Folding Tent

A dear friend is in a difficult life situation where there is almost no difference between fighting to the finish and giving up. A is nothing if not manically persistent about everything so not fighting is absolutely not an option. I have tried to offer counsel but it does not help. I believe there is a point of diminishing return in persistence that is not tethered firmly to reality and our ability to see it starkly. In difficult times it is not hard to get un-tethered and worse see if very differently than everyone else does. If from the outside looking in, our actions appear to be unhinged and that is the consensus opinion then maybe it is time to re-evaluate. 

It is easy for me to say all this to A because I have lived through that phase of my life already - where I refused to see what was plainly evident to everyone else. I wanted a certain outcome and to achieve it, I was willing to re-organize the facts to arrive at the answer I wanted. I did finally arrive at the answer like I wanted to do, but it came at the cost of a decade of my life. Looking back, I am don't think it was a price worth paying. Enough time has passed for me to have recovered from those misguided decisions and life has offered it's redemptions. It turns out this experience cannot be lived by proxy. A needs to make the mistakes and learn it the hard way. These words of wisdom on when to give up will fall on deaf years until the time is right, 

Skill Building

I was inside a fabric store for the first time and trying to buy some remnants. A few weeks ago, I got a sewing machine as a gift and life has not been the same since. For one thing it took me back to childhood when I helped (often grudgingly) my mother with her sewing projects. Her sewing machine was extremely temperamental and it took a lot of effort to keep it running. She persevered and there was a lot of output to show for it. 

It took me a few days to get a sense of how fabric, needle, thread, stitch and tension are related to each other and how to find the proper balance using my own sewing machine. Reading about this tailor on her push-cart helping people restore pieces of clothing was very heart-warming. I dream of being able to give my old clothes a second lease of life in the form of a quilt. This is something my mother was particularly adept at doing and some of my favorite quilts from childhood were made of her old saris and other pieces of fabric from the old, worn out clothes of the family. 

When the quilts had run their course, they would be exchanged for steel utensils. There used to be a woman that came to our house with her assortment of containers and pots she would trade for old clothes and quilts. Every piece of clothing any of us wore had an end of life story that was not about being discarded or trashed. Just about every item of clothing had been altered and mended over time. 

The sewing machine as cranky as it was did pull its weight in our house. For bigger projects involving curtains and table-cloths, my father would step in to assist. I remember my mother going from having no tailoring skills at all to being able to sew her sari blouses to beat the work of her favorite tailor all in the matter of about a year. I remember being impressed that she could achieve such mastery in what seemed to be a relatively short period of time. So here I am trying to make my first tunic with some remnants thinking about the sewing machine that I grew up with and the memories it had created. 

Bug or Feature

 Loved this bit of Seth Godin wisdom first thing this morning. For adults he says "Crankiness isn’t a feature. It’s a bug". He is right ofcourse but the idea extends to many other forms of childishness that adults display. What was cute in kindergarten is repulsive in a thirty year old. Though often those bad habits stick around way past thirty and you have on your hands an absolutely insufferable sixty year old. It is like they needed behavior training their whole life and never received any. Bad parenting is a gift that keeps giving and its the world at large that is left to deal with it. 

This brought to mind a certain individual I happen to know. V by any objective measure is very hard to deal with and be around, even her kids attest to that. She has developed coping mechanisms over the years to attention bomb random strangers who she can strike up conversations with on demand and then go on with her life. So observing from the outside she seems friendly and chatty. That is only good for a fifteen minute interaction. Beyond that V is unable to control that bratty toddler inside her that is now a full featured menace at sixty. Maybe no one told her that for an adult bratty is not a feature but a bug. 

I don't know if I am done raising J yet. Even though there is little for me to do actively these days, I do draw her attention to areas of improvement, quirks of character that are cute at her age but won't be ten years out. Some of the advisory sticks and I do see change over time. The rest I expect is a process of smoothing as she goes through life, meeting various forms of resistance and friction.

Displaced Anchor

 Among many things being written about the pandemic, this explanation fit for a lay-person's consumption stood out "Covid-19 is like a burglar who slips in your unlocked second-floor window and starts to ransack your house. Once inside, though, they don’t just take your stuff — they also throw open all your doors and windows so their accomplices can rush in and help pillage more efficiently." 

All around me people are growing restless to be out and about, live their lives as they once used to. One of our clients laid of thousands of employees a few days ago we started to see people we did business with over the years go on full job hunt mode on LinkedIn. Yet others have changed jobs in the midst of the pandemic, lucking into opportunities that may have not come about for them in ordinary times. To be able to go on through this period without much changing in a person's life seems relatively rare. So that burglar analogy seems to resonate. 

It would be one thing to be down with a truly terrible flu but its a whole another thing to be horribly sick, have your life upended and see chaos take over wherever you turn. This afternoon on our walk, we noticed several office buildings up for sale for lease within a couple of blocks. These establishments have been around for decades - the anchors in the community that were supposed to be around for ever. That is no longer true.

Universal Solution

Love this post about block-chain - as the author correctly points out, it is an amazing solution for almost nothing. Yet for anyone in a technology leadership role, not to have a point of view regarding block-chain is a non-starter. This is technology to which homage must be paid in the form of a strategy, road-map, use case identification and skunkworks projects. If not the person in question is presumed to be lacking vision. So to be a technology technology leader one must embrace block-chain. Could not have said it better than the author if I tried:

I’ve never seen so much incomprehensible jargon to describe so little. I’ve never seen so much bloated bombast fall so flat on closer inspection. And I’ve never seen so many people searching so hard for a problem to go with their solution.

That hits the nail on the head. As to what this thing really is past all the jargon and bombast, that is also very well described in this story:

At its core, blockchain is a glorified spreadsheet (think: Excel with one table). In other words, a new way to store data. In traditional databases there’s usually one person who’s in charge, who decides who can access and input data, who can edit and remove it. That’s different in a blockchain. Nobody’s in charge, and you can’t change or delete anything, only view and input data.

Top Gun

Several years ago my then co-worker now friend T came to the company Halloween party dressed as Goose from Top Gun. She was accompanied by a client who was dressed as Maverick. Everyone was in splits seeing the duo and the joke was lost on me. T told me that I needed to watch the movie - no assimilation into America is complete without it. I made a mental note of it but never quite got around to remedying the omission. And then a couple of days ago, Top Gun popped up as a recommendation on my Amazon Prime. Having nothing better to do that evening, I decided to watch the movie. Half way through I was so bored I took a break to cook dinner and wrap up some chores. I figured I need to watch it to end the end to see what the fuss was all about. Sadly, I did not quite get it even at the end. 

The dog-fights were fantastic, choreographed to perfection but the story-line and acting of the whole cast so anemic that it could not hold the string of dog-fights together. No matter what the situation, the conversations between people was relentlessly lackluster - it was like no one could work up any enthusiasm for the part they were playing. This is not quite a war movie so probably unfair to compare to some of the ones I love - Full Metal Jacket, Platoon and Apocalypse Now. The Bridge on the River Kwai is at a whole another level of greatness - a movie I have watched a couple of times with J because the lessons to take away from it are very different by age. Top Gun felt closer to Grease than any of these movies and maybe for that reason, I came away confused. After all these years, I am no closer to the cultural assimilation that my friend T had wished for me. Her Goose get-up at that Halloween party was spot-on though. The client made a fine Maverick in her Ray-Ban aviators and exaggerated swagger.

Feeding Chicken

Nice essay on roasted chicken. Can't count the times when the rotisserie chicken has been a life saver in our home. When my imagination for cooking dinner has completely checked out along with my enthusiasm to spend time in the kitchen, this grocery store staple comes to the rescue. 

When customers shop for a raw chicken in a supermarket, they typically face a number of choices, including organic or free-range from producers who voluntarily applied for these labels. With hot rotisserie chicken, it’s often much more opaque. Since labeling requirements differ for prepared foods and raw ones, not knowing how a rotisserie chicken was raised might even be part of the charm: It’s out of sight, and out of mind.

For parents, there is also the matter of assuaging guilt. Family dinner should ideally be freshly made and hot. When there is neither time or energy to produce that, rotisserie chicken can step in. From having no plan, you can painlessly assemble a dinner that looks like it took some effort and thought. 

Living Pain

This article about pain catastrophizing exactly matches my own life experience. So many women in my extended family came into their 40s complaining about aches and pains in their legs. They were relatively active at the time but definitely justified slowing down blaming the pain. So it would be common to see an aunt who had been self-sufficient with most household work, acquire domestic help for chores she had done by herself until then. By the time they were in their 50s the pains had grown much worse, they had gained a lot of weight and become largely sedentary. 

One of these ladies now in her 60s spends most of her time laid up in bed. When she is up and about, her gait is ungainly and she struggles to climb up and down the stairs. Exercise is unthinkable, she would be lucky to just be able to walk around the house. When she absolutely must be mobile, she takes pain medications to cope. She used to be a normal 20 and 30 year old once and just by focusing on pain as deeply as she did, by 60 she is where she is. The men in the family complain about their aches and pains too but I have noticed they don't assume they have a choice to change their way of life on account of the pain. So they soldier along best they can and as a result remain more active until a much older age. As the story points out:

how patients think about their pain, rather than the level of experienced pain, had a more powerful impact on their daily physical activity

The women I am referring to were all stay at home wives and mothers. There was no compelling need for them to do anything in particular. There was always help available if needed. When the kids were little they were naturally active chasing around after them. This first signs of pain and consequent slowing down seems to have coincided with the children growing up. 

Random Wisdom

Discovered this little gem the other day - quote investigator. The background of a quote, the possible attributions and more. I gave it a test drive with my favorite quote from my teens. My poster looked a bit different than this one but it always gave people a chuckle when they saw it. 

Sadly Quote Inspector was not able to tell me who authored "I must be a mushroom. Everyone keeps me in the dark and feeds me a lot of bullshit". Notwithstanding, there is a ton of wisdom to browse over and hopefully learn from. I likes this one for instance:

“Always, you put more of yourself into your work, until one day, you never know exactly which day, it happens—you are your work. The passions that motivate you may change, but it is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction.”

Back in the day when that mushroom quote poster dominated one of the walls in my room, I had no idea what my work was or life was about. It was the age of confusion, growth, resentment and such. I am yet to find out what my work is inasmuch it can be one that morphs into life itself.

Perfect Sound

After a long day at work a few days ago, chanced upon this story about the only playable Stradivarius guitar in the world. It was so pleasant to hear the beautiful sound. It also reminded me of the Joshua Bell performance J and I attended many years ago. At some point during the recital, he recounted the adventures of his own Gibson Stradivarius. 

As for the unique sound the article says "the secret of the Stradivarius sound: borax and brine. There’s more to it than that, of course, but the chemical bath advantage makes for a fascinating bit of trivia. To the ear, it matters little whether a sound is the result of accident, intention, or some measure of the two."

The science of the sound quality of these instruments is reminiscent of wine tasting. Reputation goes a long way in creating a bias but not that much separates the taste of garden variety wines from the very expensive ones. Such is apparently the case with the Stradivarius too. But after a brutally long day, it was definitely soothing to my ears.

Mixed Blessing

Read this article on how people use their talents or not. All three questions the author asks are valuable to consider:

What exasperates you? This can be a sign of a skill that comes easily to you, so much so that you get frustrated when it doesn’t to others.

What compliments do you dismiss? When we’re inherently good at something, we tend to downplay it.

What do you think about when you have nothing to think about? Mulling over something is a sign that it matters to you.

I particularly relate to the second one. Not only is it a compliment that I dismiss, it is also a sign of how I am perceived and why that limits the range of what I could be. There is a certain danger in being "inherently good at something" when that something does not come easy to others but is also something that does not get a lot of attention from the powers that be. That is absolutely the worst kind of thing to be good at.

It turns out I have several such "talents" for which I get compliments I don't much care for and they certainly don't help me specially that managers are usually quick to recognize them as well. So this notion furthering such "talents" within your team could be a mixed blessing. The person in question would feel unfulfilled while others benefit at their cost. The harder thing to do is to find areas where a person is lacking innate ability and nudge them in directions where they could still shine.

Shared Responsibility

This article about lost learning for a generation leading to lost earnings due to the pandemic makes for a sad reading. There could be a myriad of downstream effects from both losses - earning and learning. A less informed and educated citizenry for one could lead to bad political outcomes, the opportunities for social mobility could disappear and along with it the ability to uplift the generations to follow. 

“Not being able to attend school impacts children in many ways: children don’t have an opportunity to learn, they may miss their most nutritious meal of the day, and too many students – especially girls – may lose out on the opportunity to complete their education, which will prevent them from achieving their potential,”

The cost borne by women will be higher and there are cascading effects of that at the family and societal level. Yet a little more personal responsibility and concern for our fellows could help mitigate this crisis. My parents for example are concerned about the how the people in their apartment complex in Kolkata are pressing full steam ahead to celebrate Durga Puja. They are flouting social distancing guidelines, congregating in the common areas to discuss planning and logistics for the upcoming celebration. 

Doctors and their spouses are in the mix and yet the overwhelming majority voted to proceed with the celebration as in normal times. The old people are the ones sitting it out because they are fearful of consequences. People who want to go on with their lives are of the opinion this is no big deal and won't impact them. The story is repeated across college campuses here which can't manage to stay open because students decide to party and get a lot of people sick in the process. This is self-inflicted pain upon society with consequences for generations to come. 

Staying Latched

Have to wonder if 120 is a great sample size for a country the size of Germany for this universal income experiment. Sounds like the number was driven by the number of donors who signed up to help fund the experiment. There does not appear to be any other basis for this arbitrary and very small sample set. According to the article;

Finland experimented with a form of basic income for nearly two years: From January 2017 to December 2018, 2,000 unemployed Finns received €560 a month. But the researchers behind that trial concluded that while it led to people out of work feeling happier, it did not lead to increased employment, the BBC reported.

If the idea is to get past the stereotypes associated with those in favor and those opposed to universal income, an experiment involving a test population of 120 is very unlikely to move the needle. The findings when published will just be an intellectual diversion un-tethered to reality where both sides of the debate can find enough content to stay latched to their current perspectives

Good Activity

Great to read about the high level of start-up activity in India to help migrant works find jobs. Particularly love how one founder went about hearing the voice of the customer and developing a solution in response to it:

The idea for Apna grew out of Parikh’s experience hiring a welder a decade ago, when he got hundreds of résumés in response to an ad on a job portal. He invited about 20 people in for interviews, but only five showed up and most of those knew little about welding. “The system was broken,” he says. As he began developing the idea in earnest last year, he took a job as an electrician in a factory in Ahmedabad, 300 miles north of Mumbai, where he chatted with workers on chai breaks and spent evenings talking with people in nearby slums. “I tried to look at it from the candidate’s point of view,” he says. A key takeaway: Low-skilled workers don’t need résumés, an off-putting requirement on many job portals. 

The alternatives for the demographic Apna and the like are targeting definitely need help. 

Solutions not Problems

I never had a manager that said don't bring me problems, bring me solutions that was any good at their job. The author cites and anecdote that tells a lot about the nature of real leadership:

When I worked at Microsoft, our reviews with Bill Gates often included detailed discussions about problems. Gates says in his book Business at the Speed of Thought that one of his most important jobs as CEO was to listen for bad news so that he could act on it. Discussing potential issues with him and others in the company also helped us to see problems in a new light.

Listening to bad news to act on it takes courage and vision. If the person is in a leadership role they don't deserve they will likely have neither. So it would be very tempting to seek solutions not problems. From my experience, such people are surrounded by a cadre of yes-people who present really bad solutions that make the problems infinitely worse. 

The boss rubber-stamps those dubious solutions and it is not long before the best performers in the team leave and only yes-people remain. Sometimes, the powers that be wise up to what is going on and put the solution seeking boss out of their misery and their job. Have seen that happen too. 

Plot Points

Read these lines in Things Fall Apart - I book I have struggled to get through despite many attempts over the years. It might be that there is a right time in a person's life to appreciate certain writing. I don't know if it is quote yet my time with this one

His life had been ruled by a great passion—to become one of the lords of the clan. That had been his life-spring. And he had all but achieved it. Then everything had been broken. He had been cast out of his clan like a fish onto a dry, sandy beach, panting. Clearly his personal god or chi was not made for great things. A man could not rise beyond the destiny of his chi. The saying of the elders was not true—that if a man said yea his chi also affirmed. Here was a man whose chi said nay despite his own affirmation.

The story-line started to make sense only after half way through the book. It was as if the words suddenly started to connect with familiar things in my own life experience. It is possible such connection could come about for another reader earlier in the book or even later. That would determine the quality of their reading experience and what they take away from the novel itself. That is no different from life itself - there is no way to know when the plot points of your own life will finally start to acquire a cohesive structure. 

This was a very difficult book to stay with for me. The language and the style of writing made it hard to follow the story itself. That is not unlike having someone raised in America read one of my favorite books of all time Godaan and appreciate why it is such a masterpiece. I am glad I finally got to the end though I wish I had enjoyed the experience more. 

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Batteries Dying

There is some scientific basis to support what people often say when they feel worn out - I need to recharge my batteries. 

"...neurons involved in anxiety-related behaviors showed abnormalities: Their mitochondria, the organelles often described as cellular power plants, didn’t work well — they produced curiously low levels of energy.

Those results suggested that mitochondria might be involved in stress-related symptoms in the animals. But that idea ran contrary to the “synapto-centric” vision of the brain held by many neuroscientists at the time. "

That's basically our power supply running out of steam as the author explains the scientist's rationale:

"Sandi’s work sprang from an intuition that mitochondria might alter the operation of select brain pathways. Our brains eat up 20% of the oxygen our bodies take in, even though the brain accounts for only 2% of our weight. A deficit of cellular energy production in critical neural circuits, she hypothesized, might explain an overall lack of motivation and self-esteem seen in anxiety-prone people."

The remedy is exercise which seems to work for a lot of people once they can make themselves get out of their slump and say go for a run.

Ersatz Experience

Very interesting reading on how nostalgia works. This explanation of how brain activity drives the positive feelings associated with nostalgia makes sense: 

 "..brain activity in regions associated with reward-seeking and motivation was higher during nostalgic recollection. Entertaining the kinds of mental simulations that elicit the bittersweet feeling of nostalgia generates a reward signal that seems to motivate individuals to turn their ersatz experience into a real one, in an attempt to replace the (actual) negative emotion felt when simulating with the (imagined) positive emotion of the simulated content."

This made me think about what I feel nostalgic about. Often it will be a vignette from childhood or youth - a very small one. In reality the event that is imbued with nostalgia could have occupied just a few minutes in a day or a few hours in a long period of time. Yet, when I think about it, the surrounding time blurs out of focus and this one scene stands out in sharp focus. It is a huge distortion from reality and that can trigger the bittersweet feeling of nostalgia. The parts that are blurred out and hazy were not always pleasant. Often, the event in question stood out because it was a such a contrast to the pervasive bleakness. If I had recalled the past with more fidelity, chances are I would feel no nostalgia at all.

Mental Kaleidoscope

Ran into this little gem by Mark Twain while reading a post about old ideas being paraded as novel in the world of technology. 

There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations.

In the technology business that ends up being a slew of new jargon, definitions and catch-phrases that everyone who keeps up with technology must now be able to spew with fluency. The vast majority of the folks a merely spewing, a much smaller minority actually understands what they are talking about - by which I mean they are able to take the jargon they learned and explain it in simple terms to a lay-person. 

But even this group of folks is not questioning the validity and the point of existence of this new technology. They accept it must be good because it is new - so the implication is there was a problem the old and tired stuff was not solving that this new thing does. This trust is almost blind. The more the jargon shows on-line and gets quoted by trusted authorities the more confirmation that the new stuff is good and we must all know about it to be professionally useful. 

Every once in a while someone will question the very foundation of such things and clearly separate fact from fiction. I love reading the opinions of this very very small minority of technology professionals. 

Watching Fishing

 On our walks some evenings, we pass the waterfront and see people fishing. Sometimes its a family but more often a person fishing alone. They have their chair, a drink, fishing supplies and a cooler. Very rarely have I seen any of these anglers catch anything. Once we saw a guy with a small bass and he was pretty proud of it. I have never tried fishing but watching these people makes me want to try. 

They seem to be doing what they do as a meditative experience. A family that is fishing together appears to get that benefit too - even when it involves restless kids. The idea is to wait for things to happen and having little control over what happens or not. You learn to deal with lack of success I would imagine. You can spend hours and not catch anything. A fish may tug at the bait and not quite bite - much like getting your hopes up in life only to have them belied. So many lessons to learn alone or as a family. A few hours rife with teachable moments

Being Rockstar

Reading this story brought to mind something that happened to me. My boss back in the day,  asked how I liked working with B. The guy was new at the job and in the profession but his attitude was great and I enjoyed working with him. Instead of keeping it at that, I took it upon myself to talk about how I needed to work harder to getting in perfect synch with him on our engagements. 

The reason I did that was not from a place of insecurity. Instead, I wanted to project a high degree of self-awareness, willingness to go beyond the call of duty and demonstrate to the boss that I strove for perfection and not merely being good enough. The truth of the matter is the moment someone is called a "rock-star" at work, its game over for them. That person will be the reason many careers get made but it will never be their own.

B may have been younger and greener than me but he did better on the same question when it was posed to him. He was just high praise for me and that was all. Presumably, as a man he did not feel the need to prove all those extraneous things that I was trying to. I wish I had a mentor back then who had pulled me aside and told me that was a career-killing move that I had just pulled. Today, I fully understand the affect of such self-aware, self-effacing remarks have on how I am perceived. But it has now become second nature and therefore naturally defines where I can and cannot go professionally. These habits need to be broken early if at all. 

Museum Grade

Seeing the gorgeous art work of Bisa Bulter made me think about how people express themselves through their choice of clothing and jewelry. When I first came to America, I wore my saris to Walmart until I came to realize that as a new arrival to the country, I should focus on blending in instead of standing out in a grocery store. There is a time and place to show pride in my ethnic roots and heritage but do that while shopping for produce was misguided. Then I started working and it made even more sense to blend so people would hear me and not just get distracted by my attire. And so began the process of shedding my identity over the years to the point I am invisible in a crowd because I am very much like the average. Even today, I feel like the real me when I wear a sari and ethnic jewelry, when I can be colorful like the plumage of a tropic bird, my eyes look alive with kajal and my face with a bindi. 

Yet, for very large chunks of the last couple of decades, I have lived not feeling and looking like the real me. My desi friends and relatives find their escape in their parties where they do get to show up in beautiful Indian clothes and jewelry. Sometimes, a visit to the temple can be a venue to do that as well. I always experienced a sense of entrapment in both places - it was like playing a role on stage. A big costume party with props that are meant to invoke the home country - food, music, deities and more. This is not real like waiting for a bus at the stop on the way to work, wearing a sari like most other women and for all that to be the average. Bisa Bulter's amazing quilts, the colors and the energy do represent the real life of a people. In their natural milieu it would be average, not worthy of going up on the wall of a museum. Such are the very small sacrifices people must make to make a new home in a country that they were not born in.

Flourishing Relationship

 Interesting study on what makes relationships work. In summary "It really seems that having a great relationship is less about finding the perfect partner or changing your current partner, and more about building that relationship itself – setting up the conditions that will allow the relationship to flourish"

If that were true, arranged marriages with proper coaching on how to build a lasting relationship should have a high probability of success. Maybe that is what needs to be fixed about arranged marriages - relationship coaching. Yet the relationship factors that the article lists as key are very hard to come by: 

1. Perceived partner commitment (in a phrase: "my partner wants this relationship to last forever")
2. Appreciation (feeling lucky to have your partner)
3. Sexual satisfaction
4. Perceived partner satisfaction (how happy you think the relationship makes your partner)
5. Conflict

Wanting a relationship to last forever is not always a positive. It can get stifling and suffocating even. Appreciation can be worked up to compensate for things are missing in the relationship. When a woman can't stop talking about how lucky she is to have her partner, its usually a red flag. I was such a woman once and that marriage was dead on arrival. I hated to acknowledge that simple fact and convinced myself and anyone who cared to hear that I was ever so lucky. The last three items have a very symbiotic relationship to each other. When the balance is off, it could feel like filling a leaky pail with water where you can't plug all three at the same time. Instead you switch between the three sources of leakage and see what yields the best results.

Circular Economy

 Love reading about innovation like this - combining building rubble and tire waste for road construction material. 

This recycled blend is the first to feature a mix of rubber and rubble precisely optimized to meet road engineering safety standards, according to the team. It does offer greater flexibility than conventional materials, which the team says should make it less prone to cracking, all while offering a greener approach to construction.

If this the perfect solution and does it pose no environmental hazards is hard to tell. There is a certain monetary and environment cost to producing net new road construction material. The monetary cost will drive the quality of infrastructure and it's maintenance. In my state, the conditions of the roads can vary a fair bit based on who is responsible for their upkeep. The state, city or county. 

Counties range from wealthy to impoverished and the quality of infrastructure signals this loud and clear. With (assuming) a lower cost material made out of waste, there could be more parity in the quality of roads and therefore in the economy. If it did turn out that the environmental cost of the new solution is a bit higher than what we have currently, maybe its ability to equalize access to opportunity may act as a decent counter-weight.

Single Sentence

 Discovered this publication that only deals with single sentence prose - but unconstrained by a word count. It makes for some very nice writing. This excerpt from one of the posts for instance does a lot with one sentence where the writer describes her mental state on a wedding anniversary

"..tears streaming down my face as the smell of eucalyptus washes over me; on this seventh wedding anniversary, where my marriage is not a marriage but also not yet over because the gears of dissolution grind slowly,.."

It inspired me to write a single sentence about the day. The brightest spot of today was finding a couple of plump, edible mushrooms in the meadow where we walked; cooking it with butter, salt, pepper, rosemary and a spot of chardonnay to make a bright meal of nature.

Sorting Woes

 Funny and sad story about an Excel sort gone wrong. But there are worse things that have happened due to things gone with spreadsheets.

Barclays sent an Excel file containing assets they intended to acquire to Cleary Gottlieb at 7.50pm on Sept. 18, only a few hours before the deadline. The spreadsheet had 1,000 rows and 24,000 cells, including those listing the 179 trading contracts that Barclays did not want to buy. They were, however, hidden instead of being deleted.

A junior law associate at Cleary Gottlieb was tasked with reformatted the Excel file to a pdf document so it could be uploaded to the court’s website. Already working on a tight schedule, he was not aware of those hidden rows, which were visible again in the pdf file.

The mistake was only spotted on Oct. 1, after the deal had been approved. Cleary Gottlieb then had to file a legal motion to exclude those contracts from the deal.

Two Books

I am listening to Here We Are on my walks these days and the story is engrossing. It reminds me a lot of Monica Ali's Bricklane in terms of atmosphere. The main parallel was about the liberation of the immigrant woman in a country that allows greater freedoms and opportunities. How the operating definition of marriage becomes fluid as women learn that they have options they did not have before. That is a familiar theme with each narrator tells in their own unique way. As immigrant women, we can relate to some part of each of these stories - they form a bit of our own too. Not wanting to give up the freedom for the comfort of familiar, well-known people and places. 

Feeling emboldened to take decisions that we would have wavered over back in our home country and finally leading the way by example to our kids - what they may or may not expect from a woman - a mother, wife, sister, friend or daughter. There is another tie that binds the two stories and that of many immigrant marriages - she’s in an arranged marriage to a man with big hopes for success that are never fulfilled. The husband has many faults but he provides the best he can loves their children. This set of parameters would make a for a reasonably good marriage in the home country, yet in the West can turn inadequate. Those broken dreams leads to drift in the relationship and the outcomes for the couple could be far worse than if they had never immigrated at all. 

A Premise

Watched Silver Slipper recently out of curiosity based on the short description about the movie. Looking at dysfunctional lives from outside in through phone screen was an interesting experience but not good cinema. Only one thing stood out for me - the conversation between the two young women before one of them decides to auction off her virginity. The friend opined the first time is not as good as they say it is and its not as painful. These were the data points the protagonist considered in her auctioning decision. There is something to be said for that decision making. Culturally there is a disproportionate value and pressure attached to the event for women. 

For a young person to take the logical next step and quantify that presumed value is not such a big leap. The value goes from intangible to real when the friend suggested that some women can buy fifteen houses with what they get. It seems like the idea to auction and see the bids roll in was exploratory at first but in an unbounded environment where the mother is emotionally distant, arm's length in her parenting style, the course of events follow unimpeded. The kid has to find out where the boundaries and limits are. What her mother will tolerate in the name of her being an adult and when and where she may intervene to put a stop to the madness. 

Not a great movie but definitely an intriguing premise for one. A cautionary tale for parents trying to strike the balance between respect for adulthood and independence and still performing the role of a parent. This is an even harder job at times that just managing the tantrums of a toddler.

Swift Lessons

Read this lovely essay about swifts and their unique flight patterns. Towards the end of the essay, the author writes:

Swifts have, of late, become my fable of community, teaching us about how to make right decisions in the face of oncoming bad weather. They aren’t always cresting the atmospheric boundary layer at dizzying heights; most of the time they are living below it in thick and complicated air. That’s where they feed and mate and bathe and drink and are. But to find out about the important things that will affect their lives, they must go higher to survey the wider scene, and there communicate with others about the larger forces impinging on their realm.

That was a beautiful lesson learned from observing a bird. When we go for walks in the park nearby, I always think about the resilience of all things natural - the tiny insect I would die under my tread easily, as a community is far more resilient than human are. They were here well before us and will like be here long after we are gone. In that sense the pandemic could well be nature's pause button, to correct the many wrongs done by us to all things natural, allow the earth to catch a breath and recover some. 

When we are back to "normal" will be when that breath will end. It would be comforting to think of the crisis we are living through in these terms, except that the way humans are experiencing it is very uneven. It is not like a bad season for fire-ants where they swathes of them die and untimely death - no winners or losers. That would be easy to see an natural calamity - such is not the case with the pandemic at all. Some of us are writing utterly tone-deaf essays about dress shoes while others are finding it hard to follow religious rituals for loved ones who died of covid. 

Making Playlists

Thanks to Spotify, the playlists of well-known people are easy to come by. They tend to be curated to project and amplify their public persona, highlight what's best and shave the edges off what's not. In effect, it is a PR effort rendered musically. I have discovered interesting music this way but one can also find a nice pair of shoes clicking on an online ad. When it comes to music, the joy of finding is greatly diminished when the source is somewhat dubious. This list of favorite albums from 1965 to 2005 feels way more genuine and curated with real love. A lot of this music is familiar and yet plenty is new here for me. 

Reminds of the mix-tapes we made and traded back in the day, cross-pollinating our musical tastes and interests. There was always the cool, eclectic guy or gal who knew of bands and songs the rest of us had not. They would rise the tide of music for all, expand our collective horizons. In my day, some of the older siblings of my friends had their LP collections and on occasion they would allow us to listen. They looked upon the cassette tapes as a lesser thing suitable for unsophisticated kids who were listening to whatever trash was popular and trending.