Skip to main content

Starting Benign

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 day. The early feelings of empowerment faded away over time.

At first, the idea of running ads atop or around a car at no cost to the driver or rider may seem like a good thing but it can also be the beginning of the end as this Atlantic article says about how the laptop ruined your life. But as they say - that was then and this is now. The inability to work from home in the present situation could be the difference between having a livelihood or not at all. There is no work-life balance or integration depending on your preference - if you able to work from home while managing kids and domestic obligations all at the same time, you are in the lucky minority.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques