Heartcrossings

Another day, another theory - this one posits that the lack of universal healthcare in the US is responsible for how badly we have been impacted. A counter-argument for that is not too hard to come by.  The lack of a national, publicly-funded universal health system is a critical deficiency. But our persistent inability to set one up is itself the result of other dysfunctional aspects of American society, including the corruption of our political system by powerful commercial and class interests and the American "exceptionalism" that blinds us to what we can learn from other countries.  Healthcare in America is completely broken - there is no doubt about that. But corruption of the political system is hardly unique to us and neither are commercial and class interests. We have been slow to learn from others because sometimes the framework goes against the grain.  However, time has indeed come to think of "exceptionalism" differently. There are three parts to t...

Interesting video from CDC about what happened to America because of reckless spring breaks.  Earlier, I was listening a story on NPR about the current state of Shanghai where it is business as usual but the usual is no longer the same. People will get coded and quarantined as a matter of course. Everyone has a QR code on their phone that is scanned and based on associated movement data, the person is assigned a code of red, yellow or green. Rules follow the code.  What struck me as most notable was the response of the person being interviewed - an American herself. She said she felt safer knowing there was a process in place to keep people safe. I pondered what that meant on a larger scale. This event will have us scared bad enough that we will do what it takes to not end up dead from a virus. If that means giving up freedom and privacy it will be a price we would be willing to pay. That definitely sounds like a dream come true for those who seek to have control over us. W...

Parallel reality is interesting in this airline passenger use case , but the road to hell as we know is paved with good intentions. I don't enjoy scanning the lost list of flight numbers to find mine, triple check that the gate number on the board agrees with what is on the airline app. To that end, a big board telling me and only me where the heck my connection was at would be super helpful.  But then they want to get personal and start recommending shopping options and such, maybe even more. Alert Uber drivers in the destination city that I am likely to arrive late and will be look for a ride to the hotel. They could be even more helpful, start helping me plan for the next day and my return trip to. Comes a point when that board know and tell me way more than I like. This is not even counting showing me headline news that is "relevant" only to me.  The guy right next too me even if going on the same flight would see a totally different world. The random conversa...

My daily walk that I am still lucky I can do often takes me to an empty school yard. Often I am alone there and the only sound is that of birds chirping. The traffic has died down a great deal so it is now possible to hear the birds clearly. I feel grateful for the freedom to take a walk each day - something many of my elderly relatives in India are sorely missing. I call them often these days to cheer them up as they wait for life to resume. My aunt M is chronically ill and immuno-compromised. We are all worried about her making it to the end of this thing. She lives confined to her room with almost no human contact.  I remembered a few days ago a family I knew from childhood who moved from Kolkata to Flushing. We met them a couple of times after they immigrated. Yesterday, I wondered if they were still in NY and safe. This is the first time I they have come to mind in two or three decades. Maybe in the crisis of this proportion, we start to pull closer to everyone we know and l...

From Mashable on how isolation and exes can make a bad combination . On the one hand it is scary thought to date strangers in times like this, yet the feeling of loneliness only intensifies being alone, isolated and socially distant for an indefinite period of time. Stands to reason that exes will miss what was once familiar and comfortable, see if the other side is desperate enough to give it another shot. Being alone in such times can be incredibly hard. Each day the level of uncertainty grows and it is normal to want something to latch on to that will feel stable and unchanging.  The insufferable quirks of the pesky ex may be a source of comfort now. Better that than meeting the end of the world alone.  A young person I know told me recently how the pandemic cut short her time with the man she felt a very strong connection with. They may meet again but time and distance does change things. She wishes to be strong and not hope for what may never be. I shared these lines b...

This article about the perils of video conference calls was written in peaceful times a few years back. Today, those of us lucky to be able to work from home have very little choice. There is some pressure and expectation that you will turn the camera on during a call. This has to be your new normal. Put in perspective this is a reasonable ask - you should have much to be grateful for and there is no reason to complain. That said, most people I know find the non-stop being on camera tiresome. As the author points there are no benefits but there is overabundant stress that comes from being watched by a number of people like you were in solitary fish in a fish-bowl. Many would agree with the author when he says: I don't want to participate in your video call. I don't want you to look at me. I don’t want to look at you. It’s awkward and weird. Video calls add yet another layer of stress to the work day. I don't look nearly as put together as you do. I'm not dressed very...

In the middle of these calamitous times that we are living in, my eighty year old father decided to rely on no man but himself to get his bag of rice. That trip to the grocery store ended with him tripping on the escalator and getting a head injury. He was very fortunate that he did not suffer consequences beyond a wound and some bleeding. But it produced days of anxiety for us all who tried and failed to corral him. Stir crazy old people are not much easier to manage than children.  The conversations I have with him these days are no different from those I had with J when she was a child. He is not openly defiant but finds loopholes in what he has been forbidden to do. It's like a game for him just as it would be for a toddler - see what boundaries he can push and get away with. There is something wonderfully endearing to see my father as he may have been as a child except that he actions produce incredible stress for me. I wanted to write about how this whole event felt - at ...

Interesting Wired article on the indirect data points that tell a truer story of the current crisis. Samir Madani is the founder of TankerTrackers, a company that leverages open source information to provide insights on the global crude oil industry to small traders. As the coronavirus pandemic unfolded, he has turned to an eclectic suite of sources to navigate the mayhem. Combining data from vessel transponders with satellite images, he has periodically checked how many oil tankers are in anchorage in China, unable to deliver their cargo – an intimation both of how well China’s ports are functioning amid the pandemic, and of how well industrial production is keeping up. This makes more sense than looking at the direct data of number of cases and mortality rates. There are too many holes there to see what is really going on. When I talk to my parents, I hear concerns about deliberate under-reporting by the government so as to not panic everyone. They don't believe the offici...

The entertainment industry is one of many current casualties of the pandemic. And the aftermath for one industry will likely affect others. Like the ice-cream shop and the nice restaurants by the movie theater than was forced to shutter. Like people growing weary of the empty shelves where there once used to be toilet paper may migrate en-masse to bidets . The rapid disappearance of toilet paper upon school closure and directives to work from home highlighted people's toilet habits.  A majority must be doing their business out side home and that explains the panic buying. Schools and places of work have likely been subsidizing the collective cost of society going to the toilet. Maybe the presence of bidets at home will create a dis-incentive to use free toilet paper provided by work and school. Maybe the overall experience of being cleaned by water will feel better and we may end up saving some trees in the process. Will this experience turn us to germophobes? Will we continue t...

Reminds me of Chatroulette which back in the day a very cool concept specially the idea of serendipitous connections in a time of social isolation. Every day when I take my walk, I wonder about about all those families behind closed doors and how this catastrophe is unfolding very differently for each family.  Not every one likes each other's company. There are abusive relationships where time apart in a very important safety valve. There are kids who are not the best managed at home because the adults never had the time or energy to do that job - it was mostly outsourced to school and other organized care-givers. Now everyone is forced to endure each other's company with no end in sight. Cannot imagine the consequences will be all positive. The stories about how abusers are using the situation against their victims is heart-breaking. “Perpetrators are threatening to throw their victims out on the street so they get sick,” Katie Ray-Jones, the CEO of the National Domestic...

Interesting essay about the not so clear winners and losers from doing right by environment. Being able to recycle used cotton and other bio-degradable material to spin fiber that works the same as cotton sounds like a good idea yet it may not be good for everyone. If that level of efficiency is ever achieved, it might help save the planet — or it might not. The most likely outcome is that it would save the asses of fashion companies facing an environmentally and politically uncertain future. It also might complete what the industrial revolution started more than 200 years ago, by fully consolidating fashion’s supply chain into the world’s large cities. That could make rural life even more untenable for millions of farmers around the world who rely on cotton for their livelihood. But at that point — for better or, quite possibly, for worse — those farmers will no longer be the fashion brands’ responsibility. Reading this made me think about the impact of reducing consumption of ev...

It is a beautiful spring day outside. Traffic very sparse and and except for the occasional runner, there was just me for a couple of hours. In the deserted school yard not far from where I live. some kids were playing basketball and tennis. Families had come out for air amid the desolation. I found myself listening to My Heart is a Ghost Town  and thought why of all songs that one came to mind. It felt sadly apropos and apocalyptic despite trees in full bloom, wild flowers all around and the the bright blue sky.  This is not what the end of the world looks like. J is finally home and feeling lost like just about everyone she knows. Their journey into adulthood and independence has been placed on indefinite pause and that has got to feel incredibly suffocating. It will be a learning experience for me to navigate her through occasional pep-talks and steer her in the direction she wants to go, not feel like the world has totally spun out of control. In the meanwhile, I have no...

Continuing to read Wonderland and enjoying it. Here is what the author says about the origins of music:  I suspect music first emerged not with a need but with a difference: an unusually resonant sound happened to emerge out of the structure of some hollow object—a reed or a bone—creating a tone just different enough from the ordinary cacophony of the world that the ear took note. The sound wasn’t meaningful yet, or laden with the kind of emotional overtones that humans now associate with music. It was just new. And like the unusual shade of Tyrian purple, because the sound was new, it was interesting, worth repeating, worth tinkering with. Made me think about novel things in today that we tend to find "interesting, worth repeating, worth tinkering with" . The Internet of Things came to mind. At first it was about industrial use cases, fault and failure detection (as well as prediction). This was a realm far removed from the the world of Alexa in a child's bedroom ser...

Lately I have been stepping into grocery stores and pharmacies just to assure myself the world is still okay, the shelves are not all bare. Seeing depleted supplies replenished in a few days fills me with hope that tomorrow can and will be better, that the end of this ordeal is near . Today I was chatting with a young lady at the local CVS who told me she had one last travel sized hand-sanitizer that she could give me now.  My alternative was to wait until next Tuesday when the supply truck came. People were queued outside the store since 5:30 am so it would not be easy even on that day.  That there is still a path to more supplies at least right now and that felt oddly assuring - next Tuesday a large number of people (even if not me) would be able to stock up on hand sanitizer. Maybe my turn might come a few weeks out - I can live with that. For the kids who left to college last fall and are back home for an indefinite period of time now, the future is scary uncertain. Th...

If these small  ad that runs on top of a car , proved to be effective, then it won't be too long before such ads would run on digital wraps that can be changed on demand. Advertisers would subsidize people's cars based on the routes they drive and the number of eye-balls they can attract along the way. It usually starts small and even appearing to be a beneficial idea.  I remember the first time, I got a laptop at work in addition to a desktop computer. Back then, there was no expectation that having a laptop meant the employee was always available for work. It seemed like a good idea to have access away from work specially that you could now work from home if needed - that felt very empowering. Over time that changed, constant encroachment into personal life and time became the norm unless you pushed back hard. I learned never to respond to emails over the weekend and later not engage in text exchanges after work hours. The space had to carved out diligently every single da...

Watched The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind to catch a break from the scary situation we are dealing with these days. J will be traveling back home mid next week and I will be on edge until she is physically with me. Such a beautifully made movie and what an inspiring story. Was the perfect way to escape from the uncertainties we are facing. It is about a boy who liked to tinker and create things that helped his struggling community, the transforming power of education to those who are able to extract value from it.  When you are concerned about when you will eat the one meal you can eat each day so the rest of family may survive, thinking big is already a miraculous achievement. Being able to persist and execute on it even more so. I found this story that brought hope in difficult times. Yes, the grocery aisles are bare and there is a waiting period of over three weeks for toilet paper if I wanted to buy online - small miseries compared to what millions of people around the world fac...

This lovely poem crossed my mind while listening to the keynote address of a tech CEO. He filled thirty minutes of place and time with buzzwords, keywords, platitudes and rehashing what everyone in the business already knows. Everyone listened hoping to learn something of value. Our hopes were belied. May he have wrapped up in fifteen minutes or even five to have made an impact?  The company in question, builds fine products that have sold well for years. They continue to be a relevant player in the market. Customers trust them. All the makings of a good story and reason to take a victory lap. He aimed to explain where is company is going next and how they have always been ahead of the trend. More importantly, he wanted to stake his claim on a page or two in the history of computing. Maybe that was too much to aim for. Maybe like the poet says : The very best poem  finishes half way

I remember the times in my college days when I unexpectedly came home with no scheduled return date. College was closed sine-die following some altercation between various groups of students. The triggers were trivial but the escalations always sharp. We dreaded arriving home after these events - no one felt welcome there and it was awkward not to have a plan. Around us life went on, we remained in limbo waiting to find out when we were supposed to return. Eventually we did and we even miraculously graduated on time. But those forced vacations in the college years are among my worst memories.  I can think of only one student in my entire class who had the inner drive, energy and mental resources to thrive despite these disruptions. She made the most of these breaks to learn and grow as a person. The rest of us simply could not relate to her. We thought she was "weird" generally left her alone. In hindsight, I can't imagine she wanted to deal with us anyway. M made the b...

My immediate family lives in three continents and lately my day begins with responding to messages from my father who is worried for our well-being though pushing eighty, though he is probably among most vulnerable in this pandemic. But he feels just as invincible in his mind as he did when I was a child. Facts and scientific evidence matter little to him. But he presumes the rest of us will not do enough to take care of ourselves unless he harangues us daily. My commonsense advice to him to take care of himself falls on deaf ears. He is still bigger and stronger than us all. It does not help that he has taken to social media only recently and treats everything seen on the internet as the gospel.  Yet his anxieties do percolate down. So right after I speak with him and finish assuring him there is nothing to worry about, I make sure I check in with J, repeat my instructions on how she can best take care of herself. Stuck in the middle, I try to pacify my father on one had and try...

My parents started their married life in Mumbai. A time of great adventure and discovery for my mother who had never been outside the confines of Kolkata until then. My father has a very different recollection of Mumbai than she does. For him it was a time of hardship, sacrifice and cutting corners every day to support his new family - I was born during their time there.  Whatever charms that the city held for my mother were largely lost on him. He talks about the long commuter train rides, cramped living quarters, having to make a kitchen inside the main living area which was also the only room they had. Soon after I was born, he got a raise and could afford a separate bedroom. To him the entirely of his time in Mumbai, spoke to his failures as a provider for the family and he does not like to remember those times. My mother learned Hindi and a smattering of Marathi, made friends with the ladies in the neighborhood. She learned to cook dishes she had never tasted before. I heard...

First time for me reading A House for Mr. Biswas and I am completely drawn into the world of the characters in a way that I thought was no longer possible. Maybe age and experience living the realities of life had killed that escape hatch for me that was my sanctuary growing up. Back then I could escape into any world - Premchand, Harold Robins, Tolstoy, Barbara Pym, Leon Uris, Thomas Hardy, Alistair McLean, Norman Mailer,  James Hilton, R.K Narayan or Tagore just to give a sense of the complete randomness there.  I don't revisit books I have read simply because the volume of what I have not (and want to) is huge and daunting. That perfect escape to another world far removed from mine has grown harder and harder over the years. Reading Naipaul made me feel wonderfully alive again, able to sense and feel atmosphere through words as I once was able to - very effortlessly. It was interesting to read his assessment of his own writing in this essay : I had no gift. At least, I...

Excellent essay on how Costco does it and how it manages to survive the retail apocalyse. Worth reading in it's entireity. For me these lines stood out the most: Corporations only act as ethical as their subset of consumers, and consumers only are pressured to only act as ethical as their value-maximizing formulas allow them to be. This means that making a premature leap towards offering more progressive yet more expensive products or services comes with risk. Risk averse corporations, especially large ones like Costco, have to be completely sure that a market has come maturity before they offer up a product that represents a premium shift in its consumers' ethical frameworks. The author concludes by offering a solution that seems to address the needs of both retailers and customers Instead of reacting to the slow evolving standards of decency of its shoppers, there's nothing that's stopping a company from playing a more  proactive  market making role as lon...

I watched The Company Men and American Factory recently. The first is fictional the second is a documentary. The theme of job-loss runs through both. The high-flying sales execs that get laid off in The Company Men have at first blush very little in common with the GM factory workers in American Factory who find a second lease of life in Fuyao Glass.  Yet the pain of job loss and the toll it takes on person's sense of self-worth is universal. The ability to withstand the financial impact would vary but the emotional toll may be more on par. In both stories, we see people who have given up years of their lives for the good of the company and factory, hoping their loyalty and allegiance to the cause mattered. In the end, everyone learns that they are dispensable; that there should not be an expectation of reward beyond paychecks and incentives.  In The Company Men, one of the VPs gets fired and he quickly finds himself unable to afford his lifestyle or pay for his daughter...

Learned the phrase sexual anorexia by way of this Huffpost article . Lot to ponder about in reading the first person account of waiting until forty one and also the Psych Today piece explaining how anorexia and bulimia works in this context. So many women I know would fit the profile of anorexics - even the ones that are married. For women of my mother's generation and older this was the only control they had in their marriage - by way of denying themselves and wresting some power out of their husbands who were the sole breadwinners for the family. While they may have gained some of what they sought, it often came at a terrible cost to physical and mental health.  An older relative once told me this story about how things went for her on the night of her wedding. In the scary intimacy of laying with a stranger in the conjugal bed festooned with garlands of tuberose and jasmine, the husband she had been arranged to marry by her family, asked her if any other man had seen her in t...

Fun set of graphs that show how our spending pattern changes with age for a variety of categories. The one that stood out for me was the spend on women's dresses. The peak arrives at around fifty. Perhaps this is the time when women are able to afford (and feel like they deserve) to spend on items of clothing that are expensive and are not flavor of the month street fashion. That is the only explanation that seems to make sense.  Surely younger women have a lot more clothes in volume than their older counterparts. If the woman is a lazy and reluctant shopper like me, then by the time they hit their forties, it becomes quite an undertaking to find non-work clothes that are age-appropriate, elegant, versatile and interesting. When you try to bring all that together, the price point no longer makes sense. So when I see that graph I am thinking about women who don't mind spending what it takes to acquire a nice wardrobe for a fifty year old. 

A former colleague and I caught up after a long time recently and conversation turned to counter-offers and why no one we know could cite an instance where it went well. Most people view it skeptically because getting a counter-offer can often highlight that you were invisible until you decided to leave. Your contributions were never seen, heard or promoted. There were used covertly by those who who used you to get ahead. No surprise then, the very same people will want to keep you around - it is part of their career plan. Everything about this picture is wrong. For one thing you got direct evidence that you never mattered and never will. The love-fest that is usually part of the counter-offer deal will end the minute you say yes. My colleague made an interesting comparison - the recipient of a counter-offer is a like the long-suffering battered wife that never protests the abuse. One day she walks out and the husband immediately promises to amend his ways - though its unclear why ...

Very interesting reading about how the Japanese make the lost and found system work like a charm . It is like a well-balanced recipe with all the right ingredients with none to over-powering. The gentleness of the formula is likely the magic. Pushing too hard on any lever could create a negative outcome. Made me think of Japanese food in general and how balance is expressed in the recipes. There is the concept of Ikigai seems to extend even into now the lost and found system works.  After spending all the conscious years of my life until now doing what was either expected or required of me, I have come to have a serious appreciation for asking myself  "what should I do with my life". The answer in my case turns out to be a lot like spring-cleaning the house. Taking areas of life that have fallen into neglect and disarray and cleaning it up. So there are these piles of dust and debris outside the cleaned areas but the whole place is still not where it needs to be. But the pr...

Could not agree more with the conclusion the author arrived at in this article about what professional women need in their partner : Professionally ambitious women really only have two options when it comes to their personal partners — a super-supportive partner or no partner at all. Anything in between ends up being a morale- and career-sapping morass. I watched On the Basis of Sex recently, a great testimony to the amazing success of RBG on account of having a super-supportive partner. A truly egalitarian marriage - she was there for Marty just as much as he was for her. Each was the beneficiary of the unrelenting support of the other.  There is also my favorite quote by H. Jackson Brown on this topic but in a more gender neutral way “Marry the right person. This one decision will determine 90% of your happiness or misery.” I remember seeing this quote on a poster in my apartment's gym when I first came to America - a new bride at the time. Turned out to be prophetic words...

A dubious Top 30 list from Slate  makes for good reading.There are all the usual suspects and some that made me pause to think if they were evil enough to make the cut. “Oracle’s mission to copyright APIs is a terrifying example of the worst kind of tech issue: something totally boring and esoteric and simultaneously incredibly important. Oracle’s  theory  is bonkers, and has been propped up by a huge, expensive, shadowy astroturf campaign. It takes a lot to make me feel like Google is being victimized by a bully, but Oracle managed it.”  —Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing and the Electronic Frontier Foundation I have some grudging respect for Oracle that are even able to bully Google. Maybe this is the best we can expect for checks and balances. 

I have been a Netflix customer for a while after initially getting a year's subscription as a birthday gift. Recently, NF decided not to recognize me as a long time customer, kicked me out of account, would not let me access it. Every time I logged in they promptly signed me out.  I had to get with a call center rep to sort things out. He was nice enough and canceled the account as I requested - there was no attempt to find out why I was getting out with such sense of urgency. There was no effort to  retain me. Word on the street is NF pays its engineers some crazy high salaries to get the best talent that money can buy and there is also the NF Culture Book  (which I have long believed is malarkey) which in combination should have made for perpetually delighted customers.  To add insult to injury, NF is now pursuing me via email like they don't know me from Adam and want my net-new business. My first thought about this whole fiasco is data breach. They lost a lar...

An article meant to provoke - networking is a waste of time . From my limited experience I would agree that the benefits are marginal because as the author says each person is playing their own game. Furthermore, cliques are quickly formed between people who arrived together or know others who also happen to be there. These groups become self-contained islands ostensibly deepening existing and dormant ties as this article recommends we all do. The non-attached folks are the ones that are doing all the mingling, sticking out and being uncomfortable but soldering on.  A certain level of discomfort with the whole thing seems to confer "genuine" upon the person whereas the extra-suave who can truly work the room are viewed with some skepticism. Its too much of a good thing. Ideally, the person occupies the sweet spot between awkward and adept, comes in with atleast another person if not more so they can divide and conquer plus form their own bubble when it gets tiring. For me t...

It's not so surprising that Amazon tracks our reading habits very closely . A lot can be learned about a person from they read, skim but not read and particularly what in their reading resonated strongly with them - enough to highlight or annotate. The author concludes with this quote about Amazon “They are perfectly willing for art to be collateral damage in their pursuit of profit.” Not just art, just about anything they touch that is ours is in pursuit of profit over all other considerations. When car manufacturers make Alexa part of the standard configuration , consumers will need to start thinking about how to escape their whole lives being scavenged for data and there maybe few places left to hide.