Heartcrossings

After my little shopping trip for a littler Diwali celebration at home, my thoughts turned to why we do infact celebrate this holiday and how my understanding is fairly primitive given that I have not read any scholarly commentary on Ramayan. There is always the over-simplification of the story, honing on specific pieces of it out of context in the pursuit of some agenda and finally  derivate literature that are so far removed from the source that it might as well be a different thing. My mother is a fan of Nrisingha Prasad Bhaduri and I have heard a lot of praise for his erudition from her. Recently, I spend several hours listening to his lectures on the character of Ram and why he is revered, the popular misunderstandings about him and why is human flaws make him the ideal role model.  For me, this was the most I have learned on the topic in a few hours. It felt particularly timely because holding on to and passing tradition to the next generation is that much harder for a ...

Watched Selfie Mummy Googl Daddy recently and found it quite interesting and thought-provoking. When I was raising J as a single mother, my parents often spent several months from summer through fall with us. That was their opportunity to observe me in my maternal role and not surprisingly, I felt judged. They often told me that I was too engrossed online and not fully engaged with the family - specially pointing to missing out on time with J, this was a particularly sore point for me and produced guilt. In my defense, I was using the fact of their presence to carve a bit time for myself - I wanted to feel like a person whose entire existence was not defined by the fact of motherhood. I was so worn out mentally from doing it all that I was too quick to check out for a bit of space if I could. Every parent has their reason to be less present than they need or want to be in their children's life. Outside looking in, its easy to be judgmental.  But thanks to my parents calling attent...

Interesting piece of wisdom on how to think more wisely and make good decisions. It makes sense to put a bit of distance between ourself and the decision we are trying to make. Hearing it out loud from the perspective of a third party could potentially reveal blind-spots that we would otherwise miss. I thought to test this with something I have been struggling with recently and do not feel confident that I am making a good choice so my defense has been to preserve status quo.  Defining the problem statement and my thinking around the solution did a couple of useful things. It became very obvious that there was no way to solve it without increasing risk tolerance. If that was not an option, then the proposed solution was plainly wrong. I was actually able to step away from the situation and see all parameters with more clarity and without any emotional attachment. It was as if I was trying someone else to think things through.  ..illeism is the practice of talking about onesel...

Our cars are increasingly smart and connected with terrible privacy protections and now we could look forward to an automated sanctions when our speech patterns shows we are driving while intoxicated . It just depends on how the research and the solution built on its basis are put to use. For a teenage driver, if the car decided to pull them over and not start until their speech clarity had become normal that would be useful. Maybe ping the parents to make them aware of their teen's whereabouts while at it.  Even a speech clarity test if starting to drive at night or in adverse weather conditions could have some benefit. Some may not like the idea of their car acting like a nanny but there is still some value it. The risk of automating such things is always that people will find workarounds and the nanny technology will need to stay ahead of the cat and mouse game these things tend to become. Even the abstract of this research gives one pause to the fairness of the AI to non-native...

I love the concept of Nightshade - it solves a very worthy problem, protecting the rights of artists. When integrated into digital artwork, Nightshade misleads AI models, causing them to misidentify objects and scenes. For instance, Nightshade transformed images of dogs into data that appeared to AI models as cats. After exposure to a mere 100 poison samples, the AI reliably generated a cat when asked for a dog—demonstrating the tool’s effectiveness. This technique not only confuses AI models but also challenges the fundamental way in which generative AI operates. By exploiting the clustering of similar words and ideas in AI models, Nightshade can manipulate responses to specific prompts and further undermine the accuracy of AI-generated content. The concept of data poisoning has so far been associated with bad actors trying to cause harm. But in the case of Nightshade the same techniques are being put to good use. Creators of artistic works - no matter what their medium need more...

Did not know that the phenomenon had a name  (Dunning-Kruger effect) but the description of what it is makes sense. When it comes to the Dunning-Kruger effect, comparing yourself to others may not be the worst thing you could do—just don’t tell your therapist we said so. You can avoid being ignorant of your own performance by listening and gaining insight into the performances of others. If your friend who knew only a few Spanish words had asked how the lessons were going for you, your response might clue him into the fact that he’s not all that great at the language after all. Moreover, his poor pronunciation might show you that you actually have an unknown knack for languages. Comparing myself to others (or more like forced ranked against others) is a core and foundational experience for a desi individual if they grew up in India or among their own kind abroad. You cannot get through the day without being placed in a situation where you compare or are compared against one or more...

I always have dry moringa leaves in my pantry. There are days when I miss the shojne flowers cooked in mustard paste - my paternal grandmother's version of it is the standard my taste is settled on. My mother's not too different from it either. There was always a novelty to this dish - the flowers were in bloom on for so long and you could only make the dish during that time. But there was sense of scarcity or impossibility associated with making a meal from this flowers, enjoying the aroma of the dish as it served. When I use my dry moringa leaves to cook, it is to travel back in time when the real thing was in easy reach, when I did not have to make the most of its essence. It is the difference between wearing your favorite perfume and trying to reconstruct its smell form memory knowing you can never have it again. These thoughts crossed my mind this past Diwali. Going to the Indian grocery store was the closest I came to experiencing actual Diwali. It was Friday evening and...

Reading these predictions about how AI will change the game for everyone in the next five years made me wonder if there any specific tipping point that makes all this possible for a technology that dates way back . There are similarities between this hype-cycle and the one over Big Data - it was going to be the Holy Grail that businesses must find or perish. That used to be the sentiment until it was not and it sounds like with LLM we might have gone as big as reasonable, feasible and useful: Shortly after OpenAI released GPT-4, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told a crowd at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that he thought the era of “giant, giant” models was over. The strategy of throwing ever more text at ever more neurons had reached a point of diminishing returns. Among other challenges, he said, OpenAI was bumping up against the physical limits of how many data centers the company owned or could build. So beyond this point, it is about using the technology to produce value. The n...

Reading these lines in a poem , takes me back twenty years and the pain has not quite calloused over yet. I called for you, in vain, even using your secret names, the ones only the night knows: wind-kiss, brilliant-fruit, dervish-moon    . . . Over and over, I said your names, over and over until they filled the wounded air of  the car and when there was no more room for another sound, they caught and hooked the ring of   the brakes hugging the rails. The secret names for me are the ways in which I thought I knew and loved, the ways in which I imagined I too was known and loved. There came I time when the incantations and requiems for the past finally ended. Most days are too full of things to get done to even remember the few fragments of that time that still remain. The rustle of freshly laundered white cotton, the smell of Bvlgari Blue that brought on tidal waves of sadness. All finally .gone because there was no more room

Sometimes when I share about things at work with J, I get some very sound advice that forces me to reset my existing way of thinking about whatever my problem us. She has been in the workplace a total of one year now but it has been a very intense ride for her and the mental growth is has been astounding in the last few months - its like she crossed some major threshold of maturity. I often feel grateful for the wisdom I get from J and more than that the way she conveys her message - it is gentle and impactful. It makes me want to make lasting change.  We want to believe that we raised our kids (hopefully well) and the fruit of our labor is manifested in how they turn out as adults. In my case, I simply did not have it in me to give J what she has at a very young age - a certain Zen about her, having wisdom well beyond her years and the manner of speech is not one I could have taught her either. I can get caustic, sarcastic and worse when stressed or angry. It's how I try to overco...

The idea of borrowing a person from a library instead of a book to hear them tell their own story is as wonderfully simple and brilliant. It solves for so many things at the same time. People are increasingly reliant on digital means of keeping in touch with friends and family even as real-life in-person relationships suffer from lack of feed and care. Here in America we are living in the midst of a loneliness epidemic . The lines that divide only proliferate even though there is very little to tell people apart in a globalized world. In such an environment, borrowing a person for an hour to hear their story told in their own words is like the much needed breath of fresh air.  I am imagining how amazing something like would be to have my neighborhood library. I could go there and borrow a person who grew up in a country I know nothing about and spend an hour hearing them talk about the childhood in a town I might struggle to find on the map. Another day, I could learn about someone...

There is a lot of sense in a 4-day school week for overworked teachers. But there are downsides for parents who cannot be home on that off day and need daycare coverage. The value for the kids having to spend a whole day at daycare instead of at school is questionable - they really don't get a day of rest and relaxation, just a new kind of friction in their schedule with no benefit. It would start to make sense if the kids could use that extra day in a way that was both useful and comfortable for them. For those who do have a caregiver at home, it could work out very well. As with every change way from established "norm", those that are already thriving will likely do even better but those that are struggling will suffer disproportionately. ..   In Chico, Texas, where the public school district also announced a shift to four-day academic schedules this year, officials said positions that used to receive five applications were suddenly receiving more than 20.. It is great...

Good essay on software for medical devices and the perils of that not being free. The reasoning makes sense in some situations but not all: Free software  in medical aids helps the patient, the environment, and the healthcare system. After all, the software in hearing aids, insulin pumps and pacemakers controls parts of our body. We should be allowed to control it. Software in medical aids has to respect our freedom! Free software can make the medical device last longer. The free software community can fix bugs and provide updates so that patients are not left at the mercy of the companies. Then, patients can  choose to repair  their device instead of throwing it away. Last but not least, long-time support can save the healthcare system  and its patients  lots of money My aunt has been on a pacemaker for almost a decade now. Recently, she had to have a procedure to fix something inside that was broken and there was no non-invasive way to fix the problem. I am t...

Searching for the word Canterbury in my emails for a tart recipe and stumbled upon an exchange with C from over ten years ago. At the time of writing, I had once met her once and we had hit it off. She was married twenty five years at the time to a guy she had met a church. He came highly recommended by common friends so C said "Yes" when he proposed. They looked very comfortable together - I recognized the warm, peaceful feeling between them that could be relaxing to an outsider. I was going through what appeared to be unsurmountable challenges in my personal life at the time, trapped in a miserable, no-win situation. I felt safe to unburden to C and she promised to pray for me. I have no doubt that she did but sometimes good wishes and prayers are simply not enough, It is like having a well-meaning neighbor lend you a broom when your car is buried in snow. Reading through that exchange with C brought back memories I would rather forget.  We are no longer in touch and not fo...

I am observing a Gen Z on the younger end of the spectrum working fully remote. The company culture is not about being on video - people find it distracting so all calls are off video. The combination of remote work combined with no requirement to even look presentable for work has created some habits that would be hard to break as time goes on. V is able to lay in bed most day and work from there. Even sitting is not a requirement for his job.  There is no need to wake up before the first meeting of the day whenever that is and he can fall asleep right there in bed whenever he feels like a nap which could be any time of day or night. Monday to Friday proceed in the same manner - a blur of naps and calls all taken from bed, some work in between. Weekends are a different mode when he is out and about with friends who have freed up for the weekend. Many among them are still in school and have more structure in their lives. I don't think remote work is serving V well at all - but not ...

I met a former manager after a long time recently. Like many managers I have had in my life, T was harmless but not particularly useful. He most certainly was not a mentor to me. Twelve or so years ago, I might have had different expectations of one such as T and was likely too consumed with troubles in my own life to notice anything that did not have a "house on fire" grade impact on me. The rest was all noise that I was only too happy to ignore. I saw things in very different light this time. T had assumed that I remained where he had last found me and that the power dynamic between us stayed the same as well. I was surprised at first and then mildly amused. We had a civil and completely useless conversation about nothing.  Back when T was my boss, we had to do 1:1s once a week and the norm in the company was for the manager to take their direct to lunch and have the chat offsite. It seemed like a nice idea when I started there but good intentions don't always produce d...

Some ten years ago, I was laid from a company that I enjoyed working at mainly for the quality of talent they attracted combined with terrific work-life balance. I looked forward to meeting the people I worked with everyday - that made up for a lot that was not right about the job. That year, they let go about a dozen of us - we all took it pretty hard. One of the women in that group who is my friend to this day, has made great strides in her career since that event and has been on a mission to poach the best talent away from the company that treated her poorly. Thanks to her and similar efforts of a few others like her, the best people have left the company, hurting their business. Recently, some folks who had we had known from back then, organized a happy hour for the alumni and current employees. Both of my friend and I decided to attend.  The bad feelings from that layoff years ago has gone away for us at least - management appeared to be a mix of confused and contrite but trie...

What this kid's rant about her 9-5 life in the office gave me food for thought. We live in a time where a young lady such as herself should consider herself lucky she even has a job - there is a terrible unfairness to that and it speaks to how badly we are failing our children. If all a young person can do is commute, work and come home to sleep they cannot grow to their full potential as human beings - there is no time to think about what is next, planning and preparing to seize a bigger, better opportunity. It is also true, time moves at a different pace when you are that young - the days all blur into one infinite stretch of quiet, sad desperation - when will I cook, clean, care for me, meet friends or date. J's life is a lot like this kid's life.  Just because our generation and perhaps those before us had no option but to work in this manner, does not mean that our kids and their kids have to continue to follow a the same soul-crushing pattern. When I started at my fi...

We sometimes take a walk through a neighborhood close to ours that sits around a little lake. The lake has a small population of mallards, herons and egrets. I never fail to think how those birds have a great life - there is no competition for resources and no animals around that could prey on them. There is a abundance of fish in the lake, the trees and bushes all around it make for a cozy habitat. The people and their houses are set away from the lake by a good distance separated by woods. There are no benches for people to sit around by the lake - which based on your perspective is a good or bad thing. There are walkers (like us) and some runners that do their laps around the water.  This is never a busy place and the you can almost always expect total silence except for the sound of the birds. Last time we were there it was on Halloween so the neighborhood was a hive of activity with trick-or-treaters doing their rounds accompanied by groups of adults. Back at the lake nothing ...

Reading these lines from What If This Were Enough made me smile thinking about all the times that I have felt the way I expressed myself to my boss or a peer came out a bit too caustic for corporate tastes and that I needed to sweeten the talk: It’s the boss who wants you to be more polite in your email messages, and not point out the obvious sloppy work and bizarre groupthink and passive-aggressiveness and corner-cutting madness that unfold every day without comment. Partner teams I have had the misfortune to work with over the years in many organizations, refused to deliver on the most basic requirements of their job without the issue being escalated as high as it could be. But calling them out for such behavior was always considered improper and not demonstrative of "leadership". It was never clear to me how anyone could expect bad behavior to change without any incentive.  Over time, I came to think that this debilitating level of organizational dysfunction is exactly wh...

I can relate to one of the blockers to de-cluttering - avoidance of some stuff from the past that triggers bad and painful memories but buried in that pile somewhere are morsels of good that I do want to hold on to.  The effort it takes to sift through the whole thing and discard what causes pain is feels like a pointless undertaking - wasted time for very little value. My symptoms of the problem are a bit different from what the article describes but there is avoidance at the root to push the problem to another day and in the meanwhile pretend the problem does not exist Lettings things pile up, like unopened mail, unfixed paperwork, unfinished projects, and unreturned items, can cause an insurmountable amount of anxiety. "I say this to you now: It will not take care of itself. And you are undermining your self-confidence with every day that goes by and you don't act," the author writes. I do not have any of these things " unopened mail, unfixed paperwork, unfinishe...

The idea that after the population bubble bursts, humankind will be forced back to a primitive way of life has some logical basis. If K-12 education continues declining and kids don't see the point of learning anything because AI can answer all questions, chances are there will be no qualified people left to repair things after natural catastrophes. So, there is a path to going to back to basics and somehow surviving. Maybe that is nature's way of slowing down our unhealthy, unsustainable, unnatural growth. This was not the happiest thing to read so for balance found some inspiration in Simon Sinek's Find Your Why where he starts with : Fulfillment is a right and not a privilege. Every single one of us is entitled to feel fulfilled by the work we do, to wake up feeling inspired to go to work, to feel safe when we’re there and to return home with a sense that we contributed to something larger than ourselves. Fulfillment is not a lottery. It is not a feeling reserved for a ...

I have been oversold on every job I ever had. Earlier in my career, when I was naive enough to believe some of the story, I ended up disappointed. Restlessness set in soon after that and within a year or eighteen months I was on to the next thing. One way to look at a person like me is to say they are a job-hopper - which is factually true. But a closer look would reveal that they had a series of breakups from short-lived relationships that is very much the norm of the dating life. That very same person when the meet the one they are meant to be with, does settle down. They get off the dating market and start a family.  So is the case with a serial job-hopper - they have been lied to early on in their career much like the person who got off to a rough start with unsuitable partners, then they get a taste for change of scenery and develop a propensity to look around all too soon and with little provocation. As does the woman who had a series of bad dates and questionable boyfriends ...

Recently, I have been mulling over why competent people sometimes make a series of bad decisions that look like a set of bad gambling bets, each building on previous losses. Is this a time-bound thing that will pass with some break-through event occurring or is there a way to push the reset button on the process. Reading this HBR article on the topic was interesting. Decision fatigue seems to the likely culprit when one bad decision causes new variables to be introduced in an unstable system, requiring the decision-maker to make even better decisions than they were able to make before.  Under such challenging circumstances and given their most recent loss, chances are the decision is bad one once again. Even if objectively "smart" decision, in the context it plays out badly. So now we have upto two bad decisions - the later worse than the former. The system is further de-stablized and yet more unknowns come into play and the cycle continues. It is possible to get to the poin...

I have seen a couple of people who went from being completely healthy to nearing death's door without any early warning signs. While not very young were still too young to die - their parents were still alive. How a person thinks about their own impending death is probably more complex than anything else they might have spend their time thinking about. Having an estimated date attached to an event that is an absolutely certainty in everyone's life, it becomes hyper-real to that person and those close to them. It can be an out of body experience for loved ones who cannot forget for a minute what is coming and yet the person's life and normalcy feels like a daily miracle they are grateful to witness. I could not help thinking about my journey as a helpless bystander to the soon to come death of people I loved, as I read this story abut medically assisted death .  ..legalized MAID, allowing physicians to administer lethal drugs to patients who, as the law put it, had a “grievo...

The racism inherent in the technology of camera phone is a problem a brown woman like myself is very familiar with specially if she happens to be one is frequently shares the frame with light-skinned people. The only way for me to get a passably decent picture is to put on make-up with HD powder to finish and make sure the lighting is near prefect. These conditions are not achievable in a candid shot and out comes a picture where my face looks dimension-less, weirdly blotchy, deathly exhausted and worse. It's not they way I want to memorialize the moment - not sure anyone else in the picture wants it either.  I don't wear makeup regularly and am fortunate to have skin that can get away without it. In pictures taken by a phone (which is almost always the case these days), the light-skinned person in the frame looks mostly like themselves, maybe a notch paler in comparison to my much darker version as the phone camera renders me. I have absolutely no problem with dark skin (my o...

I definitely have nomophobia . J has called me a wall-hugger given my propensity to plug my phone to airport walls even though I have a phone charger that is fully charged. Nothing short of phobia explains the behavior. This is like having a Plan D as a contingency when the first three fail. It seems like this particular phobia is a manifestation of some other unresolved issues the person has What causes nomophobia, then? Well, first and foremost, phones. Mobiles are connected to the internet, making them highly addictive instruments. But it’s also possible that nomophobia could be a symptom of another addiction or anxiety. Other anxiety is likely where things originate for me. I am yet to get used to the idea that J is an independent woman living her own life and a phone call from her is not a crisis that I need to dive in and solve. The calls tend to be about rather mundane things like an air-fryer recipe she is getting ready to try and has a question, which nail color I think would ...

This past Puja season, connecting with Bengali friends triggered a lot of musical nostalgia. This is the time of year for me to soak up the music I grew up with and have lost touch with over the years. My father was always singing something - his way of expressing this mood and mental state perhaps. My mother hummed tunes but was not much of a singer. For reasons I don't understand, I did not inherit the humming or singing traits from my parents - and in that sense, I must also lack the ability to vocalize my state of mind. If humans are meant to have vocal or physically demonstrative form of expression like dance, then it can be viewed as a handicap to lack both.  My Bengali friends can all hold a tune, some with more dexterity that others. We all have a few Tagore songs that are particularly special or meaningful to us. It is interesting when the same song is The One for a few of us and yet the reasons are quite different. This song has evolved in how it makes me feel over the y...

Sometimes and ad is so nicely made, it makes you not hate it at all no matter how often it comes on. Discover's Jennifer series may turn into one of those . Its funny, quirky and touches some common chord. We like exclusive to be truly exclusive so we feel special but so does everyone else.  That is the sentiment these ads have tapped into very artfully. I for one am looking forward to what comes next. I cannot think of another time when I could say this about an ad since chuckling at the latest  Amul ad  back in my childhood. Amul felt the pulse of the country and the paid advertising homage to the the most trending topic of the day. Apparently, the jabs Amul ads could freely take back in my time are not so beloved these days .  While the Amul girl’s snark has tempered, she remains omnipresent. She’s on every packet of Amul milk, with 40 million sold per day. At least once a week, her ad is in the pages of the top 30 newspapers in the country, amounting to roughly ...

At the going rate, it won't be long before the idea of having a child will become one only the wealthy can entertain. The numbers are eye-watering . Back in the day when I had to pay for child-care as a single-mother on a modest income, it was a fifth of this and even that felt like a lot. There were parents even back then who had it much harder than I did - they were truly stretched thin. These numbers do not make sense. People on average have not seen their incomes rise four or five times in the twenty years, not even close.  The desire for parenthood is already a hard one to fulfill, even without the financial complications. It used to be that people could count it as a natural life stage thing. Not anymore. I have had women in their early 20s tell me that they are considering freezing their eggs. Why postpone what must be done any way. One of my good friends finding herself single in her late thirties was getting nightmares of her eggs shriveling inside, followed by her womb an...