Morality Play

This WSJ story reminds me of a dinner table conversation with our extended team. Atleast a third of the group that evening had graduated from college less than five years ago. One of them worked full-time all through college and the employer paid most of his college bill. The rest he covered with a variety of gig-work. D often says his life is significantly easier now that he is out of college and only working. Coming from some who routinely works 12 hour days, you have to wonder what his student life looked like. He is 100% debt-free and really proud of that fact. I can see how a person like D will have very little if any sympathy for the woes of someone who has to start paying off their student loan debt. 

There was this other young guy at the table who went to a state school and was sharing his story. In his senior year of college, he and this other kid who went to his high school ended up at the same internship. The only difference was he was paying in-state tuition that his family was able to afford and the other person was attending a top-ranked private school paying over $70K a year.

T admitted to feeling like a failure back in the day when his friend made it to this highly selective college and he did not but in hindsight he believes he came out ahead. The other guy has a student loan to deal with, T does not. There was consensus at the table that there is always a path to avoid debt a student and those who choose not to take it should not be complaining about choices that they made of their own volition. 

Though some debt-free colleagues feel pity—and think student-loan forgiveness would be good for the economy—others can’t stand to hear griping. They tell me they know there are borrowers who didn’t understand what they were getting into and that student loans can be most cumbersome for people who didn’t finish their degrees. Yes, they’re aware that debt, or the absence of it, is often a function of privilege.

Mostly they view the college-debt crisis as a morality play. They did the right thing, paying back what they owe or making good decisions to avoid debt. Others should do the same or face consequences.

That evening, I heard from two people on this topic. D did not come from privilege at all and worked incredibly hard to get his college education and without accumulating debt. T comes from a middle-income family, the youngest of three kids. By the time it was his turn to go to state school, his parents between their two incomes and no other kids left to raise were able to pay for his college. He worked some as well but not as much as D. Both of them could have gone to better schools if they had taken on loans but they chose not to. 

Laying Bare

This story about how our faces can be used to identify us is alarming for those in professions who do not want people in their real life know their professional identity. Then there is the rest of us who have reasons for seeking anonymity in public places for any number of reasons. All of us are included in the frames of pictures others are taking - just because we were around their subject and did not duck out fast enough. The story also underscore how painfully out of touch and out of pace government regulators are:

Originally created in Poland by a couple of “hacker” types, PimEyes was purchased in 2021 for an undisclosed amount by a professor of security studies based in Tbilisi, Georgia. The professor told me that he believed facial recognition technology, now that it exists and is not going away, should be accessible to everyone. A ban on the technology would be as effective, he said, as the US prohibition on alcohol had been in the 1920s. Those who paid attention to a box you had to click before performing a search would see that you are only supposed to search for your own face. Looking up other people without their consent, the professor said, was a violation of European privacy laws. Yet the site had no technical controls in place to ensure a person could only upload their own photo for a search.

There is all kind of vigilance and regime of fines for those who are in violation of GDPR consent and yet outing a porn actor based on the picture of her face does not rise up to level of privacy violation. By the time they write up their regulation on the topic, the world would have moved to other things more far insidious.

Rising Tide

Interesting take on what AI means for designers and creatives. Specially that it is the opinion of someone who started in this business in 1980 and has successfully adapted to many cataclysmic changes since then. 

If we can glean any lessons from the introduction of the computer to the design world, it's that one can offload the uninspired tasks to the machines, all while formulating new ideas and forms of communication. Designers and creatives of all stripes can make the unexpected while the robots replicate the necessary background pieces to our existence.

The argument might be that the bar for what is deemed an uninspired task is raised by AI. In the time of X-acto knife and tacky glue, having manual dexterity to deliver a precise output with such tools may have been seen an inspired effort. Not everyone could produce the same quality of results. When that was no longer a point of differentiation, then something else was. The goal post has moved a good bit this time around but this is not the rising tide lifts all boat. It is more a tide will obliterate the livelihood of some. The question is whether upskilling will be enough for those impacted or should they move in a different direction entirely. 

I was chatting with a former client recently and he was excited about being able to create product roadmaps using GenAI. He speculated this job of a product manager would soon become obsolete. This idea of using AI to replace the workforce is a popular one these days.

The key to making productive use of multimodal AIs is understanding how and what to delegate to a machine, so that both the human and the AI can accomplish more through collaboration than by working independently. However delegation is something professionals routinely struggle with: They either assign too much, or not enough, or not the right tasks. Working alongside a multimodal AI will require workers to master the art of delegation.

Telling History

As someone who loves visiting museums, I read this essay with great interest and was underwhelmed by the conclusion:

No matter how intricate or well researched a palimpsest—at any cultural institution—it will never solve the problem of perspective. We can never escape ourselves or the times in which we live. Maybe this is the best we ever do—and maybe that’s fine. Maybe seeing museums as deeply flawed but instructive monuments to that attempt at understanding, rather than as definitive catalogs, is the best way to allow them to teach us about ourselves. Sometimes, we need the reminder not to believe something just because it’s written on the wall.

That said, it is a valid argument that a museum is like a rich person's living room opened to the public and in that sense perpetuates their world-view which is far from representative of the average population never mind the poor and oppressed. In any age, those who were fighting to the finish just to survive did not have the luxury of preserving their own history. Much of it had to be be traded or bartered for sustenance. 

My grandmother used to say, in a refugee family like her own, it is considered a very big deal to have any single article of of jewelry from a few generations ago to gift to the daughter during her marriage. To her, the inability to pass on significant pieces of jewelry was the greatest sign of a family having fallen on hard times. Once she landed on her feet in Kolkata, she clung to her modest acquisitions and refused to replace old with new. Everything she owned was from the 1930s and she refused to let go. When she passed, one of my nieces who lives in Kolkata took over most of her belongings. 

Her home is now in a sense a family museum - just that it is not one that would be of any interest to anyone outside our family. Is this a rich person's living room? Depends on your scale I supposed. T is affluent and has a house big enough to hold my grandmother's things very comfortably. It is true that she likes to show them off to anyone who visits and has even a passing interest in her beautiful mahogany almirah and dressing table. In a sense T has set the tone for how the history of my mother's family is known and told. She is able to do this because her circumstances allow her to do so.  

Learning Life

Was at a team offsite recently where a young man joined our group for dinner. One of my colleagues had met him in the breakroom earlier in the day and invited him over. This was V's first job out of college and he was full of enthusiasm to do his best at work, get integrated into the community in the office and around town. As we chatted, he described his challenges in achieving the later goal. His girlfriend was in a different city completing her graduate program. He did not know to drive and preferred to live in places where it was easy to get around on public transportation. 

The combination of being single and without a car greatly limited his social opportunities. We were happy to have him hang out with us for the evening and V for his part was grateful for the company. He is not much older than J and I could not help feeling some maternal concern for him. V asked me for ideas for what he could do to better network around. Based on everything I had heard upto that point, it seemed like he was doing all he could given his constraints. I advised him to learn driving and get a car to experience the country and a sense of freedom. I am certain this was not the first time V had heard such wisdom but there is something to be said for timing of certain messages in life. 

I hope my timing was good and will help V feel less lost. It made me sad to hear him talk about not having friends and feeling alone in a city he felt cold and unresponsive to his overtures of friendship. In part because of J who like V lives alone in a big city. But it also reminded me of my early years in America - first as newly married and then as a single-mother. 

My natural introversion was definitely enabled by the sense of being in a community that was largely indifferent to me. V is very extroverted and experiencing a similar environment in a completely different way. I was glad to be left alone for the most part, he is not. V is lucky that he is striving to change his situation because it makes him so uncomfortable, while he is still young. I allowed myself to enjoy my solitude for too long, until the point where most of my connections have died out from lack of attention and nurture. V had something to teach me too.

Keeping Balance

My friend T has three kids ranging from three to seventeen years old. We met after a while recently and conversation turned to our kids. She told me how they balance parenting responsibilities as a couple. T has taken on the mantle of responsibility for the kids - she is the one who holds them accountable for their responsibilities at school and home. But she also provides them a judgement free zone. No matter what they do, she will not judge - that is a guarantee and she has demonstrated this time and again. Her husband is the fun parent but he can and will be judgmental. The kids have a balance between the parents and also with each parent. 

I was talking recently to a young woman who is thinking about having her first child. Her pet peeve is that men often get to be the fun dad while mom gets to do the hard work and keep the kids in line. She thinks it as unfair to women and that both parents deserve to have a fun component to their job. T's formula seems to achieve that goal quite effortlessly. The kids are sharing secrets and gossip with her without reservation because she accepts them without question - that is the fun part of her job even if can be commingled with stress at times. She is the one in the know of things - her source of closeness. T is a remarkably calm and poised woman balancing a difficult job and a busy family without missing a beat. Maybe that is the secret to her success - knowing how to be good and fun mother at once. 

Hard Reset

In the plane I was seated next to a woman who works at the same company I do. I could tell because she was working but as I was not, she had no reason to know. In another time, I would have introduced myself, tried to learn what she does and so on. I found myself completely uninterested in doing any of those things - things that came to me naturally and without a second thought. The woman was wearing an N95 mask for the duration of the flight. I presumed it was not her intent to have conversations with random people who happened to be seated next to her. Beyond that, I believe I might have changed in some fundamental way coming out the other side of the pandemic. Maybe, it served as a time for a hard reset for people to return to their natural settings. 

For me, being naturally introverted, it has always taken effort to socialize. While I can do it and after a while even enjoy it, there is a cold-start problem now having fallen out of practice for a significant length of time. Once I arrived at my destination and checked into the hotel, I went out to grab a quick dinner. Around me, I saw people headed back from work, chatting in small groups before parting ways. I could hear snatches of their conversation from where I was waiting to pick up my kimchi fried rice. This was not the talk I would want to be part of today. One group was talking about a conversation they had had with their boss and what that meant for a call they were going to have with a client the following day. In another life, that could have been me saying the things these folks were saying. But today, it felt completely pointless and unrelatable.

If I had left from work with this set, I would have walked on home without pausing for a social break. That was me in the plane too - I simply could not find it in me to have a casual conversation with this person with whom I likely share a lot of common work experiences - that was the last thing I wanted. It was great to have the space and quiet for a few hours.

Failure Mirror

J's short visit home was mixed as these things always are for me. Expectations are never met on either side I think. We fall a bit short of what the other might have hoped for and yet there is comfort even within that flawed space. Like sunlight peeking through clouds and then sometimes the sky turning brilliant blue.  We both wait for the flash of dazzling blue. Those moments always happen and I do remember them fondly for a long time. Yet, in everything that falls short in some way, I feel myself witnessing the failures of my motherhood. 

Things that I should have tried harder on, not given up because I ran out of steam and found myself yielding to the stubbornness of a child who was adept at pushing my buttons tenaciously. If only I had been smarter and known to strike the right balance between not breaking her spirit and holding my ground where it mattered most. That time has long gone, the die is cast. I wish there was a different way for me to see what is in front of me instead of feeling crushed by the sense of failure brought upon by the endless misses and missteps. I wish I could also see the things I have done well even if not with the same blinding clarity. 

Like my friend C says, I have yet to learn how to be kind to myself and forgive myself. Each time I see my kid, I realize how far away I am from that. This time was no different. 

Baking Bread

I find myself watching breadmaking recipes without any sound in times of stress. During the pandemic everyone was  baking bread at home mostly for stress relief. I went through my own bread-making phase a bit before the pandemic and did not find it as therapeutic as advertised. The process itself was fun - getting a feel for the dough and gaining confidence in being able to predict the outcome were the highlights. 

But with that came some downsides. For me atleast it turned out my attention to detail was lacking in proportion to what was going through my head at the time. If there was too much noise there, I would start to take short-cuts which resulted in an underwhelming bread. Knowing that in an hour, I would be pulling out of the oven a thing that would bear testament to my mental state was not ideal. Eating that bread over the next several days was a reminder of how it came to taste the way it did. 

So while there was some near term joy from the process of baking bread, it was far from given that it would be a gift that kept giving good things. I was working through my iterations, keeping good notes of what worked and what did not when I ran into S who is the queen of baking bread at home. I had the chance to observe her making baguette from start to finish. The final product was excellent but it also gave me impetus to take pause from my baking activities. 

I had seen first hand what it takes to produce something of that quality which brought home the realization that I was very far and away from any hope of perfection. I lost the taste for store bought bread from the first time I was able to produce something respectable and I never got back to liking it since. Reading this article about a specialist baker's tool reminded me of my own thwarted journey.

Low Battery

My father is recovering from a sudden bout of illness that left feeling less confident about himself. That sudden loss of control followed by hospitalization for several days, no clear prognosis for why he experienced the symptoms he did. I imagine that coming to terms with his age and frailty is as hard for him as it is to me to accept that. When I left home he was still in his prime or it felt that way to me. He could do any amount of physical work, stay focused on a problem for hours and days. It was as if he was incapable for fatigue. Going back to my earliest memories of my father that is the mental image - he was a workhorse and he was not one to quit until the job was done. 

He is one of the most tenacious people I know and I feel a sense of pride when I see a bit of that grit in me. As that energy dims away, I feel like the source from what I have always drawn even without realizing it is ebbing away. Every time I call to check on him, I try to cycle some of that unstoppable energy back to him. I never had what he did but I learned to emulate well enough. It makes me happy to see some of that spark return even if for a short while. Like a worn out battery, it takes longer to charge and more frequent charges. Recently I have been thinking about when I will refer to him in the past tense and each time I pray that he has charge left in him to the very end to be loud, obstinate and unwilling to believe he can no longer do things. 

Changing Pace

Right after work, I went to the Indian grocery store to pick up items I needed to cook for J on her short visit home. She had texted her "requests" earlier in the day and I smiled reading it because there was not thing in there that I did not already know and anticipate. She did add "and anything else" as a placeholder for me to use my imagination.

It is little beyond that for me. I like thinking of food I want to cook for J as receptacle for memories - ones we have from the past and the ones we are now creating. Ten years from now, I would love for her to remember this weekend trip home and ask me to cook a certain dish again. But the perennial favorites cannot be dislodged in the favor of the bold and new. As it goes with comfort food for most people, the dishes she loves the best are rather simple to make. 

The pace of our lives are diverging rapidly - she is picking up speed every day and I am trying not to slow down. Earlier that day, I was talking to C, a woman my age I met a work sometime back. We are both empty-nesters and trying to figure out how to do something different now that we can. It turns out change is scary because it requires moving with a certain speed to land correctly in the changed circumstance. It is easier to stay the course as dull and uninspiring as it might be. The weekend with me imbued with the speed of J's life not mine but it will allow her to slow down a bit, catch her breath before she returns.  

Lost Cause

My mother's cousin T is about twelve years older than me. Growing up, I thought of her as an older cousin who was misclassified as an aunt. To be respectful I always called her T Mashi and she appreciated her status being duly acknowledged. Among my earliest memories of T are those of her parents' struggles to get her married. T had was an was academic star, a wonderful vocalist with over a decade of musical training and a lot of fun to hang out with. The last quality was ofcourse the most relevant one to me. The reason for the struggle to arrange her marriage were things T could not change about herself - she had always been overweight, her eye sight was poor and she was not considered conventionally beautiful. It did not help that the father was not rich. The fact that her father was an all around outstanding guy, kind and erudite, beloved of his students was not relevant in the match-making motions. 

While her parents fretted over her "situation", T continued to do well at everything, became a college professor and sang semi-professionally. She did not let the popular views of her marriage-worthiness get in the way of life. I found that very admirable even though I was not old enough to understand the courage and confidence it took for a woman past thirty back in the day to do what T did so effortlessly. She did get married in her mid thirties and had a son close to forty. Her husband turned out be the kind of man who appreciates T for everything she is. They looked like an odd couple starting out but looking at them now, it would seem they were destined for each other forever - they are a picture of perfection together. T was always a serene person but she looks radiant now. The years have been very kind to both of them. Recently she shared a few pictures from their trip to Coorg and I could not help thinking how T epitomizes a woman who has been in a great marriage - such a irony being that she was deemed completely unmarriageable and a lost cause by most back in her younger years. 

Classic Movie

Watched 12 Angry Men recently complete with multiple ad breaks for the Westinghouse ads. The movie itself was a fantastic study on how people come together gaining and losing consensus by turn. A jab of doubt that hits a hidden nerve can make the person change their mind. Then there is the gravity of consensus -one you are able to chip away at the majority opinion, the tide can start to turn quickly. All of this plays out in a very sparse setting of a jury room where these twelve men sit across a table and deliberate. 

Each character gets their time on screen, the viewers gets to understand where they come from and how that informs their thinking around the question of reasonable doubt. Class and prejudice play their part along with moral outrage in the jury (except one) being convinced that the defendant is guilty of murder. Time passes and the details are probed to test the reasonable doubt standard over and over again. The viewer is left feeling satisfied by the turn of events at the end of 95 minutes. 

Apart from the movie itself, I was intrigued by my response to the old-fashioned Westinghouse ads. Each of them was about home appliances that would free up a woman's time and bring efficiency to domestic chores. Each ad takes the viewer through the problem the appliance is trying to solve with a simple explanation of its best features. The ads end with a a reminder that Westinghouse is trust-worthy company.  It was remarkable that I actually liked watching the ads, did not feel annoyed that it interrupted the storyline. 

Small Surprises

We took possibly the last trip to the beach for the summer the weekend past. It was plan made late Friday afternoon for the following night. The return to such spontaneity became possible only recently after a long hiatus. I had forgotten what it was like to able to take such trips on a whim. They came to be associated with a much younger age, the time of dreaming impossible dreams and seeing everything crash and burn - that was the way my life at the time turned out. But that is not to say, there was no redemption or even good things that came form the ashes for charred dreams. Just that life went in a direction I had not anticipated. Many things from that period have turned into relics that don't belong here and now. 

Interesting and unexpected experiences happened on this trip too. The sea was calm like a swimming pool and I could float on my back. The following day, it started to rain while I was in the water and I could see a school of fish riding the waves. We were all together in an infinite body of salt water, depending on who died first, one would be food for the other. Relative to the ocean we were just insignificant - the difference is one of us has to plan for retirement and the other does not. 

The Thai place we had dinner was quite extraordinary and yet it had not shown up in any reviews. One in the downtown area, I insisted on walking past the well-reviewed restaurants and to the part of town that was a bit run-down and unloved. This place was warm and welcoming run by a middle-aged couple. The food was well-balanced perfection. On the way back we were drawn to some loud music coming out of a park by the waterfront. It turned out to be a an Caribbean festival - bright, colorful and the air redolent with the smell of spices I love. The tickets were sold out but it was all open air and not hard to see the stage from out the park. We stood there with others who like us had to been able to make it in. 

The day ended with stopping at local grocery store to pick up some food for breakfast. We found some really nice coconut and guava jelly cake, yet another small bit of perfection on a trip that might have never even happened. We watched Satyajit Ray's Teen Kanya that night.

Trying Unreadable

This is my third attempt to read Blindness and it has not been any easier than my prior attempts. I really do want to get to the end of the book. The writing technique that many fans of this book love so much left me feeling out of breath. Punctuations exist for a reason even if the state of sudden, unexplained contagion of blindness is endless. 

that if, before every action, we were to begin by weighing up the consequences, thinking about them in earnest, first the immediate consequences, then the probable, then the possible, then the imaginable ones, we should never move beyond the point where our first thought brought us to a halt. The good and the evil resulting from our words and deeds go on apportioning themselves, one assumes in a reasonably uniform and balanced way, throughout all the days to follow, including those endless days, when we shall not be here to find out, to congratulate ourselves or ask for pardon, indeed there are those who claim that this is the much-talked-of immortality,

I like the premise of the book and the fact that the sudden onset of blindness in people and the societal response to the what is terrifying and unsolvable can be a useful way to understand human behavior. At the peak of the AIDS epidemic, those who were infected were not treated much differently that the blind internees in Saramago's book. In more recent times, in the early days of the pandemic the societal response those suffering and dying from the virus was fairly brutal. Like the dead blind man in this story, they too did not get a proper funeral. 

All that being said, this is not a well-written book and it makes for truly painful reading. I don't want to make a fourth attempt seeing that I have failed for the third time now. Maybe I am not the right reader for this book and I can make peace with that

Rewatching India

Watched Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro  with my friend A who wanted to see something from my childhood in India. After so many years, my own perception of the movie is very different from what it it been as a kid. The action is loud, theatrical and over the top all around but these are actors I love and many among them are extremely versatile. But for A who is not familiar with the oeuvre of Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri or Pankaj Kapoor, it was hard to appreciate their range. 

For me it was a return to my earliest memories of India, the way as a young person I understood how the system works. It was this and other movies of similar genre that shaped me as an adult. The corruption, connivance and lack of consequence creating a no-win scenario for the little guy trying to make an honest living were the themes of our times. In the 80s the chances of entrepreneurial success were slim to none as we see in the struggles of the protagonists. 

In my extended family we had a fair share of young men who were unemployed into their late 20s, working for small private companies that paid very poorly and treated them like dirt. The dream was to get employed by the Central Government and the competition was brutal. By the time it was my time to enter the workforce, the Indian economy had opened up and objectively people of my generation had way better opportunities than those who were ten to fifteen years older than us. 

Notwithstanding, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro would remain a bell-weather for what I believed I should expect in my adult working life, give or take a few details like I might work for a multi-national company (as was common when I graduated. The MNC has become the new thing to covet for like that Central Government job) and not try to run a small business. I simply did not believe the core of India could change enough in my lifetime. 

The Mahabharat scene towards the end of the movie was the most memorable when I first watched the movie and I loved it all over again this time. As a kid it was all about the comedic elements. This time, it was nostalgia for a time when it was okay to be irreverent about religion, mashup Draupadi with Anarkali with hysterical results, The character of Dhritarashtra is a proxy for the common person in India who witnesses the chaos of everyday life and asks in vain "Yeh Sab Kay Ho Rahi Hain". As in real life, no one has the time or interest to answer that question. 

Feeling Chai

I had pause between calls a few days ago during work and savored the luxury of making myself some chai with fresh ginger, fennel and cardamon. Stepping out to have my tea, decided I should text J to see if she had time for a quick call. We generally communicate by text most days - the calls are less frequent. 

So anytime I do ask her to call I make sure to qualify by "no crisis just want to chat if you are around". That afternoon she was around and we talked for a bit and I finished my chai. We each returned to work. The fact that I could carve such a half-hour out on a work day to connect with what comforts me - the voice of my child and the taste of freshly made chai, is a luxury. 

There was a time when I was driving from almost an hour away every evening hoping I would not be the last one at the daycare center, not have to see J sitting forlorn with all her friends already gone for the day. Some evenings, I could not beat the traffic and dashed in just as they were turning the lights off. I remember feeling all the effort to earn a living was so futile - I disappointed the little person I did all this for, every single day. Maybe without those years of strife, I would not have earned my peaceful chai-time in the middle of the workday while I caught up with J.

Saying No

Reading this templated rejection email for job posting I had recently applied to amused me a great deal: 

We’re very sorry to inform you that we have selected other finalists to proceed with for our <Role I had applied to>

We’re incredibly grateful for your interest in <Name of Company>. It takes courage and vulnerability to apply to new opportunities, and we consider ourselves the fortunate ones to have someone of your caliber to have taken an interest in us. 

.. and it went on for a bit after that but more mundanely

If I was a year out of college, I might have appreciated the "thoughts and prayers" line about how I summoned up courage and leaned into my vulnerability to apply for a job I was greatly underqualified for. In this situation, I had to yank out three fourth of my resume to right-size it for what the job needed - that is how little it needed. 

Between an AI based screener and child maybe about J's age who is likely the recruiter, there is no way to have a communication on substance between an experienced candidate and hiring manager. I do send out a share of shot in the dark applications like this one and the rejection notes that come like clockwork are often an entertaining read bursting as they are with the literary flair of Chat GPT. 

Seeking Children

Was not familiar with the term anti-natalism but the arguments are very familiar. I know several folks who have exactly these reasons for remaining child-free. Some would (and have) consider adoption of a destitute child over having a biological child to reduce their negative impact in the world and do some good for someone while at it. The arguments are quite reasonable and valid even. 

As someone who craved motherhood for many years until attaining that state, I don't think I will ever stop believing it was the best thing that every happened to me. For me it was more an inward looking self-centered decision - I wanted to know what it felt like to love a person unconditionally and without limit. I did not think I had it me to feel such love for anyone other than my own child - I believe that is still the case for me. Without having that experience, I don't think I would even know what it is to be human. 

By my reasoning, motherhood enabled me to understand my own humanity,  fully connect and draw from its resources. I sought to be a better more complete person by becoming a mother. What my action did for the world and the environment did not cross my mind. Did I bring J to a miserable world - I don't think so. Like most parents, I did what I could to make her life better than my own. My own life has been far from miserable.

People are different. A better person than me would presumably be able to feel unconditional, limitless love for any number of other people in their lives including children they adopt. For such folks, it would make sense to remain childfree, not burden the world through a Quixotic quest for their own humanity. They may argue that is not even relevant - specially if they view their own birth and existence as a mistake they cannot remedy. 

Striking Distance

This makes for sad reading on what is next for the WGA strike -  that people who are in power want to completely break down those that do not before negotiations can begin. The way this plays out will likely pave the way for workers in other parts of the economy who are at risk of being made irrelevant by AI. 

“We want to be able to scan a background performer’s image, pay them for a half a day’s labor, and then use an individual’s likeness for any purpose forever without their consent,” the union said. “We also want to be able to make changes to principal performers’ dialogue, and even create new scenes, without informed consent. And we want to be able to use someone’s images, likenesses, and performances to train new generative AI systems without consent or compensation.”

The AMPTP said in a statement in response that its offers included an “AI proposal which protects performers’ digital likenesses, including a requirement for performers’ consent for the creation and use of digital replicas or for digital alterations of a performance.”

The truth is somewhere in between and the when the full weight of the legalese needs to be fought, things will unlikely go in the favor of some low-paid performer whose humanity was stolen to create a digital likeness. What is happening here is only a continuation (and extension) of the current ways in which everyone's data is being monetized by large companies who hold and control it without any benefits accrued to the producer of data.

Finding Resolution

A different kind of story about watching birds. The essay painted an bittersweet word picture that juxtaposed criminals serving long prison sentences against a bird making her nest and raising her chicks until they were old enough to fly. Maybe exposing people from the youngest age to the struggles of those who are vulnerable could help raise the overall of amount of compassion there is in the world. Planting a seed, watering it, fending off the elements that the seedling must fight to have a chance - not quite as lively as watching a bird nest but still a lesson in care and compassion. Not having had those opportunities to leaven the soul could make it hard and prone to doing things that see a person end up in prison. Reading this story reminded me of my friend L who changed her phone number to get away from an abusive ex-boyfriend who refused to leave her alone.

Luckily for her, he lived too far away to pose any physical threat. She just needed his voicemails and texts to stop, And with the new number that goal was accomplished but a new issue arose. She kept getting collect calls from the local prison where an inmate was trying to reach whomever had her number before. Maybe that person had wanted a break from whomever was behind bars, maybe they were deceased. Either way, they were no longer reachable but L kept getting these calls. After a while they stopped. Maybe the person's prison sentence had ended, maybe some other resolution had occurred. The flying away of the chicks from the nest is a form of resolution too - it transitioned the observers trapped in their cells from one state to another, much like those calls that finally stopped coming to L's phone. 

No Haven

In a Slack community I am part of, a woman reported that she was commuting to her office by bus and when she was getting off at her stop a man slapped her butt in full view of other passengers. Some looked up from their phones to see the incident and others did not but no one said or did anything about it. While a lot of folks who read her message expressed their sympathies for her, outrage on her behalf it was one guy's response that really got me thinking. He said if he been there, he too would have not intervened because that could likely cause the situation to escalate, the offender could have been carrying a gun - this incident happened in a state where concealed carry is permitted by law. He said while its awful and unfair to the woman, it is the reality. 

No one had any concrete solutions except that she should report the incident to HR at her workplace and ask for accommodations. I highly doubt anything useful would come out of that. This whole exchange between this woman and the rest of the group nagged me for a few days and I had a chance to run it by my friend A. He is older than me and has a daughter who is probably this woman's age. I asked A what he thinks of the whole business as a father of a young woman and if he had been there on that bus - would he also do what the other men had done - nothing? 

A said, the reality is the guy who slapped the woman's butt will likely not go to jail for assault and battery even if the incident was reported to police. However, if another man stepped in and say slapped the guy on his face for harassing the woman and the fight escalated, that would be basis for jail time does not matter he was such a knight in shining armor defending the honor of a woman he did not even know. And this is not even counting the very real possibility that they guy may pull out his gun and start shooting. So every fellow passenger needs to weigh the consequences of expressing their righteous indignation before they make any moves. In this case the only rational move was to do nothing. 

A is an old friend, a great dad and someone who has done a lot of genuine good for others in his life. Hearing him say what he did, got me particularly dejected - such is the effect of a strong, unpleasantly dose of bitter reality. J is young woman herself spending a lot of time in public transport each day and has developed a full set of defenses to stay safe. I have traveled with her a couple of times when visiting her and observed how hard she tries to be completely invisible in crowds - that is the only hope a woman has of making it safe. It was also how my process for staying safe while traveling alone in India back in my time. 

Doll Mom

 Fascinating read about doll-moms and how social media responds to them. The logic here makes sense to a certain extent:

“My husband can play with cars, he can play video games, he can play Lego and everybody’s like, ‘That’s so cool,’” says Kiersten. “But the moment I’m like, ‘I play with dolls!’ I’m a weirdo who needs to have a real baby.” 

Maybe its about how far a person takes their play and what kinds of triggers it sets off among those who do not play and cannot understand what drives those that do. And if crossing that line, how much are they willing to share about what they do. Not everyone with a video gaming, or Lego obsession will share details about in casual conversation - a certain degree of trust must be earned and confidence that they will not be judged. It seems the issue at hand here is not so much the fact that a woman finds therapeutic value and satisfaction in being the mother of one or more dolls. It is about what happens when she chooses to share these facts widely - to friends and strangers alike. 

..Part of the visceral discomfort of watching these videos is the fact that they’re made for public consumption in the first place. It points to a bigger conversation happening right now around the ethics of “sharenting”—aka posting sensitive information about kids before they’re old enough to consent, says Jenna Abetz, PhD, an associate professor of communication at the College of Charleston who has studied combative mothering in mommy blogs. Sure, a doll isn’t going to grow up and sue you for violating their medical privacy, but there’s an increasing cultural unease with social posts that feel exploitative

Body Armor

Reading these lines from Italo Calvino's The Nonexistent Knight made me think of someone who would might be called a company man. Many variants of the traditional company man exist no matter what line of work the person is in. They would not have well-defined sense of self beyond what they do for a living. The consider the power, position and money the work affords than as proxies for their own value. So they cling to work like this knight clings to his armor. 

Agilulf, always needed to feel himself facing things as if they were a massive wall against which he could pit the tension of his will, for only in this way did he manage to keep a sure consciousness of himself. But if the world around was instead melting into the vague and ambiguous, he would feel himself drowning in that morbid half light, incapable of allowing any clear thought or decision to flower in that void.

Many among us do  not check all the characteristics of a archetypical company man and yet we have many of the traits that are lead to nonexistence without the armor. To me this was a cautionary tale of what one can easily become. 

Reading Kural

Had read of The Kural in my school history text books and was excited to read an English translation recently. Just about every verse takes a few readings to understand and the beauty of the phrasing becomes evident only once do you. The experience was a lot like trying to solve a puzzle that looks simple at first blush because the verses are so minimalistic. But as you get started, you realize there is more than meets the eye and nuances you did not see at first. After some struggle, you solve it and experience a rush of satisfaction. This is not the book to borrow from the library to read and return - which is what I did. It is something to dip into over and over, because the a specific verse will be right for a certain place and time of your life. Connecting with it when the time was right could be a very different experience. One verse that was just right for me time was: 

Healer patient medicine preparer—these four 
Together are medicine

My father was recently and quite unexpectedly in the hospital. Though one might say at his age, this is hardly unexpected. But I am still not at that point in my life where I fully accept this reality - a part of me clings to this fantasy that he is invincible. My times of trouble, I still find solace in recalling the events from my childhood and youth where my father's strength and determination to stay in the fight no matter what had made all the difference. I want to channel some of that energy so I can fight what needs to be fought here and now. So letting myself accept he is well past his prime and cannot do what he once did, feels like giving up too early. 

He was upset to be in the hospital and moped around for several days but the last couple of times we spoke we was back in the saddle - being more his usual self. My mother had everything to do with him recovering his spirits just as the doctor had with restoring his health. Together it was medicine for him. 

Data Swamp

The more things change, the more they remain the same as evidenced by this Axios story. Even twenty five years ago, there was a lot of hand-wringing over how hard it is to tease insight out data, the poor ratio of signal vs noise, the absurdly high cost of learning something truly novel and game-changing from data. Vendors have come and gone with their panaceas to solve all of those problems but there is no comprehensive solution to this day. The problem statement cited in this story is identical to that from many decades ago. 

Many companies are finding their data isn't organized for the AI revolution — saved in different formats, in disparate datasets, and sometimes still on paper — "forcing a complete rethink of how data is stored, managed and processed," said Nick Patience, senior research analyst at S&P Global Market Intelligence.

The reality was and still is that while all companies want to be data companies in theory, very few have what it takes to succeed. Those that do will build platforms and set the rules of engagement that everyone will not like. The platform players have and will continue to build data gravity, giving them disproportionate access and control of insights from data. The rest will continue to struggle trying to eke something of value from their their many data swamps. 

Green Wash

Greenwashing or not, there seems very little that could go wrong with having a piece of urban wasteland bloom into a micro-forest. The more pieces of land that be turned green this way the better. Seems to beat the alternative of doing nothing.

Some scientific evidence for the Miyakawa method is emerging. One small study from the Netherlands and another from Italy support claims of rapid growth and high biodiversity. In the UK, scientists have set up a monitoring program to measure ecosystem benefits. As the data rolls in, Miyawaki, now in his early 90s, continues to plant trees.

There is a thick line of trees and brush around my yard which become impenetrable by the peak of summer. Birds have nests there, there are any number of squirrels, a few rabbits and I  occasionally see a fox. The place is a hive of activity all year long but it is peaks with the greenery. Having seen snakes a couple of times, I try not to get in there and inadvertently step on one. I am glad that they are not poisonous and we can all share the space. I like to think of tree line growing wild and free as a slice of forest that has come into my backyard on its own. It will evolve over time and become whatever it needs to be. Not quite an reclaimed urban wasteland but better that nature has taken over than any other options that might have been possible. 

Aged Out

I still recall quite clearly how it was to be in my 20s and brand new to the workforce. At first, it was overwhelming and then in a bit I found my groove. Around me were peers who came out of college all guns blazing confident that they were the smartest people in the room. There were plenty of those. Some of those folks did deliver outstanding work - maybe their life's best work. Back in the day, I did not notice how those several decades older than us felt about about our demeanor. Youth can be myopic that way. Reading about what it means to be older in the tech business resonates deeply with me, specially the woman's point of view

"She's been fighting, and winning, this kind of thing her whole career, she says. As a young woman it was almost worse, she says. She was constantly being told she was too young (or too young looking) to get choice assignments or promotions. That didn't stop her either."

A young woman pays a penalty for her perceived naivete and gets stuck on assignments that are of career limiting nature. If she is lucky enough to break free from that cycle before she is too old, she can make some decent strides in her career until she hits the speed bump for being too old or god forbid too old looking. So the window of opportunity is really small if you are a woman and it would be wise to keep that free and clear of personal commitments that take away from being able to dive into work. For many women that career window opens just when her biological clock is starting to slow down. There is a great unfairness to it all. 

The upshot is, tech workers need to understand that they'll be fighting the perception of being "outdated" as their careers mature. As long as they can show that they are masters of the new stuff as well as the old, ageism will be more like an annoying fly, something to swat away, than a deadly virus.

If you have been around long enough, you realize that most current fads are old ideas rehashed and sold as new. The fad of the day will become outdated in a year if not a few months. Those of us who have chased after many shiny objects back in the day, might feel jaded about keeping up with the latest. We might prefer to see the dust settle and spend our time more wisely. Yet, we make such choices at our own peril.

False Expectations

The way we are conditioned in the formative years of our versus how our own reality shapes up to be can be starkly different. In my case, my father was the one with a career while mother stayed at home and took care of everything else. It took me into the middle of high school to full dissociate my expectations from life from that of my mother. I would study engineering like my father had and enter the workforce much as he had back in the day. Once that expectation was reset, I might have imagined the flow of my career to resemble his and other like him that I knew. 

That meant being somewhat lost for the first five or ten years after college trying to find the thing that would become the job to grow and retire from. My father had friends who immigrated to America around that ten year mark, some sooner than that. Other, changed jobs until their kids needed stability in the school environment. There was a point just about everyone "settled" into a career. This was the pattern with my older cousins who entered the workforce upto a decade before me. So when it is my time to settle and I find myself grappling with a job market that has changed beyond recognition from the last time I was hyper-active on it, I find myself dealing with a lot of inner turmoil. 

I have to ask myself how it came to be that the playbook got appended for me. Then there is the business of accepting that reality and making peace with it - which may take a while for me. And then if I am smart enough, I would see and seize the opportunity that it opens up. The early conditioning seems to make all of that difficult and makes me wonder if it is for the best when a young person grows up without any kind of role model to anchor to - because it forces them to forge their own path in life and be accepting of all consequences that brings.

Turning Old

Listened to this audiobook about the India Pakistan conflict while stuck driving for several hours over a couple of days. It felt like a decent primer on the topic not particularly erudite but not flippant either. It was almost perfect for the time and place where I spent time with it. It was particularly poignant because I heard this right around Independence Day. Back at work even though there are a lot of Indian people, the occasion went entirely unremarked. 

Maybe 77 is not a marquee milestone as far as birthdays go but it is a nice number. I tie the age of India as free country to my father's age - he is four years older than the nation, almost a Midnight's Child. I see the evolution of the country for the years that I was old enough to understand anything in parallel with my father transitioning from the prime of youth, his physical and mental abilities to his fading out years. While free India is in its infancy, those that came to the world around that time will not be around to see it much further than that stage. 

The book made me make a mental note to ask my father about his earliest recollections of how Aug 15 was celebrated when he was a child. Was it tainted with the pain of what followed afterwards or was earning freedom a big enough reward to overcome and overlook it all.