Being Simple

My friend A is judge in the state science fair and I enjoy listening to him talk about projects that impressed him. They tend to be uncomplicated yet novel - something he attributes to a kid's natural curiosity about the work and the ability to apply what is taught in school in original ways. 

I have always been skeptical about science fairs because they seem to crowd out the type of kids who A would root for. Their projects are not grand and unlikely to change the world. They are the child's own and the lack of maturity and access to resources is plainly evident. Those are exactly the reasons the kids deserve encouragement. Unfortunately, the winner of the big science fairs rarely if ever fall in this category. 

There are not enough judges like A around to push them all the way to the top. This year A was excited about how kids were tinkering in cloud technology and making commonsense use of the capabilities. The ease of access has made experimentation easy for anyone with an idea. Maybe cloud will level the playing field for science fairs and it has done for businesses. 

Not only do many science fairs include a doubtful amount of science, but according to the results of a 2003 study from Arizona State University that surveyed over 400 middle-school students, they don’t serve to engage kids much, either. The study found that they hardly increase students’ interest in science or influence their understanding of the scientific method, at least at the middle-school level.

What was true in 2003 is even more true now. A Chopped version of the science fair is probably the way to breathe some new life into it and remove the parents from the mix.

At Scale

I caught this episode of Finshots Daily on my walk last evening. I stumbled upon this podcast after a very unsatisfying experience of listening to idle prattle on design thinking with no outcomes on Think Fast Talk Smart. When I spend the end of my long work day listening to something, I want to learn something interesting so my mind travels in directions that the workday simply does not allow. The Stanford b-school production was a real disappointment but the folks over at Finshots made up for my loss. I learned a lot of new things - the episodes were truly bite-sized, did not seek to patronize or restate the supremely obvious like the other one. There was line there that gave me much to think about

 "A report by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) released last week pegged that human smugglers make a staggering $10 billion a year. For context, that’s what Coca-Cola makes in a year by selling its fizzy drinks. It’s a lot of money!"

The presenter carried the comparison to its logical end by showing how the human smugglers as an enterprise make business decisions that would be considered sound if they were being made by Coke in the context of selling their fizzy drinks. There is a certain logic to that cannot be denied and it applies to everything in life that goes the commercial route, scales up and starts to drive an eco-system. When it gains a certain critical mass it becomes "too big to fail". It is why some countries including India cannot overcome the drag created by systemic corruption.

Feed and Care

Recently, I spent a whole weekend raking leaves from my yard to make it possible for things to grow in spring. Cutting grass and removing dead leaves always promotes a lot of bird activity so it was no surprise to wake up in the morning to the loud chirping of birds feasting in the grass. The whole place had come to life thanks to my cleaning efforts and that's a great reward. 

It reminded me yet again of my desire to have a bird feeder installed in the yard - the thought always crosses my mind after such weekends but I never act on it. In large part because I am not sure if this is a good thing for the birds that I want to attract. I used to have a hummingbird feeder a long time ago and it was a wonderful experience at first and then I learned it took daily effort to keep it clean and in good order for the birds. If I was out for several days, then the feeder was not useful to the hummingbirds and they would not return. 

The feed and care of anything in life is complicated once you start to think about long term consequences even of your well-intentioned actions. There is almost always the possibility of unintended consequences. 

Feeding Frenzy

Its been interesting reading all the opinion pieces and commentary on Musk buying Twitter. An assortment of pundits would have us take a guided trip through Musk's brain and unpack why he did this and what manner of terrible consequences it brings for us plebians. 

Seems to me that the answer is relatively simple - the man has more wealth and resources that most of us would even be able to fathom or compute. With that comes freedom and latitude to do things - some of which cost a bit of money (even on his scale) and provide for a bunch of entertainment. Its a lot like folks feeding koi in a pond or ducks in a lake. There could even be signage posted that such wanton feeding is unwelcome but the person armed with some stale bread feels in a position of power to rustle up a some creatures who were minding their own business, looking for their own food in ways that nature had intended. They have the means for this spot of entertainment and so they avail it.

The clamor that follows in the water and the the control the feeder has over the fed is exactly the kind of value Musk is deriving out of buying Twitter. Its just a matter of scale and there are consequences to actions - being it feeding ducks against the guidance of the parks and recreation personnel or monkeying around with a social media platform that is used worldwide and has been a key component of very large scale events. People will do what they want to do if they have the means to do it. Some will feed ducks and other will buy up Twitter - and a huge feeding frenzy will follow in the water on online.

The fact that the plebians have the choice to stay with or leave Twitter is not something that gets mentioned a lot - we are being treated much like those ducks in the pond who could in theory leave the pond to a place where they are left alone but don't, make the collective choice not to be fed stale bread by humans but don't. If we choose to behave brainless en-masse we probably deserve our fate. 

Lie Flat

Learned the phrase lie flat reading this story on Bloomberg. Its interesting to the consider the impacts on the lives of folks who go against the tide of their generation. If the zeitgeist supports and welcomes a lie flat mentality, for someone who wants to work harder and earn more than their parents did, scale up the upward mobility ladder and so on, they would lead a very lonesome existence. Reading this made me think of my mentee B. She is twenty four and doing well in her career- working hard but not crazy hours, being rewarded for her work but not in ways that make headline news. 

B is in a very comfortable place in her life - she has learned to do her job well, earns very decent money and lives in a relatively low cost city. Her parents are in a town two hours away from her so she does not feel displaced from everything she grew up with. She would be able to afford down-payment on a modest house if she wanted to own a home but she is not quite there yet. In the meanwhile she lives frugally and is saving for bigger, better things including higher education. Every time I talk to B, I have to remind myself she is only a few years older than J - not at all my generation. She will definitely not lie flat, not now and not in a very long time. She has too much energy and too many dreams to do that. Yet some of the generational trends apply to B as well:

The vast number of people quitting their jobs in the U.S. and Europe is a sign of a structural, psychological shift, according to Qualtrics’s Granger. He says people are being driven to “work on something that’s going to be meaningful, have a higher purpose. We’ve seen a lot of evidence for that.”

She does seek work that is meaningful and having higher purpose. What is unique is how she has been able to find those things in the framework of her current job with a technology company that is not in the business of saving the world. B has been able to advocate for younger employees like herself to be considered for roles that would typically require 15+ years of experience.

The company has realized that folks like B if paired with a senior level employee to help offload the easier more mundane components of the job can in a year learn enough to start taking on the primary role in lower complexity projects. B is doing exactly that and got promoted recently. She has opened the door to this career pathway in her company and that to her is meaningful work with higher purpose. How easy it is for her relate to her generation is another matter.

Finding Niche

Reading about Infalurt got me curious about other products in this space because this seems such a sensible and well-known problem to solve for. No surprise that are over two hundred options to choose from on Amazon. This is one of the perils of imagining an IoT based business. If there is any merit to the idea at all, its already been done and you will be entering a very over-crowded space trying to get attention. The subtle differences between one product and the next are largely lost on the consumer. 

They see it as a choice fatigue inducing situation. The reviews of the product or word of mouth referral if that applies is the only way to stand out. In this instance, upon filtering the search it turns out that the Infalurt solution while not entirely novel, is still not saturated. There is room for more players to come in but the door will shut pretty quickly if this is a market worth being in - it will get to the point of choice and decision fatigue. If its not a popular item among new parents, it will remain a one-off novelty for a few.

Undeserved Superiority

These lines in Twilight of the Elites quoted from the valedictorian of one the best public high schools for gifted kids gives real food for thought:

I feel guilty because I don’t deserve any of this. And neither do any of you. We received an outstanding education at no charge based solely on our performance on a test we took when we were eleven-year-olds, or four-year-olds. We received superior teachers and additional resources based on our status as “gifted,” while kids who naturally needed those resources much more than us wallowed in the mire of a broken system. And now, we stand on the precipice of our lives, in control of our lives, based purely and simply on luck and circumstance.

There is so much truth to what is young person is saying. Some very well-deserving kids on that day and hour failed to make the cut in the test for reasons they did not control. The family circumstances could have been so miserable that the student simply could not summon themselves up, they had no one holding their hand, holding up a light to their hidden potential. All of that is pure, crazy luck that happens to some but does not for the the vast majority who were in no way less, many were much more. Yet once the slotting has happened in elementary school fortunes start to diverge. 

The gifted get on the speed lane and are off to the races, each year bringing more and more new opportunities that are a far remote dream for those who are struggling on the city streets trying to get on the freeway. The speed-lanes are not even open to them for the most part. By the time of high school the two sets of students are inhabiting entirely different universes. I have had the chance to see the paths leading to the top ranking public high school and that leading to the very average base school, very closely. The kids in question were about same starting out but the disparity at the end of high school is in the orders of magnitude. I deeply understand what this kid is saying and truer words were not spoken.

Forced Attention

The idea of wasting a customer's time in a pharmacy store when they trying to to get their shopping done and be on their way sounds like a really bad idea that was not tested with actual consumers before it was launched. No customer will want to be subjected to an ad to earn the right to open the freezer door to grab their frozen pizza. This is simply not the time and place for it. 

"People really appreciate their routines. They're not always seeking excitement," said Julio Sevilla, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Georgia who studies consumer behavior.

Digital screens, he said, can add uncertainty and physical barriers to a simple and literally transparent process: reaching into a glass fridge.

Sevilla doesn't believe consumers are looking for novelty when they visit a grocery store: "We all love to get into a supermarket and know exactly what we're getting. I know also exactly where things are. For this type of utilitarian-related setting, people like their certainty and simplicity." creativity within those constraints. People like feeling as though they're not just cogs in the machine.

There are infinitely better ways to engage the customer in the store and add value to their experience, what Walgreens is doing is exactly not the way to go. But again Walgreens has historically not shown the most acuity is sizing up the next big thing to bet on. Being an early adopter is great if the choices make sense and are properly vetted before execution.

Wearing Colors

You know your friendship is real when your friend is on the floor with with the department store employee wrestling the leggings off the mannequin because its the one you like and the only one your size is on the mannequin. It was a bizarre sight to behold as it unfolded in front of my eyes and finally A walked over to me triumphantly holding the desired item of clothing. A and I go shopping once in a very long while and we both know to make those hours count because it will be many months before we do this again. This trip as long and painful as it was netted a few useful things in colors I have not worn for decades. We spruced up A's ancient wardrobe too. 

Learning to accept that I am now much closer to the end than the beginning of life has been difficult, there is so much that will never get done. The lack of interest in clothes shopping is part of the territory I think as it seems to decline further with every passing year. While struggling with the passage of time, I have learned to switch gears from what I can and cannot do to finding ways to give those I love a running start so they could go further faster - the ones that are young, still full of dreams and the energy to pursue them. 

Proximity to my mentees has somehow opened my eyes to the world of color and brightness that I had left behind in times when I was their age. They make it easier to me to live in fuller color - I may have fewer dreams that will come true but if I do my job right the dreams of some young people I love and care for might come real. Thanks to A, I have come into some colorful leggings that I would have only admired from afar but not gone that kind of distance to acquire. 

Same Planet

My bestie from college S introduced me to N recently, someone she's known for years. N and I have know of each other for this entire time but for reasons best known to the mysterious S, the introduction had to wait until now. It was the strangest first conversation I have had with a stranger in my life. We have a lot in common with difficult marriages, being single mothers, raising our kids in a foreign country. She is American and raised her son in India - an inverse image of my parenting experience. Oddly the challenges were not that different even though the venues were far apart. That feeling of isolation and unrelatable to people with normal lives seemed identical. We both have experienced what it means to have a certain expectation of what our adult lives would turn out to be and then have it go completely off-script. We were raised by average parents in average family circumstances and assumed outcomes that were the norm for people like were similar to us. 

The more we diverged from our anticipated future, the more alone we felt, the more difficult it became to form points of connection with those with whom we were once close. N mentioned not having seen some cousins living in the same city as her for over a decade and for no specific reason. I could relate to that. I have a cousin I was once very close to that lives only a few hours away from me - an easy weekend trip. Yet that trip has not come to pass in a couple of decades - again for no specific reason that I can point out to. When on rare occasion we exchange pleasantries there is a void words cannot feel. It is like trying to connect to someone who lives on another planet. After I got off the phone, I had to wonder how much of our pain is self-inflicted and how much of it is unavoidable. And if it is possible that we crave for some arbitrary, impossible idea of "normal" no one really has but we imagine it exists because we finds others within striking distance of it whereas as we are very far away. 

Inner Voice

At some point in our lives we have told someone or have been told by others to listen to our inner voice. If we could hear it and act on it then it would have saved us from making poor decisions. Sometimes the inner voice is like an infinite reel that can't and won't stop. You are meant to pick up the crumbs of wisdom to save your life from the ceaseless stream of chatter. In my own life, I have found that it can get tinged and stained to the point of uselessness with your state of mind. 

When I am feeling pessimistic about something, the inner voice often reinforces that negativity instead of helping overcome. Similarly in times of exuberance, that voice can mirror and fail to warn of blind-spots. It's almost as if the mind has to be in a place of balance and equilibrium for the inner voice to deliver optimal results. It seems like our mileage varies in other ways too:

..there is a huge amount of variation from person to person. Some people hear inner voices that may sound like recordings while others describe it as much more vague and fuzzy. 

Going Paperless

Reading this story about going paper-less in India is heart-warming. It is unlikely that I will ever convince my parents to adopt such technology but the fact that it exists and is being widely adopted is great. We used to have drawers full of files, folders and binders to hold documents of different sorts and  that is still the case in my parents' home. Every time a document was needed it threw my mother into full panic mode because she could not recall where it was and my father's organization  did not make sense to her.

 Watching this deep disconnect blow into a high-stress event was a part of my childhood. Like my mother I am not able to remain organized around my paperwork and struggle to find things in a hurry. Unlike her, I am the one who is doing the organization not someone else. Our shared struggles with organization may have less to do with inability or incapacity and more with refusal. There is also the concept of the brain's Area 47 

Area 47 contains prediction circuits that are scanning and monitoring the environment and trying to figure out what's going to happen next. Keeping Area 47 happy is tricky. If everything in the environment is utterly predictable, you become bored. If it's utterly unpredictable, you become frustrated.

Pleasure results from having Area 47 experience an optimal balance between predictability and surprise. And one of the principles of job satisfaction is we function best in that context — when we're working under some constraints, but able to exercise some creativity within those constraints. People like feeling as though they're not just cogs in the machine.

Maybe folks like us need one bit too much of that surprise element even it if comes at the cost of stress, We would rather not have a robotic way to find and retrieve stuff but spend an agonizing hour to look for it without any idea where the thing might be. 

Common Pool

Reading this story about life in Japan felt particularly calming. A tiny microcosm where perfection is possible. 

“Handing in a lost or forgotten item is something that is taught at a young age,” says Tamura. “Children are encouraged to deliver lost items to the kōban, even if it’s 10 yen (7p). A child can deliver this coin to the kōban, the police officer will treat it formally as any lost item. A report is made up, and the coin is taken into police custody. Yet, knowing that no one would report [it], the police then gives the coin back as a reward. Therefore, although it is the same monetary amount, the process of handing it into the police is different from outright taking the money - that is, one is theft, the other is a reward.”

This made me nostalgic for my own childhood. We were taught to donate any money we found on the street to the temple. It was never okay to keep that money even if  it was a small coin - it had to be given away so it could serve greater good. Much like the idea of a child turning in the coin to the police officer in Japan. I recall feeling flush with pride the few times when I was able to do that - in my small way I was adding to the pool of common good. 

I have not been to a temple in years and don't particularly miss it. Recently on our walk we found a twenty dollar bill lying on the street and I picked it up. The childhood trigger kicked in and I knew that this was not mine to keep. While I did not end up taking it to the nearby temple, I gave it to someone who is experiencing a lot of financial hardship lately. It felt like a reasonable compromise.

Feeling Less

 Interesting article on IQ and the difference between the self-assessment of it by gender.

After statistically controlling for the effects of actual measured IQ, we next examined the strongest predictors of self-estimated intelligence. The results showed biological sex remained the strongest factor: males rated their intelligence as higher than females. However, psychological gender was also a very strong predictor, with highly masculine subjects rating their intelligence higher (importantly, there was no association with femininity).

There was also a strong contribution of general self-esteem to participants’ intellectual self-image. As noted above, males report higher self-esteem than females.

In the workplace women with high self-esteem often come across as abrasive. Have seen this time and again throughout my career. Successful women are able to wrap that into something less challenging to others through their EQ. So they would hold strong opinions, have clarity in vision and ability to execute without appearing to be being the smartest person in the room - which they might very well by and by wide margin.

Two of my female clients come to mind as I write this. Both are C-level and in large global companies and very good at what they do. I cannot imagine either L or E coming across as if they were the smartest person in the room - its just not their style. They are very good at delegation and trust others to do their jobs well. That and being able to get the most value from their teams is their key to success. I am also pretty sure they would both underestimate their IQs.

Civil Inattention

Did not know the phrase civil inattention until reading this abstract and it lead me to learning a bit more about the topic. Being tactfully inattentive is a related concept: 

With the phrase “tactful inattention,” Goffman captured the socially salutary response to the undue access to someone’s backstage; it is a sort of averting one’s eyes, as one might do, for instance, in a locker room or a gym. Information may be available to you, but you should not scrutinize it or use it to your own advantage

The idea is very relevant to data privacy - a topic that is close to my heart for personal and professional reasons, the authors of the paper say: 

..we would benefit if we would protect privacy by sometimes requiring tactful inattention by potential users rather than total secrecy by the target. That is, some legal privacy protections should stop emphasizing secrecy and instead emphasize the appropriate uses of personally identifiable and often sensitive information by gelling tactful inattention into legal standards

While that sounds like a sensible approach, "gelling tactful inattention into legal standards" sounds complicated enough and the next step from there would be to operationalize such "gelling" at scale using technology. The paper was a great read and gave me much to think about. 

About Things

The Last Days of Capitalism has the characteristics of a play and not having been to the theater in a long time, it was a welcome change from the typical movie experience. The real identity of the two protagonists is unknown at first and as information is bartered out over time, its mostly untrue with some shreds of truth thrown in. Context is important in understanding the story as it unfolds through the conversations between the two and yet without knowing how each person really is, context is hard to form and just when you think you may have found something, the foundation shifts yet again.

To the end, we don't know if either side revealed their real identity. But there are some facts that did come to light - both the man and the woman wanted to experience something real, something to remember before they returned to whatever world they actually inhabited in reality. Trying to achieve that goal when the balance of power between the two sides is severely skewed by money makes it very challenging. It took me a while to get into the flow of this movie but once I was in it was nice to see it through the end though I am not sure I have a point of view on what this movie is about.  

Visual Overload

I was traveling for work to a city in Midwest I have never been to before. It turned out to be tidy but unremarkable town and I had arrived too late to meet the others from team for dinner. Having nothing better to do, I turned on the TV to catch the local stations and see if I could get a better feel for the place. I have lived TV-free for decades in my home so every time I turn on the TV it is a shock to the system. An hour of it left me struggling to fall asleep even though it had been a long day and I was tired. I thought it was a result of all the visual and aural stimulation I am not used to but maybe its not just me.

“We’ve found that self-proclaimed binge-watchers exhibit higher levels of stress, anxiety and depression,” says Jessica S Kruger, an assistant professor at the University at Buffalo who has studied the public health impacts of binge-watching. “There are also studies out of Harvard showing that among people who spend two hours watching TV the risk of diabetes goes up by 20%, the risk of heart disease by 15% and early death by 13%.”

That experience made me think about how people who watch TV regularly and use that as their primary source of news could be entirely different from those that don't watch any TV at all. I know both kinds of people and have to say the TV crowd feels like they are floating above ground where its easier to find things in common with each other - there could be some sense of community. The rest of us are rooted in a different kind of reality - a reality that is a bit different for each person because our reading sources are varied and the conclusions we arrive at depend on who we are.

Change Agent

Reading these line from a Charles Simic quote in the book Twilight of the Elites, made me think about how this disappointment and anxiety of about the state of the country is timeless and pervasive and each culture and groups of people within it deal with the issue differently:

“I know that when I get together with friends, we make a conscious effort to change the subject” from the state of the country “and talk about grandchildren, reminisce about the past and the movies we’ve seen, though we can’t manage it for very long. We end up disheartening and demoralizing each other and saying goodnight, embarrassed and annoyed with ourselves, as if being upset about what is being done to us is not a subject fit for polite society.”

There are times when society as a whole is more politically aware and engaged than others. You would see that reflected in the discourse of students in high school and college most prominently. The rest of society have pre-occupations that do not allow for very strong or sustained engagement. Students generally lead the charge. When it is one of those times, in many countries and cultures it would be the social norm to engage in spirited discussions about the state of the country. 

When young people completely stop believing in their power to bring change, it is the beginning of the end. It's okay for the elderly to reminiscence about their past and share stories about their grandkids - the young still need to live in the present and believe there is value in fighting to make things better. Sadly, in many parts of the world, the youth have moved on too. 

I recall growing up in India hearing from people my parents age that only God can save the this country and even that might prove impossible in the end. For someone starting out their life, this is not messaging that inspires confidence. When you hear sentiments like that all the time and your peers are working hard to get out of college to study or work abroad, you begin to question the wisdom of staying behind trying to make a life in a country that even God can't be confident about being able to save. 

My generation grew up in politically turbulent times home and abroad. Many of us followed the news, held strong opinions about what was going on in the country. We would argue our position passionately and some among us had ideas of what might bring about lasting change in the country. When it came time to acting on any of that just about everyone I grew up with left India as soon as they were able.

Growing Old

Reading this essay about aging and our relationship with it brings thoughts of my mother to mind. For decades she had been one of those people who did not age, in my teens and twenties we were often mistaken for sisters. Once she became a grandmother, something inside her changed and it impacted the way she aged and the pace of change. 

Very slowly at first and small invisible ways and then in a chaotic rush as if to remake herself in the image of an older woman - perhaps that of her beloved grandmother. It is not the person she was in her mind, if anything her mental state reversed to a point where there is equilibrium between the two edges she seems to have pushed herself to. Physically feeling much older than she needs to and mentally going quite the opposite direction. 

It is a terrible lack of harmony that I can't begin to explain to her, there is no longer a way to communicate with her as two women with a lot of life experience might with each other. I have to wonder if she could not keep up the fight against elderhood on two fronts at once - mental and physical. This may be her way to get to a center that will hold, in a way that makes sense to her even if does not to me.

At Sea

Chanced upon this short film about a man who has been living on cruise ships for a couple of decades. Listening to him describe his days made me think about the trap of routine - different for each person but still a trap. Its why we can't wait for Friday to spring out of it. But that craving for Friday is far from equal and what's to say the weekend is not another trap - just a different one. Many people have a repeatable weekend pattern by choice or by necessity. In that case it would just be a change of scenery within a trap that never really ends. The cruise ship sounds like a variant of that. 

It's possible to change the scenery often or rarely. Cruise water of different countries see new ports of call, meet new strangers while sailing. And all of that is a pattern that repeats in the confines of a cruise ship. I have been on a cruise only once to experience it and while it was enjoyable for couple of weeks its not something I would return to. It's much like our solitary trip to Disney. It was a novel and informative experience but not one we'd try again. I had a client once whose family went to Disney every summer for decades. It was a tradition they hoped to continue forever. The film also brought to mind memories of my grandfather who had not left the house for the last twenty years of his life - his world had shrunk to nothingness and he too like this man was happy. 

Don't Try

Reading the right poem for your mood is a lot like magic. Suddenly the feeling that you had no words to express is flying like a big bird with resplendent wings -its made to be seen and noticed. The poem led me to this quote by the poet:

"Somebody asked me: "What do you do? How do you write, create?" You don't, I told them. You don't try. That's very important: not to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It's like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or if you like its looks, you make a pet out of it."

I particularly loved that he advocates waiting and not trying because I have always wanted to live that way and regretted trying too hard on things that were important at the time. The moment inevitably passes, the value of the effort always diminishes and coming out on the other side of the chasm you are left to wonder why you even tried. So I can really get behind the idea of Don't Try just that it is far from easy despite the implication of total inaction

Underserved Women

Reading this story about the gender gap in smart phone ownership in rural India took me back to the 80s when I was growing up in semi-rural India. Our domestic help, R had three daughters and a son. The oldest, V took care of her younger siblings, worked as a domestic help herself in a few homes and was the one responsible for preparing meals in their own household. Despite this endless litany of responsibilities at a tender age of thirteen, she enrolled herself into an evening school to gain basic literacy. Within months she was reading and writing. After the days work was done and the younger siblings went to bed, V would complete her homework. When I saw her last she had completed eight grade and had well exceeded her dream of basic literacy. 

Her brother, the youngest of the siblings, went to regular school for which the entire family worked and paid for. He had neither the burning desire for education like V nor any natural aptitude or talent for learning. V had accomplished orders of magnitude more than him without any support whatsoever. I tried to help V every chance I got to push a bit further - I rooted for her success because she represented the hidden powerhouse of talent women like her can often be. I wanted to be the one who saw that and shone what little light I could on it. The net loss to India from denying access and opportunities to legions of girls like V and Pinky is unfathomable and yet in all these decades not much seems to have changed. 

Buddha Pill

Mindfulness without paying mind to it can apparently lead to bad things:

It’s important to recognise that these studies examined the effects of mindfulness exercises in very specific contexts, when guilt was salient in the participants’ minds. “We shouldn’t over-generalise and conclude that mindfulness makes you a worse person,” Hafenbrack says. 

His results might, however, encourage us to be a bit more thoughtful about when we apply it. We should think twice about using it after a disagreement with a friend or colleague, for example, particularly if you already know that you were in the wrong. “If we 'artificially' reduce our guilt by meditating it away, we may end up with worse relationships, or even fewer relationships,” he says. 

As someone who has forever struggled to practice mindfulness despite being convinced of its benefits, I am not sure what to make of this. What little I have been able to do has centered around making peace with situations and people that aggravate me and there is very little if anything I can do to change that. The peace is very fleeting because my "practice" is very rudimentary. But even with that, there is a clear value that makes me stick with it as limited as my abilities are. Meditating guilt away is an strange concept - it would appear than a person would likely try to calm the raging fires of guilt by meditating and find a better channel to expatiate it. 

Simple Art

This picture reminds me of Madhubani art and invokes the same sense of comforting familiarity even though they come from different cultures. Both would fall under the category of primitive art but there is something derogatory in that definition. If a piece of art comforts the viewer, and is labeled primitive, there is an implication the viewer is deficient and unsophisticated. I am thankfully not around any art connoisseurs and feel free to express my love for such "primitive" works and have them around me. 

.. art is not an isolated phenomenon. It is part of a culture, linked up with the history of the culture and with the history of the people. Consequently, we should view primitive art as merely a general term covering a variety of historical phenomena; the products of different races, mentalities, temperaments, historical events, and influences of environment. Every people, however primitive, has developed a specific style by giving preference to certain objects and patterns or certain arrangements of lines and spaces.

Dissecting Service

I met an interesting Uber driver on my way to the airport recently. He had been a career insurance salesman and was doing this Uber thing for fun not the money. It was before 4 pm and I was his last ride for the day. We chatted about selling life insurance and what made for a compelling customer experience. After a long day it was refreshing to hear a voice that was not pursuing goals like crazy and enjoying his life and conversations with random strangers. 

I spend a lot of my professional life dissecting customer experience and its second nature for me to mentally catalog both the good and bad ones that I have. This was definitely a good one. I did not have to wait too long for the bad. At the airport, I wanted to grab a bite and the only reasonable option was a bagel store. Two young women were running the place and my repeated efforts to get their attention to place my order failed. 

They simply refused to acknowledge me and there were no other customers anywhere in sight. It was a truly bizarre experience - I left there confused and still hungry. Later that evening I did get something to eat and could put some distance between the event and my feelings. It felt like a good time to dissect the negative experience more professionally. 

First thing that came to mind is the company in question is completely devoid of a customer experience culture. If there was any, I would have seen some shred of it even in a negative encounter. No surprise that the average salaries are very low - which would only attract transient or sub-par (or both) talent. 

Employee engagement on the job from what I could see was completely missing. The two women who completely ignored me might have worked their shift and getting ready to leave - for their salary, they could not be blamed if they did not want to extend their work day past end of shift. The display case where the bagels sat looked chaotic - like someone had rifled through stuff and not bothered to get things back in order - again likely a consequence of not being paid enough to do anything beyond what is minimally needed. 

No surprise either that the Glassdoor reviews are terrible. This is not a place anyone dreams of working. I am thinking if I was one of those young ladies and I was motivated, I would be trying hard to find work at a Starbucks or a Costco to improve my quality of life. If I was one of those who like to whine and complain then I would do little to change my situation but hate it anyway. Either way, my customer would be left holding the bag - my mind and heart would not be engaged in providing good service. It's amazing what a little space from a negative event and a good meal will do to a person's perspective. 

Clothes Shopping

Very sobering analysis of our environmental impact when we consume the "Cloud" and do so indiscriminately. 

The ecological dynamics we find ourselves in are not entirely a consequence of design limits, but of human practices and choices — among individuals, communities, corporations, and governments — combined with a deficit of will and imagination to bring about a sustainable Cloud.

I read this at this after a few hours of failed online shopping for business casual clothes. Travel has picked back up and like many, I can't relate to the clothes I wore pre-pandemic. It is an unusually high level of discomfort to wear them and be around people all day long after such a long pause from business travel. I also have this need to express my ethnic identity more strongly than years past - it may be a factor of age and life stage. 

After having spent decades trying to blend in and not call attention to my differences from the mainstream, I feel exhausted from the effort that it took to turn myself invisible. I want to wear Indian fabrics and colors in way that fits my situation - feel like I am in my own skin, living my own reality. Given the parameters, my efforts to find something I liked from the comfort of my couch proved impossible. But the search itself was enabled by Cloud and that comes with the kind of consequences this essay describes. 

Con Learnings

Have been watching Inventing Anna lately and don't know what to make of it. At some level, the average person will experience schadenfreude at how Anna was able to fool the elite, classist, undeservedly rich hoping it is true what they say about the fool and his money being soon parted. In a sense, Anna was trying to test out this axiom and came somewhat within striking distance. 

Makes you wonder this whole saga might be a demonstration of Peter's Principle that enabled a woman that young with no "credentials" to bamboozle an array of rich, powerful and influential. So while she is a consummate con artist it is also true that the victims were not particularly astute, so perhaps they had "failed up" to those positions they were not capable of holding. Men do what Anna did all the time and there are not only no consequences, they are rewarded. 

Based on how the story was told in the series, its hard to feel any sympathy for the victims. That said, it is a cautionary tale of the dangers created by someone repeating lies and fabrications with such self-conviction that it becomes the truth for them. Convincing others of something you deeply believe to be the absolute truth yourself is not impossible. Sadly some in their orbit will develop a deep loyalty with them despite facts and reality. We see that here with her lawyer and her friend Neff.

On way smaller scale many of us average folks have fallen victim to cons ourselves and if we were to look back we were distracted successfully, had our weaknesses played upon until our natural instincts of self-defense were impaired. Most often, people are able to recover quickly and not remain the the thrall of the con-person. That is what one might expect people who required to perform at levels that they have the ability for. In this story, such was not the case and the con-person was able to stay in the game for a lot longer. 

There is a reason for "our evergreen fascination with scams"- it is a instructive and one hopes we can learn from the mistakes of others. When the victims are such that they don't evoke any sympathy from the average person, there is the guilty pleasure of rooting for the scam-artist. People must always have their guilty pleasures - it's what makes life interesting. 

Up Cycling

Cool idea for converting those old phones languishing around into portable security cameras. Its so obvious, I can't imagine why it never occurred to me. We also have some pretty ancient tablets sitting around that no one wants to discard for old time's sake and yet it serves no purpose other than gathering dust.

Think about it: Cellphones have decent cameras. They connect to the internet. They can work for hours without being plugged in. Real cameras cost money. It’s a techno-match made in cheapskate heaven. And lest you think it’s complicated to teach an old phone new tricks, the method I’m going to share with you is about as simple as logging into an app.

If the set-up is meant to be permanent, then the camera would need to be plugged in at all times. Wonder what it does to the battery over time specially that these things are old and the battery is worn out already. Other than that it's a pretty neat idea. 

Two Ideas

I read these lines in Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All one one evening right before listening to a Ted Talk about the struggles of farmers in India.

In some ways, being very rich and very poor are strangely similar. Just as having not enough money creates fear and anxiety, so can having more than you know what to do with. At both ends of the spectrum, money tinkers with our notions of self-worth, our egos, our social lives, the stability of our marriages, our relationships with children, parents, and siblings—even our mental health.

In recounting the event that triggered his foray into making the low-cost portable green-house for small-hold farmers,  Sathya Raghu Mokkapati talks about seeing a farmer eating a ball of mud because that was his only choice apart from death by starvation.

When the author of Jackpot, Michael Mechanic talks of the very rich and the very poor being akin at some level, clearly has no idea of what being very poor really means. On his best day he has some fetishized romantic notion of what it is to be truly poor. 

It would take a fantastic imagination to find a point of convergence between Mokkapati's farmer and .0001% of the wealthiest in the world that Mechanic is writing about. The juxtaposition of these two ideas in that close proximity made for a very jarring experience.