Cooking Medium

Reading this essay about what cooking medium controversy took me back to my own childhood. Being Bengali, mustard oil was the primary medium in our household. Peanut oil and ghee were used for foods that were unsuitable for the pungency of mustard oil. By the time I was in my teens, mustard oil fell seriously out of favor and it was considered reckless to be cooking mostly with it. 

My mother to this day has some on hand for flavoring dishes or tempering spices, but it hasn't been her primary cooking medium for a very long time. My grandparents remained fairly "reckless" to the end and could not be weaned of their mustard oil habit. None of them came to any harm from it. They all ate modest portions and their meals were pretty balanced. So it probably did not matter what oil was used for cooking. It would be a different matter if they kicked off the day with luchi and kosha mangsho. 

In my kitchen I cook most things with olive oil but there is mustard and sesame oil for dishes that need those specific flavors. There is sense in cooking chicken that has a bit of fat without additional oil - I often do this instead of trimming off the fat and then adding oil. I suppose the same is possible for other meats. A lot about how anyone cooks relies on how they apply common sense adaptations to tradition. Overly broad solutions always felt dubious to me. 

Data Hysteria

It has been hard to find any non-emotional commentary on what is going on in America. The big reveal of federal workforce with aggregations by pay range and age range is so completely unremarkable - the same data has been long available here with person-level information. For a supposedly rockstar team working non-stop for weeks, one expected to see better. Whatever is really afoot is not visible but the hand-wringing is nonstop. This hot take for example, questions the fundamental security framework of Azure. If that is so dubious, isn't there a bigger problem to solve because the said data has been there for transmission and retrieval for many years already.

If identity and access management is this fragile in the government's IT infrastructure, we've had a long standing problem. Maybe the data has been breached many times over and we were not always informed. There seems to be the presumption that privacy and security is not being managed well and the system is not prime for the use of AI - those seem like pretty big problems irrespective of what is going on now. Did the system have any safeguards at all?

On one hand, it’s a pretty logical use of AI: Using AI to interrogate raw, disparate, and presumably vast datasets to speed up “time to opinion” makes a lot of sense on a purely technical and solution level. 

On the other hand, of course, it raises some serious questions around privacy and the transit of sensitive data, and the governance being applied to how data privacy is being managed, especially for personnel files, project/program plans, and anything impacting intelligence or defense.

All this reminds me of a perpetually flustered and non-technical boss I had a long time ago. He had expended a lot of political capital to build a system that was supposed to increase operational efficiency 50x or something like that. While he was well-intentioned, he had no ability to direct, manage or even understand what had been built by the engineers based on his chaotic set of requirements. 

So he lived in existential fear that the thing could collapse in a heap one day because there was stuff in there that no one understood. Reality is that he was the only one who did not understand, others did. To him every defect or issue in the system was a five alarm fire that the team had to work on 24/7 until fixed. If that defect remain unresolved, the whole thing would collapse to dust before the month was out. As it turns out the system survived fine and outlived his tenure. 

Little Time

Reading this reminded me of J when she was in school. Always a slow eater and chatty person, the shortness of the lunch hour did not serve her well at all. It bothered me that she prioritized socializing over eating her meal but the reality as this article points out, is that even a kid who ate at a faster clip would not find it sufficient time. 

So there was little hope for J. We got into this strange routine of an extra large breakfast and very early dinner to make up for that long gap in between. I used to think this was a problem specific to J because of who she is but I could have been wrong. The recommended 20 minutes is woefully inadequate for any kid. It also explains why healthy options are scarce in school meals

Healthier foods generally take more time to consume—consider the extra effort that goes into peeling and eating an orange versus consuming more processed foods such as canned fruit. And the more kids that participate in school meals programs—the likely outcome from offering them for free—the longer it will take to cycle all those students through the lunch lines, cutting into seat time.

Unwoven Rainbow

Loved the phrase unweaving the rainbow in this essay. Made me think about perfectly symmetrical faces is almost automatically a path to a career on screen. When I first read about this as a kid, I would scan faces all around me (which there was never a lack of growing up in India) and make mental lists of who could make it to the movies - not necessarily in a leading role but could have a part at least. 

I realized not a lot of folks qualified if perfect symmetry was the entry criteria but very good symmetry opened the door for many more. Not everyone that was blessed with great facial symmetry was also conventionally good looking but there was something harmonious about them. I could imagine that face in a movie in some role that made sense for their look. They would rest very easy on the viewers eye and that was the secret. A much more "attractive" face lacking the same degree of symmetry would have to shot from angles that worked to their best advantage because everything else would cause some cognitive strain on the viewer. 

Formalism holds that we can account for aesthetic judgments in non-aesthetic terms. Maybe we find a song beautiful because of its tertian harmonies, or we like a certain photo because the angular lines converge on a point. Formalism “unweaves the rainbow” by telling you exactly why you find something beautiful. 

To many parents their child is perfectly beautiful. This is where objectively and formalism no longer matter. They probably see ultimate symmetry in their baby's gap-toothed smile. 

Giving Up

Having hearing impairment since my teens, I have balance issues that go back to then. When younger, it was easier to ignore it but with age it becomes harder. It was interesting to read that balance is an indictor of aging and longevity. Maybe for people like me, there is value is trying to fight the body to keep and regain balance as difficult as it is, the sooner we start the better. It's only in the last few years that I have started thinking about this is a problem because I find myself staying away from things where lack of balance could prove detrimental - it was almost better to have been in the state of blissful ignorance when I took risks without even being aware that I was doing so. 

The combination of new-found awareness and lack of skill makes for an interesting situation. Reading the article got me thinking about how I act with caution more suitable for someone a couple of decades older than me. In that process, maybe I signal to my brain and body that it is doing worse than it really is. This is like giving a kid a C when they deserved better and then the kid lowering their own expectations of themselves and going on to actually earn that C.  In yoga class, I am able to hold my own around folks that are much younger than me until it comes to balance poses. Right away, I skew far out of the average and start to struggle disproportionately. It might be that I have two choices at this point - continue to struggle but largely own that level of performance as inevitable or put in a lot of extra work to improve ever so slightly. My inner ear problems are not fixable but maybe how I decide to make peace with its consequences are. 

Work Champions

 Reading this story about German workers calling in sick at very high rates reminded me of D, a woman I worked with a long time ago. When I was new to the job, I noticed D was off for a few hours a day frequently. The OOTO message would have a short explanation of her planned absence. Generally it made sense and I thought she was more conscientious than others because no one announced they had to drop off parcels at USPS and pick up prescriptions to give their relative who had a flight to catch and could not do it themselves. The time taken to run the two errands was estimated at 3 hours so she showed that time as OOTO on her calendar. There were also things like severe migraine attack, need to rest so cannot attend meetings but will work whenever possible.

The density of these events in D's case was out of range compared to everyone else and so she stood out. I learned a few months into the job that a lot of these OOTO notices were not backed by any actual time off - she just let people know so there would not be any expectation of work from her but she made sure to exhaust all the sick days she had in a year with her miscellaneous ailments that she reported faithfully and in good amount of detail. D had defined how she would operate in the workplace and established what paid and vacation time off meant for her. It did not matter so much what the employer's actual policies were. 

D was diligent about vacations in spring, summer and winter - those days off were properly accounted for. Her manager did not want to make too big of a deal of these frequent OOTOs and sick hours (she rarely took the whole day at once) because D was over-reporting her errands unlike others who did all the same things she did but did not choose to announce it. There was a sense in leaving good enough alone. For the year or so that D and I worked in the same organization, I think her time out office was thrice that of anyone else - she had effectively tripled her vacation days without anyone batting an eye. It was understood that is how D rolled. 

No one else wanted to follow in her footsteps because they did not feel comfortable sharing how many times they had to go to the toilet in the last three hours due to diarrhea and how that made it difficult to join any call lasting more than 15 minutes. D was not at bothered by the fact that this bit of information was known to all who worked with her everyday and even those that did not. 

Outrage Faigue

Reading this essay about outrage fatigue got me thinking about how this is quite similar to how a battered woman would respond to ongoing abuse - the battery gets to a point where her spirit is so crushed she does not want to fight and will instead make adaptions to reduce the level of battery to a point she can tolerate. This level would be significantly higher than what she could tolerate at the beginning of the reign of abuse. If she had been sharing about what is going on with a friend or social worker, chances are that they would imagine things are slightly better - she is not as distressed or afraid as she used to be. so perhaps she should stay the course until normalcy is achieved. In reality, the woman is constantly adjusting her tolerance up so she can cope with more and not fall apart. Sadly, I have seen this happen with a couple of women I once knew well. 

Repeated exposure to outrage-inducing news or events can lead to emotional exhaustion.

In our local context with these women, being part of the friend group meant we were exposed to a lot of outrage-inducing news from them. The emotional impact it had on me the first time was infinitely stronger than my response a year into the situation. The person had built up tolerance and it seemed that they were coping better. It is very much possible, I wanted this to be the case because this woman had few options to escape given her circumstances. Emotional battery is hard to even explain sometimes - specially to traditional families who expect that marriage will come with some degree of friction and strife that will even out over time. 

Strange Request

 Anthropic does not want to be buried under AI-slush, atleast not by their job applicants. No doubt AI-bots are applying to these jobs en-masse and making the problem worse. There is such sweet irony in this. Not sure how they can prevent it unless there is a proctored writing test where the candidate has to write while being observed very closely - there are so many ways they could be getting help. 

“While we encourage people to use AI systems during their role to help them work faster and more effectively, please do not use AI assistants during the application process,” the applications say. “We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. Please indicate 'Yes' if you have read and agree.”  

They are asking for the impossible in a sense. How is the hapless job applicant to be sure that their competition is not using AI and humanizing the output - by using a specialized bot. They would find themselves disadvantaged if they did not get the help others are almost certainly getting. The market is not pretty for job-seekers these days. It would be different if the company recruiters actually called and talked to people, better yet met them for coffee - that was not unusual in the past. That is reliable way to ensure the candidate is presenting themselves as they are unassisted by AI. The job seeking process has been commoditized and automated to the point that no human intervention is needed, that is what needs to change. 

Imagining Concepts

Interesting reading about concept neurons and the idea that there could be a single cell at the heart of your most intractable troubles. So if that "problematic" cell could somehow be identified and treated then you'd become free. The trick is to find the one as this researcher did in the context of actors any famous things

..he found a neuron that responded to the actor. That raised a new question: “Is it responding to this picture of Jennifer Aniston, or is it responding to the concept of ‘Jennifer Aniston’?” he recalled. In a follow-up experiment, he showed patients seven different pictures of Aniston, and found that the same neuron fired for all of the photos — but not for images of other actors or objects. He then started to identify neurons for other famous places and people. He found one that responded only to Halle Berry, and another that fired only for the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Imagine, there was a way to stimulate a person's brain with the things that made them anxious, angry or sad and see how those feels coalesced at a cellular level. Even knowing seems like a great first step - it would afford the person more agency and not feel like they can be triggered in ways they have no control over.

Stopping Short

This essay about how its become impossible to predict what a cocktail will taste like, brings to mind my problem with chefs taking an extra creative turn with traditional foods I know and love. It's come to point where if I know how to cook the dish, I will just do that instead of trying some new take on it at a restaurant that is all the rage. There a few establishments near me that have been around for decades. What their menus lack in continuous novelty is made up by predictability. That could be boring for folks with more desire for adventure in their dining experiences, but I like knowing what I am going to get. There are memories tied with food and venue. Part of wanting to return there is to relive what had been happy or positive. 

..we went from bartenders playing reanimator with forgotten cocktails, to bartenders reimagining themselves as Michelin-starred chefs, creating tricky, impossible-to-replicate works of culinary art—

After all is said and done, the dish is not recognizable anymore. As a home cook who likes to experiment a fair bit, I have learned over the years to reign in my instincts to improvise and take into consideration who is going eat the meal and what might they expect when they sit at the table. My desire for change and originality can be at complete odds with that. I limit my experimentation to one dish; stay with the tried and true for the rest. That allows everyone to enjoy the novelty from the comfort zone of what they like. The same is likely true for a restaurant or cocktail bar menu - when the level of newness is dizzying, folks can get disoriented and not enjoy the meal or drink.

Keeping Tradition

Reading this story about the French drinking less wine got me thinking about my former co-worker and friend E, a native Parisian. When we visited him at his home right outside Paris, several years ago, he took us to his wine cellar to pick out a wine for dinner. The tradition in his family had been to travel through wine country during summer break and pick up wines from vineyards they had known and loved for generations and there was always room for new discoveries. E extolled the virtues of the Bordeaux he had picked out dinner and it mattered little that I did not understand most of the finer points. His exuberance made up for it and we knew we would be in for a treat. The dinner was lovely and the wine paired nicely with the entree his wife had prepared. Everything about that evening in the backyard of his home was a thing of perfection. It would have been incomplete without the trip to the cellar and the stories about the wines, including some that his grandfather had passed on him. E's kids were in elementary and middle school at the time but they absorbed the ambience at the dinner table and probably knew more about wines than I did. 

I thought it was interesting that the current sentiment is that a person will doubtless die of cancer even of they drink a single glass of wine - so complete abstinence is preferred and recommended. Something feels wrong about this because that does not square with commonsense. If the risks were really that high and indubitable, everyone in France for centuries now would have suffered and died of cancer. Those are not the facts that I am aware of. E and his wife drank is moderation and not a lot more than I did. More importantly, that wine had a story for them, it brought back memories from a summer past when they had visited Beynac et Cazenac where this wine was from, walked around the charming village and the store where E had bought his wife a pretty pendant that she happened to be wearing that evening. The value of the wine was well beyond the temporal joys of imbibition. We spent about three hours at that table and it remains one of the most memorable dinner experiences. I am not sure what would remain of it without the anchoring force of the wine and if it was replaced by a glass of water.  

Driver's Seat

I like Uber but don't love it. Back when I first starting using the service, I often chatted with the drivers - there was a sense of novelty in the experience for both sides. They came from diverse professional and cultural backgrounds and were often not driving Uber as their sole source of income. They were generally happy with the money they made on a flexible schedule and the opportunity to run into a people they would have not met any other way. 

Those were the good times. In more recent years, its more common to travel in complete silence. We learn nothing about each other. On rare occasion when a driver has talked to me, they have expressed frustration with Uber and how they don't make nearly as much as they once used to. The joy has gone out of the job. The drivers I see now need to Uber to pay the bills - its not something they do on the side for fun. It was interesting to read that the company CEO has spent time being a driver and understanding the drivers' pain points. Hopefully that has made a difference this story claims it has:

Khosrowshahi’s experience as an Uber driver gave him a new perspective. As he said, “Historically, we’ve always put a premium on the rider experience.” But being a non-founder CEO has allowed him to challenge old decisions. Uber needs to win the “hearts and minds” of drivers, too. This has made a competitive difference. 

Culture Shift

I was listening to a Hard Fork episode recently and the issue of us finding it harder and harder to read physical books and books in general came up as a topic of discussion. One of the speakers posited an interesting root cause. Back in the day you could talk about the book you were reading because many others were reading the same book. This was definitely true for me in school and college. You found like-minded people based on favorite authors, books and music. Since then, I cannot recall taking casually to friends or family about a book we had all read and had opinions about. 

The culture shifted in degrees to other media. Now the chatter is around things seen and shared on social media - that is the space once occupied by books. So the reasoning was that we did not stop reading books because the internet or social media happened, its just that society has moved on to a different gathering place away from books. There is definitely truth to that logic and it made me feel slightly better about my own inability to read physical books. I have been able to reread books from the past in digital format - its almost like returning to a familiar town, walking through neighborhoods I once knew and loved. A brand new book does not invoke those feelings and absent a community of readers that are just all around you, there is no sense in undertaking that exploration, finding a book club and so on.

This is not accounting for the fact that the sheer number of books published has exploded and the quality has proportionally dropped. The combination of scarcity and a high quality bar kept the reader's attention back in pre-internet days. That is no longer the case. Today finding a good book is like finding a designer dress that fits you in the final sale aisle of a discount department store in a suburban strip-mall. The chances of success are slim to none.

Unbalanced Union

Continuing to read about the impact of absent father on daughters. I am not sure this is the exclusive realm of daughter and if the father has to be physically absent. From what I have observed this one applies to children whose mother's who are partnered in paper but really don't have someone who fulfills their needs and wants. 

The absence of father means there is no balance or union, no modelling of coming together and then separating, enacting the process of development. When the father is not there to unite with the mother and the sense of their pairing is absent, a daughter experiences separation, empty spaces, anger and unmet desires. She might comprehend the father in his absence through the eyes of mother as an incompetent figure who is disappointing and subsequently denigrated

In Indian society when I grew up finding the mother incompetent and disappointing was common enough. Children learned to ignore her on serious matters because her voice or opinion did not matter anyway. Denigration was not as common as feeling sorry for the hapless woman. Grown-up kids could get impatient with their mothers and demand that she grow a spine, fend for herself and so on - mainly so they could get on with their lives instead of being concerned about her well-being all times. 

More often than not, the pep-talk to revolt was useless. The union had been unbalanced for life and the woman had adapted to it at a great cost to her physical and mental well-being. She did not have the resources left to instigate change. It is true that children of such marriages have nothing to model from and flounder in their own marriages. 

Living Quantum

 With aging and relevance on my mind lately, it was fascinating to watch Don't Die. Very rich guy uses himself as lab rat to test anti-ages regimens. He has some messiah-like appeal which helps him recruit his father and one of his son's to participate in his intergenerational experiment. Then there are fans and such on social media and equal or more detractors. The premise is that he can reduce the rate at which he ages, live productively for much longer and that is a goal worth spending millions of dollars on every year. Clearly, the efficacy of such experiments on a sample size of one does not do anything for humanity. But if you have a lot of money and this is your particular passion - to aim at immortality, who can stop you. The level of narcissism is unlike anything we regular folks will come across in our daily lives because we live well outside the orbit of such individuals. 

It is eye-popping to say the least. It did beg the question of relevance should this man manage to live 120 years and more. What exactly are his contributions now other than the maniacal focus on his physical health and desire to beat nature. It seems as if these questions don't come to mind when you attain a certain level of wealth. It is as if money is all the relevance anyone could ask of the person. At the point, the moral framework that applies to the rest of us cease to apply for them. Its almost like Newtonian physics failing to hold when objects are traveling at close to the speed or light. Watching this documentary was a bit like watching the equivalent of quantum phenomenon applied to human values and morals.

Staying Needed

Interesting difference in attitude about inheritance across generations. While the story is about American attitudes, the phenomenon could be more global. Boomers had to climb out of a much deeper hole to achieve financial success and stability. Millennials much less so because they have a better starting point and more advantages than their parents did. Gen Z is off to a rough and bumpy start and could really use the money now not in a distant, unknowable point in the future. But the Boomer who has to survive on the money they do have, it is far from a given that it will be enough or provide for them to end of their lives

Grandma Sue, yes. My husband took over her affairs after his grandfather died, and at that time, she was 87. She had some health issues. And she told Rick that he would inherit everything, everything, as soon as she died. And at that time, it would have been a fairly substantial amount of money. It would have been about a quarter of a million dollars. But that money was used to take care of her. She eventually spent all that money down, she eventually qualified for Medicaid, she died at the age of 98. And that is a fairly typical story because people live a long time and long-term care can be very expensive.

The whole situation makes you wonder if the Japanese practice of granny-dumping maybe in the cards for the rest of the world. The grandma in the story would have died a hero if she had not wiped out the grandson's entire inheritance by continuing to live. There was a point of inflection there somewhere. Since nothing was mentioned of her contributions to the world and family between ages 87 to 98, presumably there were none. It's great that she made it to the end of her own resources and did not impose on the next generations. Having elderly parents and friends who have already retired, I can't help thinking about my own relevance to the next generation - what does positive contribution look like the age of retirement whatever that might be. 

Bad Harvest

 Loved this essay about the fight over our collective inattention and found these lines very relatable: 

..maybe we have multiple selves who want different things—a self who wants to read, a self who wants to scroll. There’s a tension here between different aspects of the self that can be hard to reconcile. We contend with what our superego wants (to go on vacation and read novels) and what our actual self does (scrolls through Instagram). As is so often the case, our revealed preferences are different from our stated ones. And who is to say what our real and true desire is?

While I don't have social media to scroll through, I do have a RSS feed that spans everything I am interested in keeping up with. It does promote a lot of scrolling because I scan the title of the story to decide if I am going to spend time on it. What I choose to dive into is just as telling as what I choose to ignore. If there are forces at play that want me to be inattentive to certain things and they are successful in making me scroll past those stories, they have in fact won without getting my attention. I also like the argument that compares attention harvesting of minors to child labor and therefore prohibit it

We as a society can say that children’s attention should not be sold and commodified in the aggressive and alienating fashion of current social-media networks. Just as 12-year-olds can’t really consent to a wage contract, we could argue they can’t really consent to the expropriation of their attention in the way that, say, Instagram exploits it.

Closing Gap

 Reading these lines from The Absent Father Effect on Daughters by Susan Schwartz, brought to mind childhood memories for me:

Although the mirror of the father’s face does not reflect a daughter’s self-same face, it can reflect emotions, affects, approval, liking and love. His gaze determines how she will interpret others from his cherishment and presence for her. When a daughter is uncertain of who she is because she is uncertain of how she is seen, she experiences anxiety. The father’s mental representation is internalized, allowing the child and then the adult to find herself in the other

My father was very parsimonious in his praise for me until my late twenties and thirties. It was his way of ensuring that I continued to strive harder and do better and did not get too comfortable. There was good and bad to his strategy and I adapted my style with J as a single-parent. When I was trying to stand-in for the absent father in her life, I praised her effort and diligence always but did not focus much on the outcomes.

I could not however give her the "approval, liking and love" my father gave me very generously. I never doubted for a moment that he sincerely believed that I was perfect as a woman. While that was not necessarily true and it becomes obvious even to daughters of the most doting fathers once they come out into the real world, unsheltered and unprotected. But there is a tremendous value in that on-ramp the father can provide his daughter making it easy for her to make that transition from childhood to womanhood confidently. I simply had no way of closing this gap for J. 

Raising Oneself

Reading this essay reminded me of my childhood friend C who had been a victim of sexual abuse by a close family member. It took her many years to ask for help at which point her parents intervened and nightmare ended. What C learned through the experience, that her parents could not be relied upon to protect their children - they were not able to see the signs of trouble writ large which we as her friends from school could see. We were the ones asking her if everything was okay at home. The oldest of our group was not yet a teen. C has a younger sister who she hovered over manically. That did not stop until we graduated high school and went to college. 

C felt guilty about leaving home and leaving her baby sister with parents who had proven themselves delinquent. C was overly generous with her time and mental resources for anyone she considered her friend. I was one of them and a grateful beneficiary of her kindness. Even back then, I recognized this was not typical for a kid my own age but assumed C was just different and accepted it. Yet, she struggled to ask for help or confide in me for a long time. There must have been the presumption that she was in the parental realm unlike us, she was the one to solve problems not one whose problems we could solve anyway. 

A common thread found in people with these shared childhood experiences is a heightened sense of empathy and an ability to more closely connect to others. This is not to say that the negative impacts of their childhood are diminished, Nakazawa says, but that many are able to forge meaning out of their suffering. “People begin to see that their path to well-being must take into account the way in which trauma changed their story,” she explained, “and once they’re able to do that, they can also see how resiliency is also important in their story.”

I have definitely experienced first-hand that "heightened sense of empathy and an ability to more closely connect to others" with C. She was the parent of our friend group though we were not quite able to label it that way. We attributed it to maturity and being a kinder, more caring kid than the rest of us.

Connected String

Watched May December a few days before watching Lion. Nothing in common between the stories, but it is about how a child's life turns out due to the actions of their parents, who are often victims of circumstance themselves. In the first instance, the father of the children was was a minor himself, when an older woman seduced and later married him. The movie was inspired by those events and shows the children in state of permanent discomfort about their sordid origin. One of the two parents was not at fault and neither are the kids - yet they all suffer. There is no better place they can escape to so this is the life they must somehow make peace with.

The second movie has a happy ending for the protagonist who is reunited with his birth mother but also has wonderful adoptive parents. His adoptive brother does not have nearly the same outcomes. His early childhood until adoption was significantly worse that trauma held him back despite the opportunities he received after being adopted. Both movies are made very well and got me thinking about outcomes in people's lives - what they control and what they can't.

For some reason, it brought to mind a woman I worked with at some point that was extremely difficult to deal with. She blew hot and cold all the time so you never knew what state you'd find her any given time. Some folks had developed adaptations to cope with her because was critical to the work they were doing. I chose not to have any in-person interactions with her but use online and email channels only. It was more predictable to deal with her that way. For the longest time, I struggled to understand why H was this kind of person that made it tremendously tasking for others to get along with her. 

Somehow in the light of these two movies which have nothing to do with H - a product of a stable, upper-class family with excellent education, married to a lawyer and mother of a pre-school kid. When she is feeling sociable, I have heard her share things about her family which sound perfectly regular and normal. Yet, there had to be something about her childhood and youth that made her into this highly peculiar individual. More likely than not, she was responding to something in her environment that she was not in her control. Over time she became the H we learned to avoid or adapt to.

Feeling Kinship

My colleague L has been on H1 visa for over 10 years now with no line of sight to permanent residency. In a team call earlier, he mentioned that he had lost is favorite aunt who was like a mother to him. His mother had died when he was only a few years old. Effectively, this woman was his mother. So the gravity of the loss was comparable. He went on to clarify that he will not travel out of the country for the funeral considering the risks these days specially that his wife and kids are here, their life is here. 

I spoke to him 1:1 after the call - I have been in the same purgatory as he is in. I too lost loved ones that I was very close to. It was not even the most uncertain times like now - I was just risk averse and did not want to rock the boat for J. What if on the off-chance, something went wrong. That would require a complete redo and rethink of J's and my life. When weighed against my desire to be part of my loved one's last rites, practical considerations won every time. I was not able to reconcile those loses for years, my mourning was interrupted by everything I needed to do to survive.

It made me feel less human and more robotic - and it made me feel ashamed of myself. Back home, everyone understood the situation and I was not blamed for my absences, but I continued to blame myself for the longest time. L will go through all of that and more - he had effectively lost his mother and from what I could tell it was unexpected because the aunt had been in good health. He will need to rationalize his absence, his inability to join his family for her last rites, he will need to ask himself what kind of example he is setting for his kids by his actions - as much as they are guided by forces well out of his control. We did not go over any of that but he knew I understood his situation with a degree of intensity not everyone else in that call could have. None of them have ever been in our shoes and how fortunate is that. 

Being Fair

The man is almost a trillionaire and wants to edify us all on fairness in the workplace by way of presentism. He must really think that regular working people are spectacularly dumb if that statement was meant to convey any real meaning. Unfairness is the entire point of workplaces. People almost never get what they fairly deserve. Folks who are super conscientious are burning out because they take pride in the quality of their work and find themselves saddled with the worst projects. Others spend their entire time at work building political capital so they can get ahead - they have no time, desire or skills to do any real work. 

Everyone else is somewhere between the two extremes - and none of it is fair by design. The workplace is meant to be exploitative or the enterprise cannot be profitable. Once everyone gets treated fairly, it would be impossible to keep the house in order. There has to be the right mix of hope, fear and confusion to make the system work. Fairness is not meant to be on the menu but this guy has an easy fix for all that. Maybe such level of enlightenment is attained when a person's wealth is so vast that it is incomprehensible to the huddled masses he addresses in his post. 

I know for a fact that I would not have been able to raise J in the way I wanted if I did not have the flexibility to work from home from the time she was about ten years old. They would be no path for me if I had to present myself in the office to be "fair" to everyone else. The person most in need of being treated fairly by me - my daughter, would have lost out big while none of those folks at work or even my employers would have benefitted from me sitting in the office.

Wise Words

Reading this brought B to mind who has been battling cancer for several years and has been winning so far. She's my childhood friend. When things nose-dive for her, I feel a sense of panic, of time running out, wonder if this will our last chance to meet. Then just like that the scare is over, she is sailing in clear blue sky, her sprit undaunted and undiminished as ever. 

She makes me and everyone else who knows her believe that miracles can and will happen - most certainly they will for B because she is such an amazing human being. God must want her to stick around and do more good for others - as she has been doing her entire adult life. I did not feel right about sharing the thread with B - she is so much wiser than me that none of this will be revelation for me. But there was wisdom there for me:

You have opportunity after opportunity to create something lovely for yourself or others.  Every moment you choose to sit and think about horrors beyond your control, every time you make the choice to look for more and more details about just HOW bad... you are turning away from those opportunities..

The imagined "horrors" in the lives of regular people like me abound. We can get ourselves worked up about things we don't control, things that cause us much aggravation or disquiet. That is the time-sink to avoid at all costs. I often recall things B has said to me over the years to center me in times of trouble because she walks the talk every single day, leading an exemplary life while battling for life itself.

Crossing Chasm

Very sad and strange story about old women in Japan. Maybe there is something for governments dealing with aging populations to learn from this. Free food, medical care and companionship in return for work is what these folks are seeking. That path to there does not need to lead through petty crimes and imprisonment. Maybe the same things could be provided in lieu of free but dignified labor but not involve incarceration. 

For some elderly women, resorting to crime is a path to survival. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reports that 20% of people aged over 65 in Japan live in poverty. Theft is the most common crime among elderly prisoners, CNN reported. In 2022, more than  80% of elderly female prisoners nationwide were in jail for stealing, according to the Japanese government.

Reading about old age and loneliness often reminds me of people in my extended family who have lost their spouse and are now trying to go the remaining distance alone with various degrees of success. There seems to be chasm some are able to cross successfully and get to the point where they have a new sense of self separate and apart from being someone's spouse or parent. With this new persona they have discovered so late in life, these folks are able to go out and engage with the world in ways they never did before. From what I have observed, this is what it takes to age successfully while alone. This assumes the existence of financial security without which nothing works - a person can fall off the edge of despair and the women in this story do.

Poetic Intellect

It used to be that writing good poetry was a test of intelligence and creativity both. Now with AI being able to do it more masterfully, the standard for good poetry had likely changed. Here is a AI production when I prompted it to write a poem about chickens in a farm a la Neruda. 

Hens with eyes like polished amber,

Roosters crowned in crimson and copper light,

You transform simple dirt into symphonies of life,

Clucking secrets older than the farm's wooden bones.

Your wings, folded maps of rural persistence,

Carry the weight of generations—

Eggs like pale moons, smooth as promises,

Nestled in straw kingdoms of soft rebellion.

Humble creatures of sunlight and soil,

You dance your ancient choreography

Between fence posts and forgotten dreams,

Singing psalms of survival with each determined step.

There is obviously no remote comparison a real work of Neruda and the words are like empty shells where there should have been meaning - yet it is a poem after a fashion. Interesting to a professor's take on the subject and where she thinks LLMs can shine 

create an unexpected juxtaposition. We are limited when we’re thinking about writing in a purely intentional way. We’re limited in the kinds of ideas that we produce. So instead, we roll the dice. We create a system of rules. We follow that system of rules in order to create these unexpected juxtapositions of words, phrases, lines of poetry that do something that we would be incapable of doing on our own…. There’s untapped potential for things that might bring us joy in what we can do with our linguistic capacity.

Two Truths

Reading some Tagore again, this time Sadhana. His essays written from his travels in rural Bengal were interesting vignettes but lacked life-force energy. The stories were told in a detached and dispassionate manner creating distance from the reader. Maybe I was seeking in the essays what was not meant to be in them - they were written in a different mood, for a difference purpose and a readership that valued what he was willing to share with them, and did not ask for that which he was unwilling to. 

This observation about the west and the desire to subdue nature and the consequences that arise from failing to do so, felt particularly poignant in light of all the ways that nature has been in American news lately - fires that cannot be stopped in the west coast, intense Artic cold fronts in the rest of the country. Many lost electricity and were forced to come in direct contact with nature that could not be subdued. Many lost their homes - the thing that separated them from the brute force of nature.  

The west seems to take a pride in thinking that it is subduing nature; as if we are living in a hostile world where we have to wrest everything we want from an unwilling and alien arrangement of things. This sentiment is the product of the city-wall habit and training of mind. For in the city life man naturally directs the concentrated light of his mental vision upon his own life and works, and this creates an artificial dissociation between himself and the Universal Nature within whose bosom he lies.

He contrasts that with the Indian view of the world. Was that his romanticized opinion of the Indian world view or the  reality of his day is hard to tell. That is certainly not the truth about India today - that implicit harmony between man and nature is not there to see anymore. 

But in India the point of view was different; it included the world with the man as one great truth. India put all her emphasis on the harmony that exists between the individual and the universal. She felt we could have no communication whatever with our surroundings if they were absolutely foreign to us. Man's complaint against nature is that he has to acquire most of his necessaries by his own efforts. Yes, but his efforts are not in vain; he is reaping success every day, and that shows there is a rational connection between him and nature, for we never can make anything our own except that which is truly related to us.

The world is way more connected than it was in Tagore's day. So perhaps there is a fortified, walled city view of the world and then there is the forest, woodland integrated with human life view. It is no longer about west or east but people choosing to see things one way or the other

 

Meeting Bar

As a kid I read my fair share of Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys. There was a calming quality to them because of how predictably the stories would always unfold - the winners and losers pre-ordained as if by divine will. You just had to enjoy the ride that came with the requisite number of twists and turns to get to that satisfying end when the world would be as it was meant to be.  I liked the certainty that these books brought to my life. It was bit sad to read that the author of Hardy Boys really hated writing those books because they had no redeeming literary value. He aspired to be a good writer. 

While that may be true, those books did bring other value to the lives of many generations of kids around the world. When I was reading them in India it was already literature from ancient times in  North America, where they were written and the action took place. Nothing about my life and times in small-town India mirrored that of the Hardy Boys but it did not diminish the joy of devouring the books in one sitting until reaching the predictably satisfying last page. It was the same feeling of unwrapping a Cadbury's chocolate bar and knowing for sure how it would end. There was no room or scope for disappointment in either experience for a kid my age in India back in the day. 

Writing, particularly fiction writing, is an act of quiet terror. You are alone all at once with your genius and your ineptitude, and your errors are as public as possible. To be a writer of fiction requires extreme self-discipline and extreme self-confidence, and many of the people drawn to writing have neither. It can be a recipe for dismal failure.

Writing is also, financially, a crap-shoot. Always has been. Sometimes, good writers starve. Sometimes, dreadful writers succeed. John Grisham's sentences thud and crepitate all over the page, and he has become a literary tycoon. Edgar Allan Poe nearly starved.

Mostly, you become a writer not because you want to get rich or famous, but because you have to write; because there is something inside that must come out. When a baby is to be born, she is born.

Bot Powered

 A friend sent me a link to this press-release recently. As a small business owner who struggles to stay afloat fighting uneven cashflow every day, this would be R's dream come true to have an team of AI employees do everything that needs to get done and she would not have to keep anyone on payroll. The claims are quite monumental if not impossible but the premise is interesting. If this became realistic at some point, R would only need string a workflow together that defined how these different bots would work together to further the cause of her business. Her role could be limited to running checks to make sure things were getting done as expected. 

There is the scenario where she scaled her business using bots but still had a team of experts to verify the work the bot was doing - a force multiplier for her business and workforce. In effect R could operate like a 50 or 500 person company with 5 real employees. If all of this works, a lot of folks could reasonably jump into solo-entrepreneurship because they would operate alone to begin and not need to deal with the complexities of maintaining a workforce when business is uneven at best. 

Someone who wants to try a side hustle to see if it had enough juice to warrant them quitting their day job, they can begin this way - test out the concept without taking on any risk. I love any and all innovations that set people with good ideas free to work for themselves, create the job and the company they dreamed of working at. So while I am skeptical about the claims, I love the general trajectory of it.