Finish Line

I have fallen into a morbid routine of checking in on my parents twice a day and bracing myself for news that despite their efforts to stay safe, they are impacted by the fire that is raging in India. More and more of their neighbors are getting sick every day and this is a community of senior citizens with a smattering of younger folks. One family has been self-isolating for two weeks and no one knows how they are faring behind closed doors. 

People feel awkward about calling when their ability to help is non-existent. Checking on my other relatives feels much the same way - I am not sure anyone wants it at this time. With friends it is a bit easier but I am filled with dread when they don't reply. In one instance, this person had had a freak accident and burnt herself while making chai in the kitchen. That put her out of commission for a couple of days and I had activated our full network to track her down. On day three she called and told me what had happened and told me to stop freaking out. 

My friend L's mother died leaving behind a desolate husband of sixty some years. The old man is dazed by the events of the world now confounded by being left alone to figure out what it all means. Should he stay and wait but for what and if not then where is he meant to go and why. These would have been hard questions in the best of times for a widower his age with children living in far flung countries but now they are all but impossible to answer. No one has a plan for him, they watch helplessly as he shuffles around a shadow of his former self, waiting like the rest of us but feeling a lot closer to the finish line. 

Missing Moments

 Loved this poem about a man who had never heard of Frank Sinatra. A rather silly premise carrying a faint whiff of plausibility. It is reminiscent of the popular movie trope when a big secret comes that close to being revealed and each time an interruption occurs that prevents it. And in the interim, lives continue to unravel when a lot of pain could have been averted just if the words were spoken out loud that needed to be. In movies, closure comes in the end - the secret is finally revealed and order resumes. But it is possible that it never does. 

People do carry sins, omissions and secrets to their grave. What the poet describes could also happen to a phenomenon that is very short-lived, you could legitimately miss that moment and all could be forgotten forever. So many have their fifteen minutes of fame on social-media these days. They could be trending one day and pass into oblivion the next. So if you weren't there when they were most visible chances are you will never know they existed and you just did not know. Much like this man who never heard of Frank Sinatra.

Living Dreams

Watching Operation Varsity Blues was an illuminating experience. Much of the material surfaces in the news cycles at the time but the little details were fascinating - how rich parents can have their kids medically certified as needing accommodations to take the SAT/ACT. So they get unlimited time over multiple days to complete. Similarly check the wrong option for race (become Latino instead of White) and get a boost. The whole game is about finding loopholes to maximize the chances of admission to an elite college. As one of the test prep experts put it college admission is about the parent getting to go to the college of their dreams which the child being their vehicle to do so. He is right on the money. 

So when the said parent has access to a lot of resources, they will deploy it to achieve their goal - the second chance at life, living vicariously through their child's college experience. The burden on the kid is two-fold. First they have to jump through these insane hoops, have the flawless resume and story to get in. Second, they have to live the college dream in the manner that their parent imagined it to be. It is not enough to deliver on the first goal by just getting in. Once they are in, they are puppets on a string experiencing college by proxy for the parent. At the end of it all, the child (now in their early twenties) is left with nothing  meaningfully theirs to own. The happiest, most well-rounded people pursue their own dreams, tumble along way, make wrong turns and course correct until they reach where they want to. I have been fortunate to know a few such people over the years and not one of them went to a school so fancy that a parent would take jail time to get their child in. 

Burning Out

For a lot of young people this is their dream job out of college. It was true in my time and now in my daughter's. I never understood the point of a 95 hour work week even if the money was 2-3 times as good. There is no ROI for the employee even with that. Thankfully J has no desire to enter this hamster wheel. If a person is working for themselves as the founder of their own company, I can understand it can be a labor of love and being always on is part of that process. The separation between personal and professional identity and life could meld. The person is their business so they are infact one and the same. I can see them working 95 hour weeks if they so chose. But for everyone else who is an employee, these level of devotion to the cause makes no sense at all. The compensation and benefits should be based on a 40 hour work week and that per hour number should be where the person needs or wants it to be. The hapless junior banker adjusted for the hours she is working is likely making only a smidge above minimum wage. 

Somehow the allure of such job has been sold so well, that people are not doing the math. They are not taking into account the cost of recovering from the damage inflicted to their physical and mental health by such job and how that would greatly diminish their future earning potential. I remember the words of a wise boss I had very early in my career. She used to remind me that I have to pace myself for a marathon not a sprint so the overzealousness to show results should be tempered with that consideration. Can I produce "miracles" for years and decades or will it be all over in a quarter. Those words stayed with me and I have shared the wisdom with young people I have managed and mentored over the years. Maybe it helped save the sanity of a few - I know it transformed my life. 

Catching Breaks

Watched Inside Llewyn Davis which is probably not the best choice in such a difficult time. I dread calling home these days, people I know are sick, some hospitalized, others home before they are fully recovered - all this following a recent death. All around there is resignation to fate and the feeling that this will end when it will and not much anyone can do about it. My friend M has a mother suffering from dementia - she stands helplessly by watching the rapid decline of the person who was the matriarch of the family and had a solution to every problem. My parents stay locked indoors all day, few families in their apartment building are infected and are self-isolating, the rest are living in fear. 

Back to the movie - I am a "Coenite" as the reviewer puts it. This one is different and yet some scenes have the unmistakable Coen signature. For me, one of them was Llewyn and Jane sitting on a park bench and her spewing vitriol on him for possibly getting her pregnant. The rant assumes larger than life proportions, her anger turns comical except that no one is laughing. The movie starts and ends with the same scene, Llewyn can't propel himself out of his miserable existence, he swirls and spins around it infinitely like the earth on it's axis.

Even the moments that have some hopeful element, his life circumstances conspire to render hopeless. It is as if the universe simply does not want this man to catch a break. Such indeed is the situation for people stuck in the endless cycle of waves that the pandemic seems to bring. If you like Coen movies, definitely something to check out but maybe wait until the world is back to being "normal".

Being Scammed

I watched Compliance recently and was struck by how an entire group of people could be scammed and how the same tactics worked with many such groups of people. Scamming one random person is way easier than this. Around the same time as watching the movie, I started to receive order delivery confirmations for someone in Rajasthan whose first name is the same as mine. Each time I wrote to the delivery company (yet another wannabe UberEats like startup that is dreaming of the big league) to take me off their customer database. They dutifully opened a ticket and did nothing else. The fifth time this happened I wrote directly to the CEO and got this very bizarre response from one of his underlings:

As we connected with the customer who is using your email id, it's been informed that she is your friend, also the person took the email owner on a conference call and was confirmed on a recorded call that deactivation is not required as you both know each other hence we need to connect with you over a call and resolve the issue. Kindly request you to share your contact details so that we can connect with you and resolve the issue. Awaiting your response.

I proceeded to block the company from my mailbox and reported them to FTC. If I had more time or patience to dedicate to this stupidity I may have done more to deter them from doing what they were doing. The experience left me baffled by the level of bold-faced thievery of customer data this outfit was indulging in. 

The CEO in question is considered one of the rising stars in the desi startup land (but there are countless such stars that handily turn to mud and dust). The educational credentials on the guy were stellar but the resume not as much other than this sketchy start-up that had apparently gained some traction. I hope my namesake in Rajasthan is not being robbed blind and having her identity stolen by this company for good measure.

Snow Plow

 This is a story of snowplow parenting taken to bizarre levels of crazy and criminal. 

.. a 50-year-old mother in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, allegedly used social media photos of at least three cheerleaders and doctored them to create deceptively altered videos and photos known as deepfakes. She’s facing three counts of cyber harassment of a child and three additional counts of harassment..

This is reminiscent of other mothers (and fathers) who worked the system a bit too hard to get their kids into fancy colleges.

After all the helicoptering and snowplowing is said and done, the kids in questions are the ones left holding the bag. At some point in their lives they will be left without the trainer wheels, safety net and the walker. They will be forced to solve adult problems with their under-exercised brains that stopped needing to do any independent work after they got past they potty-training hump. I don't know if these parents think they do what they do out of love and solicitude for their children because in reality they are abusers guilty to cutting the figurative limbs of their progeny. 

True Value

Interesting post about the value of social sciences or the lack thereof.  It is not a "legitimate" science and has not produced in world-changing results like locomotives or vaccines. So why bother to study it. I crossed this fork in the road when I was nearing the end of high school. Anyone who knew me knew that in my heart I was a humanities student and I would love to study "useless" stuff like literature, social sciences and such. Yet, I was raised with the idea that becoming financially independent is the most important goal a woman can aspire for - the sooner the better, the more of this independence her chosen career brings her the greater her chance to get the other parts of her life right. This was the mantra for me and to that end studying engineering made sense - I had decent math and physics, enough to hold my own and get through the degree. Did all of that and the rest is history. 

Every day, I wonder why I am still doing what I don't love as a means to make money and when does this stop, can I ever get off what feels like a conveyor belt and do something that is actually meaningful to me. So when time came for J to think about what to study in high school and beyond, I thought I could do better. She was equally good at arts and sciences. Math came to her naturally and she was excited about it. That gave her a lot of options. We made sure she had equal exposure to all subjects she had any interest in and found the thing that got her excited to apply effort on everyday. At some point that could connect her to a source of decent income as well. From my own life experience, I have learned that those who keep working at something everyday out of love for that thing come to a level of perfection others simply cannot match. Perfection leads to other bounties over time - it is organic.

J does have a lot of math in her life but not study any hard sciences or engineering. So far the signs are she loves the opportunities she has encountered as a result. I hope she will wake up every morning of excited about the work day and eager to plunge head-first into it. That to me is the value of social sciences.

Plausible Deniability

Just finished reading Make Russia Great Again. One word to describe the book: hysterical. The story is tethered to the reality that were the years 2016-2020. But author lets his imagination take over and the one mishap follows the next. 

The cast of characters are all too familiar to anyone who follows American politics but Buckley's caricature of them turn them into faces in funhouse mirrors. Once they are that distorted out of reality, their actions don't seem so implausible anymore. He is lucky to be working with an inexhaustible supply of madness that those four years were but what is able to with it is truly masterful. This reviewer said it well:

Amid the twin economic and health catastrophes of our era, Buckley has done the impossible: Made Politics Funny Again. Laughter may not be the best medicine for covid-19, but it’s a heck of a lot better than bleach.

“Whom the gods would destroy, first they make believe that the thing is in the bag.” is a line in the book I found prescient for more reasons that one. That and this gem about the man himself "An upside to his stable genius was that he had so many brilliant ideas, he simply couldn’t keep track of them all." - probably for the best that such was the case. 

Endless Mirror

Reading this article about near death experiences made me want to read the book After, which happily is available at my local library. The way the book's author describes it's impact on people who had them is powerful:

But here I’ve found an experience that, sometimes in a matter of seconds, dramatically transforms people’s attitudes, values, beliefs, and behaviours.” Often, these changes persist over decades. In most instances, experiencers realise they are no longer afraid to die, which “has a profound impact on how they live their lives”, because “you lose your fear of life as well – you’re not afraid of taking chances.” Greyson sometimes asks people to describe their partners before and after an event, “and they’ll say, ‘Yeah, this isn’t the person I married; this is someone different.’” He adds, “They see a purpose in life they didn’t see before. I don’t know of anything else that powerful.”

That is like getting a second life without losing the knowledge of the first one. Reminds me of a quote from The Tibetan Book of the Dead: 

“death holds up an all-seeing mirror, ‘the mirror of past actions’, to our eyes, in which the consequences of all our negative and positive actions are clearly seen and there is a weighing of our past actions in the light of their consequences, the balance of which will determine the kind of existence or mental state we are being driven to enter.”

Watching Birds

On the weekends, we often walk by the river with marshes along it meandering course. Depending on time of day, it's possible to see a good number of birds. Anytime I see a birder with their binoculars, I pause as a safe distance away from them and try to see what they are seeing. Most often there is nothing to see because the bird in question maybe well hidden and far away. But in the marshes then they land or take off in unison, it does not take an expert to enjoy the sight. 

Reading about BirdCast was interesting. I did not know that these migrations happened in the dark. Maybe in subsequent versions of this tool, it would be possible to see when these migrating birds land in water-bodies nearby. Having empathy for birds can make people happier and the world a better place. I don't know about research but every birder I have ever on my walks looks like a peaceful, happy person. They would not be the kind to stir up drama. 

The researchers surveyed 3,546 people (largely bird-watchers) to evaluate how their willingness to engage in climate-friendly actions might be affected by how the problem of climate change is described to them..

.. Invoking a threat to humans led to no significant impact on the respondents’ willingness to reduce their carbon footprint—while invoking a threat to birds led to the most significant change of all.

Hardened Shape

Every time I read Jane Hirshfield, ordinary words acquire a magic glow like this poem about decisions where is begins with that time right before we decide:

There is a moment before a shape

hardens, a color sets.

Before the fixative or heat of   kiln.

The letter might still be taken

from the mailbox.

The hand held back by the elbow,

the word kept between the larynx pulse   

and the amplifying drum-skin of the room’s air.

There were letters in the mailbox a few times in my life that made for a dramatic turn of events. Almost always those "letters" showed up in due season following some steps and missteps I had made. 

One of the them was written by the boy who was the center of my universe in college. I was too proud, stupid, shy and confused to tell him that he was. He may have been one or all of that himself. So we danced around our real feelings for each other for four years and then some (which is when the letter writing started). Everyone who knew us saw what we had could be real, that we were lucky to have stumbled upon it. By year five we had started to work in different cities, living our independent lives after college. 

We talked about meeting each other many times but failed to act on it. And then one day that fateful letter arrived in which he made his first ever attempt to talk about his feelings - in his clumsy, awkward way and asked about the way forward even more clumsily. I decided to feel injured by the lack of fervor, the lack of a plan and everything else that I sought in the situation. Not once did it cross my mind, that I owned the failure equally. My response to that letter shaped the rest of my life and his. There was that "moment before a shape hardens, a color sets" which could have brought very different outcomes. I made a decision.

Killing Anger

In the last week, I have thought more about forgiveness than I have ever done before. I have held grudges and suffered for doing so. At some point, I decided to do something different, understand the meaning of :"Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil."

I started to realize that the people I find to be most pleasant and easy-going are the ones who don't let anger become destructive and what is more, they are able to channel it into something positive. They are also willing to give others plenty of latitude to disappoint them. In time the disappointment passes and they regain equilibrium. 

Based on outside observation, it seems like these folks assign very different weight to what can get a person angry. By being slow to respond to stimulus, by taking time process even when triggered and then being able to wash off the effects quickly. Over the years, I have slowed down in my response to stimulus by a lot, but the other two factors are a work in progress. 

The Dig

Watched The Dig recently and loved it. Lot of themes come together in the story - the frailty of life, the impermanence of the the physical body with the war looming and the importance of taking chances while one still can. Passion is explored in different ways - one man's lack of it for his young wife, another's devotion to the soil of Suffolk and dedicating his life to excavating the secrets that lay buried under it. Mrs. Edith Pretty around whom the story revolves does not reveal much of her inner universe but it is awash is sadness and death is closer to her than others know. This is one of those movies where each viewer will find a different point of connection. 

For me it was the relationship between the new arrivals to the dig -Stuart and Peggy Piggot. The husband is better credentialed for the job but the wife is the one with the real love for it. She is allowed to help with the excavation only because she weighs under nine stone and could not be harmful for the fragile structure of the site. Stuart is astoundingly cold and uninterested in Peggy whom he insists on calling Margaret. The woman keeps trying to find warmth in her marriage and fails each time. Edith observes from afar and notices that Peggy is attracted to her cousin Rory who is there helping with the dig. It is with Edith's discreet encouragement that Peggy is able to leave her dead end marriage and take a chance on love. 

There is nothing more corrosive to the heart of a person than to be rejected summarily by the one they married and hoped to love for life. That rejection breeds doubt, shame and fear of inadequacy if left unaddressed could cripple the person - they would never realize that the world outside sees them very differently than their spouse. They would not know they could take a chance and seek the love and warmth they are being denied in marriage. To see Peggy break free was heart-warming to say the least

Stopping Point

Reading this article reminded me of all the days at work when some conversations were so tiring and unending that once done, I had felt totally wiped out. The only thing I was good for at that point was a nap. For me there has been a theme to these discussions or meetings. Usually three or more people (including me) were involved it. It ran well over time because everyone wanted to talk rather than do the job at hand even though doing would be a lot easier and take up a lot less time. The whole game was about how to spend time not doing. 

The driver for this behavior is usually a misguided notion of what being a leader is about - a person who visions things but has no need to deliver or perform. When a person has been a leader for couple of decades, they are at the peak of their incompetence so it falls on those who are not wed to such a distorted world-view to do their work for them. 

That person who felt most like a leader always ended up the one who needed a tremendous amount of hand-holding, coaching, corralling or some such. The whole situation created an energy sink that seemed to draw out all my reserves. As I think about those events, in every one of them I knew when I needed to bail and could have found a way to do so. Each time, I did not thinking resolution would arrive in the next few minutes and people would wise up to the absurdity of what was going on of their own volition. In all cases, nothing was resolved and no such epiphany occurred.cMaybe like the author says neither side in my situation when to stop talking. 

Mastroianni and his colleagues found that only 2 percent of conversations ended at the time both parties desired, and only 30 percent of them finished when one of the pair wanted them to. In about half of the conversations, both people wanted to talk less, but their cutoff point was usually different. Participants in both studies reported, on average, that the desired length of their conversation was about half of its actual length.

If we had put ourselves out of our misery half the way through maybe we would have all come out ahead.

Mapping Stars

Interesting story about the unseen contributions of women. What is sad, in many ways that could be a story of our times too. In business, women are left to do the hard, unrewarding, behind the scenes work for which they are not recognized. If done well, it's no big deal - was too trivial to begin with. What is hardly if ever mentioned is how that job came to become the woman's job in the first place. Often because men were talking about doing the work but not actually doing very much. Posturing is enough if one is a man but not so for a woman - she actually needs to do what these ladies were doing. The real, unglamorous, tedious work that someone else can take credit for. 

This is not to say life works the same way for all men and all women - very far from that. There are plenty of women who play the man's game better than a man - a lot of bluster and no action while looking smart and competent. They move to the top even quicker than their male counterparts. That is the best of both worlds infact. Conversely, there are men who toil day in and day out in the shadows with no one ever noticing their efforts until they retire and go home for good. The majority experience is aligned closer to the story of the women who mapped out 400,000 stars.

Trying to Cope

I had to process all stages of grief in one day. People that have been in my life since I was born are falling apart over the death of my uncle - B. Well past midnight, my cousin P called crying her heart out over her guilt of not trying harder to intervene. My mother's rage at the needless passing of her baby brother is white hot but she is too heart-broken to cause any destruction with it. I think I am glad for that. All day, I found myself making phone calls - at the other end I was met with disbelief, anger, shock and guilt depending on who it was. 

Each time, I got of the phone, I felt a little more incapacitated and more squeezed out of space to experience my own grief. I keep hearing B's jovial voice in my ear as he called my name the way he used to when I called him. Each time that happens, I feel the tears coming - I wish I had called him more often, spent more time in India when I was last there. And someone or something interrupts that train of thought, B's voice fades away and there is that hollow silence that nothing can fill. 

One of my childhood friends who is close to my parents reports that he spoke to my mother and she is not holding up well. J says the same thing after speaking with my mother. I am not sure how I can help - she is drowning in this toxic mix of grief over her loss and anger at B's wife for her mismanagement of the situation, for blindsiding the whole family, for her brother ending up in a body bag, being cremated like he was toxic waste, for there not being an urn with his ashes they could float in the river close to their ancestral village that he longed to visit. 

At work, only a few people know most don't understand. Despite all the inclusivity and diversity training, it is lost on many who are not from my cultural background, that a maternal uncle can be a pivotal figure in a person's life. They don't understand why B's passing is such a big deal for me - one woman did not even offer her condolences when I told her. I was so shocked that it altered my entire thinking about who she was as a person and my professional relationship with her. I dread having to meet her in days to come. One of my Sri Lankan colleagues got it right away, he offered to pick my work for a week so I could properly grieve. I could not do that to him, the man already works over fifty hours a week. But I deeply appreciated his desire to help me find that immediate quiet space to feel the pain to the degree I needed to heal in the end. 

Losing my Uncle

My maternal uncle died of Covid yesterday. Hearing the news felt like having my face smashed against a wall. He was the anchor of the family - tenacious, energetic, accommodating, and willing to say Yes as much as possible. B was also a very private man, there was a lot we did not know about him. My first memories of him are sitting on a tiny seat attached to the rod of his bicycle as he rode me to kindergarten.  My parents were moving to a different city and he had some time off that summer and had come by to help with the move. 

The few weeks he lived with us are among the brightest of my early childhood. Back in those days, B was fashion-forward and looked like a movie-star in his bell-bottom pants, boots, goatee and dark shades. I recall the swell of pride showing my uncle off to my friends. In years to come he would introduce me to disco and pop-music, action movies, comic books and more. B was not like the rest of my family - he marched to the beat of a different drummer.

 He had dated the woman who is now his widow for about a decade before they married. It was quite the scandal and everyone pretended it was not happening and this woman did not exist. Unlike the other adults, he was not shy to tell me and my cousin that S was his girlfriend and one day they might be married. We knew not to ask questions but only listen. We got to see the gifts he bought for her but it would be many years until we actually met her. S was a mythical creature to us kids - the woman B was going to marry some day, the woman that my grandmother did not approve of, the one we had never seen but only imagined of, the one who sang on Akashvani some specific day of the week. Even grandma admitted she was an amazing singer. 

The marriage happened at last - S was the most dazzling bride I had seen at that point in my life. My grandmother and S did not get along at all. The joint-family spilt in a few years with B parting ways together with his wife and baby daughter. S turned out to be not as perfect as she seemed in her beautiful bridal wear. She turned out to be a diva that demanded more in time, energy and resources my uncle had. 

He started to work harder and harder to bridge the gap, He was close to 70 and did not stop working until he was taken to the hospital with severe symptoms. Like their mother his two grown-up kids looked to B as someone who has an infinite capacity to give, tolerate, provide, accept and not complain. I don't believe anyone in the family tried to exploit his good nature. It was just that the more they asked for, they more capacity they discovered he had to give. They took what he gave so freely and they came back to see if there was any more he could offer and there always was. B was good-natured, mild-mannered and had a ready smile.

When we spoke sometimes, it was usually on his way back from his 10 km morning walk. He had a place along the way he stopped for chai and also called me. We talked abut things other than what was going on with his wife or kids. Sometimes, I reminisced about childhood memories with him - the first time I ate ice-cream from a cone, the time he took me to the doll museum, the time he took me and my cousin to a Bruce Lee movie, the times my cousin and I ran across our grandmother's bed and crashed on him - it was our game, the time that he gave me his Dolly Parton cassettes, the time when he had to give us endless piggy back rides until our mothers hollered at us to stop. 

Mostly we talked about the world outside his perimeter, what he had not seen, things that he was curious about. He asked me my opinion about events in America and I asked him about the goings on in India. He doted upon J and I could hear the warm smile in his voice when I talked about her. He was proud of the grandbaby and made no bones about it. I had to watch J bawling like a baby when I told her of his passing. 

The way he died was very much a culmination of his life story. Everyone wanted everything from him, he did more than he was able to the very end, got sick from being exposed to the virus because he could not say no being part of a large family gathering a few weeks ago. Once he got sick, no one was in charge of him, they neglected his condition until it got to the point of no return. No one was accustomed to doing anything for B, he was the one who delivered for everyone else. His wife made decisions about his health without consulting anyone and most of the extended family remained in the dark until it was too late. Those that knew what was going including his grown up kids acted like bystanders and failed to take action, intervene, ask questions - demonstrate any kind of leadership in crisis. I was among the last to know and I learned about the situation from an unrelated third-party by accident.

I loved my uncle deeply - he was something in-between a father and a big brother to me. I have not comprehended my loss and have no idea how big of a void he has left in my life. He was a man I could absolutely count on. He never made a commitment he could not keep and as I recall, he did not promise that he would be around when I came next to Kolkata. 

Learning Salt

I was a fan of the show and decided to read the book Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking. My first favorite thing about the book - the author's exuberant personality shines through. That was the reason I loved the show. Not every cook is able to communicate their passion for the inner universe of salt quite like Nosrat. I was eager to see what she says of salt in her book - an ingredient I have had a complex relationship with over the years. When younger, I had frequently missed the mark by a few grains too little. I also had this deep connection to my maternal grandmother's cooking - she liked her food a little bland to many people's taste but it defined perfection to mine. 

While others at the table would sprinkle table salt on the food she had cooked, I never felt the need. To me that was destroying the fine balance of her work. It was as if her and I understood the magic of that taste and it somehow escaped everyone else. I think I strove to achieve that quality, that degree of saltiness that so defined her cooking. But I felt just a tiny bit short and disappointed myself - a feeling that only intensified after she passed on. A decade later, I find that most days, if I am paying attention, I can get my food to taste like hers - the salt is where it needs to be. While it defines perfection for me, others find it a bit bland. I can sense the tiniest twinge of disappointment at the table when I serve my food. For them I am seven grains short - like my grandma used to be. Nosrat says of salt:

I can’t prescribe precise amounts of salt for blanching water for a few reasons: I don’t know what size your pot is, how much water you’re using, how much food you’re blanching, or what type of salt you’re using. All of these variables will dictate how much salt to use, and even they may change each time you cook. Instead, season your cooking water until it’s as salty as the sea (or more accurately, your memory of the sea.

I love how she invokes the memory of the sea and its briny taste as a guide to getting salt right in the kitchen. My grandmother was the master of such imprecision. Would needed to understand the feeling she was going after not so much the measure of things.

I figured out that when I seasoned chickens for the spit, it should look like a light snowstorm had fallen over the butchering table. It was only with repetition and practice that I found these landmarks.

The Roof

Watched The Roof recently and loved it. To me it was reminiscent of black and white movies from the same time that were made in India with similar themes - the lack of personal space, privacy, the fight for meagre resources in large multi-generational families and the the bonds of family and community. The newly weds in the story have nothing but their love for each other and the desire to provide a roof over the head of their soon to arrive baby.  Every attempt they make to find a place of their own is thwarted by obstacles and yet they persist. The movie is about the crushing grind of poverty and yet it is a happy one. Black and white movies are very much a part of my childhood when only newer movies were color. In the town I grew up, there was a sizeable Bengali community that organized showings of older Bangla movies. 

My parents followed their schedule very closely and on Friday evenings after school, it was common for my mother and I to get dressed and walk over to this theater. My father came directly from work. By the time we all got there it would be close to show-time and the place would be buzzing with snack and chai vendors. We got our supplies and went into the dark auditorium. The taste of the vegetable chop and with sugary chai in a clay cups were an intrinsic part of the experience. Many of the movies I saw during that time were a couple of decades old and held nostalgic value for my parent's generation. While most of what I saw was not particularly memorable, this is where I became familiar with the work of Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Ritwik Ghatak and Goutam Ghosh. De Sica's Bicycle Thief had inspired Ray to make his first film. The influence and inspiration is plainly evident in The Roof as it is in Bicycle Thief. 

Making Soup

For the last few years, I have been making an effort to have a soup for lunch and make a big batch over the weekend. We went through the staples we knew to make pretty quickly and then started to get bored by having just a few options to rotate through. In trying to put together a soup with whatever was in the kitchen, I realized that there are some principles that apply to making a good soup - atleast to my taste. One of the rules I decided to follow was not to introduce too many ingredients and definitely not ones that could clash at some level. So if I was making a root vegetable soup maybe stick with two of them and not extend to five. If herbs were going to be used, freshly chopped at added in the end was best. Same rules applied - maybe two herbs and where possible only one. Butter and white wine can liven the broth but not every broth is made for such treatment. 

These were my discoveries along the way of making my own recipes to suit our tastes. I spent time thinking about the soup that missed the mark - everything was in place but it was still not something I looked forward to at lunch each day. Clearly there was something foundational I was doing wrong. I started to browse through some books to see if I could learn the tenets of good soup-making. I will always find it hard to follow a recipe but I can learn techniques and rules that apply to all of them - that is like learning language and grammar. One of the books that taught me how to make fewer mistakes with my experiments was The Big Book of Soups and Stews - one of the learnings from the first fifteen minutes of reading it was the importance of temperature and how to get it right:

Simmer soups and stews over medium-low or low heat, depending on the stove. Do not boil, just keep them at a gentle ripple. Gas stoves are hotter and faster than electric ones.

I put that learning to use immediately and got much better results. The other one was about reheating:

Reheat soups or stews that have been made ahead over low heat, stirring constantly and adding more liquid if necessary. If using a microwave oven, watch carefully and do not overcook.

I don't believe I ever reheated my daily portion of soup from the weekend in the right way. It's no surprise that it got to be more and more uninspiring by the day. 

Simple and even obvious lessons in cooking but so easy to get wrong. My latest effort involved potatoes, onions, green chili, parsnip and watercress with a bit of white wine and butter. The ingredients made sense together when I thought about it. I made sure I minded the sequence of adding them and the temperature. That made a remarkable difference. 

Slowing Down

I have never been a fan of 2-day shipping for more than 90% of what I buy online. I can easily wait a week if not longer. Given the right incentives, I would easily select a later date. Since I am not a big shopper, I don't have the problem this article describes but there is a great value to consolidating the last mile delivery to once a week. Even within the existing online shopping eco-system, it is possible to create a pattern of incentives that will promote the right consumer behavior. Maybe all the things you buy that are not super urgent, you can indicate an acceptable delivery window - a month out and anytime in that 4th week is okay. So you stuff is staged that way but not quite shopped. 

By the close of that window, if you bought other things, you will be given the option to add to that same delivery which is may two weeks out by now. At some point the window closes and the remaining stuff is staged for later or delivered right away. Providing attractive discounts to wait and consolidate will make many customers choose this option, it may help them plan better and perhaps multiple households or individuals could get together to pull their lists together. I am thinking of deliveries to apartment buildings - if consolidation happens across the units, every day could be a delivery day and residents could hop on to one that is soonest. So many ways to slow down and not affect the consumer adversely. Maybe others will borrow a page from Olive.

There may be some trade-offs for the retailer, if gratification get to be once a month instead of once a week, then chances are they will no longer have control of the buy button in their brain. So the environment can be saved some while profits are made and shareholders are pleased.

Reproductive Labor

Reading about doing work that seems to erase itself in this essay gave me pause. The author explains "reproductive labor" 

..Federici is one of a cohort of thinkers who have, for decades, critiqued the way capitalist societies fail to acknowledge or support what she calls “reproductive labor.” She uses this term not simply to refer to having children and raising them; it indicates all the work we do that is sustaining — keeping ourselves and others around us well, fed, safe, clean, cared for, thriving. It’s weeding your garden or making breakfast or helping your elderly grandmother bathe — work that you have to do over and over again, work that seems to erase itself. It is essential work that our economy tends not to acknowledge or compensate.

All stay at home mothers I have ever known have performed such labor all their lives, every day. Yet it was common to ask "What do you do all day? Don't you get bored staying at home?" I saw these women trying to explain what it is that they did that was of personal and societal value. Many seemed embarrassed that they could not cite accomplishments that converted into paychecks. A very few women had the guts to say the work they do behind the scenes enables their high-achieving spouse to have a career and not worry about mundane domestic stuff including child-rearing. To that end, what she did was equal to what her very successful husband did - there was no difference whatsoever.  I remember the first time I heard a woman my mother's age say this to a younger "career woman". She was a family friend and known to be feisty. I recall feeling proud of her for being able to articulate her value so clearly. She ran a tight ship - the home was picture perfect, the kids were well-mannered and pushed to do well in school, the family ran like a well-oiled machine and she made it look effortless. It made the newly minted career woman look incompetent. 

Getting Wed

For reasons unknown to me and most of our extended family, one of our relatives is determined to have a big fat Indian wedding for his only son early last month. Just about everyone was begging off for understandable reasons. The more people that didn't or couldn't be there the greater the pressure of the inner circle to been seen and be counted. Postponing weddings seems to be just as hard now as it was back in my day. The bride's family was getting super-skittish and seeing these pandemic driven postponements as lack of firm commitment from the other side. When I found out my parents were being counted  upon to show up in person at this event, I had to intervene. Saying a hard no would be easy but that is what you do to burn bridges with relatives for good. This is their only child and if all goes well the only marriage there will be in their family. So they want it to count, show off their prosperity which was hard fought and earned. I get all that. 

This is the moment they have been preparing for a couple of decades and now no one is excited about showing up. Having lived away and apart from all this, I have forgotten a lot about the level of stress a wedding in the family can produce. How what we do or choose not to do on the occasion is remembered to death. Some of the grudges can transit generations "The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interrèd with their bones". 

The maneuvering it took for days and weeks to keep my parents out of harm's way while keeping their connections undisturbed in the family completely wore me out. Yet again, it made me wonder what people hope to accomplish with these grandiose weddings that are meant to be the axis upon which their life turns. Just a year out none of this will matter. I wish there was more emphasis on teaching the young couple how to make and keep a strong marriage, help them understand the importance of giving to each without reservation. 

Being Mother

Compared to much worse mothers than her, I am not entirely sure where mine would fall on the abusive spectrum. To this day, I don't know what part of her behavior was beyond her control and what was of her own volition. She did as much as good for me as she failed and hurt me. I owe a lot of what is good in my life to her and much of what I have struggled and failed to resolve over the years. 

Reading this list made me think of the intergenerational nature of abuse. My mother and I share many of the characteristics listed here. I would say J has some of them too. We are all failed mothers in that sense for at least three generations. Each time, we fix some of what we found broken with ours and create new fractures of our own.

Natural Experiments

Most of last year felt like living in a cauldron of natural experiments thanks to the conditions created by the pandemic and the opportunities continue to be rife. Reading this LSE professor's list of natural experiments was interesting in that context. The one about air quality improvement and birth weights of newborns in Beijing before and after the Olympics stood out for me. 

The authors used this sudden reduction in pollution to compare its effects on the weight of 83,672 babies born in four districts of Beijing during the Olympics (August 8 – September 24) against the weight of babies born during the same period in 2007 and 2009. They found that the babies born in 2008 were 23 grams (0.05 pounds) heavier on average, suggesting that air pollution does interfere with fetal development.

For the past year, whenever I see a toddler I try my best to smile at them through my mask. Make extra effort so they can see the expression of my eyes and know that I am smiling at them. For the most part they stare at me bewildered. I cannot remember any one of them trying to smile back of say anything to me. Before the pandemic, it used to be very different. They would almost always smile back, the chattier ones try to converse. 

The parent or adult with them would join in and we would exchange pleasantries and be on our way - this is how the world is supposed to work. When J was a toddler strangers would take a minute to smile at her, say a few words to both of us. It is one of the joys going out into the world as a new parent - this particular limelight is very short-lived. Missing that element of social interaction for the better part of a toddler's life sets up a sad natural experiment too.

Third Lease

This story sounds like a third lease of life as far as the man's skeleton goes. There is also frugality and out of box thinking involved on the part of the musician in question who was related to the deceased. The uncle died young and per his wishes: 

 ..his skeleton was donated to a local college, where, for two decades it has served as an educational tool for students.. so far pedestrian fare but it gets interesting from here

..The school eventually found it no longer had a use for Filip’s rendered skeletal system, and returned him to Midnight in a “giant wooden box.” The Greek Orthodox family does not condone cremation, and Midnight didn’t want to continue paying for a rental “cemetery space” the partial corpse was apparently being kept at... so we now have a problem and no easy solution

..So he decided on a very personal method by which to memorialize his uncle, who first got him into heavy metal: Turn his bones into a guitar... No wonder this made news - turning ashes to diamonds was news years ago. For someone who had wished for their skeleton to be put to use, this definitely honors that wish. 

Feeling Rewarded

At the end of a long and frustrating day, I answered a call for Be My Eyes and it made everything orders of magnitude better. It took me less than a minute to assist the elderly gentleman who called for help and he thanked me profusely. I have been a volunteer for Be Me Eyes for years and every single time, I was able to answer a call, it is extremely rewarding. This may be the world's best and easiest customer service job - the volunteers far outnumber the blind who need help so its a lucky day if you get a turn to help someone.  

Over the years, I have had opportunity to hang out with call center staff and management, shadow them, understand at what point a customer can go from being slightly frustrated to completely irate. The happy moments in this line of work are few and far between. Every time I get to be a volunteer and provide service, I can't help wondering what it would take to replicate this feeling for both the customer a the service rep in a commercial, for-profit setting. Maybe there are parts of the experience that can be elevated to this level so the rest would benefit from the higher tide. 

Lunchbox Moment

Reading this essay about the lunchbox moment is school, brought to mind my own experience with packing J's school lunch over the years. She did not like the any of the standard issue lunch options that would have been mainstream friendly. She did not enjoy cold sandwiches, wraps and such. Her criteria was specific - it had to be easy to work with, maybe something she could snack on through the day and not just eat at lunch. So a bag of baby carrots, another one with grapes, a couple of oranges or apples and some raw almonds in a container. She usually ate most of what I packed and brought the left-overs home. I have heard stories of trading dumplings and samosas during lunch with other kids who brought more interesting lunches than she did. There were those who ate only PBJ sandwiches and nothing else and those whose lunches were widely varied and possessed of a sense of adventure.

J was in neither category with her assortment of snacks that served as lunch. She always ate a big breakfast and had early dinner which was also substantial. This stuff at school was almost a wash and I learned over the years to focus on the two meals that she was interested in and did eat well. From what J described, the ethnic foods other kids brought were studied with interest by all concerned and some were more tradeable than other - the pakoras, samosas, dumplings and spring rolls for example had many takers and could score very favorable deals. Maybe her experience is not representative of the population of immigrant kids who have to confront their cultural ballast at the school cafeteria every day. 

Creating Value

Loved reading about this young innovator and environmentalist. Such a great idea fueled by the desire to solve rather than complain from the sidelines. I am a huge fan of innovation from the third world having seen first hand the creativity and moxie of the poor, uneducated and underprivileged people in India. It takes skill and thinking out of box every single day to make the most of the meager resources. One of my early educators was a woman who worked in our home to cook, clean and wash. She had four kids and worked in a dozen homes like ours from the crack of dawn to well past sundown. Her schedule was complex and fraught with uncertainty and interdependencies and yet she performed like well-oiled machine with predictable performance. Even as a child, I could tell what she did was not easy. 

R was illiterate and could not tell time any clock digital or analog but she could do that by looking at the position of the sun. She had an elaborate scheme of knots on the sari that was her code for maintaining her daily schedule which included trips to check on her youngest kids to make sure they had been fed timely.  The oldest was responsible for preparing meals for the family but she was not tasked with cooking for safety reasons. Just with those knots on her sari and the placement of the sun on the horizon, R was able to serve her customers like my mother flawlessly no matter how confusing their asks were. She had a knot to account for it and the job would get done. I remember watching her with rapt fascination as she made and unmade those knots to serve as her organizer. Over the years, I had the opportunity to observe many creative and innovative people like R who devised mechanisms to maximize what little they had.