Insufferable Tyrant

Reading Brothers Karamazov after thirty years is turning out to be a very satisfying experience. It is like reading a whole new book and discovering things there that I did not pay any attention to in the immaturity of youth. Like this little gem about a woman who was cruel not because she was evil 

"..so terrible were her sufferings from the caprice and everlasting nagging of this old woman, who was apparently not bad-hearted but had become an insufferable tyrant through idleness"

To become an insufferable tyrant through idleness is not a concept I would have grasped as a teen. What did that even mean. At that age, life is more black and white - good and evil people, happy and sad days and so on. This line recalled to mind one of my father's favorite homilies he used to rouse me to gainful action "An idle mind is the devil's workshop". I was indulging in all kinds of idle - refusing to learns skills he tried to teach me, not working hard enough at school, not trying to achieve mastery at anything I was good at. That line used to irritate me in the moment but it also gave me something to ponder. What was I doing with my idle mind that was the work of the devil's workshop? 

The answer was not so evident back then but it became more evident over the years. Attributing more heft to problems than they deserved was one of the big ones, thinking that my life was somehow uniquely messed up relative to others was a closely related second. Consequently, finding someone to blame for my troubles became a response to crisis instead of gathering my wits to solve things on my own. Lessons were learned the hard way and over the years there was far less if any time for pure idleness. Not quite the insufferable tyrant that Dostoyevsky describes but idleness as my father saw it in me did not make me a better person that is for sure. 

Being New

An ethnic restaurant had opened to rave reviews in my neighborhood right before the pandemic hit. We had meant to visit but never got around to it. Over the past year, they have had to scale back operations and the traffic is down to a trickle now. To make up for lost income, they have converted half of the space into a mini international grocery store. 

They have interesting assortment of items but nothing is particularly affordable but people are buying - many I imagine with the intent of support this fledgling small business in their community. This owner is lucky to have the freedom to innovate and experiment - not everyone does. He is attempting a pivot which seems to be working so far. There are examples of successes like this one out there.

Those who survived have combined flexibility, imagination, and good communication to create new revenue streams...

..  Aside from shifting to more take-out and sidewalk dining, these firms developed new channels of distribution, product forms, items and sizes, audiences, geographies in which to sell, and packaging.  These new lines of business are likely to endure and continue to grow post-Covid.

Pain and Love

I know a couple of people who suffer from chronic pain. Back when it started, family and friends had an abundance of concern and compassion but over the decades that wore out to nothing. One of them is my aunt S. Her world grew smaller as the years passed until she is confined to her bedroom now. 

If anyone ever doubted how deeply my uncle loves her, they just need to see that he is the only person left in the world that feels her pain alongside her every day. It did not grow old and routine for him, did not morph into a source of annoyance. He knows where she hurts and how, what makes her comfortable and what does not. While the rest of the world has moved on from S, he has not - he is easing her troubles every day. Reading this essay about losing the ability to walk when already constrained by chronic pain reminded me of my aunt. This description about the onset of sudden and inexplicable pain is very sad to read

First off, the pain bears no relation to how you feel when you’re doing a thing. Swimming might feel great – so floaty, what could go wrong – but watch out for kryptonite later in the week. Detached from its immediate cause, pain is perplexing – like being on the receiving end of an irrational outburst of anger from someone you love.

In my aunt's life the pain may be irrational but she is lucky to have real love. 

Reading Grief

Reading Where Reason Ends and am completely dazzled by the writer who is also a mother sharing unimaginable personal grief. She chooses to elevate her pain into an art form which makes it more intense for the reader than if she were to just speak to her experience in the raw. Of how it is she came to lose her son, Yiyun Li says:

Is that how a mother loses a child? Is that how any person loses any person, by not understanding the treachery of words, or worse, by thinking one can conquer that with precision? Silence is the best defense and the best offense. What happens when one counters silence with silence, like the ironsmith in the Chinese fable who brags about having cast the strongest armor that would shield against the fiercest spear, and the fiercest spear that would pierce the strongest armor? We would both be quiet ever after.

It is a hard and uncomfortable book to read and I find myself taking many pauses. Each time I return, I ask myself why I do and if readers have a right to trespass upon a mother's grief even if that mother has made it accessible for us to do so. 

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there

But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering.

What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already existed. 

When I first met him, this job was still new to him but he dug in and delivered good but not great results. If his purpose was not aligned to the work he might have struggled to push himself harder. S got promoted maybe once in this whole time that I have known him. His results improved tremendously over the years - he speaks at conferences and is interviewed by many trade publications. 

He may not have a corner office but he is the face of his company to many. I watched an interview he did recently and marveled at how he has not aged a day in two decades - he looks truly happy and excited about what he has done for so many years. He has indeed found what it takes for a person to  forget the joys of carefree wandering.

Consumer Citizen

Interesting commentary about Americans and politics. The notion is that the people think of themselves as a consumer shopping for someone to run the country as if it were a business. At first blush that seems to square with what has been going on for the last few years. The infatuation with business as if it defined the state of nirvana for humankind maybe the underlying issue. 

A well run business presumably brings prosperity to many - the employees, suppliers, vendors, partners and the community where it operates. Those are all good things until the optimization to squeeze the most value comes into play. Value means very different things based on who you are in the system and definition will be at odds between different groups of stakeholders. So naturally in the race for maximizing value there will be winners and losers. The business even its best run state can't be everyone's nirvana at the same time. The premise of the consumer citizen does not make sense:

A consumer citizen approaches government the way he or she approaches a provider of consumer goods. Now, you and I both know government is not an ordinary economic firm, but nonetheless that’s how consumer citizens see government. And that means they’re wondering, what are they getting out of it? They’re wondering if they’re getting a fair return on their investment. Are the benefits worth the costs?

It is not possible to invest in a politician who is running for office in the manner described. The office and indeed the machinery of government itself is not a firm that these officers of the company can run. It is more likely people imagine they see some alignment of values between themselves and who they vote for. That person is meant act their proxy and channel their hopes and dreams into reality. When the basis of this perceived alignment is skewed then we have a situation where nothing works. The consumer citizen theory is buzzy but the froth of the argument dies out quick.

Big Gap

Given my rather strange reading habits, I switched from Brothers Karmazov to this gem from Gigaom where a literal hysteria is whipped up over to two sexy buzzwords of our time - DevOps and AI/ML. 

That was one heck of a swing going from plumbing the human soul and taking a diamantaire to words to make every one of them sparkle, to this bizarre exposition about absolutely nothing. 

The more we can reduce those issues and prevent them from seeing the light of day, through things like fuzzing and AI, the faster we can get that code out making money.

This all ties together. In a world where it’s all connected software, it opens the door to ambient services, self-driving cars, or completely automated retail venues. It helps create our fully realized virtual and augmented reality where everything is a digital asset, and scarcity is proven through blockchain, but that blockchain only matters if quality is enforced.

I had to wonder if everyone in the technology business had been forced to read a ton of great world literature in their formative years, would they still be doing and saying the things they do. 

Equal Affection

These lines from the Auden poem More Loving One feel very close to the heart today

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

So many times in life we are in one or the other end of an unequal affection and burn like the stars overwhelming the other with what we give. To us that intensity is real and even draining of life itself but it may not be seen or felt the same way. 

And yet at other times, we are that unfeeling one - unable to see the love that is burning away for us, taken over by grief that it is not returned in nearly equal measure. We cannot make ourselves cross that chasm, make it right with the one who loves us and make the affection more equal. We let the wounds scab over and also destroy what connects our hearts.

Blob Opera

Over the years, I have learned not to get too attached to anything nice that Google makes because chances are they will unceremoniously kill it. It was fun to play around with Blob Opera though and would be great to see it improving with time. Even toddlers are pecking away at tablets these days so it would not be be the worst use of their time to make music while they are at it. 

That said Google Art and Culture makes wasting time feel cultured and there is something to be said for that. I wish there were deep-dives on a lot more paintings so the lay person could develop better art appreciation. This thing has been around for about a decade now so hopefully the powers that be at Google decide not to kill it. But being around a decade is not guarantee of life as we know by now. Reading this reporting of the event on Wired, reminds me of how I felt when Google Reader got killed

GOOGLE PLAY MUSIC died last week. We've known this was coming for some time, and nothing ever happens across the entire Google user base all at once, but many bereaved Google customers are reporting a total loss of life for Google Music. For me the store is gone, speakers no longer work, the app is dead, and the website is dead. It's all gone.

Lost Normal

I was thinking about the waning days of 2020 recently and how everyone talked about they were waiting for the year to be over as if 2021 was imbued with some magic that would right the wrongs of the past year. The slew of virtual happy hours got tiring after a while and I found ways to avoid most of them. Skills can be forgotten at any age if unused for long enough. I believe such is the case with in-person conversations and mingling in a party. The later does not come very easy to many and when we have the choice of sitting it out in our home office with limited ability to get on the video because too many people are already on there, the skill only erodes further. The NYT carried a whole story on the topic of social awkwardness being a side effect of the pandemic.

Psychologists and neuroscientists say something similar is happening to all of us now, thanks to the pandemic. We are subtly but inexorably losing our facility and agility in social situations — whether we are aware of it or not. The signs are everywhere: people oversharing on Zoom, overreacting to or misconstruing one another’s behavior, longing for but then not really enjoying contact with others.

I am definitely not enjoying is made up social situation to simulate what has disappeared from the real world. The longer it takes to return to normal, the harder it would be to do these pretend things even if they all well-intentioned. As the NYT author says:

People inevitably change over time and certainly after something significant, like a pandemic, upends their lives and shakes their confidence in what they thought they knew. Values shift. Personalities alter. None of us are the same 

The online happy hours and coffee on Zoom continue unabated as I write this. I am struggling to embrace this change and not become reclusive. The small group settings are a bit easier on my nerves. Seeing the screen spilt a dozen ways into that may many lives on video is over-whelming for me. The more creative among us are finding ways to break ice online, trivia games and fun facts are the order of the day. Somehow jokes are way harder to land in this format and most of us miss by a mile, And we have to smile and laugh on cue so we don't suck the air out of our gathering. 

Reading Different

Nice to read an author confess to doing most of her reading on Kindle. Like she says, after Kindle its hard to go back to paper books as much I love them. For me, ebooks got me into audio books. There are times I need to be on the move and its great to be able to combine that with enjoying a book. Travel was when I used my Kindle the most but that has not happened in a while. I am part of a larger trend here with audiobooks but reasons vary

Smart speakers are becoming increasingly popular from products such as Amazon Echo, Google Home or Apple HomePod. In a recent poll from the American Audiobook Publishers Association found that 60% of respondents own a smart speaker, and 46% of smart speaker owners have used it to listen to an audiobook, which is up 31% from 2018.  Although the automobile is still the number one place where people listen to audiobooks, the home is where audiobooks are played for longer durations. 

I find myself getting to a logical end when I am on an audiobook and just returned home from a walk. As with anything else there are personas among audiobook listeners with very different needs and wants. Combining a book with a walk is a great efficiency for me and makes me look forward to the walk which can be mundane - the route is the same everyday on weekdays and its the same number of miles I try to do. It is easy to find a reason to skip the walk but the book provides and incentive not to do that. 

Fatherly Wisdom

This FT article from a few months ago, is still an interesting read. The opening paragraph gave me a lot to think about. It about the response of law students on what they think of the US constitution and they express pride in it. So the professor probes them some more on the topic: 

“Presumably you think it would also be great if our surgeons worked off the oldest neurological manuals, or if our ships steered by the oldest navigational charts?” The question usually stumps her students. What, she probes, is so special about the oldness of a document as opposed to its usefulness? Clear answers are rarely forthcoming.

Turning anything into the absolute inviolable truth that cannot be questioned or changed no matter the consequence is a recipe for trouble. This is the basis of religious zealotry. So this devotion to the wisdom of the founding fathers is no different. Only way to find out if its worth the degree of veneration is to see if the system can withstand a severe stress test. In the event that it cannot, then the answer would become self-evident and it would be sad and foolhardy way to find out. All indications are that's exactly what we will do to our own peril.

Feeling Pity

 When I talk to friends and family outside America in these pandemic times, I sense a incredulity over how poorly the situation has been managed and how unthinkable that is. America of all countries could not get its act together. This Rolling Stone article is spot-on

For the first time, the international community felt compelled to send disaster relief to Washington. For more than two centuries, reported the Irish Times, “the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the U.S. until now: pity.” As American doctors and nurses eagerly awaited emergency airlifts of basic supplies from China, the hinge of history opened to the Asian century.

Could not agree more with how the previously unthinkable is becoming normal and acceptable

Fluidity of memory and a capacity to forget is perhaps the most haunting trait of our species. As history confirms, it allows us to come to terms with any degree of social, moral, or environmental degradation.

Over the past weekend, on my LinkedIn feed people I know posted about their career milestones and success in 2020. These are the lucky few who have thrived in the darkest year of our collective lives. I know several people of my age group with kids in college and some in the tail end of high school, who have had their whole life upended. They lost their jobs and were caught unaware and unprepared. For months, they are struggling to get back on the saddle with no luck. Some of those who are promoting their good fortune have worked with these folks who are in desperate need of help - indeed they are most likely to be in a position to help.

But in a time of overall degradation, such expectations of decency and empathy don't have a place it seems. The other trend I see around me, is people opting out of the workforce of their own volition - I have some friends who have done that. The pandemic made the decision somewhat involuntary and easy. They are willing to use this chaotic and difficult time to make a hard switch that they had not been able to make on their own so far. I have experienced this moments a lot the past year myself where I wished I could make that life altering switch - flow with the chaos into a better place.

Owning Songs

 Interesting reading about how artists used to value their songs and what they do now :

..artists once held on to their song rights until they needed a lump sum, perhaps to pay for a divorce or to ease into retirement when reunion tours were no longer possible. But that is changing rapidly.

When songs turn into an asset class, there will be a new type of money manager who can advise clients on good buys. No reason why ordinary people cannot buy stock of the song, their fortunes rising and falling with the random virality of a Tik-Tok video like the Fleetwood Mac "Dreams" song had happen recently. Which also means that making hits will turn into a for profit venture and the uses of serendipity will correspondingly disappear. The "music business" has been around for a long time but this sounds a lot for removed from art where Tik-Tok is the music taste-maker. 

But even though TikTok acts as a volcano constantly erupting with hit singles, it’s not purely a machine for creating new stars. Chartmetric is one of the first companies to chart TikTok activity, and when the company ranked songs that saw the biggest percentage gain in video count on the app over the last six months of 2019, it found that old songs are as likely to catch on as new releases

Old Scar

My childhood friend S called me unexpectedly early one morning. She never does that so I was prepared for some crisis and anxious as I answered the phone. She sounded forlorn but nothing was seriously amiss. That morning when she was washing her face, she noticed a pale white patch under her left eye that covered a quarter of her face. The discoloration was so mild that no one would notice until it was pointed out to them. S said she fretted about this thing for a good hour before she remembered it was a relic from her infancy. The ups and downs of life had been such that she hardly had the time to look at her face thoughtfully and so this scar had faded into oblivion. But recalling how her face came to be scarred triggered some avalanche of bad memories and she needed to talk to someone who would understand. 

S had just learned to crawl back then, Her mother was ironing some clothes and most unaccountably had left the hot iron on the floor and was apparently engrossed in talking to a friend who was presumably in the bedroom where the action was taking place. As the two chatted, S crawled over to the hot iron and stuck her cheek to the plate. The action was swift, she was taken to a doctor immediately after getting first aid at home. The scar on her face became the center of her mother's guilt and existence. She remembers the remnants of that into her early teens. Her mother recounted the event many times over the years but the identity of the friend always remained a blur. He father chose not to discuss the event at all. S says theirs was a loveless marriage but they stuck together from lack of motivation to do anything else. 

That particular morning, S wondered if that friend in the bedroom her mother was so engrossed with that she left a hot iron on the floor around a crawling baby might have been the third in her parent's marriage - the cause of their sad co-existence. For some reason the idea that the incident could have been a random act of neglect and not an accident made S feel like the foundation of her life was a lie and the rest could simply fall apart any moment. We talked about that and many other things for over an hour. I believe I left her in a better place after that - in the least enabled her to move on from that train of thought from a past she had no way of knowing or validating to things more in the here and now. After we hung up, I thought how this strange conversation made perfect sense for me and S to have but it would come across something between crazy and entitled had it been someone else. I felt so lucky to have had S a steadfast presence in my life.

Truth and Noise

In Talking to Strangers, Malcolm Gladwell recounts the events of the Jerry Sandusky case and lot of what has by now faded from public memory returned to mind. Once the level of noise reaches the certain level it drowns out what is actually going on. As a parent who had always been hyper-vigilant about my child when she was growing up, I would have always erred on the side of caution to keep her safe. There was the time she told me that an older man at a place she volunteered at often complimented her on her looks and her clothes. She said it made her queasy though he had never done anything- she did not feel safe around him. I remember asking her if she felt confident she could take care of herself knowing the risk because this would not be the last time she would encounter such a man - she would have to learn to navigate. Maybe this could be a relatively low-risk way for her to learn. 

J was about thirteen then and  looked very uncomfortable and clearly wanted strong direction from me.  At that moment, I decided she would not return there to volunteer anymore. That decision impacted how the rest of her school years would shape out - it turned out well for her but for another kid in other circumstances, it may not have. The man used to email her often at first and then he faded away from her life - each time she heard from him she relived that discomfort. 

If at some point there were allegations of abuse to come forward about this man and someone were to ask me what I know, I would tell what J told me back then - maybe my perception of her level of discomfort. It would not confirm anything. How a kid feels in the situation matters more than anything else, a third party observing an interaction and feeling something is amiss, also matters. But none of that may meet the legal standard of abuse. The interview with Sandusky that Gladwell includes in his audio book made for deeply uncomfortable listening even after all these years. 

Apples and Mangoes

We got a box of Tommy Atkins mango recently being that was the only mango option in the store. Its a mango that never fails to disappoint no matter how promising the looks. Always wondered why it could not be more optimized for taste and just a tad less for shelf-life. This story about a newly discovered type of apple made for interesting reading. Right now. the apple exists as nature intended - imperfect, not quite an apple or a crab-apple just being itself. It invokes some deep emotions too as the article shows:

“I absolutely adore apples and Archie’s new find is breathtaking. And what a romantic origin, unearthed deep in a wood with ancient roots. We can only speculate how it arose, but that’s the joy of botany – you never quite know what you’ll find, or how it got there. These sort of mysteries only serve to deepen our love of the countryside.”

This is not how anyone would speak of the Tommy Atkins mango. I still have half a dozen of them sitting in the kitchen and no one is feeling particularly enthusiastic about them. After all, you need to be flossing your teeth for a long time - what can be appealing about that? The author of Mango Maven says it like it is:

Tommy Atkins mangoes, compared to real deal mangoes, are *really bland* in taste and are *fibrous.*  And when I say fibrous, I mean *stringy* Tommys don’t have buttery flesh.  Tommys don’t have smooth flesh. Do they taste awful? No, but I give them a C- or D+.

Stairwell Escape

It was raining all afternoon and evening so there was no way to go for a walk. The walk is something I particularly look forward in these pandemic times where options are so limited. It is the much needed escape from the day job, monotony and feeling shut-in. All minor problems on their own and in normal times it was not so hard to cope but now the reserves of resilience have been chipped away to nothing.

So as a compromise that day, decided to climb ten flights of stairs in A's apartment building as many times as I could before feeling worn out. It was past dinner time and most people were either home or using the elevators. The stairs were brightly lit and empty. The feeling was spooky but the workout was still better than nothing. There was no joy in the activity and certainly listening to an audio-book was the farthest thought from my mind and yet this stair-climbing activity was my option for change of scenery that day.

Read this quote in a NYT story about epidemiologists see the world today and tomorrow:

“This virus has humbled me as a professional and a person,” said Michelle Odden, associate professor of epidemiology at Stanford. “I did not think this level of failure in a federal response was possible in the United States. We have a lot of work to do.”

For me what was very striking coming from India, is how quickly the population here got desensitized to the death toll numbers. We now loose as many lives that were lost on 9/11 every couple of days and yet there is not even a whimper of outrage. In our individual bubbles which could be of various sizes depending on context - work, family, community, school etc. - life goes on like this does not touch us. I don't recall the loss of human life in America treated quite this way when I first came to the country - it reminds me of the many natural disasters in India during my growing up years and the fatalistic view everyone held about the lives lost - what can anyone do anyway. The living have to live and life must go on. 

Naming and Shaming

Interesting way to collect debt - by naming and shaming the person. The strategy could make anyone squeamish:

Reports of OKash using social shaming started to surface almost as soon as the app went live. And people immediately felt the fallout. A University of Nairobi student told me on Twitter that the texts cost him his relationship, and another user told me his boss almost fired him for embarrassing the company. Another user, who wished to remain anonymous, told me he had read the fine print and knew OKash that would contact some people if he didn’t repay. 

Such are the uses of social networks, My father can be a stubborn old man sometimes refuse to do go see a doctor and instead tough it out at home. As soon as I get wind of such incident, I alert members of the extended family who can start leaning on him to do what is right. Depending on the situation at had and the sense of urgency I instill on my relatives, we can see results in as little as a couple of days. Not quite social shaming but he definitely does not enjoy receiving calls and messages on the same topic from an assortment of folks. 

.. OKash is only one of many companies around the world using social networks to leverage the power of shame. Last January, a local court in China’s Hubei province used WeChat to release a “map of deadbeat debtors.” In Russia, an online newspaper launched an app called Parking Douche that let citizens upload photos of badly parked cars, which were then fed into pop-up ads on the paper’s website. Before the 2018 US midterm elections, an app called VoteWithMe was released that made it easy for users to check the voting histories of people in their contacts.

Clams and Mussels

Loved reading this story about using clams to monitor water quality - so simple and clever. And this is not an over-worked bunch either. They do their tour of duty for three months and return to their natural habitat. No funny business with IoT sensors and data and whatnot. Just learning lessons from nature. Turns out that the solution is not super novel 

This Polish Waterworks company claims that this biomonitoring method is one of the most effective proven technologies for water quality testing. According to them, mussels monitor water quality for over 8 million people in Poland. Turns out, Minneapolis is using this method as well. Minneapolis Water Treatment and Distribution Services credit 12 mussels for keeping the water clean and safe.

Reminded me of a very boring training I had to take as a new hire one time. The trainer was truly the worst and he got zero participation from the class so he had to keep talking and alienating his audience even more. We did not want to be there and most definitely did not want to hear him deliver his prepared content. Yet, there was a point in the class when he told us his mantra for life  - just know enough to do the next step and keep repeating it. It sounded simple and stupid until he illustrated with an example that made us all pay attention.

A couple of years ago, his mother had taken ill very suddenly while working abroad. He had to get her medically evacuated and become her care giver overnight. She went from high- functioning and completely normal to fully broken overnight so there was no time to plan or think. On the day of our training, she was having a medical crisis but he made her tea first thing in the morning before leaving to work. When he returned home and the end of the day, he would do whatever was needed - help his mother get through that day. He did not know what the next morning would bring but most likely he would know the next step to take when he woke up. 

The training was awful but we all learned a lot from him as a person. It would be fair to say. I was not the only one who wished he abandoned the soul crushing curriculum and just shared lessons from his life. They must have been full of moments of inspiration like using a dozen mussels to test the quality of water for an entire city. 

Two Birds

Saw this infographic linked to something I was reading and it made me pause. In the past year, which for me started on a high note, I have been through every part of the spectrum. Fortunately, so far the worst of it has been rare. But there are days when I could have been worked up about everything I cannot control. My mother is in severe pain from a dental issue that in normal circumstances would be simple visit to the dentist and a fix. These days, she is afraid to make that visit so she is alternating been tolerating the pain and being on pain medication, She says no one cares about social distancing and or being diligent about wearing a mask. The elderly are the most fearful and do what they can to stay safe which means being stuck at home with no end in sight. My parents on most days sound like they are coping. Even during those weeks when one or both of them were feeling under the weather. They soldier on knowing there are no other options. I often think of them pacing around their small apartment like two birds in a cage waiting for some the day they may be free again to fly, 

When I am having a difficult day myself, thoughts of my parents intensifies the feeling of despair and panic. In all my adult years, this is the first time I have felt completely inadequate as the person with responsibility for them. Down the street from where I live, there is an assisted living facility. Every day when I go for a walk, I see the same grey car parked outside, There is a sticker on its rear window that I recognize. It is an adult child like me who comes to visit her parent every evening. I see her walk in with things when I am headed out. Her car is still waiting there an hour later. These days, I often think about how lucky that parent is. Before the pandemic hit, I was still taking my walks, that car was still coming by every evening but it never triggered the image of two birds restless in a cage like it now does. 

Relative Absurd

Watching Kin-dza-dza! will leave the viewer wondering about things that are not what they seem to be. Instead of over the top, awe-inspiring technical pyrotechnics to transfer us to an alien world, the movie chooses to use the most low-tech and absurd contraptions to tell a science fiction story which may not entirely be one. Made in the waning days of the Soviet Union, a lot of the plot points apply to the absurd world we live in today. 

Around the time, I watched this movie, also read this news story about yet another college admission scandal - in summary a parent going to absurd lengths to secure admission for their kid in an elite school. In the movie, the character in the strange planet made entirely of sand have a very limited vocabulary - one word to be precise - "Koo". The type of parent that features in the story knew and taught their progeny only one phrase presumably "Ivy League". They would be willing to go to jail for that. Coming from another planet, I am sure this would look just as absurd as the action in Kin-dza-dza! It  is all relative and about perspective. 

Black Cord

 Read this poem by Jane Hirshfield and thought of my friend A:

And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.

The matter of having loved each other is a hard one to resolve once that love has ceased to be as it is in the case of A. It is unclear at what point in their long marriage love departed or if it were that there was never love but they both imagined it must exist because isn't that why people got married and built families? What does remain is "the black cord" that Hirsfield speaks of. It is the thing that "nothing can tear or mend". 

Sanding Down

We found a wooden rocking chair discarded by someone on the sidewalk and decided to bring it home. It looked old, well-worn and dusty. It reminded me of my grandfather's easy chair that was his favorite place to lounge in the verandah. He would take naps through the day on that chair the very epitome of well-deserved retired life. He had never had chance for leisure until his seventies and he made the most of it. Over the weekend, I sanded down the wooden chair and gave it a fresh coat of stain. It was hard work and took up most of my day and yet the results were not spectacular. 

This was not the kind of project you take before and after pictures of and wow people. The chair just looked a lot cleaner and was unlikely to impress anyone. So it stood there on the floor unabashedly unimproved and left me wondering about things in life we put effort into - how we start with enthusiasm and when after after a while, there are no visible results to show for it, our eagerness to do more diminishes. 

It's only a select few things in a person's life where they can continue to preserve against the odds. If those happen to align with what brings them happiness that is simply amazing. More often that not, we figuratively sand down projects because we believe it will turn things as good as new. One of two things happens in the end - we realize good as new is not all that it is cracked up to be, or worse - we realize somewhere along the line that the effort is mis-spent and take a different direction wasting our reserves in vain.

Winning Coalition

Reading this interview got me curious about the book referenced here. The idea of a small winning coalition seems to apply to a lot of other areas and not just to politicians doing what they can to stay in power. A is a new hire and she is assigned on a large, complex project with many loud opinions and no clear decision makers. She learns quickly that she must learn to navigate carefully to survive and thrive. To do that she needs to understand what her winning coalition is. Not everyone can or needs to be pleased. But there are those without whose support she will soon be out on the street. A gets promoted because she astutely identifies this group and makes sure they are happy with her.  

B is dating C who has a vibrant social life and also comes from a large family. B thinks he has a future with C but to make things work long term he needs to figure out the winning coalition to have the support system he will need to raise a family with one such as C. His relationship and marriage will sink or swim based on his ability to identify the key players and make sure they see him as an ally. In both examples, the size of the coalition must be small enough to manage yet comprehensive enough for it to yield the expected value. Not so different that what goes in politics. 

Losing People

The paraar mudir dokan was called Gopal Bhandar. When my parents first moved to the neighborhood, that's where they stopped by for most things. The shop-keeper whose name we did not know was a cheerful old man. His wife was around the store sometime helping him. They socialized with whoever came by to buy their groceries and it was common to see some shopper linger on the wooden benches outside the store front. A tea stall was right next to Gopal Bhandar and it worked great for all concerned. 

Recently, both the shop-keeper and his wife succumbed to covid, dying within days of each other. The store has not been opened since - its not clear if there is someone to take the reins, if the couple had any children who were willing to step in. My parents know of a dozen people who were seriously ill or died from the virus and when my mother recounted the fate of this elderly couple, she sounded completely resigned - they were old people was repeated a few times as if to soften the blow to herself. The level of both fear and sensitivity has come down a great deal over the months. 

Sometimes my parents talk about whether this is the world they will eventually leave or might it be possible in their lifetime to go out again, have friends and family over, travel - if they will see J. I imagine the older the person the more final this situation looks like - time is not on their side. Each generation is experiencing the flow of time in the pandemic differently and it likely puts them at even greater odds with each other than normal times. 

Talking to Strangers

Talking to Strangers has been a very enjoyable read and not because it was a well-researched book or I learned anything of value from it. Once you set such expectations aside, a book can have redeeming qualities. In this case, Gladwell cites a variety of examples of people failing to understand strangers in high-stakes situations with world-changing consequences. Each one illustrates makes you wonder how that's possible - the people in question were well-qualified for the job, they had more than enough data points at their disposal and yet they were terribly wrong, time after time. 

The way I want to use the content in this book is as vignettes from history and events of the modern world that all show a common theme. That is the data the reader can use to go read further if they are interested to learn about Lord Halifax and Neville Chamberlain for example. Then they could arrive at the own conclusions regarding the events and that may even help them understand what they could do in their own lives to avoid such gross misunderstanding of strangers and their motivations.

Readers who were expect to have a guiding light shone on them will be disappointed. It would also be unwise to proceed with the expectation that Gladwell's conclusions will prove satisfactory - I won't go into the likelihood to offend because that is a whole another can of worms. Luckily none of that describes me as a reader and also I did not buy the book - I almost never do buy and when I see it on display in the Target checkout line, its a extra big red flag not to buy. So given all that, I came out satisfied with the book.

Fake People

 The future of AI generated fake people sounds truly bleak:

Given the pace of improvement, it’s easy to imagine a not-so-distant future in which we are confronted with not just single portraits of fake people but whole collections of them — at a party with fake friends, hanging out with their fake dogs, holding their fake babies. It will become increasingly difficult to tell who is real online and who is a figment of a computer’s imagination.

The one benefit I see is people who spend a lot of time on social media curating and promoting their brand can let software take over. It will be coded and tasked to create the life narrative the person wants - a certain cadence of professional accomplishments, lively social calendar, exotic vacations, meeting people along their travels that are cool and interesting - all from the comfort of their couch and hopefully doing things that they actually love. If this becomes common place then there will be no stigma attached to having a fake life-stream on social media. On the contrary, a real person taking the time and effort to produce a montage of visuals and clever narrative to go with it will likely be viewed as a loser who does not have a real life to spend their real hours on. Film making to combine real and AI generated actors, reviving our favorite actors who are no longer alive in various combinations could create new forms of art. 

Musical Inspiration

My kitchen had been looking grimy and unloved for months before I got around to cleaning it up. As it turned out that Saturday morning, I was listening to Veena Sahasrabudhe and oddly enough the other-wordly sprightliness of her voice served as inspiration to take care of the very mundane business of kitchen brooming, sweeping, mopping and cleaning. 

I particularly recall feeling a great burst of energy listening to her rendition of Raga Durga. My music teacher back in the day had taught me this very bandish and worked on me a full year to get me to the point where I could render something useful - not quite a performance but generally hold my own and sing to a small group of people. The experience was scary and the production was unremarkable.

Listening to Veena Sahasrabudhe brought to mind how great talent combined with great effort produces one such as herself. Conversely, no talent and some effort produces absolutely nothing in the world of Hindustani classical music. That would be me and so that person should apply their efforts to cleaning the kitchen really well. Once that message, clicked in my head, it was a total breeze putting my best effort to get the job done flawlessly. Fortunately, this is one of those things were effort is everything and anyone can apply that. 

Autumn Days

I was not aware that Belasheshe was a thing back in Bengal when I watched it recently. It served as a great reminder of what the traditional definition of love in marriage meant where I come from. It is not about any of the things that a modernist, western view of love deems important. You each fulfill your role in the family with the greatest dedication and along the way there are tiny points of intersection where the couple builds their marriage, one tiny bit at a time. It takes a life time of effort and devotion to the cause that is greater than the two people in the marriage. 

The pay-out as seen in the movie is being loved, respected and surrounded by children and grand-children. The person and individuality takes a secondary role to the institution. Love is not hyper-personalized either. It is a very different way of viewing the value of one's own life - measured in ways that have little to do with personal goals and aspirations. The matriarch in the movie is the ideal Bengali wife of a time that no longer exists home or abroad. 

I am going to guess the movie did as well as it did because the the old couple who anchor the movie, represent nostalgia for a way of life where the rules of engagement made marriage far less complex than it is today. And after fifty years of building steady habits, the couple would find themselves helpless and incomplete without each other.

Achieving that state was considered the nirvana of marriage, It did not matter that touch was limited if any, that birthdays were never remembered, that a spouse's need for attention was overlooked to care for an elderly relative. The expressions of love were terribly mundane and indeed that was the hallmark of their authenticity. To tell your spouse that you love them would be considered insincere and a sign of great affectation. Depending on one's definition of what a marriage "working" is, this could be an ideal to aspire. 

Last Year

A few weeks ago, when J called me I asked her how her weekend was. She said it's around mid-night here on Saturday and I am talking you and we both laughed. My baby is a grown woman and we were chatting like friends. The year we all lived through has been awful by most counts and when we thought things could not get worse, they inevitably did. Fatigue is a common theme at home and burnout at work. There was more time and more aggravation to fill it when we were not despairing for loneliness and not having human contact for months on end. At the time of that call, J was waiting for some of her friends who had been contact traced to a kid who had covid, to come out of self-isolation. These had become the events to celebrate very far from the normal social rhythm of the college campus. 

Just being able to be together, knowing that no one was sick was a big deal, worth being excited about. It made me wonder if these friendships would run deeper and stronger than they otherwise would. Maybe that would be the big win for this generation of young people who transitioned into adulthood, independence and life away and apart from their parental homes in the midst of the pandemic. They might come out the other side having a tight-knit community of peers that have a keener appreciation for things that are no longer a given or taken for granted. Maybe the experience will set them up for greater happiness for the rest of their lives. Seen that way, 2020 may not have been such a horrible, terrible, no-good year after all.