The Secret Life of Inspiration

I went to listen to Andre Agassi talking about his hugely popular autobiography "Open" this Friday afternoon at the Jewish Community Center in Palo Alto. Agassi has always been my favorite on and off the tennis court, because I saw a vulnerability in his eyes that I related to long back. And now I know a lot more about why I identified with him in the first place. Among a lot of other things, his need to feel 'inspired' to achieve something is uncannily similar to what goes on in my mind many a time.

Agassi reveals in the book that he envied his arch rival Pete Sampras because of Pete's 'dullness.' "I wish I could emulate his spectacular lack of inspiration, and his peculiar lack of need for inspiration," Agassi says. I recognize a deep frustration beneath this seemingly self-serving (and frankly, somewhat insulting towards his esteemed opponent) comment. Only a person who is in a constant pursuit of inspiration will understand that how you wish you were not so dependent on inspiration, because the lack of need for it is so much simpler.

I myself have struggled with my dependence on inspiration. I have let myself feel crippled when I left myself having to deal with multiple projects at various stages of unfinishedness, because I kept moving onto the 'next' project in search of inspiration. Perhaps we all need to cultivate an 'autopilot' mode to go through the days when we are not feeling specially productive, but still need to tackle the day's deliverables. Somehow accomplishing something even at your most uninspired ground state often self-triggers the cycle of inspiration. I now consciously try that self-triggering process by sticking a little longer to the most uninspiring of the projects to get it moving rather than dumping it altogether.

The other intriguing dichotomy about inspiration is that your own uninspired moment can be inspiring for others. When you are relatively less spirited yourself, you often listen to others or accommodate others better, and they feel encouraged and inspired. I have experienced this first hand in various ways. I tend to reach out more and be more sympathetic to others when I am looking for inspiration myself. Me feeling the lack of inspiration has sometimes resulted in some substantive charitable work, or sometimes in something as simple as me being a better mom/wife at home.

Coming back to Agassi, I was very touched by how candidly he admitted that tennis didn't feel inspiring to him for a very long time. But then he reached a point where he either had to walk away or choose tennis--which was his life, whether he admitted that or not. "I didn't walk away, and I chose it," he said. "Once I chose my life, once I took ownership of my life, the scale started to get balanced with what it was giving me. ...Tennis gave me [my] school; tennis then gave me my wife; tennis then gave me the time to raise my children and to live with them, and then it wasn't lost on me. ...It no longer only came with a price."

I must thank Agassi for confirming that the pursuit for inspiration is such an integral and organic part of one's being and evolving. He has inspired me for sure.

Two…One…(Zero)...Smoke the Ganesha

My son made me a blogger in 2006. Being a new mother felt so marvelous, that I couldn’t help but start blogging. In summer 2009, my ego has made me a micro-blogger.

Micro-blogging at Twitter (and Facebook) has made me lazy enough that I haven’t been blogging at all lately, while my number of tweets is speeding towards century, and friends have been noticing the spike in the frequency of my Facebook status updates. I knew this would happen. I even wrote a blog when I signed up for my new Twitter account, speculating whether I would blog less (and micro-blog more) down the line. Sadly, my speculation proved to be true. And, what seems to be a collateral damage, I have become a more narcissistic writer than I ever was! When I used to solely blog, I felt conscious blogging about myself all the time. Thus, I used to intersperse the “me-blogs” with blogs on more universal topics or short stories. But micro-blogging and other social networking tools inherently stoke narcissism, and somewhere in that apparently innocuous ego-driven journey, I ignored my original muse—my son, who has been appearing less and less in my creative output.

Well, I have finally decided not to resort to the lure and convenience of micro-blogging before I finish this long overdue ode to my son.

Don’t get me wrong. I haven’t been any less fascinated by my son than I used to be when he was a baby. In many ways, his current 4-year-old persona is much more interesting than his babyhood, as he now possesses the skills to express himself in so many different ways. But a few things have sure changed. Firstly, I now take my son as a constant in my life, so that I don’t feel the need to chronicle every experience and emotion associated with him, as if they are evanescent treasures. Secondly, I have gradually felt more comfortable writing about things other than my son, when I realized that I reach wider audience that way. Again, ego takes over at times, but even a mom is allowed to have an ego, right? However, honestly, a kid has so much more potential to create a ‘writable moment’ for you, just because their world is so unpolluted. Let me just try to illustrate.

My son is totally into the idea of recycling. Every Thursday morning, he would accompany me to the big recycle bin in the backyard to dump the co-mingled recyclable trash in the house. Now, we are talking about empty glass bottles and metallic cans here, which do make a lot of noise when you dump them all together. It was a little too much for my son, and one day told me, “Mamma, can I do the paper recycling only, because the bottles yell at my ear.” I couldn’t have come up with that expression “yelling at my ear” to describe the clank myself!

Then there were One and Two. These are the two tiny little goldfishes that are always busy swimming in a glass bowl in my son’s room. They are fairly new acquisitions. I took my son with me for my ‘homecoming’ trip to East coast in September to enjoy my two weeks off between my old job and new job. One of our East coast friends’ son had a goldfish named “Zero.” My son was so inspired by Zero, the goldfish, that he ordered his dad over the phone to buy him goldfishes even before he would go back home from his East coast trip. The Dad obliged. My son obsessed over what to name the goldfishes the whole time we were inside the plane on our return flight. “How about I name them ‘For Here’ and ‘To Go’?” He asked. I thought they were pretty good innovative names. But before I could nod my approval, he said, “How about, ‘Jack’ and ‘Jill’?” By that time, I knew there will be a deluge of suggested names that usually come in pairs. (What’s next? ‘Prosecution’ and ‘Litigation’? Pardon my job-speak.) But he suddenly stopped toying with the names, and said, “I will name them One and Two. They will be the brother and sister of Zero.” The definitive tone in his voice told me that he was done with his exercise in nomenclature, and found the idea of bi-coastal goldfish siblings pretty darn satisfying. So we now address our goldfishes as One and Two. Sometimes my son also calls them “Ekta” and “Duto”—literal Bengali translation of One and Two. He practices his Bengali-speaking skills with his goldfishes when he is in a good mood.

Another time, it was “the poor kid” incidence. We frequently tell our son that he should not buy any more new toys, because he already has too many of them, and he should think about the poor kids who don’t have any toys. After the lecture in socialism, we went to see a newborn at a very close friend’s place, and my son declares, “This must be a poor kid, because I am not seeing too many toys here.” I seriously hope my friend didn’t hear him! But, to tell the truth, I sometime wish we could go back to his newborn days, where the number of toys were under control!

The latest quotable quote that came from my son is, “Let’s smoke the Ganesha.” Now this asks for a little bit of context for the uninitiated. Late September to mid October is the season of religious festivals in India, and the diaspora celebrates those with equal enthusiasm. My husband and I are not remarkably religious persons, but we love the celebrations. Our son may turn out to be a more spiritual being than either of us, as he is plain fascinated by the colorful and gorgeous action and paraphernalia of deity worship. He has managed to put up a shrine under a rhododendron shrub in our backyard, and borrowed a decorative metal “Ganesha” (The Hindu Elephant God) figurine from the fireplace mantle to grace the shrine. He puts fresh flowers there whenever he remembers, and asks Ganesha to keep everyone in his family safe and healthy. He even prayed for his best friend on his birthday. Now he wants us to invite all our friends, and have a full-fledged puja and celebration in our backyard. Yesterday he picked up some fragrant incense sticks from an Indian store when his dad took him there for grocery shopping. He has seen his grandma motion the smoking incense sticks in circles while serenading the deities in India. He asked me, “Mamma, can you light these sticks, because I want to smoke the Ganesha.” I obliged and he ‘smoked’ his Ganesha with the “smokers,” the term that he has coined to describe the sticks.

I can not finish this piece without sharing his most famous quote: “It takes a teamwork to make a baby.” I am sure he learnt it from his teachers, but when delivered by a precocious 4-year-old kid, it gets a special dimension.

I am glad I finally got to write my tribute to my constant source of inspiration. Now can I go back to being lazy and narcissistic again? :)

Full Circle in the Valley

Blackberry is addictive. No question. Even a non-workaholic like me check my message first thing after I open my eyes every morning even before I get out of the bed. It has become a reflex action.

Mine is an East coast law firm with big and small offices in the West Coast. By the time I get up at the Pacific coast, my inbox is already populated with a daily dose of professional newsletters, routine conflict check emails, and lately, with motivational messages from the managing partners from the East coast offices narrating recent success stories of engaging new clients and new businesses. This morning was no exception.

The firm CEO sent an excited message about engaging new business from a tech client, GigOptix, “a leading provider of electronic engines for the optically connected digital world.” This is a photonics communications company. Once you switch to patent law, it becomes a professional necessity to dilute your subject matter expertise in order to cover the breadth of technologies that come your way. Still, being a Ph.D. engineer who wrote a thesis on photonic devices, I got very curious to explore the extent of our firm’s engagement in GigOptix matters. Are we going to do their patent work? Am I going to be part of the GigOptix team at my firm?

I went to GigOptix’s website to refresh my memory regarding their technology and to know more about the key people running the company. The CEO, Dr. Avi Katz’s name rings a rather loud bell. Where have I heard his name before?

A search in the nooks and crannies of my brain for information stored long ago takes a few seconds. Oh, I remember now. I studied one of his patents on gold-tin eutectic solders when I was working as a first year graduate research assistant at the University of Maryland, back in 1997! The patent was granted in 1993 on an invention that Dr. Katz came up with while he worked at AT&T Bell Labs in New Jersey. (I later read in his bio at the GigOptix website that he has more than 70 patents!)

Back in 1997, I had no inkling that I would end up being a patent law professional myself. I had groomed myself to be an academic researcher. But patent law appealed more as a career during some introspective moments while I was pregnant, and I joined a boutique intellectual property law firm in Washington DC in 2005.

Strangely, even at my first job in patent law, I had these “full circle” happenstances. I applied to my DC patent law firm, as I knew their name through the University of Maryland’s Technology Transfer office, who handled the patent application on my graduate work on electronic packaging (along with my Ph.D. advisor and another researcher). Coincidentally, my first boss at the DC law firm was the same patent attorney who wrote and successfully prosecuted my patent application into an issued patent. I talked to him over the phone as an inventor in 1999, six years before I became his colleague.

In late summer 2008, we moved to the silicon valley as my husband joined Google. (Since we are on the topic of coincidences, it won’t be completely irrelevant if I mention that I wrote patent applications for Google at my DC firm even before my husband joined the company.) I joined the Palo Alto office of my current law firm in September, 2008. In November, 2008, a big group of lateral attorneys from a now-defunct law firm joined our firm. It didn’t take long to find another coincidence. Apparently, my current next-door neighbor, who came with the big group as a lateral Partner, knows my second boss at my DC firm very well. They had adjoining offices at the Patent Office when they were both US Patent Office Examiners!

Coming back to Dr. Katz and GigOptix, I am thrilled at the possibility of working with someone who inspired me when I was a young researcher more than a decade ago. Silicon valley is full of these people, who started as hard-core researchers, and then took on greater/more diverse roles in technology companies. The valley makes me feel everyday that I have landed in the right place. This is where you and your friend talk about “copyleft” while shopping for school supplies at Target. And it does not hurt, when Meg Whitman (ex-eBay CEO) says at a conference, “You look familiar”! I am sure Meg mistook me for someone else, but I got my anecdote alright.

For a techie, the circle is not completed until you come to the valley.

Tweet Tweet: Is that the sound of change for a Blogger?

I have finally taken the plunge. I am on Twitter now.

I was not a virgin at the social networking scene. I already have Orkut and Facebook accounts. Agreed, that I use them less now than when I first began, but one thing remains unchanged—in my mind, I always treat my Orkut and Facebook accounts as platforms to have a conversation with someone, kind of like a public chat room. Twitter to me is more about expressing my little thoughts without necessarily having a conversation. My first “tweet” was not exciting at all: I let the world know that I was going to leave my office in 5 minutes, because my in-laws were coming from India. I didn’t think this information was going to be important to anyone in the world. I was not communicating with anyone to make a plan through my tweet, but still, writing this down and seeing it published on the web felt liberating.

This communication without any specific purpose is the fuel that runs the social networking engine. I have really close friends (including family members), who just don’t see the need for social networking. These are people whose company I really enjoy. But I can clearly see that they don’t get anything out of the experience of social networking without any specific purpose. My personal viewpoint is, you are not forced to use social networking. It is a tool to cater to you, and if you can use it to your advantage, then why not? After all, social networking is still free!

Lately I have attended some high-visibility silicon valley conferences where venture capitalists and tech company executives were pulling their hair out thinking how to monetize this phenomenon of social networking. But I don’t think anyone even dreams of charging the users money for accessing the social networking sites like Orkut, Facebook, Twitter and others. There is just too much competition for the patronage of the users. But people are taking notice at the behavioral patterns of the users that emerge from their social networking footprints. Even video game company CEOs admit that they recognize people’s need to connect socially, and as a result, the famously individualistic traditional model of video gaming is evolving into a more socially-connected playfield, where each player is interacting not only with his/her machine and the virtual characters, but with other real players (often friends rather than strangers across the internet) playing simultaneously.

Coming back to Twitter, I posted three tweets today…all related to my professional field (which is intellectual property law, if you must know). So far I have only used LinkedIn for web-based professional networking (and often for a purpose), but I can see how Twitter can make that social/professional demarcation fuzzy. After all, a thought is a thought, whether personal or professional, and if you happen to be on Twitter at the time that the thought occurs, you are going to tweet, whether you are at home, or at work. I know people set up Twitter profiles devoted to focused topics (including focused professional topics), but I am too lazy for maintaining multiple Twitter profiles. So my tweets are for sure going to be a hodge-podge of whatever is going on in my life.

One thing I am interested to see…is Twitter going to kill or at least influence negatively the blogger in me? After all Twitter is not only about social networking, it is about microblogging too. Till now, I have only blogged when I have had a topic which was at least moderately substantial. Fleeting thoughts sometimes begged to be written down, but if they didn’t fall under the umbrella of a theme, I couldn’t entertain them to be included in a blog. I also blog when I feel like a rain cloud: so heavy with unreleased words in my brain, that writing is the only way to feel light again. I guess Twitter is going to provide some sort of shelter to those flickers of random thoughts, and there is a real chance that I will experience frequent catharsis, and will not feel the need to unburden myself through a blog as frequently as I do now.

Well, flash fictions didn’t kill short stories. May be blogging and micro-blogging can co-exist too. I have to wait and watch myself. And what’s more, I think a middle ground will emerge. Twitter has this 140-character limit, so you are forced to keep your entry short and succinct. But what if you need a little more room to complete the story? There is a program called Twitzer (a Firefox add-on) that shortens your text so that you can go beyond 140 characters. There is a real chance that someday somebody will offer a formal platform for mini-blogs.

Until then, happy tweeting (and blogging).

Avatar's: Ethnic Confusion

Not a lot of restaurants would have the balls to have just one dessert item in their menu, and cryptically describe the experience of tasting the dessert as: Close your eyes, and picture the sweetest concoction of dessert flavors from around the world coming full circle on one plate of bliss. Divine.

One Indian restaurant in Sausalito, California has proven that you can afford to be audacious when your dessert alone is reason enough for a repeat visit. And other items on their menu are not far behind either.

I am talking about the Avatar's restaurant, located at 2656 Bridgeway, Sausalito, CA (north of San Francisco, across the Golden Gate bridge). It was a chance find for us. We didn’t read any elaborate review or didn’t get any prior recommendation from friends whose feedback we trust. We were trying to decide where to stop for lunch on our way back home after a very refreshing camping experience at Petaluma during the Memorial day weekend, and Sausalito seemed to be a good choice. We were in the mood for Indian cuisine after two days of eating mostly campfire-grilled stuff. A quick search on Google suggested Avatar's. We automatically assumed that it would be at a waterfront (or at least an ocean view) location. But when the GPS navigated us to the address of the restaurant along an industrial back road lined with auto repair shops (with damaged Maseratis and Porsches nestled inside---after all it is Sausalito), our heart sank a little. The front of the restaurant wasn’t fancy at all, and you don’t even catch a glimpse of the ocean or the bay. Anyway, we walked in. The furniture was simple and the interior was rather cramped. I needed to go to the bathroom. I had to walk through the kitchen to go to the back of the restaurant to access the most ordinary-looking bathroom at the end of a narrow alley. Other than the beautiful black and white framed photographs of Indian village people adorning the walls, we didn’t find anything to be impressive about the restaurant yet.

I later realized that the owners intentionally build up the drama by keeping the surroundings devoid of gloss. They want you to mutter to yourself, “I hope at least the food is good.” I am sure the head chef Kala Ubhi and her brother Ashok Kumar, the unassuming smiling hosts who take part in everything from taking order to cooking and serving, rejoice their success even more when the initially-skeptical patrons like me walk away gushing about the food, and end up writing a blog about the gastronomical experience!

The menu proudly describes the cuisine as an “ethnic confusion.” The history of the restaurant, as printed on the back of the menu, tells you that the restaurant opened doors in 1989, when Avatar Ubhi, the now-deceased founder of Avatar's, envisioned the unique customizable cuisine that the restaurant has been offering. In the early days of the restaurant, a journalist coined the term “ethnic confusion,” and it stuck. Avatar's encourages you to concoct your own masterpiece. And they are extremely flexible to suit your dietary need. That may mean a dish with extremely light or no oil, a pure vegetarian dish or a vegan alternative.

We were four adults and two pre-schoolers in our group. All of us claimed that we didn’t have big appetites when we walked in. But once we tasted the soup du jour (mulligatawny soup) with the homemade parathas and chutneys, and lightly curried button mushrooms as appetizers, we kept ordering more and more parathas. We even ordered parathas and soup to take home, even before we got to the main courses. The Avatars' magic spell had started. I think I saw our host Ashok smiling at that point. He sure has seen this happen before---many times.

The Punjabi tostadas with ground lamb mixed with yoghurt and tamarind sauces served on top of mini-parathas were great as the main course. The Basmati trio (chicken, lamb and vegetables on a bed of rice) was equally good.

The teaser description on the dessert menu allured us to order at least one dessert dish to see what this divine “Avatar’s dream” really is. It was a slice of cheesecake placed on a sweet syrupy circle resembling a rising sun, and honestly, I really tasted pure bliss when I mouthed the first scoop! Needless to say, we ended up ordering a few more of the Avatar’s dreams, and even the little ones licked their plates clean.

Rarely you come out of an Indian restaurant with so much satisfaction and so little greasy feeling in your stomach. Avatar's is brilliantly successful in keeping the focus on food, and not on anything else. And yes, the service is great too. Before we stepped out, I approached Ashok, our gracious server and host, and got a menu to take home with me as a souvenir. I knew I was going to write a blog about Avatar's soon, and I here I am.

It takes confidence to make the term “ethnic confusion” stylish. Avatar's has that -- in abundance.

Green Marriage

I have frequently engaged in conversations involving various concepts of going green: from post-dinner idle rumination with friends about extreme green commute to work on a mule and demanding tax breaks for driving a “hybrid,” to serious brainstorming with inventors at a start-up company about how to make an air-powered coffee-maker. But, I was totally bowled when I read an article at CNN.com describing a local Indonesian government’s unique approach to weave green into public policy.

In the Garut province in Indonesia’s Java island, in an effort to alleviate the damages done by rampant deforestation, the local government has established rules that require every newlywed couple to plant at least three trees. While this is innovative in its own right, the government’s imagination didn’t stop there. In a master stroke to promote social and environmental greening simultaneously, the government requires couples to plant 50 more trees if they want to divorce.

Now, the devil’s advocate in me is saying that breaking up a marriage may prove to be ‘greener’ than sticking to a marriage, because by staying married you are depriving mother earth from 50 more trees, but one can always counter-argue that you are free to plant 50 saplings even without getting divorced. And, it has been already researched that a divorce does not only take an emotional, social, and economic toll, it takes an environmental toll too.

Some time ago, I read an article (http://news.msu.edu/story/970/), titled, “A Really Inconvenient Truth: Divorce is not Green.” The story described the findings of Jianguo “Jack” Liu and Eunice Yu at Michigan State University, who studied the carbon footprint of a divorce. Though one can conclude by applying common sense that divorced households end up consuming more energy, --a refrigerator uses roughly the same amount of energy whether it belongs to a family of four or a family of two-- the article presented some mind-boggling quantitative data. For example, the number of rooms per person in divorced households is 33 percent to 95 percent greater than in married households. In the United States alone in 2005, divorced households used 73 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity and 627 billion gallons of water that could have been saved had household size remained the same as that of married households.

We all knew that love keeps us green, figuratively speaking. Now we know that love keeps the planet green too.

A logical extension of the above research may be to study whether children who enjoy a stable, two-parent household exhibit greener habits and greater environmental awareness as they grow up and as an adult compared to their counterparts who grew up in a divorced household. That study may not be so linear though. A child from a divorced family may find solace and peace in the nature that he/she missed at home. That may lead him/her to appreciate nature more than the ‘happy’ child from the next door who flew to Disneyland with his parents to see the oxygen-depleting fireworks.

I guess, in a marriage, practicality is still the controlling factor that determines the degree of greenness. If your husband does not turn off the monitor every night, would you fight with him? The call is yours.