Seeking Bonolata

The call (or not meant to call) from N triggered a lot of old memories and not in any particular order. Most are actually not even associated with her. She represents a place and time in my life long gone. Yet there are threads that remain and can be tugged even by such accident as that call. Such is the power of those faded, long ago days. It got me thinking about the time I had heard Soumitra Chatterjee live reciting poetry and specifically Bonolata Sen. That was not the first time I had heard the poem recited but certainly was the version that etched the deepest impression. The words came alive in a way they had not ever before. Then fast forward to my marriage. 

Most of my cousins sat out of it for reasons I am not entirely sure of but then I always lacked the social intelligence to thrive in Indian families. That was an arranged marriage and everything about it would have checked off the requisite boxes of acceptable. Yet it was met with a seething disapproval which would come to a rolling boil when I decided to leave him after only a couple of years of being married, tiny little  J in tow. During those couple of years, I had a deep immersion into Bengali culture. Given I did not read Bangla fluently, my ex read books to me routinely. Jibananda Das was one of his favorite poets and so I must have heard all of his poems more than once - Bonolata Sen included. N unsettled things that have been at rest for a very long time and while it was aggravating in the moment, that brought clarity too.

It was not quite the Soumitra Chatterjee recitation experience but there was something special about it because it allowed me to wrap my hopes, dreams and aspirations for my life around his rendition of that poem. Things come to be imbued with meaning they were not meant to have. There is that last remaining thread that ties fragments of my life together - that is N. Childhood, youth and adulthood. She was there through all of it, had known things that could have altered the course of my life but she chose to stay away and absent. There is nothing to tie N to where I am now and those who complete my world and it's best to leave it that way. 

Phoning In

Calling in your website changes sounds a bit wacky but a nice experiment all the same. I am trying to imagine a practical application of such a thing. Imagine you launch a minimal beta of a product and then open up the phone line to the users to call in their issues, aggravations and brilliant ideas for improvement. If the system processing the requests is intelligent enough, it can create a prioritized product backlog out of all these phone calls and write up specs for the engineers to develop and release. 

Lately there is a lot of noise about said engineers being replaceable by AI. If that were even partly true the whole thing could be set up to run on auto-pilot and the product would be continuously improved based on evolving user needs. It all sounds quite magical if actually feasible and if the chatter did not drive the bot absolutely crazy. That would have the product burn itself to death because most requests were at odds with each other, solving one problem naturally created ten others. That would cause a ton of discontent leading to a ton of unhappy phone calls. It may be hard for the bot to perform under such circumstances.

Frozen Look

This story about comedians and Botoxed audiences reads like a piece from The Onion. It had a hard time accepting its veracity but figured there was some logic to the story so maybe its true. 

“Comedy thrives on connection, and facial expressions play a huge part. We want people to laugh, cry, frown, sneer, but frozen faces from Botox impact the entire atmosphere.

“We hope trialling this ban will help move the needle and get facial reactions back into the room – for the benefit of our comedians and the audience.”

Andrew Mensah, one of the venue’s regular stand-up acts, added: “Performing to an audience with frozen faces can be incredibly tough.

“Comedy is a two-way street – we feed off the energy and reactions of the crowd. Mark and the team are always devising new ideas to support us comedians – this must be his best one yet.”

I have an interesting experience each time I am in my Pilates class. One of the women was a former client and I've known her for over twenty years now. Her Botox (and whatever else she has done to her face) job has left her with a permanent smile. Some days our instructor really pushes the class hard and we all struggle because this is not a class for the very young and very fit. The demographic is motivated but they can't always keep up. 

We all look beat at some point but this lady has her smile on at all times, even though physically she is in about the same place as the rest of us. I am not sure if the perma-smile is any better than a frozen face socially. They both have the same effect in a sense - the person comes across as unsympathetic. This woman is about a decade older than me and has kept herself in fantastic shape. If she hadn't made the "improvements" to her face, I think she'd look even better. 

Aborted Call

N is my cousin. We are close in age and about nothing else. When we were younger, I spent a lot of time in her house in Kolkata when visiting there. Much of those times were spent with her mom (my aunt) in the kitchen. I found it easier to be there watch her work and help where I could than be with her kids - N and her brother B. I felt close to my aunt, we had things in common and even where we diverged, it was easy for me to understand why. 

Being around her was frictionless and she appreciated the company because her own kids were never there beyond being physically present in their rooms. My aunt shared her anxieties about them - she had tried to be a supportive mother but the kids had both interpreted that as a sign of weakness that they could leverage and exploit. So they did. Her expectations for them were never met, nothing she asked of them (which was very minimal to begin) was ever done. 

In contrast my mother had a very high performance bar for me - she simply would not stand for many of the things that my aunt's kids did routinely. I knew I had to comply or there would be unpleasant consequences. It was made clear to me that any support I expected from my parents would be extended only if I performed to their expectations - there was nothing unconditional about it, no blank checks would be signed at any time. 

N and B did not have that problem. Spending time with that family was extremely illuminating for me, it informed my own parenting style in time. It became evident to me that the optimal path was somewhere between my aunt's and my mother's way. It did not run through the precise midpoint - that would be too easy. Instead it was a meandering course veering to one end sometimes and then the other. That is what made parenting so challenging, there is no one size fits all and no one strategy that serves all needs that arise in a kid's life. 

Being able to stay the course and be infinitely flexible within a moral and values framework is what it takes. It is hard and almost impossible to get right. Our two families had run two experiments and I was able to see the results in both cases. N and B pursue very creative careers and B had been incomparably more successful than his sister. They have different kinds of struggles than I ever did and the way they have overcome (or tried to) is unlike anything I would have considered. My life despite many upheavals is way more conventional than theirs, some would call it far more boring. Recently, N called me out of the blue and hung up before I could answer. This would have been more than thirty years since we last spoke. Then to make it worse she wrote she's sorry she called me by accident. 

Then we exchanged the completely meaningless two lines how are you? doing well. It might seem odd and rude at first blush but that interaction is very much expected from those far away childhood days. This is no different from me skipping out of interacting with N and B to the kitchen to hang out with my aunt, go out with her on her errands and so on. There was nothing there back then or now to support a conversation between us.

Slow Change

I remember the day I stopped eating meat a few years ago. We were at a pizza place that some friends had told us about. They let you come up with your own set of toppings from a number of interesting and somewhat unconventional options. You sat at a long table with a bunch of strangers and ate whatever it is that you came up with. I recall distinctly that my toppings were seafood and vegetables and I loved how it turned out. But something happened that day, that meal that made me not want to eat any meat for the next three or four years. I don't know what it was about the place but that was the effect on me. 

As someone who never had any dietary restrictions, this was a big change to cope with. When traveling, it limited options for a common, shared meal. Most importantly, I wasn't sure how to make up for the lost protein and found myself eating more carbs than I needed to. It was with concerted effort over a long period of time that I was able to start eating meat, even if small portions - it was no longer off the table and my body learned to tolerate meat once again. 

If anything, it's the sudden consumption of large amounts of fibre after a long hiatus that could cause digestive problems. It's better to ease into such dietary changes. "Depending on the fibre, you can have some pretty strong reactions to it," says Kersten.

In short, worrying about your body somehow losing the ability to digest meat shouldn't impair any plans you have to extend Veganuary into the spring. If you're among those who've had an upset stomach after eating meat following a long hiatus, a loss of enzymes is not likely to be the culprit, though this phenomenon remains understudied, Kersten says.

I am glad to be back to eating what I was always used to but that extended break helped me recalibrate all parts of my diet which might have been a good thing in the end.

Vibe Coding

It's still March and I have already heard a few podcasts about vibe coding (a phrase coined only last month). From what I could gather listening to folks who say they never coded a line in their lives and are now vibecoding away, it seems to be a way to coax the LLM to do a thing for you. The thing is something you as a regular person (non-coder) want typically as a productivity tool in your life and now suddenly you can make that thing. You ofcourse don't know or care about the thing does what the thing does but it approximately does what you need it to do. Sounds extremely empowering at first blush. It almost wants me to make a coder out of my mother who is yet to be able to send me a WhatsApp message because typing is quite taxing for her. 

She has learned to find and watch YouTube videos and movies on Amazon Prime but that took quite a bit of hand-holding, coordinating with the "tech-savvy" college-student neighbor on the phone to get her the help. But vibe coding may be something she can learn to do once she learns to chat with the bot - maybe this will be the thing that gets her inspired to type as hard and taxing as it is. The problem is the experience could be truly miserable if a person expects good and real outcomes and finds that they are chasing after a mirage. What is more, if they by some miracle manage to get the thing working there is no knowing when it will stop working and why. They have to vibe code all over again. 

Plant Lessons

I have a sturdy indoor plant that has thrived even when no one was home for a couple of weeks. All it takes is some extra watering and being placed in sunlight once I am back. It seems to help to get rid of the yellowed leaves. I am no expert on plants or how best to care for them but have used common sense - its a living being and so am I. 

So there may be things to apply to us both equally. Having good intent and trying hard enough seems to count. Seeing the plant bounce back after I return from after a longish absence is very energizing. There are figurative yellowed leaves clinging to me too, they got that way from neglect of one sort or another, intended or not. There are indeed life lessons from learn from plants and pruning what is near dead is not the only one. 

Healthy and appropriate soil is a must for all your indoor plants. Some plants need more drainage, some need different minerals, and some plants do best with bark instead of soil at all. The life lesson is this: Surround yourself with what nourishes you. If you’re trying to grow in depleted soil, you won’t get very far. Put your roots down in a place that’s healthy for you.

I have done well with the soil and pruning in my own life and have had plenty of help with both. Light has not always been as easy but maybe seeing my plant come alive in the warm sun of spring is a lesson. 

Accent Cleaning

Accent neutralization for call center workers is technology that leaves a person with mixed feelings. There is a sense is matching the rep's accent to the caller's accent, giving them a relatable name and backstory even. But to wash off the accent indiscriminately to replace it with something "better" and "more acceptable" does not sit right.

I can't count the number of times I have had trouble following a rep's accent because they were from some part of the country that does not have a flat and neutral accent that is easier for everyone to follow. If they were to wash it off for my benefit I would find it a lot more endearing if they settled for an nice Indian accent that I could both relate to and follow with no trouble. 

In an interview with Bloomberg, Teleperformance deputy chief executive officer Thomas Mackenbrock said that Sanas' technology, which his employer has gained exclusive rights to through its partnership, can "neutralize the accent of the Indian speaker with zero latency."

"When you have an Indian agent on the line, sometimes it’s hard to hear, to understand," Mackebrock said. Translating agents' accents to make them easier for native English speakers on the other end of the line "creates more intimacy, increases the customer satisfaction, and reduces the average handling time," he added.

"It is a win-win for both parties," the deputy CEO enthused. 

It would have been a lot smarter to use the available technology to help create stronger human connection instead of taking a deeply prejudiced view of an accent that many would find entirely acceptable in fact. I'd speak to a Chetan from Mumbai that sounds like himself instead of a wrapper that goes by Chad and inspires no trust or confidence.

Lighting Dark

I really enjoyed watching All We Imagine As Light. The movie has a moody, introspective atmosphere but does not dwell on what is dark and difficult and instead shines rays of light wherever possible. The three female roles are played well, each bringing a different kind of strength. Parvathy is a strong woman who refuses to see herself as a victim - where doors close on her, she seeks out new ones and without feeling hopeless. Prabha is the calm centering force in the trio, wise and sensible beyond her years but not incapable of dreaming even if secretly. That is her hidden inner resource that keeps her afloat in what seems to be a really difficult life situation. The youngest woman in the group is rebellious and willing to take risks the other two would have cautioned her against so she does not share more than she needs to.

I particularly liked how the problems of the three characters are shown in very realistic terms but the movie glides gently past it to illuminate what is bright and positive. Bombay is so busy and crowded that it seems impossible that a person would find the space or time to be alone or feel lonely but those times very much exist and Kapadia shows them thoughtfully. These women are each alone in their own way and their sisterhood helps them cope - being a widow without documentation to prove that the house she lives is her own, being married to man who calls only once a year and works in a different continent or being in love a man that the family would never find acceptable. 

Kapadia makes us root for all three of them and see them come the other side from darkness into light. This is a movie set in India and relies on themes that are specific to India - like an arranged marriage with an expat factory worker who is never seen or heard from but is still the husband a woman cannot escape from to live her own life. Yet, the way the story is told transcends India and becomes about universal themes. 

Keeping Trust

Great reading about how the patients and doctors could benefit from technology by ensuring  the results delivered by the system meet the high trust bar 

The CURE technique has proven useful for synthesizing new patient records too. Outside records detailing patients’ complex problems can have “reams” of data content in different formats, Callstrom explained. This needs to be reviewed and summarized so that clinicians can familiarize themselves before they see the patient for the first time. 

“I always describe outside medical records as a little bit like a spreadsheet: You have no idea what’s in each cell, you have to look at each one to pull content,” he said. 

But now, the LLM does the extraction, categorizes the material and creates a patient overview. Typically, that task could take 90 or so minutes out of a practitioner’s day — but AI can do it in about 10, Callstrom said.  

He described “incredible interest” in expanding the capability across Mayo’s practice to help reduce administrative burden and frustration. 

While the consequences of hallucinations are not nearly as catastrophic in other industries, there is a barrier to adoption that can be overcome in the same way. I am regular user of GenAI as a productivity tool for my job and have learned to use it a trust and verify mode at all times. Even with proven gains, getting broader acceptance has proven difficult so far for a variety of reasons but losing professional credibility is the most significant one.

Measuring Gain

I fasted a lot more often growing up in India because all it took was to join in an activity others were doing. On Laxmi puja for example, I was allowed to help with preparations only if I was fasting. That made it an easy decision because I enjoyed participating, not just sitting it out as an observer. Fasting without a religious context is unfamiliar to me and would be a lot harder to implement consistently. The 7-day fast seems like an advanced level thing, novices would not be able to pull-off. It would almost certainly require taking time off from work to make sure everything went according to plan:

By the end of a seven-day fast, the body has fully adapted to using fat as its main energy source, breaking it down into molecules called ketones, which provide fuel for the brain and other organs. Beyond energy shifts, the prolonged absence of food triggers widespread protein adaptations across major organs, including the liver, muscles, and immune system. These changes signal the activation of repair mechanisms at the cellular level, promoting autophagy—a natural process where the body clears out damaged cells and regenerates healthier ones.

This metabolic reset not only enhances energy efficiency but also supports improved organ function and may reduce inflammation, offering potential benefits for overall health and longevity. These findings reveal the body’s incredible ability to adapt and optimize in response to fasting, unlocking pathways that could play a role in disease prevention and long-term wellness. 

I was reading about these new breathalyzer style devices that allow you to monitor your metabolism even in real-time. It could be very useful to have the data on how the body is working during a short or long fast - to see quantified benefits. Maybe some of the lessons can carry over every day life even when a person is not fasting

Reaching End

 I can't tell if this book club is a form of torture or the most unique bonding experience between a group of people who have stuck with something for three decades. 

Fialka said he once saw a list of at least 52 active Finnegans Wake reading groups, though Slote, the Joyce scholar, said he thinks there are even more. A Wake group in Zurich, founded in 1984, has read the book three times in nearly 40 years, and is currently well into its fourth cycle. Their first reading took 11 years.

Different groups have their own local character. “The New York group is really argumentative, and they’re always yelling at each other, but they’re all friends, they’ve all known each other for 20 years.” Quadrino said. His Austin group is “more friendly, more ‘Yes, and’”.

The Zurich group, which attracts a mix of retirees and university students, is “benevolent, although it can also become competitive and contentious,” according to Sabrina Alonso, a member, and Fritz Senn, its host.

At any rate, I feel so much better knowing that it can take that long to read the book I have attempted several times and failed to make any progress whatsoever. I see why a support group may be required to get the person through this thing one page at a time. With that kind of sustained effort, I could as well become a trapeze artist - which may prove to be a whole lot more gratifying as an accomplishment that getting to the end of Finnegans Wake.

Truth Hour

There is a time in a woman's life where the agonizing hour described by the narrator in story can happen. While living through that experience she feels angry at the man for making her feel so vulnerable and powerless. The most desired thing in that moment is to never ever have to experience this. That time passes and she comes into clarity. The hurt heals over and there is scar tissue where once the heart was so easy to wound. The next man when he comes along will not have this effect on her anymore. 

No, no, no. I must stop. I must think about something else. This is what I'll do. I'll put the clock in the other room. Then I can't look at it. If I do have to look at it, then I'll have to walk into the bedroom, and that will be something to do. Maybe, before I look at it again, he will call me. I'll be so sweet to him, if he calls me. If he says he can't see me tonight, I'll say, "Why, that's all right, dear. Why, of course it's all right." I'll be the way I was when I first met him. Then maybe he'll like me again. I was always sweet, at first. Oh, it's so easy to be sweet to people before you love them. 

She will come to realize she is not crazy to have felt this way when she did. Only that it was a warning that she did not recognize - the man she was agonizing over was not the one for her. The irony is that no one can quite explain that to her - the catharsis must come through experiences like this. It is easy for an outside observer to discuss her behavior as insecurity but it not entirely accurate. If the person has formed an unsuitable attachment, it is by nature an unstable, lonely thing and as such there is nothing to feel "secure" about. 

Sob Story

I suppose the point of Mrs. was to stir outrage at the patriarchy but it did not get there for me. The woman who gets married falls into a trap of bad sex, endless cooking, cleaning and service providing had a dance troupe. So this is someone who has more options than most - a path to financial independence. Maybe she chose to marry a doctor to have a better quality of life than she could afford on her own given her skills.

The cost of entry to that life is everything that follows - really any other outcome would be miraculous. The lady dives right into cooking lavish spreads for meals everyday, packing lunches for her husband, being at his beck and call - aiming to please as a traditional Indian wife. There is no scenario where any woman can achieve that ideal - the array of issues may vary in each situation but success is never attainable and so of course she fails. To me this movie is not about how messed up the arranged marriage and joint family living is for a woman who has dreams (and a mind) of her own. Instead it is about a woman aiming for unrealistic things, failing to set boundaries and ground rules; suffering the consequences. 

Many Indian women I have known throughout my life took a very different approach than the protagonist did in this movie, a more pragmatic one. After  the dust of the wedding had settled, they asserted themselves strongly and made it known that they would not be taking a lot of instruction from anyone. Some of them were able to get their husbands to distance themselves from the rest of the family to reduce ongoing interference in their life as couple. I can't claim that they all had blissful marriages or that dealing with in-laws was uncomplicated.  But they earned their space, won freedoms that could not be wrested away from them and chance to do what they wanted to by saying no whenever needed. 

There was a very useful kernel in the story that got a bit lost in the endless cycles of cooking and cleaning in the kitchen. There is the scene when the woman confronts the husband about mechanical sex aimed solely for reproduction and expresses that its not good enough for her. She is immediately attacked about her appearance and desirability. There is also the insinuation that she is a slut because she knows so much about the topic. It explains the obsession with chastity in marriage - the idea is if the woman has no prior baseline then whatever is on offer will suffice, the bar for the husband can effectively be on the floor with no consequences. 

The reality is that it does not take either experience or genius for a woman to figure out that her intimate relationship is completely unsatisfactory. She comes to that conclusion pretty quickly on her own but there is really no recourse if she wants to remain married - nothing will change as such a man cannot possibly have anything to fix, he is perfection already. 

Raising Right

This silly little essay would have been right on the money back in my time when I was a kid growing up in India. There really was no pleasing your middle-class Indian parent no matter what kind of child you were. No one had heard or known of a parent that was content with their kids no matter how exemplar they were. There was always something missing. Socially it was the right signal to send out - that sense of discontent with your progeny, the hand-wringing over their lack of perfection and such. On the rare occasion one might run into a parent who was oddly braggadocious about their kid. 

People held a pretty dim view of such parents and it was generally understood that their kids would end up being hugely problematic, they were indeed the object of pity for having such inept parents. The decorous and proper thing was to complain about the kids, find fault with them in private and public, keep the pressure on for improved performance. Interesting to see that little has changed with the passage of time. The middle-class Indian parent is still who they used to in my time and for generations before that I suppose. 

Reading this reminded me of my friend C's mother. This was the only woman I knew that was genuinely proud of her kid and unafraid to express her support. They were very much a middle-class family but aspired to be better than that some day. C was allowed to pursue her dream of being a baker - instead of becoming and engineer or a doctor. The other parents whispered about C's dad not being a leader of the family and not reigning in his crazy wife. C has made the cover of baking magazines as it turns out - so the mother was quite far from delusional and maybe the father was smart enough to see that and kept out of the way. There are always some parents like that and their middle-class Indian kids come out the real winners.

Giving Care

My friend L is a physical therapist and works with elderly people who need help in their homes or assisted living facilities. She loves her job and the patients but truly resents the mountains of paperwork she needs to do each day. Most of it is to make sure that the services are paid for by insurance but there is an insane amount of busy work that drains her out. 

L would love to have more control over her schedule, pick the gigs she wants and ideally have the admin part of her job gone. She could take that time back to further her education, keep up with the latest research and so on - things that would add value for those she cares for. Reading this essay about the uberization of nursing brought L to mind. It seems as if there is no winning scenario for those who care for others and rightfully want to do in way that is sustainable for them.

For workers, the old adage of equal pay for equal work has gone out the window. Personalized pay is all the rage (Teachout 2023). On-demand nursing companies such as Clipboard Health and ShiftKey encourage workers to join in on personalized pay schemes by bidding against each other. On ShiftKey, Ashley not only expresses her availability for a shift but bids for one against peers by indicating the lowest hourly rate for which she will work. To win the shift, she lowers and lowers her rate until it’s well below a living wage. Like other gig workers who spend a considerable amount of work time not being paid (see Attoh et al. 2024), Ashley is not paid for the time she spends each month updating her profile, reviewing available positions, bidding for shifts, and sending messages in the app about errors in her wages. Some days, she says, ShiftKey feels like a race to the bottom. 

If the system is set up to be a race to the bottom for care providers, there is no way it results in good outcomes for those in need of care. 

Basic Chip

As some who rarely buys potato chips, I have not paid attention to how they are priced these days. 

In the wake of rising potato chip prices, more consumers have been turning to private-label, less-expensive store brand options. The New York Times reported back in October 2023 that “private-label foods and beverages have crept up to a 20.6 % share of grocery dollars from 18.7% before the pandemic,” citing market research from Circana.

Potato chips are just another food item that inflation-weary consumers are either abandoning or seeking cheaper alternatives for. Consumers did the same with fast food which led to several chains, including McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy's to release their own rendition of value meals.

We do have this long-standing road-trip tradition where I'll buy a big bag of potato chips for the road if we are in a foreign country. I like picking a popular local flavor I would not find back at home. Its a way to indulge in and understand what kind of chip the locals favor. In all these years, I have never run into a bag of potato chips with a flavor that disappointed. It seems like everywhere people know how to get their potato chips to taste great. If it goes back to being the basic potato chip everywhere because consumers don't want to pay extra for favorite brand-names, our road-trip chip eating binge might suffer. 

Reset Time

Meeting A on my trip to India was a return to childhood in many ways. We go back to the end of high school which feels like an infinitely long time ago. It is great to be able to reset to a very uncomplicated time of our lives whenever we meet. It is almost impossible to stay in the here and now for too long - we have our happy place that is too easy to return to and we do that reflexively. 

Yes, there were conversations about her ailing parents, the need for nursing care and what their long term care means for her own life since she is single and has no plans of changing that. While those are real problems she is dealing with everyday, having an escape even for a few days gave her much needed reset. It is sad to read that the young people of today may not have such a luxury when they are our age. 

The internet is the “main contender” for blame, Blanchflower told Al Jazeera. “Nothing else fits the facts.”

In 2024, a Pew Research Survey found that three in four American teenagers felt happy or peaceful when they were without their smartphones. Researchers behind a 2024 study showing that British teenagers and preteens were the least happy in Europe also concluded that social media was a key reason.

Blanchflower’s assertion appears to be backed up by research in other nations worldwide, including the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, where more and more youths are gaining access to smartphones.

A and I wrote letters to each other after college for several years. I might still have some of them in the attic. She had a job that required travel to remote locations around India with no access to internet and international phone calls were expensive as well as unreliable. It slowed our communication and made things count. We'd write a letter over a period of time as things happened in our lives, ideas came to mind and so on. By the time we mailed it, there was a ton of ground covered. 

We both use WhatsApp now and every once in a while the conversations have the same level of richness and depth as those letters did. We'd likely never have the quality of friendship we do if we had internet and smartphones when we first met at an age when so much growing up is left to do.

Quiet Rage

Had a chance to watch Lee Chang-dong's Burning recently. I have not read either of the two source stories the movie uses - one by Faulkner and the other by Muraki, so I came to the experience without any bias or expectation. Each of the three main characters draw the viewer in. They get you to think about their inner lives as their interactions with each other play out on the screen. There could have been a way for this to feel unsatisfactory but the Chang-dong makes it work beautifully. 

He shows us the world as the protagonist's neurotic eye sees it specially after the woman disappears. The woman herself is a great study in what it means to seek class mobility while being a woman with very few options. The chaos of her tiny apartment which she shares with an authorized cat mirrors the precariousness of her existence. She has to live in a pretend world for the most part for her dreams to come true. 

While she and Jongshu share the same background she is not shown angry about how her life has turned out - he is. The rage is there bubbling beneath the surface, almost unable to manifest itself until the end. The rich man burns ugly, dilapidated greenhouses almost as a way to obliterate the ugly signs of poverty. We don't ever see him in the act but neither do we see him killing any women - these are just things within the realm of possibility. The last scene with the burning Porsche completes the arc. 

Falling Short

I imagined a Pepto-Bismol pink city when I saw Jaipur for the first time a few weeks ago. Growing up, I had read stories of mystery, adventure and intrigue set there - with the obligatory reference to its preternatural pinkness. Since I had never come into contact with the reality of Rajasthan, everything was highly romanticized in my mind. This is where I would travel back in time, see the India as it had once been. There would be perfection that never made it out to the rest of the country. Our car crossed one of the city gates and into Jaipur - dream had come into contact with material things. Absolutely chaotic traffic, no real pink but the color of sandstone, the impossibility of taking anything in without the clamor of vendors, peddlers, tour guides, scam artists, and rickshaw guys all trying to sell and pitch you things. 

The level of chaos is such that is impossible to focus on anything. You just want a few minutes of peace and quiet to see what is around, savor coming to the place of your dreams since childhood. The City Palace had been rented out for a wedding party. Hundreds of workers were busy decorating the place. A large image of Shiva and Parvati was part of the decor and had been placed in the center of a large pillared hall. Whoever was getting married was obviously rich but lacked good taste - the decorations were very overboard bordering on tacky. Tourists like us were passing by and many took pictures by the papier-mâché idol painted to look like brass.

It is all about faith in the end - so what if it did not belong to a temple of unknown and unknowable age, was made out painted scraps of waste paper not stone. It did not have to lack in divinity for any of that. Our driver took us to the best chaat place in town in the some deep back alley. That was a rewarding experience away from the madness of tourist attractions. I can't claim to have a lot of knowledge or experience with chaats but this one tasted exceptional to me. The city was very far from what I had imagined it to be but the food consistently exceeded expectations including the lassis and the Rajasthani thali. 

Seeing Talent

The developers I have truly enjoyed working with over the years have been the ones who can see and think far beyond the requirement in front of them. They ask probing questions, pressure-test assumptions and think through things that can and will go wrong. The design process is long and the team can remain at an impasse for weeks because the all proposed solutions are problematic in one way or another. Implementation once it begins, goes smoothly and the results are great. 

This is the kind of talent any company would want to pay for and coding is the very small subset of the skills they would be paying for. It should not have taken AI to highlight this and neither does it help that the lowest level coding jobs can now be somewhat automated - those were not jobs worth doing to begin and those who could not differentiate between the levels of caliber cannot be helped even by AI. I would argue their conditions will only grow worse. 

Companies that might have compromised on what they were looking for in the past don’t anymore, Sutton said, although some of the skill sets have changed. Companies want candidates who can go beyond writing lines of code and think critically about how to solve problems through technology. Communication skills are also desired, he added.

“The world is becoming more competitive. The bar for talent and the expectation of talent has just risen,” said Jason Gowans, Levi Strauss & Co. chief digital and technology officer. 

Small Perch

Meeting parents after a hiatus is an emotional roller-coaster for me. My paternal grandparents lived with their oldest son for as long as I remember, visiting their other kids on occasion. When my grand mother come to our home, it was an unremarkable event. She had a designated area where she liked her bed to be set up. It allowed her to be in the midst of activity and not alone in a bedroom. 

This spot between the kitchen and the living room is where she could always be found for the couple of months she was with us. When she returned, her things got put away and the space looked barren for a few weeks until my eyes grew accustomed to the emptiness. These visits happened on a rather fixed schedule and we saw her other times of the year in her primary residence - there was nothing notable about her arrivals or departures. 

At some point she passed away and that event was just as understated. The last time I heard my father reminiscence about her would be a couple of decades ago. I still think about her sometimes but my memories almost feel irrelevant as the extended family has long moved on. I am not sure what exactly I am clinging on to but it does bother me that she is not remembered more - maybe the irrelevance of people after their passing is more meaningful to me now than it was when I was younger.

My grandparents never became the center of gravity of anyone's existence but that has changed with my parents' generation it seems. It has to do with the shrinking size of the family. These parents have only one child, maybe two as opposed to eight or ten. I experience some of that same things my parents do when I see J after a while and can see that it is taxing for her. It would be nice to have the equivalent of my grand mother's perch between the kitchen and living room, in a figurative sense, to observe the flow of J's life. Maybe that's what my parents would like as well but just cannot have. 

Peak Perfection

It was particularly relaxing to read this longish essay about the perfect pencil. While I have never used any of the brands mentioned in the story and the last time I wrote with a pencil is ancient history, it is still a great story about competing to be the best, peak perfection in manufacturing and so on

Pencils have vanished from offices and are used mainly by artists and students. Since the 1970s, many historic European and American brands have actually decreased in quality. Frankly, we have to accept that Hi-Uni and MONO 100 will probably not be improved upon.

But is that such a bad thing? Maybe Mitsubishi never fired back with a "Hi-Hi-Uni" because pencil manufacturing had reached a natural point of diminishing returns, where any further increase in quality would be virtually imperceptible. Today's manufacturers are not racing to improve the pocket knife, for example, because the technology is mature and the major flaws have been sorted out by past generations. Many of the most revered brands, like France's Opinel, have made the same knives for decades, and they cut just as well as they always have.

If a brand reaches iconic status, makes a terrific product that is as close to perfection and humanly possible, they earn the privilege to stop. I wish there were more household brands like the ones referenced in this story about excellent pencils. 

Finding Purpose

I met two of my former coworkers after a long time. C told me that she loves her job, the team and her manager. While she did not get the raise she was expecting, everything else was so amazing that she wanted to stay where she was. It was energizing for me to see how happy she was with what she was doing. L on the other hand is on a promotion track, has newly expanded scope of responsibilities and may even come into a decent raise. And yet she is unsure if she will stay through the end of the year. She is actively in the market. The things that keeps C in her job are exactly the things that L is missing in hers - she does not particularly like what she does, her manager is completely disengaged and the team is not high-performance. The two conversations remined me of an article I had read about the cost of disengaged employees such as L. 

Both of these woman are highly talented one is so motivated that she is willing to be undercompensated because the job gives her just about everything else she desires and the other cannot be incentivized by all the things that would generally be considered desirable. I have experienced situations where bad organization structure creates winners and losers in the same team. The later do not have any goals they can latch on to and do not have the intrinsic motivation to create their own. The winners are able to make opportunities for themselves amidst chaos and mismanagement and forge their own way. That is turn makes those who are going about their working days aimlessly struggle even harder and feel more lost. I found myself thinking about my own circumstances - where I was and how I was responding to the environment and if there were ways for me to create a small but sustaining ecosystem that resembled what C had. 

No Consequence

We had rented a car with driver for the duration of our India trip. A turned out to be cheerful guy eager to show us around and recommend the best places for local food - all of which turned out to be excellent. As with most folks back home, he is versed in local and national level politics, holds strong opinions and is not shy about airing them. Neither is my father. So they naturally hit it off and traded gossip, speculation and preposterous claims about things they could not possibly know anything about. 

But it is the confidence with which the statements are made that matters. This kind of idle yet earnest chatter between strangers has always been common in India and it was nice to see that remains unchanged. The politicians are as always a thieving, lying, and conniving bunch but they accidentally do some good for the citizenry. A had no interest in American politics and and he did not care to hear or read news coming out of this part of the world. He did not see that its relevant to his life's concerns - he drives tourists around the country and is on the road over three hundred days a year. His family farms both rice and wheat which serves as their second source of income. 

Business is good and he now has a fleet of five cars and he drives one of them. The other drivers are his relatives - one being his younger brother who picked us up from the airport when we arrives. Keeps money in the family as he explained and with their homes being close together, the wives and kids left behind when the men are driving clients, support each other. I am going to guess folks like A have no idea what aid India was getting from America and it would matter nothing to them to know it would no longer be forthcoming. In the streets of the cities we visited, I could discern no signs that those most in need of help had received any from home or abroad. Money was likely misappropriated well before that. The author of the story makes a great point about the aid being tainted by colonizing tendencies that should only be unwelcome

The aid industry, in effect, inherited colonialism’s “civilising mission”. Its do-gooder image papers over the extractive nature of the international system and attempts to ameliorate its worst excesses without actually challenging the system. If anything, the two are in a symbiotic relationship. The aid industry legitimises extractive global trade and governance systems, which in turn produce the outcomes that legitimise the existence of the aid agencies.

Seeing Taj

 I have a picture of me age two seated next to my mother on the iconic bench in front of Taj Mahal. Its a black and white picture and there is a group of four men far away in the background. The day seems to be windy given how our hair is flying. This picture was taken on one of my father's business trips to Delhi that we joined him on. I have seen this picture many times in my childhood and never imagined an opportunity to re-create it someday. We now have a digital picture of the two of us in the same spot. The background of  the picture is crowded this time with hundreds of people - its a bright spring day, shortly after sunrise.

My mother's face is full of naiveté in that old picture. She is at once hopeful and helpless. She wants her story to unfold like in her dreams but she has no power or agency to impact any of the outcomes as a housewife with no college education and no avocation other than being a wife and mother.

It is no surprise that she believes in the power of prayers - that she does have control over. So here we are again - she is completely grey. Her face bears signs the ups and downs in her life, there is nothing naive left there but she has aged very well. Some dreams came true at a cost she did not expect to pay. Others did not and there were happy surprises along the way. She looks content in this picture even if there are no dreams left in her eyes.

It felt like an achievement to have made it this far. Among the iconic monuments I have seen in my life, the Taj Mahal is one of those where reality well exceeded my imagination and expectations. The symmetry of the structure is absolutely mesmerizing and its impossible to believe it could have been created by mortal hands. The white marble brought meringue to mind many times, all set to float away and melt into space. 

Finding Clarity

I almost did not make it to Mathura on the trip. Just earlier in the morning we had survived a near stampeded at the Banke Bihari temple at Vrindavan and I did not have capacity for any other adventure involving a temple. On the way to the Bihari temple, my friend A had a monkey snatch away her glasses. A pandit showed up ever so conveniently with a solution. The monkey perched on the ledge with her glasses dangling in its hand needed to be bribed with a mango drink and the glasses would be promptly returned. He had the packet of mango juice ready and for his consult, he expected to be paid. I am not a religious person and yet going to this temple had been my idea. 

Once in that heaving sea of humanity crushing me from every direction my only thought was to keep my mother alive. I wrapped her with both arms to shield her from the crowd and get to the darshan. She unlike me is a religious person but never had any desire to brave stampede-like conditions in the name of religion - she likes keeping things quiet and understated. Yet we all survived this experience and came out feeling very differently about it. I was just relieved that we had made it unscathed. My mother saw it as God's will that this darshan happened. Everyone else was just confused about the experience. 

What just happened there, who were all these people, what drove them to undertake such an arduous visit to the temple. As someone who has long struggled with sorting out if I am driven by guilt or love for my parents, I think I got my answer in those moments inside the temple almost unable to breathe because we were packed so tight. There was nothing I wanted more than to keep her safe no matter what the cost to me, no other thought crossed my mind other than seeing her out on the other side. I had my father hold on to me so we moved together as an integral unit. Whatever years we have left together seemed to start from that moment

Common Thread

This the second time in my life I have been in Delhi decades separating the two visits. That first time I came by train with my father for my first job interview, I was a few months away from graduating college. I could not recall any details from the trip other than a short shopping trip after the interview before catching the train home. Delhi remained a pleasant memory for me since then, that interview converted to my first job and defined the trajectory of my life. First jobs don't have to be extraordinary in any way for that life-altering outcome. It almost does not matter what it is - but it determines what kinds of stimulus you will experience for change. That change (or a series of changes) is really what does the trick but it all relies on the initial stimulus. 

Those thoughts crossed my mind wandering through Dilli Haat as I browsed through the wonderful store display and food options. This time the city seemed vast and full of hidden treasures but I was still very short on time. And the mad traffic of the city eats into so much what little of it I had. Distances on the map I learned do not mean anything and cannot be presumed to have a correlation to time taken to get there. No matter what your mode of transport you could not beat the cruel math of distance unrelated to time. 

When we visit a big city for the first time (it might as well have been that in the case of Delhi), I realize that I will only scratch the surface of what that city is about. I will leave with impressions formed by in random time-slices. With Delhi, I felt like the city was holding out against me and making it impossible to even form that cursory impression. It was like having a series of disconnected themes and upon waking realizing they were held by a common thread,

Extreme Tenacity

My infrequent trips to India never fail to provide food for thought. This time it was the Air India direct flight which I preferred to other options I had. The flight attendants wore an outfit that was a cross between pants or skirts and a sari. While everyone wore the strange outfit the best it could be worn, the fact of its existence says a lot about India. We want to hang on to tradition while running full-speed in the opposite direction with odd and unpredictable results. To that end there is an arranged marriage followed by a surprise engagement complete with a professional photographer and later a bachelorette party. It bothers no one that these things inherently do not belong together. 

The ladies needed a variety to pins to hold this outfit together and what might have been the elegant pallu of the sari now looked like a pleated tail - oddly shaped and sized. Any number of tray tables were atleast partly broken and one was held together by duct-tape. The elderly woman who sat in the seat next to mine, reapplied the tape every-time it fell apart. She treated it as a job she had to do for the greater good of the great nation. She did not look once annoyed, irritated or disappointed at her predicament. Just an activity she needed to keep busy on a very long flight. 

The flight attendants spent time chit-chatting with her, one brought out a pair of large tweezers to help fix the broken tray-table but ofcourse that did not work. It was unclear why the old lady was assigned such a job. But this all speaks to level of tenacity of our people and our sky-high bar for tolerating things that are broken, disorganized and even irreparably broken. One of the movies I watched in-flight Eeb Ally Ooh! is exactly about this circular train of circumstances that a person cannot prevail over. It is a matter of adjustment and adaptation only. The flight was a good preparation for my arrival in a city I have not seen since my college days. 

Being Parochial

I was at a sitar concert at a small venue recently and had never heard of the musician who was playing. It turned out to be a phenomenal experience - seeing sitar taken where it hasn't been before. He transitioned from ragas to western scales and back flawlessly. There were songs he had created and then songs there were songs by Beatles. It was fun to chat with the musician after and be able to tell him how awesome he was at such a young age. 

There is something deeply restorative about seeing young talent in a world full of pessimistic opinions about Gen Z. For me there is a second layer of hearing bad news about the fate of Bengalis in the world - our best days are west past us, maybe centuries past depending on how you are counting. It's all about reliving the glories of the past and having no proof points for here and now. 

I found myself sharing about my experience to my somewhat bewildered friends in Kolkata and abroad. You had to be there to feel what I felt but they appreciated the sentiment being Bengali and sharing in the common hopelessness about our collective fate. Our collective "kid" from Kolkata had gone forth and been of consequence in the world. It is interesting how the whole of us who never placed much stock in our Bengali identity growing up are have now turned so parochial. Even more ironic is that none of us call Kolkata our home or have any deep affinity for the city.

Seeing River

Watched The River by Jean Renoir recently as a way to see Bengal in 1950s - a time I have only heard and imagined of. Both my parents used to tell me stories from their childhood when I was growing up. Some stories were repeated more often than others. The characters from the stories were real to me even if they were people I would never have a chance to meet. They were essential to my understanding of who my parents were when they were kids. After I left India and as they grew older, I heard those stories a lot less. Certainly they are not told spontaneously anymore. Maybe too much time has passed and there is no anchoring point. I have forgotten a lot of detail and they find it amusing that I even remember as much as I do. There was a time when they would have filled in the details, naturally. Now, I would ask and it would unnatural. What if that is a time they no longer want to return to. 

Watching the movie transported to the time when my parents were very young. Most of the adults in the movie would be deceased by now. The river, the life in and around has most certainly disappeared. My great-grandmother was known to walk to the steps on the banks of this river back when the movie was made and she sat their alone for hours watching boats passing by. It was her escape after her household chores were done. My mother and her siblings knew not to follow her there because it was her time to be by the river - a sacred ritual. She passed way before I was born. Those who knew her, often tell me that I am a lot like her in spirit. I was able to experience the stairs she spent her many quiet hours of her life, imagine watching the ebb and flow of life in the river. The movie is a visual delight and tells the story of the narrator's family in certain a place and time that was formative for her. India had just gained independence so it is remarkable that the story stayed centered on the family unit, love and loss without straying into the heady political climate of the time. 

Empty Nesting

As someone who has been an empty nester for five years now, reading this story about Gen Z finding it harder than ever to leave home got me thinking about the good and bad of the situation. I have seen very little of J since she left home to college and while we call each other often enough, I do miss seeing her. Would either of us like that situation to change to where she lives in her childhood bedroom and becomes my roommate? I don't think so. 

She has grown used to having her freedom to operate as she sees fit, not having to keep me posted on her every move. No one likes to lose independence that they have earned over time and have to regress to a time when they had far lesser agency. As a mother, I have struggled to let go and this would be a huge step back for me I think. I'd find myself slipping into patterns of behavior that have produced friction between us after J became an adult. 

I lived with my parents in India even when I was working because that was the norm back then. You only left once you got married if you were a woman. A man might not leave at all and bring the wife to live with his family. I think that delayed separation hurt my ability to think and act for myself and made it impossible for my parents to have any identity of their own other than being my parents. By the time we parted ways, the habits had set in too hard for them. It did not help that they were heavily involved in caring for J during my single-mother years. We might have all fared much better if they had experienced the empty nest much earlier in their lives, had a chance to define what they wanted to do with their freedom.