Heartcrossings

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...

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 fol...

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 m...

 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 t...

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 r...

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 leav...

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...

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 fair...

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 descri...

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 prob...

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 w...

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 ...

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...

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 ...

 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....

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 fol...

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 pap...

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 bl...

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 numb...

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 t...

 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 employ...

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 peopl...

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...

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 c...

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 (w...

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 ...

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 m...

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 cus...

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,...

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...