Flower Home

My young friend S, lost her beloved grandmother recently. She was in her late 80s, ailing for a while and died peacefully in her sleep. S suffered a great loss no doubt but she was grateful that her favorite person in the world had not suffered. Grandma loved her garden and she a lot of flowers. The bulbs were properly stored after the season and planted the next year. 

Of all things the old lady left behind, S is most concerned about her flowers that she took such good care of. She asked me if I could host the bulbs in my yard and if she could care for them as grandma had. S is only a few years out of college and has no place of her own. She is estranged from her family and does not want to create such a rooted connection in their backyard. I felt happy I could provide a home for these flowers and S could rest easy knowing they would be there for her when she bought her own home. 

I have met the grandma in question and thought she was lucky to have S in her life - someone who is willing to go above and beyond for love and honor her memory the best way possible

Seeing Change

My former co-worker L called me today out of the blue. It's been over five years since we worked together and over a year since we last spoke. The pandemic was in its early days back then. I was surprised to learn that she had chosen not to vaccinate herself and believed that in America this was all over anyway. She said she does not watch the news so had no idea things were so dire in India. This is a woman with an MBA from one of the top schools in the country and by her own admission has been a straight A student her whole life. I had a very hard time processing the words that were coming out of her mouth. We talked about other things that are top of mind for people these days - based on news she cannot possibly avoid. 

L seemed utterly disinterested in thinking beyond whatever headline grabbed her attention. She said she was done with this whole pandemic thing and all other things that people were getting so over-worked about lately. Maybe it was time to step on the brakes and slow down a tad. I knew this person as well as one knows a co-worker. She came across fairly mainstream back in the day. Something has clearly fallen of the rails since then. I am not sure, how much of a communication I can continue to have with her. I tried to find something to grab on to that would be reminiscent of the person I knew her to be, but could not succeed. The whole conversation left me bewildered. What might have transpired in this past year that could result in such a dramatic change in a person. 

Telling Jokes

Interesting set of exhibits at the Museum of Failure. This politically correct doll from the 60s that managed to scare the little girls it was targeted to serves as a good reminder of political correctness can get to a point of crazy, stupid and even scary. This article about "xenophobic" jokes and being good neighbors in Europe is a great counterpoint to the culture of correctness. 

I grew up in India at a time when it was perfectly normal to make jokes about people from another state who spoke another language and celebrated holidays on a different schedule. It was equal opportunity and people got credit for making the most obnoxious jokes about each other. As a Bengali, it was expected that I would tell a good joke about my people so others could up the ante from there. There was a certain degree of pride involved it setting a high bar. We all strove to do that. 

I cannot recall a single time when any one of us was offended by these jokes no matter who told them - it was just good fun, self-deprecation and being called out on stereotypes that defined each group. None of the jokes were meant to be a personal attack on anyone. Being able to say them, made us feel comfortable with each other, appreciate what we had in common and forge strong friendships. It made us laugh at the stereotypes but also encouraged us to be improve ourselves. I cannot imagine us having to mind our manners, worry about offending someone - I don't think we would have the kind of easy, free-flowing relationships we developed over the years if there were such constraints imposed on our interactions. 

Small Radius

It was heart-warming to read the story of this farmer and his small yet happy world. He oneness with nature is likely the secret to his peace:

Autumn is my favourite time of the year, with all the colours of the leaves: it’s just beautiful. Cuckoos come here every April, and I look forward to hearing them. A lot of people, locals and birdwatchers, come here wanting to hear the cuckoo, but they don’t stop long enough; sometimes they don’t even leave their cars. This makes me feel so sad that I actually cry a bit; it pains me that others don’t get to enjoy it. I urge people to get out of their cars and walk up the road to hear the birdsong.

Reading this reminded me of the periods in my life when I felt the most peaceful. Almost always it had to do with being able to enjoy small details in nature. Watching rain turn dusty leaves glistening green, the smell of jasmine and honeysuckle in the air, watching a bird pecking at a mirror that hung in the balcony, collecting chanterelles in the woods - unlike this farmer, I never had firm roots anywhere so my surroundings have changed a lot over the years. There is a certain joy to sameness and not everyone has what it takes to savor it. This also reminded me of my college buddy K who told me recently that her life has remained the same forever - she goes some place and returns home at the end of the day - school, college and place of work. She is a creature of very steady habits and her radius is very well defined. Some may find it boring but for K that is the source of her peace - much like this farmer

For Days

Like the idea of For Days - being able to recycle old clothes and being incentivized to do so. 

As For Days has grown, it made sense to evolve beyond this approach. Its products now include sweaters and loungewear, which have been popular during the pandemic, but customers don’t necessarily want to limit themselves to subscribing to particular products. Enter the newly launched credit system, in which every item you buy has a fixed buyback cost. A graphic T-shirt costs $28 and gets you $7 in credit when you send it back; a $54 crop hoodie gets you $14 in credit. These credits can go toward anything on the site. 

Wearing sweaters and loungewear full-time for over a year can become habit forming. Yesterday when I made my grocery run, one woman stood out from the crowd of shoppers because she wore proper business clothes together with high heeled shoes and a nice leather bag. Back in the day, she would have blended in the crowd of people stopping by after work to grab something for dinner. But now, she is a remarkable sighting. For Days is timely as people transition back to work and need to replace items that no longer work for them.

Growing Old

I Care A Lot was one of the most disturbing movies I have seen in a while. Having seen family court in action in the lives of a few of my close friends, the robotic legal system  devoid of any commonsense is very familiar. It facilitates the use of the court order as weapon by those who know how to game the system. Marla Grayson in the movie is one of those - likely inspired by true horror stories of elder abuse. The lack of checks and balances is taken to hyperbolic proportion in the movie but it is a very reasonable caricature of the system. One of my friends calls having to go to family court to resolve domestic disputes like being forced to a porta-potty in an overcrowded venue. If you can hold it you don't go use one but if you end up having no choice, there is no point complaining about the overflowing filth, no water and no toilet paper.

It's the price you pay for not being able to resolve your differences in a more sanitary venue, not being able to hold off going to the bathroom. L's experience has been nightmarish and fundamentally altered the course of her life. At close to sixty she finds herself having to start over - that long dreamed of retirement will never happen for her. The one consistent theme of her legal woes was that of a system that cannot simply handle the complexity of the human condition. Every deviation from the "standard" comes at a price. The greater the number of deviations, the exponentially worse the outcomes.  At some point the tag is high enough to leave a person materially and emotionally decimated. 

Sudden Light

The poems from Hope Gap are still on my mind. This is one that I loved the most. Deja vu and that feeling you know someone from times that go much further than you know or remember. I have heard stories of life changing events that happened in the blink of an eye, the person who changed the course of one's life and that sense of being part of something bigger than you can fathom. 

I have been here before,

But when or how I cannot tell:

I know the grass beyond the door,

The sweet keen smell,

The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.

You have been mine before,—

How long ago I may not know:

But just when at that swallow's soar

Your neck turn'd so,

Some veil did fall,—I knew it all of yore.

Has this been thus before?

And shall not thus time's eddying flight

Still with our lives our love restore

In death's despite,

And day and night yield one delight once more?

Reading these lines made me think of my own life and the few moments when I came close that deja vu feeling, or patterns in my life repeated over and over trying to tell me it is something I will either need to accept or apply tremendous force to break. I chose the later because acceptance was that hard. 

Hope Gap

Watched Hope Gap recently and was completely blow away by the performances of the three central characters in the movie - particularly Annette Bening who plays Grace . She is spectacular playing the the left wife after 29 years of marriage. The poetry references in the movie are beautiful and many of them were new to me, like this one by Henry King on the death of his wife. The movie draws the viewers into the kitchen of this couple's home where much of the action happens. The lifeblood of this marriage has long drained out leaving the union devoid of energy or friendship. The husband gave up in degrees over time and then one day he found the love which gave him the courage to leave. 

Grace does not see leaving the marriage as a choice or an option that even exists for them. They are in this together until death - this is self-evident to her as the fact that the earth rotates on its axis and there is day and night in an endless cycle. You can't reasonably say that will no longer happen and it will be eternal night from here on out - which is the equivalent of what Edward, her husband has said to her. The role of their grown-up son in helping this couple navigate the end of their marriage is critical. It is only because of him and through him the parents are able to cope and move on. Watching this movie was a very moving experience for me - maybe because there are elements of the story I can strongly relate to. 

Navigating Family

One of my very close relatives is hospitalized with Covid and I only learned about this by accident. No one in the immediate family knows about it. I told my parents and advised them not to pass it around because I was not supposed to know. The whole situation left me completely bewildered. Why such a wall of silence and secrecy. A cousin in Mumbai claimed she had all the symptoms and suffered for weeks but it was not Covid - just a flu.

When in doubt about how my relatives back home operate, I always check in with my childhood best friend P. He always has the answers. According to P, there is social stigma attached to this and if the conditions get dire then the person becomes untouchable. If they end up dead, the last rites could become a non-trivial issue. So for all those reasons, anyone how gets infected tries to keep it confidential. I had a very hard time believing P so I looked around to see if there was any corroboration to his claims. 

There have been multiple instances reported in various states of India where individuals have not reported their history of foreign travel or symptoms of COVID-19 due to the fear of facing social boycott and discrimination, leading to low testing and high mortality rates. According to public health experts, the social stigma associated with being diagnosed is creating a fear among the public and is acting as a deterrent to the effective management of the disease, particularly in the urban setup.

The stigmatization is taking a heavy toll on the mental health of the frontline workers as well as those who are recovering or have survived the disease. Media has reported the influence of isolation and discrimination on suicides in India.24 Experiencing isolation and stigma from social boycotting and religious discrimination can increase the risk of loneliness and self-harm.

The idea that a person could become a pariah because they got infected was hard to fathom but it felt both sad and scary. 

"I had mild symptoms and recovered at home. But our neighbours who are doctors and engineers and teachers asked us to shut our windows, not come out in the balcony. Neighbours tell us we are high-risk even after recovery. They have made us pariahs,"

Sand Dunes

Some of friends who are fully vaccinated talk about feeling some trepidation about going out and being "normal" again. One woman talked about being anxious about over-stimulation of sitting in a crowded restaurant. She said it jokingly but the fact is she has not ventured out to said restaurant for weeks since she got her second shot. Maybe she is waiting for time when it feels more natural.

During the pandemic, I only met a very small set of people and in no more than a couple of folks at the same time. I don't think I feel ready to go into a big group setting yet. Like from staying home-bound for over a year to going to a big party. I might need to work my tolerance up slowly. Turns out that our personalities could have changed during the pandemic.

Here’s what a post-pandemic dispositional makeover might look like: Someone who was chronically late in the Before Times might work on being more conscientious, or timely. One way to show your friends how much you missed them is to start respecting their time.

Or if you’re someone who typically reacted with suspicion and anger when an acquaintance canceled plans, you could try to be more agreeable, or forgiving of minor social slights. Even making those plans in the first place might help you become more extroverted or open to new experiences.

Being Included

My friend R is an inclusion ambassador at her place of work. The job has brought her close to the real stories of people who share something in common with her - a person of color, some form of minority in the technology business and so on. She spends quality time trying to reach out to these people hoping they will share their experiences of feeling excluded. R hopes to bring change from the top down, forcing people to confront their unconscious biases. She talks about how change is slow and difficult, it makes her frustrated but she continues to strive for the greater good of her co-workers. 

We were chatting about this recently and I told her what I thought as a minority myself - that her cause may be misguided. There are examples of folks who despite every disadvantage and obstacle have managed to work their way to the top. These people look much like those co-workers she is striving to have included and treated equitably. It would serve the cause much better to learn best practices from those who have thrived despite the odds, learned to navigate without calling attention to what holds them back. 

The many captains of the technology business are originally from India - many of them first generation immigrants. It is highly unlikely that they were spared the inequities and lack of inclusion that R is trying to solve for. All around us are examples of minorities at every level who manage to thrive despite the prevailing conditions that are hard to change. Maybe they can teach the rest of the population how they do it. 

When I was starting my life in this country, those were the voices I most wanted to hear from. One of them belonged to S. She managed a major technology transformation program at a large bank and was an older black woman. I met her while on a consulting gig where she was member of the client team. S had a certain regal quality about her. When she spoke, the noise in the room died down and people listened. Her words mattered and she chose them wisely and well. She was able to maintain this perfect balance between friendly and professional no matter the situation. 

The quality of her work was top-notch but she was almost invisible, never became the story despite having such a high visibility role. The board was keeping close tabs on the program given it's potential to transform the bank. S reminded me of the inner workings of a higher performance car. You realize that there is more going on inside that you can possibly comprehend, but as a driver or passenger you only enjoy the ride. That was S, she made very complex things work flawlessly and you almost missed the fact she was the orchestrator in chief. S was that good. For the year that I had the privilege of working alongside her, I grew a lot professionally and personally. To this day she is a role model for me. 

Learning Kindness

Reading Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye made me think of forgiveness being a lot like kindness too - specially for those to whom it does not come easy. 

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth

Maybe the rage that drives one not to forgive must transform to sorrow and then forgiveness may follow the path of kindness

.

De

Taking Chance

Nice intergenerational collaboration to built a startup. The idea is to do social media in a more nuanced way and bring people together for the right reasons:

Chances is a social relationships app created for and by Gen Z. Our mission is to inspire, celebrate, and ignite genuine and exciting relationships that feed the human spirit. Unlike social media apps that focus on eliciting attention, or dating apps that focus on impulse and appearance, Chances connects people based on mutually declared intentions across nine areas to offer a better way to fire up a variety of meaningful relationships from friendships to dating based on mutual intentions.

Like the tag line of "Intention over Attention" and the fact they were able to boot-strap this. At first blush it seems like intention would be harder to monetize than attention If two people get together to study for their math exam, the monetization opportunities are limited to their specific intent and need. It is not about idly doom-scrolling and reading the bad news coming out of your flavor of social media echo-chamber.

Bad Counsel

Interesting how social norms are being applied to a question that resonates with many of us. In America it is very possible to drift apart from people when the context of your friendship is gone. For many of us it is the workplace where we meet people and become friends with them. During the span of a decade, you and this work friend would have changed 2-3 jobs and moved atleast once if not more. 

These things are normal. The young the demographic the higher their mobility. So the person who asked this question about her Asian friend may have fallen out of touch with the individual for some of these reasons and not because they are a bigot. I think it is to their credit that they though about their Asian friend recently and felt the need to express solidarity, concern and support. That is laudable I would say. But clearly the social norms of the day do not give "Johno" any credit. They are being told to to cease and desist on the urge to reach out:

But if you haven’t been in touch with your friend in years, contacting her now may seem more like racial profiling to her — “Hey, I know an Asian American!” — than personal support.

I think as a minority person of color I have the right to opine on this idiotic piece of wisdom that the columnist has proffered. If  it were to be a lot of desis were being racially profiled and attacked, and this was being regularly reported in the news, I would not be in the least offended if people who I had fallen out of touch with for a decade or more, thought of me and reached out to say so. Unfortunately the advise of the columnist is the prevailing wisdom of the day so people will not reach out even if that's their first instinct from fear that I would think they are racist. Such a tragedy all around - so much easier to just let people act human.

Food Gentrification

I ate breadfruit for the first time on a company offsite at Panaji, Goa. Absolutely loved how it was cooked and it was decades before I found a place where I could buy it. A local grocery store carries multi-ethnic fare and breadfruit is often on the produce isle. I have iterated through the recipe as I remember it from that long ago Goa trip before I was happy with the results. 

Reading this news about Patagonia getting into the business of making breadfruit commonly available in the country makes me wary. I am sure the marketing machinery will go into overdrive mode to tout breadfruit flour as manna from heaven that will fix just about everything that ails us. The poor farmers will over-cultivate breadfruit to make money and the local eco-system, the interdependencies between producers and consumers of food will fall apart - it will be all around bad news like acai berries has been for Brazilian farmers. 

In Igarape-Miri, an Amazon village 1,100 miles north of Brasilia, Francisca Neves, who sells manioc flour to neighbors and restaurants, says the bitter pulp she used to eat twice a day is now a luxury.

"Our granddaughter is turning 3 and we're going to have family coming to our house," said Ms. Neves, 68, as she paid 20 reais ($9.40), or about 7 percent of her monthly household income, for 2 liters (2 quarts) of the thick mush at a local street market.

I grew up in a Bengali household so stories about the indigo revolt were very much part of my childhood. This who business of ethnic food gentrification is exactly the same thing.

Whole Self

My friend T told me about a recent experience she had at work. It was a quarterly planning meeting with the boss and directs. As an ice-breaker for what would be a long session, someone came up with the idea of each person sharing a line about what they are currently working on and one thing about them no one would guess seeing them. The boss went first and provided info about her personal life that must have been incredibly difficult to share. 

T's boss is known to wear vulnerability like a suit of armor and invisibility cloak combined. She has made a performative art out of it from what I can tell from T's stories. With the bar being that high, everyone else in the team was forced to step up and most people missed the mark by a mile by saying inane stuff like they make a mean pasta with fava beans, foster a couple of blind kittens, tinker with a 1960s tractor in their spare time and so on. Clearly no one in T's crew was willing to bring their full authentic self to work and maybe that is the right thing to do.

..while it is nice to provide people with a sense of purpose and help them see their work as more valuable and meaningful, let’s keep in mind that a significant proportion of any company’s workforce may never see work as a central part of their life, yet that won’t stop them from making a valuable contribution to their organizations and be good organizational citizens.

T's boss may have her self-worth fused with her work and that's great for her if that brings her satisfaction but the rest of her team does not have to live up to that standard. They could be people who work the job (and do very well at it) to pay for the things that they are truly passionate about. That is their protected personal space that they should not be expected to share anything about. Many years ago, I remember how we all felt when one of our colleagues dropped it casually into a conversation that he was a movie critic on the side and got passes to just about every important film festival. 

This guy was average at his job, a sharp dresser and needed a fair bit of assist from the team to take projects to close. We did not mind lending him a hand because he was very pleasant and friendly. Now this business about moonlighting as a film critic cast everything in very new and different light. People became far less inclined to support him. Many of us had our passion projects too but we still took full ownership of the job that paid the bills. There was not much sympathy left for this guy who we collectively saw as using us to further his own cause in life. 

Wise Words

Watched this nice short about the healing power of swimming in the wild. It's unclear what events lead the narrator being so badly burned out but the story is not uncommon. There comes a point in the life of many of us when we can no longer answer why we continue to do what we do when it bring no happiness. The children do grow up, the needs of a person shrink so that they can make do with less, retirement can become reality if its not turned into a ever moving goal-post. As as Laura says in the movie:

So I was waiting for a day that might never come — when you retire or when you’re thin enough or when the kids have grown up — and there was a sudden realization that that day might never come.

Wise words. And those who realize the truth in in them decide not to burn up what is left of their life doing things that don't matter to their heart and soul. Lucky are those who can snap out their ingrained habits, fear of change and the unknown. Take that plunge to their version of wild water and come out more human on the other end.

Teachable Moment

On our walk last weekend, I paused to watch a toddler making her tentative way up and down a couple of steps while her adults kept an eye on her but did not rush to help. At first she tried to just walk down from the one stair to the next. But at the edge she paused a bit, went back, returned again but did not step down. It was a wise decision. The rise on that step was quite high. She did not give up. After a while she was back and this time she sat down, lowered her legs and tried to slide her way down. It was the right idea but still a bit hard for her to pull off given her size and her wobbly gait. So she sat there drinking water from her sippy cup. She clearly wanted to climb down and get on the grass but had exhausted her options. 

One of the adults now came over, scooped her up and placed her on the grass. The joy in that baby was palpable even from a distance where we were. There was something supremely peaceful about the scene to me. This baby had only one thing she wished to accomplish. Nothing else mattered in that moment. She was fully present and connected with her purpose. Despite suffering some setbacks, she made it in the end, with a little help from friends. That was a teachable moment for me. Often I am not fully present, my thoughts can lurch between past and future, completely missing the here and now. This baby demonstrated how to correct the error of my ways, trust the limits of what I can do on my own and trust even more that the universe will lend a helping had if I have gone as far as I could on my own. 

Seeking Baseline

It's good to see that anxiety screening is now part of a well-woman check-up for girls as young as thirteen. I remember the anxieties of my own thirteen year-old self like it were yesterday. They were poured into journals I kept at the time because there was no one I trusted enough to share them with. I learned to live with anxiety, confusion and doubt over the rest of my teen years. It probably become part of who I am as a person. I learned that anxiety is a shape changing creature but it lives on inside and the triggers change over time. 

The journals from childhood were torn up and burnt at some point when the writing felt futile and did not appear to provide any resolution. With J, I like to believe I used the lessons learned from my own experience to help her in that very confusing time in a woman's life. We were able to talk through and resolve many things, I was able to anticipate some of what she was feeling without her needing to articulate what is uncomfortable at that age. Despite my efforts, I am sure there were gaps. A baseline of a child's mental health and checking every year is definitely a good idea for both the child and their parents and caregivers

..in adolescent girls, “anxiety disorders can begin in childhood at a median age of 11 years, can develop in mid-adulthood, and often decline beginning at approximately age 60 years. During pregnancy and the postpartum period, anxiety disorders increase in both frequency and effects, including effects on the infant and family.”

Staying Home

Some of us have started to receive advisory from our employers on plans to return to the office in summer and fall. Not everyone is enthused about it. Just about no one is looking forward to the commute. The sales people are likely the only ones who are excited. Business casual went way casual over the past year. I can count the number of times I have seen my colleagues in clothes they would actually wear to work. 

We have grown comfortable seeing people in their home environment with dogs, cats and children popping up on the screen time to time. Not everyone has the perfect home office setup and no one is judging. The situation presents some personal branding opportunities too as this article notes..

.. an uptick in internet searches for necklaces, earrings, and scarves across all genders, reflecting a renewed attention to necklines—one of the most visible parts of one’s outfit during a video call. “There’s still so much that’s out of our control with the virus and the conditions we all live under,” she says. “So we take control of what we can control, and one way we do that is through what we wear.”

I have been wearing a braided silver necklace for a year now. The women I work with seem to have resorted to similar measures - some standard piece of jewelry that works with everything no need to make decisions every morning. There is Zoom fatigue from endless meetings and burnout that comes from all that. Yet, when people consider the tradeoffs going back to the office is not everyone's preferred option. For folks like me who have worked from home for a decade or longer, the answer is self-evident but the pandemic brought many others into the fold who now don't want to return to the office. 

Virtual Ownership

The idea of the NFT seems to be a sensible use of blockchain technology to solve a real problem instead of it being the other way around as I have seen too often in business. 

The powers that be dictate "we must have a blockchain strategy" and people down the food-chain go scurrying around to make that happen. Problems are invented only such that blockchain could be the answer to them. All these while mundane yet critical issues remain unaddressed. 

The creator of the virtual impossible furniture describes the value of NFTs well:

"For artists, being able to sell artwork in digital form directly to a global audience of buyers without using an auction house or gallery allows them to keep a significantly greater portion of the profits they make from sales. Royalties can also be programmed into digital artwork so that the creator receives a percentage of sale profits each time their artwork is sold to a new owner.

..I believe we are expanding our experience into a new hybrid era of extended reality, in which art and culture are freed from spatial and temporal constraints and the rules of experience are rewritten,"

Obvious Answers

I don't understand anything about wines and my tastes are as plebian as they get. My buying process is very simple. The price should be "competitive", the bottle should have some aesthetic appeal that separates it from the crowd on the shelf. The label should be interesting or quirky. Since  I don't know wines it should not be a brand I am familiar with. 

That is a pretty wide net and more often than not the results are good. I have a few friends who "get" wine and over the years they have attempted to educate me but I am not a willing or able student. I love and work with data for a living - unlike wine, I do "get" data. So it was fun to read how this wine model was built and to arrive at a pretty obvious conclusion that alcohol content being the most important variable by far. Would make sense to most people

Alcohol appears to have the biggest impact on Quality, followed by Volatile Acidity and the amount of sulphates in the wine.

Reminds me a great deal of conversations I have had with customers over the years. A big name strategy consultant firm was hired to lay out their business transformation roadmap. The output is super-secret and only a select few have read the report and none of them are willing to share. So some not so fancy consultants show up, take stock of their data and propose a recommendation identical to what they paid millions for. This second opinion is usually free because the lower-tier firm wants to earn the business. As if that were not enough, just about everyone in the company with an operations or delivery role could have come up with the right answer without any help from any consultant. That is the equivalent of alcohol being the most significant quality indicator of wine. 

Different Worlds

This post made for sad reading. So many layers of difficulty. A name that does not match the face, the accent that does not fit the stereotype associated with that face and finally teaching English in America while being Asian. 

The pandemic has strained every fault line in society. Each country and its people experience it differently. The blame for this horrific unraveling of life has to be laid somewhere. The existing "villains" are the best fall guys and those vary by where you live and what you do. The world is being stress tested and the grades are clearly failing:

..In addition, rising authoritarianism, democratic backsliding and ethno-nationalism are reported, while civil unrest including protests have risen above 2019 levels. Gender-based violence has also risen ..

In contrast to all that cosmetic dentistry is booming business in other parts of the world because the privileged have jobs and spend time on Zoom meetings all day. Jewelers are doing well for themselves too given the conditions created by the same online meeting culture. For anyone having to straddle both worlds at any level, the level of dissonance is grief inducing to say the least. 

Feeling Sore

My friend A was telling me about the dread he experiences each time he sees a call coming from India. It is starting to take a toll on his mental health. His wife has lost several family members already, he has been lucky so far. We are both expats but living in different countries. The feeling of being alone in the local population where the subject has moved on from daily death tolls, is a shared experience. I have not had one person at work or among my circle of acquaintances ask me how my family in India is faring. 

They all do know that such family exists and reside there. In a precarious time like this where I start and end my day with a call to my parents to make sure they are okay, the lack of concern from people I spend all day with can start to grate on what is left of my nerves. All of us who have loved ones in India are putting on a brave front and carrying on like nothing is happening. That is so far from reality. I know in my case, I don't want to spend any time at all on small-talk with anyone. The socialization seems wasteful, pointless and contrived.

 A's company is moving a lot of its back office work to Philippines from India - good business continuity planning. But no one has enquired about his state of mind coping with bad news from home every other hour. He for his part is staying strong and doing his job as always.

I was listening to a BBC reporter interviewing a doctor from Bangalore on my way back from the grocery store the other day. The reporter's demeanor was one of pity and condescension when it came to the debate on vaccine patents. He suggested India would never be able to figure out how to manufacture the vaccine even if the patents were lifted. The insinuation was  that it would take the developed world to hand-hold the unskilled, good for nothing Indians until they could work out how to make it. Maybe I was having an emotional response that is not objective or warranted. I allow room for that. 

The good doctor played along and did not protest - maybe hoping that his entreaties for help on BBC would go further that taking offense at the ill-advised remarks of some random reporter. But I felt indescribably sad hearing this exchange - that the country I was born it, full of flaws and aberrations but still mine. Some of the brightest most talented people I know are from that country doing amazing work in very diverse fields. To suggest that our people could not figure it out was humiliating to say the least. Made me wonder when if ever we will stop being treated like we were the white man's burden.

Giving Time

Peleton's leaky API is not earth-shattering news. It's basically what we should expect when we choose to share private information and the collector of such data has much to gain from it. What is particularly galling in this instance is that the person sharing data only to have it leaked, is paying for that privilege by way of a monthly subscription. 

This is a bit more offensive than our data being scraped off of Facebook, LinkedIn, ClubHouse and the like. Most of us are not paying directly to any of these services though the act of sharing real data is very much a fee. As such events become routine, consumers will experience fatigue and stop bellyaching over it. That in turn will normalize the notion that privacy should not be expected at all. It's great if you happen to get it but generally you won't. The response from Peleton is very telling: 

Through our Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure program, a security researcher informed us that he was able to access our API and see information that’s available on a Peloton profile. We took action, and addressed the issues based on his initial submissions, but we were slow to update the researcher about our remediation efforts. Going forward, we will do better to work collaboratively with the security research community and respond more promptly when vulnerabilities are reported.

That goes to prove its a not a problem they are in any rush to fix. People have been made aware that such leak is possible, they have had time to absorb what it means for them and it does not appear that the customer base is up in arms demanding an immediate remedy. It is a great way to assess the tolerance of their customers for lack of data privacy. 

Odd News

Silly news like this about a farmer moving the border of his country on accident is what I needed to catch a break from things. The variety of response to the Gates divorce is somewhat amusing too - there is a lot of concern around the fate of their philanthropic efforts. Its like they owe staying married no matter the personal cost for the greater good of the world. Something is deeply flawed about that logic and is not unlike the expectations from a desi couple in an arranged marriage. They are made to feel like they owe scenes from a happy marriage to the families and communities that celebrated their union. 

Two people grew older and further apart over time and felt it was time to move on - happens all the time. Once kids are grown up and gone, the strength of the marriage is fully tested freed from joint obligations. For regular people that could mean the luxury to pursue long cherished dreams, change careers, take risks that were not possible until then. The aspirations each side has for the rest of their lives could vary and if they had grown apart over the child-rearing years and simply not noticed because they were so focused and united in their common goal, it would become evident now. 

With all that being said, some older couples decide they may be happier parting ways for the rest of journey. The Gates marriage like that of ordinary couples splitting after 25-30 years together could have been a good one for a long time until it ran out of steam. If a marriage is not in good health and chances of recovery are slim to none, there is a great wisdom in wrapping it up while the friendship is still strong. That ensures, people don't hurt each other needlessly, the world around is an indirect beneficiary of such undramatic uncoupling. 

On another note, its worth asking why they extracted so much money from the system that world has to now be beholden to their charitable instincts. Like my friend S says its like hacking off a person's legs and then being so kind as to buy them a wheel-chair and push them for a photo-op. That was her summary of the "philanthropic" efforts of the Gates couple. 

Clearing Ground

The bushes in my yard have been around for a decade and mostly I don't know what they are. This year, a several of them bloomed all at once, some for the very first time. These were mature bushes ten years ago so they are only older now. It was a welcome and surprise turn of events in a time where happy news has been hard to come by. Wild violets have taken over the grass everywhere. For reasons only nature knows, many flowers have chosen to bloom all at once this year. Maybe to serve as reminder that there is light at the end of the tunnel. Trying to learn about these flowers all around me led to this site about the mythology of flowers.  

I have been spending time pulling weeds so the flowers might thrive and not get crowded in - doing my part to help this sudden and unexpected abundance. The profusion and variety of weeds amazes me when I pull out one that I have not encountered before. To my untrained eye, there seems to be an infinite variety in my own yard. They make me recall scenes from my childhood where some elderly person would show us kids a random weed and tell us why its useful - either as something edible or a herbal remedy. My paternal grandmother was more knowledgeable than most others and likely to find use of things they might overlook. 

As I labor over the weeds, I find some have such pretty leaves that its a shame to pull them out - almost disrespecting nature's labor to make this tiny thing of perfection like Rachel Carson said "Some of nature’s most exquisite handiwork is on a miniature scale, as anyone knows who has applied a magnifying glass to a snowflake"

Quiet Deseperation

I have been reading Want and finding it particularly easy to stick with. Do I love it? perhaps not. Is it a memorable experience? maybe not. Yet, there is a raw quality to that quiet, stifled desperation in the narrator's voice that draws me in. There is this one line that jumped out at me for instance:

Mommy, says the four-year-old, on our walk home, if you don’t go to work, will we still live?

It has been my experience that, four year-olds can sense misery, despair and desperation. They may not have the words to play back to us everything they know and understand about what is going on in our lives. But that question says it all - it is like a mirror reflecting the narrator back to herself. Only it is gut-wrenching in the voice of a four year-old. The fact that the author is able to do this despite creating such a cultural cliché of a protagonist, is an astonishing feat

Want’s narrator is white, a creative, Brooklyn-based: the three horsemen of our decade’s literary apocalypse, in which an obnoxious percentage of literary fiction dotes on characters you couldn’t tell apart in a Carroll Gardens precinct line-up.

Being Fluid

Stumbled upon this essay about Rituparno Ghosh while looking for something else that was prompted by my reading of Want. The protagonist in the novel struggles against her desires in quiet desperation where I am in the book. She is the product of choices she made in part because she could not bring those needs and wants to fruition. 

I watched the fluid transformation of Rituparno Ghosh over the years and was struck by now natural his transition to feminine seemed. It was as if in the core of him there was this beautiful woman who had emerged like a butterfly from its chrysalis. He must have served as inspiration who felt the way he did but lacked his power of expression. The news of his death was saddening and made me wonder if what appeared so effortless was actually far more complex and heartbreaking for the person. His cinema mirrored his world-view: 

..his disbelief in absolutes, painful trappings of the body and need for inclusion of gender, sexuality and minority communities into the political and social mainstream...

While the reality of his own life may have been dark and lonesome, Ghosh was able to recreate it with magic and luminosity on screen. Reading the book and now this essay brings to mind The Left Hand of Darkness - one of my favorite sc-fi books. 

Le Guin’s use of her creative practice is courageous. She has referred to the novel as a “thought experiment,” writing, “I eliminated gender to find out what was left. What ever was left would be, presumably, simply human.”[2]  Imagination here is a radical, exploratory tool. Le Guin uses her writing to reach beyond the constructs of gender and race, looking for the “simply human.” At the same time, she projects an alternative configuration of how human societies might look. Le Guin uses her practice to write her way into another world.

Remembering Past

I am spending time with friends in India trying to understand how best to cope with our anxieties over parents without suffocating them. Being in a different city than their parents, puts many of them in a situation not unlike mine. There is not much to do but pray, stay indoors as hope for the test. Most importantly talk about things that would once used to be normal. 

Recently, my mother mentioned a movie that she had watched and enjoyed. I was glad to have that opening and checked out Gumnaami myself so we could discuss it. The rants of journalist in the early part of the movie before he takes on the cause of investigation what really happened to Subhas Bose, would resonate with many a Bengali. He mocks our people for their obsession with the few icons we have left and make a production out of everything because we have so little left to be proud of. The pride of heritage is a relic of the past. He says its great the deaths of Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray are well documented or we could create conspiracies out of that too. 

Present day Bengal is a disaster and continues to unravel with no end in sight. In such times as these, it is not unusual to seek inspiration in something larger than life like the character and exploits of Bose are. It would be safe to say they don't make Bengali men like him anymore - they haven't in a very long time. He had rattled the empire and attracted powerful enemies. Figures like him cannot but be controversial and admirers have to find a way to make peace with those contradictions.

I get my Bengali brethren want to feel energized rehashing various conspiracy theories about their hero. My mother's family had a few freedom fighters and they turned disillusioned by India post-independence. One of them had done serious jail time and refused to ever talk about it. This was not the free India that had dreamed of and fought for. The life of Netaji and the mystery around how it ended gives our people a way to imagine a different ending to the story of India's freedom, what if Bose had been in charge, what if freedom had been won by blood, sweat and tears as he had wanted, what if India (and particularly Bengal) had met a better fate than partition. To many, Netaji embodies the dream of what India might have been.

I can see why my mother would find this movie comforting in a time when the system is completely falling apart. 

Spreading Green

When it comes to doing good for the planet, it's easy to feel that the isolated actions taken by individuals cannot really move the needle. The problem is too big and therefore beyond one person's ability to do anything about. Yet every so often someone depicted "crazy" proves otherwise. 

“People ridiculed me for bringing banyan tree seeds to the village, because they felt uneasy as they believed there are spirits in these trees,” Sadiman added.

Some even thought he was a madman because he bartered saplings for the goats he reared, said one villager, Warto.

“In the past people thought he was crazy, but look at the result now,” Warto added. “He is able to provide clean water to meet the needs of the people in several villages.”

Reading this news made me wonder if the change affected by one person's tireless efforts would make those who have watched this journey from the sidelines want to do their part. Or would it still be a random act of a person who is not like everyone else. Turns out that there are network effects of such work. 

This program will continue to be developed by the villagers because they already felt a positive impact for their local community in terms of social, economic, and environment aspects. This is just an example of a great big achievement that once a mockery. Once again, we found the proof that we, as an individual, could be the game-changer in our local communities.