Heat And Ice

One evening during the recent snowstorm, DB said to me "For snow to settle on the ground and turn to ice, the ground has to be cold. If it is sizzling hot, the snow will melt away". He has a way with metaphors. This one came about in the context of (and the challenges  resulting from ) my innate nature which is impatient, intense and restless. The snow turning to ice parallels the constant nurturing of a new marriage until it becomes rock-solid and stable. The parched earth reference is all too evident.

Conversation turned to other things but DB's impromptu metaphor stayed with me. As I watched the snow settle down on the tree-lined streets and become ice, I found myself thinking about what cooling down would mean for me. It would mean learning to let go of things from the past, not feeling the need to be in control of my life, learning to accept that I have and continue to be wrong about many things, allow the snow to settle at its own pace without worrying too much about what might follow. Mainly it would be about learning acceptance and finding tranquility.

The Couple

The life of H and S (a couple I knew a long time ago) is one I have followed over the years because there are so much to learn from it. They met when he was a TA in her undergrad class. She was six years younger than him. They made an exceptionally good looking pair and seemed to have everything that mattered in common. In short, a match made in heaven. Her parents were disappointed in her choice of husband because they thought she deserved a lot better than H.

The proverbial serpent in their marital paradise was socio-economic disparity between the two families. Her parents were tenured professors at a well-known university. They were also independently affluent. His father was a high-school drop out and worked with a traveling theater group. His mother had no formal education and worked odd jobs where she found them to support the family. They were both artistically gifted (a quality they had passed on to H) but had very little material success. 

H for his part, had always excelled academically and was working his way up in the corporate world. However, his overwhelming sense of inferiority to S (and her family) along with the constant need to prove his worth to them, ended their marriage ten years and two kids later. H has since re-married a woman who is nothing like the beautiful and exceptionally talented S. Indeed, he made a concerted effort to find someone who did not remind him of S at all. They have another child together. His career has taken off in a way that even he may not have imagined possible even five or six years ago.

S continues to be a single mother to their two kids. H has detached himself from their lives to focus on his new family. The endless bickering over parenting style was draining them both out and not doing the kids any favors either. S had to slow down career-wise despite her considerable talents, to be able to mother them without a partner. Fifteen years later, H is exactly where he may have wanted to be to prove to S and her family that she could not have found herself a better, more qualified or successful husband. His accomplishments are spectacular by any standard. She was to him the epitome of the perfect wife, the soul-mate he had sought and found.

Theirs was the perfect union that came apart before it's potential could be fully realized. I often wonder if they don't regret having parted ways much too soon or maybe the end of the marriage gave H the drive to achieve what he has. Even though they are not together anymore, the need to prove himself to S and her family must be a driving force in H's life. I wonder if such a marriage can then be called "over" - if S is still not the what inspires H to achieve and excel each day. I wonder if they are still not a couple in the heart and soul.In such a vicarious union, does one party win at the expense of the other. H got his impetus to be wildly successful but S could not achieve anything close to her potential. I wonder about the fairness of it all - specially for S. If however, one removes material measures of success (and failure), would S have appear to have emerged a winner as well.

Patching Jeans

I have a pair of very faded and comfortable blue jeans. The best I recall, I bought these at least five years ago and wore them to the exclusion of any other jeans I owned. This past weekend, I spent many hours patching and appliquéing my favorite article of clothing. By the time I was done, I was worn out and my jeans had acquired a fresh lease of life. The project was a labor of love and a form of meditation.

There are friendships I have in the waning months of the year resurrected from the dead or near-death and nurtured back to life. Like my freshly patched jeans, they feel revived from the effort I just put into them. Unlike the jeans, I do not have a way to hold up my work and admire it. When I get off the phone with E for instance and promise to catch up with her again soon, I don't know for a fact that the friendship is healthy enough to survive the long periods of neglect, misuse and disregard.

I wore my jeans this morning and both J and DB said they looked really nice. Clearly, the infusion of life into it showed. My only regret was that I as I waited as long as I did to get started. Watching me toil over my shabby old jeans last night, DB said "I wish you were doing all this work on a nicer pair of jeans". I wish the same for many things in my life, where the repair and resuscitation came a little too late. Each time I wear these jeans, I will remember to attend to what I must, when I must instead of waiting till life hangs by a thread.

The Great Adjustment Story

My grandmother lived to be ninety five and the family was relieved when she finally passed on. That is a sad fate for anyone. Her death gave me reason to pause and reconsider my own relationship with her which truth be told, was non-existent. With her gone, I was able to discern her good qualities better and make an effort to understand her not so good ones. It made me want to understand how did she become the person we all knew and so heartily disliked. 

She was my grandfather's second wife. His first love and wife died at childbirth leaving him a heart-broken widower with a five year old daughter and a new born son. That son died a year later leaving him even more desolate. To shore up his dying spirits and get him some help raising his daughter, the family decided to get him re-married. The first wife was wraith-like, beautiful, well-educated and had a lot of artistic talent. She came from an aristocratic family and had been raised with care. She had been a true companion to my grandfather who was something of a Renaissance Man himself. 

This time around, the family decided that the most important quality for the would be bride was robust health. The man did not need another wife to die on him.So they found my grandmother, a woman as strong as an ox with an unlimited capacity for hard-work, second grade education with nothing beyond youth to redeem her utter plainness.It became evident to her right after the marriage that her husband's heart belonged to his beloved first wife and all she could expect from the relationship was to be provided four meals a day, a roof over her head giving birth to a child each year. They had ten children together, lost a few along to way and lived in genteel poverty. She cooked, clean, scrubbed and did her conjugal duties but never received anything a wife might expect from her husband. This was the life she adjusted to. 

Coming from a poor family where there were five other sisters that needed to be married off, she had no choice or recourse. Adjustment was her mantra. She adjusted to being unloved, being treated like she did not deserve any better than she got, having motherhood thrust upon her time after time, losing her youth before its time, living in hopelessness about the future, worrying about the prospects of her daughters in the marriage market and much more. 

She adjusted to being a powerless, non-entity in her own household. The children gravitated towards her husband because he was a great father who helped them with their education, encouraged their non-academic interests and engaged them in meaningful conversation. Yet he never taught them to love and respect their mother. She adjusted to the narrative that her husband was a great man who had to commended for his patience and fortitude tolerating one such as herself. 

She was sixteen when they got married and yet it was never an expectation from the Renaissance Man to shape and form her into the companion of his dreams. She adjusted to being told she was ugly and stupid and was exceptionally lucky to have found such a great man as her husband. She adjusted to being told that she had no part in the success of her children because she brought nothing of value to the table - except the good health they all enjoy. If ever a woman was treated like cattle, my grandmother was and she adjusted to it. 

Until her death, she paid attention to herself. She wore crisp white cotton saris, combed her gray hair until it shone like silver. She wore some simple gold jewelry made from money she had saved over many years. She taught herself to read and tried to read everything that came her way. She adjusted to being viewed as a shrew by her daughters-in-law and grandchildren until she died. She adjusted to being avoided to the point, where she lived alone in her room, emotionally cut off from the family. No one had the patience to put up with her drama. 

We all missed our grandfather - a refined man of many talents and the sweetest temperament. A man who was like a giant umbrella over the family - ready to counsel and shepherd anyone who was in trouble. Everyone bent over backwards to attend to his needs but my grandmother was always tossed aside like a rag doll past it's prime. She adjusted to being last and the least all her life. Indeed, there was very little that the woman could not adjust to. Of all the stories of adjustment in marriage that I know of, hers is the greatest.

Real India

My cousin D has recently moved back to Bangalore after ten years here in the US. He came as a grad student and like many stayed on to live, work and make a home in this country. When we caught up recently, I found myself comparing his experience of Bangalore to mine (which is eight years old now). There is a certain timelessness about India which makes it easier on those who have been away for a while to adjust to the sweeping changes of the past decade. The recalcitrant domestic help, the teeth-pulling agony of trying to get some of the simplest chores done, the ubiquitous squalor and dust. D and his wife deal with those things just the way I had and the way our parents and grandparents had before us. 

Yet, if one has the money and the willingness to spend it freely, D tells me that is possible to create a protective cocoon that leaves everything unpalatable out. The question of "Real India" becomes a very subjective one at that point. Those inside their cocoon see a world entirely different from those who don't happen to have such protections. 

The cocooned life would begin inside an upscale gated community, the conduit to the outside world a chauffeured air-conditioned car that took one to work at an office park with accouterments that beat the best the West has to offer. They may choose to eat on the "cheap" at the company cafeteria or be driven up to a nice restaurant for lunch.They would shop at supermarkets and never need to set foot in a bazaar or a sabzi-mandi. They would never need to jostle the crowds to buy cheap street fashion being hawked on the pavements of the city. Instead they would go to an upscale store and pay the steep tag for comfort, convenience and brand.Work-life balance is not yet a social construct but that may change in time too.

D's generation for the most part began their careers in India and with the growth opportunities that came their way, ended up staying there and flourishing. They have traveled around the world and still prefer living in India to anywhere else. D and his family are a bit of an anomaly. For his friends, the cocooned life-style is the only one they know since they became independent. It is what they negotiated for themselves. The old fashioned ideas of their middle class parents mean nothing to them. Being frugal, cutting corners and squirreling away everything possible for the future are not things that this generation believes in. D is finding that hard to stomach as would I.Both he and I have not had the opportunity to grow into the changed India organically. We left early and carried with us the values from our parents that have really no place in modern India.

He realizes that he needs the cocoon to thrive and yet the cost of acquiring one seems too steep to him. When faced with a 2000 rupee tab a pub for a couple of pitchers of beer and appetizers, D finds himself converting that to dollars and asking himself if he would have spent that much in absolute terms or a fraction of his net US income. Often times, he finds that the cocooned lifestyle requires him to be much more generous with his paycheck and profligate with his savings than he has ever been. Until he is able to make that transition, his Indian experience remains completely unlike those in his social milieu.

Trying To Nest

As a first time home-buyer in America, I can't but think "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times;" for home-buying. There is so much information and misinformation wherever I look that I wish at times, I could shut out all sources and just trust my own instincts. On the one hand, there is a buyer's market - the prices have not been this good in decades, on the other the best deals coming out of the market condition are not exactly what we have in mind for a home. 

It does not help that DB and I are still working out what the "ideal" home for our family would be. We have been going through the motions the last few months - finding a place we like online, contacting the realtor for a showing, coming home confused about how far reality is from what we had imagined something to be based on pictures and videos of the house. Then there is the talking and being shown around, being handed colorful brochure ware on those who would entice us to buy balanced by the many cautionary tales of those who have.

Some days, the urge to nest in the suburbia does not feel nearly strong enough to fight the FUD that lies on the way to home buying.

Work Not Pleasure

For the first time this year, J had to study for a test and the we discovered she had no idea how to study for one. This came as a revelation to me and my first instinct was to panic. DB was a little bemused by the whole situation and asked the obvious "How would you expect her to know what to do when you've never showed her how ?" By the time I was J's age, I was veteran test taker. In India a nine year old does not remember a time when they did not take tests. I must have been taught in my time too but was so young that I have no recollection of it - I thought that test taking is instinctive not much different from breathing. We are now working with J, teaching her some basic skills she will need to succeed as a student.

Reading this article about how the educational crisis in America is a moral and not a monetary one, struck a deep chord in the context of my recent challenges. J's complete unpreparedness for test taking in fourth grade is a telling example of schools making the "mildest demands" on students.

We have gone from a culture where real demands were made on students at home and in school to one where homes and schools make only the mildest demands on children. Instead adults have become eager providers of their children’s natural, but endless, appetite for pleasure. 

The point is not that kids are rotten and teachers are lazy and parents are idiots. Rather, that we have created the wrong child-raising culture and the results are clearly confirming that.  

For parents who are trying to correct course at home, the task is a daunting one. The social expectation of us is to be providers of entertainment and pleasure to the kids.When we do very little of that and try to fill the gaping voids in their education instead, our efforts are met with a lot of resistance. J may appreciate my efforts in later life, but right now Mommy is a mostly an insufferable nag, a demanding task master and just does not know how to have fun. Unfortunately for me, most of my peers are exceptionally good at being entertainers to their kids. Sadly for J, she will grow up feeling she did not have nearly as much fun as most other kids she knows.

Another Haunting

MJ had returned from the dead for the sixth time since the beginning of their pseudo relationship. Many of Sheila's male friends had told her a long time ago this man was a bad news and the sooner she tossed him out of her life, the better off she'd be. He girlfriends warned her nothing good would ever come out of this outrageously stupid situation she was subjecting herself too - if she had an iota of common sense she should run like the wind. Yet, she found herself relenting to his 53rd email spread over a period of two years. The man was relentless - he just did not know how to give up, how to stop or move on. She wrote him back hoping this ghost from the past would finally be exorcised.

The communication followed the ever so familiar pattern - flirtation, the instant spark of connection between two really good friends, the rekindled hope of how special this could be. While MJ followed his time-tested mo, Sheila tried something radically different - she gave him an ultimatum. They had to get married by a certain date or they would never be in touch again. MJ treated this as an interesting variation of their old cat and mouse game. The off and on pattern of their relationship had lasted for years without anything changing on either side. 

There was a sense of finality about their status quo and he was comfortable knowing Sheila was there, still single and "technically" available for a hypothetical relationship and marriage in the distant future. He wanted her to wait until he got ready to take the plunge, he asked for six more months, she offered six more days. On day six, she stopped responding to him - just as she had promised. He persisted for several months after and then fell silent. 

That might have been the finale of the Sheila and MJ story except that it was not.

Comforters

Both my grandmothers and mother made a few kanthas for me through my growing up years. Even as a child, I was extremely attached these utterly comfortable quilts made from old cotton saris, layered and sewed together by hand to make qulits. These were labors of love that sometimes took months to finish and nothing comes quite close to being a "comforter" for the heart and soul as a kantha does. 

The last quilt my mother made for me was when I was getting ready for college. It was possibly the most elaborate one she ever made. Once it was done, I could not bear to use and ruin it. Instead, I used it sparingly as a bed spread. I knew she would never muster the stamina and patience to do anything like it again. It would my last kantha. 

Reading about how quilting has gone Web 2.0 thanks to technology, reminded me of those kanthas from a long time ago. Unlike a lot of things that have traveled around with me, the kanthas remained home in India with my parents. I miss them every year when the weather starts to get mild but is not yet very cold - that is the perfect time to bundle up in a kantha.

Talking About Money

For over eight years as a single parent, I straddled the fine line between talking too little or too much about finances with J. I was determined that she never felt "poor" in a material sense though I frequently over-compensated with emotional comfort just in case she did. To that end, J has never had (and to her credit, asked for) a lot of anything - clothes, books, toys and more. Instead I took time to do bead work on a plain white tee, embellished a jean jacket with embroidery and sewed on colorful patchwork on her jeans - there was a little bit of me in everything that was J's. 

She has always had enough to be comfortable but not to become and extension of my ego dolled up in designer couture. I pride myself on being economical without being stingy but these measures are completely subjective. My friend or neighbor may have an entirely different view of me than I do of myself. DB for instance thinks I don't give the child nearly enough and that this a tender age - my "frugality" may end up hurting her confidence as she is not able to be as well-heeled as her peers when I have the wherewithal to give her a lot more than I do.

As a compromise, J has come into some spiffy new clothes - I notice that she is happy to have them but coming as late as they have in her childhood, she is not entirely beholden to them. I am staying true to my principle of building in her a sense of style that transcends the dictates of peer pressure and fleeting fashion trends. DB says that I am way too demanding of a child less than ten years old and am pushing her to becoming an outlier. I don't agree with the first part of his observation but when it comes to style, I would love nothing more than for J to find a niche that is exclusively her own and cannot be imitated. If that means becoming an outlier, so be it. As we shift and change to accommodate the other's views, J experiencing the shifting tides too.  

This post was triggered by reading this article about what not to say to your kids about money. It was relieving in some sense to know that I have not said any of the supposedly wrong things to J. The issue of clothing and related self-esteem is something I continue to think about - at what point does it stop being about J and become about what her parents want to project about themselves ? What is the best way for J to blend in with her peer groups, without sacrificing her individuality or becoming one of the herd ? 

While I may not agree with DB's assessment, he does give me food for thought and I am very happy for that.

Meeting New Friends

We are spending Thanksgiving weekend with some old friends of DB a few states away from home. These are families that formed around when DB was first married and have had many years to grow bonds between each other. The wives and the children have spend many holidays together. This is the first time they met me and J. We received a warm welcome, everyone did their best to make us feel at home. 

J found a bunch of kids to roughhouse with and is happy as a clam. DB is enjoying the time with old friends - their interaction opens windows into his past that I was aware of but had not experienced until now. The ladies have to pause their conversations mid-stream to include me. The men not as much, they are able to find things to chat about that don't require them to have had previous acquaintance with me. 

The first evening goes very well. The next morning. I am beginning to grow a little trying to fit comfortably without encroaching upon people I have known less than ten hours. I have nothing in common with the ladies, I'd love to help in the kitchen but they have things well under control. The kids have more supervision than they require - I am beginning to feel quite redundant. They all speak a language I do not understand so in the middle of a telling something funny, one person needs to step in and translate for my benefit. If anything I am in the way of everyone having a relaxing Thanksgiving weekend. 

I retire to our room upstairs, listen to some music, check my email,  read the November issue of Time magazine. All the time, I am wondering at point I would have crossed the line and gone to being impolite. I do have to return downstairs where everyone is and insinuate myself ever so gently so I don't upset the natural equilibrium of things. Marrying for the second time has many challenges  - catching up with friends who have traveled an entirely different path than ourselves is but one of them.

Behind The Veneer

I used to be the girl that scoffed at Mills & Boon romances, enjoyed the modern twist on fairy tales - in which Snow White pursues an aggressive feminist agenda among other things egregious. I used to also believe that a woman's sense of self is worth a lot more than anything a man can give her - and to that end it was worth fighting for to the bitter end.

In my first marriage, I found myself turning dangerously enamored of the myth of the "perfect" union. We had to read each others' minds and anticipate needs that were unspoken. That union was the fatal mix of unrelentingly perfect and dangerously flawed. My sense of self took a beating that required the better part of a decade to recover. 

At the time of meeting DB, the facade had come together quite nicely. I looked (and even felt) together and confident - qualities that DB found very attractive. I had no reason to know that the facade was merely a veneer. Nothing and nobody had quite tested its resilience. 

That was the petri dish of romance and then there is the cauldron of marriage. Inside it the facade is peeling, crumbling, falling apart so uncontrollably that I sometimes have to wonder how it came to be that I changed this much in less than a year. It is easy to blame what is new in the mix of things - marriage and DB. To say that he is confused would be understating it.

The wounds underneath are raw and tender - it takes very little provocation to make them hurt hellishly - together, poised and confident are not words one would associate with that frame of mind. I am coming to realize that I had spent my life in denial of my true inclinations - maybe I am sucker for the saccharine romance after all. I am looking for the man in my life to be the answer to everything. DB is placed in the position where he is required to do everything and more and still find that it is not quite enough. 

Then there is the business of "sense of self" - that thing that was worth waging war over. That has not changed too much. I am over-sensitive to the point of being paranoid. There is nothing that DB can say to me without me wondering if this would be the beginning of a covert campaign to hijack who I am and replace that with who he would like me to be. I bristle at the very idea, kick scream and protest with so much passion that he cannot correlate cause and effect. 

If there is light at the end of this tunnel, it is hard to see it from where I am now.

Data Trove

Having mucked around in data for the longest time in my career, I am sucker for trends - the quirkier is the better. It's fun to tease out odd correlations between data sets even it has no practical value. For exactly that reason Christian Rudder's OkTrends makes for fascinating reading. Anyone who has sought a match online, is quite quickly able to identify some basic "types". Over time, they are able to tag a profile to a type with reasonable accuracy. Rudder with his access to the mother lode of online dating data is able a whole lot more than tag and classify people based on their profiles."We've compiled our observations and statistics from hundreds of millions of OkCupid user interactions, all to explore the data side of the online dating world." The The "data side of the dating world - is fascinating to say the least.

PTA Blues

This is J’s fifth year in elementary school and for the first time this year I became a PTA member. As a single parent, I lacked  the capacity to take on any volunteer responsibilities that took time away from my never ending list of  to-dos. I figured with DB in the picture, I might have more latitude and dove in to the deep end of the pool when I announced my desire to take on some work to help as a PTA volunteer. I have to admit, I received a warm welcome as the PTA is always scrounging for volunteers. Back home, J and  DB were excited for me.

My first assignment was to do the monthly newsletter. Seemed like a walk in the park – I would get inserts from about six sources, I could pick out a template and combine the material. Since there was no editing involved, I was toying with the idea of an  Macro to pull the pieces and assemble the newsletter. The work would be a matter of few clicks I had a whole month to do this. 

At the risk of getting ahead of myself I was wondering if I could get one of the geeks at work to set me up with something like Silverstripe so that the contributors of the inserts could post their content online have the newsletter be generated automatically that the print shop could then print off of.

A day after I had been assigned my duties, another lady whom I will refer to as F volunteered for the same job and to spare us both any hurt feelings, the volunteer coordinator asked that we work on this gig as a team. In the first email, F wrote the following :

I also volunteered for the newsletter :). How would you like to work it out? We can alternate months...When I was in the Army I did the FRG newsletter and loved it. Please give me a call if you have time and we can talk more :)

When I read that note, my sense was that F really wanted this job to herself and wanted me out of her business. Against my better judgment, I decided to call her and work out how we could work on this thing together. In what would later prove to be a  career limiting move, I told her that I was impressed by her prior experience with newsletters and would love to learn from her on the job. F had at that point already picked out a template in some obscure publishing software that believed would be perfect for the job at hand. Sadly it could not be converted into something conventional like Word – but she’d be glad to give it a shot.

Within days she had produced a top-notch newsletter, taken it to the printer’s shop and had copies made for the entire school. The speed and the level of efficiency was astounding to say the least. There was no way I was going to pull off something even close the next month. I could now see the error of my hide-bound ways – foolishly trying to empower the users with open source content management software when they had this formidable human newsletter generator going at a hundred miles a minute and delighting in the experience.

Almost masochistically at this point, I tried to convert F’s  template and find something like it in Word and when all failed , in a final act of desperation reached out to her for help. She had in the meanwhile left me a voice mail message advising me to begin work on the next month’s newsletter as time was running out. I realized at this point she had taken the leadership role very seriously. A few days later, I had to throw in the towel and wrote this to the volunteer coordinator

F  has a great format for the Newsletter that requires software that I do not have  - we have not been able to convert her template to Word. I think it will work out best if F does the newsletters going forward.
I would love to volunteer for anything else that I have the skills to help out with.

I had forgotten what it feels like to be kicked out of the proverbial sand-box and my first foray into the world of PTA brought back memories of grade school. I am beginning to realize it is a certain type of person that makes a great volunteer like F and I just do not fit the profile. I lack the intensity, don’t derive a huge amount of satisfaction by doing this job and finally don’t believe in the agenda of this PTA.

I am an outsider who tried to step into the magic circle and had my hand resoundingly slapped. As for the volunteer coordinator, she continues to preserve an icy silence that I can only take to mean that I have been banished from the playground and not just the sandbox. Thanks to me, F must have moved a few notches up the PTA totem pole and for that I am very happy – she definitely deserves it.

Movie Analogy

I served a spicy chicken curry with rice for dinner today and J commented " Eating this is like watching Bridge on the River Kwai - painful to watch but the kind of movie you remember. The blah kind of curry is like watching Cinderella" Over the years, I have heard a lot of interesting things said about the food I cook being that I can go from superlative to insipid effortlessly depending on my frame of mind. This movie analogy is however new in my experience. Since she finished eating her food fairly quickly, I am going to assume that the analogy was a favorable one. At any rate it left me chuckling to myself. 

Since DB came to our lives, we have a TV in the household and the only thing that J finds interesting on it is the Food Channel which she watches every once in a while. So when I baked a streusel cake recently and asked her how she liked it, J was on the roll. "I'd give it an eight and half out of ten. There were far too many flavors colliding with each other and that topping was quite confusing - I did not get that at all". That would be a direct lift from one of the judges of any number of cooking contests. I am so glad that there was not a TV for the first nine years of her life and now when it is here, she does not much care for it. I could only imagine her parroting lines she had heard from less savory sources - I can't imagine I would have been amused at all.

Autonomous Cars

The idea of driving as a hobby rather than a necessity is very appealing to me. I miss that one year I was car-less and used the Metro to go everywhere. As long as those commutes were, I enjoyed the luxury of being able to read and not worry about negotiating traffic. Can't wait for this technology to go mainstream. This is the best of both worlds - freedom from driving while being able to maintain autonomy over the route. There are many other appealing benefits as well - freedom from car insurance, not having to worry about your teenager driving recklessly and not having to chauffeur old or disabled family members to name a few. Along with all those benefits might come the come invasive technology that becomes prime target for marketeers and scammers alike.

Collective Wisdom

Marriage to DB brought home a few painful realizations for me. After all (I think) I went through after my previous marriage came undone leaving with no option but to leave with a three month old baby, I mistakenly believed that my job (this time around) was done when I found the right man. As much as DB is the right man for me, it turns out that the relationship still takes a lot of work to nurture and keep healthy. I realize that I was not "owed" a low maintenance and zero effort marriage because of anything I suffered in the past.

It took at least a few months to even come to this understanding though making peace with it is quite another matter. Then there was the question "What next ?". The most reasonable approach might seem to seek some counseling, try and resolve my resistance to the smallest change in my former way of life, my unreasonable phobia of confrontation and finally my tendency to take an all or nothing stance on things were a more modulated, middle of the road position may be more productive. 

Even before we got married, DB had suggested we get some counseling together being that we come into this relationship with considerable baggage from the past. I scoffed at the idea. In my mind, if two otherwise competent adults need external intervention to help resolve their relationship issues, they have abdicated control over their collective destiny. Why would it be impossible to analyze and discuss the issues at hand and come up with a remedy if both parties were invested in finding a solution ? DB let it slide and only now am I beginning to realize the merits of what he had suggested. 

I no longer find it necessary to retain custody of the relationship by refusing to discuss a problem with an outsider. While I have yet to come around to the idea of a professional counselor, I do talk with friends about some of our challenges. They share with me what they have learned from mistakes and successes in their own relationships. My friend M said to me something to me yesterday that should have been completely self-evident to me but was not. 

DB always buys me thoughtful little gifts - something that would make my life a little less stressful. It could a blue-tooth device for my phone so I did not have to fuss with a ringing phone on the commute, a nice kettle because I drink a lot of tea and am often clumsy with the saucepan in which I boil the water for it.

Or it could be buying me an assortment of dark chocolate because that's my favorite thing or remembering to replenish my supply of Darjeeling tea. Recently we were at a concert by a musician I had a huge teenage crush on. After the performance, DB braved the crowds to buy me a DVD that I could get an autograph on. This while keeping an eye on J and trying to get a picture of my and my hero.

He notices what stresses me out and what makes me happy and tries his best to diminish the former while increasing the later. Though I make every effort to ease his life,  I have yet to buy him a gift. Some days ago in the middle of an argument, he mentioned this as one of the things that caused him disappointment. I would have never imagined I could be accused of being too prosaic and here I was being told exactly that and not entirely without cause.

When I recounted this to M she said "Always pay attention to what your partner does for you that makes you happy and try to do the same thing for them. If he is so attentive to your needs, you can be sure he will be delighted to see you are to his too - it must be important to him and that's why he does it as often as he does" 

Nothing could be more common-sensical and yet it had not occurred to me. Like M, there are other friends who have told me things that I have pondered over. The ideas they have collectively suggested has made me reconsider my way of doing things and actually making positive changes. I still believe there is more power in the collective wisdom of people in myriad of life situations and relationship types than a professional with years of scientific training and a learned ability for being completely objective about the problem they are called upon to solve.

Two Million Minutes

As a parent who was educated in India and is now raising a child in America, the subject of Robert Compton's 2 Million Minutes is something I can relate to effortlessly. It is well documented how American kids are falling behind when compared to their peers elsewhere in the world. Compton brings those statistics to life, takes viewers into the lives of six above-average high school students from America, China and India.

The film depicts how kids from India and China spend the entirety of their high school years (two million minutes) preparing for the entrance exams to get into one of the premier institutes of learning. They have no life outside that and a decision about career is locked in at seventeen. What is more, that decision is most often made for them by their parents.

In both India and China students grow up in society that emphasizes academic success almost to the exclusion of anything else in a young person's life. Xiaoyuan, the Chinese girl in the movie, studies music but making a career out of it would be considered inconceivable. The boy from India, Rohit kicks a ball around when he is able to - in lieu of being coached professionally for football as his peer in America might be.

The American kids are a lot more self-assured - they have a full life outside the classroom and books. The social emphasis on academic success is almost absent. To that end, a community's spending on sports frequently exceeds that on education; parents don't expect kids to give everything they have into scholastic achievement. On the positive side, they are not required to know who they will be for the rest of their lives at seventeen. Trying several different things before they find their true calling is completely acceptable.

While Compton's exploration of what ails the American education system maybe a little one dimensional, he is certainly not off base. It is generally true that American kids (when compared to their peers around the world) don't work hard enough, they are not challenged enough and they are not nearly as ambitious. The expert commentators in the movie tackle the reasons why.The lack of cultural expectation in America for kids to excel academically is possibly the biggest contributor and that is not emphasized enough. The kids in India and China are a product of their enviornment, take them out of it and they would be no different from their American counterparts.

I am a product of the Indian education system and have an appreciation of where it has helped and how it has hurt me. I am now learning about the American system even if by proxy through my daughter. Two Million Minutes is aimed at shaking Americans out of their complacence about their assured preeminence  in a globalized world.

It is definitely a very timely wake-up call but to take away an all gloom and doom message for American kids is probably unwise. The ideal system of education would be somewhere between the Indian/Chinese and the American ones. It would emphasize academic rigor along with social skills, creativity, team work while nurturing emotional intelligence and an entrepreneurial spirit. With that combination, any kid would be set up for success in the world of the future.

Cooking For Geeks

If you are the kind of cook that thrives on improvisation and experimentation in the kitchen and cannot be bothered to follow recipes then Cooking For Geeks is be the kind of "cookbook" you will enjoy. On the other hand if you are the uber-geek who wants to get everything exactly right - this is a great book for you too.

Often the simplest things like a perfectly soft-boiled egg are hard to pull off with consistently high quality time after time. Traditional recipes simply don't get into the science of egg yolk and egg white phase transitions as a function of temperature. Jeff Potter takes the mystery out of this any a lot else by taking a scientific approach to cooking. Geek or not, you would likely find that more helpful than the inexactitude of conventional recipes that leave something to the cook's imagination and capabilities.

The ground this book covers is impressive - from your basic scrambled eggs and pancakes to making your own Earl Grey infused whipped cream, Mozzarella Cheese and Beurre Noisette Ice Cream. Along the way you find nuggets such as the "Optimal Cake-Cutting Algorithm for N People" and electrocuting a hot-dog.

Early in the book, Potter emphasizes the importance of knowing what type of cook you are to help simplify the learning process. His main division are the "cook" and the "baker". The cook being the kind of person who prefers the "intuitive toss it into the pot approach" and "course correct along the way". The bakers are much for methodical and organized. To the "cooks" among us, Potter says "A recipe isn't a strict protocol, but do understand the suggested protocol before deviating".

Cooking For Geeks is a lot more than a cookbook. Along with the recipes and how-to, it is also cultural commentary on modern American society obsessed with perfection. Being a "good enough" cook is not enough any more in a time where Martha Stewart-esque perfection is the gold standard to aspire for. The author encourages the reader to fail because "Failure in the kitchen is a better instructor than success".

The book defies a conventional genre definition and is a very refreshing detour from the over-crowded cook-book space.

About Girls

In his book Girls On The Edge, the author Leonard Sax talks about who a nascent spiritual awakening in teenage girls if not given a chance to grow could result in them seeking the ultimate happiness and satisfaction through sex or romantic relationships. This is only one of the many valuable insights in this book which is a must read for anyone who has a daughter. 

Sax comes across as having a genuine empathy for girls - and concern for their overall well-being. After a long time, this is a book that kept me hooked all the way and I came away feeling like I learned things I did not know - things that may help me raise J better.

On empowerment and expression of sexuality he writes "As parents, we must reject the notion that girls have to take off their clothes to empower themselves. Boys don't have to take off their clothes to empower themselves. Girls shouldn't either." I wish Sax would write a book targeted at tweens and teens that conveyed the same message in a way that makes sense to them.

The book makes for scary reading - it would likely shake the most laid back parent out of their complacence.
There is a lot to learn and take away from this book for a parent of a young girl. For me the key learnings were :

1. The difference between the authoritative and authoritarian parent and the impacts on the child based on these parenting styles along with the risk of being a liberal parent.

2. The importance of initiating a young person into the world of adult-hood as opposed to leaving them to their own devices to find their way.

3. The threat of living in a "cyberbubble" where a girl is "hyper-connected with her peers" and "disconnected from herself".

4. Minimizing the intake and exposure to environmental toxins that cause girls to reach puberty ahead of time and bring a whole host of physical and emotional problems in the process.

Six Shorts

Cleaning my Inbox after a long time yielded this.

I

Swooping through
the far coast into the
heartland,  I wait
to turn  home by the bay.
My traverse a wide
crescent
Like your smile.

II

I remember the night
I turned twenty nine
with my womb full 

one half of me lay
cleaved on his side
of our bed. My eyes
turned rosebuds the
day after - tears
offered in prayer.
The night I most
needed your love.

III
The emptiness of
my workday coils
like a dreary boa
stuffed to the gills
yet loathe to rest. 

IV

On an early day in August
I made a note to myself
To  remain steadfast
In friendship and not let
Eros grime the way. Yet as
Summer turns to Fall I wonder
If sometimes its not just the same.

V 

After many years again
in the feeling of love
or its approximation, I
fight my demons again.
Needing more than being
needed. Trying too hard
to please - to fathom -
to get under the other's
skin. To grow on you like
a graft to be one in soul.
All demons of pain that
I have fought down before.
Where are my lessons in love ?

VI

A wall of tears is building
up like before - and you
do not know to coax the
flood. He did not either.
you sit behind in silence
tell me through data lines
and seventeen hundred miles
that you are well. What of
me  ? What of the words of love
twisted like a taut co-ax ?
Do you care or want to know
what it takes to bring on
the deluge ? Or what that
means to me ? He did neither.
Quietness is inhaled and exhaled
interminable unbearable silence.
I am terse and vivacious
by turn not sure which will dull
the hollow numbing pain. 

Belgrade

Lights from the home on a hill
pierce the still lake water
in jeweled spears. Two stars
dot the immense sky. We hold
hands, talk about a sunny
day behind us. Two days later
the clouds lift and picks me
up. I have sunk to the depths
of despair, feared drowning and
breathed again. You are there
waiting - arms outstretched,
harboring me, my spiraling
hopelessness, my magnificent
inertia to change.
The sun warms
my spirits, your smile and
touch. I start to uncoil
hesitantly fearing I
may be visited by pain.
I am learning your alphabet
of love so unlike my own. In
the early days we spoke the
same language - the relationship
argot of our time. Marriage
morphs the meaning of familiar
words in ways that only
you and I will understand.
We want to understand and
be understood without
effort as a measure of
our love. Often we fail.
Lying on the dock
wrapped in your arms, silence
broken by the lapping of water
against smooth, shiny rocks -
we learn our first words.
We teach each other - meet
in puzzlement sometimes.
Really ? Is that what that
means ? Then there is the
compendium of gesture
and touch. You signal affection
I read indifference. I try
love and you hear disappointment
or frustration.
We drift apart buffeted
by head winds of misunderstanding.
At opposite shores we consider
the distance between us.
I crave your touch but
fear to reach out. At dusk,
you turn to me - offering peace
ask for time and patience.
The neighbors are enjoying a
showing of Mama Mia! We join
them - we expand our vocabulary
to become a couple among many
others. Our child makes us one
of other families. They smile
at us, stop to ask if they can
take pictures of us. We smile
back, ask where they are from,
buy coffee, wild blueberry
scones and chat with them about their
day. In parting, they leave
us with words to add to our
lexicon - words we may shape
to be our own. The night after
may be just as dark, daybreak
bleaker and yet in time clouds
do part, you hold me in your arms
call me your girl as we dance
slowly near the kitchen sink.
In time, the happy moments will
stand out like jewels spearing
the dark water - the water itself
or its darkness hold not much meaning.

Spectator Sport

It was the summer vacation my last year at high school and I was in spending a few weeks at my Grandmother’s in Kolkata. On the evening which this post is about, my aunt and I were at Gariahat shopping. A young man who looked like a college student had been following us around for a while and then it happened. I was “eve-teased”. I told my aunt right away and she asked “Are you sure he did that ? He looks like a boy from a good family” and I replied “Yes. I am absolutely certain”.

She suggested that we give him another opportunity to be sure that I was right in my assessment of the "incident" and give us the chance to catch him in the act if I was. A few minutes later, we had reason to accost him, beat him with our bare hands with my aunt was livid enough to go at him with her umbrella berating him as she did for being a common lecher while pretending to be a student. He kept repeating “I’m sorry. I won't do it again”. As far as I could tell, he did not appear particularly contrite but was definitely taken aback by this unexpected attack by two women in a public place.

Soon enough, in true to form Kolkata fashion an audience had gathered around us in a circle. Several men suggested that we let him go because it was his first mistake – I was not sure how they could have known that to be the case.Yet other men said that he had been punished enough and we should stop now. But for the most part people (men and women) asked us “What happened ?” (clearly all that my aunt was saying in her rage to the man and his reaction to her accusations was not conveying the message clearly enough to our audience).

Some went as far as to wonder “Are you sure he really did something ?” or ask " How bad was it ?" (suggesting that us two women had recently exited a lunatic asylum and had got it into our deranged brains to beat up a random guy walking down the street minding his own business. If the lack of our mental faculties  was so painfully evident, they should have called the authorities to strait-jacket both of us to prevent further destruction of life and property. Instead they stood around watching and asking these questions).

Not one man or woman said anything in our support - let alone demonstrate it in any useful way. Some stayed in the side lines and bemoaned the state of society where a young girl duly accompanied by an aunt was not safe from the undesired attentions of street side Romeos. They were the first to walk away from the scene anxious not to get involved in any of it. It was clear they held both my aunt and I in very dim view - just the kind of women that Bengali "bhadralok" should steer clear off. Imagine causing such a racket over a small thing like "eve-teasing".

After a while both my aunt and I stopped from sheer mental and physical exhaustion. Anger and the public mockery that my humiliation had turned us into was enough to want us both to vanish without a trace. The young man got up, collected his text books that had fallen out of his bag. He walked away and so did we. The audience left with as much haste as they would exit a movie theater when the closing credits start to roll. I would imagine it had been a "paisa vasool tamasha" (spectacle worth the money) for all of them - and it didn't cost them anything.

When we got home, my Grandma flew into a panic fueled rage when she heard what had happened. She gave my aunt a mouthful for setting a bad example and behaving “like that” in public. What’s a young girl going to learn ? Next time a man does something to her (clearly this would hardly be the last time - she seemed confident of that at least), she’s going to try and beat him up and only bad things can result from that. Is that my aunt wanted to see happen to me ? Did she not know that women from respectable families did not call unpleasant attention to themselves in public ? I hated to see my feisty aunt, my hero be treated so unfairly but it was just not the time to argue with Grandma.

We had to deal with her withering statements disapproving of our conduct for a good hour before she finally stopped. She agreed it was hard to not become furious under the circumstances but should we not worry about not stirring up even more trouble. What if the guy had decided to strike back – he was over six feet tall and well built – what would we do then ? What if he had followed us home an decided to extract a revenge even more horrible ? No matter what there would always be crowd around us inquiring into the details of the incident and do nothing. Had we considered any of that ? Had my aunt taken leave of her senses ?

She decreed that for the rest of my stay at Kolkata I was to be accompanied by an uncle (if not both) each time I needed to go out somewhere. I asked my Grandma if she wanted enlist their friends as well – I could go out boldly with a dozen men forming a phalanx around me. Should I still get “eve-teased”, I had a better chance of fighting back. She was not in the least amused.

I did not fail to notice that my uncles (both my aunt's brothers and her husband) did not compliment her on her courage. They look just as concerned as my Grandma. I was disappointed to see that. Is that they best they could do - say nothing at all ? It took my some years to understand their predicament. They could not realistically take on all the bad guys that we would meet in the world outside a la Superman. With their limited resources, the best they could do is to keep us out of harm's way

To that end, they accompanied us whenever possible, ran errands for us when it was not considered "safe" for us to do so. Refused to let their teen-aged daughters to go out wearing clothes that some pervert on the street may find provocative - the list was endless. These are the men in families just like mine who believe they are doing their best to keep the women out of harm's way. While they mean well, they also enable the crippling cycle of fear, diffidence and dependence among women and there is a steep price to pay for all of it. That was my life growing up in India - a life that I have in common with most Indian women I know.

That incident has some of the most remarkable parallels to my experience writing a post (including the comments and emails it provoked) some time back about the lack of freedom for women in India and my hesitation to return there from America specially with a young daughter.Some of the  commenters reminded me of the audience that had gathered around my aunt and I at Gariahat many years ago.

They were those that convinced that I was over-reacting and nothing had really happened - India was not nearly as terrible for women as I made it out to be. Some were passers by with no desire to take sides one way or the other - it happens in India and around the world - maybe it is a little worse in India. No big deal. Yet others acted like men often do in India - go into full-throttle denial of the issue itself so they can continue to feel like "real" men. They focus on assembling a battery of evidence to show how India is no worse than any other country instead of being positive agents of change.

However, those closest to the subject - Indian women remained largely silent or vaguely dismissive. Their own experiences did not match mine though I was probably right and somewhat justified in my concerns and opinion on the subject. There was a welcome difference too - in the on-line world some were able to take a position on their own and stick with it - it was refreshing to see some solidarity from the sisters for a change. What I remember most vividly about that evening is the general attitude of the women in the audience – there was no sense of sister-hood with me (the victim) or my aunt (my defender). They mostly wanted to know the scoop – like it was some great mystery that only I could reveal unto them.

The subliminal message being that I had done something to cause this to happen and had it been them, the same man would have not reacted nearly the same way had it been them. Something was inherently wrong with me - what else do you expect with a firebrand aunt like that - and I was merely suffering the consequences of my less than satisfactory upbringing. They were so glad not to be at the receiving end of unwanted attention that they had forgotten that it could be their turn the very next moment.

None of them paused to think why it is that a man suspected of picking a pocket could  even get killed at the hands of a mob without any questions being asked but when it came to a woman being molested, a trial by fire was needed to prove she was justified in making the claim of harassment. It did not bother them that men could minimize or even deny what they had to go through when they had no right or business doing so. It did not strike them as ironic that they were participating in this kangaroo court proceeding alongside men - that they were their gender's worst enemy.

I had felt that evening, that the eve-teaser was probably a better man than any other male in the audience. He took the public beating and the abuses my aunt hurled at him without protest and left without a whimper. As much public sympathy he had with the men in the audience, he could have well used it to his advantage and tried to turn the crowd against us. Other than my aunt, not one woman assembled there to watch the tamasha felt the indignation a woman should - to realize that was as heartbreaking as it was frightening. As far as I was concerned my aunt was the only woman who had a woman's heart and soul.

When I wrote that earlier post, I was disappointed to see very few female readers come up and voice their opinion on that post. If that knot of people around the three of us in Kolkata was a petri dish in which to observe Indian society in a test environment, so was the post. While a lot of time has passed between the two events, fundamentally very little has changed. In a sense I was alone with a circle of spectators once again.The tragedy of the Indian woman is not about the men out to exploit, abuse and manipulate her when they find her in a vulnerable position, but it is the lack of solidarity with other women. We are a people divided against ourselves in more ways than can be counted but the price of women being divided between themselves in the face of so much social atrocity is possibly the highest.

In this country, every American woman (black and white) in my acquaintance who has been a single mother herself or knows someone who has been one has gone out of her way to help me in any way they possibly can. I have yet to see an exception to this rule. These are the women that made my life in my single parent days relatively simple. My experience in India had been the exact opposite - my marital status turned me into a social pariah almost instantly. Yes, there were exceptions to this rule but not nearly enough in number to make it a comfortable social existense for one such as myself. For this reason alone, I had been able to work it out for J and I so far away from family - far more comfortably than I was had been able to in India.

My friend A, who has spent half his life in Europe and America and the other half in India, wrote this to me back in the days when I was dithering between staying back in India to raise J with the support of family in surroundings I was familiar with and taking the plunge into the unknown in this country :

"America is country of second chances, there is no stigma attached to failure (and I mean in a social sense). You will find it very liberating in your situation and it may be worth all the trouble. India is a great place to live - people are warm and friendly but only as long as you don't "fail". Once you do, the facade falls off and you see people for who they really are. From what I can tell from talking to you, you are in a state of shock at the difference. Don't be. Accept it as a chance to find out who your "real" friends are. When you come here, you may have no friends at all but you will get by with the help and kindness of strangers".

It was good advise and I am glad I took it.

A lot has been written about the position of women in India and the endless list of impediments on their way forward. Much can be accomplished merely through cultivating a sense of sisterhood - you would think the experiences they have in the public space would make this easy. Class, social and economic status mean absolutely nothing to the average "eve-teaser". Every one is just a female gender - for better or worse that should facilitate a stronger sense of kinship between women but surprisingly enough it does not. 


That aunt is close to sixty now and on most days completely wiped out after babysitting her three grand-kids. My daughter will be a teenager soon and had I been back in Kolkata, I may have needed to do for her what my aunt once did for me - that is a sobering realization.

A Move

After the marriage, a move happened. I used to think I lived simply, had very few belongings and could leave everything behind when it was time to move. In reality that is not quite how it worked out. The detritus of a decade clung to me a gooey mass of memories. The pack and move was the easier part - a couple of meltdowns notwithstanding. 

It is only when I started to unpack my belongings in the new closet that I was hit by the dead-weight of the old. In an ideal world, I would throw away everything from the past in lieu of being able to undo the past itself. But doing that is like peeling an onion - the past is laid layer upon layer and if I discarded enough of it, there would be nothing left of me or my life. I experienced an enormous sense of emptiness. Shorn of the baggage, memories and experiences there was no substance to me. I would float away like an soap bubble and the dissolve into nothingness. 

DB has yet to unpack his belongings but I doubt he will experience anything like what I did. He is simply cut of a different cloth. Unlike me, he lives in the moment and looks ahead. No matter what happened in his past, he never allows it to drag him down. On a bad day, DB will be down for a few hours and bounce right back. He is not the kind of person who will remember in painful detail when he last wore a particular article of clothing, the events of that day and allow those memories to intrude into the here and now. That is one of the things I love about him. 

He would be able to relate a lot better to the feeling of oneness that I experienced with him when I blended the spices from our kitchens together. As I did that , there was a sense of things of disparate provenance coming together very harmoniously. Unlike the closet, where the past engulfs and envelopes me, the kitchen is where it blends effortlessly into the present. I wonder why that is.

Coming Into Sunlight

Marriage after divorce and single parenthood for close to ten years is like coming out into glaring sunlight after living in permanent semi darkness. 

Until recently, the need to conform to societal expectations had been minimal if at all - I could focus exclusively on a couple of things without having to worry about that taking away from other obligations that are intrinsic to a two parent household. Raising J in the way I wanted, getting better at what I do for a living and being able to take on more challenging assignments - was all I cared about. Then there was the blog that I fed  a lot of my energy into, instead of seeking out or nurturing real life social relationships.

It was a very much cocoon - closed, sometimes rather suffocating but almost always safe. I did not have to compare against the standard benchmarks of relative to peer group success. They were "them" and not in my situation. What applied to "regular" people did not apply to me because I had challenges like they did not - at least that was my way of explaining my off the grid existence. More likely than not, I needed an excuse to not deal with the additional pressures of conformity and this seemed a perfectly reasonable one.

Now, that DB, J and I are a "regular" family unit, I feel like I have been propelled into the real world after a long hiatus. The "excuses" that served me so well for almost a decade ring a little hollow. A random Linked In or Facebook Invite can force me to take stock of my life, answer the question "Am I where I should have been by now ?" and worse begin to think about how to make up for the ten year lag in short order. 

While I lived in recluse for a decade, what used to be my world has moved on. Seeing as it is now is almost Rip Van Winkle-esque to me and there are days when I get overly anxious about making up for lost time forgetting to realize that no time was lost that has to now be made up. I just happened to use the time differently and am none the worse for it.

This is like meeting at an intersection after a long journey that took two travelers through entirely different routes and experiences along the way. Who they were at the time of parting ways and who they are at the time of reunion is determined by the journey each undertook. Mine was different than "theirs" and I can't trace back the path they traveled just to know what I missed while on mine. 

As easy as it is for me to process this logically in my mind, getting the heart to accept it sometimes a lot harder.

Anti Rules

S was telling us when we were out to lunch one afternoon, how she and her boyfriend B started dating. Ordinarily, this would not be the most riveting topic of conversation - everyone has a story some less boring than others but S is outside a couple of standard deviations in personality so hers promised to be an interesting one and she had our collective attention.

Instead of playing coy, calm and collected waiting for the man to make the first move, following The Rules book and not call him unless he called after the first date - generally being hard to get instead of "needy" and "clingy", S took a completely non-traditional approach. She walked up to the guy and asked him if was interested in getting some lunch.

Apparently, the unexpectedness of it all nonplussed him and before he knew, they were sitting in a restaurant. The lunch went well and S kept a steady flow of emails going until the next time she asked B out for a date. She does not believe in waiting for things to unfold or for men to discover what they are seeking. Instead, in the right circumstances, she takes control of the situation and assumes the leadership role.Clearly, it works for her.

Now, we've all met B and think he is a very nice guy. With a less assertive woman, he may have been dithering to this day wondering how to make his next move (if at all) and may not have been the stable relationship that he has now been in for a while. He has S to thank for setting his house (literal and figurative) in order.

S the probably the anti-hero - the woman who does everything that dating and relationship coaches caution against and achieves what she wants. It could be argued that her strategy would only work on one such as B who she has on occasion emailed or called twenty times in a day until he responded only to say "Hello". According to her, it is what she felt like at the time - she was just being her natural self. No book of Rules will cramp her style.

Gamestorming

I have grown into my current role of business architect following a path that has taken me to almost every role in an IT shop at least a couple of times. The perspectives I have gathered along the way have proved invaluable in doing my current job but every so often, the process of getting a team's to articulate in clear, actionable terms how they would get from their current state to the desired future state can prove to be very challenging. Every traditional method of eliciting requirements and mapping as-is or to-be process in my experience has it limitations and does not readily fit the needs of the team or project at hand.

Gamestorming- A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers and Changemakers introduces the reader to some off the beaten path ideas for brainstorming, process mapping, prioritization, customer persona definition, problem scenario identification, requirement elicitation and much more. The games are uniformly interesting, well defined and easy to play. More importantly it is a large and diverse tool-set that one can pick and choose from. In acknowledging that business processes don't always follow a linear path from current to future state and may indeed have a largely fluidly defined end-game, the authors make a very compelling case for practitioners in the field to try their idea of using games to accomplish where traditional methods often fall short.

One game I found particularly thought provoking is The Anti-Problem game. It proposes a way for teams to "get unstuck when they are at their wit's end. It is most useful when a team is already working on a problem, but they are running out of solutions". The objective is to find a problem that is the exact opposite to the problem that needs solving. The more extreme the opposite the more likely the team is to solve their actual problem.

I would highly recommend the book to anyone whose role involves understanding complex processes and systems, building consensus among team members, generating creative ideas to solve an existing problem, designing a new product or concept and root cause analysis.