Heartcrossings

This made for sad yet relatable reading about a mother. There comes a time when you finally stop having those bad dreams, fraught with conflict that plays over and over in your head but never to reach resolution in real life. You continue to play the role, meet expectations, feel guilty that you never exceed them, Over time you learn to stop asking or waiting for answers. Just know that your mother was and is a wounded woman. And no matter how much you want to help, how bad your need for closure, she lives alone in her island and there is no way to reach her there or to bring her where the rest of life is.  I wish we could talk, but then I remember, we never accomplished anything with talk. Yet, she is the one who fed me, taught me, read to me, gave me her values, and ultimately was proud of me.  That is all true for me too. I have learned not to talk about anything remotely meaningful. We stay on neutral third-party topics, the ones that are safe, unlikely to trigger either ...

As much as we fear becoming our mother, it is almost inevitable that we will. I strive to be all that I admire and respect about my mother but do not want any of her unlikable qualities. Life does not work quite so programmatically as it turns out. You don't get most of the best and are stuck with a fair bit of what you greatly dread. That is the mix in my case.  One of the ways that manifests itself is my relationship with women outside my professional life. Without the context of work, the equation is entirely social and personal. That is an area where my challenges are most pronounced. Women it seems like to first understand where I stand on the friendship scale before they decide to deepen their engagement with me. It seems like I may be void of modulation, inexpressive and even unfeeling in ways. So if a friend bails out on me for coffee or lunch half a dozen times, I am not offended when she asks if I am available for the seventh time. I will agree to meet her at the appointe...

Interesting article on the cause of OCD - expecting chaos and preparing for it: ..The more symptoms they expressed, the more likely they were to distrust their past. This caused them to believe that new environments are unpredictable, and therefore should be avoided or distrusted. They were actually more surprised by predictable outcomes than unpredictable ones. I don't know of anyone with the truly bad OCD symptoms like the article describes but there are many around me (including myself) who have a specific pattern of behavior followed by a trigger that they can't seem to avoid repeating. Could be small things like being overzealous about cleaning and organizing -sometimes the effort to limited to some specific area even. Or it could be that they water indoor plants religiously first thing in the morning, cannot get the day started without two cups of coffee.  There is a line between harmless ritualistic behavior patterns and OCD. But the root cause may not be that dif...

I found myself quite liking Wild Things as trashy as it is with an insane number of plot twists that take right into the closing credits to explain. Not feeling clued in and not understanding what is going on is a very relate-able feeling these days. Each day there is a new theory about the pandemic, how it is and will forever change us. The plot of this virus story is so convoluted that we should give up trying to follow along and just focus on staying safe.  One day, we read about sourdough starters being all the rage, the next day its about the run on bidets. Every wannabe pundit cites some data to tell some story with an air of profundity. This one about test-positivity rates, fails to establish consistent base-line. Unless all populations everywhere in the world were being tested exactly the same way, there is no way to compare the numbers. To that end, there is no point hyper-ventilating over one being higher than the other - there is no conclusion to be drawn from it....

Nice essay on what citizens should do if they claim political awareness and discernment.  ..we should be spending the same number of hours building political organizations, implementing a long-term vision for our city or town, and getting to know our neighbors, whose votes will be needed for solving hard problems. We could be accumulating power so that when there are opportunities to make a difference—to lobby, to advocate, to mobilize—we will be ready. But most of us who are spending time on politics today are focused inward, choosing roles and activities designed for our short-term pleasure. Ofcourse that is not what most of us do -  We soak in daily political gossip and eat up statistics about who’s up and who’s down. We tweet and post and share. We crave outrage. The hours we spend on politics are used mainly as pastime. Reading this reminded of my growing up years in India. Every adult I knew was politically opinionated. People feuded over their ideologies and in...

Moving data to cloud is happening at what seems to be a hysterical pace. Companies decide that is the way to go and then an assortment of vendors descend upon them to make this goal a reality. It's good business if you are a cloud or a cloud-adjacent vendor these days. One Slashdot commentator throws much needed cold water on this emerging and burgeoning "cloud transformation" trend with a quick history lesson Today's cloud is the modern version of the timeshare computer bureau of the 1960s/1970s. If history repeats itself, companies will eventually realize that they have a critical dependence on these computing service and bring them in-house, like they did with mainframes (then minis). If going to the cloud is what is needed to gain a centrally-managed development resource, though, then it might be worth it. At first blush, the comparison between old-school computer time-sharing and modern cloud computing seems a bit silly. But there are some strong parallels. A c...

There are many ways to feel about this news about someone flushing the toilet in the Supreme Court in the middle or oral arguments. If you are feeling charitable, you may choose not to make much of it - people no matter who they are sometimes need to use the bathroom at the worst possible time. That's why the mute button exists. But if you are not feeling such compassion, you may wonder if the people appointed to these positions for life take what they do seriously enough.  If their engagement on the job is at about the same level us one of us who needs to go offline for a few minutes to attend to the HVAC repair guy or some such while a meeting is in progress. What the likes or us do or don't do matters little in the grand scheme of things, if we missed a few minutes of a meeting on account of being pre-occupied with non-work activities, the consequences if any could be overcome in a day maybe a week in the worst case. Just about no one would be impacted. We are not at all co...

Interesting ways to combat the virus from different parts of the world. One a fabric that zaps the virus, other a remedy from nature. There seems to be a notion that the remedy must be newly created in response to the crisis for it to be credible. Friends and family in India seem to be on the fence about Ayurvedic remedies for covid even those who have depended on it their whole lives even for complex ailments. And it seems to depend on their politics for the most part not on what they objectively think.  Maybe at some level we don't want to believe that a weed we could pull from our backyard could cure us when we have had our whole lives upended. That would make us look very foolish collectively. If this was so easy all along then we would have no basis for making peace with it, or submit to the life-altering experience and the myriad of pain that the virus has brought in its wake.  My friend B works in strategy for a software product company. Lately he has been working ab...

J has grown up without a father and the for the most part seems to have survived it. The deep inner wounds are harder to see but I am sure that they exist. When the differences between the adults reaches a point where one parent decides to opt-out entirely in order to escape doing their already difficult job in a hostile environment, it is a cop-out that hurts the child. The kid wants that parent to have tried harder, fought longer just to prove that they mattered enough to do so. Irrespective of the conditions, having given up signals to the child they were not worth going to war over. And each person deals differently with that understanding. Their response also evolves over time as they see more of the world, more damaged families and peers who had it far worse.  Notwithstanding, the role of a father in a kid's life can leave a void - where the father was present in name only and did not play the part he should have. A complete absence is probably a little better than that as it...

This Wired story about a talented young man losing his mind to an incurable disease makes for sad reading. For those of us who have experienced losing the "core" of a person to some form of mental illness, this could be relate-able. You happened to have met them when they were normal or even experiencing a fantastic high after overcoming their struggles with mental illness through their own efforts, not relying on prescription medications. This to you is a testament of how strong their will to survive and fight odds, you believe that you could have an amazing life together. If you are like me and value resilience, this could be the single most attractive quality about the person. So attractive in fact that you lose sight of every other red flag and decide to move forward. What you don't realize is that it took an obsessive single-mindedness for them to work on their mental health to the exclusion of everything else.  They had one goal in life - to overcome their condit...

The use of intrusive technology to help us return to normal is becoming routine and acceptable. The use case today is sensing elevated body temperature and certainly the virus is not the only reason that someone has a fever. People are being required to get habituated to very odd things these days - be scanned and monitored, if showing symptoms of the virus told to just ride it out alone in their home, being asked why they are out and about, if they are teachers be okay watching parents ride side-car with their students at home.  In ordinary times, none of this would sound normal and that does not even begin to count the mental health problems from social isolation, living with abusive domestic partners, loss of livelihood and so on. The idea that all of this serves the greater goal of saving as many human lives from the virus does not make the conditions more bearable for those who are suffering in other ways.  I have a few older relatives that could be described as feisty -...

Love that the bracelet of silence exists and hopefully in time it will go mainstream. Don't love the aesthetics personally but do understand the spirit in which this thing was designed. Something a lot more understated would likely be what ends up in the market aimed for mass adoption. Naturally such armors are not the silver bullet but it signals a need in society so chances are things will shift and change to accommodate it over time “People into their privacy are no longer shunned as loonies,” Mr. Urban said. “It’s become a concern for people of all ages, political perspectives and walks of life.” He added: “New technologies are continually eroding our privacy and anonymity. People are looking for an opt-out, which is what I’m trying to provide.” Woodrow Hartzog, a law and computer science professor at Northeastern University, doesn’t think privacy armor is the solution to our modern woes. “It creates an arms race, and consumers will lose in that race,” he said. “Any of ...

Watching Little Fires Everywhere was a meditative experience for me. The character of Mia played by Kerry Washington stood out the most - she has so many layers of mystery and complexity to her. Yet, as they are revealed a little at a time, all her actions become imbued with a pristine clarity as if they were all self-evident. I had heard an interview of Washington where she was discussing this role and cited her own mother as the model she used to play the character of Mia. I was specially struck by how Washington described her mother as distant but not lacking warmth.  Those words seemed to be exactly the ones I have been seeking my whole life to describe my own mother. That is when I knew I had to watch the show to better understand what Washington had meant. My mother is an enigma to this day and I only know what she chose to reveal which was very little. The war of attrition to understand her at a human level corroded our relationship and came a point when I realized the ...

Recently, a dear friend pointed out to my habit of tunneling away online when I am not comfortable in my surroundings -to make my bubble of quiet in the middle of chaos. The observation is accurate. This is where being non-confrontational meets my need to have solitary time. I believe people like me were born to be quiet, minding their own business and staying out of controversy. We were made to be more sociable and outgoing by those who raised us - for our own good and as a survival skill.  So over time we learned to act and play the part but the soul of us still wants to escape to that quiet place where no interaction is needed for long periods of time. Here I was being challenged to think about why I first started to escape and it the conditions in my life had changed since then. Having this conversation about retreating in crowds - perceived and real reminded me of a Robert Duncan poem And solitude,   a wild solitude ’s reveald,   fearfully,  ...

My co-workers former and current have been scattered around the country for over a decade now. This has been the way of our lives and we learned to work around people's schedules that could involve errands, after-school activities that need pick-ups and drop-offs. The workday could get fluid when there were important deadlines.  Catching up on the weekend is fairly normal when you need time to attend to personal business during the week. I remember working with a semi-retired consultant who lives in South Dakota. This was a bit out of the norm even for our geographically scattered team. Most of us lived close to a major airport though the definition of "close" could vary for people. Some of us lived in city apartments in downtown and other could be in a twenty-acre farm in the suburbs of a big city.  Getting visible and having career growth most of us found was not compatible with this style of work - atleast not within the organization itself. Typically people changed jo...

Excellent essay on why poor people make poor decisions . The focus is primarily on poverty but the article also delves a bit into what happens when people are pressed for time. The effects are similar - they have diminished intelligence on account of scarcity and make bad decisions. “Self-control feels like a challenge. You are distracted and easily perturbed. And this happens every day.” This is how scarcity – whether of time or of money – leads to unwise decisions. There’s a key distinction though between people with busy lives and those living in poverty: you can’t take a break from poverty. Following that logic, aggressive multi-tasking would create a severe scarcity of time leading to diminished mental abilities and bad outcomes. I have always struggled to multi-task and thought of it as a liability in life. Maybe its for the best that I cannot.

Often these days, I hear people talk about luck. To have the good luck to be able to work from home, to still have a job, to be safe and well, to have friends and family who are likewise safe and well. The list is as long as the person's level of gratitude for their many privileges. As the pandemic's scale of devastation became evident over the weeks, the constant talk of luck turned a bit grating.  My friend A told me about an all-hands meeting at her company where the CEO was trying to rally the troops and tell them customers were more available than ever for meetings and so they need to all do their part to win mind-share now, dollars will follow when the situation improves. The troops were obliquely reminded they were lucky to be working for a company that had the resources to hunker down and ride this one out. By invoking luck as the prime mover, it seemed like we were collectively glossing over problems that we lacked the will to solve. Luck is akin to winning some natura...

Interesting Kickstarter project that does a number of different things to improve the life of a cyclist. Blowing purified air into their face, warming them if they are cold and also a light to make them visible. I t's hard to say how effective this setup really is, since the clean air will obviously mix at least a little with the surrounding "dirty" air before being breathed in. That said, buyers can opt for a respirator-like mask attachment that seals the system off. The idea of sealing the person off from the surroundings to create a bubble of safety is becoming increasingly relevant these days. With the cloth masks that most of us wear when we are out, the efficacy as far as keeping us from catching the virus is questionable but the number of people wearing masks seems to be increasing over time. A month ago, in my town only a small minority wore masks. Today, it would feel awkward and even wrong to show up to a grocery store without one. There is a social expectatio...

Even at this age, both my parents can recite a few poems from memory. Things they had read in their childhood and youth. This is not a talent I inherited. While talking to them recently, I asked them how they did it and they could not explain - one theory was they had far less distraction in their day, so it was easier for things to stick and make a permanent impression.  After that conversation, I recalled the arresting first line of John Donne's Canonization "For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love".  That is a line  I never forgot. Most of his poems felt out of reach when I first read them as a teen but this line definitely grabbed attention. I wanted understand the poem and what he meant to convey. Back then, the metaphysical aspects of Donne's work completely escaped me - the poet had exalted the feelings of infatuation I was very familiar with to something grand and sensual. We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms; As well a well-wrought urn becomes...

I am not up to speed on ice-cream trends and buy some on my grocery runs maybe once in a few months. The creative Ben & Jerry's flavors are always fun to read and imagine what they might taste like. In the early part of high school J went through a Ben & Jerry's phase and the Americone Dream was her favorite at the time.  Last week, I happened to stop by mainly to see what the crisis had inspired in terms of new flavors and realized I would not know if any of what I saw was new,  And was when I spotted a Biscoff ice-cream. It was an intriguing idea - Biscoff cookies, the flight food was now it was also an ice-cream. I knew I had to try it and my motivation was plain curiosity, there was no expectation whatsoever. I was pleasantly surprised that I liked it - would be even hard to explain what about it is likable.  As far as the qualities of good ice-cream go, this Biscoff production  probably has none. The taste of Biscoff cookie is pretty strong - presumably ...

My friend D has a widowed father who lives in an assisted living facility. He has been suffering from dementia for several years and at eight five, there has not much to do but to watch the gradual slide of his mental abilities and hope for the best. He only sometimes recognizes D but instinctively trusts her even on the days she is a stranger to him. She has pulled together an album of back and white pictures of their family going back a couple of generations. Other relatives have lent her what they had. Sometimes, he recognizes people from the distant past - a cousin, his mother, his wife when they were newly wed. That has been D's way to maintain a tenuous connection with her father. Last week she found out that half of the patients in that facility had tested positive for covid and her father was one among them. She is no longer allowed to meet him or even speak with him - the residents can't be trusted to use cellphone so the facility does not allow it.  This has bee...

Beautiful essay about the inner world of a writer mom. I don’t want to tell my son this is how I spend my time. I can’t tell him Mommy is racked with crippling self-doubt and a persistent fear that her work will never be published. At least not until he’s in third grade. So, for now, I hide my truth. My son thinks Mommy is writing a book. He thinks Mommy is fixing the magazines. He thinks Mommy is, and I quote, “The best storyteller in the world.” Why ruin that narrative? I’ll go on playing the role of full-time writer extraordinaire. I’ll continue imbuing his made-up characters with life and craft bedtime stories full of tension, rich descriptions, and as much of a narrative arc as I can muster, given the limitations of a fish-wielding superhero. I was never quite J's super-hero but she has always been proud of me in her own quiet, undramatic way. That faith in my "abilities" served as my reserve to keep going on the hardest day. I wanted to be worthy of her pri...

The time are strange and it leads us to do the unexpected. In my case, the random thing I decided to do was to improve my penmanship. Since the early 90s my writing has been in a steady decline. As the levels of stress and uncertainty peaked in my life, it slope downwards only hastened to that point that I cannot write more than few words in a row before it turning into unreadable chaos. Over the last few weeks, looking over notes that I have taken during the day's meetings, it occurred to me that my writing (if it can be still called that) needed intervention. I wanted to fountain pain to return to the time when my writing was actually nice.  So the pen arrived in the mail today and once I started writing with it, it felt like the life I had been missing all these years in the act of flowing words out of fingers had finally returned. This is the thing that was missing the whole time. I intend to take notes at work with this pen and the hope is in a few months I may regain some of ...

Reading this reminded me of a engagement I was on a couple of years back. The client in question that no dearth of software tools, data to to pump through it and IT resources to get them results. Yet, the sense of discontent ran deep when I first started interacting with them. A lot of data was being moved around, analyzed and visualized but there no way answer to a simple question "So what?".  Slicing the data a dozen new ways was not bringing business users any closer to the clarity they were looking for. The solution as it turned out was relatively simple. It was about teaching the end users or consumers of analytic insights, how to ask questions.  From there they had to be shown how the available data could or could not answer a given question. If the question was critical and there was a data sufficiency problem, then there had to be a way to source what was missing, understand the risks and rewards of doing so before taking the plunge. We realized this is not a job t...

Like many, I find watching people cooking comfort food more than usually soothing these days. Often, I have no desire to replicate the steps myself. Even watching the dish come together slowly is reward in itself. This is instant gratification that makes food porn such a popular genre. I seem to particularly enjoy watching home cooks in India describe their process in languages I have only passing familiarity with - Tamil, Kannada and Gujarati. It would be hard to even explain the draw and why I prefer these to Bengali or Hindi languages I am actually fluent in.  Along the way, I came across this story about a man who painted pictures of every meal he ate for thirty two years. Made me think about how deliberate the process of preparing the meal may have been for him These days, Kobayashi relies mostly on food deliveries—sometimes from restaurants, sometimes from his mother. And though his day-to-day existence rarely varies, he’s been pushing his practice in a new direction, creati...

Creative way for kids to return to school while keeping six feet part. Reading this made me think of my great grandmother whose OCD tendencies were legend in the family. She did not eat anything she did not cook herself, she washed everything she wore by her own hands and she did not allow people to come too close to her. Grand kids were the only exception but they too had to be bathed and clean before coming into contact with the grand matriarch. She had a wooden chair at the far end of a long balcony that was out of bounds for the rest of the family. If someone sat there by accident, it would be washed and scrubbed clean before she used it again.  If she had found herself in the middle of the current pandemic, she would likely carry on business as usual. There would be no need to adapt to the times - as above and beyond as she already was. She passed away a long time ago and even today, when the family gets together they talk about her extreme rules of daily living. If I think...

Something random and cool I ran into recently is this product placement blog . It is a labor of love to have fifty pages of jacket placements carefully tagged for instance. Learned from here that there are such things are product placement agencies which the blog lists. I used to wonder about the choice of products with branding visible or not that a movie or TV show decides to include - if there were considerations other than cohesion with directorial vision involved.  Done right, this could work so much better than ads that no one wants to watch. This is way more subliminal way to get the consumer to desire things they did not know they needed. It would be interesting to see how the these placement strategies changed over time and how it impacted categories and brands.  In my neck of the woods, the Walmart is placing bags of rice where they were never seen before. Rice was infact not something you would easily find at this particular Walmart. It took up one bottom shelf ...

This visual tells a sad and terrifying story about how the lights go out on us all. First to go are restaurants per this study. People in the business imagine how life post-covid might look like. Couple of somewhat co-related items stood out for me: Moving forward, curbside service will be a staple of the industry. There will also be a shift in consumer focus regarding food safety versus sustainability. Restaurants may see a 3 to 6 percent month increase in sales growth as consumers venture outside followed by cash strapped consumers looking for value offerings. That sound logical - people would not care as much for farm to table, locally sourced and organic if safety is a bigger concern, followed by price. That would be a resurgence of mass-produced food with proven quality control and lower price point. There is growth in the sale of snacks overall with cookies coming out on top. Ours used to a notoriously snack-free household and we have succumbed too. There are some options...

Love the idea of a shadow board . I have been part of a two way mentoring arrangement where an experienced new hire is paired with a junior employee - typically two years out of college having started as an intern and now an associate. The benefits to both sides is quite amazing. In my case my mentor (who is also my mentee) is a young lady whose super-power is her ability to network and make great connections across the organization.  B is like-able, dependable and always eager to help. Not surprising she is the fountain of information about the inner workings of the organization and has an amazing Rolodex - two things any new hire in the company benefits from tremendously. And because she is so well-liked, a warm introduction from her goes a long way. It is a virtuous circle - the person she introduces me is happy to hear that they are a role model to this really nice young person, they are happy to help me out because she sent me their way. This creates an incentive for new hir...

The demise of secular India and what it means for those who are away and still call it home forms the subject of this Atlantic essay . I have not been in the author's shoes but can strongly relate to his sense of loss:  To lose one’s country is to know a feeling akin to shame, almost as if one has been disowned by a parent, or turned out of one’s home. Your country is so intimately bound up with your sense of self that you do not realize what a ballast it has been until it is gone. The relationship is fundamental. It is one of the few things we are allowed to take for granted, and it is the basis of our curiosity about other places. Without a country we are adrift, like people whose inability to love another is linked to an inability to love themselves. For me this loss of country came about while I was still in India. Until then, it was my dream to contribute to my county by completing my higher education there and joining the workforce. I had many strong role models around me...

Interesting perspective on how universities should plan to reopen in fall. I was reading earlier about some students who want to take a gap year if they cannot return in the new academic year. That is logical in some sense.  Having to pay for a college experience that they are not going to have does seem futile. But breaking off somewhere in-between a undergrad program to do something else is risky specially if it becomes hard to get gainfully employed during that time or find other ways to learn useful skills.  In the absence of those options a kid is likely to drop-out which would be a loss for both them and their college. The idea of somehow making it work while accepting some degree of risk is something a lot of kids would welcome. They would much rather be in college and on their path to freedom and independence than not. There is something to be said for the resilience of youth - they would be able to adjust to the new reality much better than the rest of the popula...