Heartcrossings

A couple of days ago, while waiting at the grocery checkout line I was clicking through a Buzzfeed piece that I came across. The topic I chanced upon was how Sarah Jessica Parker buys clothes. I might as well have taken an interest in how Martians cook dinner. This person and her clothing is so out of my realm that inspiration from a Martian recipe might have been more relatable. But I read on and learned that she buys new items of clothing rather rarely and when she does she asks herself if the piece she is considering is one she would want to wear 10-15 years out. Suddenly, I found myself relating to someone whose way of life is infinitely removed from mine. Couple of thoughts crossed my mind when I read this.  The first - it is a great idea and one I fully agree with. The second - it would be hard to execute on for the average person for multiple reasons. Clothes that someone like me would consider reasonably priced and even on the high end are no longer made to last. I have clo...

Reading this interesting and timely anecdote about perfect algorithms and hard-boiled eggs . It serves as a cautionary tale about striving for perfection where the domain within which such perfection is meant to operate is both imperfect and unconfined. Welfare algorithms have made news recently for disproportionately hurting the very people it is meant to serve being optimized to prevent fraud. This is a lot like the hard-boiled egg situation. There is a certain baseline expectation the algorithm operates on and variances are flagged as problematic. A real person's life in a difficult time does not follow any pre-defined pattern.  Every hour and day presents new and novel challenges that are unique to them - not even something that can be extrapolated to other in similar financial dire straits. So they need to respond and react to what is coming at them while somehow keeping their head above the water. Chances are a lot of those behaviors will look flaggable to the algorithm becau...

Like many I have mixed feelings about the wisdom of Peter Theil . There are some germs of truth there ofcoure and there is no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater just because you don't agree with all that he says. This essay for example brings up several arguments that a reasonable person with commonsense would tend to agree with. The conclusion is poignant too The first step is to understand where we are. We’ve spent 40 years wandering in the desert, and we think that it’s an enchanted forest. If we’re to find a way out of this desert and into the future, the first step is to see that we’ve been in a desert. In light of reading this essay, I thought of a recent conversation I had with a developer friend. He is close to retirement age and has been a programmer all his life. Learned from the best and brightest and honed his skills over the years. I would describe L as a craftsman - he takes pride in his work and he treats code as a writer would treat writing. I have kno...

It is hard for someone of my vintage to understand the rationale behind Indian kids celebrating mock weddings in college campuses . One way to look at it a second chance at prom and doing it the desi way instead of fitting into something that is culturally more distant. For kids from outside of America, they may have not experienced prom at all - only seen it in Hollywood movies. Its a chance to get in on the action in a familiar setting. There is also Bollywood weddings that many might see as aspirational but reality for them in the milieu of their own family and friends might look quite different. In a sponsored wedding where the person is the playing the role of a bride or groom, they can have an experience that matches the collective aspirations of those who are there to participate. From what I have observed in friends and family circles back home, Indian youth does not seem to be in any rush to get married and even if they do, they have little desire to have kids. Seems to match ...

Beautiful essay about a son dealing with his father's hypergraphia (in a sense) after his death - fulfilling the last wish of making all the writing available online. As someone who feels compelled to write and treats the act of writing as therapeutic, I can understand why this man had to write no matter who got the point of his writing.  My father needed a great deal of space, but now he takes up almost none. Almost. Death is a lossy process, but something always remains.   A person's writing life filling 7 gigabytes is big and completely trivial at once depending on how you are counting. That is a mind-boggling number of words but a 32 GB flash-drive which is the size of a cigarette lighter costs under $5. If that is your perspective - this man's entire sense of self is contained in about a fourth of that drive and all he had to say for himself to the world costs less than a dollar to hold. The average size of a video game is 30 to 120 GB.  So one could argue that...

The collection of teas in my kitchen are primarily from India not counting the Iranian rose tea, yerba mate and such. We gave first and second flush single-estate Darjeeling teas, several varieties of Assam and Nilgiri. The tea bags I have left are from J's high school years, she kept that drawer stocked and was the primary consumer of it. For me, loose leaf tea is the only way to drink tea, always has been, After a successful run with ordering Jasmin Dragon Pearl tea directly from China, I tried with Da Hong Pao this time. At the time of ordering, I did not know much about the tea expect that it was a nice oolong. It was delivered well before the estimated date and on a Saturday afternoon. Now that the tea was on hand, I spent time reading about it and the proper way to brew it. Turned out to be a great learning experience.  Based on the price of the tea, I likely got the commodity Da Hang Pao - the stuff made for regular tea drinkers. The results of the first steep were excellen...

I found a note to myself in my old mailbox from 2004 that read: I was mad at J this morning when I tried to wake her up and she shoved me away. It was like she had a struck at my scarred, wounded heart - again. Sometimes I credit her with more wisdom than she has True, she is wise but there is also in her a frolicsome little child. She wants to play mindless games with me. I err in thinking them to be mindful and punish her for it. And after I do, I regret my haste to conclude.  The more things change the more the remain the same. Only a few weeks ago, I experienced the same wounded feeling because J was busy for days on end with work and personal life and unresponsive to my messages. What was true back then is true now as well - there was no intent to her behavior, least of all intent to hurt me. That morning like many others, she wanted to sleep in some more and was unhappy I was trying to wake her up - she acted reflexively, not to reject me as a mother.  That was me hyperb...

The timing and sequence of the most vivid memories of the past can play tricks on my memory. A few nights ago, I woke up from the most peaceful dream I have ever had about P. For the first time since we broke up a year after college, I experienced closure. All that I had hoped would be true of our relationship but had not come to fruition in our time together, did in that dream. So much life has passed for both of us since then. I am a completely different person now, unrecognizable even to myself though I hope P remained unchanged because life did not toss him around as furiously as it did me. There was another event that occurred around that time - my meeting J's father. We were introduced my aunt who knew his family. It was meant to be an exploratory conversation, C would call me on the phone and hopefully we would hit it off. Both families were in match-making mode at the time. I was one of his prospects as he was one of mine.  The gaping void left by the absence of P in my lif...

I have been to Varanasi only once in my life. It exceeded my expectations at the time and remained etched in memory since then. Even after two and a half decades, I recall the details of the few days spent there in full vivid color as if it were only yesterday. Just about every moment was perfect. Some day, I hope J will visit there with or without me - I would love very much for us to share that experience but will be just as happy if I could not there for it. As I write that, I realize it means something quite particular to have my child visit Varnasi without me.  If my second time at Varanasi were to be for my arthi visarjan , would that be so terrible? Maybe that is the proper rite of passage for Hindu who has lived away from home most of majority of their life. Things should begin and end in the same place for completeness. Reading about this story about the River Soar while cleaning old archived emails, brought Varanasi to mind and the thoughts of how and when a second visit...

Clarity can come a in a place and time that are far removed from the events that required it. Imagine two people locked in a bad marriage had spent week in hostile silence. The man is skilled at weaponizing silence while the woman needs to talk like her life depended on it. It did not matter if that talk led to no outcomes and no closure. She had tried to make peace and failed many times during that fateful week - he simply refused to engage her no matter how much she groveled for a conversation. Came a point when she decided she was done and would no longer be the one seeking reconciliation - ever. She is that kind of woman - with a built in kill-switch no one can see. It makes her actions incomprehensible even to those who know her well because they too can't tell when that switch will go on. In this marriage, she was the one who had taken on the burden of keeping the precarious balance as he hacked away at the fragile foundation. This was a fool's errand but she had proven h...

As someone who has very few friends but ones that go back a very long way, I could relate to t his essay about the importance and priority of close friendships and how they might outflank the significant other in some ways. My two closest friends have known me my entire adult life if not longer. They get me in a way later arrivals in my life simply cannot. They have seen me in raw, unshaped, unbaked form and been through the processes that got me from that point to here.  There is nothing about me that they don't understand and there is nothing I could do that they would find unexpected. The partners in our life typically come later and for those of us who had more than their fair share of misfortune even more so. They are destined to remain at disadvantage compared to those who have been there the whole time.  In the past few decades, Americans have broadened their image of what constitutes a legitimate romantic relationship: Courthouses now issue marriage licenses to same-s...

Read this piece of news in my LinkedIn feed a few days ago and it brought to mind the first time ever I had read about Ms. Kochhar in the news. She was a rising star then and on the cover of some Indian magazine. She had cracked the glass ceiling; her name was on lists few women had been in before her - never mind a woman from India. Reading about her back in the day was particularly meaningful to me because of where things were in my life. Just about everything was falling apart and I was raising J alone in a foreign country. I was such a far cry from Kochhar in every way including the fact that I could not make it work out for my family unit of two in India and had to come to America to have a shot at making it. She was thriving in the same country as a woman that I found so impossible to deal with. It would always make me wonder, what kind of inner resilience and native intelligence must a woman possess to achieve the things she was - in India. The bar for success is so much higher...

Therapy and the unending quest for self-improvement in lieu of marriage is one of the many ideas in this essay  exploring the state of modern matrimony.  To compensate for the greater challenges and impediments to marriage, working-class Americans are embracing therapeutic culture to prepare for relationships where strong emotional resilience is called for. Therapy culture is part and parcel of the turn to self-worth in the new norms of intimacy. It calls on individuals to cultivate deeper emotional maturity through self-help literature and constant self-improvement regimens. A very interesting concept. People are bracing up for a life of opportunistic and pragmatic partnerships that ease the burdens of going solo. Someone to spilt the bills with (atleast some of them), a travel companion, the fallback option for holidays if other options do not materialize. Intimacy is just one of the myriad benefits in a structure that does not require a long term plan or commitment.  M...

My friend L started at a family-owned multi-national company last year after a long career in much larger public companies. When she told me about this change, I was not sure if she was going to like it but she had a good feeling about it. The first few months were bumpy - she said she was struggling to find her bearings and understand where she fit in the organization. We chatted for a couple of hours last weekend and things are way different now and in a positive way.  L's new company has a way setting team goals that she had never encountered in the past. The CEO and his small leadership team comes up with the goals for the year and they ask all parts of the organization what part of those goals they would like to own and deliver on. There are no set expectations - teams are meant to look at who they have on board, what they are good at and what they can reasonably take on to achieve some part of the goal.  Based on what they signed up to do as a team, individuals are then ...

Soft & Quiet is not easy viewing and leaves a disturbing aftertaste. As a person of color living in America you have to think about what part of the story is plausible and where things turn hyperbolic to generate shock and awe. There is a turning point in the story where a small event leads to rapid escalation. In the case of this story the trigger is deep racial prejudice but it could be something else too - a very random person can unwittingly step on a minefield when they are dealing with someone who feels angry, hopeless, victimized, powerless and so on. The reasons for why they feel the way they do have nothing to do with the individual that triggers them but if things get out of hand it it does in the movie, that person may even pay with their life.  The women who want to create a club to vent their grievances against multi-culturalism being thrust upon them are pathetic and ridiculous in their understanding of what ails them. That part of the movie is comical even. Part...

Historically, people who were settled in their own land were more prosperous than the nomads passing by on their way to the next place they could trade and earn. Digital nomads have flipped that equation . They are more affluent than the locals - this is precisely they are there. Their income goes much further than it would have at home. It makes sense that after a while they would feel weary and like nowhere people. This nomadic way of life is not intrinsic to the person's existence. They could as well have stayed back in rural Kansas. Congregating with others just like them does not create the community that a band of traders on the Silk Road might have had. My desire for travel and seeing new places far exceeds what I have been able to do so far. Even with that small amount of experience, I have known fatigue from sensory overload. The best trips are those connected with some purpose which were expanded a bit. Meeting family and friends when I am in their town for work could be...

People have always re-written history, re-told stories with alternative endings just that it was not possible to do it so easily before . Easy as expected is also lazy - just swap the colonizer and the colonized and see what happens. Would be interesting to simulate what happens if major events were prevented from occurring - like putting a hard pause on the storyline and unpausing after a while. All parameters would have changed by then, Problems are sometimes resolved organically when there is a pause and nothing is happening.  The majority of the videos, for instance, don’t actually imagine a future without colonial rule. Instead, they swap the roles of colonized and colonizer. Even accounts that post videos of ancient societies — like “What if ancient Egypt never fell?” — tend to depict their military power. They include images of armor and regalia that those Egyptian soldiers might wear today, visualizing them with automatic rifles in hand. Those of us who ending up on the los...

D is in mid 40s and postponed motherhood until she had achieved some career milestones. Only she knows what she had dreamed of in her 20s when she started out and if indeed she had touched that goal-post before giving birth to her child a few months ago. I have known D professionally since she returned from maternity leave but there are many who knew pre-baby D and refer to her as a force of nature.  I see some traces of it still as she tries to land on her feet while going through the physical and emotional roller-coaster new motherhood can be for some women specially that age is not on her side either. It is impossible not to see how her ambitious peers are circling around her like so many vultures over around a maimed animal. They will swoop in for the kill if D shows signs of weakness and fading out. So she keeps everyone on their toes by being impossible to predict - that is her best shot of survival.  As a woman who went through significant emotional challenges during D'...

Seeing these AI generated versions of Nike shoes made me think about the future of design. Humans would need to come up with entirely new things that the AI has never seen before and cannot extrapolate based on what it has. As interesting as the sneakers are, none of the designs are beyond the ability of a human artist or designer if they had been given the brief of coming up with a collection of dainty shoes on the framework on a sneaker. This begs the question if the human designer should make their creations available in the public domain for AI to get inspired by and speed up its process. Should they want pictures taken of their creative projects such as this restaurant designed using unwanted things .  I was at an art and craft fair recently and just about every vendor had prominent signs posted asking visitors not to take pictures. The exceptions to this were few and far between and typically those were the stalls that did not bring anything particularly unique to the party ...

Having been through divorce myself and seen a couple more very closely, I am painfully familiar with the system of penalties that are designed to purportedly protect the so-called institution of marriage . It has helped me develop a great disdain for the idea that the state needs to get involved in a private lives of two people who are either seeking to unite or dissolve their union. Beyond the giddiness of love, companionship and desire to formalize the union there are practical consideration like how the parties will earn and spend their income, raise their children and so on. Most importantly, how the union should be unwound when the parties no longer want it - and how to do so in a fair way and with least hurt and trauma caused to their offspring. Every person is unique and by extension so is every marriage. The laws of divorce are a one-size fits all solution for all residents of the given state. That is the first and most fatal flaw of the system. The unwinding of a marriage that...

Back in my time in India, it was not common for schools to bring in counselors to help kids decide what career would be the best fit for them. Mine was one of those schools that was ahead of its time in many ways and so we had one of these come in to talk to us and give us a battery of tests to make an informed assessment. Being about fifteen or sixteen years old at the time, most of us were eager to game the system just for the thrill of it.  We did not like the idea of a professional telling us what we should do with the rest of our lives. We were going to do our best not to co-operate with the system. At the time, I was not sure if this is how any kid would behave in those circumstances or if our bunch was particularly uncooperative. So we went through the process and out came the results. A bunch of us including me had been found to have an IQ of 80 and lower.  Thankfully, not every parent understood what that meant and what career opportunities remained open for such a pe...

We were at our local Home Depot recently to shop supplies for a small project that had been on the back-burner since last year. The weather has been great and I wanted to use it to finish the job. I don't have strict records, but it seems like the price of just about everything has increased - sometimes buy a lot. I generally have a ballpark estimate of what supplies will cost for a project and I was nowhere close to right this time. Based on the numbers that looked ridiculously unreasonable, we scaled back the scope of our DIY project to something that would check the complete box but skip all the extras beyond that. As Lowe's CEO points out: "Two-thirds of everything we sell is non discretionary. And there are other tailwinds, millennial household formation trend, baby boomers aging in place and more widespread sustainable remote work, so all of these things give us some confidence that the backdrop remains supportive," So these stores are counting on the non-discr...

The idea of bringing coding to the masses (citizen coders as some might call them) has been around for a long time. There were attempts to make this happen in fits and starts since I entered the workforce. Seemed like a good idea back then and in many ways still does. The type of person it would benefit the most would be one who can think and frame a problem for the AI like a programmer but for whatever reason does not or cannot code. Maybe they used to code once but don't anymore. I can see such a user being able to get value out of the system. The value for the active coder has been cited in the post though developers I speak with tell me the value statements in the media a bit overstated.  They tend to use it to generate sample code snippets to understand how some language or library they are unfamiliar with works. Once they get a hang of it, they do their own thing because really distilling what they need to get done takes a lot more effort than doing it themselves. For someon...

I watched The Son the same evening as my friend B put her old arthritic dog down - and that was only one of his many ailments. He was old and in a lot of pain as a family they decided it was the right choice. I checked in on her and she shared pictures of him from happier times - they were trying to relive the good memories. In the movie, this son is a teenager who experiences a lot of pain over his parents' divorce and personalizes the hurt his mother feels over being left for a younger woman. The whole movie is about this kid's pain that he cannot rationalize but it has him paralyzed. He drags everyone around him down and feels both guilty and redundant. Guilt is a multi-generational theme. Grandfather, father and son all feel guilt for different reasons. There is no happy ending to the movie - the pain ends for the son, The pain ended for B's dog who was no less than a family member to her.  He kept her company through the years, could tell when she was having a hard da...

Watched Zarna Garg on Prime Video recently and found her entertaining. There is a lot of oversharing that makes up her material - which is not so unusual about comedians. Family and friends have to get used to it I guess. It was interesting to see her daughter's perspective on the content that is strictly speaking not her mother's right to share. I have written plenty about J here and continue to do so. It is my log of memories as a mother - little events that are intense in the moment but fade in intensity over time.  It was always my desire to capture that moment as it happened so it would be there long after the impact and memories of it had faded. Reading back a decade or more, I see my own evolution as a person, a woman and a mother. There is intrinsic value in that for me and hopefully J as well. I have been zealous about respecting and protecting her privacy because that is a line I have no right to cross.  But there is a bigger reward in keeping your child's identi...

The idea that food needs to be performative to be deemed good would sound like a novel concept of the TikTok age but it probably is not.  ..The food can’t just sit there. It must be as performative as the staff, if not more so. Nothing hooks a viewer more than items that melt and drip and stretch. “Anything cheesy is always good, because there’s some kind of action item,” says Raum. It could be syrup ladled over a dessert, rare steaks dribbling blood and hemoglobin, or strands of melted mozzarella distended between halves of a saucy meatball sub. The first image that crossed my mind reading this was that of a street-side chai-wallah in India pouring chai and the sense of anticipation is creates in the mind of the customer waiting for the finished product. Watching the action is a very big part of the process. It would not be nearly as interesting if that chai was served at once without the pouring dance.  A lot of street food around the world combines similar elements of per...

My first Fabindia item was a a gift from an estranged childhood friend who had magically resurfaced one Diwali many years after we had parted ways. She lived in Delhi at the time and nearing the of college.  M was a very special person and I was grateful to have her back in my life even though we had parted ways rather abruptly. She came from an very affluent and connected family. In hindsight, it was a class difference thing. Whatever my people may have once been, two generations of strife beginning from the partition days, had diminished us in every way. My maternal grandmother used to say that a person must stay classy even when their fortunes have declined, so the younger generations have a model to emulate even if the means to do so no longer exist. Not everyone in the family placed such a high value on such things and indeed the younger generations suffered for it.  I am sure to M's eyes, I lacked many of the social graces that were natural in her family and social milie...

My friend N is a close to sixty, very little formal education and many responsibilities all her life. She is smart and get many jobs done. These days she is not particularly employable in a market where white collar jobs are hard to come by. Her age does not help either. But what hurts her most is her track record of being a contractor all her life and not a salaried employee. That has now become tantamount to job-hopping which is not desirable . The irony of the situation is that a person who wishes to stay put in their current place of employment has very little if any control over that outcome.  It does not matter what they do, how good they are at it and how critical their role is to the organization. If there is to be a headcount reduction, the most astonishing decisions are made and the person joins the ranks of the job-hoppers, a creature of circumstance. Such is not the case with N but she is viewed in similar light, She recently changed jobs and the excitement for newness ...

Watching Mrs. Chatterjee vs Norway was heartbreaking. But the movie tells only half her story. She says the rest in her own words:  “The story of the movie ends with me winning my children’s custody. People leave theatre halls thinking my triumph makes me live a comfortable life after that. Far from it. My struggle over the last decade has been at times tougher than the times I spent in Norway. Amid all that I achieved, I took care of my ailing parents and my children, especially my son who has a mental condition and would have to remain on meds all his life. But I was determined to win that battle and this is where I have now reached, I think I have been a good mother to my children even though I have stayed away from them for the last two years,” The fight this mother put up for her children is absolutely heroic. Given the odds against her, it is nothing short of a miracle that she prevailed. I recall reading about this in the news a few years ago and but the details were scarce....