Heartcrossings

We went for a walk to our nearby park late on a Saturday afternoon. This is typical for us when the day has been busy and we don't have time for a longer weekend hike that we enjoy. That afternoon turned out to be unexpectedly bountiful for gathering wild mushrooms. We returned with about ten pounds of excellent finds on a rather short walk. It was as if nature had pulled all the stops and decided to give us gifts we did not expect. In my backward, okra and pumpkin are thriving because of the unseasonable heat - this is a bit unusual too. Preparing the mushrooms for freezing made me think about moments of unexpected grace in life and how we respond to it. Finding wonderful food in the wild, reconnecting with a long lost childhood friend who had been a role model - both of these things happened to me in the same week. D was a very special person - she was one of those kids that exuded promise.  Everyone could tell she would have oversize impact in the world. She was generous, intell...

Totally loved reading this lover's ode to Pittsburgh  a city I have a special bond with. It was a short, sweet and tumultuous relationship but looking back I see overwhelmingly positive memories. Having returned for work there a few times since I left, it was never enough time to experience all of what I hold dear in my memory. I have never been able to find my way back to the specific Polish deli in the Strip District (or maybe it was another place) where I often went with my co-workers. I forgot its name long before my first return to Pittsburgh and imagined, I would recognize when I saw it. But the scenery had changed beyond recognition and maybe the way my eyes saw things.  Reading this poem brought to mind an image of waiting to meet a beloved one at Point State Park with the Monongahela in spate, perhaps braving a pouring rain while waiting for the familiar form and gait to emerge and watch them walk over exuberantly in your direction. For a minute, the rain would cease ...

Watched Andrei Rublev recently. It was an intense and mesmerizing experience. Some frames were so beautifully shot that they could have been pictures at an exhibition a person could walk through. There were minor stories in the details of those frames.  The movie and the way the story was told felt like a Rorschach test. Every viewer will likely come away with different points to ponder after they are done though they may be some overarching themes all will find. The ending of the movie was particularly poignant for me -  The Bell (Spring–Summer–Winter–Spring 1423–1424). A young man uses his wits, talent and need to survive in the world where he has lot his whole family and community. His transition from being met with insubordination from the workers who used to work for his father to becoming accepted as their leader was depicted with perfection.  There are many such vignettes throughout the movie that makes the viewer think about faith, cruelty, tolerance, responsibil...

That manic month of destruction Wave upon wave of anger Washing over hurt new and old It was not done until the end When nothing remained but Scorched earth. This was where New things were meant to grow And they did - a wild exuberant Garden. Looking back there was Another way, another path. Thought of you yet another time Like many others - not for me But for ours. Like all other times There is nothing left to seek

This New Yorker essay has inspired me to read William Steig's books again. I am only familiar with some of them from J's childhood but even with those, I did not view the storylines from the perspective this author describes. How do you tell a child a story that the adult reading it to them finds some value in as well. Though truth be told, I have read very little out loud to J. For one thing, I pushed her to be self-sufficient since I had so little time and wanted to maximize what I could squeeze out of it. Probably goes with the territory of being a single-parent. But I also had standards I could not live upto. My mother read me a lot of things in Bangla from a very young age until the time I left to college. She comes from a very artistic and creative family so her reading was always very performative - it helped me experience the story in an immersive way.  Being that I lacked that talent, it made me self-conscious to read aloud. My reading always sounded flat and two-dime...

Nice post about the oddness of being fifty-one , neither here nor there. A time for taking stock, being at peak or the opposite of all that - planning to fade away into the sunset. Perspectives vary on who you talk to and where they find themselves on the scale.  Instead of talking with peers, I can compare the quinquagenarian reality against cultural expectations. So far some things about heading past 50 are not far removed from what I’ve been led to expect.  Others veer from the norm. This reminded me of a few folks I have talked to recently about changes that they have experienced on the other side of fifty. Women talk about coming to realize they have become invisible. While in reality they may been been invisible well before that, the fact of getting to that age bracket brings a sharp awareness of that. Men talk more about clarity on what really matters - goals not worth chasing, the importance of family that they may have neglected some in earlier decades, wanting to spe...

I have used many of these techniques over the years in my cooking - they came to me commonsensically for the most part. But there was bit of lessons learned from watching women in my extended family cook - what they reused and repurposed versus what they discarded. There was some overarching logic to their process that I must have picked up on without really thinking too much about it.  Generally, food was never wasted - fresh or cooked. That was the the first rule. The second was to use what was on hand and not require someone to make a trip to the market when a meal had to be prepared. This was particularly true when returning home after a being away for a few days or being low on supplies while have some unexpected guests show up. Either way when there was a mismatch between demand and supply, imagination had to make up for the difference. This resulted in atypical dishes showing up at the table that still tasted good. My paternal grandmother was particularly talented at making...

This past Christmas, I had received a gift of small decorative plants set in tiny pots and something made to look like a branch of a tree. Seeing that the person who gave it to me was a teenager, I assumed the plants were plastic and just set them around the house where it made sense. In the high heat of summer, I noticed some of these succulents had dried up and died. This was the first time it had registered to me that they were infact alive the whole time and no one thought to check if they really plastic or not. If the same gift came from someone older, I would have likely paid more attention or asked but coming from a child, I just did not. I am now working hard to save the plants that have proven to be alive. Making faux plants look so natural that people will mistake them to be real is a big business ,  Thanks to how well fake plants are made, these real ones had to suffer and die. The incident made me think of how artificial things in life take over and kill what is real. B...

Pretty funny account of what all goes wrong when a person lets ChatGPT manage their daily schedule. It's a lot like letting a self-driving car lose in the middle of a busy downtown area. Everyone else is doing their own thing but the driver of the self-driving car has an tech overlord that decides what happens. Often nothing good comes out of it. The writer experiences the dissonance from disconnecting with regular people who are acting from their own recognizance  to do what they must and refrain from what they must not. Such is not the case with the person who has ceded agency to an AI bot The thing about slowly doing shoulder rolls while Pachelbel’s Canon in D blares from your iPhone after you have spent 15 minutes playing with the dog in the sun and then a further 30 minutes carefully creating and consuming a turkey sandwich is that you can start to feel a chasm form between yourself and the people around you. In my case, my wife on the other side of the room is on a tight dea...

The first night in New York was suffocating. The combination of heat and stale smoke from the forest fires made it hard to stay outdoors. Inside the hotel, cut off the pulsing energy of the city that always drew me in, it felt pointless to even be here. I decided to brave the elements and go out for a walk. I have survived Kolkata in the high heat of August as recently as last year so how hard could this be. It was much worse than I imagined and I am still not sure why - that restless energy stayed with me for the rest of my stay. Falling asleep at night was hard unless I took long walks but the walks made me feel unwell after a while. One evening, I passed out quite suddenly. One moment, I was chatting with people around and the next I had was not there in the here and now. I had lost some time by the the time I came to. All ended up being well and the next several days proceeded without event. But the sudden loss of control, the heat induced event left me feeling a great sense of une...

These lines from Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life made me think about things that we don't associate verbs with and how that in effect makes them dead: The biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, observes that the indigenous Potawatomi language is rich in verb forms that attribute aliveness to the more-than-human world. The word for “hill,” for example, is a verb: to be a hill. Hills are always in the process of hilling, they are actively being hills. I love the idea that hills are hilling and will never be done. Would the ocean (in similar vein) which is visually dynamic be oceaning? It is easier to conceive of hills and oceans as things made of matter and therefore non-living - they cannot reproduce. If the same logic were to be applied to a human being that chooses not to participate in the cycle of reproduction, do they turn to mere matter and not a life form? It seems the operating definitions should apply consistently to define an organ...

I am in New York for a few days. The Uber driver is newly-arrived from Bangladesh and he senses a certain Bangla vibe about me. He wants to strike a conversation but I am too pre-occupied to engage. Even though I feel mildly guilty about it - the guy is not much older than J and looks quite homesick, we ride in silence for almost an hour. It is early on a Saturday morning but the traffic is still not easy. Each time I am here, I want to reach out and find that magic of the first time. I remember seeing the iconic Manhattan skyline with my brand new to America eyes. It has never been the same since the towers fell. And the magic has retreated in degrees over time. Back in my childhood I had once read a quote that New York City is like a beautiful lady smoking a cigar. Upon first seeing the city, I tried to interpret what that may have meant and realized that the viewer's state of mind has the answer to that question. This trip, I spent a good amount of time in the subways - a place ...

Interesting review of  book about kinds of frauds - would love to read the book itself but my queue is full for a while. so much to read and so little time. How fraud works in scientific research seems to transfer well into areas of business where there is pressure to demonstrate "innovation" ..in research, a misunderstanding of scientific method can really help you out, if your goal is to produce publishable, Gladwell-able, Freakonomics-able, NPR-able, Ted-able work. The less you know and the less you think, the further you can go. Indeed, if you approach complete ignorance of a topic, you can declare that you’ve discovered  an entire new continent , and a pliable news media will go with you on that. And if you’re clueless enough, it’s not cheating, it’s just ignorance! You only need to waste a couple of hours on LinkedIn to see the big leaps of faith the legions of visionaries and thought-leaders take on a topic that is about one month old at the time of their wisdom dispe...

I had not heard from R in a few weeks when I received a text from her saying that they had found a lump in her breast and it needed to be looked at. She went on to chat about other things - her kid's upcoming move to freshman dorm in college, a vacation she and her husband were going to take right after. I took my cue from her and moved on to topics apart from the lump.  She went quiet for days after than and as much as I wanted to check in on her, I did not want to enquire about the elephant in the room. I summoned up the courage to check in on her and got a response back immediately - she was glad I was checking in to see if all was well but what well means is debatable in such situation. How good or bad is the prognosis is one part of it but how ready R is to deal with that fact is another thing.   A few more weeks have passed since that time and we have stayed in touch but avoided the question that must drive most of what she does going forward. I don't know if I am r...

My former colleague C is consulting clients on GenAI use cases these days and as hot as the market is, she is quite frustrated.  C has been postponing retirement because she would die of boredom plus she is still sharp as a tack.  She says most customers she talks to want to find a problem whose solution is GenAI. They driven by the sheer terror of missing out. They don't like it when C asks them what problems do they have that need to be solved GenAI or not. That is too old school now - the answer to all problems is one.  I seem to recall it was the same thing with blockchain back in the day - if you were in an IT leadership role, you simply had to have a point of view on blockchain and some use cases primed up for funding. All that fell to the way side over time - just about no one could come up with a problem whose one and only right solution was blockchain.  I see history repeating itself - it is as if the thing that must be done or the house will be on fire. C m...

We were walking down the boardwalk on the beach a few weekends ago when the words from  Dust In the Wind caught our attention. An artist was sitting by one of the benches, his canvases on display - the music came from his small boom-box. It was a full moon, the wakes were breaking on the beach an endless cascade on white foam. It had been years since I had last heard the song - can't remember when or where. In the current setting, the words seemed very poignant. We walked past the artist and his paintings, the words of the song fading, the roar of the the ocean taking over. An hour later, we passed by the same place once again.  This time we were headed back to our car and a light rain had cleared more of the boardwalk. The artist had placed all the paintings under his makeshift tent along with the boom-box. This time we heard a track from The Dark Side of the Moon . Again, the music seemed just perfect for the ambience. It made me wonder about how he chose the music and if a...

I was introduced to N by a common friend who thought we would hit it off. On the face of it, we had a fair bit in common. N is single-mom and her only kid is in grad school now. She's from India but has been living in North America for a few decades mostly on her own. Support from friends and family has been sporadic so the child had to go through a few upheavals until the dust settled. She is a few years older than me and living her best life only in the five years or so, her big responsibilities over. It was good to meet her when we finally did but I could tell that we had little in common despite the checklist of things that would be immediately obvious to others as it had been to our common friend. That bonding lasted all of ten minutes upon first meeting N. Then it became all about what we did not have in common and in fact were not even aligned on remotely - there was no getting around that.  N is still discovering who she is - so there is new diet, a new fad and new style ev...

My friend M has interesting stories about her workplace which serves as a microcosm for the world of workplaces since M works in sourcing and gets to see the flow of people and technology in and out of her company. Some bring passing disruption, others lasting change for good or bad. She has been at the job for over a decade and will likely outstay the team of recent hires that she is on these days. M's team has a male manager, four women including herself and another guy - not a typical configuration for teams in her company. It would be a welcome and refreshing change at first blush but apparently it’s not.  A lot of ink has been spilled on women being objectified, harassed and worse in the workplace, not enough is said about the kinds of behaviors that women can exhibit almost reflexively  that serves to undermine the very causes they want to fight for. Based on M's description her team is rather full of toxic females demonstrating a spectrum of unprofessional behavior...

J and I were chatting about W.B Yeats poetry recently. Her favorite is the big crowd pleaser and so is mine - maybe slightly different crowds but there is a broad appeal for Yeats poem we each like most. Interestingly enough, our first introduction to the poem in question happened in high school. Maybe timing matters here. We were hit hard by what we read and the impression remained - mine for decades, her for much less (as of now). I love reading The Second Coming too - the magic never fades but when I do, I read it as something written for the world and not just for me. I am just one among millions who have been moved by those words. When You Are Old for me reads as if it was addressed to my soul. I cannot speak for how it makes anyone else feel but the effect on me is very deeply personal - from the first reading to this day. As time passed in my life, the face of relationships changed and along with it my conception of love (and capacity for it), the poem came to hold a mirror to...

Reading this article made me think about how the world might look completely different to a bird than it does to do. Just because their reality is different would be call it an altered consciousness? And if so is that something a human should aspire to achieve - see the world as the bird sees it. Maybe there is a reason nature intended for us to see things muted and not quite as colorful - we likely have less ability to process the sensory stimulation than the bird does. Maybe given time, humans will achieve bird-like vision and the serenity needed to deal with what they see if full, resplendent color.  Scientists have speculated for years on how birds obtained their colors, but the Yale/Cambridge study was the first to ask what the diversity of bird colors actually look like to birds themselves. Ironically, the answer is that birds see many more colors than humans can, but birds are also capable of seeing many more colors than they have in their plumage. Birds have additional col...

This is one of my favorite sites to be inspired when my cooking hits a rut. The recipes are only part of the joy but there is so much more to learn on the topic of food. Recently, I was there to see I could find some easy but interesting options for lunch at work for J. From there I wandered to a sangria recipe with ginger and cardamon which got me thinking of our trip to Spain, discovering Tinto de Verano and Gazpacho in the grocery store and how often we stopped to get stock up on both. It was a very hot summer and both drinks are perfect for the weather. After the detour, I discovered a Malaysian recipe for sardines which I made the following day.  While I might not be making the sangria anytime soon, reading it took me back to a happy place and time. That is usually the case whenever I am here. Food and memories are very tightly coupled and what is more it is possible to create a wonderful memory with food alone. I will remember the first time I ate something I loved - it cou...

On our walk through the park in the neighborhood last evening, saw a strange looking thing growing under a clump of pine trees. Had to check it out on Seek  and it was a Ghost Pipe . Supposedly a rarity these days but used to be a common sighting in earlier times. Given its mushroom-like looks and the fact that was growing right next to a Fly Agaric , I thought it was of another variety of the same thing.  Turns out that there is a relationship but not the one I expected. Ghost Pipe can be used to calm down a person who has been through a rough trip from consuming the cubenis or agaric mushroom maybe. After we got home, I wondered what the sighting of this plant meant if anything. It is supposed to help cope with emotional and physical pain  but the manner in which it works is unique ..it doesn’t make the pain go away. Pain serves a purpose. It alerts us to what needs our attention. With the aid of Ghost Pipe we don’t deaden the pain, but rather distance it so we can work...

I bought a sachet of Foxglove seeds to plant in the yard recently and noticed more than the usual level of caution on eating the seeds. It got me curious about t he flower itself and why the seeds posed such concern. I was not familiar with the flower but think I have seen it growing in other people's yards based on the pictures on the sachet. The plant is toxic, but planting it in the garden may grant your house protection. It is also said to attract fairies and according to legend, the white spots inside each bell are marks left by fairies. But don’t pick the foxglove and bring it inside, as it’ll annoy the fairies. This made it an unlucky plant to have indoors, though Margaret Baker also notes it was unlucky to have on board ship It would be one thing if the flowers were only associated with magic and mystery - they are are p oisonous all over and also considered invasive in America . You have to wonder why something like this would be sold in the garden section of your local st...

I grew up hearing my father repeat this line many times making sure I heard him - God helps them that help themselves.  I am all but certain he did not know the provenance of the saying but I would guess he had heard it from my grandfather who taught him just about everything he knew outside what he learned in college and beyond. I think this line pre-dates his college years so its more likely than not he heard this line for the first time from his father and it clearly made a strong impression given how many times I heard it growing up.  This sentence were served up as a reminder every time my father found me failing to apply myself which was rather often. Early in life, I had learned how to earn the tokens that proved I was working and making progress while not applying my mind to the task. There was a pride in being "clever" enough to do this but it frequently dissolved in the face of paternal disapproval at my scheming ways.  Nothing fundamentally changed about how I ...

J and I have been chatting about essays and essayists lately, so I re-read Consider the Lobster.  All the questions and the moral quandary about the methods used to cook a lobster remain unresolved. And just in that lies the timelessness of the piece. That and also the tone and voice the writer takes - he is confused and wants to understand if his readers and the world at large share in his confusion. That sentiment is also timeless. The lines that resonated most with me in my first reading of this essay many years ago are still the ones that get to the core of the issue for me ..Still, after all the abstract intellection, there remains the facts of the frantically clanking lid, the pathetic clinging to the edge of the pot. Standing at the stove, it is hard to deny in any meaningful way that this is a living creature experiencing pain and wishing to avoid/escape the painful experience. To my lay mind, the lobster’s behavior in the kettle appears to be the expression of a preference...

The loss of unstructured playtime for children is a real tragedy as this article notes. The problems persist long past childhood I think if the kid grew up with all of their time planned and accounted for with someone watching over. Comes a point when the child becomes an adult, they cross all the toll-gates that were defined for them since birth and come out the other end of college completely lost. No one has plan for them in the real-world. It is expected they will figure things out on their own. I can't count the number of kids I know who are now there on that other side after years of every minute of their life properly planned.  They pick up whatever is in front of them and latch on to it without thinking too hard if this is the thing for them. I believe that ability to introspect is a function of having had plenty of time to let the mind idle growing up, doing things without any plan or structure for no specific outcome. Random thoughts and questions come to a child's m...

Watched Pieces of a Woman recently and was surprised how cold the whole movie felt despite a such a sad topic it deals with. The story is about the death of a baby minutes after its birth and how that rips the family apart. While that was the strong central theme, as a viewer I saw one of disbalanced, unequal partnership leading to tragic outcomes with no path to recovery.  The woman is shown to come from an affluent background with a complex relationship with her mother. The man is working class - not quite as rich or refined at her and hers. He refers to himself as "boorish" at some point. While that is not the affect he creates the point still stands. He is a outsider and somewhat subordinate to her and her whims. Presumably she knows better or best because of who she is and where she comes from.  A great deal of emphasis is placed on the fact that he is her partner not husband. It seems the idea of a home birth was hers and no one could talk her out of it including the m...

Interesting to read this scorching critique of Joan Didion right after I read that lovely essay. The author may be right or wrong on her assessment of Didion's writing but for me reading hers was laborious to the point of impossible. Sense a fair bit of jealous combined with fixation - maybe they come together. If her main argument is Didion is too self-absorbed to the point that she introduces herself even into her reporting of a crime, it does not make her a bad writer.  Many of them tend to be self-absorbed. Infact, how can you begin to be a writer without seeing yourself somewhat as a center of the universe. You have to believe that you have something unique and important to say that the world must hear - that calls for a certain degree of self-absorption. Based on the genre, its degree could vary but it's hard to imagine a writer who absolutely does not think the world is what they see and make it out to be. I imagine it would be quite hard to write that way.  I have not...

J recommended Goodbye to All That and it was an amazing reading experience. Over the years, reading recommendations have started to come from her to me as much as they flow the other way around. Not all suggestions are unknown or unfamiliar to either side but new meaning is added to a suggestion if it comes from J. I have also watched some movies she recommended and in many cases, what I took from the story was very different from her perspective so it is interesting to exchange notes after.  Two people even if very closely related can come to very different conclusions from reading the same facts . J is more fact-based and objective in her decision-making no matter what the issue at hand - that is just how she works. For me, the facts matter less or more based on what we are dealing with. In some cases, we will align because the issue was such that I relied on facts just as much as she did. But on the "interpretive" end of things, we will diverge a great deal. When she was y...

Not sure what triggered the word Kohima in my mind a couple of days ago and it stuck with me like an ear-worm. The sound of the word could have been turned around in my memory as I was reading this book - two things could not be more  unrelated. At first, I could not recall the meaning of Kohima (it felt like I knew it at some point) and then forgot about went about my day. It returned again randomly and this time I looked it up. This was in the list of states and capitals we had to memorize back in childhood. Thankfully, the name of the state or its capital have not changed since then. This is not the kind of permanence we have come to expect in India so it was a pleasant surprise. I have never traveled to Northeast India and it features high on my bucket-list. I also know woefully little beyond whatever fragments of information was included in my textbook from back in the day. A small dot on a map, some call-outs about the state that were absolutely irrelevant to me. The number ...

An old colleague from one of my earliest jobs in Kolkata, reached out to wanted to reconnect after close to twenty five years now. I remember S being friendly and happy to mentor a younger more inexperienced coworker - which I was. He would walk me through things very patiently and make sure I understood. After all these years, I cannot remember what I had exactly learned from him but the experience remains a positive memory from that time. He was engaged to be married and actively looking for other opportunities. Most of us who knew him thought he would make a good husband and father - S was one of those all around decent guys that no one could not possibly have a problem with. A proper straight arrow.  As we chatted about the years since that time, it turns out that his life had proceeded exactly as any one of us could have predicted. He has two kids who are doing well - he is proud of their accomplishments. He is married to the same woman and has lived in the same Midwestern tow...

Last evening, the weather was particularly pleasant and the bugs were not out in full force yet when we stepped out into the backyard. It would be nice to bring out some blankets lay down and watch the sky, do nothing. As so we did. The birds had already turned home but some bats were flying around. As dusk started to settle, fireflies came out. It was quiet hour of doing nothing but watching whatever was around us, the soft whooshing of cars passing by the distance. The neighbor's grandkids squealed with joy every once in a while breaking the silence - whatever they were doing, it made them happy. This was a hour about nothing but the mundane flow of an ordinary day.  It reminded me of Virginia Woolf's The Death of the Moth . Set in a day much like any other, she zones in on something and creates and abstracted narrative that transcends that little thing itself - the unremarkable day moth. We all see the same things but what we make of observation is so vastly different. That ...