Heartcrossings

Found this proverb in a book recommended by a co-worker ‘An invisible red thread connects those destined destined to meet, despite the time, the place, and the circumstances. The thread can be tightened or tangled, but will never be broken.’ . The book is more useful for a younger person if the reader intends to use some of the learnings from it.  But the quote gave me some food for thought - its the same idea I was raised on growing, about pre-destination and how there is no such thing as free-will. All the puzzle pieces of your life will come together, you just don't see the end state picture until you put the final piece in place. There is no randomness only a slow, gradual process of discovery. I have thought about this concept many times in my life specially in the context of how two people meet along their separate life journeys an part ways after a while.  That encounter opens some doors, closes others, and defines what happens next - another puzzle piece falls in plac...

I don't buy a lot of stuff to begin with but this year, I have tried to be even more mindful. Clothing that I have bought this year, I have made it a point to wear as often as possible. It would be great to downsize a lot more and bring it down to basics - only what I truly love and want to wear anytime and not seek excuses to wait until another time. I agree that buying online has become more and more frictionless over time to serve the retailer's interest and not that of the consumer . We are only the accidental beneficiary if we believe that getting stuff delivered to us promptly is a benefit and not being deliberate about our buying decisions is a good thing.  Convenience, though, tends to be a hollow virtue on its own. Much of the consumer system is constructed to generate retailers’ desired outcomes as frequently as possible. When something is made convenient, it’s because that convenience benefits the company. Sometimes, your interests and those of the retailer can align...

A young lady in my parents' neighborhood is getting married and its the biggest celebration in their para after Durga Puja and Diwali. I know for a fact that my parents like S a lot. She is a very pleasant, easy to get along with, happy to spend time with the elderly, and is an amazing vocalist. S is only a few years older than J so that is another reason for their affinity for her. I would have expected my mother to be excited for her wedding given her closeness to the family. But she only complained about how out of hand celebrations of all kinds has grown - people just need and excuse for a shindig even while everything around them is falling apart. The ranks of the unemployed and underemployed keeps growing, the elderly are on their own without any safety net, the infrastructure is stressed beyond help and yet people are looking for every excuse to have fun.  She thinks the world around her has gone crazy. S's wedding party has turned into a week of non-stop entertainment f...

This article about where the digital afterlife industry is headed makes for fascinating reading. We started watching Six Feet Under recently so it was particularly interesting for me to compare where we were some twenty years ago on this topic versus where we are now. The idea that our data is us has obvious merit but a lot depends on how expressive, honest and complete a person's written word is. I have been writing this blog for a very long time but the content was never intended to be a factual journal about me or anyone else who I have written about. There are enough breadcrumbs there for me to reconstruct the memory and relive the events that prompted the post but there is not much beyond that. I have my reasons for writing what I do, the people who feature in it serve as inspiration in some form. But what comes out in the form of a blog post could be quite far removed from facts, the timeline is almost always random and then there are any number of omissions.  If a conversat...

On Thanksgiving Day this year, I reached out to thank the many friends who had welcomed J and I to their family dinner tables on this day for the many years that I was a single-mom. We became an extension of their families - aunts, uncles and cousins knew of us and expected us to be there. One person I really wanted to reach out to and could not find her phone number. A few days later, after much searching I was able to find an old email address for her which likely she no longer uses. But I had to take my chances and write to her. She used to be my boss back when I knew her.  L was working hard to save her own marriage at the time. Her husband worked five states away and they met only few times a year other than for the holidays. L relied on the support of her family to help raise her kids while he worked full-time, so it was not feasible for her to relocate to the husband's town. He had some specialized skills that made it hard for him to find work in ours. I met L's husband ...

Thought this was a beautiful way to celebrate a person's life . On our local park there are a few benches with little plaques memorializing the people to whom they are dedicated. One of them lets passersby know about the couple who loved the tree that grows across from the bench and their children set up the bench so others could enjoy the view of that tree from their parents' vantage point. I love that vignette about the bench and came to appreciate the tree whose beauty had moved this couple. This woman's idea of wiping out the medical debt of those who are still living is such a powerful gesture. It gives the surviving loved one something tangible to hold on to - which is such an amazing gift. How to remember those we loved and lost to old age or untimely illness is not an easy question. You want the one departing to choose the way they want to be remembered and for what reasons. Was it that special tree in the local park that moved two people in a profound way for reaso...

The tech news these days are strange bordering on bizarre. Disbanding the team in charge of responsible AI in the name of efficiency is a choice that is wildly irresponsible but totally okay at some level the way the company spokesperson depicts it Though RAI employees have now been dispersed throughout the organization, the spokesperson noted that they will continue to support “responsible AI development and use.” “We continue to prioritize and invest in safe and responsible AI development,” the spokesperson said. In many organizations ignoring a problem and pretending it does not exist can make it go away or morph into a new and different problem. Its like wild things growing in a forest. You stop dealing with it and you no longer know what comes next. Maybe that is the best answer for now. Who knows what the operational definition of "responsible" is. That needs to be defined first and then everyone can take stock of whether they are meeting the bar or not. This decision ...

It has been a pretty unique year with random stressors that I did not anticipate. Luckily, there were close calls but nothing was lost. Yet, as the year draws to close I feel drained of some inner energy much like one who has suffered a few significant losses.  Maybe that is what a series of near misses will do to a person. Reading this Elizabeth Bishop poem made me think about loss, impending loss and so on. Perhaps I should go into the new year being better prepared and with more grace- learn the art of losing better and placing things in context: I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster. For me that would more than two lovely towns and several rivers and a sub-continent at least. Those losses are quite old now and certainly whatever disaster it may have been it is long gone and forgotten by now. The scene that I do remember is seeing the truck packed with everything in house leaving a plume ...

I was not familiar with the stay-or-pay clause in employment contracts. The stories of folks for whom staying was not a viable option are eye-opening. The employer makes your work-conditions completely untenable maybe because they want you to quit and as a bonus pay them for the privilege. The first story is reminiscent of H1-B body-shops from back in the day when those were running fast and lose.  The right to work in the US came with a big price-tag. The employer paid the hapless visa holder a fraction of their fair market value, gummed up the works as far as processing their Green Card and maintained a crushing degree of control on this person who was free to quit their job and return to India in 60 days, all the time and effort spent in gaining stability in the US upended instantly. For many that was not a choice they could easily make and they had to suffer in ways that are similar to Vidal in this story - but somehow this is legal Before moving to the United States, Vidal ha...

My friend B and her husband have become empty nesters recently. Last time we met, it was right after the youngest had left to college. Now it has been a year and they have both had time to process the feeling. B's husband is very ready to move on to the next phase of their lives. He looks relaxed and happy - major responsibilities were executed well and it is time for well-deserved rest. This is the most cheerful I have seen him in the decade that I have known this couple. B is a different story entirely. She looks bereft - there is no other way to describe her affect. She is going through the motions of entertaining friends, socializing and the rest, but her heart is not in it. She is simply not able to join her husband in his desire to move on to the next phase, have their grand adventures together.  That is the not what the rest of her life is about. She is seeking the community of women of her age and life stage she can commiserate with. The life experiences of B as a mother ar...

In the introduction to The Upanishads, Swami Paramananda says:  Upanishad shows that the only hell is absence of knowledge. As long as man is overpowered by the darkness of ignorance, he is the slave of Nature and must accept whatever comes as the fruit of his thoughts and deeds. When he strays into the path of unreality, the Sages declare that he destroys himself; There is this Alvin Toffler quote about the need to learn and relearn to not descend into illiteracy in the 21st century “The illiterate of the 21st century,” Toffler wrote, “will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.” Thinking about the hell begotten by the absence of knowledge and the need to unlearn and relearn to stay even passingly relevant these days, got me feeling concerned about how I would fare in the next decade and more. The learning muscle will grow increasingly weaker even the number of brand new things to learn will increase rapidly.  The foundational...

Walking through the carpet of fallen leaves in my neighborhood recently, I recalled  this Stanley Kunitz poem Blue poured into summer blue, A hawk broke from his cloudless tower, The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew That part of my life was over. I don't pretend  to know what Kunitz had in mind when he wrote these lines. But that afternoon seeing the leaves under my feet and the the cerulean blue of the sky above, I did feel "That part of my life was over". In the sense of what the year has been so far, the near misses and scares I had with the health of both parents. Learning my childhood friend is fighting for her life and going through the full roller-coaster of emotions after that. That afternoon was about feeling grateful that my parents are both still around, my friend is still in the fight and we are planning to meet. The part about being in a state of constant dread is over. I am glad that fall has put a clear division between what has been and what I want to l...

Nice essay on the concept of reductive seduction which in summary is the fallacy of the first world that they can wave a magic wand and solve basic third world problems like access to clean water and toilets . I can speak to problems in India having been in the midst of them for decades. The first thing to understand is that if a problem were easy to solve it would have been solved already. There is no lack of smart people with ingenious ideas and the desire to roll up their sleeves and do the work. It might not be enough to eradicate the problem but good enough to make a visible impact.  With that being said, if the problem continues to exist, suffice it to say that is hard and bordering on impossible to solve. The best efforts will yield marginal results, it will be a case of two steps forward and one step behind for decades until some visible signs of change can be seen. If anyone home or abroad comes with the desire to take on a big problem without the right mindset, their fai...

Throughout my career I have seen women cope with burnout very differently than men. Women are impacted a lot more as the numbers in the story suggest and the decisions they make are more extreme. Leaving a high-pressure job in a large, well-recognized company to take on a role in a small obscure company no one ever heard of is a move I have seen a few times. Some have switched careers entirely to find a pace that fits their needs. Long hiatuses to raise children is not uncommon either. My friend W calls this phase "left to be Mamma". He has been in HR all his life and has seen any number of talented women simply leave when the pressures of raising children and keeping their marriage functional was too much to fit alongside the job.  W sees these women returning once the kids are older and more self-sufficient and having to prove themselves all over again. All the gains from their last time around having disappeared by the time they return. I know of a few young women who are...

A few months ago, some words my father said to me made me cry uncontrollably. Having put time space between the event allowing time to heal, I would say the words themselves were not material. They served to trigger memories I want to leave forgotten. He forced to me re-examine them and deal with the full cycle of pain. I am certain that was not his intent and he does not know how badly I reacted. We did not discuss and moved on to other things after I had calmed down. I felt foolish to begin with having the hysterical reaction that I had - it was like my mental age had been reset of under twelve with a few magic words. It took some effort to claw my way out to the here and now, where I am seen as a stable and dependable person by those who love me. My problem statement that had brought on the episode is well-described in this article : As a psychological phenomenon, guilt can be frustratingly thorny. For if you’re afflicted with a tyrannical superego—one that feels compelled to come a...

It was fun reading this book excerpt by an author I had never heard of. Crime fiction is a reading genre for me but it is definitely one of the movie genres I like. If they made this book into a movie, I would gladly watch but reading the book is harder. After having watched The Fall of the House of Usher, I tried reading the Edgar Allan Poe - starting with the eponymous book. I struggled just as much as I had as kid trying to read Poe, inspired by my cousin who was older, wiser and a fan of Poe's works. I did not want to miss out and applied my best effort to understand what the fuss was all about. It did not work and it was my loss. There will always be some exceptional writing out there that some readers simply cannot latch on to. As such, they cannot get the value from that that the devotees of the writer get from it (my cousin was nothing short of a Poe devotee).  The writing of Poe was only one of many examples of the how two kids from the same family, cultural background an...

This election cycle, I received a ton of flyers from both parties in my mailbox. Some of the content came in envelopes and was marked as sensitive or triggering. I opened them out curiosity. They contained salacious pictures of one of the candidates with a lot of quotes from various dubious sources that were meant to vouch for the images. The woman was depicted as immoral and having sexual interests that did not conform to family values one seeking public office should uphold. My first instinct was to think of the whole thing as AI generated and fake. Just not worth wasting any time over. I threw it in trash where it properly belonged.  Given the high likelihood that information that seeks to influence election outcomes is false, my strategy has been to filter out all information with no exception. The average person will not have the time or resources to sift real from fake news. If there is a significant probability of the news being fake, seems like a good enough strategy to dis...

I can understand what drives people to be " over-employed " having done a simpler variant of it when J was growing up. I picked up contract work that jobs that I was way over-qualified for. While the money was far from great, it gave me the gift of time that I so badly needed as a single-mother. Work was not an overhang in my life - the job was simple, transactional and only took a small fraction of my billable hours. Given that it was so easy, I always exceeded expectations and built a good reputation for myself - known to be very reliable, delivers on time and with high bar. For me the hours in the day that the strategy freed up to do things for J was far more valuable than the money.  Having done this for a decade and half until J was in high school, taught me a few important lessons that folks who are trying to maximize financial security instead of free time, will learn along the way. Over time, you become a lesser version of who could have been professionally and that b...

I like the idea of a doctor-in-a-box instead of a PCP given that I have not found one in the last two decades that I like or trust. It's been an unending series of bad first-dates trying to find one that is right for me. While not everyone is like me, I do believe there is enough of us to have such a box concept even worth bringing to market.  the CarePod is an attempt to fully automate a check-up: A patient approaches the metallic, square 8x8 foot box, which is eight feet by eight feet, and unlocks it with their phone. Once inside, they find a chair and a large screen, where a robotic voice walks them through a body scan or blood pressure reading or finger prick blood draws — all of which they do on their own. I know the risks I have based on my family history and try to do what I can to manage and minimize them. I also know that I do not want to go on medications unless that is last and only resort. What would help me most is to have a set of performance metrics determined for m...

Tech talent going to work for the government starts to make sense seeing how disposable they have become in the tech industry. If the person has a valuable skill and they are being treated disrespectfully despite doing good work, comes a time when they no longer want to put up with it.  “This has been a moment where folks have started pausing and started thinking about where they can make the most difference.” Maybe the tide with rise for the government and the tech worker will have the sense of stability they have long missed. A win-win situation if all goes well people may be realizing that tech companies are treating them as replaceable, pushing them to reconsider roles in tech.  I know a few folks who came from government to tech and after a short stint returned to the world they are more familiar with. I can only imagine, the tech industry detour gave them a taste for how the other side lives but it did not impress them enough to consider a long-term career option. My fr...

This post was met with a lot of enthusiasm in my network and made me smile when I saw it. It is the unvarnished truth about a product manager's life. What you want to make possible versus what you actually can is so far apart that they are two different things entirely. You start with one vision and narrative about what the product will do and be. Reality strikes and you start paring back one feature at a time until you have the infamous MVP that is horrible outcome of several dozen compromises in none of which the product manager or their vision prevailed. Now, all this has to be dressed up as something worth for the engineers to rally around an build.  You cannot motivate a team to do their best work if they know they will be delivering something ugly, deficient and unlovable destined to hobble along for very many releases until it has a better life. That does not get people energized. And so this lovely bit of wisdom from the trenches on what purpose a product roadmap is meant ...

Watched The Fall of the House of Usher and it was very entertaining. The one bit that really impressed me was Roderick Usher's monologue about lemons in the middle of Episode 3. Every word in his exposition is sadly true and is drawn from real life. Not everyone feels the same way about the lemon speech:  Taken in the context of the entire show, this whole business with the lemons completely undercuts much of what Flanagan is trying to say about wealth or the greed of corporations. Making a healthcare CEO who got rich on opioids into a caricature of evil because of the way he’d sell lemons is easy, but it also obscures the insidious and more straightforward ways corporations actually do exploit markets, or even the way Roderick himself knowingly pushed an addictive painkiller in order to sell more of it. The way I see it, sometimes it is cathartic to create extreme caricatures to draw attention to a complex problem. We have to credit the viewer with a modicum of intelligence and b...

I spent a good hour cleaning up the earthen lamps I lit for Diwali. They have been around for a few years now and by any standard would be considered quite ordinary - I had bought them at the local Indian grocery store. Every year when I light them, my thoughts turn to children in India who likely labored over these lamps. To make them look less mass manufactured (as they are) someone had to paint and embellish them by hand - that would be the kind of job a relative young child could do.  There are some many intertwined layers of wrong here that a person would always be in error no matter what they did. Cleaning the lamps is my way of showing gratitude and contrition at the same time. Some child somewhere in the country where I was born made this thing  and it did not bring any joy to them. It is likely they spent Diwali without light and food. People like me around the world, enjoyed the fruit of their labor, celebrated the festival of lights. We talked to our kids about the ...

I had never heard of such a thing as a Mikiphone and thought it was a very clever invention. To think that the idea of bringing portability to music was implemented that long ago is fascinating.  It is not super-simple to use and takes more than pushing a button but there is a certain charm to the process of setting it up. Was reading another article about how our taste in music is created and what it means.  ..the music people listened to at an early age becomes their native home comfort music. When they grow up, that music will be part of who they are, tied in with memories and growing up. All of these powers are why music is so important to us. For me the music I listened to at an early age had two very distinct tracks. The music I listened to at home and I want to listened to at school. My school had a public address system and the principal enjoyed Western classical music, often waltzes and marches. I was too young to know what any of it was but loved what I heard anyway....

J's college freshman year is well behind her but this funny list of things a freshman would never say on their weekly call home made me chuckle. Towards the end of her college years, J did ask "How are you?" Post college she wants to know in greater depth what is going on in my life. But back then it was impossible to imagine.  The self-absorption of a child who has recently turned adult can be range from absurd, irritating and hurtful but in reality it is just them trying to become their own person, learn who they are and what they are meant to do with their life. Once some of the goals start to trend green, they have more capacity for parents, family and the like. I loved this particular one from the list   “I already bought my airline ticket home, because I know prices go up if you wait until the last minute.” I have yet to see that come to pass with J. The travel plans are up in the air till the very end and suddenly I will have flight details by text. I am too overj...

 The author of this highly pointless article calls himself "the office whisperer". What he calls the trend of the future was available quite ubiquitously even twenty years ago. The right to work from home (telecommute) part-time or even full-time as reward for strong performance was common in mundane organizations like banks and health insurance companies. Even as a consultant, I got to enjoy those privileges, the full-time employees had a much better deal and rightly so. The closing of this writing so clueless that I have to wonder if the wisdom that author is spewing out sprung from the trusty ChatGPT By anchoring flexibility as a merit-based privilege, you invite a culture of self-motivation and responsibility–one that values results over routine, innovation over presence, and autonomy over micromanagement. It’s a cultural shift that can redefine what it means to be productive in the modern world. People had reasonable expectation of quality and originality if stuff was p...

Someone I know (we will call her L) has been telling little lies about work she is doing for almost a year now. At first it appeared that she sincerely wished to do the things she was representing she would or already was. There was every appearance that such was indeed the case - there was a lot of action that an outsider could genuinely mistake for work. Then at some point, it started to appear as if the volume of work was greatly exaggerated. In order to cover for the foundational lie on top of which the whole edifice of lies was built, L had to manufacture things do to that tangentially connected to work that needed to be done. It hardly matters what the work was because the way this unfolded over time is pretty universal.  Say a person was tasked with cleaning my yard and they came in with the full set of tools and represented to me that the work would take 8-10 hours. If I have never done any yardwork myself, chances are I don't know how far off the mark that estimate is. In ...

I had not heard of the anti-bride movement but it sounds quite sad - all the pomp and circumstance of a wedding without any anchoring tradition that people (including the bride) maybe familiar with. It would make more sense if the whole business was frugal and simple but that is clearly not the objective. It is as if not dressing like a bride and skipping the rituals of marriage will de-risk from bad outcomes. The bridal and wedding industry is making just as much money and the bride best have a very good prenup no matter now truly, deeply and madly she is in love. My friend T who is in her 60s now said something the other day that resonated with me. Historically and until quite recently, marriage and love were not meant, required or expected to intersect.  Marriage was a family and social obligation - the true nature of the union most evident in royal alliances but the same construct applied for the rest of the population - the stakes were much lower but the union had to bring so...

Nice post on why bias for action is not always the best idea . The example of a goal keeper taking action just to not be hated by fans for losing the game when in fact staying put could be the better play is something we can relate to in everyday life. Say a child comes crying to their parent saying they got hurt in their head and are in a lot of pain. The parent would likely bias for action and it that probably the right thing to do no matter if the child is exaggerating a bit to get attention - neglecting the situation could have bad consequences.  The same child when they push their parent to yes to something they are reluctant to allow, will likely meet some stalling tactic - no action basically. It would not be a good move to say yes (and lose  authority) or say no (be intractable where the facts may prove that to be a bad decision in the end). At work similar things apply.  When dealing with a person who is not a good team player, sometimes it's best to ignore them ...

Watching my aging parents and others of similar age, it seems that the idea of irrelevance starts to set in well before people are close of dying. Not everyone is able to have a healthy self-esteem when it comes to their understanding of their relevance to the world and even immediate family. What are they contributing and why they would be missed when they are gone. Those who are able to add intrinsic value to the lives of the younger generations in their families and communities feel much better about their relevance.  They have something to contribute and are infact doing so. The "contribution" can take a myriad of forms - being a judgment-free sounding board, being a mentor, older and wiser friend, lending professional expertise in a pro bono capacity and so on. When a person is not able to see their contribution quite clearly, they need their loved ones to help shore up their flagging confidence - convince them that they are indeed wanted, loved and valued. I can see how...

What prominent writers have to say about AI and the future of writing brought to mind a story about Flaubert and Maupassant I had read in essay a while back. The essay quote what Maupassant had to say about what he had learned from Flaubert “Whatever you want to say,” he would later quote from Flaubert’s teachings, “there is only one word to express it, only one verb to give it a movement, only one adjective to qualify it. You must search for that word, that verb, that adjective, and never be content with an approximation, never resort to tricks, even clever ones, and never have recourse to verbal sleight-of-hand to avoid a difficulty.” In theory, AI could find that perfect verb, adjective and adverb to say what needs to be said. Presumably it is trained on this notion of perfection as defined by masters of the craft. But even that is only part of what makes Maupassant's short-stories so compelling and unforgettable. The language is polished to perfection but there is a lot more ...