Colored Dreams

A free mobile app to file taxes in America sounds too good to be true but maybe miracles do happen. I want to be cautiously optimistic about this one. But if we start to make changes at this scale, it would be nice if people also got a say in where atleast an certain percent of their taxes went.

If say, it was up to the individual to decide what cause they want to support with 1% of their taxes, I would for sure give mine to National Parks and Public Libraries. This could be a great way to test what the population really cared about. The top ten categories to receive funding through this 1% channel would clearly be the things the people cared about the most. In similar vein, it would be nice to have a say in what I did not want my tax dollars spent on - maybe an impossible thing to ask for. The top ten categories based on people's "deny" list is similarly a strong indicator of what the population does not want the government to invest in. It can be argued that the wisdom of the crowds is worth learning from and acting on. 

None of what I imagine to be ideal is ever going to happen, but while dreaming of this free mobile app that will make tax filing painless, why not make that dream a lot more colorful.

Keeping Up

B has a very intense travel schedule and an active social life. Between the two, it is about impossible to meet her for coffee or lunch. Years may pass between meetings, but I have always been flexible to make these episodic meetings happen. A few days ago, I got a text from her that appeared to be a mass outreach to all folks like me in her life that she had ignored for a year or more. Almost a marketing campaign to signal that we were on her mind and were missed. I decided to respond with sure, sounds great. As expected there was no response back. This is more a brand awareness message I guess than something more transactional, were the touch is made in hope of some conversion event. 

Maybe there is a lesson for me to learn from B even though there is very little common between our lives. There are folks that I could do a better job of staying in touch with and perhaps this style of outreach maybe the way to go about it. Seems very low effort all around. I know of a few other folks you have this mass outreach style of staying in touch with people and keeping up with the news. I am about to get a call from one of them in the next couple of weeks because its been about three months since last check and R is great about keeping cadence. As I get older, I have to wonder if my social ineptitude grows as well. It is sad that there was a time over a decade ago when B and I were friends in the way I would know and understand that term. We met for lunch at the sushi place near my house and got dinner at a place she loved in the shopping mall halfway between her place and mine. 

A few days after the initial contact, B wrote that she wanted me to meet the new man in her life. Based on the description I have met this man last time I saw her when he was officially new but given the number of  people in her world and the sparse meetings, she had forgotten that the new was old news to me. If we do infact meet this year, chances are we will re-hash updates from the last couple of years until we part ways for that amount of time. Comes a time in our lives when that time interval is enough for one of the parties to have passed away.

Speaking Truth

Reading this I tried to imagine what might have happened if the user who was interacting with the chatbot was suicidal to begin and was then told to please die. Lately I have used chatbots a fair bit for trip planning. I find it useful when we have just a couple of days to spend and specific interests, to get a sense of where we should focus. Or giving the chat bot a proposed itinerary and asking it to refine it based on some criteria. The answers have been mostly helpful. But what if the bot responded back saying that you should have stayed home and rotted to death because that is what you deserve. If the person has no imagination of their own and want travel without years of planning, then they should be prevented from doing so. 

Perhaps there is some truth to that but would it make me happy to hear that. Indeed there are people who travel to places they have dreamed of visiting their entire life. They have saved up money little by little, planned every detail of the trip most meticulously over several years. When they arrive, they are completely prepared and know exactly what they are doing.

Chances are they will encounter random people on their travels that just showed up there on a whim because they could. They have no specific plan and will no dream to fulfill - it can be argued they are not nearly as deserving and should be sent packing to wherever they came from. The chatbot may make that value judgement and say as much - same as this bot exploded when asked to do homework. Loved this other story about an AI grandma designed to waste the time of scammers - that is real clever. 

Perfect Match

 I spent a lot of time in Asian metro train systems recently during commuter hours. During this time, cannot recall seeing a single person of any age reading a physical book. It's possible to see these relics elsewhere in the world but not in large numbers. Just about everyone was glued to their phone completely oblivious to their neighbors. Couples might be in a conversation and not tightly tethered to their phones. Every screen I caught a glimpse of was some form of infinite scroll and Tik-Tok style videos. The form factor makes perfect sense for someone who has a very long and mindless commute. They really need to escape the fact that they are wasting a significant part of their lives just riding trains - easily 3-4 hours a day, door to door. 

The addictive short videos on loop are the perfect way to use that wasted time. It can be argued that non-value time is being recycled in a sense. That would be a wonderful solution except that the nature of the content is such that the person becomes more and more unable to disconnect from it and pursue meaningful things in the time that they do have left. The easy escape from ennui becomes second nature. It made me wonder if this specific type of content came to exist to fill the need in the lives of commuters or it became a match made in heaven without ever intending to be. The use of this form of content among youth in Asia does appear excessive but the rest of the world is not so far behind. 

for underage students, they should be restricted from logging in and using their short video accounts late at night to ensure that they get enough rest time. For adult students, it is recommended to use the short video time every day as a reminder, and the short video software will be temporarily stopped when the accumulation exceeds a certain time on the same day to avoid excessive use of it.

Mixed Data

This essay on the duplicity of Big Toilet Paper is a good read.  I remember feeling quite bamboozled trying to compare price per sheet when I first arrived in America. Forget about doing the math in your head, it could pose challenges even with a calculator. I came up with some crude short-cut to figure it out. Mostly it was to tell myself that I was being an astute consumer and not falling prey to pricing shenanigans that the manufacturers were trying to pull on me. 

Someone has done better than that. Shrinkflation as a concept goes well beyond toilet paper but the level of effort applied to befuddle the consumer is probably among the highest with toilet paper. It is at the intersection of an expense that is essential and yet literally throw away. Flushing money down the toilet. It produces a strong response in the form to desiring to minimize the waste. That presents the ideal conditions for the manufacturers play the games they do to sow confusion by providing data that renders direct unit price comparison an impossibility. For me this realization brought home very many truths about America that served me well since I first visited the toilet paper isle. 

Smelling Excuse

This story about Home Depot not doing all that hot and how it a bell-weather for consumer sentiment seems to missing some important data points. HD's quality of in-store service has been on a declining path for a long time. The inventory in the store is poor compared to the customer's online options. A vast majority of the items are not price competitive. We had a small home improvement project in mind for a while and showed up to our local HD one evening with a full shopping list. Between having to wait 8 weeks to get a key item needed for the project and much higher price compared to our online options for the items they did have, we had no way to pull the trigger on the project. 

Time kills all deals as we know. The ideal customer experience would have been for a knowledgeable customer rep to understand what we wanted to get done, provide us an all-inclusive HD pricing with a guaranteed delivery date for all items on our list, get us to commit on the project instead of leaving because we could not see a path to completion in the next couple of weekends. The issue here is that the customer wanted to experience some certainty and HD failed to rise to the occasion. 

Back in the day, the first rep we stopped to ask a question about an item on our list would take the opportunity to chat with us about our project and what we were hoping to accomplish and by when. They were able earn our trust because they had skill and experience. In that context an 8 week wait would have felt very different. All that is ancient HD history. All this prattle about consumers needing for the world to become a better place before they improve their kitchen seems like HD abdicating ownership of their many failures - the whining smells an awful lot like poor leadership looking for a way to cover up their mismanagement. 

Playing Games

Adults playing games from the childhood used to be a normal thing in India when I was growing up. They taught us kids to play them and played along with us - there was no stigma attached to it. Games that did not require physical strength was the reserve of the elderly and a way for them to bond with grandkids. We had a set very silly board games at my grandmother's house and it was tradition to bring them out after dinner. Any child could be taught the rules for these games in five minutes and then you played. These were the same games she had played as a child. I don't think there was ever a time when she was too old to play them. It is interesting to read that being a kidult is now being called a new trend and something toy-makers are wising upto. Grandmother was a kidutt by such definition but she was just going about it very naturally, no one thought twice about her having a stash of silly board games meant for very young kids.

..adults are buying Lego and collectibles for their "positive mental health benefits as they spark nostalgia and bring escapism from global turmoil", said Melissa Symonds, executive director of UK toys at Circana.

I am not sure if she had been seeking escape from global turmoil or even had awareness of such. Her concerns tended to be hyper-local. If the vegetable vendor she preferred would have green jackfruit during my stay at her home because it was my favorite, if the guy who traded old newspapers for steel utensils would give her the big pot she had her eye on for three months worth of old newspapers. I am pretty sure the machinations of the ruling party in Delhi meant nothing to her, much less the winds of change blowing through the Eastern Bloc back in those times. There was likely mental health benefits from bonding with grand kids through play - she was always happy to set up the games for us to play and we looked forward to that time. The fact that I remember to this day attest to their positive benefits for me. 

Outside In

Traveling aboard during election time in America has been a great learning experience for me. People have strong opinions about the outcome of the election and why the results were what they are. This line of reasoning from what I could tell has no support atleast judging from the random assortment of folks who chatted with us about US elections. Infact, they believe that making this (and just about everything else) about race and gender is exactly what got us in this situation in the first place.

Outside looking in, people see that the losing party has gotten completely, irremediably out of touch with the concerns of the voters no matter how you slice the population and count their votes. The items on the agenda (or atleast how the voters perceive them to be) are all the wrong and irrelevant ones. So they demonstrated their eagerness for something to be shook up and for the statis to end. The rest is noise. Plus no one trusts the media to be treating the challenger to incumbency fairly - so most of the bad press was likely written off as lies and fabrication (does not matter the reality). When all these factors are combined the outcome was a foregone conclusion for these folks sitting thousands of miles away from the action. 

It is bitter pill to swallow that the dubious credentials of the winner did not pose any impediment given how disappointed people were with the incumbents but this is likely the truth - as seen by foreigners. To write off all Black women in one fell swoop seems a little pre-mature given the conditions in which this came to pass:

Unfortunately, this country will always default to its original tenets of racism and misogyny in the face of fear, frustration, or just plain dissatisfaction. It has never been more unclear what unified Democratic opposition to Trumpism should look like, but there is one very clear reality looking at us straight in the face. If Harris, the closest woman we had to a bridge between the Black and white vote, couldn’t win in 2024, maybe no Black woman can

Better Crisis

Not being able to afford a baby-boomer style midlife crisis while being millennial changes what such crisis looks like going forward.  

.. some experts argue that it’s not that millennials can’t afford a midlife crisis—it’s just that this inflection point in life may just look different from past generations. 

“While the classic image of a midlife crisis may involve extravagant spending, it’s the underlying emotional and psychological turmoil that truly defines the experience,” Andrew Latham, a certified financial planner, tells Fortune. “Whether it’s splurging on luxury items or making impulsive life changes, the essence of a midlife crisis lies in the quest for meaning, identity, and personal fulfillment—not on the balance of your checking account.”

Anyone who has seen their parents burn-out from working too hard, prioritizing career over family and such will have a very strong desire not to follow in their foot-steps. Not all baby-boomers fit that description and I would assume their kids would not be naturally inoculated against workaholism. They would need to make their own mistakes and then their kids would need to make some of their own - the said millennials would recoil from such a way of life. Seeking meaning, purpose and engagement in what a person spends their time doing is a great way to have a mid-life crisis. Even better to have that be a person's quarter-life crisis

Escape Hatch

An interesting option for those who wish to escape American reality but also makes sense for those nearing end of life and having the means to travel the world before they depart

"Villa Vie offers a unique one-of-a-kind way [to] see the whole world at a slow pace where you have enough time to actually experience the cultural vibe of every port," Villa Vie Residences Head of Sales Anne Alms said in a statement. "Your villa is your bedroom, and the ship is your home, she'll take you across the globe to endless horizons."

If this was a true "skip-forward" escape from reality, maybe the person will return to a country they no longer recognize and likely can't re-assimilate to anymore. If what they fear most from this presidency comes true, America four years out will not be home to them anymore. So the question is if it makes sense to stay home and actively engage with the system they love and seek to protect. The desire to escape a country whose problems seem endless, mounting and unsolvable is very familiar to folks like me who found a way out. 

All of what had prompted my desire to leave India remains true to this day. Things have gotten worse in many ways but it would be a lie to claim nothing has changed for the better. Those changes have been big and sweeping to the point that it is a country I hardly recognize anymore - and in a positive way. In hindsight, should I have stayed back and worked through the obstacles - I can't know for sure. What is likely is that if I had never left, some parts of my life would be much better and some much worse than it is now. In balance, my net happiness with life would look about same I think. 

Finding Tao

We discovered one evening that there was Taoist temple not to far from our hotel and decided to visit there the following morning. The map had the temple up on the nearby hill that did not look too hard to climb so we set on our way. The winding road took us through small farms on both sides, a few rundown shacks and a number of shrines honoring the dead. Out of curiosity we stopped to read the inscription on one of them. It belonged to a concubine of some emperor. There was more detail on her lineage and progeny that we understood nothing about. As the road went uphill we found more such shrines big and small, many dedicated to concubines. There was an old man in a hut pulling nails out of a wooden board. It was unclear if he was salvaging the wood, nails or both. A stray dog lay curled up in sleep under a grapefruit tree laden with fruit one of which had dropped right next to where the dog lay. After the while the road ended abruptly. 

The map showed the temple to our right but what we saw was tiny patches of farmland where a variety of greens and vegetables were growing. We trusted the map more than the reality we saw in front of our eyes and wandered into the farms expecting to see some path to the temple emerge magically. A farmer coming down the hill observed us quizzically and correctly assumed that we were lost. We did not speak any common language and the translator app failed to pick up his dialect. We showed him the point of the map the temple was marked and assumed he was able to read the words. 

He kept pointing to the path left and repeating "there" - the only word we could understand. He steered us away from the farms and to the path that was going to get us to the temple (or so we thought). We ended up at a different place, away from the farms and the road but no temple anywhere. Retracing our steps back to where we first veered into the farms, a woman headed down to the village with her harvest stopped and smiled at us. We tried to explain to her the best we could about the temple which we had no idea if she understood or not. She gestured us to follow her and we did thinking the temple was on her way to wherever she was headed. 

Along the way we passed the old man toiling away on the wooden boards, extracting nails. The dog was still asleep by the fallen grapefruit. Nothing had changed in the scenery and nothing had changed in our state either. We were exactly where we began and only time had passed. The woman had brought us to where our journey had started at the bottom of the hill and gestured for us to go back to town. She thought we needed to find our way back having wandered into the farms on the hill. Did the temple exist as all in map or life we don't know.

Relative Home

The village is lit up with LED lights all colors of the rainbow. Some are blinking, others not. Every tree and house is decorated with lights and in the center where most of the shopping and restaurants are the lights are even more spectacular. In the distance, lasers are beaming on the sky. This is no holiday season and yet the place is more festive than many cities are during Christmas.

I had to wonder how many more lights go on when they have a major holiday. I buy a little vermillion sand bracelet for J. It is meant to ward off the evil eye and attract prosperity. The shop-owner is a young woman probably about the same age as J. We converse using a translator. She wants to know how old J is and if I want smaller or larger beads in the bracelet. She picks out something that she thinks would be nice for her. 

Buying a piece of jewelry is always imbued with meaning far beyond the act of purchase. I am thinking the color would suit J very well but I also want her to a have a piece of a my trip that I had long looked forward to. This is a place she would have loved. I want her safe and protected at all times -  even if random men ask her ask her out while she is walking to her apartment from the metro late at night. I learned to make peace with feeling constantly anxious about her to finding my peace by sending good thoughts her way. This bracelet is meant to give my thoughts for her a shape and form. 

A week or so later, when I am back home, I will remember this young lady taking the time to find me something for my daughter as if she were a sister in spirit. I will recall also the dinner we had on the way back to the hotel - how the food was unlike I am familiar with but there was so much of India in it. I had to use my fingers to eat and a Slavic woman in the table across from me who had ordered the same dish smiled at me admiringly. There was no other way to get a handle on that dish - you had to get your fingers dirty. 

The friendly people, the large crowds and the food got me feeling connected to my roots and my childhood while in a foreign country. I know for a fact that as much I enjoyed the visit, this is not a place I want to ever return to. In that there is a certain parallel with time I spend in Kolkata. If I can strip everything away from the experience other than meals with family and friends in the comfort of my parents' home, then it would be a trip to enjoy and even return to. But that is so far not the reality of any visit there and accordingly I am never eager to make it.

Choosing Self

This story about how young people are coping with post-election realities made for pretty sad reading. These are choices that can become irreversible in some cases but the desire to take charge of one's destiny particularly in youth is understandable as well. I have heard such lines from younger members of my extended family so many times over the years, just replace "election" with some other burning, insurmountable and unsolvable problem India has - there is no shortage of those, and you have their reasoning to remain childless by choice.

“Before the election, we both had been back and forth on having kids, but after the election, we agreed that this is no world to bring a child into,”

Many young couples can be ambivalent about becoming parents and the reasons run the gamut. But the one thing that seems to firm up their decision is their perception of what the future holds for their child - the future that is beyond their power to control. If they feel bad enough about what they see, then they will decide not to have kids. For me this is very far from anecdotal - I am the minority among my cousins, nephews and nieces because I am a parent, the vast majority of them are not. There came an inflection point in their decision-making much like the couples this story refers to and the die was cast. There are indeed many who would rather go childless than cede their right to control their reproductive destiny.

Juvenile Times

It is common for people in their middle-age or older to bemoan the falling standards of things and recall how things were better in their youth. We have all seen our grandparents and parents go through this phase and then it becomes our turn to repeat the pattern - I am guilty myself. But reading about Gen Z bringing their parents to their job interviews feels like something that would have been incomprehensible in my day and it legitimately sounds like things have taken a turn for the worse. 

In my day, no employer would take such a person seriously, there was no way such interview would translate into a job offer. What is interesting about the story is how HR is responding to this next level compulsive hovering of parents. They want to be accommodative and find way to explain and excuse the behavior and give this person a fair-shake. Sounds to me like a great disservice is being done to members of Gen Z who are perfectly capable of writing their own resume, conducting their own job-search and do not require a parent to accompany them to a job interview. It seems like attaining adulthood in the real sense should be respected and celebrated not treated as optional, nice to have. The way all this is explained away is fascinating: 

“We have a generation getting into the workforce now that likes connection,” she said. “They want people to get excited about their decisions so their process is about bringing people along with them. That’s their comfort level and as long as that’s still there, we’re going to see that kind of supported decision making in the years ahead.”

Why can't the person keep the parent in the loop, seek their opinion and counsel offline? That would keep everyone in the informed and cognizant of the decision-making process. Maybe this craziness needs to be taken a step further to its logical conclusion. Instead of being a passive participant, the parent should co-interview with the kid and get co-hired so the employer gets additional value and the kid can feel fully supported at all times in the workplace and the parent will never need to miss a beat.

Letting Go

 I had heard of Bibek Debroy but have read any of his writing except this obituary he wrote a few days before his passing. His recollection of conversations between him and his sons who live abroad and want to know if they should hop on plane in time of a parent's health crisis. The words they hear back, most expat kids have heard from their parents. There is nothing going here than you can solve by coming over, you will be more hindrance than help since you don't know how things work here. There will be a time when you need to rush but this is not the time. 

As it almost always happens, that time when one must rush is the last time. Parents do not want to impose, act needy and be an impediment. They played a significant role in the the child's immigration journey through their support and encouragement - it is like an investment they really want to work out. What working out means can get very distorted over time and the cultures start to diverge between parent and child. The parents continue to evolve in the native land, they remain socially current and relevant there. The expat kids are fossilized in a time and place that has long disappeared and their evolution is occurring in a different place and pace entirely. 

Why indeed can't a middle-aged empty-nester, well-established in their career rush home sometimes even it is not the highest order of crisis and why must a parent be near-death for it to warrant it. From personal experience, I believe the reason this happens is the drifting away of parent and child to the point they have almost nothing in common and rely on a combination of mutual goodwill, filial duty and parental concern to keep things together. It is easier for both sides to stay in contact and communicate with each other from afar and not have to be in each other's physical presence.

The desire not to rush in is not on account of the person having such pressing responsibilities that simply cannot break off. At some level the parent knows this too but they would rather pretend their child is busy because they are doing such meaningful, world-changing,  consequential work. It is a much better explanation than acknowledging the reality of how the relationship is really not able to withstand frequent and on-going in-person contact. 

There are those that perform their annual pilgrimages to India to execute their obligations and ensure the parents are well-provided for in all respects including physical time together. I admire such people and their parents for being able to make it all work - such is not the case for the rest of us. Those that are showing up and being counted at a reliable, predictable cadence hold the moral high-ground, I think. They have managed to reduce the drift and separation by holding tight to their roots, the harder thing to do than letting go to become a better assimilated immigrant. 

Crow Behavior

Read this interesting article about crows holding on to grudges for a long time and making it an intergenerational  - much like humans. Though with humans sometimes the source of the grudge is sometimes replaced by the default behavior of one who holds a grudge. If the grudge holder were asked specific reasons why they are resentful, they may no longer be able to recall. And even if they did, they would realize it made no sense anymore. Those events from long ago might have been relevant to who they were as a person back then but time has changed them at the the one they resent so much that it is now illogical and bizarre even. 

Yet that is not how humans always think. For crows seems there is a time limit for grudge-holding  - they can remember people they perceive as threats for as long as 17 years. This long-term memory enables them to react aggressively towards these individuals even after many years have passed since the initial encounter. I have a few folks in my life who have felt resentful at me for much longer than that. My efforts to reset have never worked because as more time passed and more we drifted apart, the last time we actually knew each other had receded to a past so remote that neither of us recalled that time in our lives anymore; there was nothing to return to. Like crows, these folks have socialized their grudges along - frequently to spouses and children who have no baseline of me as a person and all they know is there is an unresolved grudge. They do what is logical for people in such situations to do - they avoid what could potentially be problematic. I am myself guilty of such avoidance behavior - I do not want to confront this person about what they did to make me so upset so my strategy is to completely avoid them.

Captive Reading

Reading in-flight magazines always felt an odd thing to do. I always leafed through them and took comfort in the half-filled cross-word puzzles. It was proof there were other people like me who read these publications, whatever their reasons. I liked being able to escape into something very bounded to the trip and yet informative in odd ways - some ad for a jewelry store in Hawaii, a story about a guy who had taken his grandfather's dying oyster business international, the most unique candy from a country I have never been to, interviews with people who had traveled to challenging destinations and so on. All of the reading was meant to inspire thoughts about what adventures await if someone just buys a ticket to a place they have never been to. The reason for this publication's demise are complex: 

But even as they have been selling up, on the whole, they’ve slimmed down. Carpenter told me how, in the course of her tenure, in-flight magazines began to be printed on thinner paper. “It was really annoying when you have great photographers,” she said. The situation was one of cost-benefit analysis, as well as environmental concerns. Weight on a plane translates to fuel, which translates to money. That’s not a new consideration: back in the eighties, Robert Crandall, the CEO of American Airlines, mandated the removal of a single olive from each dinner salad served to fliers, saving the airline forty thousand dollars per year. Not every airline was as parsimonious, however: it took until 2012 for Alaska Airlines to stop handing out prayer cards with the meal service. What flies away in time, and what sticks around—these are decisions not so easily explained by earthly logic.

Missing Neon

The ferry ride from one shore of the lake to the other was accompanied by the non-stop chatter of a wise-cracking tour guide that we might have enjoyed had we understood the language. As much as translator apps are the savior on such trips, it failed to keep up with her sarcasm and rapid change of context. The other passengers seemed to enjoy it so I am assuming she was funny and entertaining. 

The sky remained heavily overcast but it was hard to tell where the fog ended and clouds began. The scenery was a painting in shades of green blending into grey - there was no room for other colors. As we neared the pier where were going to dock and disembark, a set of singing voices broke through the air and all at once the mood changed - from a light despondency to one of brightness. 

Often I have arrived at a place full of anticipation of what it will be and then reality seemed a large deviation from imagination. Like seeing sky-scrapers going dark for the night, broken LED panels blinking bleakly and no bright neon signs anywhere. None of those things mean anything consequential to me and yet by being absent, there was some disappointment. It is okay to miss the scenery because it was obscured by a middle-aged man tapping away furiously at his cellphone brining attention to his very expensive watch and a diamond encrusted signet ring with a large blue sapphire in the center. 

Four Days

The four day work work-week seems a very logical for many kinds of jobs. People start to trail on Fridays unless there is a crisis. It is also the designated travel back home day if you had been working offsite for the rest of the week. Giving people more time to recuperate and have the incentive to drive things to completion to earn the day of rest on Friday, are likely to produce good results. 

Between 2020 and 2022, 51% of workers in the country had accepted the offer of shorter working hours, including a four-day week, two think tanks found, saying the figure is likely to be even higher today.

Last year, Iceland logged faster economic growth than most European countries and its unemployment rate is one of the lowest in Europe, noted the Autonomy Institute in the United Kingdom and Iceland’s Association for Sustainability and Democracy (Alda).

“This study shows a real success story: shorter working hours have become widespread in Iceland… and the economy is strong across a number of indicators,” Gudmundur D. Haraldsson, a researcher at Alda, said in a statement.

Children and elderly in need of care and time from those in the workforce are big beneficiaries of that extra day. If the family has lower stress levels as a whole, that can only be a force of good for society. I wish this data would be used for decision making on how people work going forward.

Street Walk

We take in the surroundings, the street food, sights, and smells. As darkness gathers the faces in the crowds grow younger. The youth dominate nights and evenings. In the early morning when the city is just beginning to stir, we walk through old neighborhoods with little parks and squares of green where the elderly are gathered to exercise. One woman in her 70s is twirling in her hoola hoop, two others slightly younger than her are stretching using the branches of a young banyan tree for support. An old man is cleaning his car with what looks like a small brush. He removes the leaves from under the windshield wiper meticulously. 

An hour later, the office going crowds emerge on the streets. The food vendors are open for business as well. We get in line behind a dozen folks at what seems to be a very popular dumpling shop. Everyone gets a couple of dumplings and coffee. The lady serving them is working at a very brisk pace. We don't want to be clueless and touristy, break her flow trying to figure out what the contents of each dumpling are - there are only three kinds. So we get one of each and its the the right choice - they are all uniquely delicious. We sit on a park bench eat our breakfast. On a tree nearby is a big bird with bright blue and white plumage, quite oblivious of the humans around. 

Yesterday, we walked on a street full of stores selling birds - much smaller than this one. The colorful parakeets were not confined to cages. They sat on little branches outside unlike the smaller, quieter birds. There is a rhythm and meaning to what happens in a country and city you have never visited and in many cases are unlikely to return to. These vignettes from my slice of time there will come to define what meaning I ascribed to what I experienced. To me it felt like a very peaceful place where people had their lives very well organized and were flowing through their days quite effortlessly. This may be a great distortion of reality but perception can be reality to outsiders - a very happy, serene and positive one in this case.

Flow Blocker

 I know of a few people who refused promotions in favor of better work-life balance and higher job security. In one situation the woman's manager told her that she would always be the highest performer in her band given how over-due she was for promotion. That also meant she would get the highest raise among her peers. To S, that was sufficient to decide that she was not going to pursue a promotion and start to work her way up to highest performer level. So she's stayed put for eight years now with a job that is so easy for her that there is no stress associated with it at all. One of the interesting consequences in this case is the fate of the junior employees who are trying hard to break into her level and will succeed through their efforts. They have almost no chance of moving to the next level because they will never outperform S. They will likely not even get any decent raises given their performance relative to S. 

When teams have multiple high-performing tenured employees refusing to move up, there are consequences all around. The managers start to look worse because they got there because the path was cleared by the likes of S who were may better qualified. The peers are stuck in limbo because they cannot grow in this kind of environment. When it comes to a critical, high-impact project, S is likely to be chosen given her track record. The junior employees at her level will be left with crumbs which does not help their growth. Most importantly they will not learn and improve. This article focuses on why this trend is emerging but it just as worthwhile to examine what it means for everyone involved in the process - the person who stays in place and collects the biggest paycheck they can without incurring higher risk, the less experienced but ambitious peers of this person who do want career growth and finally the managers of people like S. I don't think anyone is helped by this. 

Wandering In

While exploring the new city right after we checked into the hotel, we wandered into the entrance of a night club that looked to our foreign eyes like a mall. It was not until we were almost at the door that I realized this and then turned back. I thought it was interesting how differently I saw the young people who had come there to party on my way in compared to how I did on the way out. On the way in I thought this is probably how all young people here dress specially on a Saturday night. There was nothing more to take in about their look and how they were interacting with each other. The club personnel were all dressed in black uniforms to me and in my mind they were just working at that shopping mall in some capacity. 

I am sure there were eyes on us with the population being more J's age than mine, but I attributed that to me being a foreigner - nothing out of the ordinary. Some of them were smiling at us. On the way out, I caught the details - the club attire the young people wore, the look of surprised amusement that I had seen as friendly smiling and so on. When you are missing basic data to anchor on, it's sometimes impossible to make sense of the stimulus in the environment. This happens in many other situations in life too when we wander into situations and events unaware of what we are doing and even what we expect. Things happen around us it that make sense once we have the anchor in place. If we retrace our steps like that evening out from the nightclub to the street all the data is laid bare. 

Considering Morals

I generally like Chris Nolan's movies and watched two back to back on a long flight to Asia recently. Insomnia with its theme of what is doing good or right really mean. Can you achieve the right and moral outcome and still feel like you did wrong or conversely follow the rules, fail to achieve the outcomes and feel like a bad person consequently. The second movie was Following also with dark themes. Things end very poorly for the protagonist here. It brought to mind that as a kid, I had often wondered what interesting things could be learned by following someone. What you think their life might be like and what it really is. This was a time before internet never mind social media. Your understanding of another human came about through direct, face to face contact. 

Some people revealed more about their inner universe than others and I was always curious about those who seemed to have many hidden layers. Looking back, I have to believe these idle thoughts crossed my mind because my daily life was extremely mundane and predictable. If I ever actually acted upon my imagination, that would be the wildest adventure. Being that I was a boring and conformist kid, none of that happened. At some point the idea died ungerminated and moved on to other things. In Nolan's Following, the main character does go around following people in hopes of finding material to write about. Until watching the movie, I had not considered the moral issues associated with a kid following somebody out of curiosity. But when an adult takes such action it is no longer benign or silly. This and many other thoughts that cross a kid's mind should best die well before they reach adulthood. 

Random Benefits

I have wondered about the concept of bringing dogs to work and why only dogs have achieved the work-friendly status. They are trainable and that makes the biggest difference. A cat would not do as they were told but a dog would. They can be distracting and some people can be allergic to them. But companies that decide to allow them to work have obviously decided the benefits outweigh the problems.

The dog is somewhat like the bowl of candies folks used to have at their desk back in the cubicle farm eras. They create a natural watering hole for coworkers to gather around and fuss over the animal's cuteness. The dog owner becomes more visible and memorable specially in a bigger place. I know of a woman who has her dog on an extraordinarily colorful leash. To this day, I don't know her name but that leash is like the flourish at the end of her signature. 

Seeing dogs in the office being fussed over by their owner and random dozens of people always makes me think about the young children left in daycare that belong to the same dog-owners. Wouldn't it be that much better if that child could be lavished the same attention and did not have to be separated from their parent all day along. Sometimes being a dog is indeed the best life - such is the way with random workplace benefits. 

Assigning Order

It just so happened that a work trip ended up being right before a vacation we had planned for months. It would be unwise for me to postpone the meeting so I said yes even though it made things tight. Once I start optimizing I don't always know where to stop. Since I was going to be in town for four days, I reached out to a few friends who live there to see if they might be able to meet. It ended up being a flurry of seeing people and long conversations that I did not know were meant to happen. I got a few excellent book recommendations, learned about pain suffered and wisdom gained from it. I was able to share lessons from my own life that I hope serves V well. 

She has chosen to completely bury herself in work, chase after the most challenging assignments to make sure she has no capacity left to process her loss and grief. I told her that I had done similar for a decade because I was not brave enough to confront the void in my life and acknowledge only a miracle would save me (which it did). And when I finally summoned up and allow the blunt force of pent up pain to pound on me, I did gain clarity. 

It stopped hurting after a while and I was ready to move on. I hope V sees some parallels there and decides to do right by herself. She promised that she would and that I would be proud of the progress she has made. It warmed my heart to hear her say that. That long chat with V put me a bit behind on what I needed to "get done" that afternoon but it was the best use of my time. I am glad I was there and she had the time to meet me. If that conversation triggers change in her, it would be best thing I did on that trip.

Grief, whether from trauma or major life changes, may also take form in workaholism; anger, guilt, depression, and more may be seen as uncomfortable feelings that one can escape by focusing on the tasks at hand.

Those tasks on hand were infinite and endless for me back in the day and so it is for V. I think there may have been a brief moment of clarity there for her that the task of loving and caring for oneself is just one task and it can fit into any schedule if the person decides it is their task number one.

Greek Dinner

Met H for dinner after a decade a few days ago and got to experience that same inner brightness that I had always known her for. No amount of adversity can take that away from her and she has experienced more than most people ever will. She was married to the love of her life but the man suffered from an illness that decayed him slowly and there were any number of medical emergencies over the forty years of their marriage.

 When she finally lost him she would only talk about how well-loved she had always been and how he always had surprises that warmed her heart. I have stayed in touch with H over the years because she shows me how to age with grace, turn adversity into a source of energy to pour into people and things you love. I learn just by watching her and hope that in time learn to be something close to the person she is.

The evening will now be a memory of H across the table at the Greek restaurant at across the street from my hotel. Her laugh as the waiter encouraged us to try a liqueur he uses to glaze his onions to make them smell of licorice. It is not a smell you would imagine to be compatible with onion but it works really well. Such is also the the lessons learned from observing how H has lived her life - things that you cannot imagine would work out well for a person end up being ideal. You just need to have her amazing spirit

Food Memories

My friend B brought me a home-cooked Bengali meal one day as a surprise. She is a prolific cook and I have long admired pictures of her dishes she shares with me. So that day, I got to taste it for real. Her cooking reminded me of a grand-aunt who passed away several years ago. The same attention to detail, the perfect balance of sweet, salt, spice and heat. This is not a meal cooked in a hurry and certainly not a meal cooked without love.

Just like that one rainy evening in a hotel room, far away from home I was transported to the last time I had a meal in my grand-aunt's home. I remember the polished wood of her small dining table and the spread of dishes I loved. It was as if she knew this would be the last time and she wanted it to be memorable. I did not recognize the momentousness of that meal but in years since, that has been the benchmark of the perfect Bengali meal. I compare my own efforts to it and it inspires me to improve every time so I get closer to my ideal. B was much closer to that perfection than I have ever been and for that I felt so grateful. 

Reading this sad but beautiful essay about life without food made me think of the meal that B made for me

I am astonished, now, at how many of my first memories of places are related to food: goose in Hong Kong, lardo in Florence, cherrystones in Boston, pizza in New York. And milestones, too: my fortieth at ABC Seafood, my son’s graduation at Lupa, my mother-in-law’s seventieth at Providence, my daughter’s haircut party at Hop Li. I fondly remember the ham-and-Swiss sandwich at Bay Cities, the crispy-skin cubes of pork belly at Empress Pavilion, the roast-duck noodles at Big Wing Wong, the grilled prime rib at Campanile, those perfect bites of charred, almond-and-olive-wood smoky, tapenade-smeared meat dabbed in flageolet beans and braised bitter greens.

Food Habit

While packing food for a road trip recently, I found myself thinking how we decide if something makes sense to take for a trip and now easy or difficult it would be to find a place to sit and eat it. Sandwiches in their own bags and something to drink from a spill-proof bottle are the reliable and fail-safe options. Reasonable people would settle for that because it is sensible. But for me, eating like I was still at home is a big factor in choice of food - I am creature that likes being comfortable and will prioritize comfort over commonsense sometimes. 

This also means carrying a lot of extra things to make it all work. When I pack for a road-trip. I am often reminded of a story my mother used to tell of one of our distant relatives. The man had eight kids and worked for the Indian Railways post-Independence. He travelled close to free with his large family with his railway pass but food still had to be paid for and he was known to be thrifty. 

Apparently they had a huge custom-made wooden box with many compartments that housed all kitchen utensils for the family along with a stove. This box traveled with them everywhere. They could be anywhere and still have a home-cooked meal and on budget - it was no different from being at home. The family would live in a rented house for a few months during summer, the man would go back to work and return to pick them up a the end of the school holidays. Those kids managed to see parts of India that would have been impossible for a family that size on such limited income. 

I found this story fascinating since I first heard it as a kid. This relative was deceased well before I was born so the story is more like a myth that lives to this day. I imagined a family of ten traveling by train to far flung corners of India with their hold-alls and that huge wooden box, making a home instantly wherever they landed. It must have made a strong impression on me because I am trying to replicate my variant of that wooden box. Reading this story of how food made to supply rations to soldiers during WWII is still in our lives made me think of food and habits that transcend generations.

Big Dive

Great story about taking action instead of experiencing climate anxiety, having a skill and putting it to use:

“I’ve been jumping for 25 years, and I’ve always pushed the limits with risky jumps,” he shares. “Now, I’m 51 years old, and I don’t have that drive for danger anymore. I want to do something to help. Like the seed drop, this next project will have real meaning behind it.”

Reading this got me thinking about things I have seen people his age do drive change where they can and how they can, gifting their time and talent. There is E who left his senior executive job in a large bank to become a high school math teacher. His kids had left to college and wife after decades of staying home to raise the kids, had returned to her physical therapist job she absolutely loved. There was no pressing need for his big salary and he decided to go make the best difference he could - get kids to love math. It's been almost a decade now and he still at it and loving it. 

The way E tells it, that was a scary transition to make and he had no idea if it had it in him to be a good math teacher and if the kids he hoped to transform would even like him. The first couple of years were a bit bumpy- he had to unlearn everything from his successful banking career and have the kids teach him how to teach them. Not quite the same act of daring as this skydiver dropping 100 million seeds in the Amazon but E has no doubt made a lasting contribution as a high-school teacher and will continue to do so. E is a role model to many of us who knew him professionally - he demonstrated by his example, what we could all aspire to do in our own way.

Aged Out

Came across this via LinkedIn a few days ago - the question is a valid one but the response not so much. I often try to think back to the time when I was among the youngest in the workplace and see if I can recall how I treated those who were then my age today. The thing that comes to mind that we generally ran in different circles but sometimes there would be overlap. The folks I was hanging out with socially outside work were more like me than not. We had things in common, kids of similar age, relative challenges. It made sense to learn from each other and even get tactical help and advice. Someone with children who were already married was not the right target for the questions I had about dealing with J's kindergarten issues. That was not about leaving them out - it was just not a intersection of what I needed and what they could offer. 

Yet, we did go out to lunch and happy hour with a wide assortment of people, sometimes generations apart. There was a lot that I learned from folks that were close to retirement, had started working the year that I was born. Some of the wisdom had to do with raising my kid even though they had grandkids by then. Do I feel treated differently now that I am on the other side? Quite often infact. The big difference is not even about the specific individuals but about company culture, poor people management and the complete lack of team cohesion in many situations. 

Under those circumstances, people find their own comfort zones in ways that works best for them. Getting to know someone your parents' age in a workplace setting takes a degree of self-confidence and social acumen that few possess. No one is coaching them on how to improve their skills in this area so they don't want to what feels awkward. For scaled comparison this would be like me trying to befriend someone my father's age at in workplace context. This man would have used slide rules in their early career and not seen a computer until the mid-80s. Engaging them in a meaningful way may require mores resources than I have. So while they feel like they are being left out, reality is more nuanced.