Heartcrossings

I sure am glad my kid is an adult now and I don't have to prioritize learning about the new ways Facebook is harming the lives of children. That said, I feel for parents who need to do exactly that . ' What’s unique about the 2021 iteration of the metaverse is that it includes fully immersive 3D VR and AR worlds that transcend screen viewing by putting the user inside the game spatially. This is an entirely new and more personal experience that, according to a 2019 study (pdf) conducted by Facebook, can impact how bullying, harassment, and lewd content, as well as positive content, are experienced by users in the metaverse. Sadly, many children experience realities in their life that really beg for escapism. Social media and gaming are already offering that and in ways that are more addiction than a temporary escape. Kids are infinitely creative and with the options they will have in a metaverse, opportunities to take it to destructive levels abound. It's like parents don...

Being desi, it is no surprise that a story written by a highly educated fellow desi containing phrase " green colonialism " would grab my attention. There was a lot to absorb and learn from her relatively short essay.  The Nordics and other rich countries are betting on achieving their climate ambitions without the need for harder-edged policies at home. It is simply too tempting for leaders of rich countries—including those who produce plenty of oil and gas—to impose restrictions on others. Pursuing climate ambitions on the backs of the poorest people in the world is not just hypocritical—it is immoral, unjust, and green colonialism at its worst. The global south is large and diverse but there could be some unifying themes about what ails this part of the world including that of vaccine apartheid . India is part of this south and one place I do know something about. There is no culture of personal or collective accountability in that country. The family unit used to a sourc...

Interesting move to keep independent book-stores alive in France . Coming from a place and time where scarcity of books was common and buying one was a very intentional process, I find that abundance made me a lazy reader over the years. There is no penalty to skim the first few chapters of the book and decide to stop there and repeat that process twenty times in a month. All books are digital and borrowed from the public library.  The fact there is so much to just sift through makes the desire to go browse the offerings at an independent book store less attractive. This is not even counting the ease of ordering a book on Amazon. What I have missed over the years is a trusty guide who is there to help you navigate through this excess and connect you to what you will love from start to finish.  I wish instead of my infinite sampling platter, I could focus on a handful of books that truly enriched my life. Despite the overload of information about everything including books, fin...

Such a beautiful story about love and tenacity - this woman is the kind of mother any kid would want theirs to be,  Wolownick first learned to climb to be closer to her son, a world-famous climber and the first person to scale El Capitan without ropes or safety equipment in 2017.  "He would talk and talk about where he'd gone, what they'd done, who he did it with, and I didn't know what he was talking about, which is not a good way to relate to anybody," she said.  Sometimes he used so much climbing jargon, she says couldn't even understand what he was saying. So one day, she asked him to take her to a rock climbing gym.  As we grow older, it gets harder and harder to relate to what occupies the life and minds of our kids. We may not "get" their music, the way they conduct themselves in relationships, the things they prioritize or don't. If they have an esoteric job or hobby that is yet another layer of separation. This woman is an inspiration i...

I read just about every book on Kindle for about a decade now. Love that my local library has a great collection of eBooks which makes this possible. Don't recall ever having read a Kindle self-published book so this New Yorker story was eye-opening :   "..The platform pays the author by the number of pages read, which creates a strong incentive for cliffhangers early on, and for generating as many pages as possible as quickly as possible. The writer is exhorted to produce not just one book or a series but something closer to a feed—what McGurl calls a “series of series.” In order to fully harness K.D.P.’s promotional algorithms, McGurl says, an author must publish a new novel every three months." For my own reading, Amazon's recommendations are somewhat interesting but it has not lead to the kind of discoveries I would love. However, when J was a younger and a fussy reader, I found recommendations based on what she did like very useful. It opened the world of books I...

Interesting essay on why we use Facebook even if we know it's evil and doing way more harm than good in the world. The author identifies a few reasons why: "...Like eating meat, ordering cheap clothes or buying Chinese products, the use of Facebook also has advantages. Through Facebook people renew ties or maintain contact; through it interest groups can be created that coalesce around a particular subject or cause; people can be made aware of new ideas; shared activities can be coordinated; alternative voices can be heard. Not everyone has access to the massive amplifiers of mass media, and Facebook allows each person to make their voice heard. There are small businesses that reach a larger and more diverse audience and potential clientele by advertising on Facebook. There are people who specialize in creating and managing online campaigns using the platform – people who do it for a living..." There is I think another reason - with Facebook people found a way to create ...

Have been reading The Republic when I have the mental capacity left at the end of the work-week to absorb such writing. I am always amazed by how the morsels of wisdom that I can get from even reading a few pages, help me understand the world I live in: "..the makers of fortunes have a second love of money as a creation of their own, resembling the affection of authors for their own poems, or of parents for their children, besides that natural love of it for the sake of use and profit which is common to them and all men. And hence they are very bad company, for they can talk about nothing but the praises of wealth." These lines made me think ofcourse of all the sales and business development folks I have been working with for over a decade now. Some of them are star performers and have blown past their targets even in the toughest years. No surprise that they are also very wealthy relative to the peer group they belong to. Most most non-work conversations with any of these pe...

I like the title of this poem  A Pity, We Were Such A Good Invention as much as the rest of it. A relationship or marriage is indeed an invention and sometimes it could so good that it levitates over the ordinary folk who have no such invention to show for or don't have one nearly as stellar. The sum of the parts produces this energy and lift above the mundane until it ceases to. They dismantle us Each from the other. As far as I'm concerned They are all engineers. All of them. Depending on your perspective and what mood you are in as you read this, "They" can be very different things. The forces that pull you apart - infidelity, betrayal, loss of love and intimacy, breaking up, divorce lawyers, illness, death, dementia - the list goes on. But those forces do have the same dismantling effect on the "good invention"

I am reading The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton one of my favorite writers of my younger years. Years ago when he was a relatively a new arrival on the scene and he had just published Essays in Love, I wrote to him about how much I loved that book and his style. He wrote me a short but nice reply. I recall the warm happy feeling of closing the loop. So many years later reading The Art of Travel, it is familiar territory - his style has mellowed with age, but its still recognizably his but as reader and writer it feels like our paths have diverged over time and with age - I was not able to like this book nearly as much as I did Essays in Love. His description of monitors in airports is matches what many of us have experienced or imagined: The constant calls of the screens, some accompanied by the impatient pulsing of a cursor, suggest with what ease our seemingly entrenched lives might be altered were we simply to walk down a corridor and onto a craft that in a few hours would land u...

Interesting set of partnerships for Hertz - Uber, Tesla and Carvana. The Uber scenario is particularly interesting - the would be driver would rent a Tesla from Hertz for week (for instance) and return it. The benefit is that they could get into the business of being an Uber driver even if they don't own a car or the one they do own is not road-worthy. For this to work, the said driver has to make more than they owe Hertz and Uber. If this reduces the barrier to enter the rideshare driver business, there will be a glut and prices will go down.  Consequently none of these drivers might turn a profit.  Currently in the best case scenario if an Uber driver is making trips 8 hours a day they would make about $1100 per week .  In a same market a Hertz rental costs around $1000 per considering liability insurance and such which the driver will need because they presumably have no auto insurance. So the driver would clear $100 in a week. Unless the rental cost drops to $100 a w...

I spent the majority of my adult life single and can relative to this notion of oppressive pity this Atlantic article talks about And many single people, whether they live alone or with others, constantly face the stigma associated with not being partnered. “It’s oppressive, always getting pitied,” DePaulo said. “People have bought into the ideology that having someone is better—[that] the more natural, normal, superior way of being is being coupled or having a family.” The pity can take many forms but it exists as an under-current. Well meaning people are on the constant lookout to match-make, they check in to see how your most recent date went - to see you back on track would be their dream come true. I went through such a transition in my status and there was a burst of euphoria in the community that had been rooting for me.  Finally they said as they heaved a sigh of relief. But having been single for long, the stigma takes even longer to wash that stain. It becomes part of yo...

The last few weeks, I have been in the zone working with a client helping them re-imagine customer experience. Its one of those time when you feel you are helping make meaningful change using skills learned over a long time. In a metrics driven organization, collaboration between the well-intentioned and like-minded is not a given. The person whose advise I need may not at all be goaled for advising me at all even though that's what they would love to do.  So while the pieces of work people are goaled for come through beautifully, the collective effort can be far from stellar because the metrics of all those who need to come together don't quite line up as they should. Reading this story brought to mind my own experiences being measured by formulas that are not rooted in reality. They do not reflect how people work, thrive and excel and so also with clients who are measuring things that don't yield the right outcomes.   the logic driving newsroom metrics aims to maximize...

Form and function come together beautifully in this wind turbine wall .  Filled with spinning blades, the kinetic machine is more like a sculpture than a power generator, but that’s what makes it so fascinating. This aesthetically pleasing design means that homeowners could capture clean power while keeping the look of their home’s uncluttered and beautiful. Kinetic sculpture is mesmerizing to watch . The process of building a sculpture seems long and painstaking so I was very surprised to see how affordable they are to buy and no surprise to learn they were fakes . The price on the artist's own website make more sense given what it takes to make them.  Kindala is a made up word I created by combining Mandala and kinetic. I thought this series needed a distinctive moniker. Every design has a circular design like a mandala and they all move but each has visual distinctions in the wheel design or power structure.

 Love the idea of being able to recreate objects of art and history at home. For those looking to turn their desk, bookshelf, or dashboard into a gallery of Grecco-Roman masterpieces, Sketchfab user  DL  (@leinadien) has created a wonderous collection of statues throughout art history, rendered for 3D printing. The collection holds nearly 500 individual models by different Sketchfab contributors, and the possibilities are endless.  It would be interesting to be able put some of this objects to daily use. Serve orange juice out of this 17th century pitcher and so on. Such deep integration of life with things that until now have only been museum exhibits could open up doors we did not even know existed. 

Found this a fascinating and heart-warming story about the power of forgiveness. As the story unfolds you see the profound effects on both the forgiver and the forgiven. It is hardly an easy feat to accomplish but for those who are able to truly forgive, the turn the person who caused them so much pain into a force of good.  “It wasn’t violence, it was extreme violence,” he said of killing Julio Jimenez. “None of it was necessary, but that’s what my frame of mind was.” After six hours of talking, the two men embraced. Carroll was later smiling so hard that he was asked if he had been found suitable for parole. “Being forgiven for the hurt you caused a family, that took so much weight off my shoulders, like I was soaring on my way back,” he said. “They said, ‘You got found suitable?’ I said, ‘Hey, I got something better than that.’” On a much smaller scale, at home and at work we have reason to be sore, angry and even furious at others. The reasons could range from trivial to impor...

This  Margaret Atwood poem  distills why, achieving milestones associated with achieving ownership of material things always feels underwhelming. Either the feeling is not what you imagined it would be or the goal-posts move further so you still don't have reason to celebrate. There is never that wholesome feeling of having achieved perfection. I can count five times in my life so far when I had accomplished a milestone that meant a lot to me and came after many struggles. I had imagined that moment of crossing the finish line many times and how wonderful it would feel; how life would fundamentally change after that event. Every single time that rush if it came at all, was extremely short-lived. The day after or the week after it is like Atwood describes "  the air moves back from you like a wave and you can't breathe" The moment when, after many years of hard work and a long voyage you stand in the center of your room, house, half-acre, square mile, island, country, ...

 I experienced a sudden emotional outburst on a recent visit to the dermatologist for a skin issue that has been bothering me for a while. The physician's assistant collected the information and any background, history I wanted to share. I assumed there was interest in understanding the big picture so I spent time describing all that. Once the doctor came in, it was evident that he was going to recommend the standard regimen all typed up and ready to go for anyone like me no matter what caused us to arrive at that point. He told me with a straight face that he will need to put me on a medicine for life that even very cursory research will show has a battery of side effects. Just with this one medicine a person can go from being normal to sick needing a dozen more to manage the burgeoning side effects.  I told him that is not the path I will go down because someone I once used to love was destroyed just this way. He went from being someone who had almost achieved full control o...

Such an amazing concept to treat your existential woes with a dose of poetry .  The whole impetus for that project was to be a vehicle (pun intended) for poetry to be delivered to people who don’t usually encounter it;  to be inviting and not intimidating, to counter the widely held perception that poetry is “difficult, obscure and not for the likes of me” Thanks to reading about the poetry pharmacy, I felt motivated to find a poem I had never read that spoke to my current state of mind and found Keep The Rage Tender by Nayyriah Waheed. It soothed the spirit and made me reconsider and re-evaluate.  Could not help comparing this to the times I have been to a doctor's office during the pandemic - it seems that the designated healers have completely lost the desire to connect to the human that they intend to heal. The interactions were more sterile, soul-less and unempathetic than ever before. After each of these encounters I felt no one cared about the body or soul of me. ...

Reading the part about unrequested advice in the article gave me new perspective about folks I have encountered in my life who came across and micro-managing.  They tell others what to do… even when advice isn’t welcome. Aren’t these people just control freaks? Advice is sometimes regret in disguise. Perhaps a past experience has left them with a longing to have acted differently, and this is their chance to put things right and help you avoid the pain they felt. When you notice someone giving unrequested advice, ask if they’ve been in a similar situation before — and how it went. Since unrequested advice makes me uncomfortable, I am very mindful of providing any to others. But the impulse to help others so they don't repeat our mistakes makes sense. This explanation of the driver got me thinking of a particular colleague in new light. T is constantly issuing words of caution and homilies on what he would recommend in a situation, what he has seen working or not. He makes every ef...

There is a toxic mix of infantilism and desperation in Facebook seeking playdates as a growth lever . ..Messenger Kids in person, according to a presentation the  WSJ  viewed called “Exploring playdates as a growth lever.” Facebook researchers have also tried to introduce a more holistic understanding of childhood by breaking things down into six age brackets: “adults, late teens ages 16 to maturity, teens ages 13 to 15, tweens ages 10 to 12, children ages 5 to 9 and young kids ages zero to four,” a slide mentioned in the report reads. One presentation set a goal of transitioning younger users from Instagram to the original Facebook, or the “Life Coach for Adulting.” Facebook in a child's life is has no redeeming value - it only serves as a habit forming time sink while the mind idles. Those are best years of a person's life being wasted away. This is not even counting the mental health toll specially for tweens and teens. An article I read a while back, did a great job of sum...

Happened to read this post about Moderna recently and had to wonder what a piece about the company would read like in 2021. Did not have to look too far - a properly fawning interview of the same CEO. History is written by winners as they say and these days by SEO. I guess lessons were learned and from being super-secretive they went to being super-collaborative "..And we designed the vaccine and we got the two teams at NIH and Moderna because we were so worried about making a mistake in the vaccine design, as you can imagine. So we were super happy when the team literally compared notes after two days with exactly the same design for our vaccine." Maybe now there is a case for the kind of culture Bancel promoted. While exuding all the signs of being the next Theranos , they came out with a huge win. Maybe toxic will get rebranded as demanding where only excellence is welcome.  “It is a demanding culture,” Mr. Bancel says. “It is not an unfair culture.” He says he made his ...

I heard this Atanu Sanyal album for the first time when I was in college and was completely entranced. It was a love that did not fade with time and cassette tape was worn out by the the time I came to America. Somewhere between the multiple moves and significant life events, I lost track of my beloved tape.  This year, during Puja I felt an acute longing to listen to it again and bought the album online. As the music filled my living room, I felt the broken pieces of my life symbolically turn whole again. Long forgotten memories lit up and brightened the evening. I remained in a blissful state long after the last track had played and it was an amazing experience. This is the closest I have come to experiencing the healing power of music Research findings have supported a wide range of music therapy benefits from changing brain waves to lowering heart rate and blood pressure.  While clinical trials, to date, have been small, the results are promising.   Music therap...

After watching the Minus promo video, I had to sign-up to see what the experience felt like. Would I be inclined to post at all or just join conversations that are happening there. What kind of crowd would such a platform gather, what might they want out of it beyond participating in an interesting experiment. Once I was in and started to read other posts, my first thought was frugality - if I had only 100 chances to say something useful, I need to think each on through. This was not the place to keep my writing muscle active like my blog is. There is not part of my life that allows writing with no end in mind, for writing without pre-defined structure or tenets. So the blog is my scratch pad to write and move on. If some thought crossed my mind, a place to keep notes. Frugality is not the driver here.  At Minus I would assume as the older joiners get zeroed out, they would be able to influence the overall shape of the conversations by replying to what newer joiners are writing. Th...

I have been reading Range by David Epstein and got the many plot points by end of Chapter 1. It is generally how things go with books of this ilk. The author posits a provocative theory to grab your attention and tells you just about everything they are going to tell you in the prologue. In Chapter 1 you get a sense of how the rest of the book will flow - how topics will be introduced, analyzed and closed. By the end of Chapter 1 you should have enough information to decide if you want to commit or not. In this instance the answer for me was - not.  However, as is often the case, that means you as a reader may miss little nuggets of information you might have found insightful or entertaining. Sometimes these are few and far between so one has to make a choice. I decided to abandon the reading and go find something else. But this nice summary has me and other readers like me covered. In my life experience, I have found people with range more interesting, entertaining and insightfu...

Reading Mediocre out of curiosity. The notion that you already won because you are male and white is not that far removed from what I have seen growing up in India where white is not a factor. Being a male is already being ahead all other factors being equal. Given a smattering of money, power or intelligence, this idea of being ahead can go into over-drive mode.  This study about white males in the work place will likely map exactly to the males of the majority demographic in any country. Depending on what that majority looks like the minority groups will be displaced and victimized in different ways but the key tenets hold - its based on numbers and not color. Mediocrity is also about numbers - the vast majority of any population anywhere in the world is mediocre by definition. If the people with talent and intelligence to make a real difference don't care enough to engage, mediocre folks will naturally feel self-assured despite their limitations and fill the leadership gap. Ex...

Reading this article about pandemic triggered dissolution of marriage , reminded me of this other one about gray divorce that I had read a while back. Both are about the effect of certain life events people are not prepared for. It shakes up the status quo, the problems buried beneath the din and bustle of getting through each day, come to take centerstage. They want to be seen and counted, cannot and will not be ignored. Becoming empty nesters is not something people have experience with dealing from practice much like dealing with a pandemic. These events are stress-tests for a relationship and not everyone survives. Those who do are stronger than ever.  Recently, I met a former client who I have not seen in years. He was in town and we decided to grab lunch. His oldest went to college this year and the young one has four more years left to go. B mentioned how much he valued the time at home being able to bond with the younger one and being able to be the kind of father he had a...

Listening to Daring Greatly these days on my walks. I have to say the book did not get off to a promising start when the author expresses great astonishment that what she wrote six years ago is still true of the human condition. At that point, I was not sure if I wanted to invest the next several hours on this - one would hope a life time of research on a topic would last much longer than six years. But I did continue listening out of curiosity and learned a lot in the process.  That shame or fear of being ordinary and presumably invisible is rooted in the culture of scarcity which she describes thusly: When I look at narcissism through the vulnerability lens, I see the shame-based fear of being ordinary. I see the fear of never feeling extraordinary enough to be noticed, to be lovable, to belong, or to cultivate a sense of purpose. Scarcity thrives in a culture where everyone is hyperaware of lack. Everything from safety and love to money and resources feels restricted ...

This will be the third year J has been away from home and in college. Overall, I have learned to live in my empty nest and made peace with seeing her only occasionally. My dear friend L who passed away this spring used to tell me about the time her only son immigrated and how the pain of separation took decades to fully wear out. This was over thirty years ago, they wrote letters back and forth, life got busier as the son's family and responsibilities grew. They also went through a period of estrangement but thankfully the last decade before she passed there was peace and they stayed in regular touch. L's point was that one's only child becoming an adult and leaving home can involve greater distances than you are prepared for. This stage of a parent's life has many joys and rewards - I recognize them.  When I observe other parents in the same situation as me, it seems like some of us were better prepared for the reality of our children's adulthood than others. I mig...

We met an old friend recently. T has had a complicated life and is one of those well-intentioned people who end up breaking a lot of glass. He retains the sense of wonderment about life in his 60s and is young and hopeful in spirit. For those of us who have known him for a while, he reminds us of our naïve and foolish youth and we can only aspire to have some of what he has by when we are his age. We traded stories as we cooked and then had dinner.  Our lives are incomparably pedestrian compared to his so his stories are way more entertaining than ours - some could be tinged with a hint of tragedy but many are not. He seems to have expanded his circle of friends to include folks like himself who fell off the mainstream rails at some point and deviated so far that there was no path back to "normal". In a sense, I disappointed him by becoming way more boring than I had been a while back - settling for the tried and true, lacking daring and imagination.  Chatting with T late int...

Marry the right person. This one decision will determine 90% of your happiness or misery. Ran into this quote by  H. Jackson Brown Jr.  after over  couple of decades of first seeing it in the most unlikely of places - on the wall of my apartment's gym room.  I was married by then and wanted to believe he was the right person for me. Where reality did not match up to my imagination, I compensated by attributing qualities to our marriage that simply did not exist, believed if I strove a bit harder, made some more adjustments it could become a thing of perfection. I wanted to believe with very molecule of my being that I was with the right man for me and after the hiccups of my then new marriage had subsided, it would be smooth sailing because all I had to do is apply effort. There was no end to how much effort I was willing to apply and no end to my self-assurance that I could make it right. When I read this on the wall while working out, I remember experience this sen...