed in witches because it made things easier. People don’t just need an enemy, they need an explanation. And it’s often useful, in unsettled times, where ignorance is everywhere, for people to believe in witches . . . Who do you think believed in witches?’

We live in rather unsettled and arguably ignorant times. We are definitely looking for explanations and finding an enemy to frame. How much further does society need to unravel before we need witches to ease our troubles? If not witches what will stand in for them in challenging times to explain hard things away? 

Haig tells a clever story and uses time to shine light on our collective stupidity as human beings. We were looking for witches once, in more enlightened times people who failed to fit the accepted mold were referred to the mental asylum without further ado. Most recently, we have made political correctness and identity labels the way to project our imagined selves to the world. 

In so doing, we attract only imaginary things back to us - fake news, insta-friendly lives, social media influence and so on. If like Haig's protagonist some of us were living to be four hundred and older, the cyclic pattern of stupidity would give them splintering headaches all the time. Such is the fate of Tom Hazard in the book.

Ad Resistant

This blog has a Facebook page but I do not. Over the years, I have played around with the privacy options, joined and left groups, clicked and ignored ads and videos - always randomly. I take perverse pleasure in seeing what FB thinks I want to consume in terms of content and what persona it tries to assign me. It has been a fascinating experiment and the results have been interesting to say the least. Ad Nauseum takes a simple and clever brute force approach to achieve very similar results with Google. Instead of doing random things, it just clicks all ads and makes it impossible to profile the person. They have to be placed in an out-group for any persona analysis to make sense. I would consider myself very averse to being marketed to and definitely targeted for relevant ads. 

Yet, I always read the Trader Joe's Fearless Flyer when it shows up in my mailbox. There is no targeting of me and none of the content was written with me in mind. But I do read the whole thing, sometimes even stop by at the store to pick up something I read about. That is a solid good conversion metric for any marketer worth their salt. Maybe hold-outs like me and millions of others who will block every single ad they can, will respond better to content like that in the Flyer. There is a story, some humor some silly pictures and a generally an atmosphere that invokes the brand. That feeling sticks long enough to even warrant and unplanned grocery run. That is more than more most ads would do for companies that are fighting both sides - Google to display their ads when and where it makes sense and the end users who don't want to see anything at all.

Counted as Math

Computer science being counted as math credit sounds like a bad idea. Where is the equivalence between proving theorems and solving riders and being able to code something by calling a few APIs to make some stuff happen? Recently, I met a young man working on his PhD in physics at a top university. As we waited on the tarmac, we chatted a bit about life and career from the vantage point of my age and his. Despite his extensive education, he did not have a plan - not yet atleast. Which is not the worst thing for someone still in their 20s. 

But when he talked about having picked up data analysis and programming along the way, I felt a twinge of disappointment. He seemed to value those skills as real and tangible - something that could get him a job in an investment bank. Yet, he persisted with physics as long as he did because he loved the subject. 

Was it that such love does not convey into material things like a job or was it that coding has become equivalent of everything science, math and engineering? It would be great if people who loved pure sciences could reclaim the subjects from the ambiguous STEM pool where everything becomes lines of code. 

Voluntary Isolation

The hikikomori lifestyle sounds like the far end of the spectrum of what would be considered a solitary way of life. For a person who is not particularly social, the modern world allows them to create a safety blanket and live as isolated as they would like.  Life can be completely digitized and all need for human contact eliminated. It used to be the awkward and unsocial among us, were pushed out of their comfort zone continuously.

They had to go out to work, meet people along the way and at the place of work even if they chose to remain mostly silent. Buying essential goods and services required a conversation with the seller. Complete isolation in the manner of hikikomori would not be compatible with survival in the past. Presumably, under those conditions a person would learn to cope and over time develop a working relationship with the world. Today it is very much within the realm to survive comfortably in total isolation making it that much harder for those with social anxiety

Although the disease originates in Japan, hikikomori can be found across the world. It's a kind of modern hermitism. 

Planned Darkness

These scheduled black-outs in California are reminiscent of what they called "load-shedding" back in Kolkata when I was a kid. It was a fact of life, the schedule was predictable so no one acted surprised or offended. We rolled out the kerosene lamps and candles, got on with our lives. 

If the mosquitoes got too out of hand, there was the mosquito net to get under. Typically, kids who wanted to lazy out of doing homework were quick to get under the net and into bed, call it a day. And at the appointed hour, the power would be turned back on. This was decades ago, in a city that was once called the "Dying City". Yet the present day ordeals of the hapless Californians sounds significantly worse

The outages could last days. That’s because turning the electricity back on is no small task—every mile of power line that’s been shut off needs to be inspected visually, by foot or vehicle or air. The winds that caused the shutdown could have knocked branches and shrubs into the lines, which will have to be cleared. Power lines run through dense forests only accessible by hiking in. The work can’t be done in the dark.

Layover Thoughts

Unusual things happen when flights are cancelled in a strange country and instead of an hour layover you are out looking for a place to live overnight and even longer. By the time the night was done, I had walked a few miles in rain and wind with some strangers I had met in the plane, chilled to the bone. One of whom lent me a jacket she had to spare but it was no match for the weather. 

Yet another had an apartment near my hotel and invited me over for dinner. I was grateful for the warm food after the ordeals of the day. We talked about our woes and how poorly the airline had managed the mess. My neighbor on the flight had not been able to find a hotel and was sent to a nearby military base to camp for the night. She appeared to be shaken by this turn of events but had no choice.  

As we waited to find out if we were going to stay one or more nights here, we also learned about each other's lives - places people had traveled to in years past, kids back home who may or may not be worried about them, people with no one back home that they needed to inform about their situation. 

Crisis accentuates the good and bad in our lives - for the woman in the fraying marriage, a day of escape and unaccountability, for the elderly couple with no schedule to follow in their retirement - an accidental vacation they don't really want but grudgingly accept, for the pharma exec on  a business trip a time to expense a whole new winter wardrobe to her company. As I walked around town alone, I felt grateful to have people in my life who awaited my return and those I may not see right away but were concerned for my safety. 

Setting Limits

I found this book Setting Limits With Your Strong-Willed Child in a used book store and decided to buy it for my friend A who has very challenging teen to deal with. Was not sure if the book was aimed at teenagers or younger children but thought there could be some useful learning anyway. I was not disappointed as I started to browse through. By the end of chapter one, the author gets to the core of the problem. When the child is strong-willed and just about impossible to manage or bring into compliance it is a reflection of the emotional style and temperament mismatched between the manager and the managed. 

More importantly, the distress on the part of the parent stems from their disappointment over their strong-willed child not being the ideal they had hoped and dreamed of. They struggle to let go of that image of perfection and accept reality. All actions they take therefore only worsen the parent-child relationship.  The advice is quite simple "Letting go if your ideal picture may be one of the most difficult tasks you'll face as a parent, but it is a necessary task". 

No child strong-willed or not should match up to the ideal picture their parent may have had. If they do, it would be concerning. And letting go of the best part of the dreams is indeed hard. For a parent who wished to play sports with their kid that is absolutely not interested, that can be hard. Their dream of rooting together for the same team will never come true. So as they watch the cheering fans on TV while the kid is holed in their room, it could feel sad and desolate. This is even for the most amiable and easy to manage child. Things would get significantly worse if there is a battle on every other front as well.

Return Experiment

I never had any problems with my Amazon returns and have made a fair share  of them over the years.  So when they started offering a drop-off at Kohl's as an option, I was surprised I wanted to try it. The local UPS store closer to me than the Kohl's and printing the label and pasting it on the box is not such a great hardship. Arriving at Kohl's I was surprised to find that the Amazon return area was the busiest in the store - it had sucked the air out of the room. 

Copious amounts of paper and was being wasted by printing large return receipts with a 25% store discount for each item returned. I had a bag full of these labels by the time I was done. Despite all of us getting these great discount labels no one seemed to stick around to shop at Kohl's. I did stay back to see how this experiment was turning out for the store. People were visibly happy to get their discount coupons with their return. Likely the reason they will continue to come back. But in trying to use mine, I found the assortment to be woefully lacking specially that the Amazon app is a click away. If anything it will promote a lot more show-rooming and ill-serve Kohl's. This is contrary to their expectations needless to say.

"We're off to a good start with the back-to-school season and are confident that our upcoming brand launches, program expansions and increased traffic from the Amazon returns program will incrementally contribute to our performance during the balance of the year and beyond," 

There is increased traffic no doubt and they are being lured by a friction-less return experience and 25% off coupons. All wonderful things, except as a customer who just returned something from Amazon, I would be most likely to look for it's replacement. And that is where the assortment at just about any brick and mortar store will not be able to compete. There is absolutely no incentive for me as a buyer to shop from Kohl's. I could just order it on Amazon again while in the store even. The prices beat Amazon only when stuff is on clearance already on deep discount. Then that 25% off moves the needle. 

In the business it is well know that all categories are not equal and similarly all footfall is not either. If I came to return my stuff bought from Amazon, I am likely treating Kohl's no different than the UPS store where I previously dropped off my returns. I am likely not in the frame of mind to browse and shop. So it is a footfall no doubt but hardly the most desirable kind. In the end this will serve Amazon way better than it does Kohl's.

Amazon has definitely shaken the Whole Foods tree and made it look like just any other grocery store. As a shopper, I see slightly better prices but the assortment has lost the charm and whimsy that was attractive to many I think. Everything is more data driven no doubt but sometimes operational inefficiency be an inadvertent contributor to the charm. I don't shop at the local farmer's market because they run a tight ship and know exactly what their customers want. They bring what they have and we get from there what we need. Whole Foods used to be that way once.

Wall Art

Clever idea to make your TV screen double up as as art display on the wall. I will take the Gizmodo reviewer's word that the product is not quite all that it claims to be. The criticism is reasonable 

I can see how the Frame might be wonderfully appealing for the lobbies of fancy office buildings or as incognito sports-watching installations at nice restaurants. In those instances, the TV as an object is more of a business expense anyways.

It almost looks good, too. From a distance, the effect of Art Mode on the Frame was somewhat uncanny, as if you were looking at a weird print in a shiny package. Once you get close up, however, the illusion completely falls apart.

Would be great to bring the museum experience home using such a TV.  So you get to tour the best galleries from around the world and learn about the works on display as you do. Could be a wonderful way to get kids engaged in art and culture from a young age. Definitely a step in the right direction - for a TV to have better purpose to exist than it has today.

Low-Tech Sustainability

J is an avid thrifter and takes pride in being able to find wonderful items of clothing on the cheap. Over the years, I have learned to enjoy our thrift store outings and looking for needles in haystacks.  Definitely love the element of surprise and the off-beat provenance of some of the clothes. And every once in a while J will find something that fits so well that it might as well have been tailored for her. It makes up for all the trouble.

Both J and I have friends who absolutely swear by thrift. Many of mine have not bought clothes from a department store or even on-line for decades. This is a community of people who want to spend their money sensibly while doing the right thing by the environment. 

Thrifting is a sustainable way of life and that is a big part of the appeal apart from the wicked good deals. It may not quite as hi-tech as plankton based shoes but still helps the world a bit.

Being a Teacher

Such tragedy - the story of every teacher this Time magazine article covers. I have been fortunate to see some of the most amazing people teach J, root for her success and love her. My kid owes much of who she is today to those that taught her. There was brilliance, kindness, humor and compassion in those teachers - some of whom have completely transformed lives of kids they came into contact with, including J's. 

Teaching has long been dominated by women, and experts say the roots of its relatively low pay lie in sexism. “The ‘hidden subsidy of public education’ is the fact that teachers for many years were necessarily working at suppressed wage levels because they really had no options other than teaching,” says Susan Moore Johnson, a professor of education at Harvard and an expert in teacher policy.

It may also be true that the best most tenacious teachers love their job so much that they are willing to bear a great deal of hardship to keep teaching kids. In a sense we are all beneficiaries of such unconditional love for the job and their desire to help our kids. In every profession there are those that are very dedicated to the trade and will overlook hardships for their love of doing what they do. 

My friend T, the mother of two teen kids works brutal 70-80 hour weeks with a lot of international travel. She gets paid well but not nearly enough to warrant the sacrifices she has been making for years. Yet, T will have it no other way. You could not make her sit at an undemanding desk bound job for equal or even better pay. 

There are those who are beneficiaries of T's "irrational exuberance" about her job much like some of long-suffering school teachers who make enormous personal sacrifices to teach children. Yet, beyond this minority population there are the vast number of folks who love what they do well enough not "irrationally" so. When it comes to our teachers, failing them is failing our kids.

Simple Words

Nice article that explains the connection between simple or simplistic language and authoritarianism.  Could also be considered an attempt to infantalize the citizenry. People have to deal with a lot of complexity and knotty problems in their personal and professional lives. This naturally reduces their capacity or even eagerness to hear complicated arguments on larger topics of the day that impact society and the world. The Cliff Notes version is usually all we have energy for at the end of a long day. So when that is delivered with great predictability we may find ourselves shying away from a long from intelligent argument. The downside of such simplicity is outlined clearly:

“Well, I think the big downside is that it’s false. The world is a complex place. It’s not a simple environment. There are many interacting forces simultaneously that really elude simple explanations or simple solutions"

We all know these things to be true and yet when laying down the law for a fussy two year old, we simply tell her what is bad and what is good; demand that she be good. Often the two year old will comply. If not, they will be reprimanded. Eventually, a parent is able to establish the framework and the toddler learns to work within it. It's unnerving to think that "we the people" are being given as much credit as a tantrum-y two year old. 

Problem Overload

On our way to a musical recently, while waiting for the walk sign at the intersection, noticed a woman in a wheel chair. She was double amputee and holding up a sign about having served in two wars and now homeless. Most people tried to avoid eye contact with her and some gave her money. Just about everyone who passed her on their way to the theater was visibly uncomfortable. That image stayed with me for days. It called to mind many other instances of social apathy and failure to act. Having grown up in India, never had to look to hard for that. 

In-fact, there was such an overload of signs that pointed to us having given up on those who needed the most help, were all around. The levels well over the threshold of compassion fatigue. To assuage our guilt, we may offer free food and clothes to the poor on festivals, but look the other way as they continued to suffer for the rest of the year. No matter what we did was only going to be a drop in the ocean - the unmet need was so big. I could not help wondering if people that evening walking over to the theater to get their well-deserved break from work  on a Friday did not feel similar. A problem too big too complex and too out of their power to solve was looking at them dead in the eye. 

Eating Eggplant

My local farmer's market is very small but it never disappoints. As I was baking the eggplant I got from there recently, it occurred to me that the level of satisfaction that the whole experience affords, cannot be measured just by cost. The said eggplant was time and a half more expensive that what I could get the grocery store. But I wanted to savor the finished product for longer because it had taken effort to procure and maybe just for that reason tasted so much better.  

Enjoying the humble eggplant bake reminded me of this interview with the former editor of Vogue India about how to be less consumerist in fashion and clothing. She talks about how clothing should inspire some sense of nostalgia and we would be less likely to discard pieces that have value because they are tied to story close to your heart. Such was my eggplant too -  it was different, chosen with deliberation, paid for in cash and there was human touch in the transaction between buyer and seller. Spending that extra time and money to buy food that was produced with more thoughtfulness may end up being a good way to stay on a diet that is more about savoring than consumption.

Color Purple

Watched The Color Purple recently and came away feeling sad despite the relatively upbeat ending to the story. Comes a point when so much needless pain, suffering and humiliation has been endured by the protagonist that no redemption can make her whole. The story-telling in the movie was so stark that it leaves a hollow two-dimensional feeling. The women in the movie are victims of the very men who are supposed to love and protect them. The violence that awaits them in the world outside is an extension of that awful misery they live at home every day. 

Even love comes in this story from a particularly hopeless place - in the forming of the odd ménage à trois  between Celie, her abusive husband and his lover Shug. The story of the supremely suppressed and abused woman finding her salvation is an universal one. There are many in vernacular Indian literature that I am familiar with. For any woman who has had the good fortune of "emancipation" and has the ability to live the life she chooses to, such stories are a very stark reminder of the debt we owe our progenitors - the first woman in our family lines who stood up for her own rights and those of her daughters. We would not be here today but for her, but for Celie. 

Odd Compensation

Fact is stranger than fiction sometimes as is this news about workman's compensation set in France.

According to Aurélien Boulanger, a lawyer at Gide, an international law firm based in Paris, the Court of Appeal’s decision was not entirely surprising.

“There are even more extraordinary cases like that of an employee stung by a wasp while driving a car, considered as a work accident,” Mr. Boulanger said in a telephone interview.

Once it was established that the accident had happened at a place of employment or during time spent on business, it was up to the employer to prove that the event had nothing to do with work, which could be very difficult, he added.

This on one hand and employers being able to monitor their employees almost non-stop makes for a very strange combination of facts to co-exist. Such is the world we live in.

Restoration Economy

Sad but logical this Slate essay about who will win because of climate change. Here is one example of a "winner" who just happened to get lucky

“Nobody’s celebrating climate change, and I’m certainly not celebrating climate change, but I’m almost careful to say it’s had a positive effect on our wines,” says Darryl Brooker, president of the Mission Hill Family Estate in the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia, Canada. “We are definitely growing varietals that we couldn’t have grown 20 and definitely 30 years ago.” Brooker’s own high regard for his wine, he says, has been validated by the recent recognition Mission Hill has received in international wine competitions and the higher prices that consumers have been willing to pay for it.

Would not be surprised at all if schools started to offer degrees in Restoration Economics, so kids could out into the climate changed world we leave behind and make the most of it.

California Story

I read A California Story by Namit Arora while traveling and it kept me company through flight delays, rainy weather and jet-lagged sleeplessness. This is an important detail because it has to do with the atmosphere of the story. It invokes a great nostalgia for things past, a time of innocence and the end of irrational exuberance that was 2003. 

For those of us who lived in America in the years the protagonist, Ved speaks of, we could relate to this story many different ways. If you had been a cog in the wheel, doing your meaningless part to advance the mission of one of the many technology over-lords of the day, like Ved, you would recognize the emptiness you found where your soul should have been. 

He asks himself why he lives a life that does feel genuinely his own. You hear his angst in his conversations with Liz when they go on dates - both in the good and bad phases of their emotionally tentative relationship. You can agree with a lot of what he says and think about what you took for granted a bit differently.

His relationship with Sasha, a Russian escort, while unconventional is without pretense and artifice. In our single years, many of us have known people like Sasha who don't fit any societal model of good dating or marriage material and yet they offer much needed solace. So we clung to them sometimes against our better judgement because there was only so much "alone" we could deal with. 

Then finally there is the fact of being an immigrant in America and what it means to "succeed" or "fail" to people keeping score back at home. The more you fail to conform to their standards the more rootless and un-tethered you feel. Ved grapples with the needs of the various facets of his personality and experiences an overarching sense of discomfort he can't seem to shake-off. He comes across and cold, aloof and hyper-analytical. Like many immigrants he struggles to overcome the inertia of what he has grown familiar with and trigger change. 

Yet change does come to Ved's life in the end and in a cataclysmic way - perhaps the only way such profound change could come. Reading last few pages of the book on my flight home, I thought not all of us have been as lucky - we were not hurtled out of our dubious comfort zone and forced to reckon with what our real purpose in life was. A wonderful, intelligent and unvarnished traverse through the life of an immigrant in America. 

Old Kaapi

While having cup of Cafe du Monde coffee chicory blend with milk and sugar (any other way felt plain wrong), it crossed my mind that this is not so different from Madras Kaapi that I remember very well from childhood. It is not an aroma to forget. My concoction made in a rickety French Press was not quite the decoction that defines good kaapi, but it brought back memories. There was a  grandma in my neighborhood back when I was a kid that made some seriously good coffee.

She started by roasting the coffee beans. You knew the best was yet to come - such was the delicious smell of anticipation. Then came the grinding - one step closer to the magic drink. We watched her but from respectful distance. And finally when all was done and it showed up at the table steaming in it's small tumbler, you hesitated to drink it. It was hot for one thing and then it would be rude to ask for a refill. This was something to enjoy in a small portion. So you did not want to be the first to finish and feel sorry for yourself. Good to see that there are folks who took such nostalgia to its logical conclusion.

Pointless Time

This one is a story about nothing but pretends to study our souls as driven by the draining iPhone battery. For the longest time, I had such a phone myself and was always found close to a wall outlet. My best friend gifted me a phone charger to put me out of my misery. Life has been just normal since then. 

That is how easy it is to fix the problem or if you want to spend a bit extra - not impossible to replace the battery either. A team of researchers spending time on analyzing the behavior of low battery iPhone owners seems wasteful and pointless. Better things could be studied in the world.

“The methods we used are basically anthropological,” says Robinson. “[We] get a complete understanding of respondent’s motivations, mapping out their life world.” And as a big part of that understanding, his lab confirmed that “from the moment you get up in the morning, to the moment you go to bed, [energy concerns] are there all the time.”

Spending time on pointless research leads to findings such like "Your personal perception of time and space becomes relegated to the power in your battery.” 

Wrong Priority

This sounds like a truly awful way to "improve" customer experience in airplanes. 

From the time it takes a flight attendant to respond to a call button, to preferences for prosecco versus chardonnay, to which bathroom gets the most use—the information can help optimize all aspects of flight. “You can make the service more attentive,” said Ronald Sweers, an Airbus cabin-products director. While the digital doodads are expected to simplify flight attendant workloads, their true value may lie in giving airlines more insights about what happens in the cabin.

Much smaller things would go way further to help us poor souls traveling economy and cramped for many long hours. How about free and working wifi for one?  Maybe a way to prop your feet up a bit even if under the seat in front of us? Presumably the passenger can choose to stow their bag there or give their feet a break. If you are going to sell me food then how about making that food edible? 

The low or no (God forbid) toilet paper situation would be very frustrating but easily fixed by an alarm button connected to a chute that replenishes supplies while you try not to panic. No IoT is needed - really. But not being able to recognize any of the "food" items in a "platter" I just paid for when I was really famished is something I would even endure IoT for it that helped improve anything. Finally, eye contact with the person who just asked for the tea or OJ would be a great step forward in making customer service "more attentive"

Yellow Stars

Love the boldness of this idea so much, showing off your acne-scarred face instead of hiding it. The odds that this experiment will work are pretty slim but it is commendable all the same.

A new startup called Starface wants us to radically rethink our relationship with acne. Rather than spending all our energy hiding it, the brand invites us to decorate our faces with little yellow stars that cover our zits, helping to clear them while simultaneously drawing attention to them

An idea ahead of its time perhaps. The pervasive culture of air-brushed perfection cannot be overcome in one fell swoop to decorate an acne-ridden face with so many yellow stars. Maybe the first step is to make being make-up free the new normal. No teen will want to celebrate their acne if everyone else is caking on the concealer to look flawless. 

I grew up in a time and culture where people could walk up to a young person and ask them why they had so much going on on their face. It was expected that you respond politely to such queries, swallow the shame and carry on with your life hoping your skin will clear up magically - which ofcourse it never did. I am just trying to imagine a kid in my day walking around with a face full of yellow stars. 

Cropped Out

Such a sad and poignant set of photographs of people with their smart-phones edited out. Its about being trapped in our own bubbles while with people we love and care about.  With children, it is specially hard as they mimic our behavior and escape into their device only because we are absent from them in the real world. 

They would have much rather spent their time with us, doing things together instead of separately. In my own experience, I have been more guilty than J of distraction by way of phone. There was a no-electronics rule at dinner time instituted to make sure there would be actual conversations had everyday. 

The quality and depth of our relationships with just about everyone likely suffers from our constant distraction. Over time we may socially accept that as the new base-line with no expecting or deserving better. These thoughts crossed my mind when  I watched five old ladies at my neighborhood cafeteria sit and knit together, drinking their coffee and chatting. There were no electronic distractions at that table and it was gratifying just to watch such a peaceful scene where human contact and communication flowed as nature intended

Knowing Enough

Its no surprise that employees cannot escape surveillance by their employers. But the depth of monitoring begs the question - to what end? When does this collection of data cross the line into voyeurism ? 

Email monitoring that once flagged predetermined keywords can now scan every message for emotional cues, giving bosses a heads up if someone's likely to quit, or if they seem to be considering corporate sabotage.

I can understand the part about corporate sabotage though even that is a bit over-zealous and could be subjective and rife with false positive alarm signals. But being likely to quit is another thing altogether. Would it not make more sense to incentivize the boss to keep up retention rates and employee satisfaction numbers? 

I once worked for a company where this was done and it fostered a very healthy competition between peer-level managers to keep their ranking on the leader-board. If you were one of the top-ranked managers, you were likely to attract the best talent from across the organization into your team. That in turn improved your own prospects for career growth.

There is no commonsense in figuring out some malcontent is about to quit when infact the person figuring this out by electronically monitoring "emotional cues" in their emails, is likely the biggest reason they want to quit in the first place. This one of the infinite ways that technology seems to be enabling a general loss of rationality in the world these days

Treasure and Trash

This was a fun documentary to watch about a museum of things rescued from trash,  Would be interesting to learn the history of these pieces - particularly, the more offbeat ones. At what point did it lose value to the owner and get tossed, were they victims of family feuds, property division, inheritance, down-sizing and divorce. Items of great value to one person but none to the next. Maybe some original owners if they are still around could share the stories of the objects that ended up in trash. I once found a beaten metal painting of the Goddess Durga in dumped outside a trash can. It was a desi family I knew and was a bit surprised to see it there. 

I asked the lady of the house if it was okay for me to take it and she was fine with it. Once I brought the spurned goddess home and cleaned her up, I was not quite sure what may be the best way to install her back in a way that would be fitting. It is not upto a mere human to rescue a goddess, so I decided that would be over-stepping my authority, So for a few days, I left her on a table in the living room unsure what would be best. She has a permanent place in my home for several years now. When I see her face, I always remember where I found her and much like Molina in the movie, very glad that I did. Unlike him she is my only treasure from trash. 

Vanishing Point

Excellent essay on Lolita and much more. The author very rightly points out:

The housewife who married for money and then fakes orgasms, the single mother who has sex with a man she doesn’t really like because he’s offering her some respite: where are the delineations between consent and exploitation, sex and duty? The first time I traded sex for material gain, I had some choices, but they were limited. I chose to be exploited by the man with the resources I needed, choosing his house over homelessness. Lolita was a child, and she was exploited, but she was also conscious of the function of her body in a patriarchal economy. Philosophically speaking, most of us do indeed consent to our own exploitation.

Even if not a housewife,a woman has to fake their interest in their husband in intimate and non-intimate ways to keep his self-worth up; to ensure he has enough motivation to do this part for the marriage and the family they have built together. It is the cost of doing business in marriage. In similar vein, the man may need to pretend his wife has the most impeccable taste, is great at her job, the most charming host and a wonderful mother to their kids. He needs to do these things if he wishes to keep the peace and derive the value from his wife. It would ill-serve both to be too blunt and stop pretending.

Is that an exploitative situation just for the wife or for both? Maybe the man is dying to tell his wife, the dress she wore to the most recent dinner party resembled a colorful canvas sack, she is woefully out of shape, does not at all inspire him in bed or out of it, that her high pitched voice grates his nerves and the kids are mostly embarrassed by her. This is as much of a "hardship" as the wife needing to laugh at the infinite repeat of his same stupid jokes, his bombast about his work successes, his thoroughly unimaginative love-making, his lack of attention to the emotional needs of their teen-aged kids and much more. 

Everything within reason and balance is fine, once that is exceeded one or both could feel like that they consented to their own exploitation. The trick is to keep things just shy of that point.

Staying Afloat

Watching this movie All I See Is You gave me a lot to think about. In the absence of truly magical grade love or earth-shattering chemistry (some people are blessed to have both) in marriage, the system is held in place by the opposing forces of power and control. The party with the greater power generally cedes a bit of control to keep the forces in balance, create parity. The controller must in turn relinquish there desire for increased power (money, social status, business and family connections etc could all be sources of power) to retain their controller-ship (being the key decision-maker in the family - the PTA parent, the one that decides where the next vacation will be, which relatives are welcome home and which ones are not, who is invited to the backyard BBQ, curfew rules for kids and so on are all about control of the family unit). 

In the movie, it would be easy to see the husband as a villain - he will stop at nothing to keep his wife disabled and dependent on him. If he cannot stand her being free can he claim to even love her. The fact is, these truths would have never been known if she did not regain her sight. The marriage would have felt perfect with none of the flaws coming to light. An older couple I know has an arrangement very similar  - no one is disabled but each has mutilated the other until they are both handicapped. 

The man was socially inept to begin with but his wife has pushed his feeling of insecurity over it to the point he feels he cannot open his mouth without first clearing things with her or their place in society would be destroyed. In return, he has convinced her that she is so technically challenged that even browsing the internet could compromise their only desktop computer irreparably.He refuses to get wifi because that could give her access to the world on their shared cellphone. She is not considered capable of using a smartphone either - for anything apart from answering calls. She has never texted anyone in her life and she is only in her mid 60s. 

This is the give and take the couple has worked out to keep their marriage afloat. They do take vacations together and maintain an active social life. To the casual observer very little if any issues in their relationship will be evident. Maybe they even love each other in a way that makes sense for them but they cannot exist in a marriage without the balance they have created for themselves. My theory is if the woman gets on the internet freely and without limitation, this marriage will be over in short order. Regaining sight as the character played by Blake Lively does is a much bigger deal.

Answer Bot

The awkwardness of the teen years meets technology in the sex-ed chat bot. There is no real way for a chat bot to talk to a teen about their emotional readiness for intimacy. That takes conversations that can happen at the most random even inopportune times - with someone they trust.

If that person is older and possessed of life experience even better. Given so many alternate ways to get answer to be the more tactical questions of the day - such as this bot may answer quite well, there is no incentive to get into awkward territory. 

This effort to meet teens where they are is well-intentioned but comes at the cost of human communication and mental growth. When an elderly relative talks to a teen about the mistakes they made when they were young, their stories stick. Maybe the bot could be the best of both worlds - take the tactical questions and continue to nudge the kids to talk to adults in their lives too.  

Tide Rising

Watching this Daily Show segment featuring Greta Thunberg made me think about people who don't fit the mold. Thunberg has plenty of fans and critics. This particular objection to the fuss over her is a rather popular one

Out of all the 16-year-olds in the world, why is it that just one features in the media worldwide? There are other kids who care as much, are just as articulate, just as concerned. If you think the world focussing on this one young girl was just some happy accident you are plugged into a faulty socket.

Even greatness needs help if we can agree that a kid who is able to make news around the world no matter why and how she does it might be "great" in some way. Maybe there is something there is something about her that stands out and gets get attention. And if that attention does the world any good why fight it? Maybe best to seek collaborators and amplify her impact.

An interesting piece on genius and collaboration with great examples of successful collaboration. And this one argues that egalitarianism and genius cannot co-exist. The author argues 

"The religion of genius has collapsed under the blows of egalitarianism, aspirational self-help and commercial celebrity."