Multi-Format Binge Reading

I’ll be honest. I don’t think I read any book other than the textbooks during the first two years of law school. Or even if I did, I don’t remember. It was a blur—balancing law school, family and my job. I am not counting reading “Fast Forward: Hollywood, the Japanese, and the Onslaught of the VCR” by James Lardner in the spring break of my first year of law school. Though I thoroughly enjoyed the book, I had to write an “optional” book report (to earn extra credit) on a famous lawsuit, the “Betamax case” on copyright infringement, that was the essence of the book.

In the third and final year of law school, I discovered audiobooks, and a whole new world of “reading” opened up for me! The first audiobook that I read was a behemoth of a science fiction, named “Seveneves,” by Neal Stephenson. I doubt if I would’ve finished the 880-page book but for the audiobook format. I used to listen to it religiously on my way to work, or pretty much any time I was driving. The first ten or so audiobooks that I read were all DVD or CD-based. It was a little inconvenient to insert a disc into the car’s CD player while driving. Also, I kept thinking that the newer cars won’t even have a CD player. So I explored a bit, and found Audible, the app that lets you download audiobooks into your smartphone and play it from there. After almost two full years of “reading” only audiobooks (with the occasional exception of a paperback or two), this year I am embracing multi-format reading in its full glory.

In February and March this year, I parallely kept reading a novel in hardcover (“Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage” by Haruki Murakami), a biography on Kindle (“Shoe Dog” by Phil Knight), and listened to three audiobooks (“1984,” the classic dystopian novel by George Orwell; the hot-selling non-fiction “Fire and Fury” by Michael Wolff; and “Where the Red Fern Grows,” a young adult book about a boy and his beloved dogs---my son highly recommended this book so that we can share our experiences). This is the closest I have been to binge-reading, something that Bill Gates does encourage (https://yourstory.com/2016/12/bill-gates-book-recommendations/). I noticed the audiobooks were getting finished at the highest rate, thanks to the regularity of commute time listening in the car, followed by Kindle (because I could read in bed even when the lights are off). It took the longest time to finish the hardcover because you can only read when there is ambient light. But each format had other facets that could enhance or diminish the reading experience. 

The hardcover was so beautifully designed that it was a pleasure to hold it in my hand! (http://spinemagazine.co/articles/chip-kidd). Kindle was all about convenience. I actually missed seeing real page numbers in Kindle—percentage of how much you have read is not the same as seeing how many pages you have read. And the appeal of an audiobook is heavily dependent on whether you like the narrator’s voice and style of delivery. But at the end of the day, if you are addicted to reading, you will end up finding a way to read, one format or the other. 

So, happy reading, everyone!

Freezing Eggs: Part Deux

Today my newsfeed had a story about how liquid nitrogen malfunction at a fertility clinic in San Francisco may have damaged thousands of frozen eggs and embryos. This happened within a few days of destruction of nearly 2,000 eggs at a similar but unrelated facility at Cleveland. These two incidents got me thinking about a new argument that didn’t quite occur to me before when I wrote an article in law school on egg freezing. I wrote about the cons of freezing eggs in general, with a special emphasis on how taking advantage of employee-sponsored egg-freezing--while seemingly an attractive choice to beat the biological clock--can ultimately harm women. 

I understand that with technological improvement in cryopreservation, it’s just a matter of time before egg-freezing becomes more commonplace as an employee benefit. Non only the private sector, but even the US Army offers egg-freezing benefits to female soldiers these days. 

An employee probably cannot sue an employer when a malfunction at a third-party facility, such as the San Francisco and Cleveland clinics, destroys her frozen eggs. I would assume the employee would have the right to directly sue the facility for damages (an Ohio couple already sued the Cleveland facility for loss of their embryo). But a lawsuit is not always a comprehensive solution. 

The emotional cost of losing one’s frozen eggs/embryos could be many times more than the monetary damages that you can get from a lawsuit, especially if the woman’s chance of producing healthy eggs had declined significantly since freezing her eggs previously. Even if the woman is still biologically able to produce more eggs for freezing, it does not change the fact that each attempt at egg freezing takes a physical toll because of hormone therapy and other medical procedure that are involved. For example, a woman may suffer from ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome during the hormone therapy, that can pose serious health risk.

At the end of the day, the choice remains with women to freeze their eggs. But incidents like the cryo-failure in the fertility clinics in San Francisco and Cleveland should be a wake-up call for women to realize that they cannot fully hedge the risk associated with "timing motherhood" just by freezing their eggs.

Routine and Joy…and Artificial Intelligence!

I just finished my first book of the new year--Hillary Rodham Clinton’s “What Happened,” where she does a detailed post-mortem of her stunningly unexpected loss to Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential election. For someone who is not that much tuned in to politics, I was surprised how engrossed I was with this book from start to finish. The book’s appeal was in going beyond just describing what was happening on the surface during the election campaign—anyone who followed the media would have found that information from a number of other sources. What made the book unique is that it transcended into the deeper territories of human psyche--accepting the difficult challenge of going through the grueling schedule of a Presidential election campaign, knowing it would neither be pretty, nor easy, and then having to learn how to deal with a soul-crushing defeat and still find a purpose to keep going.

Midway into the book, in the chapter titled “A Day in the Life,” Clinton used a phrase “routine and joy.” She used this phrase to describe the approach she took based on a valuable piece of advice she received from President Obama to be able to successfully stick to a demanding campaign schedule spanning over nineteen long months—she announced her candidacy in April 2015 and the election took place in November 2016. “I put some routines in place to keep my traveling team and me as healthy and productive as possible through one of the hardest things any of us would ever do,” she wrote. “And we all tried our best to savor every moment that came our way—to find joy and meaning in the daily grind of campaigning.”

It really caught my attention seeing these two words “routine” and “joy” juxtaposed together —a pair that I never consciously thought of as being complementary to each other. When you set an ambitious goal to achieve a lot within a finite time, you got to have a routine. On the other hand, routine by definition is opposite of spontaneity. In my opinion, spontaneity and freedom from routine are some of the biggest sources of joy. So how can routine and joy not clash? But the context in which Clinton used them together made perfect sense. May be “routine and joy” should be my new mantra for every project that demands a long arduous journey, I thought. “Routine” for guaranteed productivity, and “joy” as the fuel to continue on to the finish line.

But that was not the end of it. In a subsequent chapter where Clinton expressed her worries about the widespread emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI), including jobs being threatened by AI, a new thought stirred in my head. Instead of giving equal importance to both routine and joy, can we not use AI to take care of the routine part of the job, leaving us to do the joyful part of it? 

In a recent article in Forbes, titled, “Millennials, This Is How Artificial Intelligence Will Impact Your Job For Better And Worse,” the author presents both an optimistic (AI will create more jobs than it will replace) and a pessimistic (millennials will be most impacted by AI replacing their jobs) view of AI. I believe AI’s impact should be seen more in terms of change in quality of a job than change in quantity of available jobs. If a job can be redefined so that AI does the mundane routine part of the job, leaving the non-routine part to a real worker so that she finds her job a source of joy in her life, then everyone wins. 

Of course an argument can be made that if AI becomes sophisticated enough to handle even the joyful “creative” part of a job and costs the employer less, then at least some of the for-profit employers would not hesitate to employ AI without thinking much about how the joy is being taken away from a real human for the sake of efficiency. Perhaps the key to stay relevant in today’s job market is to embrace “routine and joy” together—the way that Clinton described it—rather than thinking that routine is the joyless part of a job that should be outsourced to AI. After all, AI is “intelligent,” albeit artificial.  You would not even realize when AI has "learned" to manipulate you so that you unwittingly give away some tasks to AI that were the sources of joy for you.

So millennials—make AI your friend, not your slave. Share both the routine part and the joyous part of you job with AI for a happy synergy.

Life and Death of Kenneth Cole

Kenneth Cole was born and died in our backyard in the short span of a few days. Kenneth Cole the bird, not the famous designer.

A few days back I started noticing a house wren going frequently into the tiny hole of the bird-house that hangs in our backyard. My hopes rose! Last two summers in a row, the bird-house has been the cozy nursery for wren hatchlings. We always heard them chirp, but we could never nail the time to see when they become big enough to venture out. Each time they flew away—abandoning the perfectly good built-in nest for whoever picks it up next season.

This time I kept a regular vigil. I developed the skill to silently come close enough to see the parent bringing food from outside and feeding the babies. I learned not to be too obtrusive and scare the parent away. Just like a cuckoo clock, the babies poked their little heads out to grab the food from the parent’s beak. It was pure bliss to observe this—for two afternoons straight! I knew the babies are growing and gathering strength to learn to fly. 

And one of them did learn, but perhaps not well enough. Yesterday when my son Gogol was hanging out by the pool with our dog Biscuit, he suddenly heard a plopping sound. Biscuit started barking like crazy. I was inside. I heard Gogol screaming, “Mamma! The bird fell down in the pool!!”

We rushed outside. We saw a tiny bird floating in the water. We tried to rescue him/her with the pool-cleaning net, but to no avail. The little lungs got filled with water in no time. The little heart stopped. From where the body was found, it is clear that the baby ventured out of the bird-house and walked some distance along the twigs of the Japanese Maple tree canopying the pool before losing grip and falling down. My heart broke.

We decided to give the baby a dignified burial. The white Kenneth Cole watch box seemed like the perfect casket to cradle the tiny lifeless body. When we dug a hole in the ground and put the box in, the top of the box looked just like a gravestone, lying flat on the ground--the name  “Kenneth Cole” prominently visible. 

I guess the little one was destined for a human name—Kenneth Cole. RIP Kenneth Cole. It was nice to know you, albeit for just a few moments.

Oasis

This is the twelfth time I am flying to India in the last six years. I have flown alone a couple of times, but most of the time we travel together as a family. The purpose of the travel remains the same—visiting family in India, with a predictable regularity, especially for the peace of mind of aging parents, both mine (when they were around) and my husband’s. Each time we take the same Emirates flight—from San Francisco to Dubai, and then from Dubai to Kolkata, with a generous stopover at the Dubai airport breaking the two legs of the journey. The Dubai airport lounge now feels like a familiar vacation spot where you come back again and again. Nothing symbolizes our immigrant life more than this acquired comfort at an airport lounge in a country that, despite being superbly welcoming, is neither our birthplace, nor our adopted workplace.

As I try to analyze the source of this strange sense of comfort, I realize something profound. This journey is the only legitimate break where I feel temporarily unencumbered from the professional demands in the US and the personal duties in India, both of which I like immensely, but there is no denying that this dual existence keeps me stretched thin between the two continents.

This realization is more poignant this time, perhaps because of the cumulative effect of three deaths of three beloved parents in India in the last four years. Each time death, or the prospect of it, loomed in the background during the journey, but each time in a slightly different way. The saga started in 2012. In December 2012, I was flying to India knowing that my mother’s cancer was rapidly deteriorating. But I didn’t imagine I would receive a phone call from my siblings during the Dubai transit that mom had slipped into a coma, quite unexpectedly, while I was flying from San Francisco to Dubai.  She passed away the day I landed in India. Three years later, I was again flying through Dubai, knowing that my father was in the hospital due to complications from an angioplasty, but at least he was stable at that point. (He died two weeks later). Today, I am flying with my son—my husband is already in India—knowing that my mother-in-law has already passed away a few days earlier. So I know that there is no escaping, or even delaying, death this time. I have to face the reality that I have lost a parent—again—even before the first anniversary of my father’s passing.

When you have to preserve all your fortitude to bravely deal with deep personal losses over and over again, you appreciate the temporary refuge offered by a transit airport more than ever. Thank you Dubai for being the true oasis that you project yourself  to be.

What's in a name?

It was the first Monday after we brought home our puppy two days back on Saturday. I was a 'new mom' once again after 11 years! The logistics of transporting the puppy to the dog-sitter's home before going to work in the morning was a bit overwhelming. No wonder I missed the breaking news that there has been a mass shooting in Houston that morning.

Once I was settled in at work and started reading my daily dose of legal news, I saw the headline--"Man ID'd as Houston Gunman Was a 'Good, Competent Lawyer,' Ex-Partner Says." I was intrigued. I read on. The lawyer-turned gunman injured nine people before being killed by the police. The article mentioned the lawyer's name--Nathan DeSai. I assumed he must be of European origin, like DeSantis or De Palma.

More details started coming in eventually, including an interview clip with the lawyer's father by a reporter. The father looked South Asian and had a totally Indian-sounding name. And now for the first time I started thinking, could it be that Nathan was someone who changed his name? And the DeSai is actually 'Desai,' a common Indian last name? I was right. Apparently he changed his name from Niren Desai to Nathan DeSai in 2001.

This business of changing one's name has always interested me. Sometimes it is motivated by sheer practicality. I can see if your first or last name is so long that there are not enough boxes in the forms, then you could be tempted to cut it to a more manageable length. Sometimes it is just a natural outcome without anyone formally changing the name. My son's name is Jyotishko. His caregivers started calling him Jojo when he went to his infant daycare. He started responding to that. So even though he has another nickname--we Indians often do--the diminutive version of his formal name stuck with him. My own name 'Madhumita' became shortened to 'Mita', because--get this!--the information technology guys at University of Maryland, my graduate school, said I had to choose a login name that is 'no more than six letters long'! (Boy, I came to America as a graduate student a very long time ago!) And 'Madhu' was already taken. I did not choose Mary or Maddie though, that would potentially create a confusion about my ethnicity or religion. Not that anything is wrong with that. But at least in Nathan DeSai's case, I am left to wonder whether he changed his name to deliberately create a confusion regarding his race or religion, so that he appears more 'mainstream' to his prospective clients. Kind of like how Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz became Jon Stewart, or Carlos Irwin Estevez became Charlie Sheen.

When my son was a bit younger, he once asked me, perhaps out of sheer curiosity, why we did not choose a more "American" name for him. I told him that if he is good, people will have to take notice, irrespective of whether he has an easy name or not, just like people once took notice of a "skinny kid with a funny name," who went on to become the President. I showed my son the video of Obama's famous speech, and he got his answer.

In case you are curious what name we chose for our puppy, let's just say he is named after a very chompable thing recognized equally in India and in America. We named him Biscuit. Goes well with his brown coat, doesn't it?

The Transcontinental Chin Buddies

From the moment he was born, my son Gogol forged a special bond with his grandfather (my father-in-law). Grandpa was the first person to figure out how to put baby Gogol to sleep. Though grandpa had to go back to India when Gogol was five months old, through our frequent visits to India (and their occasional visits to the US), the bond remained as strong as ever over the last eleven years. But what happened on August 30, 2016 was truly special!
Gogol came back from school with a deep laceration under his chin when he tripped on the volleyball court while diving for the ball. His first big sports injury! We had to take him to the emergency. When we called India to share the news that Gogol got three stitches, Grandpa laughed and told us, "Ha ha, I was not going to tell you, but now it is too much of a coincidence not to tell you that I got five stitches yesterday on my chin too! I fell while cutting the branches of a tree in the garden."

The 11-yr old and the 80-yr old naughty boys--two of the most gentle but toughest human beings that I know--became chin buddies across the globe! Blood is thicker than the (ocean) water that keeps them apart!