Self Sufficiency

There is such a thing as a rental hen market for people who want to get a feel for having their chicken in the backyard without the commitment. Seems like hiring a backyard farmer to teach people how they could become self-sufficient for food would make even more sense. Back when that story was published in 2017, backyard farming was more something people may have wanted to explore. Today, it could go the way of the rental hen. 

Rent the Chicken is a network of farmers in the US and Canada who deliver chickens, portable coops, and all the necessary supplies to people wanting to give chicken-rearing a test run, or for those who want to keep chickens only part-time. 

The company’s co-founder, Jenn Tompkins, said she expected business to dry up this year because people facing furloughs or layoffs wouldn’t want to throw money at borrowed birds. It turned out she was “dead wrong:” The waitlist in Toronto is now 175+ deep.

Virtual Grief

After four months of work without breaks except for abbreviated weekends, decided to take a few days off recently and without any plans whatsoever. The idea was to disconnect from the endless cycle of virtual meetings and conversations. Before the pandemic, I never saw so many people on video camera all day long even though many of us were working remotely. 

Now the norm for a 1:1 meeting is to definitely have the camera on. In larger meetings, there could still be an expectation. If the customer comes on the camera you definitely should. If they don't you probably still should. Just understanding the dynamics of a particular group and what they expect from you takes a bit of mental effort. Doing this every day of the week with no end in sight is mentally exhausting. I happen to like the people I work with and can't imagine how much harder this would be with people that you don't. This FT article talks about virtual grief and why this form of interaction is so painful.

Unlike true novices, Mr Cornell made me realise, in the current virtual confinement most of us are working twice blindfolded — by what we have lost and by what we have not yet learnt. We are remote, he contends, but not virtual. Video calls give our forced absence a plausible deniability. We are neither with nor without each other. Our eyes record the presence of another person. Our bodies register their absence. The dissonance is exhausting.

Leadership Bubble

Interesting article about how Google identifies leadership talent. The list of questions make sense and thinking back to managers I have had in my life, not one of them would score more than 7 out of 11. I have been lucky to have had some great bosses over the years - ones who have taught me to be a better person and professional, gone on to achieve amazing things in their own careers. Makes me question the validity of the standard Google is touting here. I can pick a couple of questions in this list that are not always easy to answer "Yes" to:

• My manager regularly shares relevant information from his/her manager and senior leaders.
• My manager has had a meaningful discussion with me about career development in the past six months.

Sharing of relevant information is not always an autonomous function or decision for the manager in question to make of their own volition. The organization should have a culture of openness and transparency that allows and encourages it. Say if my boss is going to leave her management very displeased if she shares "relevant information" with me, then chances are that she won't despite her natural instincts to do so. I have found myself in this very bind many times. 

On the career development question I have found the organization culture to play an over-sized role. The boss may recognize your talents, talk it up with his peers and managers, even recommend you for roles where you will thrive professionally. But there is limit to how far he can go alone. The culture should support his goals to create a career path for his best performers and allow him to nurture new talent. He must see a trajectory for his own growth as well. 

These things are all inter-related. He cannot afford to lose his star players and have his own's team performance take a hit in the process. The organization and his leadership should enable him to succeed as he enables his directs to do so. Often this is not the case and even managers with the best intent cannot do what they know is right and very much want to do it. 

This whole approach to identifying leadership excellence feels rather juvenile and out of touch with reality. But again, this is Google we are talking about - a business without any real peers or competitors. It is easy to build a bubble when you are in an island and no one can touch you.

Unsure Smile

I was at the grocery store early in the morning a few days ago to pick up a few essentials. A mom with a little baby was there too. While mom was scanning the breakfast cereal aisle, baby sat in the cart and looked around curiously. At some point we made eye-contact. Under my mask I was smiling at her but the baby had no way of knowing. She may have sensed friendliness in my eyes and was almost beginning to smile when a look of confusion took over and she decided against it. She continued to look in my direction as I walked away. The incident stayed with me for the rest of the day. 

All my adult life, I have had the privilege of random babies seeking me out to play peek-a-boo, smile, laugh, prance and generally try to get my attention. I have cherished every one of those moments. Babies are known to boss over me and get me to participate in their capers that other more sensible adults may not want to be any part of. To me there is nothing more relaxing than to spend time with a child, become part of their world for a little bit when small things become the temporary center of the universe. It is a meditative experience. That morning with that baby confused by my mask, I was wondering how much this pandemic is hurting children of that age who need to study the faces and expressions of adults to understand the world around them. This Brookings Institution study on the topic is very timely:

As more and more people are covering their faces in public, it becomes difficult to read facial expressions and see people smile (or frown). While this may not pose challenges for adults, young children look for emotional cues from caregivers to interpret novel or potentially threatening situations. That is, children rely on their caregiver’s facial expressions and tone of voice to regulate their response toward people and new situations. The development of this emotional communication is referred to as social referencing, and occurs between infancy and the early preschool years.

Factory Art

I read Unauthorized Bread recently and found it interesting in a prescient sort of way - much in the manner of Black Mirror. Each time I read or watch tales of near future dystopia, 1984 comes to mind for its sheer brilliance and timelessness. This toaster mayhem which forms the basis of 

Unauthorized Bread is a story told too precisely. All the detail is culled from the state of the art and where technology could logically go next. There is no leap of faith or imagination or deeper thought needed to process anything in this story. You are inundated with facts and supporting facts to the point that you can safely park your brain and be none the worse for it. That to me is also what makes it mundane and forgettable in the endless spill of dystopia. 

This particular story could be swapped with any of the gems that formed episodes in Black Mirror and no one would know the difference. There is a mass production quality to these things that make such productions feel factory-made instead of being the stuff of genius like Orwell's 1984. It is the difference between fast and gourmet food. Fast food can be fun as we know.

Orwell’s imperishable value as a writer is that he provides a template on the character of political power that tells us that we cannot be complacent, cannot leave it to government to fix, and cannot leave it to fate and hope for the best.

It would be great to read something of similar "imperishable value" written by a modern writer.

Serving Food

On my bi-weekly grocery runs, I pass by a strip mall that is home to half a dozen restaurants. The neighborhood is fairly diverse and has long been home to refugees. That reflects in the dining options too - a lot of variety and small establishments run by the owner and their family members. Everything is closed now of course and the parking lots are empty. I was wondering why atleast some of them are not providing take-out options. 

Maybe these establishments are not the type customers would associate with take-out. They have grown two accustomed to dining in, enjoying the meals served fresh from the kitchen, socializing with the owner and so on. If they wanted take-out they would go elsewhere. In effect, what made this strip-mall so vibrant and these little restaurants successful is working against them now. This Vice article talks about the many challenges faced by this business as they try to re-open.

.. the pandemic has created some supply chain issues. "I don't see many places surviving," he said. "You might not be able to get customers in the door and you might not be able to get the product that you had before the coronavirus situation."

The supply chain problem, if it impacted the signature dish the restaurant serves, might leave customers disappointed and unwilling to return or try again. To avoid that, they may choose to remain closed and be remembered positively for what they were when times were normal.

Making Statements

The mask as an art form is something I have been reading about lately. In my neck of the woods, people are not being adventurous. Masks are standard-issue and unremarkable. There are some that look could have been ordered from Etsy but even those have pretty tame designs. No one is trying to make a statement with their mask. The couple of times I went grocery shopping wearing my hand-sewn production, people gave me concerned looks. The mask was no work of art and certainly lacked in workmanship. It served as stop-gap until I could order some online. This designer goes way beyond functional with his masks. 

Would masks just become the acceptable social norm in the future? Would it ever get to the point where a person wearing one would not be subject to any judgment ? It seems reasonable. There might be any incontrovertible proof that pandemic truly over. Maybe it peters out, maybe there is a vaccine or not but could anyone be blamed to take measures they feel they need to in order to feel safe? In those circumstances wearing a mask could be as uneventful as wearing sunscreen - there is no mandate but its considered generally advisable. Instead of plugging your ears with head-phones to signal we don't want to socialize, we can now also cover half our face with a mask making it all but impossible to be engaged in social interaction. It would be an introvert's dream come true to be able to escape so fully without needing to feel awkward or uncomfortable. 

Indian Matchmaking

I would remiss as desi with an affliction for blogging not to weigh in on Indian Matchmaking. Where do I begin? This is one of those productions where truth is uncomfortably close to reality TV to make the experience particularly cringe-worthy. I likened it to be seen popping a big pimple on Zoom during a company all-hands meeting. No matter where you exist on the food chain that is not the best day of your professional life. Similarly, no matter what kind of desi you are there is no hiding from the zingers delivered by Sima Taparia, the match-maker de-jeur. Her services include consults with face-readers, astrologers and life-coaches. The palm-reader was missing as was the priest who offers an assortment of remedies by way of prayers, fasts and amulets for long-suffering single people to be delivered from their misery. 

On average, the social milieu that the show traverses is way more upscale than my own so I have no direct or relatable experience with that level of bling and other forms of material excess. Where on occasion the average person pops up (like the character of Vyasar and the women he was being matched) things start to be more within the realm of my own life experience. 

The theme that stood out the most of for was the systematic emasculation and emotional stunting of grown-up people by their desi parents. No one seems to think this might be inhumanity being dressed as "Indian culture". Women on the brink of forty being stymied on the relationship track by a disapproving parent who basically tells them what they can and cannot do and even more tragically tell them how to think. I know this to be true from my own experience and observation of desi life from near and afar. 

The next concept of note that was repeated ad nauseum is one that I was familiar with since childhood. Marriage is about adjustment and compromise. At some level it might make sense but think about the dichotomy it creates in the mind of a young person (a female) who is being raised by liberated, equal opportunity, forward thinking parents to believe that she should never ever consider herself less than any male. And then when she attains marriageable age, they flip the script on her overnight and start talking about adjustment and compromise. 

When this happened to me, I processed the data points logically as is my wont. Every marriage I had seen around me until that time was a desi one and none of them looked like one I wanted to get into. There was not one couple that inspired me as a role model of how to be good together in marriage. If anything I wondered what prevented them from going their separate ways. The best case scenario was one in which the parties were civil to each other and leaving each other be - that was the most I could aspire for.  That begged the question what exactly I needed marriage for if that meant a life time of low grade disappointment and inability to express myself as a person. This in return for unending compromise and adjustment. I simply failed to see the benefit given the cost. The few couples I knew who had met and married on their own without input or consent from the families seemed to have a better handle on their relationship, they seemed to be able to manage without running to their respective mothers all the time. These were the lucky few who managed to get hitched before family could take over and "settle" them into the marriage of families not individuals.

I believed then and I still do that there is nothing inherently wrong with match-making once the business is cleaned of all its clutter. At that point, it is no different than meeting a person on Bumble or Tinder. Instead of an putting an algorithm in charge of your destiny you employ a well paid human consultant to offer bespoke services. I would never knock on an arranged marriage - it is just another form of brokerage nothing more. The process demands participation from the family which is also not a bad thing- more people to help you see your blind-spots. That is not where the problem lies. Instead it is about the emotional incapacitation of adult children to the point they are unable to make decisions about their life partner. To the extent that the show highlights this fatal flaw in the desi arranged marriage system, it is a success. Hopefully as that pimple was popped for the world to see, we desis saw it too. 

Reaching End

Early in his book Being Mortal, Atul Gawande refers to this story by Tolstoy as a teachable moment for doctors and understanding what mortality about. I took a detour from the Gawande book to read the Tolstoy story and it was so worthwhile. The themes in the life and death of Ivan Ilyich are timeless and Gawande touches on many of them in his book about mortality. 

All of this made me think about all the people in my life that I love and care about that are over retirement age - friends and mentors I first met a few decades ago, family members who have known me since birth. In the years to come, many of them would be faced with complicated health conditions, some already do. In each case, their family members would process the situation differently and it would impact the quality of life of the person suffering. 

There would be the denial of others, self-denial, resignation of others and of their own - maybe some toxic combination of all that. Irrespective, in may cases the end would come with many surprises and disappointments along the way. As Gawande describes, the modern day death may be like a downward slide down a hill with patches of recovery but overall downward trajectory but it not like falling off the cliff as it used to be in the past. 

Ivan Ilyich did fall off the cliff in the end over the course of three days when he decided to end living the lie about his illness being passing instead of terminal. 

The Interloper

Recently, I stopped by at a Bangladeshi grocery store to pick up a few things I was missing in the kitchen. Strolling around the aisles, reading the Bangla labels on the various spices, I indulged in a a ad-hoc bit of nostalgia. The background noise of the owner chatting with other customers in Bangla only made me want to linger. The hilsa in the freezer were separated in bins by size and priced accordingly. They ran from S to XL. I don't recall having seen such a pricing table in past. All prices were ridiculously high and as much as I love hilsa, it made no sense to me. 

At the checkout line, there was occasion for me to make small talk with the owner in Bangla. As always I was met with the look of incredulity - never looked Bengali enough to make the cut. Not back in India, not among expats abroad. He indulged my attempt at conversation while I felt self-conscious about my Bangla accent. Maybe it was not good enough either. When younger this lack of acceptance from the community that I understood to be my own, did not bother me much. I was hungry to explore the world and go well beyond my Bengali identity. Generally, that has served me well. 

But sometimes, I want to be able to chat about how my Dida made kasundi at home with a Bangladeshi grocery store owner. Not sure what that achieves to have such discussion with a stranger with whom I share a common language, but it feels just a bit disappointing to be seen as an interloper.

Common Desolation

While picking up groceries at the nearby Walmart yesterday, this poem came to mind. This was the first time I had been inside a Walmart after they made wearing masks mandatory inside the store. The sea of expressionless faces filled me with a sense of desolation - perhaps a common one these days.

Any Common Desolation

can be enough to make you look up

at the yellowed leaves of the apple tree, the few

that survived the rains and frost, shot

with late afternoon sun. They glow a deep

orange-gold against a blue so sheer, a single bird

would rip it like silk. You may have to break

your heart, but it isn’t nothing

to know even one moment alive.

As I bagged my produce and household items in the self-checkout, desolate people all around waiting their turn. The store was busy but people seem not to speak unless there is a need to. Having a private conversation through a mask is difficult so perhaps we don't have those in a public place. Getting someone's attention is much harder with most of your face and their's being obscured. Once I got out of the store into the bright midday sun, I thought about any common desolation being enough to look up at things in nature that offer the sense of immutability and anchoring. 

Carefree Adult

Nice article about the desire to be carefree and how that related to a life well lived. The authors says:

".. a child who isn’t carefree lacks the mental space required for the enjoyment of all the good things in her life."

While that maybe true, the operating definition of carefree and specially how it may manifest itself in a child's life has changed a great deal. Back in my day in India, the only source of entertainment in the house was a radio. Some of us were lucky to have a record player and some vinyl disks. Both were usually not meant for use by the kids. 

We found ways to entertain ourselves alone or with our friends. One of my favorite activities was to make kitchen utensils with clay and match-sticks, dry them in the sun and then arrange them in a tiny shed surrounded by pictures from magazines rendered "three dimensional" with some clay as well. Those were by far the most carefree days of my life. My friends at the time were pursuing their own kind of carefree activities - just as absurd as mine.

Each person had their own thing - distinct and different from the others. There was the kid who collected marbles and arranged them in ways that were interesting to him. Another had seeds of various kinds stored in home made cotton pouches. There had to be something unique about the seed to make it to the collection. We never asked each other why we did the things that we did - but we took interest in what each person was making or collecting. It expressed our personality.

Children today cannot be carefree in such primitive ways. They are required to engaged with the real world a lot more which automatically associates  them with various degrees of stress. Maybe the part of their life they would recall as being good and happy would be much smaller than ours, which had shrunk from that of our parents and grandparents.

Long Haul

Sobering read about how we will be in our current state for several years. Unfortunately, people have decided they've had enough and need to get on with their lives. In my social circle, people are traveling nationally and internationally, specially now that it is summer and they are getting good deals on their vacations. They are being vigilant, wearing masks, sanitizing and all. One of these couples was over to our place for dinner recently. We social distanced the best we could but having a conversation while wearing masks is not realistic. J and her friends from high school are meeting sometimes in large park where it is easy to stay apart and still have a conversation. I was hesitant both times - having our friends over for dinner or the idea of J going out to see her friends. Clearly, there was risk in both situations and a choice of us to make.

Yet, both events happened and mentally everyone felt better after seeing each other. We have missed social contact and no about of FaceTime can make up for it.  For the days after each event, I was jumpy and feared the worst over every sneeze and cough anyone of us had. What if this had been a big mistake and we would pay for it. Was seeing our friends after months worth us getting sick. People I know are gradually coming around to a common operating model. They try to stay as safe as they can, do what they can not to get sick and meet others who are likewise being responsible so that way no one endangers each other. Only time will tell if any of this works but I do know I would not risk coming around my elderly parents.

Cloud Thoughts

As a T-Mobile customer, I was surprised that I had not been notified of this big outage event a few weeks ago and at the found out in the news. Being at home, there was no impact to me - I am guessing T-Mobile decided it was not worth sending out a notification to the customer base when infact most would never know for the same reason. So it was interesting to read their explanation of what caused this outage. Lot of companies are in a race to move everything they can to cloud these days. Once they can get going on this journey (which could be harder for some than others), its a race to complete the job. They want to trust the cloud providers to be better providers of infrastructure than their capabilities in-house. 

The lure of the Easy Button is tremendously powerful along with the desire to abdicate responsibility. If a bank experienced the kind of outage that T-Mobile did and their data was being managed by a cloud vendor, they have that one throat to choke. Back in the day, it would be a all hands of deck trying to find that throat. More often than not it would be many reasons leading up to such mishap and fixing it for good would be a herculean effort. The reputation impact would be squarely on the bank itself. With the cloud model all of that changes and the vendor will need to take the fall. No matter who blames whom, ultimately, the customer holds the bag.

One Dimension

Suicide of the West is back in rotation on my walks when I listen to audio-books. The author talks about our retreat to tribalism which manifests itself in a variety of negative ways. He argues that being tribal is what comes to human beings naturally and in modern society the organization of tribes has been fueled by forces of technology and globalization that were never part tribe building in history. He attributes a lot of what ails the world to this phenomenon. The book is provocative but as is my gripe with most modern woks of non-fiction, the content merits an essay or opinion piece not a book. 

When the essay is foamed and frothed out to occupy the space of a book it was never meant to be, it taxes the reader's patience. In this case, there is the unending proof-points to make what is already a cohesive case regarding tribalism. It is a reasonable thesis and many could agree with Goldberg. But that idea alone does not explain everything that is going on in the world. And trying to convert us to his line of thinking by arguing the same thing ad-nauseum does not help. 

Over half-way through the book, I have yet to learn what if anything we can do to correct the error of our ways, improve our collective lot even if we assume that at the root of all our problems is the resurgence of tribalism. The navel-gazing and self-flagellation must at some point give way to something concrete and actionable. I will stick to the end to see if there will be some big reveal in the end.

Flying Again

This summary of what it will like to fly post-corona makes the pre-corona air travel feel like the thing to get misty-eyed nostalgic over. This will prove a very serious disincentive for business travel for one thing. Just the math of the hours wasted in trying to get on the plane will not make sense. Customers are now getting used to meeting us on-line from the comfort of their homes. It used to feel awkward at first but after week five, not nearly as much. We are now talking about the nice wall-decor that they acquired from their honeymoon trip and sometimes a kid shows up to get permission for a snack which they are reluctantly granted. Life goes on for all of us. There are new opportunities to bond. 

At first we put in an extra effort to look presentable on those calls where customers would be joining. Then it started to feel over-kill. They want to dress-down and relax so we followed their lead while remaining respectful. It is hard to imagine in a few months all of these folks will suddenly want to commute to busy metropolitan downtowns to sit in a conference room just to see us in person and have us walk up to the whiteboard to illustrate a point in the conversation. Specially when social-distancing will still be the order of the day. We will likely not be taking them out to lunch or dinner. Drinks at the bar would be very much out of question. 

So the value of the in-person interaction balanced against the waste of time and degree of difficulty for all involved, does not add up. My guess is that no one will be getting on a plane just to meet a customer in-person anytime soon - not until the conditions for travel become realistic and we can actually be social with each other.

Over Promise

Over the years, I have run into many "programmers" who really had no business being in that role. If AI can dis-intermediate the entry level jobs, will it be such a bad thing really? I agree other readers who think that the barrier to entry should be much higher. 

Need to bring something unique and multi-disciplinary to the party for it to count. The cost of bad code is not trivial - and this is not even counting on all the cascading impacts resulting from such abominations in the name of running code being out in the wild as interfaces for B2C and B2B commerce. 

Sadly AI coming up with smart code for use cases it has not been designed for seems like a pipe-dream. Yet "savvy" tech investors will pay for these dreams to come true and peddlers of snake-oil with slick pitch decks will raise monies and pivot when the dreams are belied.

Lost and Found

Discovered Unclaimed Baggage by way of a story in The Hustle recently. It was an interesting experience browsing their online store. There is something intimate about packed bags that belong to other and were pried open to reveal their hidden contents. There are stories there in how people pack for travel. On an outbound trip the way the bag is packed is all about expectation and anticipation. What a person or a family may expect to be doing while they are out, what weather they expect during their trip and so on. The dysfunction between people who cannot agree on a plan will likely present itself in their bags too. 

Then there are trips that are special and create memories of a life time. You bring to them vignettes of your life in the form of a favorite outfit, jewelry of sentimental value or a gift for someone very important to you. And sometimes all of this could end up in lost baggage and strangers will rifle through all of that and see if they find something of value. It is interesting to see how the value of an item can transfer from one life to another, come to take on new and different significance than was originally intended. Yet, a second chance and a second life is always more welcome than being lost and discarded forever.

Pulling Weeds

The asphalt in my driveway needs re-paving but its a project I am not able to even contemplate these days. The times as they are don't promote such thoughts for me. I am occupied with the safety of my elderly parents in Kolkata, their mental health being home-bound for an indefinite period of time without the social contact they had enjoyed all these years. Closer home, when J wants to meet her friends from high school in a park - I am grateful she shares her plans with me and will even defer to my decision to go or not go. Saying no to such a simple request feels inhumane - so whatever my irrational fears for her safety I say yes ofcourse you should go see your friend and then worry privately. 

And at such times, I find myself pulling weeks from the cracks in the asphalt when nature's gushes patches of exuberant green in what would look like unyielding earth. So I tackle these weeds one area at a time until the sun gets too hot or my limbs feel sore. There is a parallel in my mind to the present times - there is this virus that does what it does and we try to defend the best we can, you control it one place and it blooms somewhere else. This country particularly seems unable to achieve much control anyway so it is like the weeds in the cracks of my asphalt growing with abandon where it can. My efforts to manage nature's entropy fail spectacularly but there is an illusion of things being more in control thanks to them.

Being Remarkable

Love reading about kids who have real passion about things and the drive to see them come to fruition. 

I’m not a really good student. No, really—I was a really bad student. I had a 1.7 GPA. I focused my time on programming-related stuff. In ceramics class the teacher would turn around and I was just working on my coronavirus site, which is what I was passionate about. I couldn’t focus in any class. I’d stay up late working on programming—my attendance rate was 60%. My parents were always hassling me about it. They didn’t care about my programming thing. School is something I was terrible at, so I did dual enrollment at community college and Mercer High School [where he attended], but even there, I was always programming things. 

With such GPA, this kid is not the archetype of a "good student" but his ability to enable himself with the skills and tools it take to solve the problem he wants to solve are truly exceptional. Even kids with great college education don't have nearly this level of executive function. That is where he is he stands out. Unfortunately there is no grade awarded for such things. I doubt college can teach this kid very much if anything at all. 

I sort of plan to go to college eventually, maybe? [Pause] I probably won’t go to college. I’m working on more interesting things.

Being Ridiculous

It's good that someone took the time to write up what makes desis shape their existence around guilt. It can be argued that what ails the desi kid is not so unique. Many other cultures share the same problems - old cultures that have done it their way for thousands of years and don't believe anything needs to change. The fact that they have survived this long serves as "proof" that the traditional way works.

Of those who have been impacted by one or more of the factors the author lists, in building their edifice of guilt, some do a better job than others creating the carapace around it than others. This is not a problem limited to millennials either - much older folks have the same story, just that they have had longer to cope with it and the adaptations are such that it makes for that guilt to transmute into more toxic material to pass on to the next generation. 

Four of the eleven strongly resonated with me and I immediately shared this piece with J. Despite my efforts to end the cycle with me, I have no doubt I have brought things upon her that I should not have. I hope that with the benefit of youth she is able to root out what does not serve her well. The author says:

We as Asians have been conditioned to feel guilty about not being the perfect child/brother/sister/mother/father.

The list is actually a good bit longer - spouse/friend/employee/grandchild/relative/in-law and that may be short list of perfections a desi person is expected to achieve. If you are not God, its likely you would have fallen short on all counts to various degrees. With that your guilt can be a heavy weight to carry around every day of your life, impacting your ability to see interactions with the world without this preponderant feeling of having done wrong, continuing to do wrong, being called out for your imagined failures and more. When everything is tinged with guilt, no joy is complete, no relationship is without stress, anger, sadness or pain. If you raising a child while being so hobbled yourself, chances are you will fail them in a myriad of ways.

I had a pretty adverse reaction recently that was triggered by this amorphous mass of guilt I have carried and added to all my conscious years. It made me act very uncharitably towards my best friend who had two short sentences for me to end what was becoming a very hurtful discussion "This is ridiculous. I am not supporting this line of conversation anymore". 

The interminable pause that followed got me thinking how indeed the apparently irrational behavior of a person driven by guilt whose sources are not visible or understandable to the world would rightly appear "ridiculous". People cannot adjust to what for all intents and purposes is invisible and therefore non-existent to them no matter how much they love and care for you. To survive the person must learn to resolve the guilt. There is just no other way. My best friend and I have since made peace and I am grateful for that. 

Missed Calls

Clever way to monetize and productize a customer behavior. This reminds me of trails people create by choosing to collectively walk certain path. That becomes the official path and everyone uses it as such

Starlogik, with its minimalist touch, frees their existing capacity, as they do not have to tie up costly network resources setting up a voice call that is not intended to be completed (since missed calls are directed into the Star cloud rather than onto the core network). Carriers also benefit from significantly reduced subscriber churn, since StarCALLs enable even the lowest-income customers to continue using their services.

Most importantly, customers win, as with this service, the star caller doesn’t run the risk that the recipient will unexpectedly answer the call, thereby leading the caller to incur an unwanted cost. The recipient gets a discreet ring prompting a call-back, and (if the call is returned) the star caller gets a free conversation. Users do not even need a data plan or smartphone connection, making it readily available to everyone. Indeed, StarCALL has already been dubbed “the WhatsApp for the next billion.”

Lost Cause

Schooling the World was made a decade ago and it completely relevant even today - if anything even more so. In that time, I lost half a dozen family elders who grew up a different way, had values different from mine and were part of the organism that was their community. The notion of "I" was ill-formed for them at best. There was no question about doing what it took to support younger siblings and aging parents. If someone from the village came around, they were supported until they were able to land on their feet. These folks had lost their way of life and livelihood through the partition of India in 1947 but they had not given up on their values yet. 

That took a couple of more generations, the nuclearization of the family and western schooling to get there. Today, my generation of the family has very limited connection to each other and what little we do is staged and managed on social media like an interpretive performance. Being that I have no presence there, puts me out of the discussion for the most part. I am clinging to the few strands of real human relationships that are still left - with my uncles and aunts. 

The are two great aunts left in the extended family both in pretty bad physical health. They bounce between hospital and home as their kids try to eke out more time in what's left of their frayed lives. The light is gone, there is nothing to talk about with them anymore. Their end of life did not at all turn out like that of their older siblings that died many decades ago. Back then, family was bigger, someone was always around, care was mostly palliative and no one tried extra hard to fight for another month or year. The end came naturally and everyone was prepared for it. 

Today thanks to the "better" western schooling that the kids and grand-kids have received, the ties to the roots are tenuous at best, understanding of culture and religion shaky and the priorities completely different. Everyone is out there trying to succeed, make more and live better. There is no time for introspection. Since we can't really be there for our elderly parents and integrate them fully into our lives like previous generations did, we absolve our guilt by paying the medical system to pull all manner of stunts to prolong their lives. We have decided to throw money at the problem because that is all we are capable of doing.

I am just as guilty as the rest and have not raised my kid in the tradition of my ancestors because I was neither well-versed in that are nor understood why that was important. Within the span of just two generations of western schooling in my own family, we have managed to fully destroy what it meant to be people from my ancestral village in Bangladesh who lived their lives a certain way for many hundred years that we have record of. I have become a nowhere person myself and have raised a child to be even more disconnected from her roots than I was.

Barmecide Feast

I have written before about my weariness over the girls in STEM business. It launched college dreams and careers for the first women to spot it as a trend. I ran to several of Reshma Saujani wannabes since that time only to be disappointed. Their commitment to the cause runs only as far as getting their resumes ready for college application time. Historically, such resumes have yielded excellent results so the rush to be the next champion for the Girls in STEM/Code continues apace.

Beyond college, these young women move on to other resume building pursuits more appropriate for their age and place in the world. The pyramid scheme involves recruitment of the next wave of women from the same high-schools as the founders attended,  who also spot the "glaring gender gap in math and science classes and resolved to change that" exactly in the manner of their predecessor. The Women in Code/STEM playbook and the talking points have not changed in close to a decade which begs the question about the efficacy of their collective mission.

A one of my former clients,  is a tinkerer with broad-based engineering and programming skills. Recently he developed a low cost medical device and was looking for interns to help him complete the programming work on it so the product could be ready to ship. When he told me about his new venture, I reached out to several of these young ladies who I have met over the years with purported interest in getting women engaged in STEM and asked if they have any high school seniors that could use an internship this summer. They are always looking for mentors, coaches and judges for their hack-athons and such. I thought it was worth a shot to ask. 

This was real engineering and there would be applications of math and physics in the programming. Actual STEM stuff that these folks are talking about - not building a endless fake apps to solve social injustice of all stripes in the world. Never heard a peep back from any one of them. I can't say I was surprised. The make-believe STEM stuff that goes on at most of these organizations is the Barmecide Feast equivalent of the real thing. Everyone involved gets caught up in the delusions of greatness and change but becomes incapable of doing actual work. It reminds of what one of my former co-workers used to say about our boss at the time - the only person in leadership that can't separate product release documentation from a marketing brochure. 

Writing Right

I truly dislike Grammarly and my grammar is very far from perfect.  Having lived with this flaw all my life, I resent some language bot weighing in to correct the error of my ways. There is a certain charm to writing with less than stellar grammar or maybe that is my excuse to give myself a pass on grammar. I happen to love the writing of every author in this list that made it a point to break grammar rules It was amusing to read that even Shakespeare would not pass Grammarly muster. 

That said, I do enjoy reading some of their blogs on use of language and what that reveals about us as a society. Recently, while reading one such post, Google Ngrams came to mind and it was fascinating to see the use of words ebb and tide in popularity over the years. Was not sure what to make of the surge in the popularity of "India" in 1880- the peak of the bell curve. 

Times Past

Watched a Bengali movie after a pretty long time recently. By any objective standard it is pretty poorly made. The plight of the hapless young lady that simply can't be married off by her family is a maudlin, over-done tragedy to the point of cliche. Hard to tell what day and age the story is set in - one assumes several decades ago being that the protagonist goes to a typist school. All that being said, the movie struck a painfully deep chord with me. 

I have spent time in the arranged marriage purgatory of the middle class Bengali family back in my day. I have also seen other women in my family and social circles do their time in hell. Nothing good has come of out of it for any single one of these women including myself. The system is not designed for any remote shot at success. Depending on the woman's level of tolerance, which my Bengali sisters are blessed with plenty of, they soldier along and try to give it an appearance of working. For the first few years they even go the extra mile and try to appear giddy with joy. Not every sister can carry on this charade for life- but some exceptional ones do - they are the masters of the game. 

The movie brought to mind, the revolving door of prospective grooms, their insufferable families trooping in to check out the patri (the would be bride) with no outcomes. It gets to the point where getting married is about as welcome as being granted parole. The romance and happiness that marriage is supposed to bring in its wake wears out well before the garlands are exchanged. Being married (at last), turns out to be deeply anti-climactic. The dust settles, the newly-minted bride realizes that she was short-changed by the system. 

She looks around and sees there exists a world where she could live and breathe a free human being and not be valued exclusively for her performance as a wife and a daughter-in-law. If she is how I was back at that age, she will like work up an exit plan out of that marriage stunning all concerned - all the time and effort to get married laid to waste. I remember feeling like I had failed everyone who had been a part of this bizarre multi-year production - the effort to get me married to a bangali bhadralok - I had made them all look like fools. 

My own troubles were secondary to the large scale social disappointment I had caused by quitting on the marriage before year three. It is easy to look back at that time today and say how stupid I must have been to allow this to be done to me, that I should have held my ground and taken charge of my life. I was an educated, working woman back then - I surely had no excuse to be shown around like a cow in a cattle market looking for someone to approve of me solely based on what I looked like - if I met their criteria for "beautiful". I had agency and failed to use it - shame on me, no need to blame the "system".

When I describe that time of my life to J, she thinks its bizarre and medieval. She cannot comprehend how one such as her mother could subject herself to this atrocity. Yet, that was the life I lead and everything that happened to me, happened to all Bengali girls I knew. It was hard for me to fathom that we were collectively victims and we all deserved better. There was an implicit understanding that we girls needed to be processed through the system and somehow emerge married on the other side. That was the rule of the game and no one questioned it. There was this presumption that once you got to the other side and achieved the status of "married" life would be simply wonderful. That is how they sold this barbaric game to women, 

Slumdog and Parasite

I enjoyed watching Parasite and was hardly alone in comparing the experience to Slumdog Millionaire. There are some parallels there including the depictions of poor people literally wallowing in sewage. That might be what it takes to produce the punch in the gut feeling for jaded audiences in the Western world and earn consideration for an Oscar.

At first there was some debate about Slumdog Millionaire in India, most of it having to do with the depiction of squalid conditions and shantytowns, and how they allegedly are tired images of India. But all that talk vanished with its Oscars conquest. Parasite had its critics too but success, as they say, is the best revenge.

Back in the day, Slumdog left me with very mixed emotions not many of which were positive. Whatever the objective goodness of the movie, as a desi it was difficult for to process it because it had won the Oscar. That felt morally dubious. I could think of several dozen movies made in India in a variety of languages that were just as if not more deserving - movies that most in the West had never heard of. I remember recommending my favorite art-house movies from India to local friends to help them understand that India has been long capable of producing excellent cinema. 

I felt a lot of those same emotions upon watching Parasite. There is a strong story-line and the themes have an universal appeal. The cast of characters is excellent and they have complex and nuanced motivations. The pacing is perfect as the story unfolds. All in all a solid good movie and yet the Oscar win put it in the same category as Slumdog for me. I am not sure if I am really supposed to like Parasite.

Staying Free

Freedom in America in the time of pandemic is about making choices people are deeply divided about. As the author of this article, a professor of constitutional law opines: 

The COVID-19 constitutional balance is hard because the things being balanced are both vitally important: stopping the spread of the coronavirus is a matter of life and death; but many lives have also been lost over the past 232 years fighting to protect the rights guaranteed to all Americans in the Constitution. The examples above shed light on whether any particular COVID-19 order is constitutional. If that order takes away constitutional rights—such as the right to travel, the right to assemble, or freedom of religion—then ask if the government can achieve the same COVID-19 health goal in some other way that does not take away those rights or involves materially less interference with those rights. If the answer is no, then the law may well be constitutional, but if the answer is yes, then the balance may tip in favor of protecting our constitutional rights and striking down the order

There is the other side of the story. Health-care workers who are paying a personal price for everyone's right to freedom - people who think wearing a mask is a choice or even a political statement, people who want to travel because it is summer and that's what they have always done never mind the virus, people who want to gather in large numbers and party because they are stir crazy from sheltering at home and need a break, people who think for some reason they are invincible or this whole thing is a hoax. It seems a little bit of empathy for people around us could go a long way. This is not about loss of personal freedom but about seeing actions through a lens of collective responsibility. 

What happens if I don't party with a dozen people I have not seen in months, what happens if I postpone that summer trip to next year, how hard is it to put on a mask when inside a grocery store or generally in a place where there are many people in close quarters. The fact that a person is so lucky in these times to even have the ability to ask such questions is a big deal. There are those who have no choice but to physically show up to work each day and put themselves and their families at risk. They can't choose to be free.

Papasan Chair

When J was a in middle school, she dreamed of having papasan chair in her room. This was part of a re-decoration plan and she often showed me sketches of her what she imagined her room would look like in its ideal state. This chair would always have a place there - it was meant to be her physical cocoon. She desperately sought comfort in the part of her life that she felt she still had some agency while chaos ruled supreme in our family. 

We would often stop by at Pier 1 to check out the papasan chair in question but we could never quite pull the trigger. Sometimes, we checked out the ads in Craigslist too. I can't remember what made me unwilling to indulge the kid in a rather modest ask, why I could not help her re-decorate her space as she wanted to. But the guilt has remained with me ever since. That period of my life is a blur of stress, anxiety and hopelessness - and I am glad I no longer remember the painful minutiae anymore. Somewhere in the midst of that and on auto-pilot I continued to raise J - making sure that the bottom did not fall off her life. That meant preparing meals, school, after-school activities, volunteering and generally staying close to her mentally. Talking to her as much as I could and as much as she would allow me to.

J's vision for her room's renewal started with simple things like a coat of fresh paint and a few pictures but as time passed and I did not jump to help her with the project, her vision of the ideal room morphed to become more difficult and abstract - harder to deliver. It was not as if she was asking for more material things to fill it will but for me to put more energy into her project - find a certain kind of mirror at the thrift store, help her complete a collage that she had started and so on, think about the best color for her walls and so on.

It was as if we were both pulling away from the center of a realistic vision for different reasons. I wanted her to give a quick win -  spend half a day on this and make her dream come true. That was about all the mental capacity I had and it did not feel nearly enough. In response to my reluctance to launch, J wanted to create the most ambiguous plan for what it would take to make her room "perfect" that it would take an unknown amount of time on my part to see that vision come to reality. 

We were both hungry for comfort and peace in our lives - I was choosing the fast food route and J was insisting on haute cuisine and eating deliberately. So that redecoration project never saw light of day and she never had her papasan chair - to this day her room remains as it was when we first moved in to our house. Reading about Pier 1 closing all its retail locations and J being back at home in her old room brought back an unexpected flood of memories. 

Made-up Face

I never had much patience for make-up and now with being at home all the time, the need of any has disappeared. Some women I work with started strong in the early days of the quarantine. They put in the time and effort to look right on Zoom. I did way less but but atleast tried. Over the weeks, just about everyone  started to relax about it. Women are showing up on Zoom in clothes, I would never expect them to wear to work. Just stuff out of their wardrobe that could be dated or perhaps not comfortable to wear at work all day. These clothes are now all coming out of the wood-work. I have taken to wearing bright colors that I don't wear to work. 

My own work dress code has been normal and boring - absolutely nothing about it would remotely stand-out. The more blend-in the look the better has always been my goal. In the time of Zoom, I have deviated a bit from that - now I do like a brightly patterned top to break up the monotony of days that bleed to weeks. There is no dress-code for such times as we find ourselves in, though people are writing about the topic, reporting from the field and such. It comes as no surprise that make-up sales are declining. Women I know are taking the lazy route of using the Touch-up my appearance on Zoom. Personally, I have found that quite workable. I am sure there will be good make-up filters on Zoom over time,

Little Impaired

Read this nice Helen Keller quote in a Gizmag article. "blindness separates people from things, deafness separates people from people," 

As someone who has impaired hearing in one ear from a young age, that only gets worse over time, I have learned many ways to cope with my deficiency while pretending all is well. For instance, I have managed to convince myself, it is not a big deal to have lost nearly seventy percent of my hearing out of one ear. I just need to mind the volume at which I speak on the phone or in person. If I spoke too loud it may clue in others to my problems. People who care about me are in charge of watching my volume and tell me if I being too loud. They also know my right ear is the good one so they stay to my right whenever possible. 

In my own simplistic ways, I have been able not to separate from people as a result of not hearing too well. So far, I have been able to do that without needing an aid. But Keller is exactly right that "deafness separates people from people". There are times, I miss the laugh line in a conversation with a group of people not all of whom know to stay to my right. So I  laugh along and pretend like I heard the joke. Then I must play catch-up for the next few minutes so I am back in the flow. It is a bit worse when someone said a something emotionally charged and I miss part or most of it, it becomes incredibly difficult to progress the conversation. I have managed to work around that too with reasonable success.

When with strangers, I have to carefully navigate the space so I hear them from my right ear. Over the years, it has become a part of how I live,and feels quite normal. I love that I can sleep on one side in a noisy environment because my bad ear is not conveying all that much. Its not all bad, yet I am acutely aware that I am lucky to have what hearing I do have left.