Heartcrossings

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.

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 . Un...

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...

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 chi...

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 fa...

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...

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 ...

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 oth...

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 ...

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 co...

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 m...

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 ...

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 ...

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, i...

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 tr...

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 ...

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.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 eff...

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 pl...

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 o...

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 ques...

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 . 

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 e...

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 va...

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 t...

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...

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-co...

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 se...