Heartcrossings

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 sto...

 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 neve...

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, ...

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 like...

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 r...

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 ...

 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 o...

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 mea...

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 foun...

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...

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,...

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 wha...

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...

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 fragil...

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 amo...

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 be...

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...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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...

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 ...

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 t...

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.

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...

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 ash...

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-profi...

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 b...

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 ...