Heartcrossings

An " parenting expert " who took pause during the pandemic to consider if she had any expertise at all (great self-awareness there) and then without skipping a beat wrote another essay on her new found wisdom. My working theory about parenting is that you should have parented upward of three kids of your own and spent a lot of time with kids your whole life to even qualify for the application of parenting expert role. Kids are very different in level of effort and complexity - you could get lucky once but more than three times unlikely. Also, all your kids should be in their 30s before you do apply. Lot of disasters can take place in the late teens to the mid to late twenties. A kid may look like they are off to a running start and have problems lifting off or keeping momentum even if they do.  Really need to make sure they are fully launched before you as a parent can take a victory lap and take on the role of telling others how to do it right. So this woman with a couple of...

Nice article about the history of Margo soap . My grandparents swore by it and it was always a staple in our home too. My generation ofcourse had plenty of choice in terms of soap and we liked things that smelled nice. But if we need a good scrub after getting muddied, scraped or cut playing outside, it was always a thorough scrubbing with Margo - nothing else was qualified for the job. I would recognize that smell anywhere and immediately be transported to my childhood.  Almost a century ago, at a time when Indian markets were being dominated by British-made goods, an Indian entrepreneur rose to take a bold step against it. Although his name is lost in the annals of history today, he was one of the few pioneers of the Swadeshi movement who stood up to threaten the colonial hold on Indian economy, with home-grown Swadeshi products. A revolutionary, a chemist, an entrepreneur and a mentor, this man was behind the research, development and marketing of one of the most prominent FMCG...

Was reading this poem , as I was recovering from a minor but aggravating ailment recently. My mother is the person we go to when in need for a home remedy. She usually has one or knows someone who can make a recommendation. This time, it turned out not be enough - I had to seek more mainstream help. For a few days, the conversation changed from how they are coping in the pandemic to how I was doing. In a strange way, it brought them some relief in what has got to be a very suffocating time cooped up in their apartment with no end in sight.  My issues were not serious enough to warrant their worry and yet it was one where some help was needed. So they sprung into action suggesting what they could to me. The conversations turned more normal than they have been in a long time. For many months my calls have laden with anxiety and helplessness knowing they are on their own there, would need to survive this thing and cope with being isolated for an unknown period of time.  At their ...

Beautifully written short story about a woman and her house guest. The narrator describes the state of her marriage in words that reminded me of scenes from many marriages I have seen at close quarters At the time we had been married for almost three years, we had two children, and I wasn’t happy. To my husband I represented something like a piece of furniture, which you’re used to seeing in a particular spot but which doesn’t make the slightest impression. The spouse in due course becomes a piece of furniture around the house that everyone is used to seeing at the designated spot. It may have some intrinsic value even like a chair you sometimes sit on to tie your shoe-laces but not quite the favorite couch where you curl up with a book under a throw. Such a chair has utility in the household and it would be annoying to all concerned if it one day went missing.  But it is not a big, irreparable loss - another chair can take its place or the person needing to tie their shoe laces c...

It was one of those days when I started out feeling low for reasons that feel foolish. It can be described as anemoia . In my case the time I have never known is the longing for having a life that would appear more "normal" to my own world-view. It was therapeutic to dredge through The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows to find words that defined how I felt that morning. The one that came close to perfect was nodus tollens n. the realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore—that although you thought you were following the arc of the story, you keep finding yourself immersed in passages you don’t understand, that don’t even seem to belong in the same genre—which requires you to go back and reread the chapters you had originally skimmed to get to the good parts, only to learn that all along you were supposed to choose your own adventure. Choosing your own adventure is something I was never comfortable doing. My favored way was always to go with the flow o...

The experience of reading poetry can feel like looking at a piece of art. Some are bursting with energy and myriad ideas - a visual and sensory overload  that can even leave you fatigued. And there are those like a Charles Simic poem - sparse and requiring the observer to focus intensely on an idea that is presented masterfully. In his poem The White Room , Simic takes the reader along a journey that ends with these lines: Gods disguising themselves As black hairpins, a hand-mirror, A comb with a tooth missing? No! That wasn't it. Just things as they are, Unblinking, lying mute In that bright light— And the trees waiting for the night. The idea of seeing God in everything was something I first heard about as a child. It may have been in response to my question to my mother about why people would worship a rock under a tree and believe that the rock would answer their prayers. The answer as I recall was faith can turn any object into a deity and in that sense its upto us to see God...

I was deeply puzzled by this piece of writing about real leadership . Granted that the standards of leadership have declined across the board and in business but for this to merit a story is a road too far. You have to wonder both about editorial judgment and quality of readership. In my case I came upon this gem via LinkedIn because one of my contacts had shared it. It brought to mind the time and circumstances of my acquaintance with V, the person who had shared this post. I instinctively un-followed her.  Yesterday it was someone else also on LinkedIn who had shared their view that our President was appointed by God. I have to wonder if people are collectively losing their beans in these pandemic times or its just a set of random events. That leadership non-story made me think of stories that did not make the news . This one is about the grooming gap - women who take the time to put themselves together earn more than those that do not.  Not sure how scientifically accurate ...

I am a big believer of natural remedies and always try those as the first step. Often, it could be enough specially if the condition is detected early and the symptoms relatively mild. It was interesting to read this That a mixture of onion, garlic, wine, and bovine bile can work so well in this context is pretty amazing, and it’s clear the inventor of this brew was onto something. As to how it works, that now presents a bit of a mystery. This is quite an unique and specific mix of things. On the other end of the spectrum of natural remedies would be something like Neem, Growing up, I saw Neem being used as a cure for a variety of internal and external maladies. The leaves were put to use fresh, cooked, dried and powdered, wet ground to a paste or they could be boiled in hot water. If one of these things did not fix the problem then you might look into other options -  found in the yard or in the kitchen too. I miss having a big Neem tree in my yard but I make do with my Aloe plan...

I went through a phase in J's elementary school days when homeschooling felt like a very attractive option. In hindsight, we both agree that would have been a bad decision for her - public school played a vital role in her social and academic life despite the sporadic disappointments and frustrations. Reading about pandemic pods brought those days to mind. I can see parents who are going through that phase deciding to pull the trigger because the times justify the action. In speaking with other parents over the years, I have learned that the yen to home-school is not so uncommon but the drivers could vary. In my case it was triggered from feeling endlessly overwhelmed and guilty about not giving the kid enough time.  When I look back, it was more about me and less about J. I wanted to feel like a better parent and somehow homeschooling would help me achieve that goal. It was fed by a  presumption that a well-intentioned and diligent parent and do it all and do it better than ...

H cuts the grass in my yard and for a very reasonable price. When I first hired him, he was younger and even more naive than he is now. I asked him to take a look at the yard and quote his rate. The number was much lower than I expected so I offered higher and he accepted gracefully. H is just a few years older than my daughter and was newly wed at the time. I felt a maternal need to protect him how I could. He is a good kid, well-mannered and friendly. The only problem is that it takes about a week each time to track him down for the job. In the meanwhile, his life has grown more complex. He had a baby and the young parents took turns caring for their son as they worked different shifts on their respective jobs. H added some handyman work to his landscaping, the wife was a nurse. A year ago, I started to hear less about wife and child, but he was always happy to show me pictures of his baby if I asked to see. He is now divorced and paying child support and unable to get his profession...

This past birthday I received a Sennheiser Monoural UC Headset as a gift. There is a specific point to this particular choice. I refuse to use a hearing aid though I have very limited hearing from my left ear. To me that is a sign of succumbing to and accepting that my deafness is winning. The last time I saw a hearing doctor and she walked me through the graphs, I felt some despair but it did not diminish my desire to to be defiant. The good doctor was unable to persuade me to consider one of many concealed hearing aid option - so small that no one would notice. I would know and that was not going to work. A knows this about me and hence the gift. It is meant to give me the option to hear through my bad ear all day as I go from one call to the next.  This way I would be providing aural stimulation to the ear that will likely die on a vine otherwise. Doctors have related this cognitive decline over time - and every time my hearing was measured, I was warned about this by the docto...

J is an adult now and makes sure I don't lose sight of this important fact. We have more equal conversations now but there are times when we slip into old patterns. Not all such instances are viewed as negative by either of us - there is some fulfilling nostalgic value to these events and if short-lived. Recently, I was asking her if she remembered when she was a child, I did a weekly performance review with her - asked her how did I fare as mommy the past week. The intent was for her to provide candid feedback to the sole authority figure in her life without fear of consequence. It worked much better than I expected when I started this tradition. She would offer feedback much in the manner of a good boss - start with the positive, raise the concerns and wrap up on a high note. Maybe it is what humans are naturally conditioned to do because no one taught J how to provide a performance review. I would offer my point of view in the areas she deemed I performed less than satisfactory ...

Great story about how one bakery hires its workers without making them contort themselves infinite ways to prove they are worthy of the job. Every job I have had in my life where it turned out to be a positive experience for me, the hiring manager had made their decision with ten minutes of speaking with me. The rest was just process they needed to follow to make sure all the boxes were checked and they were being in compliance with company policy. Everyone else involved in the vetting process knew the decision was already made so we spent the time getting to know each other's professional background, I learned about the work they did in their current role and so on. At the bakery they wisely decided to not waste anyone's time and get on with the program.  While this is not a formula that can be used in all types of jobs, there are many where the person can be trained and on the job, paid some for their efforts and if all works out well they can be brought on board full-time. ...

In her book Why We Can't Sleep , Ada Calhoun quotes a woman who says this about her "career" “I don’t know that I have a formal career, not one I carefully chose and then built,” said Lori, forty-one, who grew up in Pittsburgh and is now a contracts analyst in Charlotte, North Carolina. “I just sort of wandered around until I finally landed in my current job. And it’s fine. It’s corporate, it’s safe. Predictable. But sometimes, I have these moments of clarity—usually during lengthy conference calls. Maybe a slightly different journey in my case, but I completely share the sentiment. It is impossible for me to describe my professional life as a "career". To me that would imply that I had a plan and worked diligently on executing it, put energy into accomplishing the goals and milestones in that plan. No such thing happened in my life - like Lori, I wandered around until I landed where I am. Men who started out where I, when I did are now at the top of their game ...

Early on in Amusing Ourselves to Death , the author Neil Postman writes:  "It’s great to be an entertainer. Indeed, in America God favors all those who possess both a talent and a format to amuse, whether they be preachers, athletes, entrepreneurs, politicians, teachers or journalists. In America, the least amusing people are its professional entertainers."  "There is no shortage of critics who have observed and recorded the dissolution of public discourse in America and its conversion into the arts of show business. But most of them, I believe, have barely begun to tell the story of the origin and meaning of this descent into a vast triviality." What was true when Postman wrote this book in 1985 is true today as well. Everyone is either a visual learner or has to deal with people who are. With that being said, there is no room for robust dialogue or probing ideas for deeper understanding. If you were able to grasp the one concept conveyed in one visual then you are...

Listening to Being Mortal on my evening walks has been a deeply sobering experience. Every line of the book makes me think about my aging parents and their options as they grow older. Their differences as people continue to impact their life together - my mother is ready for the next adventure, another move meeting new people learning and growing. My father wants to stay back and rest among people and things he knows.  She was never one to form strong friendships or attachments with anyone - I can't think of one person in the world she could call a friend but she has a large set of acquaintances of various sorts with whom she maintains a superficial relationship. It would be very easy for her to form these connections at any time and anywhere. That is probably to her advantage. My father is more conventional - he likes the known and well-worn in life.  So when they think about the next phase of life - should they need help to do what they do on their own now, or just grow tir...

My niece L got married at thirty two and everyone was happy for her. But that was relatively short lived. Given her age, the extended family started to wonder when they would hear the happy news - which means only one thing. There was none forthcoming in the last two years and then the pandemic happened. For now the expectations for her motherhood have taken a pause. In the meanwhile, L has been able to think through what it means to bring a child into the world with the man she is married to. When she views this decision through the lens of her parents' marriage and the degree of success they had with raising her and her brother, she is not entirely sure what the future bodes for her.  Within my extended family she is one of many women who took pause around this age to make a decision about motherhood. The pressure to become a mother was nearing its peak and so was their uncertainty about that decision. Their marriages would experience shift in the balance of power, the child woul...

It would be funny if were not so sad that a skin-tone filter exists on online matrimony site . It brought to mind the many Indian weddings I have attended in my life and how in the overwhelming majority of them the color of the bride's skin was a metric of great consequence. Lighter the better. Families score points by the number of light-skinned relatives they possess. They carry themselves with an air of superiority. I recall the rather cruel remarks made about my paternal aunts by extended family on account of their dark skin. It is as if their whole person-hood was subsumed by color. It did not matter that every one of them was well educated and had musical talents, it did not matter that they raised good kids or were good wives. They failed the first test by being dark-skinned.  When I came of age, it was my turn to be ranked and compared by color of skin, to other females of my generation in the family. I fell somewhere in the middle - the place of irremediable mediocrity. O...

One of my long-term volunteer gigs has been for a social enterprise. Since they started operations fifteen years ago, online ads had been the mainstay for sales revenue. Customers found they via keyword search, looked up the website and then usually called the main number. Sometimes, they might email but more often than not they called. That business model produced a decent income for the business while employing around ten people.  Around 2015 the online advertising completely cratered and the business has been on a downward slide ever since. I used to think that not being able to play the online ad game was a function of lack of expertise - none of us had much to speak of. They few times they tried to hire consultants to help remedy the situation, it was just a waste of resources they did not have. Reading this 2018 interview of someone who clearly knows their way around the web , made me re-think how 2015 turned out for this small business and if that was the beginning of the e...

I missed this story about a lawsuit against Cisco for caste based discrimination until a friend who lives in Cupertino told me about it. L was asking me if I thought this had any merit and if this was even possible. There is a certain level of bizarreness to this whole business that causes disbelief. Our desi brethren have apparently transplanted prejudice that is thousands of years old to their country of domicile. Not at all hard to believe. I have not seen as much of an active caste system in play in companies I have worked or consulted with. In many of these places there are large contingents of desis in leadership. What I have seen in the high concentration of individuals from the same region of India with a shared language and culture - there is certainly some logic to that whether we like it or not. So if say the boss is Punjabi it would be no surprise to find a large number of Punjabis in the ranks of the organization. They would be the kudzu choking out other varieties of...

Watched Catch-22 recently and found it disappointing despite the foundations of a great story and a gifted cast of characters. Sadly the movie feels like a two dimensional caricature of the book which I had read in my college days. The memorable lines from Heller's book are served up as zingers and yet for someone who comes to the movie without having read the book, it would appear facile and comical. They would fail to get the point of it. Satire and dark comedy about war has been done to death - this is yet another one of those.  For those of us who loved the book and came to the movie with great expectations, we would struggle to explain to the other person why Catch-22 is so special and why it is not all about Yossarian trapped in the eponymous catch but a story of the human condition, the various traps and catches that make up the sum total of our lives. Like Yossarian, we too are afraid of death and don't want to needlessly put ourselves in it's path. As we try to esc...

Interesting article about falling fertility rates . Women once had children for lack of choice and agency. And the large brood kept the woman occupied with childcare with no time for improving her own life.  ".. it is being driven by more women in education and work, as well as greater access to contraception, leading to women choosing to have fewer children.In many ways, falling fertility rates are a success story." There is a myriad of consequences arising from declining population and a high percent of it being elderly. Systems that society depends on are not designed for it.  Prof Ibrahim Abubakar, University College London (UCL), said: "If these predictions are even half accurate, migration will become a necessity for all nations and not an option.  "To be successful we need a fundamental rethink of global politics. The distribution of working-age populations will be crucial to whether humanity prospers or withers." It would be ironic if some day, countrie...

 I have been reading Anand  Giridharadas ' Winners Take All and his rants against philanthrocapitalism. His ideas have merit certainly but at some level his tirades against the rich and powerful trying to good without hurting their own interests, does ring hollow. It seems like a cozy win-win situation here. He takes down some holy cows, calls some babies ugly and skewers the rich for trying to solve problems that they created in the first place.  Yet he speaks at Google on this very topic so the powers that be gain absolution while scoring points for self-awareness. Maybe they are not like the rest of their well-heeled ilk. By giving  Giridharadas  a platform to tell it like it is, the  philanthrocapitalist is able to legitimize whatever it is that they do to "make the world a better place". Works out great for the author too - an endless publicity tour for his book and platform for is opinions. The average person in the meanwhile is being conned twice- i...

There is a scene in the movie Denial where the judge presiding over a libel case asks the question - if a person actually believes the things he is claiming based on some deep prejudice is holds, then can he still be accused of lying. In this context it was about holocaust denial. It was a satisfying movie to watch but this particular question gave much food for thought given the times we live in.   There are people who believe that the pandemic is a hoax and living their lives based on such belief. The source of the belief could have roots in political or other prejudice but the person holding it is likely not lying. To that end, if they go around asserting their views and trying to create more awareness of it they would not be propagating a lie but the harm they cause in the process is immense. This review of the movie makes a great point about the absurdity for needing to defend the patently obvious. .. no one would dream of asking Neil Armstrong or Buzz Aldrin to share a...

Recently I ran into a Medium post by someone I worked with a long time ago. A very tenacious self-promoter and now an analytics guru, R did a good job of putting her LinkedIn network to work and that's how she showed up on my feed. She edifies readers on how App makers should consider the interests of the target demographics before building an app, some thoughts crossed my mind. R has basically taken three or four simple graphs produced from aggregated App download data and explained what each meant. Are we so mentally lazy these days that we need a bar-graph explainer? R also high-lighted the data points of note in a five paragraph article and concluding remarks to make it worth the five minutes it takes to read this thing. For some reason this is insightful to people and so she is busy speaking about her topic in conferences and doing webinars.  It is no surprise that clients chase after insights from data all day long and yet cannot take real action on it.  In the real worl...

Instead of starting with his short-stories, I launched straight into Ulysses as a teen and retired hurt never to return to Joyce again. Recently, I watched the movie Nora which made me want to try again - see if knowing about the man and his life would make his writing more accessible. Also, I had age and way more life experience on my side now. This time, I decided to start with The Dubliners and see how I fared before taking on more challenging books. The writer of The Guardian article tells it exactly as it is: When  James Joyce  finished writing Ulysses, he was so exhausted that he didn’t write a line of prose for a year. I can believe it; I needed a nap after reading 40 pages. For the last three months, I’ve glared at its fat, lumpen form on my floor with a vague sense of personal failure. I’ve opened Ulysses twice, determined to finish it, and achieved getting all the way to page 46 (it’s a bit longer than that). I have read so little both times I started that I have nev...

The casualties of the pandemic are many - some make sense and others not as much. Not needing business attire is part of not needing very much clothing overall if people are mostly staying home, so that one makes sense. Odwalla is not the most expensive juice out there - there are others in the similar price range that seem to be doing okay (so far). You have to wonder if these first one's to go in their particular spaces are somehow canaries in the coal-mine for what is to follow.  Nordstrom's, J.Crew and Macy's have been struggling as well. Would it get to the point where people lose the desire to buy new, fashionable clothes because it does not matter what you wear if who you are is obscured by a mask. The point of fashion has always been to craft a personal identity - if that identity is now blurred with the crowd, how much does fashion even matter. With the juice it is a bit harder to see how the pandemic brought about the demise. It could be the last straw for a com...

The times are strange and the light at the end of the tunnel feel far. Ran into this NatGeo article that is about things way less stressful - the changing song of a sparrow . There are people who spend their time studying birdsong - I have to imagine, their lives have been relatively less impacted by the pandemic. Instead of worrying about the spread of a virus around the world. these folks are lucky enough to ponder the reasons for why a new birdsong went viral New variations of songs crop up constantly, but the vast majority of these aren’t picked up by other birds. “For some reason, some birds just went deviant,” says Podos, describing the advent of the new doublet-ending song. “You figure it would have just died on the vine, but somehow other birds must have found it interesting.” Otter and his team didn’t find that birds singing new doublet-ending songs were better at wooing mates or defending territories, so it doesn’t appear to be advantageous or deleterious. This just adds to t...

My friend M had to have her left leg amputated to the knee several years ago. I did not know her when still had full mobility. M has managed to live a reasonably normal and independent life for over a decade now. She uses a prosthetic leg and a walking stick to get around but is deeply resistant to the idea of a wheel-chair. That rejection has impeded her mobility a great deal. If a trip involves a wheel-chair she refuses to make it. I understand the point of pride there and she desire for self-reliance and it has served her well all these years.  Yet, when I read this story about an all-terrain wheel-chair , I can't stop myself from asking M if she may consider something like this even if only on occasion - to be able to experience the outdoors she loves so much in a way that she has not been able to for a while. The answer is a tentative maybe but I know her heart is not in it. She used to be a dancer back when she was much younger. For a person who's life meaning centered ar...

I have been reading Zucked by Roger McNamee. It is a book worth reading even for those who are very familiar with the Facebook story and have a decent understanding of what is so wrong with this "platform". There are any number of long form essays and books on this topic - some of which I have read. Where McNamee shines is in being able to connect the dots and show the reader how Facebook went down this destructive path. Profit over all other considerations and by manipulating human thought and behavior to fuel it's growth engine. I maintain a Facebook page for this blog but never had one of my own. I use the blog's Facebook page out of a perverse curiosity to understand exactly how Zuck is trying to manipulate the entity that it thinks owns this page - I am sure they have connected dots despite my efforts to make it difficult. How much do they know and what are they doing with that knowledge. I have cranked the dials up and down in terms of how much I would allow Fac...

I may be out of touch with the times but the notion of a K-12 AI camp feels deeply disturbing and disappointing to me. I can't think of one redeeming quality of such education for the under 16 age-group. To create any artificial intelligence of value, the person creating it must have a fully formed emotional awareness and understanding of the world they will be operating this AI in. Kids that young have a lot of growing left to do in that area. A notional understanding of what AI is and the discussing the ethical concerns around it are very beneficial. Just blithely applying the key-phrase social-impact is not a way to circumvent the real problem here.  Why does an kindergartner need to implement AI Out of the Box? What possible use or good that be to the child or anyone else? What happened to the idea of focusing on fundamental things like reading, writing and numeric literacy and then going on to logic, reason and philosophy? Those are the skills every kid needs to make sense o...