Heartcrossings

I was seated next to a young couple on a flight recently. The young lady was only a bit older than J and her partner a few years older. For the length of the five hour flight they both sketched on their tablets and compared notes with each other, sometimes assisting or improving the other's work. They worked in companionable silence and there was a peaceful energy about them. I would have loved to learn more about them - judging by the quality of their work and the pace of production, I would guess they were professional artists of some sort.  I can't recall any other time that I have been seated next to a couple where both spent the entire flight time creating art. It was wonderful to experience as an outsider looking in. I realized that it would be rude to peer because it is their personal space and this is like a private conversation between them. While I was consumed with curiosity to see what they had made, it did not feel right to interrupt their flow. Seeing their happin...

I read this article with interest having been a beneficiary of the allegedly fake hiring free by tech companies when the going was good. It was a hiring wave and new people kept pouring in where I worked at the time and from what I heard anecdotally from friends in similar companies. Folks were job-hopping like mad too and asking their ex-coworkers if they wanted out.  Many did and that triggered a backfill hiring. My own observations during this time have been that the level of engineering and technology excellence in such companies is patchy at best. It is very much the story of the cobbler's son with no shoes. The level of chaos and dysfunction is quite mindboggling, I have heard this from friends, through insights gleaned from interviewing for roles in these companies and also first-hand. The large enterprise discipline that I have seen with client organizations in my decades of consulting simply does not exist. Ad-hocism is the rule of the land. Maybe some notion of breaking t...

On International Women's Day a few weeks ago, I had a few friends and co-workers wish me for the occasion and each time I felt offended. My reaction made me also feel like a kill-joy and a curmudgeon - the very stereotype of a person who is needlessly disaffected by the most mundane things in the world.  Notwithstanding, I took it upon myself to explain to these well-wishers why I felt so offended. I am tired of women being put on a pedestal and being made a big deal of on a specific day and being treated like second, third and worse tier every other day of the year. I recognize I am in a position of great privilege and that makes it all the more reason to feel that such celebration is a slap on the collective face of womanhood. The overwhelming majority of my sisters around the world have is way worse than I do. That was true centuries and millennia ago and it continues to be true today. Women have not had it good as a default state of affairs - ever. It has been a infinitely long...

The stories that come out of Twitter generally give pause these days but selling office plants to employees for cash is a new level of creative. Given that Meta is such a faithful follower mimicking the subscription service and such, would not be out of the realm to see office plants there being up for sale - maybe they will throw in the furniture as well. People can bring their own to work (add some bedding for good measure) so they can stay devoted to making money for the company every waking hour.  Seems like the logical next step. Just get a big empty space where the laborers can keep working until they drop. If the tech companies execute well enough on downgrading the employee experience, time will come when the food services and hospitality industry jobs will start to look quite attractive. Meta's move to demote was an interesting one and seems like Google borrowed a page or two from that playbook which gives everyone else in the business to say no to promotions and raises...

I have been dealing with a field mouse that found its way to my kitchen for several nights without success. Trying our best not to kill it and only trap and take it away is proving impossible. So far the mouse has prevailed and I start my mornings disappointed. But my recent troubles seemed like nothing when I heard this man's story about his  fight to the finish with the bobbit worm . My mouse troubles will be over if I resort to harsher measures and there is some comfort knowing that. Such was not the case with this guy. Whatever the creature that needs to be overcome in such situation we apparently rely on the wisdom the "Art of War" .. the famous military treatise written in 5th century B.C. by Sun Tzu, source of the famous quote, “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.” So, Arndt decided, he would start off by befriending the Bobbit worm. “So I started feeding it, trying to feed it every night,” he said. “They’re nocturnal mostly, and I would stay up all n...

I happened read this poem first thing in the morning in my daily feed and was left thinking about what kind of mood the words created.  Love by  Radmila Lazić I sharpened knives All night. To welcome you In the brilliance of their blades, And among them, My love sparkles For your eyes only.   — Translated from the Serbian by Charles Simic The simplistic view would be that the person (a woman presumably) was cheated on by the lover and there is a mix of passion, hate and threat in those world. It conjures a vision of a scorned woman who is bent on revenge. If that was not the case, maybe this is a woman who lives a bit dangerously, her love is shiny and bright, can cut like a knife, So maybe this is a word to the wise, not to take her casually - this is a love that can turn another direction quickly. Maybe the hope is the recipient will say alert and focused on her and not take the lazy route in the relationship. Either way, it was amazing how much can be conveyed with so ...

I met F through a mutual connection who thought it might be interesting for us to network given our professional backgrounds and interests. F was pretty upset when I needed to reschedule last minute. I gave him a pass given he is older than my father - and he is a career academic. Not the kind of person who deals with having the whole world stomping on their calendar and needing to fight for personal time. Maybe something he did not need to deal with in the course of his career. I did not have a good feeling about this meeting but second guessed myself and decided to meet him anyway.  F turned out to be a person who stopped being curious about things a while back but based on years of practice had muscle memory to respond correctly to new information and opinions that contradicted his own (I had plenty of those) in our short conversation. I wondered why our mutual connection had decided this would be a good learning experience for us both. I can learn something from talking to just...

I can't say I enjoyed The Lost Daughter but there were many quality moments throughout the movie. One of my favorites came towards the end of the movie where Leda describes herself as an unnatural mother. We see her trying to overachieve as a mother of two young girls. Her influence on their little lives is oversize and matches their level of clinginess to her. Leda is the sun and they can only reflect her light or be in her shadow. In the phase of life the girls are shown in the movie, it seems like they cannot discover the world and need mother to show the way and shine the light. This gets Leda beyond the point of exhaustion and she abandons them. Some element of post-partum depression is alluded to and then there is the extra marital affair that presumably helps her cope with it all. This is something many an overzealous mother is not told when she has just given birth - there is a fine line between being supportive to children and being the tree that does not allow young plant...

I came across this paper which was linked from an article I was reading. The topic piqued my interest and I went past the text to the graph which shows clearly that if you are a liberal teen then irrespective of gender you are more depressed than your progressive counterparts. There was a lot to read there but some things stood out for me:  Among liberals, female adolescents without a parent with a college degree reported the highest average depressive affect scores, increasing from 2.02 (SD ​= ​0.81) in 2010 to 2.75 (SD ​= ​0.92) in 2018.  That makes for quite the combination - female, teen, liberal and parent without a college degree.  Taking a very textbook notion of what a liberal is - desiring equality in society, respect for the individual no matter what defines the individual, seeking freedom and access to due process. In the context of this young woman, the prototypical depressed liberal teen, most of what she values is not a given in society ...

I have a Downy Woodpecker working diligently a few trees in my yard. He makes a perfectly spaced set of holes on the bark on the tree is the closest to the house. After he is done with his day's work, there is silence until he is back again. Watching him at work is soothing and if the symbolism is true then we are lucky he has been coming around so consistently, If a woodpecker has appeared to you, pay attention to the new possibilities and opportunities in your life. You may need to dig deep to find your creativity, but don’t give up. Keep persevering! To reach your goals, you must be relentless and push through, even when facing the toughest challenges. If the woodpecker is your spirit animal or totem, you most likely missed out on crucial moments that could have altered your path. This animal is pushing you to right the past. The thrum of the pecking can be heard as a death rattle assuming the tree is nearing its end. I would not know seeing how it is in full bloom right now. T...

 Read these lines in the book What Happened to You ? about how child abuse can manifest itself: If a child experiences abuse, their brain may make an association between the features of the abuser or the circumstances of the abuse—hair color, tone of voice, the music playing in the background—and a sense of fear. The complex and confusing associations can influence behaviors for years; later in life, for example, being served in a restaurant by a brown-haired man who hovers over you while he takes your order may elicit a panic attack. But because there is no firmly embedded cognitive recollection—no linear narrative memory—the panic is often experienced and interpreted as random, independent of any previous experience. I was in a relationship with a man a very long time ago, who I suspected might have been a victim of childhood abuse. M was highly intelligent, creative and personable - traits that made him attractive to me and people who knew him socially or professionally. Yet, fo...

Watched Side Effects a few days ago and it brought to mind my own visits to the doctor's office over the years. No matter what the issue and what my age at the time, the pattern remained consistent. For each out of bound metric that defines "ideal" health, the doctor who suggest a medication. Had I acted on every prescription that they so readily doled out, I would be on a full regimen of drugs by now - one an hour every hour every day. That would get me really sick too and likely a candidate for various procedures as well. It's been my observation, that the desire to push new, untested, unattested pills reigned supreme at all times.  Every single encounter with a physician that I have had left me feeling that this person was most certainly not looking out of my best interests. And if I cared for my health and well-being, I was mostly on my own. I refused to take any one of the medicines I was prescribed over all these years and I am okay for the most part. Lately, d...

Between my yard and the neighbor's there is a rather dense tree line and then a narrow creek. The trees are yet to green but there is a big clump of Narcissus is in full bloom somewhere between the creek and the trees. Every time I look out the back porch, my eyes are immediately drawn to them. The flowers are lovely and are a delight to see but they make me think of death and flowers by a grave.  Some years ago, I visited the grave of a child one of my close friends had lost their oldest close to two decades ago. We spent time cleaning the headstone and the earth around it, working together but in silence. Then we drove to the nearest Home Depot to look for perennial flowers that would bloom there even if no one was able to visit.  As I recall they were some kind of lily and in full bloom at the time we planted them. We left the place looking brighter and well-cared for. My friend used to say there were no more tears left to cry but the pain remained forever. I stood there in...

I was fortunate enough to work from home for over fifteen years and my run of good luck might be running out. Before the pandemic, it meant finding jobs in the local market that allowed me flexibility or something with a large, dispersed global presence. I was not able to take the opportunities that my peers in bigger cities had access to. It was a choice I made - to stay where I was for the greater good of my family even if that meant limited career opportunities. Remote work brought by the pandemic allowed me to work for companies that would have been completely out of the realm before that. I jumped in and it has worked great so far - both for me and my employers.  Around the world, I am sure there are millions of such stories. Of women, disadvantaged people of different stripes who magically had doors opened for them that had until then been out of their reach. Once in, the realized to their surprise and happiness that they were more than well-qualified for these roles that had...

Some time back, J needed to fly very early one Monday morning for a business trip. I spent a completely sleepless night worrying about her being alone in her Uber on the way to the airport at 3 am. At times like this, I can forget that she is a grown woman, living independently for a while and capable of taking care of herself. All night long, I had images from J's childhood flash through my restless mind that could not fall asleep even though I was tired. I was anxious for her with the same intensity as when she was a child. Once she texted me from the airport a little past 4 am, I finally dozed off. In the life of every mother there are many such nights and you want them to end so you can sleep a bit. I take great care not to bring any of this up with J. The worries might not be unwarranted but there is no way for her to make them go away for me. They can only create mental constraints for her, break her stride. Thinking back, I am following in my mother's footsteps - she too...

Reading this Inc. article made me think of people I have come to know over the years. Could not think of anyone who is prone to using all the six phrases in the list consistently - some leaders use more from this set than others. L came to mind for always getting on calls with customers with "How can I help you" - and did not matter how upset that customer was when they called L, they always end up calmed down and eager to do more business with L's company. "I trust you" is a popular one - the folks that came to mind in that context were typically managers that teams liked and got along with. They were also more likely than not to ask "What do you need from me" - to make sure they were being useful and removing obstacles for the team.  I think what I have heard the least and wish it was more popular for the powers that be to say "Honestly, I don't know". There is a presumption that they do or should know. When they don't allow themse...

Enticing employees back of office buildings by going resimerical is an interesting idea but needs to be taken a lot further to have a chance. Depending on the age and life-stage of the employee their needs and wants will vary a great deal. Lets say for the sake of argument, a vast majority of the employees at a certain company ExampleCo are either single or coupled with no kids or pre-school kids. A resimerical situation that could work for this set is heavily subsidized housing in walking distance from the place of work. Add to that easy access to amenities they would care for like daycare, fitness centers, food and entertainment - ExampleCo might have a good number of takers for working from the office all days of the week.  Assuming this office location is the downtown area of the city, it will likely not cater to the folks with kids that need to go to school - and the desirable ones currently tend to be in the suburbs. To get this crowd to come to office everyday, would take mo...

I had a chance to listen to  María Dueñas playing with our local symphony orchestra. It made for an unforgettable experience being in the presence of such talent and having seen her at twenty. My friend M who was at the concert with me recalled seeing Anne Sophie-Mutter when she was a rising star several decades ago - it was the same thing for M, hearing  Dueñas .  The following week doing mundane chores at home, I recalled how her music brought tears to my eyes and how much this young woman had already achieved at twenty.  She was playing along with an orchestra that has played together in our town for many decades - some of the oldest members have been around for forty years. There is something to be said for such solid continuity in a world that has been hit by many waves of turbulence in the last four decades. These folks stayed together and made music the whole time - maintaining an unshakable center.  They have played with top talent from around the ...

The Bradford Pear tree in my yard is visible from my kitchen window and is a trusty bell-weather for the season. It is a male tree and is a sight to behold when in full bloom. This tree is problematic and should probably be taken down. My friend's sister L is an activist for growing native species and we recently got into a conversation about what is that bright red line in time after which things are no longer native and how much data do we have about species that existed before that time. I did not get a clear understanding based on her responses which are not unlike what I have heard from others like her.  Poking around for better answers, I found a couple of things that looked interesting - one of which is chloroplast sequencing  and a database of plants thus sequenced . Unfortunately, neither is geared to a lay person who has a question while shopping for plants at their local nursery to see if its native or not. Would be very helpful to have this database provide a plai...

I have known a few victims of domestic abuse in my life and none of these women were able to sever links to their abusers successfully. There were children involved and lack of financial resources to strike out on their own. That is not counting how the cycle of abuse tears a person's self-confidence to smithereens.  They view the world through different eyes and nothing is easy or unassociated with fear. The idea of not having logs of phone calls and text messages made by the victim of abuse is a great one but it should be much wider than just crisis hotlines and the like. Even calls to a neighbor or a friend can trigger violence from the abuser - their goal is to isolate them so any signs to the contrary is problematic.  A person should be able to go to their phone company's website and register themselves as a victim of abuse and determine exactly how much visibility they want their abuser to have into their phone records. That will be a great first step in empowerment - g...

Read this Kurt Vonnegut quote today and it made me smile. My father has always sung for pleasure - never a professional but good enough to perform at smaller venues. It was always his escape from all that he did not like or could not control or both “Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.” He created my earliest taste in music on which everything else was layered and built over time. I associated the sound of his voice with the ability to escape to a happier place. To this day, it is his way to disrupt a difficult situation - he can break into song unexpectedly and suddenly there is a diversion from the problem at hand. I do believe those are all things created as Vonnegut says. I often ping him requests to send me recording...

 As someone who believed that sharing space with someone everyday is the thing that destroys relationships and indeed spent a good many years diving between two homes to prevent, I understand this issue of needing separate bedrooms . In many situations, this bit of space and the room to breathe undisturbed can be what it takes to keep the relationship eco-system survivable. But based on my personal experience it does not make for peace, comfort and tranquility that makes that relationship a sanctuary one craves for. That can happen when this need for separation and space dissolves - sometimes the process and slow and winding but given enough time and patience the dissolution might come about and bring great results for both. The need for private time and space is a real one but it can be accomplished in many other ways without needing be in separate bedrooms ..according to the International Housewares Association, a trade organization, 31% of surveyed couples who said they sleep ap...

I read about the Dove CROWN Act the same afternoon as I was squirming while on video because my hair did not sit quite right compared to other that of other women who were on the call. I have long forgotten that my hair was once considered beautiful and I received a lot of compliments for it. That was back in India and ofcourse I was way younger. Adjusted to age, my hair is still nice. I think deep down I understand this to be a fact - it is not such a big surprise, Indian women do have the best hair in the world . So why do I feel so unsettled each time I am on video and something is every so slightly off with my naturally wavy hair that I don't like to use any products on.  I don't want to change anything about it - don't want my hair to look like someone else's hair. I love what I have but each day it brings me some low level of anxiety around other people who don't have my kind of hair. I have a lot of sympathy for any woman whose hair is viewed as distracting....

I have lived through the H1-B ordeal that upended my personal and professional live profoundly. My story is over two decades old counting from when it started. I had and continue to look at it as the price to pay for making my own choices and pursuing my personal idea of freedom. I was not forced into any situation against my will and I am very cognizant of that. While that is likely true for people enduring the same pain today , it does not diminish the level of needless suffering and how it makes a person feel like they are on unstable ground every minute of "their life" as "normal life" goes on all around them. The ones who try to insulate the kids from the chaos, try to plant roots - buy home, form community and more, incur even more stress because they have added the weight of baggage to the unrelenting uncertainty of their lives. Nothing seems to have changed in the two decades that have gone by since my time. There are wave upon wave of people who go through ...

I read this story about Meta asking their managers and directors to become individual contributors or quit ,  with a tinge of amusement. It seems to be borne out watching layer upon layer of management fail to add any value to the organization whatsoever. Have long held that people who need to be actively hand-held and managed are bad hires. Even high-school and college interns that have worked for me over the years have proven to be capable of self-direction with some basic steering. If a person that young and inexperienced does not take extensive management effort, there is no reason that someone with a few years on their resume should.  The greater the number of management layers in the organization, the higher the level of dysfunction and lower the quality of production - people are too lost managing up, down and sideways to actually work. The ideal situation would be for teams to be organized by executive management and given team goals to deliver on that can be broken do...

I have stopped paying attention to fabric labels for a long time now. The first time was when something I bought was labeled as silk, but clearly nylon. The merchant did not fuss about the return but the event opened my eyes to the fact that the labels were decorative and should not be taken seriously. This article breaks down the reasons why accuracy of such labels is a hard goal to achieve . The item in question changes hands too many times to have its chain of provenance correctly accounted for and there is plenty of room to introduce false data along the way A typical supply chain in the textile industry can be incredibly complex, with separate facilities, often in different countries, completing each step in the process. Cotton grown in Egypt might be shipped to India to be spun into yarn in one facility, woven into a fabric in another, then sent to Portugal to be cut and sewn, before being sold in a department store in London. Both my grandmothers used to wear pure cotton sarees ...

I read this essay around Valentine's Day and thought there could be no sweeter or sadder tribute from a woman to the man she loves. While Jason may and (still might be) all the things his wife of 26 years says about him, it is also true that he is the product of their love made from the bonds between the two of them at first and then between them and their children. He perfection exists in the mesh of support created by the ties that bind this family together. It is not to say that this man is not amazing on his own, but I imagine he will manifest himself differently with another woman, another context and another life. We are blinded by love as we should be and the person we love is imbued with perfection we bestow on them.  Sometimes we help them be their best selves because they feel so loved they want to exceed expectations. So it is a two way street- to love and be loved back in return, not in a quid pro way but because it feels so wonderful. Doing things for the one you love...

When anyone asks me how I have been or how is work, I really make an effort to provide a thoughtful reply and very rarely claim to be busy never mind crazy busy. I notice the confusion and bewilderment that my response is usually met with. Something must be wrong if I am not making claims to being busy - what exactly am I then doing to justify my existence. It is true as this author points out , that most people do claim they are crazy busy and with a sense of pride and accomplishment. I am always intrigued by those that don't - they are fun to talk to, there is something to learn from how they are living their lives.   Over the holidays, I met B who is unabashed about doing what he needs to to collect his paycheck and focus his time on learning things he is curious about - which is a wide range of items. So the learning time while it takes up most of his mental capacity is not "busy" time. B can break off any moment to run errands, do things with his family or just sit b...

In a neighborhood close to mine, some folks have chicken in their backyards. They are nice to watch from afar but seem like a lot of work. Reading this little tirade against brunch and the true cost of cheap eggs, brought those chickens to mind that I see sometimes on our walks. The writer has some interesting pipe-dreams about such chickens and the riches they could bring to their owners: My sillier hope is that, as the end times draw seemingly closer, backyard chicken keepers like me become the supply cornering barons of apocalypse narratives. I imagine myself sitting in a heavily guarded enclave, wearing a feathered cloak and stroking a pekin bantam, receiving supplicants hoping to exchange their treasured possessions (petrol, jewels, cashmere) for a single, precious egg. Finally, my girls would earn their keep and eggs would get their lustre back. Imagine how you’d revere an egg if it was as rare and luxurious as a truffle: imagine how differently you’d view the creature that prod...

Irrespective of how Twitter does it , there is a great value in sharing ad revenue with the consumers who are helping generate those revenues. We watched the Decameron movie recently and it was on a channel that is ad-supported - something I am not used to these days on Netflix or Prime. The ad choices were quite bewildering to me - one specific car-maker, one specific Italian designer, a range of frozen meals from one brand and then with unrelenting regularity a vitamin pill ad. Taken together the whole set of ads made no sense for me. I do not do frozen meals - so that data point is missing or dead wrong. The car-brand choice is interesting but also one I have not shown any inclination for - personally or as a family. The vitamin pills seem to be an antidote to the processed food that was being promoted - there is no other way to explain the juxtaposition.  It is like if I take action and start eating copious amounts of processed food then I will need vitamins to go along with su...

The posts from folks who have been laid off the last few months have a certain formulaic, untruthful tinge to them that makes for painful reading. The structure of all posts are alike - Was in a complete state of shock at first and upon recovery felt ever so grateful for the 10-20 years they had with the company and "the people they collected along the way" - that turn of phrase has a stomach churning effect for me - what in the hell is collecting people? People are not objects you add to your collection of things and objects. Then to go on to say they don't know what is next but will figure it out, big thank you to the company that just threw them out like last week's festering trash.  Strong and positive close just as the the societal norms expect. That is so crazy wrong at every level. A post like this in my network garners several hundred likes and comments. I have been laid off and have known people who have been as well - some at the same time as me, others at o...