Heartcrossings

This mother speaks for many a parent out there I am sure. J was not able to come home for the holidays and as much as I missed her, I am glad she is staying safe and taking care of herself the best she can. My friends with grown up kids that did come home had to navigate a lot of landmines and at the cost of diminishing their overall standing with said kids. There is now a line between making them feel welcome at home, showing appreciation for them taking the time to do that and being scared for one's own safety. Being that adult child is not easy either - filial obligation is not easy to execute in the middle of the pandemic as this author explains: I began to realize that the pandemic has just offered up a crisis most unloved daughters will face at some time, albeit a version on steroids and in public view: What to do if a toxic or hurtful mother becomes ill or infirm? I wrote about it some years ago in a piece called “The Crisis of the Ailing Toxic Mother: Caretake or Run?” S...

Watched The Assistant recently and really liked it. A movie about nothing at some level but depending on the viewer's perspective, it can be and mean different things. I watched from the vantage point of a parent who has a child close to the protagonist's age. Soon it will be J's will be working her first job out of college. Her days will be busy and like it often happens, the dream job of early youth can be a world apart from dreams. All of that happened to Jane, the Assistant to a famous movie mogul. Two times during the span of that day, Jane tried to communicate with her parents about what was bothering her and she could not quite do it. The conversation was steered by the loving and enthusiastic parents and at some point her desire to open up got snuffed.  Being able to seize the precise moment when our kid was ready to unburden, be vulnerable and share is the hardest part of being a parent for me. These two scenes with Jane on the phone trying in vain to have a real ...

My friend S has none daughter in her 30s and that is her only child. Any phase of motherhood I am going through, she already has so I always count on her wisdom. Recently, I was telling her that I feel guilty over missing J as much as I do. It's hard for me to come clean about how much I think of her - I don't even want to admit to myself. I view it as an enmeshment of the person who is no longer a child and needs freedom and space to be - mentally. To that end, I wait several times before I give in to the impulse of needing to check in on her. Wait even longer to call her without arranging a time beforehand. I am training myself not to miss my limb in a way.  Hard to tell if any of that works but I do know I can feel low sometimes thinking how the years with baby J vanished in a flash now she is a grown woman. S has advised me that I will never stop missing J and to deny my feelings is just a foolishness. And what is more just the act of missing her is not stifling J as I fear...

This is new terminology for me and I have been in the data business for a long time. The logic does not make sense to me as relates to data "If equity isn’t intentional from the beginning, we’re not going to end up with equitable outcomes. It won’t happen by accident,”  Data collected from any source is meant to represent the system as it is. If it turns out the system is not equitable then the data will reflect that reality and correctly so. Data cannot by definition be equitable or be made equitable unless we live in a perfect, Utopian world. The question about how to use data as it stands to identify inequity is not a novel one - many have tried to answer that question. Creating a misguided phrase like data equity will only serve to confuse and confound.  There is no one size fits all to that question of how to use data to drive equity in the world. This rather juvenile take on visualizing data inequity is unlikely to produce good, usable solutions. In the meanwhile we ha...

The concept of male ally has started to be a thing these days. Most recently, a dude I worked with a long time ago received an award from the local technology council for being one. That was a very curious choice. The company he runs is small business and has always had a remarkably large number of woman at all levels. I worked there a long time ago. In our town, people spoke highly of the way the firm was run and the great work-life balance it afforded the employees. The dude in question H, was senior leadership back then. He promoted a number of women - as long as they did not make waves or have strong opinions. The most important qualification to have H as a male ally was to be in complete awe of his smartness. Girls who thought they were better (and rightly so) were assigned the most soul-crushing projects and to the most ornery clients. The conditions were set up to where they would have no chance of success. H would then tell them ever so kindly that they were a few years away fr...

I am reading The Soul of an Octopus and The Plant Paradox in parallel. No particular reason other that happenstance. The tone of the two books could not be further apart but they each disappoint in their own way. Sy Montgomery loves the subject of her book unabashedly and when the narrative starts out, she completely draws the reader into her world where she is beginning to form a relationship with a feisty octopus named Athena. Montgomery is able to make us feel what she does abut Athena and that is a remarkable achievement. Whatever your thoughts about an octopus going in, the author will make you feel as dazzled as she is by them. Beyond that the book veers off course and off mission.  The Plant Paradox is a very different story. The author's demeanor is so off-putting and his desire to over-sell his credentials so painful, that it is difficult to get engaged. For me the low point came early on when Gundry took it upon himself to expound on the canary in the coalmine metaphor ...

On our evening walk recently, I saw someone looked remarkably like P from my college days - or like P might look now decades later.  She had been quite the character even back then, unwilling to be like anyone else in any way. P was the ultimate in uniqueness - there was no one quite like her. She had no real friends but plenty of fans and haters.  Folks like me who did not care enough to be either were a rarity so she took a special interest in our type. Perhaps she was trying to understand why we did not respond one way of the other to the thing that was P. So anyway, upon returning home I Googled P to see what she is up to these days. She has become an executive coach with a religious guru flair. As many of us predicted even back in the day, P has remained single.  Our collective hypothesis was that she was too caught up in her uniqueness to dilute it with partnership - that would imply some level of equivalence with someone. That would simply not work for her. I liste...

On a call recently, a number of us experienced connectivity issues, voice fading in and out, video failing to render and more. We persisted through all that and our partner across the pond implied ever so snidely "only in America". None of the folks on their side suffered as we did. Maybe we should have taken a leaf out of this student's book and found a tree to climb on , see if that would do the trick. ..his home internet is not strong enough to connect to his online classes and that he has been forced to come up with a creative solution. “I need to go into the forest 300 metres from the village and climb a birch tree that is eight-metres high... and I get on Zoom to speak to professors and prove that I am not skipping class for no reason,” he said... Kids blessed with good internet connection here at home sometimes go a very different direction and have to be forced to the the wilderness for therapy . Showing on in online class pretending to have connectivity issues ol...

Post Secret is as as old my blog and looks much like it did in 2005 - almost retro in this day and age. Reading the secrets always left me feeling pensive if not plain sad. All those cries for help floating in a postcard and in ether. But there are those notes that resonate, themes that many can share in. Like every other well-intentioned but provocative medium, this one easily lends itself to abuse. These days, I fret about the mental health of my loved ones a lot and mostly have no idea how to help anyone. The phone calls feel ritual after a while - the news is the same as the day before, staying home and trying to stay sane.  How many times can a person repeat that to reassure me that they are doing okay and not actually losing their mind. Why should they even bother. I like to tell myself that I am okay and I am coping well with all that is happening in the world and around me. This is the story I tell people I care the most about so they strike one thing off their list - havi...

Fisherman's Friends is a delightful movie and brought to mind Billy Elliot one of my very favorite ever. Of course in feel-good cinema which this is, the narrative arc takes out the rough edges of real life, adds a love story and some family drama to round things out. It leaves the viewer satisfied like after a good meal - all flavors and ingredients well balanced.  Notwithstanding, it is a great story and wonderfully told. Watching it from my couch on cold fall evening, in these pandemic times where I haven't met people outside my immediate circle for over six months, it served the much needed escape into a world where being close to friends and strangers is mundane, everyday stuff. Maybe some day in the not too distant future, it may become possible to travel to a quaint village like Port Issac, enjoy the robust local culture and music.  .. the film is unrepentantly upbeat, even featuring some last-minute extremely happy storytelling to cap it off. It’s not very believable,...

There are countless sad and terrifying stories like this one about the pandemic. Around me I see young people and kids tired of waiting for normalcy and taking their chances. Playing soccer in the school yard, running together, hanging out in large groups for dinner and so on. This is understandable - not everyone can wait infinitely for all this to blow over. Being in denial of pandemic fatigue and what it can to to the person feeling it or those around them who can be impacted is wrong. In the workplace, there is a lot of talk about talking mental health breaks and carving time out during the work day to get away from the meeting madness for quiet time to think. That is all good but no one is talking about growing tired of waiting for a post-pandemic world.  ,,pandemic fatigue refers to feeling overwhelmed with still having to maintain a state of constant vigilance, in this case six months after the pandemic started, and a weariness to abide by restrictions. Everyone I know wou...

On our hikes we often meet hikers who look like they have been on the trial for a while. We are just doing the seven or ten mile root to keep from going stir-crazy, these folks are following their passion. It's inspiring to see and know it's possible to walk and entire coast of this country - just a matter of having time and stamina. Reading about this hiker who died alone in his tent and now cannot be identified makes for sad reading.  Not having cellphone connection for the several hours we hike feels like a huge relief from the burden of being constantly plugged in. Now that J is away in college and living her own life, I feel blissfully untethered for those hours in the mountain. The rush of notifications, messages and emails that come when we are back on the road driving home is the reconnection to reality that is not so easy to escape. This man tried in a much more determined way and one can only wish he had lived to return to life as it real and complex as it is. 

This past Diwali, I had a craving for the choddo shak of my childhood. Until now, I was not curious to know what went into that mix. It was just one of those things that was done on the day of Kali puja and not even the most exciting part of it. The fire-crackers, sweet and savory foods came later in the evening. This was served during lunch and set the stage for the festival. My ersatz choddo shak was nothing like the real thing having none of the real ingredients.  Yet, having recalled a time from the past offered its own kind of satisfaction. During lunch, I found myself trying to remember a similar Diwali from childhood see if something would trigger the memory of taste and nothing did. In effect, I was left with the feeling of a planted and somewhat incomplete memory. Perhaps, I am lacking what it takes to reach "pattern completion"   When we first experience the event, all these distinct aspects are represented in different regions of the brain, yet we are still able t...

We have had a great season of hiking so far and tried some trails that were really hard for me. Most recently it took us down a waterfall in the mountains down to the stream at the bottom. We were there on a bright fall morning and it there were a few others out there too. One of them was a fit, elderly couple. The woman was petite and reminded me of my mother for some reason though there was no physical resemblance. She took her time to climb the rocks on her way up the waterfall, but she held her own and needed no help. If I had to guess, she would be in her late sixties or maybe even older but just in great physical shape. It brought back memories to a trip to Dalhousie in India many years ago. My mother was dressed the most absurdly she could be to climb rocks around a waterfall, but she soldiered on in her sari and walking shoes and at some point it became evident any further would be fool-hardy and we all stopped.  There is a picture of me with my parents sitting on some rock...

This story about vertical farms made for strange reading. The system automatically generates feed for cows with no human intervention needed. On the other end, comes out a processed meat product that likely had very contact with humans in its production. When food we eat is so far removed and disconnected from us, it feels a lot less like real food that is meant to nourish body and soul. Could not help comparing this to some of my early memories of food.  The milkman brought his cow to the front of our house and milked her there so there would be no questions about the provenance or quality of the milk. I watched my mother make ghee from the cream extracted from that milk along with yogurt and cottage cheese. All of this magical transformation of milk happened in the kitchen. When my grandma visited us, she always foraged for edible greens in the yard. What until then had been a weed to my eyes would magically transform into a dish she served at lunch. She planted seeds where she ...

 This video was made for children but works for just about everyone. It's beautiful. Only recently, I was thinking back to the time when J transitioned from middle school to high school. It was a time of feeling anxious and unsettled for the first few months until she found her place in the social order and hit her stride.  That is no different for a person of any age, starting a new job. No matter how awesome you were in the last ten places you worked, you still have to prove yourself here, make sure what worked before works here too. You need to find your allies, build networks and relationships you can draw on. None of that is effortless and certainly not comfortable. It is very much like this animation depicts, the need to put on a new skin of the new company culture to hide away whatever glorious mess lies beneath it. 

January by Charles Simic never fails to move me and I can't count how many times I have read it over the years: Children’s fingerprints On a frozen window Of a small schoolhouse. An empire, I read somewhere, Maintains itself through  The cruelty of its prisons. In the most recent reading I thought of children stuck at home in these pandemic times, looking out the window in a snowy winter's day. They are captive of both the home and the school at once. This interview with Simic opens a tiny window into his world, his recollection of his own childhood: You know how it is. You only have one life. You don't choose it. When things happen that way, I didn't complain. Kids in a big city in war time actually have a good time, because the parents are busy worrying about those sorts of things, and you are playing on the streets, and the streets are incredibly interesting. Parental supervision is minimal. So, everyone I knew from those days, later, who remember those days, all ha...

It was good to see someone call BS on following your passion to build a great career. In his book So Good They Can't Ignore You , the author writes: .. If you’re not focusing on becoming so good they can’t ignore you, you’re going to be left behind. This clarity was refreshing. To simplify things going forward, I’ll call this output-centric approach to work the craftsman mindset.  ..Irrespective of what type of work you do, the craftsman mindset is crucial for building a career you love. In other words, build up your skill level, become the master of your craft whatever that may be - project management, building things, writing code, cleaning the facilities. It reminded me of that popular  JFK story featuring a janitor who worked at NASA . The janitor knew something that most of us struggle with, the purpose of his work. He kept the building clean so that the scientists, engineers, and astronauts could focus on their mission of putting “man on the moon”. They did not have to w...

 Love the idea of a perfume that smells like a bookstore . It's been a long time since I have been into one and even longer since I wasted endless hours in second hand bookstores looking for something unique or quirky. My favorite thing would be to read the notes the prior owner had scribbled along the way, the passages they had highlighted and so on. It never took away from the quality of the book ownership experience. The only new books I have were given as gifts to me - I don't buy new books.  I love it when the person giving me the book decides to personalize it with a note on the flyleaf. Not many do - they like to keep their gift pristine which is a pity. I wish it were personalized and spoke to the the reasons why it was chosen for me. In lieu of all that is not happening to people who love bookstores and don't have a way to spend time there as they used to, the perfume could be a great gift idea. I have atleast two people in mind for this one. 

Still reading Learn Better in hopes of being able to do so. There are some interesting bits of information scattered around the book but its not helping me have any epiphany so far. On writing, the author says: The act of writing is a good example of metacognition because when we think about composing sentences and paragraphs, we’re often asking ourselves crucial metacognitive questions: Who will be reading this? Will they understand me? What things do I need to explain? This is why writing is often such an effective way to organize one’s thoughts. It forces us to evaluate our arguments and think about our ideas. I have been making myself write on this blog for fifteen years now. For most of those years, I was able to write something every day. The fact is I rarely put thought into any of the questions the author posits. Writing was therapy at first so it had no specific purpose. It morphed over time to be different things based on what void was aching most and needed to be filled. For...

In a new job while still learning the lay of the land, a person is often unable to decide which meetings they need to attend and which ones are okay to skip. This is specially true of places where chaos and churn are the order of the day. I found myself advising my mentee on the topic recently and it occurred to me that what applies to her ( a young person just starting out in her career) applies to older folks like me too. The new job stress is similar in many ways. If you take longer than a few months to establish control of your calendar, it is likely you never will. Being quadruple booked all times of day will just become the norm and you will find yourself overwhelmed every day.  What is more with time zone differences that person who failed to claim their space and time will be starting their day very early and ending very late. I had one of my sales guys in mind as I was advising my mentee B. He is about my age and and lives alone. H works what appears to be round the clock ...

My young friend, P tells it much better but again she has suffered her first heartbreak in her teens. It was early January this year when she was waiting to meet a professor. They had an appointment and she was a bit early. Instead of waiting out side his office, she stepped out to the main lobby where there was more seating and a much nicer view. It so happened that she sat across from R who was there to meet someone else. They struck up a conversation. R was working on his masters thesis in rural entrepreneurship after having worked a couple of years in a successful automotive start-up. He was ready to take a pause from that life, where ideas were always well-funded, obstacles were removed by money and connections and it was reasonably easy to make an impact. He wanted to see what if the system offered limited to no support, did good ideas find a way to thrive. Everything about R struck a deep chord with P that morning. They exchanged numbers and promised to stay in touch. And so the...

Since my teens both my parents tried to impress on me the value and benefits of pranayama. They both practiced regularly and could not stop talking about how it helped them. Back then, I was extremely skeptical. If this stuff was as magical as they made it out to be, why were not at peace between themselves, why did my father bring the stress of his workplace home everyday, why did they lose their calm ever so often. Clearly the breathing stuff was just not everything it was cracked up to be. I never developed a regimen and continued to live my chaotic life.  Over the decades, things got more complicated than just merely chaotic. Sometimes, I recalled the exhortations of my parents and on rare occasions I would try to breathe as they had taught me. Its only in the last several months have I come to realize the value and it takes no prompting for me to do a few minutes of pranayama at the beginning and end of my work day every day. The cost of not following this practice is immediat...

Reading Learn Better - mainly because I am very interested in understanding how I can continue to learn as I grow older. Early in the book, the author says: ..in the Internet Age, information is fire-sale cheap, and within tenths of a second on Google, we can figure out how proteins bind with plasma. Dinner-party disputes are quickly settled with a swipe of a finger on an iPhone. What’s more, mastery itself is constantly shifting. The life cycle of expertise has become ever shorter—over the past ten years, for instance, the car-sharing service Uber shot from an obscure app to a household name. This shifts both how and why we acquire new skills and knowledge, because practice alone doesn’t make perfect anymore. We need to develop more than simple procedures in order to succeed, and the modern world requires that people know how to learn—and develop the thinking skills that matter. I love the fire-sale cheap metaphor for the cost of information. Being cheap and ubiquitous renders inform...

I stopped by at the local thrift store the other day to see if I could find a small tea-pot to replace my old one that aggravates me every morning as the tea spills over to the counter-top when I try to pour. The red tea pot has been a fixture in my kitchen for years. Amid the din and chaos of everyday life with a school age kid, full-time job and more, there was little space to be annoyed over a tea-pot that was designed poorly - you got your tea and moved on with the day. Now in an empty nest, the smaller details of everyday have come into sharper focus, specially that staying home is the predominant theme of these pandemic times.  Combining the need for a new tea-pot with an opportunity to go thrifting felt perfect. As luck would have it, I found the perfect two-cup tea-pot for under three bucks. It seems to have not been used very much. Could have been a gift or an impulse purchase by someone who did not have much use for it. I may not have quite the perfect tea-pot yet, but m...

I am a Jeff Bridges fan so was sad to read this , The Big Lebowski is my favorite Bridges' movie and his update on his condition is very reminiscent of the Dude himself. This summary of the movie says it all: A moderate hit upon its first release “The Big Lebowski” has evolved into a cult phenomenon with people holding screenings where the audience quotes the dialogue back to the screen. The cult group fans of the film call themselves “achievers” in response to the main character being somewhat of an underachiever. The New York Times praised Bridges performance  saying “Mr. Bridges finds a role so right for him that he seems never to have been anywhere else. Watch this performance to see shambling executed with nonchalant grace and a seemingly out-to-lunch character played with fine comic flair.” Needless to say, not everyone is the a fan of the dude abides .  And how The Dude abides: The film implies that he has been abiding for decades, and that his sole ambition is to abide...

I have a progressive hearing loss from my left ear which I am trying to stall best I can. Apart of the all the aggravations bad hearing brings in its wake, I also have some struggles with balance when I walk. Tripping on flat surface is very common for me and it alarms family when it happens once too often. The fact that I love hiking gets me into situations where such imperfect balance can reduce speed and also increase accident hazards. Recently while on a hike, we were trying to find the best way to cross a small creek. If balance had not been an issue this would be an easy body of water to ford. But with me in the mix, it took a good ten minutes to make sure I got it right and there would be no missteps.  Watching a young man do the same crossing effortlessly using his trekking poles for assist, made us wonder why we don't do what obviously makes sense. Why had we not invested in these before we wondered. The problem was remedied quickly and our next hike felt like a breeze in ...

I have recently discovered the joys of Ceylon loose leaf tea in the mornings. For me it is the perfect compromise between Assam tea which is usually my go-to first thing in the morning or coffee. Coffee is not really my thing so I used it only to break up the monotony of tea. The loose leaf Ceylon is right in between - brewed strong it can do everything a strong coffee can do for me while still being a tea. There is a certain light brightness about the taste that I love to start my day with.  It was interesting to read t his story about cloud based auctioning of Ceylon tea that is helping the growers in these pandemic times. There is also this poem about the tea - the deep amber reminded someone of rattlesnake venom. And there are others who have written thesis on the history of Ceylon tea. Your mileage may vary as they say. 

These lines from Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World could just as well have been written about a highly successful CEO of a global company with adjustments for warfare and fighting: Genghis Khan’s ability to manipulate people and technology represented the experienced knowledge of more than four decades of nearly constant warfare. At no single, crucial moment in his life did he suddenly acquire his genius at warfare, his ability to inspire the loyalty of his followers, or his unprecedented skill for organizing on a global scale. These derived not from epiphanic enlightenment or formal schooling but from a persistent cycle of pragmatic learning, experimental adaptation, and constant revision driven by his uniquely disciplined mind and focused will. His fighting career began long before most of his warriors at Bukhara had been born, and in every battle he learned something new. In every skirmish, he acquired more followers and additional fighting techniques. In each struggl...

I have a few teachers in my family and they have been online with their students for months now. My niece is young and has embraced this new world a lot better than my aunt who is close to retirement. But both experience screen fatigue and the stress of teaching in a way that feels unnatural. My cousin decided to take a break from teaching entirely - her love of it was not enough to deal with the new normal of education. Reading this article made me think of these folks and other teachers I know. In truth, many teachers were experiencing threats to their mental health even before the pandemic. A recent survey by the American Federation of Teachers  found that  58 percent said their mental health was “not good” for at least 7 days in the past month. Even when mental illness isn’t present, we all know many factors — like unrealistic job expectations, negative portrayal of teachers in the media, overwork, and worry about students facing trauma — lead to teachers feeling highly s...

Reading a couple of books in parallel that oddly seem to connect. In When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing , the author describes our executive function and quality of decision making is slave to the individual's chronotype. Generally we do better work before noon and things slide after. To build from that concept, we could in theory have a personal decision making bot that would use our chronotype and other data points to ping us to take certain actions at certain times of day. The email you need to write to an irate customer maybe around 10 am. The meeting about a new business opportunity that you are not too serious about at 2 pm and so on. A personal assistant that understands what makes perfect timing for you.  In his book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century , the author talks about the tsunami of change that is about it hit us as biotech and infotech start to meld. The chronotype personal assistant is only one of the myriad innovations that would become possible. Good an...