Life, friends and business

Self destruction

2022-03-08T22:09:00.000-06:00

I self destruct, a lot. I am like the bounty hunter droid in the first episode of Mandalorian. I go into perfect situations, I got all the power and am taking out the bad guys. Suddenly, once I take a minor hit or two, I reach for the self destruct button. I am just happy today that I am beginning to realize this just now - at the age of 45. Better late than never!

The magic lies in realizing in the moment that I am self destructing. That realization has two effects. One, a choice materializes. A choice to not self destruct or continue self destruction. Two, after the moment passes, there is time to look back. I am looking back right now as I write this.

What is self destruction you ask? I don't know what everyone else thinks of it. For me, it shows up in small, subtle forms many times through the day. For example, when I am eating a perfect meal with some great conversation, I might hear just one sentence or two that affects me negatively in some way, then, I self destruct. I start adding on spices, or butter and that one extra serving of whatever it is and it just spirals down from there. Sometimes I realize what I am doing and I am able to summon my good senses and stop. Other times, I realize it and I keep going. Later, when I look back, I realize how the moment unfolded. I devise a strategy to avoid self destruction the next time.

Awareness is what I need. I need self awareness, an awareness of the 5 senses, an awareness of the mental state, my own heart beat, my own breathing and an awareness of the physical state. I think some of these feelings work in unison, in sort of a crescendo, to affect me positively at times and negatively at times. When I am practicing Golf at golftec, on some days, the senses get together to help me drive my best shots, consistent, long, straight shots at the right distance. When, I am unawares, one after another all senses collaborate to sabotage my game. It is almost as though my senses conspire to hide themselves from me until I am so overwhelmed that I participate in those shenanigans to the point of self destructions.

In future, I hope to become more aware of myself and avoid self destruction.

Kama Bistro - La Grange

2022-01-31T22:23:00.002-06:00

I have had severe allergies over our Christmas and New Years vacation and that left me miserable for a good 3 weeks. I saw my Doctor and was on the mend. I also had my booster shot appointment on Thursday Jan 20th at Orland Park, Illinois. Thursday January 20th just seemed to be an ideal day to get dinner outside and kick of our "Adventures of a Hungry Couple". A day before the booster appointment, I looked for Indian Cuisine near my vaccination clinic and I was surprised to find very few that were within a few miles. Kama Bistro was about 15 miles away and it has been on my list of places to try since quite long. I knew of it, but, had never been before. I reserved it on opentable.com. Visali and I went there after my booster.

We arrived around 7:30 pm and found parking by the BNSF train station parking for La Grange Road, a few steps away from the restaurant which is well located on main street. It has a nice glass facia with warm, comfortable lighting inside. They asked for our vaccination status and had us seated at a nice booth. I was expectant and happy to be there. The menu looked good. The menu was not the longest or deepest, but it looked good. The menu seemed to promise "Hey, what I have is worth it. Go ahead and try.". The server arrived quickly and I ordered a mango lassi while Visali ordered a Love - Rooibos hot tea. My mango lassi was good. It was not overly sugary and it felt refreshing. Visali liked her tea - it was aromatic and soothing to her.

Mango Lassi

Love - Rooibos Hot Tea

We spent a few minutes on the drinks when the server asked about our preferences. The server took time to describe the items and all that conversation whetted my appetite. For appetizers, we ordered the Crispy Chili Potatoes and Paneer Lemon Tadka. Crispy Chili Potatoes were good. The food was super hot as served and felt like it came from a pan on the stove (not reheated). Potatoes were just well crisped on the outside and soft, sweet on the inside. I could not tell that Ketchup was one of the ingredients, Visali could tell and then we confirmed from the menu that indeed, it had "Kama Ketchup" in it. It was tangy, sweet and had a chili kick to it. The cold weather outside, sweet Mango Lassi and then the Crispy Chili Potatoes were all going very well for me. The Paneer Lemon Tadka also turned out to be a fresh item. I don't think I can compare it to anything else before that day. Later we learnt from our server that the chef blends French and Indian Cuisine in some of their items and Lemon Tadka was one of those. Je pense que c'est une bonne idee. The Lemon Tadka had house made paneer. Upon asking, the server reminded us that all menu items were house made from scratch. The Lemon Paneer Tadka had the paneer and creamy soup or gravy like base. After the first few bites, I felt like the cream was a bit too much and I somewhat struggled to imagine a French citizen eating that Lemon Paneer Tadka - admittedly, I have no knowledge of French food except for what they show in "Emily in Paris" (I binged season 1 last year and will binge season 2 later). Both our items were for eating with a spoon, like eating a thick soup served in a dish (not a bowl) with chunks of paneer and potato.

Crispy Chili Potato

Lemon Paneer Tadka

For the main course, we chatted again with the server and landed on Kama-Kaze Vindaloo (medium spicy) and Paneer Black Pepper Bhujnee. Interestingly, the menu had an "Add-On" section containing a few other of my favorites. I ordered Eggplant Bharta from that add-on menu. For breads, I got Paratha and Pudina Paratha. When the food arrived, it looked and smelled great. The Vindaloo was not too hot and the Black Pepper Bhujnee was - peppery. Parathas were fresh and perfectly cooked. My Eggplant Bharta started out good as well. About half way into the main course is when we started talking earnestly about the food. So far, it was all "ra, ra, go, go", but as the belly started filling up, we started becoming a little more selective and started feeling new tastes and textures. Lets just say that the food was better and the ingredients felt fresher than any other Indian Cuisine restaurant I have been to. Beyond that, there was a nagging feeling that the chef was simply too generous with cream and oils. The Vindaloo, the Bhujnee and the Eggplant each could have been laid on a strainer to drain some of the cooking oil, better yet, the chef could have started with a little less oil. I have never enjoyed vindaloo because it is a one track dish - just red hot chili pepper (in this case Bhut Jholokia). The black pepper in the Black Pepper Bhujnee was too coarse for my taste. The eggplant was not fire roasted enough and hence was too mushy and I did not taste any herbs in it. This is a common problem with Indian Cuisine in United States. It is almost as though all chefs have extrapolated the "chunks" and "mush" construction of the Chicken Tikka Masala on to every other dish even if those dishes were originally meant to have a crispy texture of main individual ingredients. At one point, to demonstrate the oil, I picked up a spoonful of Eggplant Bharta and gently twisted my wrist for the spoon to drain a stream of oil back into the dish that I picked it up from. I sincerely felt sorry for myself because I had come deliciously close to calling this one of the best restaurants I had eaten at.

Eggplant Bharta

Paneer Black Pepper Bhujnee

Kama-Kaze Vindaloo

Paratha

Pudina Paratha

For dessert, I ordered Kama Bistro's take on the Malai Kulfi. Malai Kulfi is my favorite kind of Indian ice cream. The server described a malai kulfi served with Kama Bistro's own take with a few other spices, sweets and tart. I liked the malai kulfi, although, I have to say that this one was probably made from heavy whipping cream from the store and was too low on sugar. In my opinion, Malai Kulfi tastes better when made from condensed cream than just whipping cream. It was served in small chunks with strawberries, a raisin sauce and some nuts. I liked the dish but, I sorely lamented the kulfi itself.

Overall, I don't think I will remember this as my best Indian Cuisine restaurant. It definitely has a fresh take on some of the food, it is high end, servers are knowledgeable, friendly and it has a decent ambience. On the way back, Visali and I tried to compare this experience with other experiences. We ended up saying that this Indian Cuisine restaurant wanted to be like a Sunda (Asian Fusion) or Tanta (Peruvian Fusion) but fell way short.

We continue, on the Adventures of a Hungry Couple. Next up are Chicago Curry House and Shikara.

The Adventures of a Hungry Couple - the quest for good Indian Cuisine in Chicago

2022-01-19T20:08:00.000-06:00

I have only rarely eaten good Indian Cuisine in restaurants in the United States. There are only handful of restaurants out of 100s that I recall the taste and the experience of. To say the least, that is shocking. Having said so, I am now not so sure what exactly is shocking. Is it shocking that I don't like the Indian Cuisine that I have eaten or is it shocking that Indian Cuisine restaurants in the United States really suck? There is one way to answer that question. Visali and I are going to try out one new Indian restaurant every week and write a review. We will go in with an open mind and a empty belly. We will sample as many items as we can and I will follow up with a blog here. I want to believe that it is shocking that I don't like the Indian Cuisine that I have eaten. I want to collect evidence for my hunch that there must be some place out there that serves good Indian Cuisine.

Now, let me state a few traits I would look for in this adventure. For one, the food must taste fresh and reasonably balanced. The word "fresh" here means it should feel like the cook heard me order the paneer korma and then chopped up the herbs, grated the paneer, took fresh oil from the container, fired up the kadhai (wok) and made that korma. The words "reasonably balanced" means, each item should have the right amount of flavor, bite and texture while reasonably matching up with the rest of the items we order. That is mainly it. Fresh and Reasonably Balanced. At this moment, I do not care much about other stuff such as ambience, service, price and other non food items. This is definitely about the food.

Note: I will write this blog and the series following this while addressing all experiences as "My" experiences or "I" doing things. However, my wife Visali is going to be an equal partner. When there is reason to relate to our individual experiences separately in the same dinner, I will call that out separately. So, "I" means "Us" unless I say "I" and "Her" specifically in the same context. I know! Complicated.

If you like a restaurant, do let me know.

Self Importance is unimportant - shed it

2022-01-07T15:37:00.005-06:00

How important am I? On the cosmic scale, not at all. What I need to learn is that even on the microscopic scale, I am not important at all. This is difficult to understand. "I am not important!" Who says that? No one can say that without a little loss of self-esteem. I am starting to think if one can say "I am not important!" without losing any self-esteem, then, one has found the secret to happiness.

It seems to be a choice in everything we do moment to moment in our lives. When performing any activity, we must make a choice. How important am I? How important are my feelings? If we choose to make ourselves important and attach our feelings to the result of activities, then, we are bound to controlled by our activities. Instead, if we choose to say, "I am not important" and "my feelings are not important", then, we become detached with the work we are performing or its results. Suddenly, the work we are performing need not satisfy us, success does not come from the success of the activity we perform. I think that is the secret to happiness.

I would like to apply this secret to my work and life everyday this year. I have meditated on and off over many years after first reading Jon Kabat Zinn way back. At first, I found it very easy, then, at some point, I simply lost interest. I should have kept it up. I think this realization I had today about my importance (or the lack thereof) is the core of meditation. One goal of meditation is to disconnect the material world from the soul, to disconnect the outside from the inside. I think answering the question "How important am I?" and asking it over and over again in the context of activities we perform is an important self-aligning, self-correcting mechanism to get happier moment after moment.

Wish me luck. I wish you luck.

Meeting hell

2022-01-06T16:00:00.004-06:00

Give me hellfire and brimstone. Don't give me meetings. I mean I would rather be dead. Some meetings are good, but most suck the air out of my lungs. The big problem is that half the time, participants are never well prepared, and the meeting organizers never think of what they want the meeting to end with. Here are my suggestions for all meeting organizers all over the world.

Suggestion 1: Set an Agenda

I mean, people! Please! I might be working on 5 different things and my wife and kids may be wanting other things from me. I have not gone working out for 5 days straight. It is cold outside. I don't have enough money in my bank and I drank too much last night. You expect me to read your mind on what your meeting is about? At the very least, set bullet point agenda of what you want to talk about. What does an agenda look like you ask? Well, what is the meeting about? Is there a problem that we need to collectively solve? Then, lead with the problem statement in one sentence containing one subject, one predicate and as few conjunctions as possible. Follow that with a few bullet points describing potential solutions and who will do what part of that solution. Do we need to agree on a difficult topic? Start with the topic itself. Chase with a call to action to participants that they must formulate their thoughts and bring to the meeting. Tell them that they must reach a consensus before the end of the meeting. Sometimes, it feels like these things are obvious, but that is never true. Without a written agenda, participants will often make up their own agenda or highjack your meeting. Don't let them.

Suggestion 2: Budget time

Do you have all the time to listen to your grandma talking about her problems? What makes you think anyone wants to listen to anyone else in your meeting? Hence, feel free to budget time. If there are 6 people in a meeting and the meeting is for an hour, have a think about who gets to talk for how long. If the meeting is to discuss a person's requirements for the next 2 quarters or address their issues from the last interaction, then, budget 30 minutes for that person and 6 minutes each for the remaining 5. If the meeting is discuss highway construction plans, then, offer 10 minutes to each participant. You may think that often times, a single meeting participant "just emerges" as the important participant. Thats baloney. Having a free reign on time allows the noisiest person to self-emerge as the important participant. Don't allow that.

Suggestion 3: Ask your participants to pre-send a written response

You know that smooth talking person who can walk into a bank, impress upon the banker how rich they are and walk out with a million-dollar loan? Neither do I. Banks have gotten smarter. They use a credit score, financial statements, purpose statements, character statements and even mortgage your house to give you a loan. Why can't you expect a meeting participant to send you a brief write up or a diagram of their opinion of the topic at hand before the meeting starts? Force them to prove that their participation in the meeting is important and meaningful. Additionally, they will be forced to prepare. Preparation has two benefits. Firstly, they will bring their knowledge to the meeting. Secondly, if they are wrong, they will learn that they are wrong and will learn new stuff from the meeting.

Suggestion 4: Cancel your meeting

If it can be done on teams chat, google chat, zoom chat, telegram chat, whatsapp chat asynchronously (meaning, with about 15 minutes to an hour between chat messages) then, do you really need to spend collective hours on a phone call? Really?

Please. Give me hell.

Writing is hard

2022-01-04T17:08:00.006-06:00

For me, writing is hard. Writing is hard because I am busy working, living or thinking about working and living. Now, I have started to feel that I could probably skip the thinking about working and living and replace that with writing. Hopefully, in 2022, I will busy working, living and writing.

The idea is to write often. Just get into the zone of expressing things publicly. No matter what the topic, or how frivolous. Just write. In normal course of life, whether I am at work or spending time with family, I am concerned with being right. In 2022, I want to be just concerned with the write (not right, you see what I just did there?).

To writing, here is a poem.

Write they say?, Right, they say.

But what about, by the way?

When? Between meetings and eating?

Normally, I wish I was sleeping.

I've been trying to write since August last year. Now, I realize that trying to write itself is taxing, time consuming activity. I think the actual task of writing itself may be much more fun and fast.

Well, well, well, what could I write about? Oh there are so many things to write about. The key is to not fret about what to write about. How many times do I reminisce times gone by in a week? 3? 5? 10? Each of those are opportunities to write. How often do I feel intensely more intelligent than the rest of the world? Those are the number of times I can write. It seems to me that there are many opportunities to write. See this post itself? See how I am writing about my desire to write. This itself is a great piece to write.

In short, writing does seem hard, but, in reality, it is really easy. All I gotta do is write. But that's hard!

A few new books I read recently

2021-05-11T22:56:00.002-05:00

I have not written since Jan 22 and now it is May 11! Soon, June will be upon us and before you know it, we will have finished more than half a year of 2021. It does not feel too long because I have been busy.

Anyway, today, I want to write about books I read since the last one I finished. First of all, I must say that I have been on a tear! Here is the entire list at first and below it I will review briefly.

1. The Culture Map - Erin Meyer

2. No Filter: Instagram - Sarah Frier

3. Invent and Wander - Jeff Bezos

4. This is Marketing - Seth Godin

5. I am afraid, Debbie from Marketing has left for the day - Morten Munster

6. Drug use for grown-ups - Dr. Carl L Hart

7. How to avoid a climate disaster - Bill Gates

8. Power of Habits - Charles Duhigg

9. Checklist Manifesto - Atul Gawande

10. Talking to Goats - Jim Gray

11. Mentors - Russell Brand

12. Hard Crowd - Rachel Kushner

13. A Runner's High - Dean Karnazes

14. Educated - Dr. Tara Westover.

Educated

I must start with the last book first. Today, I finished "Educated" by Dr. Tara Westover. When the book finished, I found myself holding back tears and walking to the bathroom to hide. I connected to Tara Westover in some ways. While Westover's case is extreme - meaning she suffered violent abuse at the hands of her own Father and Brother and then got out of it to go to Cambridge and Harvard - I also suffered mild abuse growing up. She writes in detail about her experience living in a remote Idaho town under the omni-present shadow of her abusive, mentally ill and survivalist father. The father is so deeply mired in conjured conspiracy theories that he does not allow medicine, science, schools, police, telephone, tv in his house. The first thought I had as I got through the first few pages was about economic inequality - how can one part of Idaho be so far behind the rest of the world in today's day and age? She writes how her father, due to his deep distrust in humanity and utterly blind faith in the Mormon God, leads his children down a dangerous path. Reading through this part of the book, I felt like "I've been here". I did not suffer anywhere nearly as much as she did. However, I am now convinced for a few years that any trauma in childhood is too much trauma. It takes years for an adult human being to shed poor experiences when growing up. In the middle of the book, she describes her unlikely journey through college in Brigham Young University, Utah. She writes about her introduction to the real world and how she starts to deal with her own feelings about her family. Here, again, I felt a connection to how I felt when I first left home, then my birth-country to come to the United States. I cannot say I had the same experiences as her, but, I had similar feelings about myself as she had about herself. I felt guilt, sympathy, excitement, fear, loneliness and fatigue, all at the same time for many years. By the time I got to the third part of the book, I was deeply curious about what she did next. I wanted to read the rest non-stop so I could learn what she did to get out of her funk and blossom into the life that she wanted for herself. So, I did read non-stop and shed a tear at the end of the book just because it was so overwhelming, so truthful, so visceral to me. I imagine that to many readers, this book is about poverty, stupidity turned into a success story through individual perseverance and some therapeutic experiences. I can see how some will draw parallels to another similar book titled Hillbilly Elegy. In my opinion, this is different. This is about her education about herself. Something I sorely need for myself.

A Runner's High, Hard Crowd and Mentors

I had watched a news interview of Dean Karnazes very long ago. I was amazed! Now, reading his book for the first time, I am not that amazed! I mean, he is definitely a beast and deserves everything he has. My objection is to his superlative way of thinking about running and runners. It is facetious at best and dishonest at worst. Ultra running is an industry and he is part of it. Boy got bored, boy started running and boy made money. That is it. Of course, I am doing myself a disservice by judging him so harshly after reading only one book and watching a 30 second clip 10 years ago. Just not my type of a book. Full disclosure: I have high blood pressure, I am always stressed and I need to run. I am running these days, but, I am not even one quarter of the healthy person I used to be 10 years ago. I hope to get back on track!

Hard Crowd was in the Sunday NYT book review. I was looking for something different, possibly even fiction. Rachel Kushner wrote mostly fiction and this was a collection of non-fiction essays. That seemed like a good break from my usual fare. I am thrilled to report that I loved this book. First of all, the writing style was novel to me. I am accustomed to reading non-fiction, with facts, figures, evidence and experiments. This was just a story book of real things. Plus, some of these essays were shockingly good.

Russell Brand is awesome, Mentors is his book. Forgetting Sarah Marshall is one of my favorite comedies. He married Katy Perry! Then he had issues and went to rehab. Now, he is a new age podcast guru. I have heard him talk and I love his talks. He tackles many topics with aplomb. When his book came out, I wanted to read - just because it was from him. I don't remember any of it. Having a book by him reminds me of the evening when I dragged my wife to an auditorium to hear Cameron Diaz talk about her book and sign a copy. I have the book, I have no idea what is in it. :)

Talking to Goats

If you know who Jim Gray is, then you probably should read this book. I did not know who he was, but, I felt like it would be great to read an outsider's perspective on all these GOAT (Greatest Of All Times) athletes. I liked the book, I liked to read about all those stories from 80s and 90s. However, this book, like many others written in twilight of career was an explanation of Jim Gray's life. It just so happens that Jim Gray had a great life among some of the best people, events and stories of his lifetime. Good for him and good for anyone into sports.

Books about "Habits"

I read a series of books about habit forming. These I read to affect some much needed change in my personal life as well as my work. It started with a quest to distill my work around digital marketing. I wanted to learn how to effectively persuade prospects to buy my services. I am well versed with the process and the technology. However, the question I had (I still have), is "What exactly should I do day to day to become a good salesperson". At first I read This is Marketing by Seth Godin. In many was Seth Godin is the proto digital marketer. He started in 1984 before it was a thing. He has a different way to look at it compared to most street friendly folks. It is easy to dismiss him as an idealist. I think "This is Marketing" was an eye opening book for me. To me it cut through the crap and defined what marketing means today. What does social media mean to marketing? How do ads help (or not)? Why should there be content? And what should be the driving goal behind all of this? These are fundamental questions and Seth's book covers some potential answers.

From This is Marketing, I found "I am afraid Debbie from Marketing has left for the day". This is a very nice book. Morten Munster has done a great job of defining the marketing problem and providing a real, powerful process to solve the problem. In essence, he defines the problem as "a need to make change". For example, you need your customers to change their habit and instead buy your product. Then, he goes on to postulate that this is a System 1 problem. System 1 and System 2 thinking or "Fast and Slow" are behavioral science concepts from a Nobel prize winning scientist Daniel Kahneman. System 1 is fast, impulsive decision making. Most people make decisions based on such sort of thinking. To affect change the marketer (or any change agent) must analyze barriers, then design a "cue-response-reward" cycle that causes lasting change. I truly liked this book and wished I had purchased a physical copy to read and annotate instead of my audible book. I probably will do that some day soon.

Another book on the same topic is Power of Habits. This book does away with theory and measurement of any kind and focusses on the cue-response-reward cycle. I found the basic concepts similar to Morten Munsters book, but, the difference is that Munster's book is a lot more fun to read and has better examples from real, practical life. I think I may read this book again in paper form.

Atul Gawande's Checklist Manifesto is another one about habits. He has described how a simple change to standard procedures leads to a series of actions by humans that lead to better outcomes. Even though he is a cancer surgeon and his major success is in applying checklists to hospitals, he goes into some detail about how checklists are used in a myriad of situations. For example, flying a plane, constructing a high rise building and running war operations. Before reading the book, I felt like why would a cancer surgeon write a whole book about something as mundane as a checklist? He goes into that. Checklists are not just a guard rail, in fact, in critical, high stress, life-or-death situations, checklists lead to better chance of survival and success. Among many other real examples, he goes into the famous Hudson bay water landing and talks about pilot training in its context. For laypersons, it is easy to miss the power of checklists. This book brings it home!

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

Bill Gates is a brilliant man and is well read. He has decided to apply his brain and his fortune to the worlds toughest human problems. One such problem is climate change. In this book, he splits the problem down arithmetic lines. What are the 7 or so biggest contributors to climate change and what are the capitalist industrial life forces of those contributors. For example, cement, concrete and steel used in construction contribute a certain percentage to climate change. So, what are the factors here? How can we replace cement? What materials exist? Another example is much more obvious - fossil fuels. How do we replace that? He has gone into a business like analyses of these topics and described some potential ways to tackle the problem. He is so business like in this book that he side steps some issues such as animal farming, social habits and public opinion. On the contrary, I feel like he somewhat trivializes the activism that calls for massive changes in the human diet. He may be right from a dollar arithmetic point of view, but I think he is being unfair to simply dismiss the idea that changing the human diet from meat to plant based or lab grown meat 100% could be great for the climate.

Drug Use for Grown Ups

This was a phenomenal book. First of all, I had no idea (until I read this book) that the US Government has an entire agency dedicated to drug abuse named NIDA (National Institute of Drug Abuse). How we had a national crisis on opioid addiction despite having this agency is beyond me. When I picked up this book, I thought this was going to be a fringe book filled with opinions and anecdotes. I thought so because there is no way to get evidence based literature on an illegal activity. I was pleased to find out that NIDA existed and this author was a senior scientist there. The book itself is great! He has written about all drug types from Marijuana, Meth, MDMA (Molly/Ecstasy), Opioids (Oxy, Heroine), Acid/PCP and many others that I have now forgotten. Not only has he conducted scientific research on subjects in his lab, but also on his own body. He asks all drug users to not only come out of the "closet" but also proudly claim actively that they do drugs. He is himself an active drug user and is telling everyone about it. The book assumes that everyone knows how many problems we have today due to unjust drug laws and Nancy Regan policies. It just goes into a great, in-depth explanation of each drug type and how or why none of these drugs are truly unsafe. One caveat is that Drug Use is only for "Grown Ups". That means, the consumer should be in good physical and emotional health, should be using drugs for recreational purposes only. Kids are not included! I should mention that this book is deep and broad, please read it. You will be surprised.

Invent and Wander

Have you read all of Jeff Bezos' shareholder letters since 1997? Me neither! So, this book contains all those letters and a few of his important speeches. What stood out to me is that Jeff Bezos did not just build a website, he has invented a new way of doing business. It is surprising to see how much business innovation he produced and how he defined his metrics over time. Other than being a single unconstrained dump of all his letters, this books is not much else. I don't mean it is insignificant - far from it - instead I am saying it is a book worth reading for any student of 21st century digital businesses.

No Filter: Instagram

This was a great book. Mainly, it is very well written as a narrative non fiction. It reminded me of a book I read long ago about Anheuser Busch titled Dethroning the King. It was unputdownable. It starts from Kevin Systrom's dorm days and ends with how Instagram influencers now rule the digital marketing world. The authoress takes the reader deep into the minds of Instagram founders, employees, their community leaders, moderators, early artists and then leads the reader deep into how Facebook and Zuckerberg think of Instagram. I found the book fascinating.

Culture Map

Culture Map is a deep dive into the background of a book I read last year. That one was about netflix - co-authored by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer. This book is by Erin Meyer and it describes in detail how cultures across the globe differ and what a global manager must do to make a multi-national organization effective. I have seen first hand how multi-national organizations work. I always felt that there is just no way to plan for cultural differences other than simply wing it or stumble through it. This book provides a great framework to thinking about this problem. This book applies mainly to work culture and productivity. In some chapters, I found the authoress digressing into longs anecdotes or stories of personal experience, but, it all makes the point that she has written about. I cannot imagine how thick and slow the book would have been without her anecdotes and experiences.

Enjoy reading!

Book Review: The Deficit Myth

2021-01-22T19:00:00.005-06:00

I first read about Stephanie Kelton in the Financial Times in their "Lunch with the FT" series. In that series, FT reporters meet their quarry at a restaurant, eat great food, talk about stuff and then the reporter writes their article in the FT. The idea is that readers, such as yours truly, get to vicariously eat lunch with the subject. The article describes the food eaten and the itemized bill as well! At any rate, that article was eye opening for me. That was the first time I read about a contrarian idea that Money (aka, cash, aka moolah) was invented as means of credit and not as a means of barter as is widely believed. Per popular wisdom, long ago, humans started bartering goods to receive things they needed in return for things they had but did not need. Soon, they were using sticks, shells and stones as currency in open markets and that lead to standardization into Money. Stephanie Kelton's ilk posit that, in fact, Money was first invented as a form of credit. Meaning, people took things from others and in return gave them tokens of credit (such as sticks, shells, stones) that could later be called in for return favors. The first recipient of the token could then pass that token to someone else with the same rights of an expected return favor. What they posit is more an economic theory than a scientific fact. They call this theory "Modern Monetary Theory".

Understanding money is important to public policy that in turn affects everything in our life. You and I can only earn money, but, only Government can print money. How money is distributed across the economy and who earns how much money can sometimes be taken for granted and other times be questioned with equal fervor. Some people are willing to kill for money and others find ways to give it up completely. I can write a pretty long dramatic prose just on this topic of understanding money only because it is such an enigma to me. Out of consideration for you, my dear reader, I decided not to do that. However, I did decide to read the book and write about it here. That book is Stephanie Kelton's June 2020 book named "The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the birth of the people's Economy".

I have to say: this is by far the simplest and most interesting economics book that I have read. It begins with the meat of the topic in the very first few pages. I remember the aha moment I had when I was listening to chapter one, walking on a nature preserve trail near my house. I could not resist but look up to the sky, amused and awed at the same time about how simple the concept was. It starts with the idea that Government Income (Taxation) and Government Spending are two unrelated things and are not the same as Household Income and Household Spending that are highly related. In Econ 1, I studied that Governments should strive for a balanced budgets such that Tax income should equal Spending. Now, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) turns that on its head. It posits that Government Income (Taxation) is not really a means of Income in the sense of "Profit" or "Surplus". It is simply a number on a ledger that can be increased at will by Sovereign, Fiat Currency Governments. Let me try to say in a few lines what Kelton takes a whole chapter to say - forgive me for butchering this. MMT says that Tax was not invented as a means for Governments to collect money that can then be spent on public projects. Old world Rulers instead invented Tax as a means to coax their subjects into working for them. The Rulers decided that they would simply take a percentage of the Subject's Produce without giving them any Credit Tokens. Unless, of course, the subjects worked on the Ruler's Projects such as building roads, forts, and iron smithy. In that case, the Ruler would offer the Subject a Credit Token (a stick, shell, or a stone) and then, when the Tax Man came around, the Subject would simply offer up one of the shells to show that they had worked on the Ruler's project and hence are exempt from offering produce. Hence, there was always an incentive for the Subject to work for the Ruler as long as the Produce was dearer than the labor spent on the Ruler's Projects. That is how Money was first invented as a Credit Token that replaced domestic Produce for taxation. Then, a secondary economy sprouted around these credit tokens as people started trading these tokens for other kinds of work between each other. For example, a farmer could offer one of his hard earned Credit Tokens to a iron smith to produce an augur. Hence, by MMT, the Ruler could simply continue to offer as many Credit Tokens (a.k.a. dollars) as they wanted and as long as they wanted work done. The only limitation that the Rulers must be wary of is limitation of physical resources. Meaning, the Ruler cannot expect to purchase goods and services after all able men are already occupied and after all grains and water is already consumed. In the modern world such unbridled demand would lead to inflation. Inflation is the only real limit to Government Spending.

Now that I have butchered the whole thing for you - I suggest you go read the book!

At any rate. Kelton opens the book with some eye opening, mind blowing positions. After the first chapter, she goes on to refute other misgivings and fervent objections to an idea that Uncle Sam can spend spend spend. She addresses current thinking that each dollar spent in the US must be accounted for in taxes. She addresses trade deficits, national debts, balance of payments, entitlements (Social Security, Healthcare, Welfare) and all other so called budget deficit expenses that are going to doom our country. It is very clear to me (the reader) that MMT has in fact addressed these and it is almost a panacea to many of our problems today. I was surprised that this has not already been done in the US Government. I agree with her representation that politics and not economics is the driving factor in Washington DC and I am appalled that politicians do nothing to improve human conditions in spite of an easy way out. Human suffering, in this case, is a more easily reparable state than the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) would lead you to believe. All in all, MMT makes a important case for Governments to solve all human problems with a stroke of a pen (or a keystroke on a keyboard).

I must admit, I got a million questions from people with whom I shared my thoughts. The first question was "But, isn't that simply socialism/communism". Communism or Socialism, which erstwhile USSR had, and today's China has, is Government Ownership of all resources in the nation. In communism, Government owns everything and allows Subjects to partake of those resources in "equal" parts. In Socialism, Government owns a master license to all resources and it allows private citizens to partake of the license to produce, consume such that all private activity affects social gain. Now, if I run my uneducated mind on high gear, I could reach the conclusion that eventually, the US Government, under the influence of MMT, could spend money to the point that they elbow out all private companies and all resources in the country would then be owned by the Government. Ergo, Communism. However, I do feel that is a big leap of imagination and nothing else. To keep it simple, I will only say that the US Constitution simply won't allow the Government to take over private sector. The more I think of the questions I got about this book, the more I feel that those questions are simply unfounded doubts and suspicions. I feel that the Ronald Reagan administration successfully screwed everyone's mind about how Governments work. I agree that there have been many political thoughts in US about "less government", but, Reagan administration turned a lot of those thoughts into policy. 401k (vs pension), social security delays (1983 amendments), tax cuts and many others turned the public spending conversation in the wrong direction. Today, Tens of millions of people are at best living an ordinary life and some, at worst, dying early in poverty, and I think Reaganomics has a role to play in it. MMT might be the anti-Reagan medicine to resolve many living condition issues for all of us. I do not mean to say that Kelton's book compares MMT to Reagan or any other past policies. This paragraph was just my thought process after having read the book.

I say that Kelton's book and the whole MMT concept can unleash human potential much like how torrential April rain can bring May flowers.

Today, that Lunch with the FT article is one of the top article on the "Lunch with the FT: Top 10 interviews of 2020" and Bernie Sanders is the Senate Budget Committee chairman. I cannot wait for Joseph Biden to apply some of these MMT principles to US public policy to bring it out of stupor.

All in all, I highly recommend reading this book.

Book Review: No Rules Rules - Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer

2020-12-25T17:20:00.003-06:00

I finished a nice book on organization culture. Its called No Rules Rules. I would most definitely add this one to my previous list of memorable books in 2020. This book is about Netflix's organization culture and how it helps them innovate. Some of my close friends may know that I sometimes enjoy reading, of all the things to read, profit and loss statements, balance sheets and cash flow statements of public companies. No, I don't do it for my work, I genuinely enjoy reading those statements without any context. Public companies release statements every 3 months and even juicer ones at the end of the year. These are like photographs of a person. Looking at a photo, you could say how happy, healthy the person is or what that person is doing at that point in time. Looking at statements is similar. When I looked at Netflix's statements way back in 2002, 03, 04, I could not understand what they did and how they could sustain anything in future. Of course, I was not alone and I am definitely aware that I am not as smart to understand these things. My point is that this book is the tell-all tale for those questions I had.

I must say that the content speaks directly to owners and managers of any size of a team. I think that Reed Hastings (the founder and CEO of Netflix) and Erin Meyer (Prof at Insead) did a great job of melding reality (Hastings) with science and academia (Meyer). They took turns with Hastings explaining how he sees Netflix and Meyer explaining and backing it up with the science. Hastings opens with describing his prior exit at Pure Software and what he learns from it. Then, he introduces the culture of "Freedom and Responsibility" - F&R (Spiderman anyone?). The first few chapters clearly lays out the unique mechanisms and results of this F&R culture. There are a few examples of how F&R failed in other organizations - I felt like those failures were just inserted in there simply to show what F&R is and isn't. The point of noting those failures is not to say that Netflix alone can do F&R but, that "anyone can do it, as long as..." they also do a few other things that Netflix does. I am guessing that a lot of readers will simply lose the book in this introduction to F&R. It simply is too bold and it glosses over many real challenges that F&R bring to any organizations. Fear not, because soon, the book explains that one key element of F&R is that Netflix hires only rockstars and meticulously unhires those who are not rockstars. It explains that the age old, top down, command and control structure is not compatible with Netflix and it recommends that when you want to drive innovation (as opposed to safety and error prevention), you must hire rockstars and give them all the F&R they can handle.

The remaining book (after the introduction in chapter 1) peels the layers on the Netflix culture. If you just see the chapter names in that book, you can see these "layers". At the end of the book is chapter 10 which the reader must read in order to understand limitations of the Netflix culture and how they are solving for it. I really liked that the authors admit that when going global and multi-cultural, their experience is not "one size fits all". Somewhere in the book Hastings says that he was researching global cultures when he read Meyer's first book "Culture Map".

Towards the end, Hastings and Meyer clarify reality that Netflix really operates at the "edge of chaos". That there are reasons why other companies would not want to do this. An example would be airline companies - they must not operate as Netflix does, not should Exxon Mobil. Hastings clarifies that the Netflix culture is good for "Innovation" not good for "Error Prevention".

Overall, I feel that this is a great book for any owner, manager, entrepreneur or student of business. For many readers, this will look idealistic, utopian and "Netflix-only". To me, this is the secret sauce of why companies such as Netflix are able to churn out quarter after quarter of monopolistic growth while others struggle. At this point, I must mention Bob Eiger's business autobiography in which he has dedicated a chapter on how he set the foundations for pivoting Disney into a tech company. It is clear to me that many other CEOs and Shareholders are going to want to pivot themselves to be tech companies. This book may be a great introduction to the "how".

Memorable books I read this year

2020-12-03T21:55:00.002-06:00

I just finished another book. This one was called "Caste - the origins of our discontents". This was the third book I read this year to understand and relate to the race issues we are facing in the United States. Like many of you, I was deeply affected by the Trump election in 2016 and the ensuing four years. I still believe that all societal ills from the last century and prior are coming to an end, and I still feel that we are only at the cusp of a new awakening because of technology. I feel strongly that many technologies are going to become much more ubiquitous and cheap in future and that will bring people closer. Believing what I believe, when I felt and sensed 4 Trump years, I was shaken to the core. I could not make up my mind whether I was wrong and indeed, evil will dig roots in technology or that I was right and this was just the last hurrah for evil before it disappeared in an abyss where it belongs. I needed to understand and I did what I like to do most. I read 3 books. I must list these at the top of my most memorable books of 2020.

Early this year, I read a book by Jill Lepore and was enthralled and also challenged by her writing style and historical detail. Then, I stumbled upon a critique she had written early on about Clayton Christensen (1952-2020). Clayton Christensen wrote about the relation between innovation and disruption (I cannot do justice in one sentence). His books such as The Innovator's Dilemma are often read in business school and boardrooms around the world. Jill Lepore tore down that part of his legacy in a scathing critique in the New Yorker magazine. That article was an explosion in my brain and I had to re-orient the contents of my skull. The reason that article came into my sights was that Jill Lepore's wrote another book this year about Data Science (history of). This book covered the life of a corporation named "Simulmatics" in 1960s. Simulmatics was the prototype data science company. A very interesting read.

I have recently had a few health issues. When I saw a recommendation for "Why We Sleep" on gatesnotes.com, I immediately picked it up. This book is an eye opener. No wait. This book is a brain opener. All us humans seek so much in life including success, happiness, patience, stamina, longevity and whatever else humans may want. One of the easiest way to eventually arrive at your station is to sleep more and sleep better. It turns out sleep is a biological process that we still have not understood well at all. This book seems to be the first ever that normal humans like us can read without being misled. All in all, this book was amazing insight into what happens when we sleep. I did write about this earlier this year. Similarly, I found Bill Bryson's book about the human body very interesting. He has covered each system of the body in vivid and interesting language over all chapters. The book does not waste time and is unputdownable.

The last book I will remember for long that I read this year is Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century. I must admit clearly that I did not understand 80% of the deep economic science that he as written. However, he has used examples of Aristocrats and Rentiers to explain how capital works and how it has fared over the last couple of centuries up until today. I am not sure whether he makes a case for one policy over the other - for that, I probably need to read his newest book called Capital and Ideology. However, to me it felt like he has clearly laid out how modernity has been impacted by capital and why we need different systems for humans to thrive in future (I am thinking about my children here). In my opinion, capital ownership and capital itself are going through seismic shifts. Too many angles to this to write in one or two sentences.

Capital in the twenty-first century

Note: I did not actually read all these. I listened to these on audible.

Book Review: The Body by Bill Bryson

2020-03-25T21:12:00.001-05:00

The Body by Bill Bryson is a great book. This is an informative, educational book. It is not a college textbook - meaning it is not trying to teach biology to students of the body. It is not meant for diagnosing medical conditions or to classify medical problems of the body. This is not a manual of the human body that one can read to fix or change the human body. It is merely a guidebook - just as the subtitle "A Guide for Occupants" proposes. However, what a great guidebook it is! I was enthralled and could not stop. Once again, this was one of the first few books I listened to on my brand new audible subscription. Hence, it is possible that my curiosity about the audible format played into me liking the book very much. Anyway, let me focus on the book.

This book is split into 23 chapters spread over 14 hours of audio. Most chapters deal with individual systems in the body such as the brain, nervous, reproduction, respiratory, immune - you get the idea. Within each chapter, though, Bill Bryson goes into interactions of these systems with each other and with human society of today. For example, here is a quote: "The heart is the most mysterious of our organs. For a start it looks nothing like the traditional symbol associated with Valentine's day and the lovers symbol carved into tree trunks and such.". Then, there are other chapters that deal with how we got here over the hundreds of thousands of years past, what are our current travails and how might the future look like. After listening to the entire book, I was left feeling very well informed and also with a lot of questions about ourselves. I mean, for all we know about ourselves, it appears we still don't understand everything that really matters. Cancer, aging, emotions such as love, hate, what happens when we sleep, brain function - there is so much we just don't know. Throughout this book, my mind drifted to sci-fi novels and movies in which humans have augmented their trivial knowledge of human body with abundant imagination of the human body.

Apart from being a good inward looking scientific narrative of the human body, Bill Bryson additionally related me (the reader) to many events in human history. This is key! When the book weaves in narratives from human history, it brings human body to life (sorry for the pun). Meaning, the book relates the human body to human condition. This really drives the book deeper into the mind. This is what turns the book from being a thick, opaque biology textbook to being a easily readable true story narrative.

My only complain is that I have already forgotten many parts of the book - I blame it partly on listening to the book on 1.65 times normal speed and for multi-tasking when listening. In that sense, this is not a life altering book that will leave a mark on your mind. It is merely a guide to the human body that you will want to read once and use as a ready reference.

Happy reading!

These Truths

2020-03-24T20:27:00.000-05:00

These Truths is a great book by Harvard Historian Jill Lepore. It traces American Political History from it's discovery to 2016. This year, for the first time, I purchased an audible.com subscription and this book was the second audio book I ever listened to. The first being Hans Rosling's Factfulness. These Truths and Factfulness are both books recommended by Bill Gates on his blog gatesnotes.com.

These Truths was a great eye opener to me - especially so because I immigrated to the United States for work and started my life as an American citizen in 2015 without any formal training in her history. Until I read this book, I was equal parts amazed and consternated about how and why Americans made political decisions they did. Trump's election was the most perplexing phenomenon to me. That piqued my interest and aroused suspicion that I was naive, that there was something about her that I just didn't know. Reading Gates' review about the book, it was clear to me that I needed to read the book!

I was not ready for it! Not having had any formal American Education in the K-12 sense, These Truths was a tsunami of information for me. The book starts somewhere near the discovery of America, covers pre-constitution times, goes into details of how the constitution itself was written, the lives of individual founding fathers, then goes into details of civil war and the winning over of all states, of the years up to emancipation, then voting rights for blacks (and all other struggles), Jim Crowe, women's suffrage, the evolution of the three branches of government (supreme court was a toothless in the beginning), amendments, failures of amendments (ERA), civil rights, voter suppression and a 100 other things that I have already forgotten.

I found the book very interesting, well narrated (by Jill Lepore herself) and fast paced. The book has a confident style (meaning, it leaves no dispute in the mind of the reader) that comes across as a statement of facts (rather than a statements of opinion).

I learnt many things about America - some consequential and others not so much. For example, the word "polls" meaning elections comes from a past usage of the word "poll". "Polls" are the tops of the heads as seen by a person sitting on high ground watching a crowd of humans. An election (a "poll") was simply the process of counting heads in a room (and apportioning 3/5ths of white vote to black persons).

Through this book, it is evident to me that the founding fathers had no clue or any prescience about how the future would play out. Too many people in today's world apply way too much significance and weight to the constitution itself and have completely forgotten the times and events between 1776 (declaration of independence) and 2020 (today). This is convenient to many because at the very best, they can prolong the needless ambiguity of a 200 year old document into current and future days. At worst, they can cause considerable harm by halting the progress of our nation and its people. Without reading this book (or any other good history book), it feels like the constitution is a bible and we are all christians (or quran and muslim etc.). After having read the book, it is clear the facts are much more nuanced.

In case one does not know (as I did not know), the words "These Truths" come from the preamble to the declaration of independence. The complete sentence is: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

I am glad I follow gatesnotes.com and I am glad I read this book. I highly recommend it.

healthcare for 27 year old "kids"

2012-07-17T10:23:00.001-05:00

I am fed up of what is going on in the political arena with the 2012 elections coming up. What really irks me is that I am not seeing too many people talk anything good about Obamacare (aka Patient protection and affordable care act.). There are way too many sound bytes talking about what is not right about it, very few about what is right. NY Times covered a few points well in an Five Obamacare Myths, but we need more. Lots more! I feel like analysts and naysayers are missing the point. I read someplace that "kids who are healthy will be mandated to buy insurance, even though they don't need - just to pay for the older and sicker folks who need more healthcare than them". First of all the people whom that article called "kids" are really full blown 26 year old adults. I say this because, per this new law, "kids" under the age of 26 will be allowed to stay on their parents health insurance, which means they will not have to buy health insurance. About folks who are more than 26, if they don't buy insurance, they either have to be rich or crazy. Consider the case of the rich. Lets say that a rich 27 year old falls sick with a major illness or meets with an accident in which no liability can be proven. This person will have to pay for healthcare from their pocket. If they can project their expenses to be much lesser than what they will pay for insurance over a few years, by all means they should go without it and stick with the mandated penalties. However, how many people (as a percentage) are actually so rich that they can pay for healthcare without feeling the pinch? Consider those who are too poor or too sick to buy health insurance. What will they do? They wait till they are deathly sick or are in need of emergency healthcare and then off load their entire burden of healthcare upon the taxpayers who in all probability purchasing insurance in the first place. So, as of today, in any case, the taxpayer ends up paying for themselves as well as these people who don't have any insurance. The new law mandates that those who don't have insurance should either buy it or pay penalty. In principle, the new law, actually disallows free rides. Now, there might be tax credits and rebates which allow the poor to get a better deal on insurance than the rich, however, its still better than a free ride. Additionally, I bet that having insurance (and the free preventive healthcare - by law) will lead to better overall health of citizens, which in turn lead to fewer people needing expensive healthcare. In effect, adults who are 27 and above will very likely be better off buying health insurance than not under the new law. I just don't see how they get the short end of the stick.

Where to put those dollars?

2011-08-19T21:15:00.001-05:00

With the market and economy as it is, there are many sound bytes to catch on what should one do with savings. Nothing seems sure. Stocks seem to be the "falling knife", gold seems too be highly inflated beyond its true value, treasury is backed by a non AAA country (!!). So, why not add my two sound bytes to the noise?

I am old fashioned. I like stocks and the old world thought process on stocks. In times of slowdowns and recessions, I caught words of an old man who was talking on TV. He talked about Altria (NYSE:MO) - a stock that has been somewhat beaten along with the rest of the market. Its a profitable company and relies mostly on its subsidiary Philip Morris - the tobacco company. It has a consistent dividend history and at today's price its dividend yield is 5.91%. So, I used the stock screener on Zacks to look for more. My stock screener was simple. Look for stocks that have a market cap above 1.5 billion $, is currently profitable and has a dividend yield greater than 9%. I was happy to find a stock that I already own. Alliance Bernstein (NYSE:AB). Alliance Bernstein is an asset management firm owned by the french insurance group AXA. They also have funds that they sell to the public. Their earnings history is pretty consistent and did not buckle under the subprime crisis. They seem to be fairly insulated from the credit markets as well. They make most of their money by managing other people's money and providing investment advice. Their stock price has no reason to go up and down just because the general market goes up and down. Their net fund flows could change and that could impact earnings in volatile markets, but that does not seem to have happened. So, I feel, not only is it an undervalued stock, it also is a great dividend play. I am going to double down on my position next week. Another stock that caught my attention was NYSE:PT. That is a telecom company that services Portugal, parts of Brazil and Africa. This has a market cap of 7.8 billion $ and currently yields 11% on dividend. Its currently not profitable, but boasts a good current ratio and good D/E ratio. It is a utility, so is probably independent of consumer tastes. Only major changes in underlying technology can unseat its business. I think it will make a great dividend play to ride out the recession.

cardio or weights?

2010-10-25T21:08:00.004-05:00

Joseph Rajadurai is a sweet mallu guy who asked me this:

In your experience, does weightlifting help with fat reduction in the body at all.. If say, I am 30 pounds overweight, do I focus more on cardio as opposed to strength training??

To which I responded with this:

Yo!! ty for that comment. Weights will help you with weight loss only in the long run. Short term, weights will not do much. Although lean muscle mass is a great metabolism factory, you need a lot of it to burn all food you eat and the 30 lbs that you don't need. Between cardio and weights, the "fat burn" type of cardio is pretty useful to lose pure body fat. This is the type that is low intensity but long duration type of running, swimming or any other endurance activity. The key difference between weights and endurance exercise is weights are anaerobic and endurance is aerobic. In some ways, you could imagine that, weights build your system to use food better on the long term while aerobics can stimulate the body into turning readily available food into energy to use instead of storing as fat. The best thing to have happen to you would be to have a good muscle mass which then is used for aerobics. Meaning that it would be cool to have large muscles and do cardio so that you burn more than the average guy doing cardio. Now, remember that cardio is absolutely no use if you dont do it for at least 30 minutes or so. In first 30 minutes of cardio, your body will burn up all available glucose/carbohydrates in the body then it will switch to fat burn. So, if you do 20 minutes of running, its possible that you only wasted time! Further, cardio will boost your metabolic rate for upto 36 hours after you work out and then your body will go back to your normal metabolism. Weights on the other hand will slowly, over the long term, raise your BMR (basal metabolic rate). So, if one day you eat a lot of cake and drink a lot, go run. However, if you want to live long with strong muscles, strong bones and immense strength, weights are your main exercise. Haha, as you can probably tell, I am a fan of weights. I dont do cardio! lol
Hope that answers your main question.
The bigger problem with weight loss programs is intake of food. Exercise is necessary, however, any exercise, is bound to make your brain release the hunger thought army. It is going to make you hungrier than ever and it is going to make you hungry for chocolate and cake because it knows thats where the glucose is. In my case, all my attempts at exercise failed for almost 5 years mainly because of this hunger reaction. First, I worked out then I pigged out! haha.
If you really want to lose weight and lose it fast and safe, I would highly recommend a low to zero carb diet such as the Atkins or South beach. I have no knowledge of South beach, but I am currently in Atkins's first phase and am loving it. Zero carb diets work really fast, because if you keep your food intake under 20 grams of net carbs, then your brain switches your body's metabolism from the regular one (i think its called glycolysis) to ketosis. Meaning that when your body does not have enough carbs to be turned to energy, the body begins to fall short for doing your daily activities and even vital functions such as heart, brain, lungs etc. To keep you alive and kicking, the brain tells the body to switch to Ketosis. In ketosis, your body actually burns excess body fat into energy. Literally that! The body literally burns your tires to produce energy. Once you lose a big chunk, you could slowly start adding the good carbs back to your diet. However, while you are switching over, you cant have any fruits, many veggies, any sugar, any alcohol to count the most dangerous items. You can add complex carbs and whole food carbs after you have arrived near your target weight. One side effect of Ketosis is that your sweat, breath and piss will stink like nothing has stunk before. But thats a very small price to pay.

Hope this helps you Joe.

deciding what to work out

2010-10-12T11:48:00.003-05:00

So, I had lunch with Anoop (who writes here) recently and as usual, I was eating a lunch which many people don't find too interesting. On that day I was eating a low carb lunch. There was no bread or pasta. A chicken breast roasted with herbs and a roast beef tenderloin along with a salad (no pasta or dressing). Each of us is healthy but he is "handsomer" than I am. I am also older and I work out every day with weights while he bikes. However, the cool thing is that he gets the diet crap and he also was looking for Weight Lifting exercise tips. What better topic to get my conversation juices flowing than weight lifting? So, I shared my article with him. Its here:

Afterward, he emailed me asking a really good question which can come only from a person who is seriously considering and planning to start working out with weights. So, I decided to write the answer here on the blog instead of responding to his email.

Q: How to break your workout over a week? What day to do what exercise such as "curls, 8 sets, 30 lbs"?
A: So, again, very valid and also very important question. I'd say there are two to three phases your body goes through when working with weights. In each phase, your workout schedule and how you break your work out over days will differ. Here, I have tried to write about my experience and have tried to write what should happen in each phase so the reader can determine whats her/his best schedule.

Initially, when you are new to weights, your muscular system, joints and your cardio system is not fully ready. Even your brain is not fully ready to understand what is going on with all those weights. Lets look at that situation in a little more detail. Your body is as ready as it can ever be for any sort of reasonable exigencies. So, if a large refrigerator suddenly toppled on you while you were unawares, your body and brain might be able to summon enough energy and strength to push it back in place or at least avoid injury to your body. Reasonable exigency and positive response! If a truck were to skip the light and run over you, you'd die - Unreasonable exigency and total lack of bodily response! How this relates to body building is that, when you go do weight lifting for the first time, your brain and body will think this is some type of exigency and release many resources (including adrenalin) to respond to the challenge. This is not really an exigency, you are working out, but your brain does not know the difference when you do if for the first time. So, you are likely to push harder than what you are actually capable of. The least impact it will have is that you will have severe DOMS on the following two days and the worst is that you will pull or tear a muscle and injure yourself. (Severe DOMS is OK). Now imagine that you have already broken out your exercises by body parts by day. So, on the first day, you do arms for 27 sets and second day you do chest 27 sets. It is likely that you will have a constant bout of DOMS which will break your motivation to go back and leave a bad scar on your memory. (Really, it might). I would say that for new beginners, its best to spread out exercies all over the body for at least a month. Additionally, don't just do weights every day, spend a lot of time adding flexibility to the body. If you have not worked out for long and suddenly try to flex your muscles, you could hurt yourself pretty early in your game. Lastly, try to stay with dumbbells and machines for the first month. Barbells are good too, however, most barbell exercises need good balancing abilities. That ability is not readily available if you have not worked out for long. In terms of specifics, here is my set by set recommendation. You can pick any of these as long as you do around 27 sets (or as many as you can).

Do all of these with low or no weights and up to 20/24 repetitions.
1. 3 sets of push ups
2. 3 sets of sit ups
3. 3 sets of arm curls with dumbbells
4. 3 sets of tricep dumbbell raise
5. 3 sets of leg/thigh extensions/raise
6. 3 sets of hamstring
7. 3 sets of abdomen or back.
8. 3 sets of pull ups
9. 6 sets of shoulder front and back dumbbell raise
10. 3 sets of flies
11. 3 sets of peck deck

This itself is a pretty hard workout. Make sure you provide ample rest to your body, maybe work out only 4 days a week to begin with. Rest will make things easy to deal with and give the body enough time to recover.

Next, after you have been working out regularly for a month or more, you switch to the second phase. During this phase, your body has started accepting the muscle tear as a part of your daily regimen. Its no longer working on the emergency/exigency response system. Adrenalin is no longer driving your strength. Now is the time you should switch to doing maybe two or three small body parts or just one large part and also add barbells to your workout. Note that depending on your strength level you might want to just stay with machines for certain workouts instead of free weights because machines will take off some stress of balancing weights and smoothen out some of the motions on your workout. During this phase, the goal is to totally tear your muscles, but still keep the tear to a manageable level by spreading your workout over two or three body parts instead of just one. The only thing you may want to ensure is that when you choose your exercises, choose opposing muscles and not complementary muscles. What I mean is that on the day you do you do your chest, don't work out your shoulder or arms too. In most cases, when you use your chest muscles, your arms and shoulders chip in too. Pair your chest muscles with your back muscles. Its very unlikely that in any day to day use of your body, you will ever use the chest and the back at the same time. This pairing of opposing muscles might also help a little with your posture as you will have opposing stress after the workout and one muscle will not unduely hinder your posture. If you are doing one large body part, such as legs, you might want to potentially skip the rest of your body. Leg exercise can be tiring, just because it is used so often everyday and is also one of the largest muscle on your body. Further, during this phase, try to discover your body limits. Add weights to all your workouts until you find your repetition maximum weight. Repetition Maximum weight (RM) is the weight your muscle can push without you being able to do more than 8 to 10 repetitions. Lastly, for those of you who are not flexible enough, please get into a flexibility routine during this phase. Without flexibility, you are heading towards injury.My recommendation would be:

Day 1. Chest & Back
Day 2. Arms & Shoulder
Day 3. Legs
Day 4. Rest
Day 5. Abdomen & Flexibility
Day 6. Repeat Day 1 and onwards

Finally, after having been working out for 2 to 3 months, you are on your way to be whatever you want to be. During this stage, the focus is to grow specific parts your body. The aim is to work out one muscle a day as per your requirements. Avoid repeating the same muscle on consecutive days. There are no rules or concerns here provided you are sure that you are ready to enter this phase. How do you decide whether you are ready? If you feel like you have increased muscle mass, flexibility and weight lifting capability over the past 2 to 3 months, you are ready! In this phase, you should see good results from each day of your workout. Remember that if you are not seeing results, the only problem could be that you are not working out enough. Its very important to find your repetition maximum every day. Add weights until you fail to lift it on the 8th, 9th or 10th repetition. If you go beyond 10 repetitions, you are under working your muscles. (Take this with a pinch of salt, its not really that you are under working, but, you are definitely not micro tearing as many muscles as you would like to. The other thing you should be concerned about is flexibility. Flexibility is your friend who will prevent injury. You don't want to be injured. Injury can set you back, really back. During this phase, if you like to or need to, you may also start a diet rich in proteins. If you don't need to loose weight, you should load up on carbs before your workout and follow up with proteins after. Carbs provide immediate supply glucose (energy) that will allow you to push your workout limits. Protein after work out will help your muscles rebuild and recover. Really, this phase can be very creative. You should try different exercises to see what you like and what keeps you motivated. Just set your aim high and fire with a smile on your face!

Hope Anoop and other readers like this post.

blackcherry? mephone?

2010-08-25T10:23:00.002-05:00

Recently, on a visit to India, I came across two new mobile phone brands. Blackcherry and mePhone. What? These names remind you of some other phone brand that is wildly popular? Hmm... wonder which ones!
There is even a "deal" to buy this phone. It is pretty inexpensive compared to the real and well known blackberry but I have no idea how it works. I think it is audacious that a trademark infringement of this kind is so easy to perpetrate.

energy and obama

2009-10-27T14:08:00.004-05:00

On WSJ.com, an article on energy appears on its most popular list. Prez O is going about the country and talking big about energy policy. In this specific article, he talks about smart grids. From various readings on smart grids, it looks as though a smart grid is essentially a "connected" grid. I use the word connected here in the sense of information. Just like your mobile phone is always connected to the network, this grid will always stay connected to some network and relay information back and forth about its load characteristics, surges, troughs, consumption patterns by type of consumers and such. For example, it can relay information about how a town uses its electricity when everyone is at work in factories or offices vis-a-vis how it uses it during thanksgiving or Christmas. That, in my opinion is a really good way to think about electricity. Since the time human kind started distributing energy in the way it is distributed today, this will be the first time that we will actually try to measure how we use it. So far, we simply measured as to how much we used at the end of a certain period. That enabled us to budget for a certain energy import bill (whether we were buying coal or crude). That also enabled consumers to manage general usage by active action such as switching off lights when leaving a room and such. If the smart grid actually provides the type of information that I imagine it can, then it paves the way for a large potential for devices that can automagically or actively monitor and control energy usage. Thats where the good stuff starts. Do you use anything like Quicken or Money? If you do, you probably are thankful to it for the reason that it can micro categorize all your household expenses and help you manage finances in a way that you cant manage with paper and pen. Now imagine what happens if all electronic devices in your house report back their power consumption patterns to your personal finance management software. You will suddenly be able to budget and plan your energy usage just as you can manage money usage, retirement plans, investments and such.

I know I am thrilled with this idea. There are two reasons. 1) I just personally love the idea of playing with data. 2) I can only imagine good things when this comes to business opportunities. Suddenly, there will be an larger market for smart devices and such tech stuff. For what I am alluding to, take a look at the interactive feature on another article on WSJ.com.

Andromeda.

2009-10-15T09:26:00.000-05:00

Today, I calculated the position for Andromeda!! Hurray!

no bells

2009-10-09T11:25:00.002-05:00

O! Bummer! No bell for me! Who is saying that today? the other 120-something nominees for the nobel peace prize award this year. By now, everyone who is reading this knows that Prez Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace prize. Its surprising, but still apt I would say. I don't think any other president so far (except Carter) has taken a stance as bold as Obama. So its a good international approval of what he wants to do. Hope it helps him and everyone else achieve peace goals. After all what do we all want? "World Peace" right?

Here is a link to a phone conversation between CNN and the chairman of the Nobel selection committee...

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2009/10/09/bpr.obama.nobel.prize.jagland.cnn

easy & opensource products

2009-07-20T13:00:00.003-05:00

This morning, I relived an old pleasure with open source technologies. I am used to using all kinds of commercially available software programs to manage projects. I am used to having our CRM system setup to manage marketing campaign work flow. There used to be a neat little project management tool to setup new projects, calculate them ROI's and track completion of activities. In my new world, I am starting up a business on my own and I really dont have the cash to burn on software. Thats when I turned to open source again after many years. The last I depended on open source for actual work was when I was in college. Between then and now, I have used plenty of open source tools to build my own products, but have almost never used a product that is totally open source. That in itself is a little bit of an oxymoron. There are thousands of companies using open source technology to create their proprietary products. For example, there is a whole suite of technical tools available to download at www.apache.org. Companies use these tools all the time to create commerical products. However, they balk at using customer facing open source products due to only one reason: "They are open source and hence there is no performance guarantee". Its true, many IT managers find it risky to use open soruce products because there is no guarantee of performance.

The fact is, that there is no guarantee of performance for any software product period. I mean a technological product can fail and will fail on some aspect or the other. What really is missing is the accountability. I think what managers really want is the comfort feeling that when something goes wrong, they can call a third party who is said to be an expert at a specific technology. They like the fact that there are legally binding contracts which make vendors liable for performance failures. This is a very valid point. I will find it very hard to communicate to my clients that there are no bigger business risks with open source technologies than there are with proprietary technologies. However, once there comes a critical mass of vendors who can support products with legally binding contracts, the playing field will become very level and open source could compete with proprietary technology pretty fairly.

Going back to my experience this morning. I wanted to replace my old features management product with something open source and low cost (ideally free). On the features management function, what we do is we write "stories". Stories are nothing but an imagined day in the life of our customer (or our staff) that is written out in a easy to read format. This story then becomes a starting point for our staff to create software. This mechanism is part of the agile software development paradigm. I looked at a few vendors including our older vendor for this system. All fo them have great offerings. Many of them have free offerings that have the basic features or are bound to work only until a certain "trial period" ends. Then one of my friends suggested I take a look at bugzilla. www.bugzilla.org. I took a look at it and at first glance, it looked an awful lot like a software test support, bugs management tool. However, it was VERY easy to get it running. So I got it and installed it anyway. After a few customizations and some configuration, I had it running and I had almost identical features to what I had before. Now, I can write up my user stories, provide priorities on those and assign people to work on them. Admitted, it still looks a lot like a bug management product. It even says so everywhere it can say so. However, it works great, is easy to maintain and is zero cost solution. Works great for me in my little startup business.

Intelligent web

2009-07-18T23:11:00.017-05:00

What does the customer really want from your internet business? Answer that question for once and you can claim a permanent undisputed position in business management text books. As unlikely as answering the question may seem, it might actually be at least slightly more easier than you think. Admitted, all online businesses, great and bad, have tried hard to find an answer. Admitted, there are tomes and tomes written and debated. However, its only recently, in 2009, that all that is really starting to come together in a cohesive and widely available manner. Its a big secret of good online business thats written on the wall. This big secret postulation is that an intelligent website can probably learn more about your customer than most of your offline marketing projects while breaking all speed records. So what's new about that? What is new is that its only now that business managers are starting to actually need the things that engineers have been talking about since google was born. Its only a recent phenomenon that number of Internet connections has started surpassing the typical market share of a leading product of an offline business in a competitive market. It all sounds as though a mini-evolution of sorts is taking place in small pockets of the business world where people have started to answer the question successfully. They are finding out, in hard ways and easy ways, what their customers really want!

This hit home for me when I was contemplating my little web world. I am down with the techno talk and walk at the place I work. I do believe that our setup is fairly modern and capable. However, I had not seen any attempt to really find out what was going on with the website. We had the analytics and the KPIs; every now and then, I would log on to my analytics provider's application and see the green dots and arrows to see that all was well. It was satisfying to see that people were hitting us up. At times, I would see red marks and I would immediately swing into action to fix the problem. Wow! That would really be the time to exchange high fives and pat each other on the back. I really felt that we had it going. However, simultaneously, I had this deep down feeling that the tranquility was just a sign of ignorance. Our bounce rates were acceptable and comparable to competetion, but really high. Our length of visit was acceptable, page views per session were also good. However, we really had no idea what was ticking. It was as though many customers came to our little website, saw things, some left the site, some lingered and some bought stuff. All we could do was watch it unfold. It felt like other than doing what we already did, there was not a whole lot to it. I realized that we had not many concrete ideas on how to pro-actively influence customers or to get them to take favorable action on our site. We had the cool content, we had the humdinger campaigns, but we were simply a production shop with web being another distribution channel. Technology had to better than that! A little research led to ideas about what some people call the intelligent web. If you get the drift, that is what Amazon.com has mastered and is democratically applying it to all marketers who sell products on their website.

The "intelligent web" idea is very simple to build up. Starting at the very beginning, we could state it very simply: as a business, we should adapt to our customers needs. Lets add in a possible outcome namely "satisfaction" to this statement. For this article, lets define satisfaction as an observed positive change in a customer's behavior between successive visits. Thats heavily loaded! Note that we are adding two notions here: 1) the discrete nature of experience as far as visits to the website are concerned. 2) some kind of an outcome of the customer's visit that can be measured for positive or negative changes. For the first point: unlike a product that people consume privately over a long time after the initial purchase, in the majority of the online world, every visit is an experience that occurs in your shop and can potentially be managed with a white gloved hand. For the second point: the online world allows you to measure each and every behavioral minutae that makes sense. In the physcial world, as most of you know, you can only take samples and statistically prove theories. That is a huge opportunity right there! Further, lets talk a little about adaptation now. In a physical world, marketing cycles, store design cycles, product design cycles work really well to provide a satisfying consumer experience that also gets better over time. The beauty of software that powers websites is that it literally provides you the means of adapting to every single click on your website. So, in addition to your tool belt of marketing programs, you can code your website such a way that your store design and almost any other parameter can be changed with every visit to the site. In that light, we could re-state our initial idea to say that "our website should pro-actively adapt to every visit from a customer to provide constantly increasing satisfaction". Its a little complex, but it will do for now.

Sam's poetry

2008-06-17T12:05:00.002-05:00

Samya and I were at it again. Self-sympathizing and wallowing in the situation that we are not doing what we want to do. In other words not following our dreams. (This is at an age of 33 years old for each of us). And Sam actually wrote a few lines of poetry. Here it goes:

mirror mirror on the wall,
what's my dream, wherefore I shall,
make my mark and garner my riches,
put to rest the demon that itches,
and scratches and bites and brawls and breys
and makes moments add up to a terrible day

Very Cool I say!

1998 to 2008

2008-05-21T13:28:00.002-05:00

I got my under grad degree in 1997 and an year later, my alma mater published a directory of all alumni. Just as any good directory, they had included all known public contact information of alumni. I laid my hands on it recently and realized that the directory did not have any email addresses on there! Cut to 10 years hence. I do not know of any business or person who does not provide email as a contact mechanism. In fact for many transactional relations, people qualify their contact info by adding a line - "best way to contact me would be email" or "just email me and I will be sure to respond quick". Thats how much has that changed. Cut to another area of life. Think B2B IT sales. I remember distinctly that in 1997, when I was stepping into the industry, everything in IT was considered competitive advantage or a means of securing markets sooner etc. IT was core to a good business strategy. Circa 2008, IT is very core to business strategy, however, I will be naive to think that its positioning has not changed. For one, skills have become ubiquitous. In other words, if an IT strategy has been formulated, it is very easy to get it executed. Remember this talk is all in relation to how it was in 1997. For the very act of strategy formulation, there are plenty of companies who are able to do great IT strategy formulation. Some are large and purport to be one stop shops for entire IT function. Others slice and dice the market and specialize in very specific corners of the market. But, there is major proliferation. How will this play out in the future? In other words, just as email addresses and other personal usage of Internet becomes so ubiquitous, what else in the B2B world will the Internet commoditize?

A letter I sent to my House Rep

2008-02-28T00:31:00.003-06:00

This is a letter I wrote to Congresswoman Judy Biggert (Rep, Illinois 13th District) as a part of a campaign being run by my friends at IV.

2^7th Feb 2008

The Honorable House Representative
13^th District of Illinois State
Ms. Judy Biggert
6262, South Route 83, Suite 305

Willowbrook, IL, 60527

Re: Administrative fixes to alleviate issues faced by highly-skilled immigrants in Illinois.

Respected Congresswoman Ms. Biggert,

I am a constituent of the 13^th District of Illinois State and an employment-based highly-skilled immigrant to the United States. I develop highly complex software for major nationwide business corporations in the United States. To be able to do this job, I am educated with a Bachelor’s degree in Engineering and also a Masters in Business Administration. Further, I have almost 8 years of progressive experience in my area of expertise. I'm also a member of Immigration Voice, a not-for-profit grassroots organization working to fix the issues faced by highly-skilled legal immigrants like myself. Currently a million immigrants and their families are stuck in the immigration process due to insufficient visa numbers and processing delays at the agency US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). Going by the publicly available statistics, these legal, highly capable and skilled immigrants may have to wait anywhere between 6 to 12 years to receive their green cards. During these 6 to 12 years, large corporate US-based employers for whom these immigrants work face declining productivity and lack of flexibility to employ these skilled immigrants. This is a huge deterrent to new immigrants and an encouragement for skilled labor to flee the United States. This is also a personally and professionally harming situation to be in for the highly skilled immigrants like me. This situation can be alleviated if your office decides to take positive action directed towards the economic betterment of these immigrants, your district, the state of Illinois and the United States. Your person and your office have the power to change the law and in effect change the lives of many people – including these immigrants.

Though Immigration Voice is interested in seeing positive legislative change enacted by the US Congress, we want to participate in the legal process and allow it to happen through the constitutional process of introducing bills that get debated, voted upon and ultimately signed into law. In the meantime, Immigration Voice has proposed the following points to President Bush's administration to fix some of the issues administratively. I urge you to support this cause by writing a letter to the President of United States to implement these administrative fixes as soon as possible. I have provided the content of the letter that you could possibly send to the 43^rd President of the United States Mr. George Bush.

“

Respected President Bush,

I urge you to implement the following administrative fixes immediately to help the highly-skilled immigrants waiting their turn in a severely backlogged system.

1) Recapture 218,000 unused visas wasted over the past few years administratively, in line with Congressional intent of providing 140,000 visas annually to our community.

2) Flexibility in the USCIS interpretation of "same and similar" jobs, to allow promotions and job mobility. Current USCIS rule is restrictive and pushes the applicant to the end of the line, if they accept promotions.

3) Allow filing of 'Adjustment of Status Applications', even when visa numbers are not available. This will not create an increase in visas, but will allow a number of immigrants to avail the benefits of changing jobs while waiting for their visa numbers.

4) Increase the period of Employment Authorization Document (work authorization) and Advance Parole (travel permit) to 3 years instead of the current practice of providing it for 1 year. This will reduce the burden on USCIS and on immigrants. It will also make travel to an immigrant's home country easier during emergencies.

5) Allow visa revalidation in the US as before. Currently, immigrants have to travel to their home country to renew their visas. If it was performed here in the US, it would be helpful in making it easier to travel back and forth during emergencies.

6) Restart premium processing for I-140 applications. Now that USCIS has cleared the receipting backlog, premium processing should be made available. Without it, many immigrants are unable to extend their stay beyond 6 years, if their labor certification was applied for after the completion of their 5th year of stay in the US.

As a really relevant opinion, I want to bring to your notice paragraph 2 of page 407 in the book titled “The Age of Turbulence” written by Former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank Mr. Alan Greenspan. This paragraph is part of the book’s 21^st Chapter that focuses on issues related to “Education and Income Equality” in the future of United States. He clearly states a business case for easy and flexible immigration policy as far as skilled labor immigration is concerned. I hope you and your office will use this to formulate your political case on the same cause: “Education and Income Inequality”. Please read the enclosed copy of this opinion.

Respectfully,

Mr. Sachin Sudhakar Dole

3615 Arlington Ct
Aurora, IL 60504
(630) 270 3102
sachin.dole@gmail.com
Web-site : http://www.immigrationvoice.org