Heartcrossings

Talked to my childhood friend A after a long time today and much has transpired in his life. A month ago, he quit his job because he could not deal with the idea of having someone manage him anymore. This was a cushy job that required little effort after all these years and kept his dysfunctional marriage afloat. The wife was deeply disappointed with the decision and did not hesitate to demonstrate it.  A used this as a trigger to initiate parting ways with her peacefully, with minimal harm to their two kids. When we spoke, he sounded a couple of decades younger and happier than I have known him to be in his adult years. The chain of events triggered by the arrival of his new boss, turned out to be a big blessing in his life. A is now free to act in advisory capacity for the same clients he was serving while at the job. He gets to travel a lot more - something he had been looking forward to. The kids are old enough to manage on their own for the few days he will be gone.  I ha...

A couple of years ago, we made a rule that if there was difficult or stressful discussion that needed to be had and it was already after dinner, we would walk and talk, never stay in and stew. Over time we adapted the rule to if there is any such conversation that needs to be had and it can wait until after dinner, we will do that, walk and talk.  A few different benefits results from this small change we instrumented into our lives. For one thing, the issue becomes depersonalized - it is just something that we needed to talk through, analyze and figure out a solution that makes sense. It puts distance between us and the topic at hand, stimulates good debate and the couple of hours it takes to reach a conclusion is spent getting a nice walk. By the time we come home, we have resolution and ready to wind-down. This is a process that works every time and it seems like the benefits spill over to other areas as well. It does not surprise me at all that walking stimulates creativity . P...

Reading this reminded me of an over-sharing boss I once had. It was not tawdry stuff but it was very uncomfortable all the same. The oversharing ran the gamut - details of domestic mishaps in the form a burst sewer line that had flooded the basement and needed a weekend of clean-up. That was not a mental picture one could un-imagine. She had learned to weaponize the over-sharing to the point that some of her superiors viewed it as her secret super-power. When it was not a household disaster, it was something about her kids that was not something an average parent would share with a group of random co-workers. It certainly did not show the said kids in any positive light and it made one question the quality of parenting.  She always triggered a tsunami of over-sharing in meetings because she led by example. Her stories had a couple of interesting effects from what I could observe, first it deflected the discussion from areas where she was not quite performing or delivering. Second,...

This essay made for sad reading. Everyone around me is talking about being burned out and how sometimes they need atleast a day off to keep sane, keep going. I felt the whole community rooting for me when I went on a two week vacation - people wanted to see it work for me so they could try it as well. The fact that I came back home without incident gave them hope.  A few summers ago, this was an incredibly stressful time for me with J applying to colleges together with all other complexities that are part of raising a child that age. When I transpose that period of my life to present day, I don't feel like I could have made it. I would be broken. Broken or not, parents will continue to preserve because there are no options, and that can only bring misery to the kids. In describing the circumstances, parents of school-age children find themselves in, the author says: It’s enough to bring a parent to tears, except that every parent I know ran out a long time ago—I know I did. R...

Good article on the forces that are driving the school bus driver shortage in America . Schools are hurting in a many different ways - there is also a school teacher shortage driven by some of the same forces.  According to a June survey of 2,690 members of the National Education Association, 32% said the pandemic drove them to plan to leave the profession earlier than expected. Another survey by the RAND Corp. said the pandemic exacerbated attrition, burnout and stress on teachers, who were almost twice as likely as other employed adults to feel frequent job-related stress and almost three times more likely to experience depression. The life of a school bus driver is no fun and the wages certainly don't make up for it. A teacher may get more satisfaction from their job in some circumstances but it may not be enough to compensate for all that is broken and dysfunctional. Things only got worse with the pandemic . My friends with school-age children tell me the classes are over-crow...

MeFi has always been a fun place for me to go for accidental wit and wisdom. This one for instance about people in their 50s trying to be in a relationship is spot on:  Pretty much everyone is broken by the time they’re in their fifties - physically and mentally. Everyone has some sort of family problem that they have to deal with from time to time. The key is to be aware that you’re broken, and find someone whose broken parts work well with your broken parts. This is true even for much younger people. I would argue as young as 25. At that point things are not broken to the point they cannot be mended, but there are tendencies that are pretty well entrenched. There are those who are blessed with a sense of adventure and want to go see the world, there are those who want to be comfortable and mostly stay local. There are those who aspire for a great career and prioritize that over other things, those that want to start a family and work only as much as is needed.  These tende...

Watching My Zoe is a hard movie to watch for anyone who has been in a corrosive marriage, tried to get out of it fighting for every inch of the way out. It is also about the sudden loss of a child in that situation. There are bad marriages that produce a constant and tolerable degree of pain, one gets used to it and develops a carapace - there might never be enough impetus to leave. Isabelle is not in a such a marriage so she has no option but to leave. Her ex is one of those who makes her miserable in marriage and can't stand the thought of her having escaped to a better life.  This is also a story about how a couple that is no longer in love have no way to support each other when they lose a child. So they suffer in their own private hell though the pain is one and the same. They forge their own path to recovery which could lead them to very different places over time. The sadness in this movie build layer upon layer, fold upon fold and you experience a sense of drowning in it t...

Have been reading old philosophers lately growing increasingly weary of the reading I do routinely as part of my job. The older I grow, the harder it seems to find anything that captures the imagination in this kind of reading about business and technology.  Reading this passage in the Confucian Analects: In matters which he does not understand, the wise man will always reserve his judgment. If terms are not correctly defined, words will not harmonise with things. If words do not harmonise with things, public business will remain undone. If public business remains undone, order and harmony will not flourish. If order and harmony do not flourish, law and justice will not attain their ends. If law and justice do not attain their ends, the people will be unable to move hand or foot. The wise man, therefore, frames his definitions to regulate his speech, and his speech to regulate his actions. He is never reckless in his choice of words. Even today leaders in organizations are coached ...

Recently I found myself in the mood for dinner at an Indian restaurant - something of a rarity for us. There are many complicated Indian dishes I love and don't have the time to cook at home, but its not possible to get them in the average desi restaurant in America either. So there is very little incentive for me to choose Indian over the innumerable other dining options. The place we picked that was in the older part of town, near the local university. It was late of a weeknight and we were among the half dozen people seated inside. Most tables were empty. A Mohammed Rafi playlist from Bollywood movies made in the 50s and 60s played in the background. The smell of spices and incense along with the music created the ambience I think I might have been craving not having been home for a long time and with no line of sight into when that may be possible.  The waiter had impeccable manners and knew everything about every item in the menu. The quality of service we received that evenin...

 In The Memorabilia , Socrates says this to Xenophon about beautiful people: Know that a beautiful person is a more dangerous animal than scorpions, because these cannot wound unless they touch us; but beauty strikes at a distance: from what place soever we can but behold her, she darts her venom upon us, and overthrows our judgment.   And perhaps for this reason the Loves are represented with bows and arrows.. Reading this made me think of beauty in the scope of alluring things that we want to chase after against our better judgement. We start out by loving that thing and wanting it because "she darts her venom upon us, and overthrows our judgment". It reminded me our a conversation I had been B recently - he is retired tech executive and even a decade after hanging up his boots, he is struggling to make sense of what his life is about. That afternoon we were talking about what it takes to be a stellar sales person in our line of work.  B said that the best sales pe...

 Beautiful and funny comparison of American and French cheese  and what that means for marketing cheese in America: ..in America the cheese is dead, which means is pasteurized, which means legally dead and scientifically dead, and we don't want any cheese that is alive, then I have to put that up front. I have to say this cheese is safe, is pasteurized, is wrapped up in plastic. I know that plastic is a body bag. You can put it in the fridge. I know the fridge is the morgue; that's where you put the dead bodies. And so once you know that, this is the way you market cheese in America. In contrast, he says of the French: ..you never put the cheese in the refrigerator, because you don't put your cat in the refrigerator. It's the same; it's alive.  A relatively simple idea but with such a myriad of consequences. Reading this essay made me think of other things like cheese where cultures are similar at the surface but really far apart when you dig a bit deeper. Cheese is...

J is just of of her teens so it was interesting to read these lines from The Girl In Her Teens - a book I chanced upon by accident and definitely not my speed. Not withstanding there was some wisdom here: It sometimes seems as if Shakespeare must have been thinking of the adolescent period of life when he said:         " There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood,  leads on to fortune . Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries" The teen age is the period where the battle for an honest, clean, pure, righteous type of manhood and womanhood must be waged and won. Having realized this, it now remains for us to bend all our energies and summon all our skill to meet the task. There is definitely something to be said for the window of opportunity that the teen years offer in a person's life. My own teenage years were far from taking the tide at a the flood. It was a period of intense confusion, distraction an...

Reading A Place Within and its fascinating to see India come alive in the author's voice. He says this of Kolkata, my home-town: Of course there is a brilliance here, compared to the simple career-mindedness that I’ve seen elsewhere. These people here are not merely climbers, with wives or families to answer to, status to aspire to. They do not yearn for trips abroad. They are well informed, up-to-date not only on the news but also on global events and history; and they know literature. This is Calcutta. They can quote freely from Bengali writings (as well as Derrida and Foucault), and unlike Indians elsewhere lapse easily into the mother tongue in front of a non-speaker even as they apologize for this; they relish the language, love it, so it’s easy to understand, excuse the lapse. And there is a genuine sympathy for the oppressed: after all, there exists a caste system, and the multitudes are poor beyond imagination. This is the Kolkata I met when I first came there to work a co...

Beautiful essay about the body and being able to negotiate the world without the physical body seen. I can relate to this maybe because I am reclusive by nature - I love not having to worry about appearance all through the work day. My mind functions just the same whether I am dressed for a business meeting or in comfortable home clothes and no makeup.  It has been a privilege to be able to work in this mode for a long time and that it become the only way since the beginning of the pandemic. This is hardly the best choice for a young person starting out their own lives - people J's age for instance. All the learning and growth that comes from spending time with others, working towards similar professional and personal goals would never come about. It would likely stunt a person's life and their worldview. The saddest lines in this essay were: Why do bodies feel so embarrassing? When I first had sex, I remember thinking it was best if I could leave my body, instead of being in ...

One of my goals in 2020 was to make peace with my father. The year came and went, covid remained and very little changed in my relationship with him. Time after time, when I start down this path I begin with gratitude for all that he has done for me - and there some big ticket items in that list. But for him, I would not have sat the engineering college entrance exam for instance. He never thought that was a good career choice for me but once I made a decision, me made sure I did not back out.  Career wise everything followed from that morning he took me to the exam hall and told me to give it my best shot. He made me believe that was all I needed to do.  In the early years of my independent life I went through a lot of confusion and soul-searching not sure if I wanted a career or want a family and if these things could even co-exist. I believed that they could not and if they did one or both would be highly imperfect. I wanted perfection somewhere not all around mediocrity wh...

Interesting article on our propensity to take risk by day of week .  .. the outcome of a decision can depend on the day of the week on which it is taken. That turns out to have important consequences. For example, in the UK, every general election since 1935 has been held on a Thursday – the most risk-averse day. The Scottish Independence and Brexit referendums were also held on Thursdays. The core message of the Brexit campaign – "Take back control" – was a direct appeal to risk aversion, and the opinion poll data show that support for Brexit was strongest on Thursdays. Our analyses show that the outcomes might have been different had they been held on Fridays. This got me thinking about scheduling high-risk events ahead of time. Some you can control the timing of others happen to you. In the event you control when the event itself will occur, I wonder if you would make the decision differently depending on which day of the week you made it. Say A is planning on suing B - th...

First thing in the morning yesterday scrolling through my RSS feed, I read about National Dessert Day . Back in Kolkata it is Navami and had I been home, there would be no dearth of mishti on such occasion. All at once I felt a longing for Pujas past, not what I would run into today but the way it used to be when I was a kid. The friends I went pandal-hopping with, the rides on the fairground and eating street food until we were stuffed to the gills. Interesting that the pictures of blueberry cobbler and key-lime pie would act as a trigger for things so far and removed from them. But the remnants of that wave of nostalgia stayed with me past the work day and I made a run to the up and coming Indian grocery store in my town. No surprise that the place was busy and the parking lot almost full. People were shopping for Dussehra. Just the twenty or so minutes I spent there picking up some sweets, I had a chance to dip into the closest thing to the nostalgia that had got me here.  I ima...

These lines by Rilke exactly describe how the endless workday cycle feels: If one day one grasps that their busyness is pathetic, their occupations frozen and disconnected from life, why then not continue to see like a child, see it as strange, see it out of the depth of one’s own world, the vastness of one’s own solitude, which is, in itself, work and status and vocation? The busyness of calls and running from one goal to the next that are not connected to the purpose of life to the point that you don't even get a chance to contemplate what that purpose might be. These were the thoughts on my mind when we went swimming recently and saw this ménage a trois in the far corner of the pool. The woman was likely in her 30s basking in the glow of attention of two men one much older and the other younger than her.  Their universe was complete and self-contained, a temporal bubble of perfection perhaps. All three of them looked radiant. The other folks at the pool looked two dimensional a...

The Facebook do-over of a bad and long dead Google idea is very discomforting news. For one thing, FB learned from the mistakes Google made so the Ray Ban Stories look very much like the sunglasses we are all used to seeing - it would be harder to notice that you are being recorded without your consent. The terms of service is a smoke-screen at best, its as laughable as FB's pretense of allowing users to have control over their privacy settings.  No such thing as a free lunch in the world - you pay with you data. Since this is a lunch buffet and no one is metering how much nonsense you post on FB, there should be no expectation of data privacy either. As if that was not enough, now all of us have to be concerned about folks strutting around in their Ray Ban Wayfarers and try not to get recorded and posted on FB without our knowledge or consent. 

Watched In The Cut recently and found it to be very interesting movie despite the overall plot being rather trite.  Loved the literary quotes, like the line from Neruda - I want to do with you what spring does with cherry trees, and the lines from the Federico Garcia Lorca poem: The still water of your mouth under a thicket of kisses. There were many others that I did not recognize but enjoyed just as much. Notwithstanding the predictable serial killer arc with a generous smattering of red-herrings, the movie had redeeming qualities.  It was shot with love, care and attention to detail. That turned the most mundane scenes luminous. Each character was developed enough to stand on it's own - except for the serial killer. The bond between the half-sisters was depicted very beautifully - they were thrown together by fate by father who had married five times. After the dust had settled over the squabbling parents, the numerous exes, there was this friendship between two grown women...

Ran into this job posting the other day and it got me thinking about the importance of curiosity and self-improvement in ways that matter. The person has a steady and comfortable job from how she describes it and likely does not have a compelling reason to become smarter about Java architecture. Yet, she is willing to pay to be mentored on the subject. There is so much to love about this. She is not looking to acquire credentials to parade around but actually learn something she cares about.  In the technology business it is becoming commonplace to require certifications as a condition of continued employment . There is a window of opportunity to get it done and once that is missed, the pressure on the employee mounts. Folks do end up getting certified to keep their jobs but it often does not correspond to actual learning or increase in level of knowledge though there are always metrics proffered to insinuate a strong co-relation between such certification and job perfor...

Continuing to read My Reminiscences and can't help wondering if Tagore's genius might have been helped atleast in part by the lack of sensory overload paired with abundance of time to let his mind wander, find ways to overcome boredom without being gainfully occupied: In that golden age of pipe water, it used to flow even up to my father's third storey rooms. And turning on the shower tap I would indulge to my heart's content in an untimely bath. Not so much for the comfort of it, as to give rein to my desire to do just as I fancied. The alternation of the joy of liberty, and the fear of being caught, made that shower of municipal water send arrows of delight thrilling into me.  It was perhaps because the possibility of contact with the outside was so remote that the joy of it came to me so much more readily. When material is in profusion, the mind gets lazy and leaves everything to it, forgetting that for a successful feast of joy its internal equipment counts for more...

Lately there are just too many op-ed pieces of Afghanistan and everyone is a purported expert on the topic and had seen this debacle coming a long time ago. This essay was a bit different  and sobering kind of read for someone novice to both the topic itself and how the forces of history shaped that country.  Knowing a country and its context is no easy feat even for those who have roots there. In the preface to his book A Place Within M.G. Vasanji writes: It would take many lifetimes, it was said to me during my first visit, to see all of India. It was January 1993. The desperation must have shown on my face to take in all I possibly could. This was not something I had articulated or resolved, and yet I recall an anxiety as I travelled the length and breadth of the country, senses raw to every new experience, that even in the distraction of a blink I might miss something profoundly significant. He goes on to describe his background. Vasanji is not from India and neither are ...

Reading My Reminiscences by Tagore for the first time and it transports me back to my childhood when my mother read this book to me on summer afternoons. She may have planned to read a only so many pages before I ready to nap but these readings never went by her plans. I always begged for another page, just a bit longer and so nap time was greatly abbreviated. I hold those memories dear to this day.  His comparison of his own childhood to those of more modern children holds true even today across a similar generational divide:  Our elders were in every way at a great distance from us, in their dress and food, living and doing, conversation and amusement. We caught glimpses of these, but they were beyond our reach. Elders have become cheap to modern children; they are too readily accessible, and so are all objects of desire. Nothing ever came so easily to us. Many a trivial thing was for us a rarity, and we lived mostly in the hope of attaining, when we were old enough, the thi...

Nice essay by David Sedaris about how people process the death of someone they might not have not known very well but still want to be polite about. In our desire to be kind and generous to the departed, we may easily overlook the reality of that person's life the way those closest to him know it to be. A close friend of my family died a few years ago leaving behind his wife and two adult children. No one appeared to care that the man was gone. Many of us who knew him socially thought he was a nice guy who made everyone feel welcome to his home. There were many that recalled good times they had together, the acts of kindness and generosity that they had been recipients of.  Having nothing of substance to contribute, I listened to what others had to say. But I did not fail to notice the stoic indifference of his wife and kids to all of this - they really wanted to get the whole thing over and to get on with their lives. The home was completely remodeled in a few months, like they h...

There is a heart-breaking quality to this essay - like a silent scream so powerful that it tears through the body instead of emitting the sound that it was meant to.  I need you to know: I hated that I needed more than this from him. There is nothing more humiliating to me than my own desires. Nothing that makes me hate myself more than being burdensome and less than self-sufficient. I did not want to feel like the kind of nagging woman who might exist in a sit-com. These were small things, and I told myself it was stupid to feel disappointed by them. I had arrived in my thirties believing that to need things from others made you weak. I think this is true for lots of people but I think it is especially true for women. When men desire things they are “passionate.” When they feel they have not received something they need they are “deprived,” or even “emasculated,” and given permission for all sorts of behavior. But when a woman needs she is needy. She is meant to contain within he...

Just out of the blue, J started to share pictures of dishes she had cooked. Always creative and meticulous in the kitchen, it was no surprise that each meal was relatively complex and visually pleasing. This is the first time that she had started to cook on a regular basis. At first the effort felt significant compared to the reward but with each passing day and meal, that improved. She started to experience the creative freedom and relaxation that comes with cooking.  Back when she was at home, J used to say my cooking was always an indicator of my mental state. She could feel the stress, anger and happiness in it. So sitting down to dinner was in a sense confronting my state of mind that day. Knowing that is how she felt, I tried to get into the right frame of mind before preparing dinner - telling myself that the only point of the meal is to nourish those I love. Sometimes that seemed to help. Knowing how cooking is therapeutic for me, I am very glad J has taken to it and is le...

I know of a couple of folks who have died after being struck by lightning. Until reading this news story I did not pause to think it was odd that I would in the recent past hear of such deaths. Both times, I had dismissed it as a freak accident and thought only for second how odd that it would happen to two people I know both living in the same town. Most human deaths in thunderstorms are preventable but almost no buildings have lightning rods to protect their inhabitants, Srivastava said.  Forecasting is also tricky and warning people of approaching storms is difficult.  Indian scientists recently developed a mobile app that seeks to provide real-time warnings about imminent strikes and precautions to be taken.  But this has limited use in a country where only half the population has access to a smartphone and even fewer in rural areas where strikes are more common.  Many people are also unaware of the dangers and what to do – like not sheltering under a tree and a...

A couple of decades ago, when a person was introduced in a meeting as the enterprise architect, everyone else knew this was a person of serious consequence. They knew everything that was to be known about the technology that operated the business. If you were there to peddle some product or service, you had to convince this individual that you knew what you were doing and that whatever you meant to add to their stack would make architectural sense. Over time, I have noticed a rapid dilution in the expectations one could have of a person with the title solution architect. Now that cloud is the way to go, enterprise architects are not as common - they are viewed as a part of the old guard.  The ubiquitous solution architect of today is a a couple of notches above a self-taught programmer. This is not to generalize the community as there are many capable folks as well, but on average you need to temper your expectations when you hear someone call themselves a solution architect - they...

If a kid makes $400K at 12 creating digital art on summer vacation, what might it take to incentivize him to do things that are way harder and much less rewarding. While NFTs are new, making money off of them is no different that in the traditional  world of art. It takes being noticed by the right people - as this kid did: He said his artwork went viral after he posted a thread on his creation. “I had only a few followers on my Twitter. Luckily, someone big on Twitter sharing the same interest retweeted me and today I have over 12,00,000 followers — from the BBC to New York Post to Geo News — everyone has picked up my news,” said the confident young man. One of my clients, a traditional retailer with a dwindling customer base is spending a lot of money on influencer marketing in hopes of creating that elusive virality that will bring shoppers to them in droves. So far, their efforts have not produced any remarkable results. Maybe influencers can move the needle only if they promo...

J has been in college for a couple of years now and this time has been one of great emotional growth for me. I graduated from being a hyper-attached, high-strung, high-separation anxiety parent to someone who is willing to wait a couple of weeks to have a phone conversation with her child. We both have busy schedules and live in different time zones so getting that opportunistic hour to chat is not easy.  I first learned to control the impulsive urge to call her at first and then when that  behavior improved, tried not to text just because I needed to feel connected to my baby. The last step which still ongoing is to communicate with a light touch for a friend and mentor - J is a sensible young woman and does not need to be hovered over. She generally makes good decisions and I must learn to disagree and still back her play.  Learning how to get to an equal footing with my grown-up daughter, not suffocating her and still being the one she can always count on, are the next...