Long Lasting

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 clothes from my childhood that are as good as new - J wore them as a baby and they have been put away for the next generation. My father bought them on his business trips abroad but they were items a very middle class person could afford. Today, such items simply do not exist at the kind of price point. So owing a piece that will stand the test of time is out of reach for the average person. 

Then comes the ravages of time - physical and mental. There are many items in my wardrobe from two decades ago that I still like and still fit me - but they no longer feel right. I don't feel like myself when I wear them because the person who bought them unrecognizably different from who I am now. I believe this kind of harsh transformation is also the realm of the average person who has to cope with a lot without the endless resources of the rich. So while her idea is laudable, I don't think it is meant for folks like me. 

Hard Boiled

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 because it deviates from what it expects. Would it help atleast a bit to have the people such algorithm is meant to serve be the one to help define it - maybe they are the closest to the range of possible outcomes in any given scenario. Might now people expecting their three-minute eggs are in receipt of hard-boiled ones. Not much has changed. 

Staying Stagnant

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 known others like L over the years - this is the type of programmer people of my generation aspired to be if they were inclined to make a career out of it. All that as I understand has now changed. 

L's view of what ails the programming world aligns with what I have heard from others as well. Compute and storage is virtually infinite and that seems to have promoted bad architecture, design and programming - at scale. Combined with that is a proliferation of programming languages designed for those who want to take short-cuts not bother with theoretical concepts and jump into coding something that works. Crafts people are no longer required. Highly-specific and just-in-time skills are what get rewarded in the job-market which has no need or use for big-picture thinking. I would imagine this will be an accelerating trend with AI-driven programming getting the proverbial lazy programmer half the way there for doing nothing. 

So looking back at Thiel's comments over a decade ago about computers being the only bastion of progress, I would say that will change too. There will be highly skewed progress in pursuit better more capable AI but the rest of the programming world with get lazier and not in a good way. 

The zenith of optimism about the future of technology might have been the 1960’s. People believed in the future. They thought about the future. Many were supremely confident that the next 50 years would be a half-century of unprecedented technological progress.

But with the exception of the computer industry, it wasn’t. Per capita incomes are still rising, but that rate is starkly decelerating. Median wages have been stagnant since 1973. People find themselves in an alarming Alice-in-Wonderland-style scenario in which they must run harder and harder—that is, work longer hours—just to stay in the same place. This deceleration is complex, and wage data alone don’t explain it. But they do support the general sense that the rapid progress of the last 200 years is slowing all too quickly.

Mock Wedding

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 what this study found. Many reasons are ascribed to the phenomenon among which is the point of marriage itself:

..Then comes the ‘shift in the attitude’ on the significance of marriage. The youth with higher education don't aspire to get married early. These days becoming a single father/mother is also not considered taboo and many consider a single lifestyle "woke" and modern. The difficulty in finding the right partner with physical and emotional compatibility is another daunting reality of our society that makes most of the youth underconfident in entering matrimony. 

If the stigma of single-parenthood is removed, I can see a lot of people wanting to have a child and raising them without daily drama and conflict where all decisions about that child will involve bickering and negotiation followed by sub-par outcomes. Back in my time being a single-mother in India was a bit of a novelty and people responded to it with some combination on unacceptance and hostility. Even if a parent were to overcome the social pressures, they would find them stymied in getting the child to fit in with their peers and get an equal shot at school and beyond. The shadow of the single parent would block out all light from the child's life. It was unfair to subject them to that. Times have changed now and it makes sense that kids would like to do a fake wedding to experience something they likely will not have in real life. 

Measuring Life

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 this man's life held a lot less meaning than any video game out there. Call of Duty would be seen as 20 times more meaningful than the entirety of his life if measured by the number of bits it takes express such meaning. Made me wonder about the futility of words written with no one in mind and no one that it would reach and connect with. Notwithstanding some of us cannot help ourselves - we do have to write our thing. 

Treating Tea

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 excellent - this is nothing like any oolong tea I have tasted before. The smoothness and aroma are remarkably different compared to my baseline of oolong. It is great that the tea has so many benefits too. Whenever I drink an interesting tea I did not know about growing up in India, my thoughts always turn to my parents who introduced me to tea. In their case, it was typically Darjeeling teas. They trusted a specific tea-seller to make them a blend they would like. Friends and family would sometimes bring nice Darjeeling teas when they were visiting - in lieu of the mishti that is customary for the guest to bring to the host in Bengali culture.

They knew that the gift of tea would be appreciated a lot more. My mother was very scrupulous about keeping the flavor of the tea intact. Only small portions of it would be placed in the container she used regularly but the rest would be packed tight with layers of paper and silver foil secured in place with rubber-bands. This was the "for later" tea that lived in the pantry. Though I played no part in any of this except drink the tea once it was prepared, the attention to detail in storing the tea and preparing it stayed with me. If we were visiting someone and the ladies went to the kitchen to chat, I was usually there with them. I could see my mother cringe, if the woman in charge there did not steep her tea right. She would talk about how that person destroyed a fine tea by not treating it right. Might as well had not bothered at all and made a chai with the cheap CTC tea and be done with it. Atleast it would an honest beverage serving its intended purpose. Some might call my mother a tea-snob but that's probably not right - she just wanted to do right by the tea, make it shine.

While all this chatter was about tea, I took away a slight different lesson that has served me well in life - one of treating what is in front of you in the manner it is meant to be treated. Only then can you evaluate if that thing can and is indeed serving the purpose it supposed to. It could a fine tea but it could be an gardening implement or piece of software - it does not matter what the thing is, the true generally applies. 

Feeling Inadequate

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 hyperbolizing the situation fed by the insecurities of being a single-mother trying to do my best and always falling short. Today when she gets immersed in her own life as a young woman starting out in her career and living independently, it has nothing to do with "hurting" me. I am destined to feel like an inadequate mother no matter what. There is nothing J could do about it as a child and nothing she can do now as an adult. No one can prop another person up if they lack self-assurance in the work they have done, the work that cannot be undone for better or worse. 

Time Horizon

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 life made me receptive to anything that might fill that gnawing silence. C was charming, witty and had a way of drawing me out of myself. That first conversation lasted an hour and he asked if he could call again and we exchanged email addresses. The flurry of emails started almost at once and it did not stop until we got married. But that was far from a linear path - that first phone call to the wedding ceremony. I went through tremendous upheavals over a two year period and decided to marry C against my better judgement - it was a heady mix of infatuation and desperation. I was not able to be interested enough in anyone else that I met during that time and I wanted to have a baby because the clock was ticking deafeningly loud in my mind. 

When I look fact from the sobriety of today's age and life experience both infatuation and desperation were unwarranted. It was almost like the die was cast that fateful moment that C made his first phone call and struck some deeply hidden chord that told my heart (and at the time I thought also my brain) that he is the one and no matter what evidence I receive the contrary I must persevere and so I did. The timeline of events has become a blur and maybe for the best because that would make my actions even harder to rationalize from my vantage point today.

Full Circle

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 might come about for me. 

One Life

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 herself a fool to be in this situation. 

Yet finality can be a terrifying thing. The silence and loneliness that came with her decision to emotionally disengage even more so. The house they had bought together in this very uneasy union felt even bigger and emptier. The endless cycles of loud discord followed by begging for peace had given way to a quiet eeriness. She remembered the day they first spoke, the dreams she first dreamed of them together - a real family, a companion for life. At the end of the coldest week of their marriage, she found herself looking at this man as a badly broken human being that needed to be rescued before it was too late. If only it were only possible to slip by his side, naked and hold him with all of her- her full womanhood. Kiss him on the lips and take away all the pain, bitterness and suffering of the past three years, the disappointments of his life that went much further, magically make things whole for the man she once thought would be the one for her. Inhale life back into this wasteland of marriage, make love and feel close once again.

She realized they were both alone and suffering with no one to turn to. She resented her lover on days like this because he did not experience pain like hers - he still has a somewhat normal family that she did not. Sometimes her resentment peaked and she feel like the kept woman that she was not - there was absolutely no deception in their relationship. Neither side had misrepresented the facts of their lives. She pushed her lover away from anger and he sensed that. She wished he would stop loving her because that love could hurt just as much as the lack of it in her marriage. She had herself up in this dense mesh of knots that  know no untangling - they run through her marriage, her past before that, an unknown future with a man who might one day become something more than a lover who she meets secretly. 

Her home is weighed down by the heaviness of unexpressed anger and pain. The night before, it floated up from the basement in physical waves and wore her out. She was not able to sleep. Maybe this is how guilt feels. She has a lover,  there are others in her life she can share things with - he has no one else. He is not the kind to have a lover - that would be too much emotional work for him. The sports channel was all he had capacity left for after being married to this woman. Everything started to fall apart with her within a month - decades of work he had done on himself was undone in a few weeks. She was everything he could want in a wife and yet being married to her was the worst mistake of his life.

Before they were married, this union promised perfection in every way, he mistook that for feeling love for her. He is estranged from family and those that were once his closest friends. To his wife, he has become unreachable now - something has snapped that cannot make him or them whole again. The people that once made up his world are no longer welcome there - he does want their concern or pity for how his life has fallen apart. Her heart breaks for him, but there are no ways left to help him anymore. She cannot recall having hurt for anyone as much as she hurts for him. If this does not mean she loves him, she does not know what does. Somehow the realization that she loves this man despite their marriage being on fire, all the hurt and pain he has caused her, all the dreams and promises he broke was terrifying for her. It made her wonder about her lover - if she truly loved him or was merely intoxicated by sex that gave her closeness she craved for her marriage. Talking of love was so easy once. 

Seeking Balance

As someone who has very few friends but ones that go back a very long way, I could relate to this 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-sex couples, Americans are getting married later in life than ever before, and more and more young adults are opting to share a home rather than a marriage license with a partner. Despite these transformations, what hasn’t shifted much is the expectation that a monogamous romantic relationship is the planet around which all other relationships should orbit.

Maybe the better model is not to have a specific center of the universe but be able to meander in and out of many orbits. If there was more idealization of balance in a person's life - have a well-balanced life be viewed as the pinnacle to strive for, the world would be better for it. Having friends, family, professional and personal work as different areas to strive to harmonize, balance and enrich is a better ideal. 

Falling Stars

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 for women that she must be nearly invincible in every way to get there. Kochhar was everything I was not and it was fascinating to observe her from afar - imagine the art of the possible while being the same demographic. I rooted for her success because I needed to overcome some impossible odds on much smaller but deeply personal scale.

Elizabeth Holmes first came to limelight when my situation here had started to stabilize in many ways and I was looking forward to how my efforts might help J  in the future. A young woman who was finding ways to challenge entrenched establishment and status quo was a heady story. As with Kochhar back in the day, I very much wanted to see Holmes succeed, wanted to believe these things are possible and women can be the ones to make it so. In light of all that has come to pass with these women, I feel disappointed and disillusioned.

Therapy Culture

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. 

My friend S is in her mid 30s - a very bright woman making great strides in her career. She has been in a long-distance relationship for close to a decade because converting that to marriage asks for placing certain constraints on her life she is unwilling and unable to place. Last time we chatted, she spoke of how long it has been since she's known this man and how its not yet the time for marriage. She sounded wistful but confident in the choice she had made. Not sure how much therapy and self-help it takes to attain that state but I can imagine living with difficult choices can benefit from such support to make it a sustainable way of life. 

Goal Setting

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 assigned their specific smaller goals against which their performance will be measured. Then there remains hairy things no one is crazy about taking on - that is where aspiring leaders can make their mark. They are free to sign up and pull a like-minded team together to close the gaps.

But this process does not happen until all teams have had a chance to deliberate what they want to own. The leftovers are not fun to work with but it they also present opportunity to those who choose to sign up. L's team is one of those what are very good at what they do and take on a respectable chunk of deliverables against the CEO level goals. But it is not the team that goes above and beyond - people want to do a good job working reasonable hours and having capacity to live the rest of their lives relatively stress free. 

All teams are not like hers and that is culturally completely acceptable. People from teams like L's have the choice to be part of some cleanup crew that is going to be doing some hard but useful work no regular team wants to sign up for. 

This freedom of choice is what had L quite confused in her first few months but she sees it as the source of strength for this company that has been around a very long team and has always been a great place to work. She sees why. I wish more companies could emulate this model and create an environment that rewards all types of work and workstyles as long as people are objectively contributing to the goals the company is pursuing.

Much credit goes to clarity of leadership vision that can be distilled down to individual goals down to the last person in the company. It is quite remarkable as it is an exception from what I have seen over the years.

Soft Unquiet

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. Particularly interesting is the leader of the pack, Emily who is not above verbally castrating her genetically perfect white husband for failing to get her pregnant. She taunts him ruthlessly until he does her bidding just to prove his manhood - this is her ideal of the perfect marriage that results in strong creating families and she is desperate to get started with hers. With a brother who is incarcerated for rape, you have to wonder if she herself is the product of a "perfect" marriage that brought forth such stellar offspring into the world. As the ladies say in their club meeting it is all about the mothers instilling the right values early on as their must have doubtless done. 

World Travel

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 very rewarding but visiting a place listed as a UNESCO world heritage site in an unknown country might fail to provide the same level of emotional satisfaction. It does not help that the expectations are higher given the level of effort to get there. 

J made an interesting observation recently that a lot of folks in their 20s want to be in a relationship from the fear of missing out a decade plus of travel while they are still unencumbered by family and responsibilities. Often they know it will not work in the long run but they can still have visited most of the 195 countries in the world before they go their separate ways. It is a tradeoff that makes sense for them. Maybe a completed bucket list is worth it all. 

Alternate Endings

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 losing side of colonization and its aftermath are prone to re-imagining our lives as it might have been if our homelands were not looted and trampled upon. We want to believe the alternate ending to our story might have been a better one - specially when times are tough. This is the kind of escapism I am quite familiar with but each person has their own version of the perfect world where they have been able to correct what did not work out for them. What if they went to a different school when the had the choice, married a different person, took a different job - the list is endless. 

Circling Vultures

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's stage of motherhood, I can relate to some of what she is experiencing. Fortunately for me, I had a rather simple job at the time and did not have to perform the psyops every day to survive at work. I just needed to focus on getting physically and mentally fit besides taking care of J. Work paid the bills but did not require any emotional investment. Those are table-stakes in D's world. Her realm of problems only begin after all that is done. Much of D's adult life has been about achieving milestones. The baby is a culmination of many successful achievements. I can see why she would be loathe to concede her hard-earned wins over this difficult post-partum phase. That said, there are many around D that are collateral damage to her chosen survival mechanism. 

My friend L who works for her is constantly anxious because no one can predict what D will ask for and by when. Like me L is sympathetic towards D but her management style leaves a lot to be desired. As allies of a new mother in the workplace that folks like L and I consider ourselves to be, it puts us in a bind when considering someone like D. Is she really leadership material cracking under the pressure the way she is? On the other hand, D's situation cannot be compared with any of her male colleagues. Who is to say any of them would perform even a tenth as well as her in the same conditions. Who is anyone to judge what D does at all.

Separate Worlds

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 - it was the typical hand-made jewelry, pottery, decorative items for home and yard. Wherever there was some bit of unique and proprietary, the signs to not photograph were front and center. While that kills the opportunity for social media popularity and word of mouth marketing, it presumably protects the artist from making their product part of the training data set for the AI. I hope there will be a point where the AI and human-made would being two different genres entirely, with the tools to tell the two apart clearly. Each would have its place in the world but they would not suck the air out of the other's life and eco-system. 

Wrong Question

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 is unlike any other will need to fit the boilerplate template of the state. This can only lead to terrible outcomes for all concerned. People would fare way better if they worked up private agreements on all issues relating to their union, much in the way that they create personal wedding vows that accurately reflect who they are and what they value in their particular relationship. Those agreements can be treated as a valid legal contracts with enforcement mechanisms. The legal profession could play the role of ensuring that no guardrails of the law of the land are undermined by the private agreement. For example, one spouse cannot require the other to be flogged or stoned if they are found cheating. This should be standard process for any marriage - have the couple come up with their private dissolution agreement at the same time as they come up with their bespoke wedding vows. It puts everything in context and helps them appreciate the gravity of what they are stepping into. 

It would not hurt to create a mechanism of revisions to the contract as life events and circumstances change. A couple in the twenties cannot anticipate what their life looks like in their fifties and beyond. If there is a clause to revise the contract upon their youngest child attaining adulthood, the problem can be addressed in an orderly manner. Say they are out of love by then and want to part ways, they would have a mutually agreed upon way to do so and not waste public time and resources fighting to death in court. The kids will fare much better as well. 

The solution I believe is to privatize the whole process and not involve the state at all, instead of squabbling over what the state has the rights to do or not to do. In the end there is no solution that works for everyone. Some will still want the state involved in their private business and marry in the traditional way. Others might take a different approach and go the partnership route with legal protections for the partnership so that they never have to deal with divorce law and the court system. 

Under Eighty

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 person. We had hardcore geeks represent themselves as wannabe poets, artists and the like. Similarly, we had folks who truly hated math and barely passed their tests, pretend that they dreamed of becoming engineers and scientists. The career counselor as it turned out saw through most of that nonsense and made very sensible recommendations on career choices that would work best for us. We attended those feedback sessions with our parents and it was embarrassing at best. For me, it was also the time I experienced some regret for having squandered an opportunity to derive real value from the process - maybe not answered so many questions wrong deliberately only to prove  I could bamboozle a professional. 

Maybe part of what was driving our collective behavior is that we wanted control of our lives and did not want a random adult prying too deep into our souls - we wanted to be young people of mystery and intrigue, not so easy to decipher or direct. After the counselor had left, we compared notes between ourselves and had to agree, she was way smarter than we wanted to give her credit for and perhaps she was actually good at what she did. This was also my first encounter with a real "professional" - an experience I never forgot. 

Bare Bones

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-discretionary expenses to keep your home safe and livable combined with people spending more time at home like they did during the pandemic. It seems that the other one-third which DIY work people did to make their space better and more comfortable is a big part of the draw. Small improvements made on small budget to get to the ideal state over time. That strategy has become unsupportable at the current price point. If a DIYer does not see a path to the finish line within the budget they have in mind, they will likely not embark on the project. So the likes of Lowe's have to depend on the the two-thirds of their merchandize to realize their revenue goals. That is not easy. 

Citizen Coder

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 someone who codes for a living, coding is not the big lift - thinking through the solution design that will work consistently is much more painstaking. The true citizen coder is one who cannot think like a programmer, has never been one and does not even have any related educational background. Such a person can have very worthwhile, creative and game-changing ideas. Today they would it challenging even to explain what they have in mind in a way that a coder can take action. Much is lost in translation. The real trick is to take what the citizen coders have in mind and convert that to a viable application in a seamless but interactive way. That is definitely a problem worth solving and we are not quite there yet. 

Pain's Passing

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 day and had a favorite TV show. B will be an empty nester this fall and the the void will feel bigger with this loss. The events of the day and the movie got me thinking about what it means to love someone who is in so much pain that they cannot live anymore. The thing that it takes for the loved one's pain to end is also what condemns those that are left behind to deal with feelings of guilt and inadequacy - like the father in the movie. Was he wrong to want out of a marriage he was unhappy in, did he have a right to want a child with the woman he now loved, was he wrong to push his son to get a grip on himself and not wallow in depression and self-pity. It could be argued he was wrong on every count and deserved the ultimate punishment. He can also be looked as a flawed human being who did the best he could and that proved not nearly enough. 

On Sharenting

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 identity unknowable when you are in the business of sharing things about them with the world. You can be completely free - there is nothing to feign, pretend or hold back because the cast of characters are all unknowable to those with whom you share. In J's childhood I was grateful for the wisdom of the crowds that either commented on something I wrote or reached out directly via email. The reader and I would never know each other in real life but their words of support and counsel did help J and I. 

Watching Zarna in action gave me a lot to think about - she is clearly talented and it would be a shame if she could not share what she has with the world. Yet, it begs the question if her children's lives have to be part of what gets those laughs. She has a lot else to say that does not involve them and she is funny in those instances too. More jokes about desi aunties and uncles, the Spelling Bee and the population of India are very welcome. She can have an entire segment dedicated to the skin tone color-wheel and how that impacts a woman's prospects in arranged marriage. 

Performative Food

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 performance into preparation and service. Successful vendors are able to draw the customer into the act of getting their food ready, work up the appetite and build readiness to love what ends up on their plate. Social media might have enabled the concentration of this energy but the idea is far from new.

Brand Awareness

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 milieu. As much as she liked me as a person, there were points of friction in our interaction. When that block-printed, indigo-dyed kurti arrived in the mail accompanied by khadi-paper card with a note in her perfect penmanship, I experienced very familiar mixed emotions of elation combined with trepidation. She had wished me a happy Diwali and the outfit was meant to be something I wore around the house to relax. What was I reading these days, she would love some book recommendations. She made the whole thing look so effortless. It would take me a long time to reciprocate in a meaningful and memorable way. In the end, I settled for a thank you note in a simple blank card. That was the best I was able to do. We fell out of touch once again and this run has lasted decades. I only had to see an ad for silk-tunics from Fabinida to remember the first time I came into contact with the brand. 

Moving Target

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 faded within the first couple of days - a commute three times as longer than what she had before, a dysfunctional program that she is supposed to magically manage into shape and no line of sight even six months out when the contract ends. 

N has a son who is still in university, not fully ready to launch on his own. She wants to be free after struggling for decades to get out of a bad marriage. She achieved that goal a few years ago - a moment of triumph and an act of courage that continues to nourish her. But freedom is a moving target specially for those who yearn for a particular version of it. I should know because I was one of those people for the longest time. 

Many Odds

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. Reading the Telegraph article and also while watching Rani Mukherjee play Mrs. Chatterjee, I could not help thinking about the wasted potential. This woman is an absolute powerhouse - she has the courage to take on the world. 

Such a shame that all the potential was wasted fighting to keep a family in a terrible marriage to a man who was unfit both as a father and a husband - the root cause of many of her troubles in Norway. Imagine, she was given the chances to thrive and be her own person - the could have changed the world against all odds just like she saved her children.

No words for the connivance and racism of the Norwegian authorities - dumbfounding stuff.