Heartcrossings

I met a sales guy recently who confessed he truly hated traveling and that was even before he had twins who are a few years old now. He lucked into the most rewarding part of their babyhood being home full-time during the pandemic. Before the kids, he traveled a lot did not enjoy it but there was no compelling cause that made him say he won't. I got the feeling R had got in touch with what fatherhood meant to him, the rewards of seeing his boys grow in front of his eyes, being able to chase after them and tip-toe around when they finally napped. He intents to work from home and not travel until there is no choice.  To that end he is hiring people to do the travel for him, folks in a different phase of their lives or those who actually enjoy being on the road most of the time. It was heart-warming to hear R describe the forces that tie him to home. It does turn out the he was raised by two professional parents both on career tracks. They were there for him as much as they could whi...

Love seeing a baker say that it's okay to experiment  with baking bread. Recently, I had the chance to watch a home cook bake the most perfect baguettes - she had learned from a professional baker during the early pandemic days. The baker in question broadcast her lessons from her kitchen in some Italian village.  I observed all steps of her process and became quite overwhelmed by the level of detail and precision involved in every step. The end product was a beauty and probably worth the trouble but it would kill the joy of the process if I had to repeat her steps faithfully. I would much rather get a feel for the dough and fail a dozen times before getting it right.  .. experimenting with your dough will give you hands-on experience that is far more valuable than anything I or anyone else could tell you about hydration. You need to just play with it and feel the differences for yourself.   That's the way I taught myself to bake bread with yeast. Started to experime...

For those curious about cybersecurity but lacking any practical knowledge of the domain, it is often hard to come across articles that easy to follow along. This one about the myth of workforce shortage in cybersecurity is a good read. Traditionally, enterprises have treated vulnerability management as a manpower and triage problem. They assembled lists of CVEs that their scans turned up and argued over which ones to patch. Every day the list grew, and every quarter CISOs tried to make the case for additional hires. Application of data science to this problem has shown that companies can — and do — make meaningful risk reductions with available resources. That's because the small cadre of hackers capable of developing new exploitations are highly likely to follow well-worn patterns. A complete analysis of decades of threat data bears this out. I wonder if there is another contributing factor to this workforce dilemma. The exploits are carried out by hackers and there is a cult of ...

Interesting observation from the author of The Tyranny of Merit. Of the students he teaches at Harvard, the Sandel says: ..students have always voiced a wide range of moral and political views. I have not noticed any decisive trend, with one exception: Beginning in the 1990s and continuing to the present, more and more of my students seem drawn to the conviction that their success is their own doing, a product of their effort, something they have earned. Among the students I teach, this meritocratic faith has intensified. He clarifies this is not unique to his students but there is a larger trend, in speaking of students he has encountered in Chinese universities he says: .. these Chinese students, like my Harvard students, are the winners of a hyper-competitive admissions process that unfolds against the background of a hyper-competitive market society. It is no wonder that they resist the thought that we are indebted for our success and attracted to the idea that we earn, and theref...

Reading the stories of how six families spend their money was educational. Each situation is different  and the spends reflect the diversity of lives. The ratio of spend on categories was so varied. Some families spend as much on food as they do on rent. Some have discretional expenses that well exceed the essentials. Banks are starting to provide insights on how we spend our money and what our expense profile could look like in the future.  I look at mine sometimes to see if I have a directionally accurate sense of what I spend on and if there are missed opportunities to save. There are subscriptions I could cancel if I wanted to but these relatively small indulgences are hard to give up. I use all of them pretty regularly too so not sure the annual wasted dollar amount applies to me.  Among those who pay for streaming services but don’t use them, respondents had an average of 1.65 entertainment subscriptions. Based on the costs of those services, these people waste an...

A friend I visited recently gave me a bit of her sourdough starter and I have been feeding and caring for it as I use it for simple baking projects at home. There is something incredibly satisfying about seeing a process work in my kitchen that goes back to 1500 BC . I have toyed with the idea of making my own pasta inspired by S an incredible home cook I know. He makes pasta and cheese from scratch and the taste is to die for. It's unlikely that I will ever get around to fresh pasta making but this article about shape morphing pasta caught by eye.  "We were inspired by flat-packed furniture and how it saved space, made storage easier, and reduced the carbon footprint associated with transportation," said co-author Lining Yao, director of the Morphing Matter Lab at CMU's School of Computer Science. "We decided to look at how the morphing matter technology we were developing in the lab could create flat-packed pastas that offered similar sustainability outcomes....

I read this Emily Dickinson poem time and again . As we grow older, the sadness from losses of various sorts accumulate - layer upon layer, fold upon fold. Some old wounds are buried by new, others open up when we thought they had long healed. You also meet others your age and older with complex life experiences many much harder than your own.  That gives perspective and like Dickinson you may want to measure and sometimes the other's pain feels unfathomable. In this tine's reading, these lines were the most poignant. It brought to mind the unbearable loss a very dear friend suffered - that of a child and how after twenty years the wounds are still tender to touch.  I wonder if it hurts to live,   And if they have to try,         10 And whether, could they choose between,   They would not rather die.    I wonder if when years have piled—   Some thousands—on the cause Of early hurt, if such a lapse       ...

I had manageable levels of travel even before the pandemic. Then came a complete stop. Like many I realized, I really did not like the travel even at the tolerable levels it had been for me. Signs that it could pick back up and more intensely that before, gave me very long pause. This is with having an empty nest and no compelling reasons to stay home. It's just an undesirable overhead. I have friends in sales who are parents of younger kids and truly enjoyed being able to spend time with them during the past year.  Despite the challenges, it was a happy time. Many are not thrilled to be back on the road again,  a lot of the fakery that goes with working a job  has started to rankle more. This quote by someone interviewed for the article is the voice of the people  “I can tell you, most people really don't give 2 flips about 'company culture' and think it's BS."  It will be interesting to see how people demand and create the change they want from their employer...

Traveling for the quarterly team meeting used to be routine pre-covid but seeing that invite land in my inbox filled me with enough anxiety that I could not sleep most night. This is going to be a couple of dozen people with whatever vaccination status gathered together to team, bond and celebrate the end of the pandemic and return to normal - or so it seems. Everyone has the choice to attend remotely but its obviously not where the momentum lies. Being out and about is an act pregnant with meaning these days. It acts as a social signal of being a people person rather than a recluse, being a company culture adherent rather than someone who marches to the beat of their own drummer, being a bold risk-taker and not a wimp and the list goes on. This is an active and conscious choice imbued with reasons that never applied before to traveling for work. You just showed up to these things as needed and life went on.  Now it seems you need to show up needed or not and be counted, every sing...

 His his book The Tyranny of Merit , Michael Sandel writes: Meritocratic hubris reflects the tendency of winners to inhale too deeply of their success, to forget the luck and good fortune that helped them on their way. It is the smug conviction of those who land on top that they deserve their fate, and that those on the bottom deserve theirs, too. This attitude is the moral companion of technocratic politics. Many places I have worked and clients whose organizations I have come to know well have made this inhalation of success the author describes a part of the corporate culture, brand identity and building team morale. We hire only the best, you would not be here if you were not exceptional - is the language routinely used to make new hires feel like they have arrived in workplace heaven by the sheer force of their merit. I have found such exhortations cringe-worthy and have only seen it promote anxiety among those touted as being the "best and the brightest". Who then is th...

This   poem by Tomas Unger   and specially the last two lines, resonate with me: The surprise always something has not abandoned us, the way, standing there, another’s  expression as you realize has become yours— Self given, self seen— Suffering composing  itself is compassion. Unsure if that is what the poet intended, but I read that to mean when one has suffered enough, they are able to recompose that into compassion. So another undergoing similar suffering will see their feelings mirrored in our face and that would be viewed as our compassion for them. I have known people in my life who have experienced pain well beyond anything I have known. I might be able to comprehend and even commiserate but compassion as Unger describes would need to come from lived experience. 

I recently had opportunity to meet an immigrant family who made their huge fortune in one generation. This includes three mansions in as many different countries, ability to spend extravagantly on everything including the basic needs of life - food, clothing and household items. There is more money, than years left in the lives of the generation that made it, to spend it. And so it flows out like from a faucet turned on full.  Staying a couple of days with the family was an illuminating experience for me. Most of the people they started out with, are way behind them in socio-economic status. There is a newer set of rich friends that were acquired later in life but those relationships don't run deep. The older connections have an intrinsic value to this family - it brings the familiar and comfortable. So they like to keep these contacts alive but are wary. They can never be sure what these former connections seek from them - money, status, privilege or just friendship.  I ...

It crossed my mind recently (and not for the first time) that I feel exhausted by my work for none of the obvious reasons. I do have decent work-life balance, do not work particularly long hours, feel very comfortable with the actual content of my job , there are many opportunities to learn and my co-workers are decent. All in all hardly a situation from hell. Yet most days, it takes a lot of effort to get up and get going. Emotional labor is the likely root cause here. It is manifested in the intensity of effort that goes into managing people who simply cannot help tripping over their egos by the minute. Dealing with a crowd of such characters is like taking a stroll in a dense minefield.  Someone is getting their feelings hurt all the time and then they decide to act out and create needless chaos for the group. The drivers for bad behavior are almost always visibility leading to promotions and bigger compensations. I am at a point in my life where I don't much care for any of wh...

Interesting story about remote work and discrimination against residents of Colorado . Upon cursory read of the situation it seems to one of those where the road to hell is paved with good intentions. If the idea was to get a better and more equitable deal for the resident of the state, clearly that is not the outcome that is happening. Employers are okay to remove a whole state from the pool of applicants because that is the easier option. A Reddit post on Friday  first pointed  to Digital Ocean, a cloud infrastructure company with job advertisement explaining that Colorado was being excluded "due to local CO job posting requirements” and resulted in an  investigation by 9Wants to Know  that found at least 10 firms avoiding compliance with Colorado’s pay equity law. Digital Ocean has since quietly removed the qualifier but still  refuses to include a salary range  which puts them in violation of the state law. In a time where WFH or atleast a hybrid model ...

Of all the ransomware stories I have read in the news, this one feels like the saddest most terrifying one . Talking to a therapist is one of those protected, inviolable communications people still have left in a world where privacy is harder and harder to come by. When all doors close, this one is still open. To have this space invaded by a ransomware exploit is wrong at more levels than I can count. Besides the data of 300 patients, “RANSOM_MAN” made a 10.9GB TAR file available through their server on the morning of October 23. It’s not clear what it was, but if it included the full patient database, then it’s feasible that many people could have downloaded it, acquiring the tools to extort people. One concern is that it’s hard to determine how far this data has already spread and cybercrime officials could find themselves in a game of whack-a-mole for years. A few hours after it was uploaded, the file disappeared. Uploading a person's most intimate thoughts and confessions for p...

When I saw this infographic somehow I thought of the cost of dysfunction in the workplace and the costs thereof. Downstream impacts could easily be the impaired health and well-being of family members, educational attainment of children who are under the care of employees who are dealing with dysfunction at work.  My friend L works for a large company that has embraced wokeism to the degree that makes it impossible for people to function normally. There are mandatory sessions for leadership of which L is a part to espouse and embrace the company's personal brand of wokeism. The level of disingenuity is such that those that are choking on the kool-aid need to find their way out of the place. L is getting close to that point with two school age children to raise.  There is only so much capacity she has to deal with this craziness, deliver on her very difficult job and somehow also be a good wife and mother. Somedays everything seems to fall apart. If gets out of this job and fi...

I am definitely in the demographic where such interview questions could be asked to correctly peg my vintage. It's not happened so far but interesting to know. The Chinese Zodiac sign is the most bizarre of them all: A really sneaky way I’ve seen employers pinpoint an age is asking candidates what their Chinese zodiac animal is (rat, dragon, rabbit, etc.),” says Janelle Owens, HR Director at Test Prep Insight. “For those that don’t know, these are the animals and years you’ve probably seen on placemats at Chinese restaurants.” Each animal only comes up every 12 years, so given the potential timespan, you can typically use this info, with other questions about pop culture, to back into their birth year.   Its a lot easier on everyone if the conversation turns to kids for some reason. There is a minimum number of years you can add to the age of the child to arrive at the lowest possible age of the parent. If I sensed that there was this pregnant question in the air about my age...

Commonsense advice on how to make WHF work for all concerned. The data is predictable and unsurprising. When I was a younger mother and J could suck up my time like a sponge, I took every opportunity I got to be with her. It was the best ROI of my time by far and it was mostly a fun time. This is not to romanticize the past and claim there weren't days when I felt so over-committed and over-scheduled that my head could burst. There was a fair share of those days and also the ones when dealing with J felt like immovable object meeting unstoppable force. Notwithstanding, there was some reward even at the end of those days.  I can see why mothers would want what I wanted back then - be with the kids as much as possible. What I learned from my own example and that of my peers is that such women should be prepared to make trade-offs. Building and growing a real career while devoting the best of your time and energy to raise your little one comes at considerable cost. It is not impossib...

Interesting essay on sex-positivity and the lack thereof.  Read this right after a BBC story on falling birth rates and had to wonder if there might be a co-relation there. When women were less educated and financially empowered, having a number of offspring offered her validation and also security for the future. It made sense that she felt incentivized to reproduce, specially if it improved her social standing. The quality of sex, the level of positivity and such did not matter much. The end goal was pro-creation so a woman endured what she had to. Increasingly that is not the case.  Women have a lot of choice and there is no cachet attached with being the mother of a half a dozen children. The quality of sex and the feelings of positivity it promotes for the partner become part of her decision to become mother. If the conditions are middling to bad, the woman will focus on either improving them or moving on but getting pregnant will likely not be top of mind. In societies w...

I had watched Seemabaddha as a child - one of the many efforts of my parents to get me "cultured" We never lived in Bengal and I did not have peers who spoke the language - so watching Bangla movies was one of their ways of giving me practice with language comprehension. I recall asking them to repeat what the characters in the movie said in "plain" Bangla. Often they would explain what I missed on the way back home. I enjoyed these movies mainly on account of the snacks I got during the interval. Watching it recently was a wonderful experience. The finer plot points made sense this time. The wordplay is subtle and the characters have few if any degrees of freedom. They are all constrained ( seemabaddha translated to English). The protagonist Shyamal Chatterjee is a product of where he comes from and who he aspires to be - that forms his set of constraints. The wife has her entire identify tied to his success and her constraints are defined by how far her husband ca...

Reading this essay reminded me of a conversation I had with my mother a few weeks ago. She said in the early days of the pandemic, she would sit by her window and watch children play downstairs or ride in their bicycles. Often they chased after one and another in the staircases of the apartment. She enjoyed their loud exuberance. Now she does not see or hear any kid. They are staying in as instructed by their parents. Whatever their source of entertainment is likely solitary now. She said she feels most sorry for the little ones who had a couple of years robbed of their childhood in a country where the system already makes a carefree childhood unattainable.  The author of the essay argues that the pandemic has made private affluence more visible: Capitalism pushes us towards private affluence. We aspire to acquire our own things. Shared things are seen as second best, something of an inconvenience. Politics responds accordingly, prioritising economic growth and ‘more money in your...

Interesting interpretation of sexualized women in the context of Playboy in Carina Chocano's book  Play the Girl : On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks, & Other Mixed Messages : She was a fresh animal, well-washed with soap and water. She could not learn, grow, or change. She could not really exist in a temporal sense. All she could do was to try to preserve and display herself. Experience made her difficult. It got her banished to her witchy cottage in the forest. She had to remain a dumb bunny, an unconscious body, frozen in time and preserved in amber, for as long as she could in order to survive . Later in the book, Chocano talks about where a girl fits in the world: Girls exist only in relation to boys.” In other words, “the girl” was an intrusion, often unwelcome, in an all-male universe. She did not represent human consciousness but a psychosexual disturbance with a bow on top. In the workplace, the narrative the inclusion and equity minded HR people wan...

There is no story about eternal youth without a plot twist. Be it Ayesha in Rider Haggard's She or some tapeworm giving ants youth forever . The tapeworm's strategy is multi-generational and no surprise that the reward for the ants they host on make youthful seem to be getting just too good of a deal. I could not help thinking of parallels in human society.  If a group of people suddenly turn forever young and beautiful chances are they will not need to work the kinds of jobs regular imperfect looking folks too. They can sit around being social media influencers and reality show stars showing everyone else their immutable perfection. That would provide for an income stream that well exceeds what they might have made in their past life working more mundane. They will have a fan base which is equivalent of the uninfected ants taking care of the infected ones. Also, if the fan base dies out for whatever reason, the eternally youthful and beautiful people may be left without the re...

Data science has become an increasing ill-defined term and all kinds of folks call themselves data scientists. Even worse is the category of people who claim fluency and proficiency with data - you have no idea what to make of such claim. This helpful chart goes a long way in clarifying what data skills you should have based on your job function.  I have a good mind to put this to use soon - have the data folks plot their skills graph on this chart so its clear what expectations other may or may not have of them. When interviewing a client team regarding the production and consumption of data it would be useful to see their responses in the context of this chart. The skills they have or lack can drive their perceptions and their view of what needs to change. The only thing I would add to this is intuition about data. When a customer describes a problem statement how often is your hypothesis about the data (that can explain it or help with root cause analysis) accurate? There is a ...

My handwriting has grown progressively worse over time . A few years ago, I started taking notes at work using a fountain pen but the results were underwhelming. It helped me recall the discussions much better but the writing was still appalling. For a month now, I have started to copy a poem a day from my copy of Coleman Bark's Essential Rumi. The first time, I just copy the words down and don't focus too much on the quality. The next iteration, I focus on consistency and not taking lazy short cuts with my cursive. The third and last iteration, I try to see if I can get any improvement over my previous days efforts. It is too early yet to judge if my home-grown method of trying to improve my handwriting is yielding results. But I believe this is a step in the right direction for a few other reasons. I makes me take a break from all kinds distraction, sit upright at a desk and put pen to paper and most importantly read and ponder the magical words of Rumi. All of that might hav...

Explaining to my parents' generation what I do at work is challenging enough even though they are familiar with many components of it from their working years. Trying to explain what a Tik-Tok influencer does is a whole another level of impossibility.  Before the pandemic, Herbes owned a vintage shop, but once Covid hit, she found herself in the position of many other small business owners and had to shut down her store. TikTok became her primary business. Because of the popularity of her blog, Herbes was able to monetize her TikTok through sponsored posts, which she works with brands to develop. Sometimes, to mix it up and engage her followers, she’ll involve them in her design choices. When decorating a guest room, she asked viewers to vote on the color of the decorative pillows. (Teal won out over pink, and viewers also chose a salmon-colored paint for the walls.) Lately these world have collided for me as I find myself researching how influencer marketing works on Tik-Tok for ...

We were out in the park last night watching fireworks. After a long time, heard the sounds of kids squealing with excitement. The spectacular show of light and colors took me back to childhood Diwalis. My maternal uncle who I lost to covid recently often came to visit us for Diwali.  He always had an assortment of firecrackers for me - they were not run of the mill things my parents would buy. He put thought and effort into getting things that were different. At dusk, we burst and lit them up together along with other children in the neighborhood. There were always some enthusiastic adults like my uncle who participated as equals and not merely as supervisors to keep us safe. Those were such carefree, happy times - arranging all my firecrackers on the balcony floor so I could enjoy the feeling of bounty and then going through them over the course of the evening, the familiar sulphurous smell in the air as the noise and the lamps died down. I thought about how life goes, how the me...

Watched The China Hustle recently and it made me feel like a pawn in a game that I can't begin to understand. Yet, it was the monies of average people like me that is being looted by an array of actors who seem to have no losing scenario. One scene was particularly poignant for me. Dan David, the whistleblower who is trying to get Congress to take action is shown at a barbeque in his father's house with a bunch of elderly neighbors. He is trying to get them to understand that they are being robbed and defrauded. No one in the gathering exhibits any signs of comprehension as David explains the problem statement and what he does as a short seller. One man asks him at the end of it all to explain how it is that he makes money while they lose on the same thing. The conversation moves on.  People have been conditioned to chase after the next thing in sight - a vacation, a nicer car, a bigger house and so on. If they can find the money to do what is top of mind, it lulls them into a ...

The Gates divorce has forced some useful discussion on the topic . If the richest most successful couple can't figure it out after 27 years then is it such a big failure when it happens to ordinary people. While that is useful to ponder, the more germane question is whether creating a legal contract to make marriage official serves anyone well. If it is meant to test seriousness of intent, anyone who has been through divorce will tell you that if people really want out no piece of paper will prevent it. If they choose to be unfaithful they will, if they don't want to work on the relationship they won't.  The end will come when it will, the presence of papers will just make things that much more messy, complicated, stressful and expensive. Most importantly, children will suffer needlessly not only during the rupture of the marriage but for many years to come. In the meanwhile the machinery that helps people unwind from their marriage papers will make a ton of money at the e...

Wonderful reading this interview with Francis Weller on grief and loss .  In speaking of how little time people allow themselves to mourn and how grieving has become a solitary process, he says:  In this culture we display a compulsive avoidance of difficult matters and an obsession with distraction. Because we cannot acknowledge our grief, we’re forced to stay on the surface of life. Poet Kahlil Gibran said, “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.” We experience little genuine joy in part because we avoid the depths. We are an ascension culture.   The whole interview is thought-provoking. This one I can particularly relate to having lost a loved one recently. I cried my heart out to my best friend from college. She knew my uncle and his significance in my life. We cried together - me for my loss, she to see her friend in pain. It was a momentary release from the pain but I was grateful for it. I took one day off from work to cope and...

For some people, not knowing whether to dress warm or cold is not just a month of May problem - it could last most year. So having shirt that can keep you warm or cold based on which side is up would be a perfect solution. This is great for traveling too as you get exposed to different weather conditions along the way and your destination could be exactly opposite of where you came from - maybe the very point of your journey. Its nifty that the fabric can also generate some power, maybe there is a way to make it a phone charger too.  On the warm side, the material is covered in zinc and copper nanoparticles, which absorb solar energy. There’s a term for that type of mechanism, which is appropriately called a solar absorber. It’s basically a solar panel, but instead of turning sunlight into electricity, it turns sunlight into heat. This warm side even works at night, albeit to a lesser degree, when it can warm your skin by 5 degrees. On the cool side, the fabric is covered with an ...