Heartcrossings

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...

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 shuffl...

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 no...

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...

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 applie...

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

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 circumsta...

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...

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 ...

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...

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 th...

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...

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 com...

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 mil...

 The first line of the poem Frame Six by Cheswayo Mphans a, 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 s...

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 com...

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 w...

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 re...

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 ...

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 th...

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 i...

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 ...

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 mov...

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 th...

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...

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 ...

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 c radle 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 b...

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 kid...

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 goo...

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 co...

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 wi...