Forest and Tree

Reading this proverb today made me think about family in my life: 

The family is like the forest: if you are outside it is dense; if you are inside you see that each tree has its own position.

The forest in case thinned a great deal over four generations. From having a dozen children, people went down to three or four. Then it was the time of the single child nuclear family by my generation. Most of my cousins are childless by choice or force of circumstance usually by way of very late marriage. The few of us who do have kids are the oddities of in our extended clan. I see my nieces and nephews who are married feel uninclined to start a family. 

What used to look dense from the outside four generations ago and housed the equivalent of a small village, is far more scattered in every sense now. We don't meet each other, don't live around each other and finally there is very few of us. No one looking from the outside in would mistake our collective for a dense forest. We are just a bunch of scattered and forlorn trees, looking for comfort and nourishment that the woods once afforded us. We have no strength in numbers and we certainly have no plans for posterity. 

Lessons Learned

Great read about Bhutan's pandemic strategy. Resilience and focusing on the collective good are pointed out as reasons why that country has such remarkable success. The final takeaway was my favorite:

Finally, make it possible for people to actually follow public-health guidance by providing economic and social support to those who need to quarantine or isolate. Nuzzo calls these “wraparound services.” But Tenzing Lamsang, an investigative journalist and editor of The Bhutanese, believes the term doesn’t do justice to Bhutan’s deeper policy impulses. “Bhutan’s approach as a Buddhist country, a country that values Gross National Happiness, is different from a typical technocratic approach,” he told me, noting that its pandemic plan covered “all aspects of well-being.”

All aspects of well-being for a person, automatically broadens the scope of care. It takes a village to make any one person to experience a feeling of all around well-being. Maybe that message was lost in the shuffle here in America where the desire for individual freedom and choice left people bereft of that village. 

Seuss and Ray

I have some of the best memories of J's childhood tied with Dr. Seuss books. It made me incredibly sad to read that they are now the target for lacking inclusivity and political correctness. These were the books that taught J how to read and opened the world to her. I remember the sense of pride she experienced being an independent reader moving up in her reading level. Generations of kids have experienced what she did and that is incredibly powerful. I grew up without Seuss and can't recall that magical moment when I learned to read without any help. The critique of Seuss makes no sense to me whatsoever and I am a person of color:

That tension between Seuss and Seuss-free classrooms is emblematic of a bigger debate playing out across the country — should we continue to teach classic books that may be problematic, or eschew them in favor of works that more positively represent people of color?

When I was a child, I grew up with Abol Tabol by Sukumar Ray - a book of Bengali nonsense rhymes rife with discrimination and negative biases about people from our neighboring state - who are absolutely no different from us Bengalis. And that is the least of what was insensitive or politically incorrect about the book. Those were also the rhymes my parents grew up with - it was part of the childhood experience growing up in a Bengali home. 

Notwithstanding my biases and my complete lack of perfection as a human being, I don't think I would deprive my grandkids of Abol Tabol in favor of more politically correct limericks in Bangla. I highly doubt taking such measures would enhance their level of human perfection. Seuss and Ray make nonsense a powerful learning mechanism. In doing so, they almost automatically negate what may be construed objectionable in their content. It's too bad that we now want to attach gravitas to the clearly nonsensical and get ourselves offended in the process. 

Bad Experiments

Very timely read for me that puts some of the ideas in the Deficit Myth to test and reports outcomes. That book has been on my mind since I started reading it mainly because it defies common sense and makes economics sound like voodoo. The reader is expected to believe what does not compute on small scale just works out as you scale up. Maybe it does but it is not easy to understand how.

Prioritizing economic support over inflation risk seemed like the right move: Many emerging market central banks initially offset the impact of fleeing foreign investors and rising borrowing costs, while helping to lift their stock prices. 

This logic makes sense even to a layperson like me. It reads a lot like doing whatever it takes to prevent an immediate crisis and hope that the system works somehow and blunts the pain of these measures. Turns out that is not so guaranteed

Declining currency values can in turn be damaging to emerging markets reliant on foreign imports of basic goods like food and fuel. Countries like Turkey, Brazil, and Nigeria are now smarting from the pain of food inflation, a major contributor to overall inflation for many emerging markets.

With my parents in India, I see that their retirement savings shrinking (in dollar terms) as the years go by despite rising interest income and frugal living. When my mother talks about how much their monthly expenses are for food and utilities, the numbers are astronomical compared to what I remember them to be in the 1990s.  

Real Life

A good family friend has a kid in high school who is a very good programmer. Over the years, it has fallen on me to "navigate" T given his interests. His parents are non technical and feel a bit lost. While tasked with helping T pursue his technical passions, I have tried to draw him out of the narrow confines of his geek universe to see that possibilities exist everywhere he is not looking. His grades have never been great and as he skills up as a programmer, he feels his work is real and the silliness of school is not relevant to him. Recently, I started to help him with looking for a summer job. Going into this project, I had assumed this would be easy. T's resume is very targeted - it's clear he has some great skills that many companies would pay good money for. A resume bot would be able to identify all the keywords that make him a good intern candidate. 

I was naïve enough to believe that posting his resume online would trigger bunch of interest and if he applied to enough jobs he would have multiple options for summer. It turns out I was sadly mistaken on all counts. Development has become far more commoditized than I remember from back in my day. It is not nearly as hard to develop a decent level of competence so the entry level is teeming with candidates who are self-taught or went to some bootcamp. There is no real foundation on which this programming experience stands. What I have come to realize, that the companies that have a strong intern pipeline are looking for people who they can hire once they graduate college. The employer needs to see just about every sign that this student would make a great hire. So credentials matter and grades most certainly do. Just being a great programmer is not a ticket for admission. 

Showing Scabs

Taking mental fitness seriously as a society has been long overdue. Good to see some startup activity in that space. 

..group classes were an entry point into one-on-one therapy. Much like a gym, where classes can lead to signing up with a personal trainer. Talking about mental fitness in the same context as physical fitness is a deliberate way for Meyer and Coa to reinforce their message that mental health is best supported out in the open.

One simple exercise that I have stumbled upon accidentally a few times proves to be very therapeutic atleast for me. Say a colleague and I are talking about work and at some point the other person makes a decision to be vulnerable and share something about their personal life with me that is difficult. In the past, I have let that moment pass and not reciprocated in that act of sharing with took the other person courage. 

And it set the tone for our relationship going forward - there was a sense of uneven and lack of balance even though we continued to work well together. Over the years, I have learned not to let that moment pass. Treat that act of vulnerability with the respect it deserves and share something about me that is hard. I don't know what it does for the other person, but I do feel lighter and freer for being able to be authentic and show the scars and scabs that were hidden till then. 

Hard Mask

When it first became common and necessary to wear face masks, we did not fully understand how long term the need for them would be. As time passes and we are still masked, the need to walk, talk and listen while our faces are covered is a real thing so the idea of incorporating a microphone and headphones into the mask is a very sensible one. There is a theory that people will embrace face-masks when they are out and about way past the pandemic.

..masks could become a more long-term fixture in the U.S. is because elsewhere in the world, previous pandemics had the same effect. In 2003, the SARS outbreaks in parts of Asia, including China, Taiwan and South Korea, required mask-wearing. The shock of the SARS outbreaks and a cultural memory of what helped control them could partially explain why the transition to consistent mask use in some of these nations during COVID-19 was seamless compared to the U.S..

Should that be the case, the mask will undergo many more adaptation to circumstances. It will become a way to make a statement, to send signal about social standing and attitude. It occupies prime real estate and will need to step in for what we could have otherwise communicate through facial expression. Adding electronics to it will enable people to more fully disappear while in the the public space. Having a casual conversation with a random stranger will be harder and require more barriers removed than many will have the energy for. 

Birth Rights

I was not aware about the controversy about the rights of frozen embryos until I ran into this article. Divorce can land people into a variety of messes but this one is pretty unique:

That agreement specified that the embryos would be the joint property of the couple, so they would both need to consent to any future use of the embryos. It also covered what would happen if their relationship ended.

That fact that the embryo is considered anyone's property is morally wrong. How is this different than claiming one human being is the property of another? 

"embryo disputes have become a battlefront for larger conflagrations over the moral status of embryos.”

That’s because “underlying most of the conflicts over disposition of embryos is whether one person’s right to procreate should prevail over another person’s right not to procreate,”

The fact of having needed to freeze and embryo is indicative of a stressful situation in the couple's life. Add to that now, the issue of having to figure out ahead of time the fate of this embryo should they fall out of love and part ways makes it significantly worse.

Understanding Deficit

I have zero background in Economics and The Deficit Myth was recommended to me by a banking type who swore it was easy enough for anyone to understand. That part is true - the language is simple and jargon free so the average person can follow along just fine. The problem is what they are meant to make of the statements are are made that appear to defy commonsense. For example, this one about taxes: 

The tax is there to create a demand for the government’s currency. Before anyone can pay the tax, someone has to do the work to earn the currency.

This is not different from collecting digital trinkets in the online gaming world in a sense. That "currency" can only be created by whoever developed the game, they get to control how much of it exists in the world and can create scarcity to drive up demand and desirability. Applying the same logic to taxes does not compute in my head. 

The story the author relates to fortify our understanding of the concept is an interesting one. A parent pays his kids in business cards for chores around the house and they need to have built reserves of such card each month to keep their privileges. Not connecting the card to outcomes made kids not do the chores but once it was assigned value their behavior changed. A good story but still can't understand what that has to do with taxes.

So we are all put to work by the government and to ensure our compliance taxes come due a certain day of the year. Say we wanted to opt of the system because we did not like the kinds of work we were expected to do, in theory we could resort to bartering and cryptocurrency and find ways not to owe any taxes. While I am following along the author's logic in the book, I don't understand fundamental concepts that would allow me to have an informed opinion about any of the arguments in favor of MMT.

Naming People

Desi names being mispronounced is what we have come to expect as the norm in America - the fact of having a Vice President who has a "challenging" first name is not going to change that. When someone gets it right, we think the person is well-traveled, well-read and cultured. In the workplace, the collective jaws of my brethren can fall to the floor if Parineeta is pronounced correctly for instance. We certainly don't expect it. It's not a matter of if that name will be butchered, we are interested in the creativity that goes into the act of butchering. Some of the variants are more impressive that others - it shows the person made quite an effort to get it as wrong as they could. 

A woman I worked with has a rather simple desi name but there was this one dude who took issue with her being assertive and willing to call bullshit when she saw it. He mispronounced her name like an act of revenge every chance he got. S was gracious to ignore the stupidity and get on with her life. I remember feeling aggravated each time he did it - but she was too cool to care. It was plainly evident she thought too little of the guy to get bothered by how he pronounced her name. 

A few years later at another place I worked,  a desi woman was referred to by her last name habitually because these folks could not tell her first and last name apart though they had absolutely nothing in common. K was a young person, a few years out of grad school, so I felt the urge to rescue her but when I thought of how S behaved when faced with something similar, I decided to hold back. K was a sharp as a tack and did not suffer idiots anymore than S did. Maybe there was a common theme here. 

Cult or Culture

Interesting read on the difference between culture and cult in companies. The scene described by the author here is played out in some variation is most big tech companies. If the founder is still around, they are treated like God and words they said casually, in the passing back two decades ago are repeated like mantras all the day long by employees.

When I recently attended the weekly “get-together” of a leading US tech company, I found a packed auditorium and an audience who started the session with what I later learned was the standard introductory “cheer”: people screamed the company’s name three times. After this, the CEO, who had invited me, handed out the weekly service awards, and each recipient received a deafening applause. I felt as if I were at some evangelical revival meeting. A barbecue followed the prize-giving and nearly everyone attended, all dressed (like the CEO) in black and gray.

My theory is that the cultism takes root because the person or people at the very top of the food chain are incredibly rich - by several orders of magnitude. Furthermore, their place at the top is far more certain than if they were executives of a company they did not found. So they longer the stay, the richer they get and it make sense that they would have everyone work incredibly hard . All of that is somehow conflated with being incredibly smart, gifted, prescient, visionary and so on. While some of that is definitely true or they would not be where they are, its not like if the words that dropped out of their mouths if repeated like a mantra will vastly improve the lot of the folks down in the trenches.  

The advice for executives is spot-on "you should always be on the lookout for signs that your culture has become psychologically coercive" I am not sure they would do anything about it though. It is much easier to herd a cult to make them more money which is what this is all about anyway.

Unappetizing Experience

There is a pizza place in my town that is has been a local institution for decades. I have a personal connection with the place because its one of the first pizzas I ate in America when I first came to the country. The taste of my favorite pizza here has remain unchanged since then - there is certain comfort to being able to time travel on a slice of seafood pizza. As much as I love their pizza, it is a treat I indulge in very rarely. A few weeks ago, I called to order my pizza and the woman who answered the phone was rude and surly to the point I had to hang up. We talked it over and once I had calmed down a bit, I called back acting like nothing had happened and ordered again - as politely as I could. She was about the same level of rudeness. 

She was the one who brought out the pizza when we arrived and her demeanor was much better because she expected a tip and I was too upset to even consider it. As we drove home, I thought about her behavior had single-handedly ruined a happy experience for me. I am sure in my town, there are many whose memories with this place run much deeper and longer than mine. This woman could sour it for them a lot worse. In times like this, people want to re-create happy memories more than ever. 

I had a good mind to write to the owner that he and his customers deserved a better first impression of his excellent establishment. This place is featured as a must try for visitors to our town. So it has a reputation to uphold that is beyond the quality of the pie. I remember the first time I was there, how I felt enveloped in the warmth of the ambience, the friendly waiter who took the order. He had recommended the signature seafood pizza for me which has been my absolute favorite since that day over twenty years ago.

Jenga Tower

Towards of end of 28 Summers, Hilderbrand drops this pearl of wisdom upon the reader.

.. Mallory doesn't understand the architecture of his marriage. Ursula doesn't want to deal with the issue head-on partly because she can't summon the emotional energy and partly because she is afraid if she pulls the wrong block, the whole Jenga tower will fall.

Having observed more than one marriage from the outside where one side was unfaithful and the other seemed to turn a blind-eye to the obvious, this explanation could well be the reason why most such marriages don't fall apart. If the straying spouse is doing what they do out of boredom,  the desire for a shiny new toy and so forth, chances are the desire to keep stepping out, spinning the elaborate web of lies such things demand, will wear off in time. 

One has to assume the conditions at home are mundane, uninspiring, aggravating but not abusive. Given enough tine, things will return to equilibrium, the one straying will come home. It is up to the party who knows what is going on but pretends not to, to decide if letting time to do its thing, is worth their while. Because it does save them having to summon up and expend a ton of emotional energy that a confrontation will demand. The capsized Jenga tower of a functional marriage has no redeeming value either. It will only prompt pity from those who are keeping their intact. 

The real tragedy occurs when the aggrieved spouse decides to pull a block in a moment of distress, see if the marriage will hold - hope that will be the sign they need to stay. Nothing good comes out of such a move and the edifice is rattled badly even if not completely flattened. I am thinking of one marriage I know of where the woman bore the indiscretions of her husband stoically for over two decades and when I last saw them, there was every sign of peace. To his "credit" he always treated the wife like she were a princess. In return, she did not fuss about his bad behavior. They had an understanding, Given that they got married right out of college and are together thirty years later despite many upheavals, their marriage is far from a failure. Like Mallory in the story, most outsiders would not understand the architecture of this marriage. 

Fading Etiquette

So many views on our collective Zoom etiquette or lack thereof. A woman I know has a rule that she does not show up on camera unless until the screen has spilt into atleast eight so her face does not fill up the entire space. It is not something I had considered or worked up a formula as she had. You want to be seen but not with every defect visible.

I had to stop by at the local branch of my bank recently and saw a woman ahead of me wearing a mask with an oversize YSL logo and a good amount of eye-makeup. A study in contrast I suppose. Some of us want to take a break from putting a face on and getting in front of camera all day long and others want to make the most of what remains visible. I completely agree with this CEO who says dress-pants aren't returning after the pandemic. I personally have no desire to wear them ever again and from what I know, other women would agree.

Women have traded business suits and tailored pants for clothes with more stretch. With millions of Americans now using their living rooms as offices, donning casual tees or hoodies during video calls has become the norm.

When people dress up for Zoom like they are in a physical office, everyone notices and they get compliments. It's not expected and if we choose to go out of our way for whatever reason, no one else feels obligated to follow suit. So the enthusiasm for dressing up for work does not last too long. 

Frame Six

 The first line of the poem Frame Six by Cheswayo Mphansa, lingered with me for days. 

"These days I wake in the used light of someone’s spent life."

There are degrees of sadness and despair in those words for me. It brought back memories of time thankfully long past where these words could have been exactly what I sought to describe what I was living through. I wrote about my nights in a cold attic many years ago. If I had the words Mphansa does, I would have expressed it more memorably and without wasting any. His poem reminded of a blog by young person describing the wisdom of having lived thirty years. Lot of good insights there but the last line is the best - the days are long but the decades are short. This gets truer the longer you live I think. 

Just like that the 20s and 30s are over and if you had not been spending those long days thinking about the larger purpose of your life, suddenly you are left with far less intangible resources than you once had. I spent my 20s waging wars that I felt were worth fighting at the time - not concerned as much about what I would have to show for it at the end of my life. The wars were won to my satisfaction and I was also worn out. In hindsight that energy could have been diverted to much better end and by when that epiphany occurred I was no longer the person I was in my 20s - I did not have any of that fight left in me. 

Building Tunnels

Our walks in the evening takes us under a tunnel sometimes built in pre- Civil War times. There is a plaque at the entrance that has the story about when it was built and what purposes it has served over the years. Lately, it seems to be a favorite spot for people to take glamor shots. It makes for a stunning backdrop for a portrait.  Recently the lights inside were changed to LED creating a strange juxtaposition of old and new. 

Reading this article about the use of AI in civil engineering made me think of this tunnel build without the benefit of anything modern and holding its own for centuries. Was it the best design or was it the most cost-effective project - who can tell. But after all this time has passed and as people treat it as a thing of beauty not engineering efficiency, does it even matter? Two hundred or more years from now, would any of what we are building now to serve our daily needs (as this tunnel had in it's time) turn into a place where newly weds would come to take pictures, or a girl hoping to launch a modeling career have her portfolio shot? If that were to be a goal to aspire for the AI would need to optimize for very different things. 

Cooking Simple

I watched this video recently and decided I must try to fry eggs masterfully. Jacques Pépin makes it look very easy and it would seem if you repeated all his steps faithfully you could do it too. And so I did and there were so many points of failure that it wasn't worth enumerating them. The experience gave me a lot to think about. I have been cooking since my teens - for myself when I felt like trying something new and then over the years cooking more routinely. So in terms of years of experience, I have more than plenty. But mastery over a very simple dish is the hardest thing to achieve. Pépin's eggs will take me many more attempts until I figure out which steps went slightly wrong to create the long list of defects. It is a teachable moment for anyone trying to master anything and being deceived by the simplicity of the first task. 

It made me think also of the dish that I have indeed mastered over decades of trial and error. It is my grandmother's signature fish stew with a bunch of vegetables and potatoes. It takes very few ingredients - salt, turmeric, green chilies, ginger, cumin and coriander. My first attempts came out a far cry from the taste I loved so much. She suffered terribly the last several years of her life and the closer we got to losing her, the more I was desperate to master the stew so it would taste as if she had cooked it. 

I arrived at point a few years after her passing. It was like the sun has broken through the clouds. Finally, the ingredients did what they were meant to do and it was like I was eating at my grandmother's house. This is one of the simplest, humblest Bengali dishes. Grandma was able to whip it up in under fifteen minutes. It took me a couple of decades to match her. When I watched her in her kitchen cooking this stew, I never thought it would be so much time and effort. Like Pépin she made it look dead simple. 

Choosing Lanes

A post by a client from a long time ago popped up on my LinkedIn feed recently. I have not been in touch with B for over a decade now so it was interesting to see what he has been upto since that time.  He stayed with the same company for going on twenty years now which in itself is quite remarkable in this day and age. He started as an intern after grad school and just stayed put. Doing that, making the right moves and finding the right sponsors has got him pretty far long. 

B was unremarkable at the time I knew him and there were others in his peer group that could outshine him easily. The fact is none of them did what he did - they got restless, moved on - some a couple of times, others far more often. B hunkered down and built a brand for himself. I am sure who I knew this person to be once is far from who he is now - he applied effort to grow and transform himself. It made me wonder of internal motivation that drives people to do that. B's well curated LinkedIn profile reminded me of a TED Talk I watched a while back about finding sponsors and it made me think about those who don't care to do that - like my other former client P. After twenty years at the job, he was recently laid-off. P is one of those that can deliver results in the most adverse conditions and do so consistently. The workhorse everyone counts on and he has a very pleasant demeanor. 

Yet, he never got promoted and more importantly, he made no effort to get visible or rewarded. He just did a great job everyday. He had both performance and relationship currency in spades but he never cashed on either. What I remember most about P is how his face would light up when it talked of his wife and his young son. He had been through divorce and found this amazing woman a few years later. P was genuinely grateful to have her in his life and for the fact that she made him a father even if late in life. I am going to guess that family gave a lot more validation and happiness than any promotion at work could so he chose his lane. 

Imagined Conversations

Interesting and creepy idea about a chatbot that would allow you to speak to the deceased. Its not enough to had digitized just about everything that could be a live human, we need to now go to the other side and rouse the dead up as well. What would be more "useful" would be to have the memories of people stored away so we could recall the great grandmother's knowledge of the family tree, folk remedies and dessert recipes. Most of us have never met our but if they had vibrant personalities, you hear stories about them that fade away over time, with new generations knowing less and less about them. 

According to the patent information, the tool would cull "social data" such as images, social media posts, messages, voice data and written letters from the chosen individual. That data would be used to train a chatbot to "converse and interact in the personality of the specific person." It could also rely on outside data sources, in case the user asked a question of the bot that couldn't be answered based on the person's social data.

Too bad the dead cannot be left in peace anymore. We would harvest their digital remains to make something out of it. If we wanted the great grandfather dead in the 1920s to show up in my cousin R's  wedding video, maybe that could be arranged. I think of R in particular, because he is way younger than me, has parents who managed to estrange just about everyone they know. Now, with a wedding planned in the middle of a pandemic, just about no one will make it - they have the perfect excuse for bailing out now. Faking up a big fat Indian wedding with five hundred guests to include every branch and tendril of the extended family would be his mother's dream come true. To bad the technology is not quite ready yet. 

Being Broken

Beautiful short about being broken and the power that comes with it. Got me thinking about broken-ness that is not visible, that did not leave scars that are easily seen. A person can through years of emotional distress and come out the other end looking normal, doing mundane, everyday things like others who have not had anything close to the emotional equivalent of being amputated. This person has no signs of being broken, so much so that they can convince themselves they are not. 

That can be a trap because as Jon Wilson in the short says, there is such a thing as post traumatic growth. Not acknowledging the trauma and being broken beyond repair from it is going to prevent the opportunity for growth. Watching this was very timely, given my life long struggle to make real and lasting peace with my parents. I am likely seeking that growth without accepting I am broken and have been for a very long time. I need to accept my life before J was an absolute ghost town because the all the significant people present in it were broken and could not be family for me. I carried all of that into my motherhood and failed J in ways that I cannot undo but I also made amends along the way, allowed her room to forge her own path. That was the only glimpse of "growth" I had. 

Letting Go

Recently, I had a particularly intense conversation with my father that left me feeling about as helpless as a child. At his age, and given the times, he wants to make sure he has thought through inheritance issues. Working through the logistics is where the problems begin. It seems like he wants the facts of my life to fit the easy option for him. When they don't, he starts to reject any information I provide and then becomes angry and resentful towards me. Every step of my life which has been a deviation from the norm is a source of disappointment and aggravation for him. There is an exuberant abundance of these "deviant" steps in my life so he is perpetually dissatisfied. 

While I am too old to worry about not living up to his ideal version of my life,  other things upset me deeply. I see him unwilling to do his part despite having the luxury of unlimited time and very little to do. He has been retired close to twenty years now, I am very far from that life stage. He is physically and mentally capable of doing a lot of what he is asking me to do. As the conversation grew tense and angry, I found myself telling him it is impossible to talk with him - not just because he is old now, it was no different forty years ago. There is truth to that - my father is someone who is not able hear others. He was not a good listener and age did not make it better. He is also deeply pessimistic and has been planning for the end of his life for as long as I can remember. Reading this article on the value of forgiving your parents gave me much to think about. 

Perfect Escape

28 Summers is a fun and the much-needed escapist read. It reminds me of fast casual food. I would compare it to brunch at Panera. I pick Panera because it was J's favorite place to hang out with me on Saturday mornings. It was our third-place and we looked forward to it all week. Now that she is away and in college, she thinks about those outings and we both miss that experience.

The book created the same sense of cozy but not fussy and not to too easy either. J and I have picked up fries from a McDonald's drive-through sometimes we wanted a quick snack and were not willing to think to hard about it. This book is not that easy bag of fries - it has a lot more going for it. It is simply begging to be made into a movie. The language has some punch to it and makes effortless word pictures:

They order breakfast in the room each morning. The coffee is rich and fragrant; Jake enjoys hearing his spoon chime against the sides of the bone-china cup. It sounds like privilege. He feels the same way about the French butter, which he paints across the flaky insides of the croissants.

Definitely recommend reading for those times when you want to escape and still learn from the experience. Little gems like this one about the minor acts of love that we don't even see:

Jake folds the omelet over. He gives Mallory the one that is a little superior—with more gooey cheese and more golden-brown onions—and that’s another demonstration of his love. At home, he always takes the better portion because giving it to Ursula would be a waste.

As the story progresses, the cast of characters grows. Many are incidental, don't fortify the main storyline but as in real-life they form the din and chaos of everyday which is full of people who are living their own lives unrelated to yours and meet only by accident and at tangent. At the center of this whole thing is the idea of having found the one and how its over for everyone else at that point:

Mallory loves Jake. Her heart is not transferrable. It has belonged to Jake since the first time he answered the phone in Coop’s room, since the afternoon he stepped off the ferry and onto the dock, since the moment he slid an omelet onto her plate

Marriage Story

Watched Mr. and Mrs. Smith recently and was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked it. This is definitely not my kind of movie genre. I saw it as a story of a marriage and how it responds to various forms of stress. The hyperbole is hysterical all the way around but the concepts hold for average mortals with their mundane relationship struggles. Lack of trust, desire to control resulting from that acting as a corrosive force in the marriage. In the movie it escalates into a lot of silly, gratuitous violence because the spouses are mad enough to kill each other literally. 

Release comes through coming clean out of the intricate web of lies - it saves the marriage. In the life of ordinary people,  a couple can be strong together and be a bit isolated from their community. This is a figurative killing of outside connections to preserve the most critical one for the parties. It is reminiscent of grooming a nice bonsai - the resulting relationship is perfect and stunted. The movie made me think about the trade-offs people make to preserve their intimate relationship. It was interesting to take away from a mindless action flick something entirely different. 

Raspberry Jam

Read this Anna Akmatova poem for the first time and was struck by its sparseness. It called to mind a loveless marriage where the partners are all too familiar with each other's loves and hates but there is still no accord. Neither love nor hate makes for common ground but it results in knowing each other deeply and having more reasons to pull apart. 

The reference to raspberry jam and tea, reminded me of many couples I know who are very far apart in their food preferences. Over the years, the gravity of what is cooked at home moves to one side or the other. The person who simply won't stand for certain foods will likely prevail with the other coming around to accepting food they don't particularly like but can tolerate. 

If I stay overnight at anyone's home, I generally cook them a meal. It's a habit I learned from my mother. With many of these couples, I end up cooking something the "deprived" party loves and has not had in a long time. They remember that meal for months and and years not because I am such a spectacular cook but because I made it possible for them to enjoy something they had loved and lost. 

The longer the marriage, the less this person remembers who they used to be, what their loves and hates were because they are the unifying, binding force of the relationship. They move to center and get consumed and almost disappear. By cooking for them to their taste, I connect them briefly to a time long past. I did not set out to do this as a goal but it always happens that the sacrificing spouse will often tell me what foods they love and haven't had in a long time. 

Fictional Show

Great idea for a television show that will never happen. The vision is picture perfect: 

Finally, they could hire epidemiologists to “call” a state as “healthy.” Imagine Kornacki getting an update from his producer in his ear at 8:30 eastern on a Tuesday night. “Wait, wait — I’m just getting this from the decision desk. We are now prepared to call the state of Maine as healthy.”

But apparently, the man has other plans, Being that I did not follow election coverage live last year, I am not able to fully appreciate his talents but people in the know are singing his praises:

If you are not familiar with Kornacki, the first thing you need to know is that he is spectacular and must be protected at all costs. Kornacki is a national political correspondent for NBC News and MSNBC who guided many a frazzled viewer through sleepless nights in early November by playing a touch-screen display of election results like a Stradivarius while chugging Diet Coke and becoming a viral sensation.

The stories about Kornacki remind of the guy in our town who called snow-day for the local school system. A nice looking young man, he attained celebrity over time and had memes dedicated to him and his very careful phrasing of updates before making the big reveal - snow-day or not. Sadly for him, his celebrity was seasonal and no one remembered him until the dead of winter. Talk about fifteen minutes of fame but almost a more heartless version of it.

Musical Protest

Watching 8 Mile was an enlightening experience for me specially that I have no understanding or familiarity with this genre of music. I used to wonder about the allure of rap music and listening to the lyrics for the first time while watching this movie, it started to make sense. As we grow more sensitive and politically correct, there needs to be space where rules can be broken safely while creating music and art. There is empowerment in that. What was a big revelation to me is a well known fact. 

I was more familiar with the negative connotations and did not think about such music being a form of protest. The supporting cast is great and they go a long way in giving the troubled under-dog story some heft and authenticity. One of my favorite scenes was Eminem tucking in his baby sister making up a lullaby on the fly. His rapping talent put to mundane use but the little girl's face lights up with happiness. In the middle of the dysfunctional family situation with an absent and alcoholic mother, he brings a bit of joy to this child who is shown running scared and fending for herself the best she can. Overall, the movie is offers a taste of rap culture and holds it own even for people like me who know nothing about it. I am sure there are better movies in the genre but for a novice viewer this may be good enough.

Back Door

This news about a back-doored home security camera and invasion of privacy is no surprise. Such events are a not a matter of if but when. Having the perimeter of your home watched 24/7 and having access to the cameras from just about anywhere is a huge convenience - and there is a proportionate risk as illustrated by this story. Our data is being constantly harvested by devices we allowed in our homes and it is sold to third parties who use it to build better, more complete profiles of us. There is a cradle to grave cycle of data collection in progress all aimed at pushing us to consume more. 

Advertising giant Google claims that 30 million students nationwide use its products in school. In many schools, students are required to use a Gmail account and Google products as part of their public school education. When we consider the impact of these programs, we must remember that Google is an advertising company. The maxim that “When something is free, you're the product” applies broadly in the digital age. 

Allowing our minor kids to become the fodder for advertising companies cannot be good and yet very little is being done to stop it. There are certain gravitational effects when it comes to movement of data and when a bulk of it is in one place (in this Google), the rest will follow there. It's very important for the vendor to get their foot in the door and create the momentum for data to move in their direction. The rest takes care of itself. So much harm can be done to our kids with their data. I would not be surprised to read about some back-door exploit that harmed a lot of them and with no recourse. 

Making Friends

This funny New Yorker post on how to make friends as an adult takes a light-hearted approach to solve this problem. Jokes apart this is a problem that afflicts more than just young people people coming out of the bubble of college where the demands of socialization in the real-world are comfortably absent. It's easy to fall into the trap that the ease of making friends and acquaintances in college just follows naturally into the real world. It takes a while for reality to set in. 

The pattern continues into much later life - for those who had many fits and starts to establish their place in the world. Each change takes away some of the community the person had created around them, time and distance fray the bonds between people. So in the second half of a person's life they might find themselves in the need to make new friends and struggle with it. What's funny at twenty something is much sadder by that age. 

I have a few friends my age who chose to never marry or have kids. From what they tell me, that is the hardest category to be in if you are looking for a vibrant social life. All well-meaning people around them are trying to get them paired and just that is enough to trigger alienation. They don't want to look like people in need of a rescue and the truth is they are don't need these lifelines. The choice to be single and/or childless they made thoughtfully. It was not an act of desperation or a consequence of failure. But they are not given enough credit - people are too eager to normalize and mainstream them. Having been an odd misfit for most of my life, I feel a kinship with this set and do my best to stay close to them without telling them how to live their lives. I know they enrich mine and I hope they can say the same of me.

Other Endings

I learn a lot from young people all the time. One kid I have known since her teens, is in her mid-twenties now. She's been going steady with a guy for a few years and they have been living together for over a year. In the early days, she was very excited about him and talked about how he was too perfect to be true. 

As our lives grew busier, I heard less and less from her but even when we talked much less about her guy. I assumed it was a sign of a good and comfortable relationship where much more was private than it had been in the early days. Recently she spoke about wanting out of what appears to be a comfortable but not exciting life situation with this man. She very much appreciates the value of what she has and is by no means ungrateful. Yet, she just can't see the rest of her life with this person. 

Around her age, I found myself in very similar shoes - though in my case, I experienced it as a high degree of overall unhappiness that never went away - not even on the good days. Nothing was so broken that I had to leave the marriage with my few month old baby and yet that is what I did. So far, I have not regretted my decision. That is not to say, I never will and definitely that is not the right decision for everyone. But I know all to well that feeling of numbness, waking up every morning and wondering if the days will unfold ad nauseum to the unrelenting hopelessness. 

I knew back then that it is possible for a person to wake up feeling positive about their day, generally see a path to attaining atleast some of their life dreams. And I knew I wanted to experience that - even if it came at a significant cost. I did not advise my young friend one way or the other though she knows my story, Only she knows the truth about her relationship and her level of satisfaction with it. Only she knows how high a price she will be willing to pay for a chance to have other options, for the story of her life to have other possible endings. 

Nudge Robot

My friend B was complaining about her teen being constantly immersed in his electronics to the exclusion of everything else in life and how the pandemic can exacerbated the problem. She is not alone here but that does not make her plight any easier. As we chatted, we tossed the idea of a robot that could nudge kids into doing things that were good for them and disable all electronics until the beneficial tasks were done. It was amusing to consider these intermittent digital blackouts to help him put away his things, complete his homework, do his household chores and more. The idea is not novel and no surprise there are ethical concerns around it. 

Who should be the arbiter of good and is it humane to trigger Pavlovian responses for such good are the first questions that come to mind. In the example of a robot that is meant to nudge a recalcitrant teen into building good habits and life-skills, it can be argued that is it automation of some parental duties. Instead of being the constant nag and bickering all day with your kid, presumably you get the nudge robot to do the unpleasant work on your behalf. So the rules by which the said robot delivers its nudges is no different from those of the parent. 

There is no such thing as the perfect, infallible parent so it follows that the robot will be similarly flawed. The short term benefits are alluring, all devices go dark until homework is done, piano practice is completed, room tidied up and so on. But the parent gets disintermediated in the process - this is no different than turning on cartoons to placate a fussing child. Parenting should be the job of the parent and when it is outsourced, that entity be it a person or a robot acquires the mantle of parent in some sense. Long term that is not a good idea for anyone involved. 

Contrast Study

Read this funny and heart-warming story featuring the tooth-fairy the same time as this sad news of LA County. Both stories stuck with me as I thought about the astounding contrast in how this time was experienced by people not so far apart from each other.

Across the border, this child is leading a largely normal life - attending elementary school in person, meeting his friends everyday. The school Vice Principal has the mental capacity left to be a fun and caring adult in the life of this child. 

Such is hardly the case with teachers here in America. The levity has evaporated a long time ago and teachers are in crisis management mode for going on a year now.

“There was a lot of emotional turmoil and we couldn’t do a whole lot of curricular teaching,” she said. “Those were some of the darkest weeks of my life.” Instead of spending her time focused on lesson plans, she found herself consumed by her students’ emotional well-being — contacting those who had to temporarily stay with other relatives, texting with children whose parents were hospitalized.

Gavin and his friends are incredibly lucky to have normal in their lives which has all but disappeared for many of his peers across the border. Losing a couple of years to this chaos in the life of a child who is under ten years old is a disproportionate blow in terms percent of life lost. I cannot even begin to imagine how it feels to be in that kid's shoes or how the parents cope.