Sadly Relatable

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 of us and we each go our way. As we grow older and acquire life experience we like to believe we may have the solution to whatever ails our mother. The truth is they would rather remain alone and wounded, than seek our help and lose the standing motherhood gave them - it may be what they value the most.

Finding Likeness

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 appointed place and time. Within reason, I will work my schedule around to do so. 

This is not because I am particularly anxious to see her but that I don't see any reason why I should not. Her cancelling on me six time prior is not a big deal because I had not been inconvenienced any of those times. I was only going to drive ten minutes to be there and my calendar had been open to begin with. The fact that I don't feel the need to express frustration or disappointment at their actions much less feel any such thing makes me a strange friend to have from their point of view.  

And in that sense I remind me of my mother - maybe like her, I cannot get that emotionally close where such actions start to register on me and matter. I look at it very logically and logistically. I suffered no losses so why should I be upset with them. The only saving grace is that there are a few people in my life who can make me pretty sad just being late to return my call or reply to a message.

Fine Lines

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 different. Maybe we expect the day to go awry if we don't make the bed perfectly, don't put the shoes away where they belong, don't get our mug of coffee for the road and so on. We are expecting chaos to strike and these ritual actions could be our insurance against the worst.

Wild Things

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. 

In Wild Things, stuff happens to the characters - no one explains the basis for such. We are meant to know that everyone is in cahoots with each other and somehow it all makes sense in the end. Maybe in a decade, someone will make a covid-explainer documentary for the average folks like us and it will all be revealed like in the last one minute of Wild Things.

Political Hobbyists

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 extreme cases, even shunned those who supported the other side. Yet, a vast majority of these folks never lined up to vote on election day. Instead they spent that day gathered around over chai and fritters to complain how their vote did not matter - nothing would ever change in India. It is interesting that now in their golden years, some of my relatives have started to exercise their vote ; still a far cry from the active political engagement the author writes about.

Cloud Nine

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 customer does not want to be responsible for managing their own data center anymore and wants to move it to cloud. There is no magical place in the cloud where this data moved from a physical data center will now reside in immaterial ether where infrastructure disappears like a magician's rabbit. Its just a matter of who is responsible for this new physical location where the company's data now resides. 

A time will come when the managed model of the data center, and all data being in the cloud will start to cause problems that seem far-fetched right now. Much can be learned from the stress-test Amazon Prime Delivery was subjected due to the pandemic. It went from being a fairly well-oiled machine to unmitigated chaos in less than a week and is yet to make a recovery months later. As 80% of the world's data moves to cloud in a very short period of time, the entire eco-system of providers will be stressed much in the same way. 

Customers who are only getting starting on the cloud, are salivating over all the IoT and sensor data that they will pump into their data lakehouse and make crazy magic with it. At some point in this amazing trip through the cloud, there will be contact with real, earthbound stuff - just a matter of time. It won't be surprising if on-premise solutions make a strong comeback much in the way of mainframes and minis from back in the day.

Hearing Flush

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 consequential in the world - we get that and the world gets it too. Whomever flushed in toilet here is in a bit of a different pay-grade or so they want us to believe. 

Seems to be that such an inopportune flushing of the toilet is a sign of the times we live in. Those in positions of power and authority have decided they don't need to do the jobs they were assigned, elected or appointed to do. The trappings of power and privilege serve as a proxy for the value that they are supposed to deliver. As long as there is a perception of the wheels turning, there is no need for exerting themselves much more. 

Alternate Remedies

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 absolutely insane hours all days of the week and weekend to re-do everything in the wake of the pandemic. The last strategic plan the company had put together is only a few months old has to be trashed out. It's just not him but atleast another dozen people who are working just as furiously at this small company trying to sort the mess out. B says strategy is a pretty ridiculous word these days and to pretend to have one even more so - but that is his job description. Repeat that many millions of times around the world every day. 

To think that a tisane made from a common weed growing in any backyard could make this all these gyrations of humankind redundant may be a pill impossibly hard to swallow. A reasonable solution would need to cost many billions of dollars, involve research institutes, governments and universities among an assortment of other players. Then it would be solution worthy of the pain covid has produced. There is no way to scientifically prove the remedy works without the required time and sample size. The virus itself (in some incarnation) has existed for a long time. Logically then it is possible some humans somewhere in the world might have encountered it and perhaps dealt it with locally in ways they knew to. That would be the kind of "folk remedy" that no one seems to be interested in anymore. 

Being Father

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 does not bring about a death by thousand cuts of disappointment. 

Unlike the traditional role of a mother with a large number of constant and mundane touch-points, a father has a different scope and influence in a kid's life as this female divorce lawyer representing men's rights points out. It is the things learned from example, the life skills that were taught through real-time problem solving and the confidence that came from watching him take charge and lead in crisis. 

This is not to say a mother cannot do all of that but in a two parent household, a natural balance is created based on what each parent can do best. It is heart-warming to see a father do for other kids what his own father did not do for him.

Falling Down

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 condition through unrelenting effort and so they did.  A new relationship brings unexpected circumstances to this person's life, disrupts the eco-system that they had developed painstakingly over time to help themselves. So they try to work within the new constraints, take occasional stumbles, you help them get back on their feet. They are encouraged that they have you to count on and the dark days don't have to feel interminable. Over time the stumbles get more frequent, their dependency on you increases past your ability to help and comes a time when they simply cannot get back on their feet. 

Changed Lives

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 - they like being independent and doing their own thing without interference from anyone. Today, some of them have been pushed close to their breaking point. One aunt is diabetic and in her town there is no access to fresh produce. To add to her woes her very old mother is in the hospital with renal failure. 

M feels entrapped in ways that are completely new to her. A dying mother, mounting hospital expenses, a retired husband who looks to her to lead the family, her only kid in another country, working from home in a job that was never designed to be remote, eating the same meal for going on two months. Nothing changes for her from one day to the next. People like her are at a point where they would be willing to give up a lot for the right to the life they had before this. Those more vulnerable than M would have been at the point sooner and the rest of us will get there in a matter of time. This is a war of attrition no one can win. 

Privacy Armor

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 these things is a half-measure or a stopgap. There will always be a way around it.”

Little Fires

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 cost of such understanding would be to lose the many things I did value about her. It was not worthwhile for me to carry on my crusade to achieving an honest relationship with her. I would need to learn to do without.

Yet, my mother gave me confidence, she believed in my ability to do things I never thought I could and most importantly she taught me the virtue of hard work and pulling one's weight in life. She is fiercely independent and would never take anything from anyone that she could not return - this extends even to human warmth. She could be incredibly warm when I did not try to pry into her deeply secretive soul. It only took a few decades for me to learn how to bask in that warmth without being scorched by my rage of never truly knowing who my mother is. 

Seeking Retreat

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,   high     I’d climb   
into the shaking uncertainties,

part out of longing,   part     daring my self,
part to see that
widening of the world,   part

to find my own, my secret
hiding sense and place, where from afar   
all voices and scenes come back

Going Remote

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 jobs to achieve those goals. Those who stay on often have reasons for doing so that may be unrelated to work. Reading about the pandemic giving tech company employees a chance to leave Silicon Valley makes me wonder why this did not happen already. 

If the entire workforce is remote, no one is specifically disadvantaged for not getting the requisite face-time with the powers that be. It levels the playing field for all. The problems occur when some spend a lot of time in the office, meet the right people while they are there and further their cause while others never get a shot. Once that problem is eliminated, there is no reason why a tech company employee can't work out of Glasgow, Montana if they so chose. The salaries would need to adjust to reflect that reality naturally. 

Scarcity and Intelligence

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.

Invoking Luck

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 natural lottery that absolves us of responsibility - even that of being lucky. Ofcourse we are not guilty of being beneficiary of random happenstance. 

With all that being said, those that proclaim to be lucky give themselves a pass to move. It is likely that this luck we speak of could be quite fleeting. As the waves of devastation sweep through society, it could well peel off the protective coating of luck. What then? Would the formerly lucky have more sympathy for those who had never been or will there still be a division. Emily Dickinson had a very different view of luck that would be worth pondering over today

Being Masked

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.

It'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 expectation for us to comply even though there is no mandate from the government. 

In my own experience of wearing a mask has been instructive. At first, it helped me feel more comfortable being around people who were for the most part wearing them. I did not stick out in the crowd. Over time, I realized it went a bit further than that. I have started to appreciate the comfort of anonymity that the mask affords. It serves as an invisibility cloak. 

Within a few weeks, I started to see that feeling was similar to what I experienced when I first starting working from home. Not having to get dressed for work and still have meetings with customers was hugely liberating. I could cook dinner between these meetings and not miss a beat - it was too good to be true. Even after a decade, I value the freedom as much as I did in those early days. 

Reading Donne

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
The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs,
And by these hymns, all shall approve
Us canonized for Love.

In The Rising Sun too, his directness was remarkable for the times. 

Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?

It was nice to read some of those poems again. 

Biscoff Icecream

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 that was the whole point. It was in-flight service turned into an ice-cream. Maybe being quarantined makes us long for the time when we sat cramped in the middle seat with two uninspiring choices for snack - Biscoff cookies or pretzels. That is a far distant dream now so that cookie in a ice-cream may well have the properties of comfort food. 

Overall, it was an interesting experience but next time I want ice-cream, I may be looking at more traditional options. The product does have it's fans though and it is unrelated to the pandemic.

Doling Hope

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 been a hard year for D overall and now this is loss she is bracing for. She is not optimistic about her father's chances of pulling through but wants to believe miracles are possible. In the meanwhile not being able to see him or even talk to him is what makes her the most frantic.

Secret Weapon

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 pride and strove to accomplish goals that may have otherwise fallen to the way side. The author of this essay will likely fulfill her potential because of her son's unshakable faith in her abilities. She is a very lucky mother.

Hope and Dream

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 the skill I once had. I also imagine that being able to restore my hand-writing will have a positive effect on my mental state, the way I process thoughts and feelings. If I kept up with this in time, I may even be a better version of myself as a human being. If a fountain pen can make life whole again, remains to be seen. But these are strange and difficult times. Without hope and dreams to cling on to, it would be impossible.

Teaching Fishing

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 that you wrap up and leave - there is a coaching and mentoring component that remains even after the client has learned how to ask questions, partner with IT to see if the data is sufficient to answer it and so on. In my experience maintaining that on-going coaching relationship goes a long way in alleviating the disappointment this article speaks of.

Being Nimble

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, creating a new series of pop-up paintings.

The times have impacted his work too but he has adapted. Many among us are as well. A few weeks ago, I was reading about barbers doing house-calls endangering their health and that of their customers. But the trade has found other ways to flourish - advisory on a virtual haircut is the way some are going. 

Keeping Apart

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 back now to what she was trying to do it was likely being in control of her life where uncertainty was so rife and her agency non-existent. Furthermore she did not trust others to do the right thing so she did it herself. This also meant there was very little she could do - she could only go as far as going solo would allow. This is a semi-literate widow with eight children and absolutely no means to support herself. It defined hard boundaries that she did not attempt to cross. 

Product Placement

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 in the international food aisle. Seeing it so prominently displayed makes me wonder what has changed because of the pandemic that is pushing rice to such placement. The demographics the store serves has not changed overnight. 

Million Words

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 to be had these days. Not something I am proud of but it is a sign of the stressful times we live in,

Shadow Board

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 hires to share what they know from their prior experiences and replenish the pool of shared resources from which they are drawing.

B gets to observe how someone who has been around for a while deals with real life situations that she has not been exposed to so far. She shadows me and observes how I work in teams, with customers, vendors and partners. Once a week we debrief about what we both learned. I think my young friend will get further much faster than someone who does not have the benefit of such cross-mentoring - she has a few people like me that she works with. Someone like B would be great fit for a shadow board - she could bring generational insights and her perspectives based what she learns from all of us.

Losing India

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 who had taken this path and were doing well for themselves. I viewed those who jumped ship to immigrate to America as traitors to the cause. They had availed the scant resources of a poor country, received their college education almost for free and decided to become part of the brain drain that was hollowing India out. I was absolutely determined not to be one of them. 

Until college this was all very theoretical for me. I could afford to sit on my moral high horse and be disdainful about people abandoning India to pursue their selfish goals of amassing personal wealth on the broken backs of their countrymen who could ill afford to support the government subsidies that was funding their engineering education. I was going to be better than that.

And then it was my turn to be one of those fortunate beneficiaries of  the education that could open a lot of doors. In my case it was the process of arriving to that point that truly shook up my entire belief system. I understood first hand how difficult the task was, how high the odds were stacked against the likes of me and how kids just as qualified and deserving as me - if not more, missed out in this absolutely wild game of chance. 

I remember that toxic mix of guilt and exhilaration that followed college admission. I was not undeserving but neither were the thousands of others who did not make it in - some among them were kids I had known since childhood. Yet what I was getting for my troubles was woefully inadequate. This is not the education I had dreamed of, it was not the worth the price of passage and it was deeply unfair to leave many others just like me outside, with the doors closed. There was no joy for me in the four years of college - I don't think I learned anything of enduring value except how to survive in adversity, cope with disappointment and make the most of what morsels of opportunity came my way. 

It was around the same time, I first became aware of my maternal desire. I dreamed of motherhood as second chance - a way to use my energy and imagination to give another human being a chance to live a better, more impactful life. But with the dream came this idea of doing right by the child I would have. Knowing what I did about building a life and career in India, could I in good conscience do this to my kid. Specially if this child happened to be female. 

By the time I entered the workforce right out of college, there was little doubt in my mind that I could not raise a child in India and reasonably give them the life I had wanted for myself - and this was not about material success. All around me were people who were doing very well for themselves, living and working in India. They were willing to live in their elite bubbles, untouched by challenges that India presents to most people. They would buy their way out and their kids would live the privileged life. Doors would be opened for them. 

I found myself unable to relate to this crowd as they forged their path in India. They came from my social circles, we attended the same kinds of schools and colleges and definitely did not grow up in any kind of bubble. Our families were mainstream, middle-class. The India I knew and loved was the one that shaped me - it required being part of the human flow in everyday, ordinary things. Our landlord at one point was also a cow-herd. His cows made a terrific racket each morning as they mooed in the courtyard, the whole place reeked of hay, dung and milk.

I was well integrated with the family and all of us kids ran wild in the neighborhood. It made no difference that our fathers had such different professions. We celebrated the same festivals and had very similar rituals. The cultural values were not so far apart either. To me that was living close to reality and actually understanding what it means to be Indian - it is what made people like me unique. If the only way I could live was in a bubble, my child would never get to be Indian in the sense that actually matters. I made my choice and will always mourn losing my country. 

Coming Back

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 population. Seems like they should be given that chance specially if it can be done without endangering anyone.