Enabling your offspring…

Ok this recording of thoughts business can get quite addictive. Perhaps it is the result of deactivating Twitter from my phone on weekdays? (for now)

I was thinking about writing the previous post – the response to the Spectator piece – and how much I would have enjoyed studying History. We were speaking about PhDs at dinner and the utility or futility of them – their role in social sciences etc. and whether there is a purpose beyond getting entry to an elite coterie in academia. These two statements have nothing to do with each other, just musings around the same area and hence recorded back to back.

A puzzle I had ordered for K before the lock-down, finally arrived today on re-ordering it (hurrah for Amazon services being back). It’s a jigsaw puzzle of the states of India on a map. I’m hoping he enjoys it and develops a liking for geography in general. I hope his room when he grows up has all kinds of maps in it. Parenting can be an absolute PITA at times but I look forward to enjoying shared interests.

And it kind of fell into place suddenly – I know what I want to leave him with (sounds more dramatic than I intended). Not a fortune – I’ll hopefully spend money we’ve earned while we can please, the selflessness of our parents generation seems to be too much to aim for. Nor with a legacy – I don’t think I’m going to have one, may his mother do one better. But with enough resources to enable him to pursue in life the things which truly interest him and drive him. To not need to make choices prioritized by money-making potential or the job-market only or other such idiosyncrasies which bothered so many of our generation until it was too late or they were too cowardly.

Of course one may not ‘discover’ a one true passion in life. In which case an MBA is always the right answer as I hopefully will be there to advice him about.

Empire Apologia again….

Baba forwarded me a piece via a super-intellectual friend of his. Felt like responding to that in some detail so went on and on in an email. Realized he might forward it to him so then structured it a bit nicely. Also realised that this is 200 words+ for the day so might as well record it here 🙂

I’m also keen to read this 10 years later (where I’m hopefully not wasting my day on conference calls which I couldn’t give a rats ass about) and see if my thoughts on this have evolved. I’m sure I would have structured this very differently 10 years ago…

The piece in question:

In defense of the British Empire
If the Empire was a system of exploitation, it was a very inept one
~ Robert Tombs

https://spectator.us/defense-british-empire/

My response:

Isn’t Empire Apologia a bit out of date now? This debate has been going on for many years – especially post Brexit. Shashi Tharoor shot to popularity among GenY and milennials by a viral speech against this point and made much money by milking a book out of it. Again this now for an American audience I daresay?

There is concern and debate in the UK that the British education system does not speak of or teach their children about the dark side of the Empire at all. I think that is where there is a lot of clamour for correction, which seems reasonable enough in this age of jingoistic hypernationalism.

Clearly there is enough of a spread of facts to pick what to focus on and what to ignore . Of course there were some benefits, but they were hardly driven by a spirit of generosity or egalitarianism. The railways for instance were to transport British goods to the ports. That they benefited the locals later was purely incidental. Likewise for literacy, agriculture reforms etc.

It is undeniable that the Empire and its history is predicated on an axiom of White Man better than Coloured Man – the histories of white colonies versus other ones attest to this. In most cases better weapons and strategic alliances, trickery and opportunism allowed a handful of Englishmen to take charge, not that they were invited with open arms as this piece indicates.

That this was a function of that age (as was the slave trade, conquering a people and looting their lands etc.), it was not an orchestrated strategy driven centrally but opportunistic scope creep etc. is acceptable. So one need not be apologetic re: that, just like descendants of the Mughals/Marathas/Rajputs in India should not be apologetic about atrocities from that age. And perhaps whether it was a more humane empire than others of its age like the French, Portuguese, Spanish etc. is an interesting intellectual debate for Europeans to indulge in.

I am not well-read enough to debate the merit in the auditing of ills from generations ago or reparations. But to position it as an act of benevolence (or Kipling’s White Man’s Burden) which this gentleman seems to do is also a bit rich and smells of BS.

Horowitz & Hawthorne

I first read Antony Horowitz with the Magpie Murders a couple of years ago – a perfect Agatha Christie pastiche mixed up with a parallel story running in present day. Here’s some snippets from my ‘review’ (ahem) which I wrote back then in February 2018.

This is a very ‘meta’ book as they say these days – at 2 levels. One is what the blurb pretty much gives away – at a superficial level, this is an Agatha Christie inside an Agatha Christie. But it’s also a whodunit which analyses whodunits throughout – the cliches, the tropes, the disproportionate amount of mindspace (or shelfspace?) murder mysteries & their ilk occupy – and how readers react to them, try to solve them and why they’re so popular.

So there’s a enough spice in there to make it a good airport page-turner for the most casual of readers but there are also plenty of winks, nudges, red herrings and Easter eggs for the more discerning and well-read ones.

This year, I’ve read three more of his works. One of them was his James Bond imitation – Trigger Mortis. I didn’t particularly love that, but that’s largely to do I think with my dislike of the cold-war, spy genre which I’ve frankly been exhausted to death with as a teenager with Fredrick Forsyth and co. He has got the Ian Fleming voice (or what I recall of it from many years ago) quite spot on though.

I’ve enjoyed much more the more recent Hawthorne series – both pieces of which I’ve heard over an audio-book rather than read. Like the Magpie Murders, these are delicious detective stories or murder mysteries which hook you on to the very the end. Full marks for engagement as I listened to them on as audio-books with great narration even if the female impersonations are quite bad. For the first one I was preparing for a half-marathon and I listened to the second one in lockdown. Did a lot of extra running and pacing about the house respectively 🙂

Horowitz has cracked the genre of being ‘meta’ as we call it these days by introducing himself as a key character in his own series. He is the Watson to the unlikeable detective Hawthorne’s Holmes – something which he does not quite enjoy. He gets the tonality spot on with a healthy dose of self-deprecation, making himself the foil to the intelligent detective and by doing that from the lens of how a typical detective/murder mystery reader would look at it, it’s an unique lens of putting the reader in the middle of the story. The plot is reasonably realistic, set in modern-day London with lots of pop-culture references, cultural norms and relatable stereotypes put in for it not to even veer remotely into the territory of fantasy which is crucial when we’re in it ourseleves.

At the same time he is realistic and self-aware enough to know that the readers really want an insight into the life of a successful author which he also provides in healthy doses – from the Spielberg cameo to his dealings as a writer for a TV show Foyle’s war, interactions with his agent and so on…

I loved listening to these for another reason – Horowitz has a wonderful skill of making you feel you could write a book like this yourself if you just spent some time with it. That is a hugely impressive task and the perfect feeling to leave someone with. This led me to spending an altogether excessive amount of time on Saturday night reading about Horowitz and figuring out just how in the world is he such a prolific writer of so many things. Some people really get it all in life…

I hope K picks up the Alex Rider series when he grows up, it seems like the kind of thing I would have absolutely adored as a teenager and is perhaps more contemporary to invite some attention compared to the Enid Blyton’s I grew up on which are going to be historical by the time he starts to read.

Death by Conference-Calls

How does one concentrate on long unending conference calls where you have no active role to play? Where you’re not even the I in the RACI matrix… (rhyme that with the chorus of Gin in the gin-soaked Boy.)

Damn I haven’t heard that song in ages. I remember Damle used to love it back in school…

But yes. Conference calls. Which suck the life out of you worse than housework. The only solace is that you justify you can’t escape and are therefore busy. But it is such a task to focus.

I end up daydreaming, surfing Twitter, walking to complete 10,000 steps, playing scrabble, thinking about what I will do with my life once the quarantine ends, re-imagining how I should have responded to my wife in that last argument (or how I will respond once we’re having the argument and not cold-warring), imagining myself on some talk-show a la David Letterman or as a keynote speaker giving gyaan as I explain the struggles I’ve gone through in my life etc. etc.

The Scrabble thing is a new one – an app based version complete with push notifications. I try to justify to myself its an intelligent game but really given that half of the game is basically figuring out arcane words which the multiple dictionaries may just accept (DSO is a Tibetan breed of cattle to give an example) is it really all that better than Ludo for which I sneered at someone a few days ago? Oh well. At least I will make sure I know the rules to play it with K in a few years.

I need to figure out how to crack this conference call chakkar though. Not because there is any inherent value in there – I’ve learnt you must pay just about enough attention to know when someone is summarizing the topic. Also not because of any interest in the subject – although I suppose I need to have some takeaway from it at the end of the day. It’s to prove to myself that I can indeed concentrate.

Must. Start. Making. Meeting. Minutes.

War & Peace

I did something this weekend which I’ve not done in a very long time. I binge-watched a series.

Now I know 6 episodes over 2 and a half days is hardly considered binge-watching by most connoisseurs of the craft, but we all strive to be a better version of ourselves no?

I think I ‘unsubscribed’ from Netflix back in 2017 or so around about when K was born. The last series I properly binge-watched was Silicon Valley – I think 5 seasons over a couple of weeks – back when I used to stay alone in Heritage and had all the wonderful time in the world. I’ve since watched Sacred Games (1^st season only, some 8 odd episodes IIRC) in mid-2018 and then the final season of GOT with the wife (I think we watched an episode a week for the first couple of weeks and then saw the rest over a couple of weekends towards the end) so neither of them counts as binging.

I’ve cut down on binging on series purportedly to invest time in more meaningful pursuits – though the jury is still out of that. Read more books perhaps. Focus on work. Not be distracted while spending time with the kid. Etc. etc. A realization has been that it’s ok to miss out as long as you have the larger ‘context’ about it – entertainment-wrap podcasts like A&A ensure that you’re not unaware of something even if you don’t get the finer details. The kind of person I am, that seems to work for me where I have breadth. So I’ve largely got over this hump of FOMO I think – which is crucial. I rarely thirst to watch something, and most of the times there’s enough going on in my unorganized and inefficient lifestyle to not permit that kind of time (this is hardly ideal, but one problem at a time). It also means that on the odd occasions when you do end up with some free time (thank you global pandemic), you prefer to watch movies which you are done and dusted with very soon. I was only half-joking when I told someone at work that I’ve become so commitment phobic, I don’t even consider watching anything which has multiple seasons and long episodes. I haven’t watched too many movies either in the last few years (thank you baby who doesn’t sleep independently) but 2020’s been better. This year I’ve seen
1) Once upon a time in Hollywood
2) Parasite
3) Kumbalangi Nights
4) Monsoon Wedding

As Vinnie Mac would say “it’s good shit bro”

I digress. I’ve been listening to the audio-version of War and Peace for the last couple of weeks. Well not audio-book, this is more a radio-adaptation put out by the BBC. 10 episodes, each an hour long. And I thought I might as well supplement that with a video series as well so that the experience of reading the book is complete without actually reading the book. I used to love reading these sprawling epics but as I’ve grown older one of the things I’ve started avoiding is long books. What a pity – I do miss not having read A Suitable Boy for example, when I had the time to do so. And therefore this new found appreciation for the art of a good short-story. But to close loop a digression within a digression – I sincerely doubt I’m going to sit down and read a 19^th century epic by Tolstoy and hence this combination.

The radio adaptation is good, but not quite on the level of A Suitable Boy I thought. It took me a few episodes to actually figure out what is happening. Or more precisely – who something  is happening to. Too often you hear incidents but don’t quite make out who is the protagonist there. Needed to keep checking Wikipedia and an online synopsis (treading carefully to not cross where I was in the audio-version) to be able to navigate through this. For e.g. –  I almost didn’t realise the character of Nicolai Rostov was such an important one until I was a good way through. Or I kept mixing up Denisov and Dolokhov. There needs to be some kind of a reading guide attached (which apparently was provided with the radio play on Twitter). It doesn’t help that a lot of them have very similar names or variants of the same name (e.g. Nikolai, Nicholas, Nickolenka etc.). But take some supplementary support and this is a fun listen. They’ve also picked a very creative mode of depicting this through a flashback from many years later to allow a lot of the authors monologue as a part of Pierre Bezhukov’s exposition. I felt supplementing it with the 2016 mini-series was a great idea because it allowed me to visualize a lot of what you don’t in a radio show and clear up so much confusion. What does that say about our lack of faith on our own powers of imagination – I don’t quite know.

I think this is the kind of TV series I will prefer from now onwards. Short but historically relevant which will stand the test of time (and not a flavor of the season thing like *cough* Money heist *cough*). I’m thinking Les MIserables and Wolf Hall next. And A Suitable Boy comes out later this year from Mira Nair.

Zen and the Art of Dishwashing

Note: The title isn’t an original one

An important part of living through a global pandemic and the subsequent lock-down is the need to keep figuring out positives. While not of us may be as fortunate as the DINKYs all across my social media feeds who are building new skills and a side-hustle (which is the term en vogue these days), I am trying to make my own list of maine-bhi-kya-ukhaada on Evernote.

At a societal level, this lockdown has forced us into a crucible experience which would have been unthinkable in most Indian upper & middle class families : to actually operate a household without domestic help. And with the men in the family free from the bahanas of office and traffic, there has been a forced need to get involved in domestic chores. Now more qualified folks will no doubt write peer-reviewed papers on this phenomenon, but at the base level it has done two things.

Firstly, created some dignity of labour and a new-found respect for the women of the house and domestic workers. This will hopefully translate into better salaries and less haggling  (although given demand-supply dynamics this may be easier said than done). I’m always amazed how most Indians seem to think of their weekends and leaves in corporate jobs as something they are entitled to but expect household help to work even on weekends.

Secondly by literally getting their hands dirty,  hopefully build some habits and set examples towards children which will sustain beyond this. This will ensure that the next time (or in the ‘new normal’) Setting an example is something Indian men are terrible at (my 2 year old for e.g. probably thinks his grandmother and mom are the only people who can cook. His verbatim question every morning is to ask “aaj aajji ne kaay banavla aahe mazhya-sathi?”. I’m also very concerned about extended family members who watch Republic TV with impressionable kids for a couple of hours everyday but that is another story for another post..)

However now that everyone has to chip into the housework and the anthropological effects of these have been peloed, it is important to identify how you actually make yourself useful at home. I thought this would be intuitive and common-sense but conversations over WhatsApp groups have led me to understand that this is not actually the case and there are many different opinions. Let us approach this as a good consultant would…

Given that there is a fixed amount of tasks to be done (while the volume may vary on a day to day basis), the smart way to do this would be to use Fredrick Taylor’s scientific principles from a century ago and build specialization across family members. Depending upon your household size, country of residence and access to technology –  these may vary slightly but should fall under the following buckets:

• House cleaning
  • Zhadu / Vacuuming
  • Pocha / Mopping
  • Dusting
• Laundry
• Dish-washing & auxiliary activities (rearranging the kitchen utensils)
• Cooking & auxiliary activities (chopping, cleaning etc.)
• Grocery shopping & auxiliary activities (now also involves queuing up and disinfecting whatever you get back

Considering we know that there are preferences in this which are defined largely by human nature, rather than objective criteria – how can you with no such fallacy – optimize your time spent in these activities while also contributing your fair share?

KPIs to consider here are

• What permits you to get into flow state best (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi would be proud)
  • Can you listen to an audiobook/podcast/music (whatever rocks your boat)
  • Minimal human interaction
• Physical labour involved (low is ideal here)
• Feedback potential
  • Implications of errors (where does a bad job have a cascading effect or where does a bad job affect customer experience and therefore lead to poor feedback and general discontent)
• Flexibility
  • Can you do the chore whenever you want?

A discerning selection would involve picking up chores which are

• High flow state potential (e.g. while doing the dishes you are in a corner of the kitchen with little chance of being bothered by anyone. While vacuuming or mopping, this is not the case)
• Low labour intensity (should be self-explanatory)
• No or low feedback loop (a bad job with mopping will lead to fingers pointed at you
• High flexibility (do it when you have the time and inclination to do so)

Now we may create a 2 by 2 matrix to come up with what is optimal. These scores may vary slightly depending on some factors, but feeding in your numbers should get you to the same result

	Flow potential (1 – low, 3 – high)	Labour intensive (1 – high, 3 – low)	Feedback potential (1 – high, 3 – low)	Flexibility (1 – low, 3 – high)	Total
Zhaadu	1	2	2	2	7
Pocha	1	1	2	2	6
Dish-washing	3	2	3	1	9
Laundry	3	3	3	2	11
Cooking*	2	1	1	1	5
Groceries	2	2	2	3	9

And ergo, QED etc. – always pick dishwashing and seek your own Zen there. Motorcycle maintenance ain’t got nothing on this…