Heartcrossings

I read a short story written by a friend from college recently. It was a proud moment to see one of our own getting published in a reputable literary magazine. B was a geek who dreamed of being literary without the education in early life or the time to work on her craft later. We were kindred spirits in that sense. I was glad to see her make it somewhere even if decades too late. But the topic of her story put me in a pensive mood. Only those who knew her well from her college das would be able to see that it was autobiographical. She was pushed into an arranged marriage by her parents. It was considered a high-status match for their family - having scored the best deal ever, they made haste to close. In her story, B mentions meeting her ex-boyfriend from college a decade after marriage. The event is described with the degree of precision that is hard to mistake. That was S clear as day. In her story S is married and so is the protagonist but both are unhappy in their own ways. S is e...

I find this story about the shrinking number of female C-suite execs quite insulting. The implication seems to be that women reached those levels because of diversity and inclusion initiatives that are now waning. That implies that women are not C-suite material and need to be propped up by measures aimed at achieving a certain gender balance.  ..one possible contributing factor to this trend is a “waning focus on diversity initiatives”. Mentions of “diversity” and “inclusion” on S&P earnings calls — which surged during the pandemic, when the terms were mentioned 1,367 times in total — have fallen consecutively to fewer than 100 in the most recent quarter, as legal complexities and backlash have stalled inclusion efforts. The truth is women have to work a lot harder to get to that position and just because they channel energy into their career does not absolve them from having to deliver an all A performance at home as a spouse and a mother. Sometimes that combination may prove...

We landed tired and hungry at the airport after a five hour flight followed by car rental shenanigans that set us back an extra hour. Checking for restaurant reviews, I stumbled upon one with only five star reviews but only a handful of them. The pictures of the food showed the attention to detail - whoever cooked it had cooked it with love. We were a bit concerned about the neighborhood and the fact that the restaurant had its door reinforced with iron-bars along with a very big electronic lock. These folks did not take their security lightly.  The place was run by a middle-aged couple and the food well-exceeded my already high expectation given the ratings. The portion size was very generous, the quality of cooking excellent as was the service. We came in famished and went away satiated. I told the man that we loved the food and wished we had room for dessert - which looked even better than the food. He thanked us very graciously and asked us to come back again.  The experie...

This Economist article about why young men and women are drifting apart was good reading but ends with a defeated whimper What neither side has done well is to tackle the underlying problems that are driving young men and women apart. Most important, policymakers could think harder about making schools work for underperforming boys. Mr Reeves suggests hiring more male teachers, and having boys start school a year later, by default, since they mature more slowly than girls do. Also, since “the desegregation of the labour market has been almost entirely one-way”, the state could beef up vocational training to prepare young men for occupations they currently shun, such as those involving health, education or administrative tasks. If such reforms help more boys and men adjust to a changing world, that would benefit both men and women The proposed solution for boys sound more than a little hopeless. Have them start a year later in school sounds like an obviously terrible idea. If indeed th...

Recently, we stopped by at Chinese restaurant at the local strip mall for early dinner. The supplies in the fridge did not inspire any creativity and the day had been too long to contemplate a grocery run. This place was very quiet and we were among the half a dozen people dining there. The food was good not great but that was the expectation given the type of establishment. But the quietness felt wonderful to have a conversation without needing to be loud. The level of loud at restaurants specially the ones that come highly rates is very frustrating for me. I was happy to have mediocre food in relative peace on a weeknight. Noise generally drives business but the the implication is that the diner is there for entertainment Restaurant owners think they know something about their diners that their diners might not fully know about themselves: They enjoy busy spaces more than they realize. Customers tend to have more fun in louder environments. High-energy dining rooms are more likely t...

I never warmed up to the self-checkout lane though use it the majority of the time. There is something to be said for being familiar with names and faces of people. Some cashiers can be chattier than others, they warm up over time even if things were transactional to begin. Shopping at a big box store where these lanes are typically found is usually a soulless experience. The only human touch could be experienced at the check-out lane which many retailers decided to do away with to save monies.  Yet the success of retail relies on the human experience at the store, it may be the only way to differentiate from competitors who look and feel much the same and can price match as well. Those few minutes at the check out line can the only way brand can stand out. I always found it counter-intuitive that brands did not see than as an opportunity but as a lever to crank up operational efficiency. Thanks to rampant theft, the math of self-out no longer makes sense and many retailers are rem...

I was reading this essay curious to understand how Richard Feynman distinguished knowing from understanding but was struck by his definition of what is means to have "fantastic imagination" "If you can find any other view of the world which agrees over the entire range where things have already been observed, but disagrees somewhere else, you have made a great discovery. It is very nearly impossible, but not quite, to find any theory which agrees with experiments over the entire range in which all theories have been checked, and yet gives different consequences in some other range, even a theory whose different consequences do not turn out to agree with nature. A new idea is extremely difficult to think of. It takes a fantastic imagination…” As someone from with a very rudimentary science background, I was not able to fully appreciate how imagination plays a role in discovery but it got me thinking about art and literature where it is easier for me to see imagination. T...

Heart-warming to read about Toni Morrison handing rejection letters to aspiring authors. There is so much grace and kindness in how she said no.  ..she occasionally ended a rejection by offering her name as a kind of passport with which hopeful authors might navigate the borders erected by other cultural gatekeepers. In 1977, she advised one young writer to find an agent and directed him toward the legendary literary agents Georges Borchardt and Peter Matson, adding, “When you write to them you may say that although I could not take your manuscript myself, I was very much in love with it, and I’m willing to put it in writing.” The role of cultural gatekeeper is to decide the bar writers must clear to be sellable in the market they address. Being sellable is not always correlated to the quality of the writing or the novelty of thought. The world can miss out on both because someone decided to gatekeep for reasons of not meeting the bar not matter how ill-advised. It is also the rea...

Loved reading about this woman who became a scuba diver at fifty just because she wanted to. In the paragraphs that form the story, it becomes evident that she had potential that was ignored, undermined or denied. There are always the better informed, more traveled and worldly relatives who can't wait to find fault. It was only at the age of 45 that Uma revived her interest in painting. “When I started to paint, I felt like I was reborn. Then, I saw a documentary on coral reefs which encouraged me to read more about them. I started painting them and holding exhibitions,” she shares. Once while speaking on the impact of pollution on coral reefs, she was mocked by one of her cousins. “He asked me if I had seen coral reefs in real life, or how the ocean even looked underwater, or what the colour of the ocean was. Although it appears to be blue and beautiful outside, it’s full of pollution inside. This sparked my curiosity to dive deep into the water,” she adds. What is so inspiring a...

Nice essay on the building a patchwork family and the particularly painful decision to leave a good enough marriage when there are children involved. An overwhelming majority of folks who are in decent marriages, do their best to maintain status quo. While there maybe the secret yen for change, the gnawing doubts about if this can be the partnership for life, people realize finding good enough is a miracle too. To that end there is the concept of a "parenting marriage" and the rising wave of gray divorces. A parenting marriage simply cannot last after the parenting done. The couple is forced to reorganize in some sense - look the other way or part ways, whichever is less painful, less disruptive.  To me, ‘blended’ suggests a homogenised state of merging; or, more precisely, of erasing differences and becoming indivisible; the new family, a seamlessly repaired vessel trying to replicate the original before it was ruptured. This attempt at merging into one is where so many ste...

If you have ever been part of a large program involving between ten to over hundred teams, then you have surely sat in a program retro session. The higher the level of dysfunction in the organization, the greater the zeal of leadership to organize these and spent hours and weeks to get people to provide candid feedback in on what went well, what didn't and what can be improved. At first blush this would seem like an honest and prudent thing to do - let's all be self-critical and call out our collective failures to perform and see what we could change going forward.  Reality tends to be a bit different. The highest ranking person in the session will almost always kick off the session by saying this is not about blaming people so don't make anything personal. It's only about process that can be improved. So the group consisting of those who precipitated trouble and those who dealt with its consequences are now left to review their collective feedback  as myriad manifestat...

Kudos to this woman for being able to get honest feedback on why she was not hired for the job - not wasting an hour of her life to put on a face  - that is called making an effort when you are a woman and seeking a senior level position. ..As an HR expert herself, Weaver pushed for feedback, which is when she was told via email by the recruiter that the company was "concerned that you didn't put forth enough effort into your appearance given you were interviewing for a Vice President role." Putting effort into your appearance when female has no single or simple answer. How much effort is enough is the question. What if a woman looks at herself in the mirror and has no problem with what looks back at her. Maybe she applied a lot of effort to remain physically and mentally healthy and takes pride that the results show. But for the person in the video call making a decision about hiring her, that would not be enough - this woman did not aim to look flawless and airbrushed. ...

I started to volunteer at my local kindergarten recently. The idea has been on my mind for a few years but it took a friend to learn about my goal and hold me accountable - she made sure I signed up for real and just did not waste time "thinking about it". It's early days yet but I already look forward to the mornings I go to the school. The kids recognize me now and beam when I walk in the door of their classroom. We do mundane things together like learning to spell three letter words but it's a great way to learn the distinct personalities of the kids.  Even if  I forgot a name, I would remember how each child was unique. I go through the same exercise with the group of kids but they all behave differently. As they grow familiar with me, they want to spend as much time being silly and playing. These kids were identified as needing extra help but in reality none of them do. They are just bored and don't want to follow instructions. But none of them are acting out...

Reading this essay about how coincidences are not magical and signs from the universe reminded me of another story I had read a while back also involving truly large numbers, double jackpot winners and chances of sharing your birthday with another person at a party - this one was about astrology . Elsewhere economists have been compared to astrologers . To a lay person it seems as if you can create a mathematical structure to explain observed phenomenon than you automatically start to resemble a science. But sometimes when you go a step further and start prognosticate what will happen in the future using that same structure - it puts you in the realm of economists and astrologers. Since there is some mathematical basis to begin, then they likely have a lingering claim to science as well. ..Ultimately, the problem isn’t with worshipping models of the stars, but rather with uncritical worship of the language used to model them, and nowhere is this more prevalent than in economics. The e...

Being rich and leaving your windows open go together. I have seen this phenomenon is some neighborhoods - one that comes to mind is a townhouse community on the river with boats docked in front of the homes. There is a walkway that meanders through the community and the artsy part of downtown behind it. If you are the homeowner in your living room, you have a much better vantage point than the passersby who might curiously peer into your house. I always thought it was a strange choice to leave windows open specially when the living space is at eye-level with someone walking by. The only way it makes sense is if the space that is in public view is decorative and performative. The people who live there perform their lives and show themselves in the most flattering light from that open window. Reality is a few walls away and hidden from view. There are likely rooms in that house that are soundproof and also don't have windows open to the world. It makes sense that the rich want to fl...

I took my friend L to the most authentic desi restaurant in town. The food and ambience are both a real taste of India without the filters and adaptations that make Indian food very uninteresting to me. I had warned L that she will be the only person who was born outside India in that establishment but it had not prepared her enough for the experience. We found ourselves a table in the farthest corner from the kitchen and the place started to fill out fast. L stuck out and looked pretty lost.  Across from us sat an Indian couple and I knew the woman from J's kindergarten days. Our daughters we in the same class and I often ran into her at school. But that evening, I could not recall the kid's name or the mothers. I am not sure if she recognized me and had the same issue as I did with recollection. For the duration of her meal she kept her eyes on the food and declined to look our way. L needed help figuring out how to properly eat Masala dosa with her fingers and what ingredien...

Right after reading the story about women working in the sugar cane fields of India, read this other one about the declining number of delivery wards in China . In this instance the decline comes from choices women are making about marriage and childbirth. They don't feel like the conditions are right for them to make one or both of those decisions. “We would have to work a lot more to provide for a baby, and we don’t want more stress and pressure right now. Life is not just about starting a family, quality of life is also important,” she said. “So for now, we just have a cat.” India is much the same for women who have the privilege of making their own choices .  The figures of the continuously declining fertility rate among educated women are a reflection of the changing beliefs in society.  This emerging situation in demography does not bode well for the rising level of population in the country. Although theoretically, even in uneducated and less educated families, childre...

It was incredibly sad to read this story about the  abuse of female workers in the sugar can fields of India . I grew up in India in what seems a different time - things were far from great for the poor but forced hysterectomies were not common. There was no Pepsi and Coke so presumably the sky high demand for sugar and the abuse that comes with it had yet to come. Maybe the problem existed for other reasons and I had simply not known about it.  Young girls are pushed into illegal child marriages so they can work alongside their husbands cutting and gathering sugar cane. Instead of receiving wages, they work to pay off advances from their employers — an arrangement that requires them to pay a fee for the privilege of missing work, even to see a doctor. An extreme yet common consequence of this financial entrapment is hysterectomies. Labor brokers loan money for the surgeries, even to resolve ailments as routine as heavy, painful periods. And the women — most of them uneducated...

Reading this in the news some time ago reminded me of my friend N. A regular person but she has had life experience similar to royalty in this case. N too has three kids and her spouse was diagnosed with cancer. She made the choice not to discuss the situation with anyone and also not share the diagnosis with the younger kids because they would not know how to process it. Their father was said to be working from home because he needed some time to recover from an unspecified illness - nothing to worry about. The kids were satisfied with the explanation and life went on. He had made it five years since the time of his first chemo. N still does not talk about his situation with anyone. Those who know her know that the topic is off-limits. All three kids are doing fine. Their lives are as normal as it could possibly be.  When at first N refused to even acknowledge what was going on, I will admit I was concerned for her mental health and reached out to be someone who could just listen...

When I got my first Lakme lipstick as a teen, I remember the giddy excitement of reading the names of the different shades and how each one produced a different emotional response and informed my buying decision. That was also the time when I believed my dream job would be being paid to name lipstick and nail polish shades. I was never a make-up person and certainly did not have a weekly manicure habit - the supposed pre-requisites to dream of such a career . That job appealed to me based on the level of impact it had on me.  I imagined every woman who was shopping for these products experienced the same things I did when I read the name of a shade. It was not enough that the shade was right for me - the name had to resonate as well, wearing that color needed to make me feel a certain way and the name had to communicate that feeling effectively. I could tell that doing such a thing at scale was not easy - each woman is different and yet the shade can be called only one name - it ha...

I was down with a very bad cold for over a week. At the lowest point it was as mentally exhausting as it was physically. A cold is not something that is even relevant mentioning to anyone but I did have to take a day off to recover. Yet, it brought one some end of life thoughts for me. Particularly, difficult was to think about the one or two people in my life that matter a lot of to me and how they might manage my passing. On the one hand you want to be missed and remembered for the good you did your life on the other, you don't want the people who you love most to grieve so much that they can no longer function.  How much is enough and when it is too much. I could not help thinking what a ridiculously vain metric this thing was. If the person is dead, what do they care if they are missed or not, mourned or not. They are done with all that. Everything of consequence has to happen before their passing. Once the worst of the cold was past me, I was back to my normal routine and end ...

My friend L has two kids of her own and two step children of which I she likes very much but still can't claim to love. Her own kids have posed more than their fair share of challenges to her and she struggles with them. No one is perfect here, no one has any illusions of being perfect - not L, not her husband and none of the four kids in the mix. This is a situation this set of people have landed themselves into - some of their own volition and others not quite. L told me once, that her own kids at flawed and complicated as they are a product of whatever she was able to make of them given the circumstances of her life - marrying too young, staying with the wrong man for far too long and so on.  For better or worse she had an active role in how they were raised. With the step-kids that is the single biggest missing piece - they are the product of some other couple's parental framework, she mostly does not agree with the decisions they made regarding their kids. This is not to s...

Sad reality of how much a single person needs to make to live comfortably in a big city . Presumably it make sense to live in such places while single to maximize professional and personal prospects but at what point does the opportunity cost become untenable and how does a person realize they have breached that threshold - because that is the point they need to recalibrate their options. I am not sure the definition of comfortable is quite comprehensive here.  “Comfortable” is defined as the income needed to cover a  50/30/20 budget , which assumes 50% of your monthly income can pay for necessities like housing and utility costs, 30% can cover discretionary spending and 20% can be set aside for savings or investments. Commuting time from home to work is a huge factor in the math of comfortable. A person may come out looking "comfortable" by the proposed math but the housing that can actually fit in their budget puts them over an hour away from their place of work. That situa...

One of the rites of Spring in my town (and maybe elsewhere as well) is the emergence of Girls Scouts selling cookies outside grocery stores. The other day, I saw a group when I was making my last minute run after work and one young lady was distinctly uncomfortable asking passers-by like me to buy the cookies. She was sulking in the corner and one of the adults was trying to have a conversation with her.  The sight brought to mind an article I had read about the shortage of plumbers and variety of skilled tradespeople in the country. Jobs that are future-proof in that they cannot be automated away. And unlike many technology jobs that still pay well, these jobs involve real and tangible work where the results are unambiguous. You either have fixed the leak or not. There is no lying and fudging about it. You have solved an actual problem for a person instead of providing a service that the person did not even know they need. Maybe kids should be encouraged to learn some real skills...

One of my LinkedIn connection shared this no bullshit profile that I totally loved. This person tells a compelling story about his career without wasting his words or the reader's time. In a time when there is so much embellishment of accomplishments and self-aggrandization all untethered to reality, this was refreshing. It takes someone very comfortable in their skin to state they stopped learning much once they reached a certain level in their career - this should inspire confidence in anyone who wants to hire the person. Middle managers have always been that precarious position where their contributions can't be measured clearly, but they make too much money. The most important issue that is not talked about as much is they stop learning making their situation that much worse.  After dealing with people management and all the administrivia that goes with it, the average middle manager has little capacity left to keep their skills sharp. Every once in a while, I run into a ...

The first time I paid attention to all the chatter about TikTok was when I read the NYT  article  on how its recommendation engine works. The numbers to chase were time watched and retention - which are sensible things to do, but how it gets done is where the problem lies and gives cause for concern.  ...watch time is key. The algorithm tries to get people addicted rather than giving them what they really want,” said Guillaume Chaslot, the founder of Algo Transparency, a group based in Paris that has studied YouTube’s recommendation system and takes a dark view of the effect of the product on children, in particular. Mr. Chaslot reviewed the TikTok document at my request. “I think it’s a crazy idea to let TikTok’s algorithm steer the life of our kids,” he said. “Each video a kid watches, TikTok gains a piece of information on him. In a few hours, the algorithm can detect his musical tastes, his physical attraction, if he’s depressed, if he might be into drugs, and many ot...

Over the years, I have often questioned what it is to be Bengali and Indian when the colonial debris is removed from those concepts. It seems quite an impossible task as all the history of my family that I am aware of spans a period of time when we were a colonized people. Whatever it meant to be Bengali and Indian was already distorted by that overbearing influence. From that time on, its layer upon layer of foreign ideas grafted upon the core of what might have been my people's actual identity. Reading these lines from Asif Manan Ahmed's The Loss of Hindustan gives words to what I had been struggling to express for the longest time:  Colonization refuses the colonized access to their own past. By imposing a colonial language, it retards the capacity of indigenous languages to represent reality. It claims that the languages of the colonized lack “technical” or “scientific” vocabulary. It removes the archives, renders history as lack, blurs faces and names.14 Thus, the coloniz...

I always find it amusing to read that a certain vegetable is having its moment as it it were a new line of handbags launched by a famous designer. This year the cabbage is having its moment in the limelight presumably because its still relatively cheap ... restaurants across the country have taken notice, adding cabbage dishes up and down their menus. At Michael Stoltzfus’s Coquette in New Orleans, one of the most popular dishes is a charred wedge of green cabbage atop turnip ravigote, covered with Parmesan. “It’s something we joke about,” he told The New York Times. “Our best-selling appetizer is the thing we’re most excited about, and also by far our best cost margin.” That’s particularly important at a time when restaurants are dealing with rising costs across the board. J and I have a favorite appetizer at our favorite restaurant in town. She used to take me there for lunch on my birthday once she got her driver's license. Of all the dishes on their menu, that particular appet...

Interesting article about outcomes in one British school is being helped by strictness . Some of ideas being implemented in these schools are reminiscent of how school was for me in India growing up. Teachers were often strict and compliance was both demanded and expected. Not that we loved it as kids but understood clearly those were the rules we had to play by.  Good behavior was sometimes rewarded - even publicly recognized but the penalties for bad behavior were significantly more memorable. Yet, our parents complained about how lax things were in our schools and how our teachers did not command the kind of authority their teachers did. We heard stories of legendary punishments doled out to those who did not follow direction. I am not sure if class or wealth had much to do with any of this. School was not about fun and games no matter who you were and how affluent your parents were.  Ms. Birbalsingh argues that wealthy children can afford to waste time at school because “t...

S hasn't been her usual cheerful self for many months granted I only see her during calls where we are both required attendees and come on video. I wasn't sure what to make of it and with things as busy they have been for the both of us, I could not find a time to just connect with her for a chat. This has been a pattern with other women I have known at work. I can sense something is not right but since we work in different cities or even countries, making that wellness check is not something that happens without effort. We finally had a 1:1 a few days ago and I learned that S was leaving on maternity leave and by the way the conversation went it was not a given that she planned to stick around even if she returned.  There is a point of inflection in an employee's timeline at a job when they decide they have done enough, have not been recognized enough or even had their tribulations acknowledged. S has had a bit of all that I think in the last couple of years. Having the ba...

 In his book Imaging India, Nilekani says "Voters, especially the poorest ones, see their votes in these states as a trade for safeguarding their basic rights." This largely squares with what I have known to be true from back in my time which feels like history now. But trying to map this to West Bengal, my home state is a bit harder. Its decline seems never-ending and its not clear what rock-bottom looks like. Every time I return to Kolkata, things seem significantly worse. Literacy or lack thereof is a culprit but there are many others ..West Bengal is second only to Kerala in terms of literacy of people over the age of 80, suggesting that the state was a high performer back when it was prosperous. But now it has fallen far behind states such as Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Tamil Nadu when it comes to the literacy of the age group 10-14 year-olds, kids who are supposed to be in school now. West Bengal has a large negative residual when one plots the literacy rates of these tw...