Blogcritics Author: Heartcrossings

Signs of Decay

Heartcrossings — Sun, 6 Jul 2008 09:23:24 EDT

A racial incident makes me wonder if my quest to find freedom in America is a dream nearing its end.
My mother's first visit to America was soon after 9/11. That Christmas, I took her to a mall near where I lived at the time. J was only a few months old and I was not able to fit into any of my pre-pregnancy clothes yet. I remember wearing to the mall a black shalwar-kameez she had brought for me from India because it was the only outfit I...

The Delusion of a Heavenly Marriage

Heartcrossings — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 11:39:46 EDT

We preferred to pretend our troubles were only in our imagination and that there was absolutely nothing wrong with our marriages.
There are women I know either professionally, socially or both. They are in their twenties and thirties, married with or without children. Some are from India, like I am, and others are not. They have very little in common except for one thing: they just can't stop rhapsodizing about their marriages and their husbands. They have stars in their eyes...

Underage Obamaphilia

Heartcrossings — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 04:38:16 EST

Improbable as it seems, in a match between Hannah Montana and Barack Obama, the later wins hands down with my six-year-old.
I have a pint sized Obamaphile -- or should that be Obama-bhakta (bhakta in Sanskrit means devotee) in deference to her Indian roots? -- in the household. These days, he is included in J’s morning prayers, which is an honor normally reserved for things and people closest to her heart. She has been following his fortunes in the primaries for a...

Single Motherhood And Dating

Heartcrossings — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 15:45:28 EDT

One neighborhood perspective on whether a single woman can be a great mother and a great date.
There is an unusually high concentration of single parents in my apartment community and with good reason. If you moved in at the right time of year when they have specials running, it can be a great bargain for the school district and neighborhood. The single family homes around us are among the most expensive in town.The newest, ritziest mall is...

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

Relationship Patterns

Heartcrossings — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 04:07:47 EST

After much soul searching and unnecessary heartache, I think I might have finally come to an understanding of the pattern and modus operandi (MO) of my past relationships. I have a stadium-sized ego cushioned for comfort with several layers of pride. With that combination, I had for the longest time imagined my life's purpose was to take on a man who looked and acted like a train wreck and "decorate" his life as beautifully as possible. No lesser challenge was good enough for my larger than life sense of my own greatness. I had no interest in any man who wasn't desperately in need of being saved. I am sure there is an official nomenclature for my condition, but whatever it is, sure as hell it is painful to live with.Like they say, if you want something bad enough in life, you end up getting it. I was blessed with the kind of man I sought not once, not twice, but thrice. That is what it took for me to understand the fatal flaw of my ways. One marriage and two significant relationships repeated the same pattern. The first two times I at least had the discernment to know I was dealing with men who were completely out of the "normal" range in all respects, most notably with regard to raw intelligence.They managed to awe me with their brains to the point where the train wreck started to look like a thing of unsurpassable beauty. So, there I was, head over heels in "love" or more accurately in high alert mode to stage the rescue that would free these very deserving men from their constricting circumstances and propel them to the heights they belonged.R was, in my mind, C-level executive material languishing in a low end IT drone job that insulted his intelligence every day. It was my mission to set him on the right career track so he could make CXO before age 35. I set to work in sober earnest while our marriage was still in honeymoon mode. It's a whole different thing that R wanted that to be the permanent state of our marriage - "no staleness, no boredom, no sameness" was his mantra, but I digress. I am glad to report he is almost there, just a year behind schedule with every chance of making the grade in short order. I am vain enough to imagine he could not meet the before-35 timeline because we are no longer together.Malhar, my first significant relationship after calling it quits with R, was doing almost as well as he should have career-wise, so there was not much I could bring to the table. What a crushing disappointment that had been! Being that he managed mergers, acquisitions, and such other arcana for a living, there was precious little I knew that could further the cause of his career. There was, however, a role for me in his life. He was a rescue-worthy project beyond the shadow of a doubt.His two adorable little boys needed a mother just like me because their own mom was too self-absorbed to be there for them. Apparently it would be love at first sight between the pint sized brats and me, and J -- with whom I was pregnant -- would fit right in the mix. In a matter of weeks Malhar had proselytized me into accepting the blended family as the ultimate Utopia. Up until then, my position had been "It will be a cold day in hell before I get into his kids', my kids', and their kids' situation." Apparently, with Malhar coming into my life, hell had frozen over quite nicely.Then there was "the great Indian novel" he was working on. It had been a work in progress for a few years at the time of our meeting. His passion for it was akin to mine for J when I was pregnant with her. I could easily relate. I knew at once I could help push it out the door and, God willing, with cryptic a dedication like "To the beautiful seashell that washed up to my shore one summer" on its flyleaf, a Pulitzer might have "washed up" as well. I thought he had what it took. In other words, I was suffering from fantastic illusions of grandeur.We parted ways too soon for any of that to happen, but he persisted with me via anonymous phone calls for a whole year after he was officially with someone else. Our breakup had been nothing short of hysterical, as can be imagined -what with my life's grand design being taken away and handed over to someone who was my exact opposite in every way. How did that make any sense?What did that giggly cow in Wal-Mart couture know about uses of iambic pentameter in expressing feelings of love and loss? In hindsight there was significant jealousy in pronouncing that verdict upon the over-endowed, but bland-looking new woman in Malhar's life. Here was a man who had shown impeccable taste in marrying who he had the first time around. She was smart, charming, stylish, sophisticated and had versatile interests. The fact that she was doing great professionally was only an interesting side note. Did I mention she was quite a looker? The man had everything going for him.Post-ex, he may have done better than the Wal-Mart couture-cow he chose to be his lawfully wedded second wife. In his defense, Malhar would say as he often did to me "You are like Jolt cola. I want to be with a woman around whom I can relax and just be myself. I don't always need cerebral stimulation and I don't want to keep up with someone like you and worry about what might happen if you got bored."With cow firmly tethered to the post, he threw little baits my way to see if I would bite. After a year he gave up and just settled into what I imagine must be perfectly bovine domesticity. I imagine a placid couple sitting on the couch, chewing cud and watching Hindi soaps on cable TV. While I can't see myself in that frame of reference, neither can I picture Malhar in it - he just wasn't the type. I felt a great sense of solidarity with his ex who, like me, lacked the bovinity Malhar sought in a wife.The third time was not nearly as dramatic as R or Malhar. H was smart enough, but not nearly in the same league as R or even Malhar. He looked as train-wrecked as a man might look like if, after five years of marriage, the wife, on the pretext of going home for a vacation, just flies the coop. Other than that he was reasonably, if not somewhat dangerously normal; but then what I find normal would intimidate most people. A couple of months into this "vacation" that was happening back in India, H tries to find out when she may be returning home, to which she responds "Never." Any other woman in my shoes would have panicked enough by this point to consider running as fast and as far away from H as she could. Not I. I soldiered along, knowing in my bones that I had landed myself a mega-project truly worthy of my greatness.So what if R and Malhar could not recognize my potential? Our friend H would surely not miss the obvious when it stared at him in the face. I liked the quirky sense of humor, the passion for all things dangerous, the vigorous work ethic, and not so much the fact that dinner was often two slices of bread with "Kannadiga gun powder" for spread accompanied by Kamchatka Vodka or Rum and Pepsi.Just for the record, I am a health freak. One major bone of contention between R and me was our dietary preferences. For those who ask "Then why?" I would answer that a worthy cause is worth the supreme sacrifice. With me in his life, H would magically be weaned off his drinks and gravitate of his own free will to Odwalla carrot juice. I just know these things to be self-evident despite all evidences to the contrary from past experience.There was so much work ahead that I could not wait to get started. H needed to be rescued from the ghosts of the past and the closet full of his wife's clothes that he held on to for close to two years, saying all the time, "The purge will need to happen." That was aptly dramatic for me. It came as no surprise that he dated this woman long distance when they were both in India and his phone bill ran to forty-five thousand Indian rupees in a month. On their first date, he drove 20 kilometers to the nearest pharmacy to buy condoms because she said she had gotten in the mood. I was as impressed as I needed to be. It did not bother me that the same woman lost interest in sex even before the ink on the marriage certificate had dried.This was clearly a go as far as I was concerned. Before I forget to mention, his divorce was not yet granted when we met. It was in the works in India, pending the seal of the judge on papers they had signed and the Domestic Violence laws had just been passed. This was getting to be more challenging by the minute and all the way up my alley. Neither R nor Malhar had come with some many challenges. Every once in a while H would send me links to articles on mental health and its relationship to marital happiness. I would read them out of curiosity and wonder about their relevance to our situation. Surely, he did not think my mental health was lacking.According to him, his wife suffered from chronic depression and he did everything in his power to help her. Even after she locked herself up in their bedroom with the biggest kitchen knife threatening to kill herself, he persisted with her. Loyalty and grace under pressure scores big with me, ergo H was a keeper without a question.Breaking up with H was a long, drawn-out and tedious process not in the least because I was loath to see a lifetime opportunity of being a man's savior go to hell in a hand basket. To his credit he maintained dignified silence to the end, but I felt drained emotionally because he just was not letting go in the mind. While we had reached logical closure in the relationship, it had to end in a symbolic way for us to be fully freed of each other.Thanks to H, I have come to realize that a man suggesting we could meet inside Victoria's Secret, while quaint and quirky, may not necessarily signal a chance of life-long marital bliss. Offering to buy me a toy of choice, so that waiting for "the one" was not so onerous, may be more than a friendly gesture of concern and perhaps needs to be viewed as such.

Movie Review: Deepa Mehta's Water Is A Watery Waste

Heartcrossings — Sat, 2 Sep 2006 20:46:41 EDT

Perhaps the only positive thing I can say about Deepa Mehta's Water is that it provoked me to list in painful detail all of the reasons I did not like it. That is possibly a better reaction to a movie than to have walked away to get dinner started and not been able to recall the name an hour later. Since the negatives are abundant, I will start with the few saving graces. The film opens with a scene of an adorable girl wearing a nose ring and anklets, chewing on a stick of sugar cane. She has not even had the time to register that she is married when her father tells her she is now a widow. She asks him "For how long?" That was a beautiful and promising opening, except for the disproportionately strong sitar background music. Mehta, as is evident throughout the movie, does believe that less is more, at least in editing. Chuyia, the child widow turning hysterical as she refuses to accept the status-quo of widowhood, is portrayed very well. The only other plus that comes to mind is Raghubir Yadav in drag, though its amazing how little Mehta could make of his prodigious acting abilities. Why is the Hindi so stilted, one wonders the minute the characters start to talk? It does not belong to any part of India. Is this a bilingual movie? Once you get past that annoyance, it dawns on you that the cast is about as professional as a group of middle schoolers in their first theatrical production. They shuffle around like a bunch of unsynchronized puppets completely devoid of facial expression. Our generation came of age along with the second wave of parallel cinema in India. A thinking person's cinema was made by the likes of Shyam Benegal, Govind Nihalini, Sai Paranjpye and Adoor Gopalakrishnan. We have seen poverty, corruption, casteism and a plethora of other ills that ail Indian society depicted with gut-wrenching realism -- Paar, Arth Satya, Aakrosh, Mirch Masala come to mind immediately, but there are so many others. Anyone who has watched the pregnant Shabana Azmi and Naseruddin Shah herd their cattle through a river in spate in Paar has been forced to confront truths about India that they may have been in denial of. That is perhaps the role of a movie that purports to bear a social message. Watching the expressionless John Abraham woo an equally bland Lisa Ray with verses from Meghdutam is a slap in the face of the destitute widows of the early 1900s, who were often forced into prostitution just to have enough to eat. With her unflappable serenity, au naturel makeup and gym toned body Lisa Ray makes widowhood of the 1930s look quite desirable. Mehta does not manage to provoke any visceral reaction from her audience. The music is too loud, often too modern, and almost entirely out of synch with the situation at hand. For her, there are lessons to be learnt about an effective background score even from The Tiger and The Brahmin. Quoting from Manu Samhita out of context is a time tested way to horrify a Western audience and gain credibility as an authority figure on all things Hindu -- Nirad Chaudhuri had always done it with great success, Mehta borrowing a page from his book is hardly surprising. Manu did not exclusively prescribe restrictions on widows and remarriage, he also laid out very meaningful laws for an ideal society in which no one group was completely disenfranchised.As with any law, the interpretation by those in power left much to be desired and the widows of pre-independence India were one of its many victims. That said, Mehta's depiction of Manu Samhita as the binding religious sanction for the atrocities perpetrated on Hindu widows shows a very crude understanding of the religion. Manu Samhita is not the Bible of the Hindus. This set of rudimentary edicts is hardly the entirety of Vedantic philosophy and cannot serve as its proxy.That Mehta would not have an eye for detail should be expected by now. We see women dressed in garish polyester saris in the 1930s along with taxi cabs. The crowds are uniformly accoutered in spotless white complete with Gandhi topis. There is no space and time transportation - realism at any level is clearly not a priority. This is the cinematic equivalent of serving a half cooked food to dinner guests - unpardonable carelessness. She is also historically inaccurate in her depiction of Gandhi, but westerners would not recognize Raja Ram Mohan Roy quite as easily, so I guess it is okay to swap their places in history. The fact that the story suffers from factual inaccuracies is not such a big deal. One is willing to view it as a work of fiction, perhaps a director's spin on a certain zeitgeist or even rewritten history for art's sake. All of that is perfectly acceptable if indeed it results in a work of art and not in such an immature abomination of it.So when Time calls this movie "a triumph" and Ebert and Roeper give it two thumbs up, one wonders if they are being condescending or merely facetious. Surely, they cannot be serious. The only other possibility is that the leading lights of Indian parallel cinema did not go nearly as far as Mehta to pimp their work, country, and culture to the west and as such never saw their movies make it to an influential western reviewer’s inbox. The loss is as much theirs as it is ours.

The Lead Developer is the Wrench in the Works of Outsourcing

Heartcrossings — Sat, 15 Apr 2006 23:20:01 EDT

Though its well-known, acknowledged old news, every once in a while the "real" cost savings from outsourcing makes headlines. That it may take "research" to derive the obvious, common sense, conclusion is quite baffling. This research proves that the promise of massive operational savings is unrealistic when you take into account the costs of procurement and ongoing contract management.One small detail that researchers don't seem to uncover is the role that fear of unemployment plays. Most places I have consulted typically have a local resource that acts as the lead developer and designer - the number of such resources is proportional to the size, "presumed complexity," and budget of the project. More often than not, these individuals act as a major bottleneck in the process and play havoc with planned expenses.The typical lead developer/designer (from my experience) has not had an opportunity to keep up with latest technology because they were too busy trying to keep their jobs. The technology skills they have are at least ten years too old and will not be any use to them once they lose their current job. It does not help that they are in their late 30s, sometimes early 40s - the twilight zone of a development career in IT.Their modus operandi on outsourced projects is to provide minimal information upfront to the team offsite and zero oversight through the development and testing cycles. When at last all is done, they begin complaining bitterly about the abominable end product that they now have to work overtime to fix and render acceptable.I have heard the line "The offshore code sucks so bad that it needs a full re-write" more times than I remember. Clueless middle management does not recognize that code cutting is not rocket science and that, if the lead developer/designer had done their job, code would be the least of anyone's concerns. Instead, they have this person work overtime to "fix" what should not have been broken to begin with. Not once does anyone question why they had not anticipated the extent of damage until the final product was delivered. Is that not their role ?After all is said and done, everyone bemoans the lack of savings from the deal, powers-that-be proceed to switch vendors to remediate the situation and researchers write up thesis on the failed promises of outsourcing. In failing to take the human element of the problem into account, everyone gets it wrong and we as consumers pay for expensive mistakes.

Awarded Patience

Heartcrossings — Thu, 13 Apr 2006 21:22:48 EDT

My co-worker T got engaged over the weekend and conveyed the glad tidings to us this morning. Much friendly bantering ensued and, like a birthday boy, T did not get much done today besides basking in the attention. By popular demand, he promised to be available until there were visible signs of his hitched status. A date for the wedding has not been fixed yet.Later in the afternoon, we went into a meeting where T was the only man. One woman congratulated him. Soon everyone knew and "Oohs" and "Aahs" followed. Then there were questions. "So how did she react?" "How did you propose?" "Was she expecting it ?" (The answer to which was "I guess it was about time. We've been dating seven years. She has waited enough.")Nevertheless, the ladies persisted "Did you go down on your knee when you proposed?" (Acting out the Cinderella and Prince Charming fantasy I guess.) "She must be overjoyed ?" "Have you decided where you'll be getting married?" (Was this going to be a destination wedding or a theme wedding? T presumably is a destination kinda guy.) And finally, "What does the ring look like?" T went on to describe it and the ladies cooed en-masse, "How beautiful!"I came to see a very interesting contrast between the reactions of a random bunch of men and women to the news of T's engagement, especially in light of the fact that his girlfriend "had waited long enough." The women illustrated why T believed he had done the girl a favor by deciding to marry her at long last. She had waited for him long enough to make her worthy of the honor and privilege. One guy reminded T that he had "upgraded" his girlfriend's status by getting engaged but nothing had changed for him. T was in complete agreement.As a woman, I felt offended when he said that and I was the minority of one. Isn't it as much a man's pride and joy to ask the woman he loves to marry him? The boys viewed the engagement as T finally caving in to pressure; to the girls it was about perseverance awarded with a diamond ring.I wondered how little is different between women in the first and developing worlds and how little "independence" and "choice" had to do with mindsets. A girl in India who "catches" a suitable boy to marry her is viewed exactly how T's fiancée was viewed today by this group of Americans. Whereas men think she was impossible to shake off, the women marvel at how her persistence paid off in the end. I felt sorry for T's would-be bride and for those who so rejoiced over her good fortune.

Crossing The Border

Heartcrossings — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 01:49:26 EDT

Coming as I do from a family of refugees from Bangladesh displaced by partition and settled in India for a couple of generations, immigration legal, illegal, enforced, or by choice is always of interest to me. My ancestors were driven out of their homeland and had to start their lives over in a new country. Years after the 1947 refugee crisis was over, the tide of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh to West Bengal, India rises unabated.The semi-porosity of the international border and the government's studied indifference to the problem only helps these people who desperately seek a better life. Once in India, they form a formidable vote-bank that no political party can afford to alienate itself from. They derive their strength in their large, undocumented numbers and just for that reason the free flow from across the border will never stem.Anyone who has spent time in West Bengal knows that an impoverished neighbor and electoral math involving illegal immigrants is a lethal combination. We bemoan the state's appalling lack of infrastructure and how it is the least favored destination for domestic or international investors. We watch helplessly as the swelling ranks of illegals overtake what little the state has got left -- it is akin to watch a parasite grow so large that it kills the host it feeds on. We wait for that slow death to deliver our state from its debilitating status quo.The storm of protests over the US immigration bill fills me with deja vu. With some variations, there is the same fatal mix of an impoverished neighbor and electoral math. Only in India illegal immigrants would not so boldly proclaim that an enforcement-only policy is not acceptable to them. Also, in India we do not have a large body of people working diligently through legitimate channels to acquire permanent residency and citizenship.Granting any form of general amnesty to illegal immigrants in America is a slap on the face of those who have and are pursuing the long, arduous, and mind-numbingly painful immigration process. It is as much a mockery of the immigration system in this country as it is of all those who are involved in it.The real solution lies in eliminating the root cause of such exodus from one country to another -- in helping the impoverished, sometimes relatively dysfunctional neighbor improve their lot and set their house in order, so their people would have no incentive left to cross the border. Because once they do and their numbers swell to 11 million and over, the electoral math will render it impossible to remediate the situation as is evident in the ongoing struggle with the immigration bill.

Managing Marriages

Heartcrossings — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 21:13:44 EDT

Marriages must be in a state of emergency if it now takes "Managed Monogamy" to keep a couple together. The significant difference between this and its older avatar "Open Relationship" comes about through the connotations of the word "managed". In an open relationship, you presumably set each other free to pursue extracurricular activities, and you ceased to have any control over what your partner did on their spare time. There is a greater sense of empowerment in managing. You get to determine the rules of engagement upfront and are required play by those rules. This is a more constrained type of openess. The old ball and chain tugs you ever so slightly if you stray too far away.The underlying premise seems to be that marriage is a form of entrapment, desirable for the social acceptance that it affords among other things. However, the natural instinct of both the parties is to break loose and turn fully polygamous. That being assumed inevitable, the best way to keep chaos from taking over order is to "manage". With office spouses in vogue and convergence technologies blurring lines between personal and professional space, it may not be long before management of marriages involves NPV, TCO, ROI, earned value metrics, and the like. It may then be reasonable to treat a troubled marriage like a badly managed project. A case of mismanaged monogamy perhaps.That there may some merit to curbing that temporal urge to stray in the interest of long-term good and emotional wellbeing seems out of scope of the managed monogamy discussion. When primal instinct overrides both common sense and ancient wisdom there is not much hope left for an institution that is already challenged by the demands placed on it by our times.