Heartcrossings

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, n...

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, pro...

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, t he pain bears no relation to how you feel when you’re...

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 t...

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 ex...

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 citi...

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...

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.

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 ac...

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...

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 l arger 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 au...

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....

 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 ou...

 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 f...

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 t...

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 directi...

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 fee...

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...

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 so...

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...

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 th...

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...

 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".  

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 di...

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...

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 t...

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 ...

 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-...

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 wou...

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 Benga...

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. M...