Learning Patience

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 have known A for as long as I remember and he was always a very patient and methodical person. Everyone who knows him values his counsel because he thinks through the consequences of actions very carefully. If you are planning to do something stupid, he will call you on it and explain his reasons. Some of us who were privy to his marriage troubles told him many times to put himself out of his misery but he always said the timing needed to be right and he would know when that is. We were not sure he would ever do it, maybe it was easier to preserve status-quo. He surprised us all and there is so much to learn from how A brought change in his life with minimal hurt and damage to those who were impacted by it. 

Walk and Talk

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.

Perhaps it is a coincidence that so many great thinkers were obsessive walkers. There could be just as many brilliant thinkers who never walked. Did William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, or Toni Morrison walk every day? What about Frederick Douglass, Marie Curie, or Isaac Newton? Surely the astoundingly brilliant Stephen Hawking did not walk after ALS paralyzed him. So walking is not essential to thinking, but it certainly helps.

Much lesser mortals like us will not become one of those names just because we walk a lot too. But maybe it makes us a smidge smarter.

Chronic Overshare

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, it promoted random over-sharing by everyone around her to where the point of the meeting became a human bonding experience but no progress was made as far as work. She was able to normalize this mode of operation and people in her orbit lived under this spell of fake warmth and false sense of security. It seemed to me that when bosses decide to overshare to the point of making others feel uncomfortable it is a very twisted power move. 

Forever Broken

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. Ran out of tears, ran out of energy, ran out of patience. Through these grinding 18 months, we’ve managed our kids’ lives as best we could while abandoning our own. It was unsustainable then, it’s unsustainable now, and no matter what fresh hell this school year brings, it’ll still be unsustainable.

Part of me wants to believe that collectively we will come out stronger at the other end of this. Many of us would have found our real purpose in life, some of our kids would have discovered inner resources they did not know they had. Maybe the broken will mend too. 

Quitting School

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-crowded because many teachers have quit and school is fully in-person. The kids are not adjusting well to returning to class full-time after remote learning for over a year - the older ones don't see why their physical presence is required and acting out their disengagement. None of this in addition to stress of the virus spreading around among unvaccinated kids is helping the worn-out teachers. 

In a child's mind, their home-room teacher is there forever - whatever their definition of that forever is. It provides and anchor and source of comfort. They grow attached to this person. In times of turbulence in their personal life, this teacher could be the one they go to for support. When these teachers come and go from their lives, the disruption goes well beyond education. The child begins to see that everything in the world as fickle and unreliable, diminishing their desire to persevere - who will be there to cheer them for trying and succeeding in the end.

Broken Parts

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 tendencies remain static until there is a major life-altering event - but a prospective partner should not count on it. What you see is what you get for the most part. If what you see appears somewhat "broken" it is best not to come in with a chest of tools in hopes of fixing it. The only difference is that in our youth we believe change is possible - in us and in the other, as we grow older we come to realize that it is not. So making sure the broken parts and mutually compatible is key to success 50s or 20s. 

Love and Loss

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 that stays to the very end. Isabelle has triumphed and she has her Zoe as she wanted and yet there is a terrible lack of closure for all concerned. 

Defining Terms

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 on public speaking and being measured about what they say. Being on brand and on message is deemed supremely important. Yet in the midst of all that very little effort is applied into the first part of what Confucius says - the importance of correctly defining terms so words will harmonize with things. It is very hard to listen to these very well-trained, well-rehearsed folks for more than a few minutes and just about impossible to learn anything of enduring value from anything that they say.

Nowhere is this malaise more evident that in a modernly designed website. It is just about impossible to understand what anything is about. This site was awarded the best site award in 2016 - a more abstruse landing page would be hard to find. Then there is this one from 2021 that definitely fails the test of correctly defining terms. If these are the examples of the best in class of communicating ideas in today's world, it is no surprise that as a society we use word recklessly to our collective detriment. 

Tasting Home

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 evening was something I had not experienced in a while. The food was cooked with care and tasted authentic. None of what we ate was too complicated to make at home but still a very enjoyable meal. Speaking of complicated things to cook, one day when I am feeling brave I want to give this cabbage recipe a try.

Impaired Judgment

 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 people he has known have their sense of self-worth completely wrapped up in their professional success to the point its one and the same. For that reason, it is possible to incentivize them to meet and exceed their targets year after year. If as Socrates says this is the effect of those venomous darts that overthrows judgment, it may be why some of these rock-star sales people achieve that status at a great cost to their personal lives. The beautiful person in this case is that high of being the top salesperson. Everywhere you look there are examples of beautiful things casting these poison darts on us, impairing our judgement.

Talking Cheese

 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 not cheese dead or alive. It is inherently different and signals very different cultural values and can be an explainer for much larger divergences. 

Wise Words

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 and no strong sense of purpose. In hindsight, whatever was accomplished then and in years to follow was from keeping the inertia of motion going and not stopping entirely. The activities were not focused in a specific direction but there was some forward movement all the same. And yes, there were many lost years bound in shallows and in miseries, followed by some redemption.  

Remembering Kolkata

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 couple of years out of college. I have lived and traveled many other parts of India - until then Kolkata was a place I visited sometimes to meet the grandparents. Working there was an eye-opening experience for me then and the impressions I formed remain with me to this day. I am fortunate that I can stay with the romance and nostalgia of those long ago days, unblemished by the struggle and strife of everyday living that my parents and relatives report. I have the luxury of reminiscing about the smart, talented, artistic, quirky and charming people I got to know during that time, how great it felt to soak in that atmosphere as a young person who had a lot of growing up left to do. 

Leaving Body

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 my body. One part of me was underneath a boy and another part was safe at the top of the room, hovering, free.

A lot of women at some point in their life experience the desire to turn invisible. Maybe for lack of love, feeling so vulnerable that they fear people see right through the insecurities or even from too much attention for being beautiful. When the body takes center stage and subsumes the person, a woman might crave leaving her body figuratively as the author of this essay describes. 

Car Driving

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 which seemed to be my fate.

We exchanged long emails and hand-written letters on these topics. Sometimes these discussions would spill over to the occasional phone conversation. Back then I had no personal phone and had to pre-arrange a time when I could take it call with some relative privacy. All this communication helped me stay the course and learn to make decisions on the fly, not come to a grinding halt. 

He took it upon himself as was the norm in that time to find me a match - he went about this tireless, soul-crushing and often humiliating job relentlessly. He was determined to find me a good husband and despite his efforts he failed resoundingly. The marriage was very short-lived but I got J out of it - the best thing that ever happened to me in my life. When I told him, I had made up my mind to leave the marriage, I asked him if would support my decision - the answer was a unflinching yes ofcourse. 

My father navigated me out of that phase of my life in real tangible terms - he walked the talk. Even though we have very different visions for my future he did the best he could. He and my mother helped me raise J. When I run through that list, I know anything but feeling of gratitude is in error. And I am grateful. The lack of peace always came from the path we took to get to the different milestones that turned out to be pivotal in life. He always did what was needed but he wore me out with his unrelenting negativity, pessimism, irrational fears of the unknown unknowns, emotional outbursts and much more. 

It is analogous to driving a car that has a variety of problems and needs many stops along the way to deal with its quirks but it never fails to get you to your destination. You just budget some extra time to deal with its issues and you get there. Imagine this is the car you used all your life and you never failed to make an important appointment if you were willing to deal with the aggravations - lack of air-conditioning, lack of heating, noises that are hard to diagnose but the kind the mechanic tells you are not serious. Every trip you run into a new type of issue. 

The car keeps you on edge, you dread every trip you take in it but you have no choice. You make it to your destination just like everyone else you know. Just that they drive "normal" cars and they don't have to plan their existence around its multifarious ailments. Chances are by mid-life you get bitter and disappointed about this car. People have seem to have settled, predictable and comfortable relationships with theirs but you never hit your stride. Your efforts over the years to fix what is broken yield very unsatisfactory results. Some noises disappear but new ones appear. It is never easy. That is my life with my father. 

Risk Aversion

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 - the issues leading up to this situation may have been brewing for years and months but one day A decides to pull the trigger despite the associated risks of initiating litigation. The question is would they be more likely to do so a Monday or a Friday. To extend that idea further, if for some random reason they could get this process started only Tue-Thu would they would choose not to start it at all. 

The idea of day of week being a influencing factor in our decision making makes me think about religious observances that fall on certain days of the week. If you are meant to fast all day and stay in on a certain day of the week, it is likely you will not make high-stake decisions on that day. The following day might be the day of week when you will be risk-averse and make more conservative choices. If society in its entirety could be edged more towards risk-aversion then status quo would likely prevail. 

Dessert Day

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 imagined most people at the store were recalling some time in their own past when they had celebrated this holiday with family and friends. They were all trying to recreate that feeling best they could. We were all there will common purpose and impetus even but that was all. I remained infinitely far away from Pujas of times past. I recalled our group of three that was once so tight. S lives in Canada- she married very young, even before completing college. N lives in Delhi and teaches at one of those New Age holistic schools. 

I have not been in touch with either of them for a long time. Part of me wanted to reach out tell them I thought of them and then realized people come to be at very different places in their lives and such outreach may be out of place. Even thinking about what I might write highlighted the absurdity of the idea. But against my better instincts, I did sent a short note to N and she replied with a single word skipping even the greetings for the occasion - the warmth of childhood was long gone to be replaced with something I did not recognize in the person who used to be my best friend in middle school.

So this post is for childhood friends who bring joy from memories they helped make long after we had drifted apart, become strangers to each other and have nothing more than a word left to say. 

 

Bursting Bubble

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 and pale compared to them. Then just as suddenly as they had appeared, they parted ways. The bubble had burst and the colors had bled into the water, diluted and died. I had to wonder if these folks had grasped that their busyness is pathetic and had found a way to combine their vastness of their individual solitudes.

Wayfarer Story

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. 

Killing Void

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 who had more in common that would be immediately evident. 

The idea of being a lonely woman is explored in two different ways through the characters of Frannie and Pauline, the half sisters. It is ultimately what you make of that loneliness - you do live it, integrate it into your character or act it out in an effort to soothe that aching void. There is no right or wrong, good or bad way - it's whatever the woman is comfortable with and no matter the choice there are consequences. 

Real Learning

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 performance. In times when credentialing is king, this job-poster truly goes above and beyond. 

Feast of Joy

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 than the external. This is the chief lesson which his infant state has to teach to man. There his possessions are few and trivial, yet he needs no more for his happiness. The world of play is spoilt for the unfortunate youngster who is burdened with an unlimited quantity of playthings.

As he describes it: 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 than the external.

The world of today is makes every youngster who has adults in his life to meet his needs and wants an unfortunate one - burdened with an unlimited quantity of playthings and no ability to exercise the power of their internal equipment.

Many Lifetimes

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 his parents. It was home to his great grand parents. But he speaks multiple Indian languages and always had deep connection to the country sight unseen. Even with all that learning India was a not easy for him. I can only imagine the quandary of those in the Western world who sought to understand Afghanistan. It would take many lifetimes. 

 

Time Cycle

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 things which the distant future held in trust for us. The result was that what little we did get we enjoyed to the utmost; from skin to core nothing was thrown away. The modern child of a well-to-do family nibbles at only half the things he gets; the greater part of his world is wasted on him.

We have snow-plow and helicopter parents now that kids are being smothered by affection, attention and solicitousness. They would love nothing more than to break free from that non-stop enmeshment and breathe free. A generation prior, there were more kids to be managed per family and parents had way less help by way of services or automation to get done what they needed to in order to feed and care for the family. That put some distance between parent and child and perhaps stimulated the same desire among the youngsters to enter the adult world that they could only observe from the periphery. 

Separate Grief

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 had gutted out every shred of his presence from it and given it a brand new definition. The wife looked younger and happier, the kids carried on their independent lives. 

He was missed as much as a cup of water from a river, and that was how much impact he seemed to have made by his passing. Whatever the skeletons in the cupboard, all of us who knew him clearly did not know enough but at his funeral many among us went to great lengths to remember their best memories of him - just like Sedaris describes in his essay. Did his family grieve his passing? Maybe they did in their own way, knowing as much of his darkness as they did his light. Whatever the rest of us did or felt was likely not real. 

Silent Scream

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 her own self everything necessary to be happy.

That I wanted someone to articulate that they loved me, that they saw me, was a personal failing and I tried to overcome it.

Many of us have been at this very place and we have expressed our anguish and sense of failure differently. Consistently with the author, women in this situation believe the fault to be there own, until by some magic of happenstance, it is revealed that such is not the case. They are actually good and whole. 

Learning Food

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 learning it is a gift that keeps giving. 

I long wanted to share what I learned over the years so she know how to recreate tastes from her childhood, the comfort foods she grew up on. Other mothers with grown up kids would tell me that time comes eventually and one can't rush it - they were right. 

Lightning Strikes

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 avoiding open areas in a thunderstorm.

Used to be that thunderstorms inspired awe and poetry. That was then and this is now. 

Learning Weird

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 are neither particularly good at creating solutions nor do they have a holistic understanding of architecture. 

The few enterprise architects I still run into do have breath and depth, they understand what is going on in their shop and what is trending in the world outside that is worthy of their consideration. This is dying breed of talent that is sorely needed. Reading this Paul Graham essay about weird programming languages made me think about what it takes to program to solve for problems in novel and creative ways - something I see less and less of over time. 

So if you want to expand your concept of what programming can be, one way to do it is by learning weird languages. Pick a language that most programmers consider weird but whose median user is smart, and then focus on the differences between this language and the intersection of popular languages. What can you say in this language that would be impossibly inconvenient to say in others? In the process of learning how to say things you couldn't previously say, you'll probably be learning how to think things you couldn't previously think.

Making Waves

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 promote something of their own volition - the weird whale emoji resonated with them in an organic way that peddling product for a paying client could not. It would not come across as genuine and the followers would know the difference. 

Being Parent

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 stage of growth for me as a mother. Failing to adapt to the needs of an adult child whose life will progress in ways I cannot fully understand or relate to, is the best way to create distance - one that grows insurmountable over time. This I have learned from my own relationship with my parents. However it is that we got to this point, the loss is mostly mine - they may see it differently. I hope that J and I will fare better.