Personal

Ah… 2009. I finally feel well enough to blog and here I am.

And what better way to start than with a most excellent (yet pithy) post from Seth Godin…

Not having a goal lets you make a ruckus, or have more fun, or spend time doing what matters right now, which is, after all, the moment in which you are living.

The thing about goals is that living without them is a lot more fun, in the short run.

It seems to me, though, that the people who get things done, who lead, who grow and who make an impact… those people have goals.

My publicly stated goals are then – to find the time and inclination to blog more. Specifically to blog more about movies on Tatvam – that starts today. Besides that, all of my goals for 2009 are personal.

Hello my year… please be kinder and gentler than 2008 was!

After a particularly horrible day today, I was decompressing when I found a song I’ve been looking for for a long time.

The song, called Praan (I discovered), is the song from the “Where the hell is Matt?” video. The song is fantastic (listen). What’s even more fantastic is that it is from Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali. It is Stream of Life set to music.

Stream of Life

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day

runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.

It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth

in numberless blades of grass

and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.

It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth

and of death, in ebb and in flow.

I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life.

And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.

It is brilliant. It is on continuous loop and it gives me hope that tomorrow will be a better day.

But… back to the topic of the post – I tried twice to post the audio file to this blog. Both times WordPress collapsed. And that’s why I have In The Moment.

The tab is where I post stuff as I experience it. Quotes, songs, inspirational videos, creative brilliance, an image from the No on 8 protest, whatever. It is what I experience in that moment. I hope you’ll visit to experience stuff with me¹. And since it is so much simpler to post there, the quick and little stuff will go there – more stuff and more frequently…

1. yes, there’s a feed ↩

Thanksgiving was spent being glued to the computer. Monitoring the #Mumbai twitter stream, tweeting like a maniac and watching NDTV and CNN-IBN online.

It didn’t feel like there was much to be thankful for.

Like so many have said, this felt more personal than any other terror attack. I never spent much time in Bombay before I met R. But Bombay is as much home for him as NY is. He spent a year living and working in the Oberoi Trident and every time we went to India, we went to Bombay. We stayed at the Taj. We stayed at the Oberoi.

The last couple of times we were there it was to contemplate moving to Bombay. I hated the thought of it. I’d just gotten my mind around living in NY and now I had to move to a(nother) dirty, crowded, overwhelming city? No, thank you. I still remember a late night drive from the Oberoi to Oval Maidan to get advice from a friend on how to deal with scary prospect of having to live in Bombay.

Circumstances changed and we never ended up moving to Bombay, but R spent a lot of time there each month. And every time he was there he did a dozen meetings at the Oberoi and the Taj.

Because of the limited time I spent in the city, because of the fact that I’d stayed in the two hotels briefly, because of having eaten at the restaurants, this felt so personal.

But imagine if I had grown up there. Imagine if it was part of my life – woven into the fabric of my being. That’s what it is for a lot of people in Bombay and it is those people and the people who were caught in the nightmare who have the right to feel truly overwhelmed.

When R heard the news, he smsed everyone he knew in Bombay. Almost everyone smsed back. One of our friends did not. So I emailed her just to check in. She emailed back. She’d been a hostage for 11 hours. One line in her email has stayed with me all day and will stay with me for a long time to come – she spent the 11 hours “… waiting to be slaughtered”… But providence in the form of the commandos, or destiny or fate stepped in. She walked out of the Taj alive.

2008 has been an incredibly difficult year personally. One filled with minor and major struggles including a very serious health issue of an immediate family member that we are still dealing with. But this Thanksgiving, there’s actually a lot to be thankful for.

I am thankful my friend is alive and okay.

I am thankful so many were saved in Bombay.

I am thankful R’s trip to Bombay is this week and not last week.

I am thankful that J&G are in my life – adorable and incredible.

I am thankful that we identified the health issue when we did and am hoping and praying the person recovers completely.

I am thankful to have R in my life.

I am thankful for my family and their love.

It is easy to be thankful in a great year. This thanksgiving tested that. But even in the bleakest of times, it is important to me to realize that I am so fortunate. Important to me to pause and appreciate what I have. So even though this post is late, it was something I had to do.

Despite everything going on around us, I hope all of you have a lot to be thankful for as well.

I’ve had the same basic WordPress K2 theme since I started this blog. It always felt basic, but I was fine with that. In contrast, Tatvam, designed by uber-designer George, was beautiful and elegant.

For the past few months though I started wanting a new, fresh look. I looked at the WordPress themes that were out there, but none of them really grabbed me. Then one day I saw a really unique illustration done by someone called MayG (Mahjabeen Umar). I dug a little deeper and found that MayG designs websites and has just started styling blogs.

MayG and I got to work. She asked me a whole bunch of questions to figure out who I was, what mattered to me and what kind of design aesthetic I wanted. She then cranked away and about four days later sprung what I consider an incredible illustration on me. It’s the multi-handed image that you see on the top left of the new blog design and it was love at first sight. The concept was cool and she did such a great job on the execution (in the process making my online avatar look better than reality!) And it really felt like even if I had a most basic theme, this illustration would set it apart.

But she was just getting started. Far from producing a basic theme, she designed something elegant and unique with style elements that are uncommon in blogs. At the same time she stuck to my requests for classy, elegant, clean and non-cutesy.

And voila! We have here Shripriya’s Post-It theme. It’s a theme that can change with me and morph as my life does. It makes me smile.

As MayG promised me early in the process – a blog redesign, when done right, can be better than a spa day. The past few weeks have been incredibly rough on the personal front and I need not just a spa day, but a full spa month! In fact, I actively sought distractions to help me get through things. Well this little redesign was definitely a step in the right direction.

I can’t say enough good things about working with MayG. She has the right balance of her own creativity and giving the client what she wants. She is incredibly talented and very responsive. She’s up on all the latest design trends and has informed opinions on what works and what doesn’t. And she hits the timelines she promises.

If you are thinking of redesigning your blog or just want a new avatar, MayG is your gal. I could not recommend her more highly.

In addition to having a new blog, I also have a new friend. What could be better?

I thought I’d be in India on November 4th. Circumstances changed and I’m still in NYC, but I had already asked for an absentee ballot.

A couple of weeks ago, I filled in the ballot and sent it in to ensure it is counted.

Absentee voting is just not as fulfilling as going to the polling station and pulling the lever. To make myself feel better, I am giving myself an “I Voted” sticker I would have gotten if I went to the polls instead.

Let’s hope Wednesday the 5th is a new day of hope, promise and progress!

With the Web 2.0 goodness, we are leaving tracks everywhere. Your photos are on FlickR, your videos on YouTube, your tweets are on Twitter, Identi.ca or Plurk (if you hopped on that passing craze). Your song choices are on LastFM or Pandora, links you like are on Digg or StumbleUpon and your blog posts are on WordPress, Tumblr or any of the other providers.

And all of this is *your* data. You created it, it is a piece of you – what you were thinking, looking at, watching, saying or reading at a moment in your life. I, for one, want a record of that.

I know there are websites that will aggregate that for you, but again – it is being aggregated somewhere else – someone else now owns your precious data and to get it you have to log in, sign up and hand them tons of information.

So I decided to just aggregate everything myself. It took a fair bit of investigation to figure out how exactly I wanted to configure things – enough to deserve a separate, followup post. But now I have what I want.

And voila – the new tab on my blog. In The Moment.

In The Moment is what I named my Tumblr blog when I started it. At that point, Tumblr was my repository for all my data – my blog posts, my tweets, everything. I’ve now repurposed it to collect all my non-blog “lifestream” data [Updated – i.e. the In The Moment tab *is* my Tumblog and the RSS feeds pull in all my dispersed data]. Right now it is mainly tweets, but all other things will be added in as well.

In The Moment is still a bit of work in process. Skinning my Tumblog to look like my main blog was more work with CSS than I had expected and there are little nits I am working through.

But it is up and it is active. And it is me… as I live in the moment.

The March 2008 edition of the HBS Bulletin had a little piece about the first women MBA students.

“A ‘Daring Exper-iment’: Harvard and Busi-ness Education for Women, 1937–1970,” tells the story of how coeducation at HBS evolved from an eleven-month certificate program in “personnel administration” at Radcliffe College (1937–1945), to the Management Training Program (1946–1955), to the Harvard-Radcliffe Program in Business Administration (1956–1963) — the last step before complete integration took place with the admission of eight women into the MBA Class of 1965.

But what’s even more interesting is a letter to the editor that showed up in the current issue (June 2008) –

Your March article “A History of Women at HBS” omitted an important category — women in the early sixties who were not admitted to the firstyear at HBS. Instead, their only option was to attend a separate and unequal first-year class at the Harvard-Radcliffe Program in Business Administration, a nondegree program. The women were then allowed to apply for the second year at HBS, and fewer than ten were accepted. In the second-year program, they were given no housing or section designation, and a professor could deny entrance to his course.

When job interviews started on campus, women’s names were scratched from the interview list. Recruiters refused to interview them because it was a “waste of time.” I know, because this happened to me. I was part of this forgotten class.

Joan Oxman Rothberg

(HRPBA 1962, MBA ’63)

Summit, NJ

Wow – scratched off the interview list! Incredible how far we’ve come. And that’s an excellent thing.

Each time you’re about to throw away an empty container — for ketchup, cereal, pickles, milk, macaroni, paper towels, dog food or whatever — you just pass its bar code under the scanner. With amazing speed and accuracy, the Ikan beeps, consults its online database of one million products, and displays the full name and description.

In a clear, friendly font, the screen might say: “Nabisco Reduced Fat Ritz Crackers 14.5 Oz.,” for example. Now you can toss the box, content that its replacement has been added to your shopping list.

After a few days of this, you can review the list online at Ikan.net — and if everything looks good, click once to have everything delivered to your house at a time you specify.

Maybe it’s not exactly a Food-a-Rac-a-Cycle. But at least it’s the Netflix of groceries.
State of the Art – Grocery Shopping Made Easy – NYTimes.com

The next revision of this will be a smaller, lighter scanner. When that happens AND when (if?) they integrate with Fresh Direct or Whole Foods, I am SO there.

originally uploaded by andy in nyc.

As adults, we don’t enjoy being in the rain. We may say we enjoy the rain, but it is as a distant observer – we ourselves need to be warm, dry and inside to enjoy the cool, wet outside.

I really can’t think of a single time in my adult life that I’ve been stuck in downpour and enjoyed it.

Well, all that changed last night. I had to head out to run some errands. It had rained all afternoon and so I convinced myself that it couldn’t possibly rain anymore (er, what?!) and head out blithely without an umbrella. Finished grocery shopping at Whole Foods and headed out to discover the torrential rain coming down.

After standing under the awning and whining with other shoppers about how we forgot our umbrellas, I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I voluntarily got drenched… and had fun doing it.

So, I ensured my bag with phone and iPod was firmly closed and I stepped out from under the awning and crossed the street. I was soaked by the time I got to the other end. But I didn’t melt.

And by the time I got to the next block, I was having a great time. As I happily walked along, people standing in storefronts would smile and laugh. I just smiled back and enjoyed a leisurely walk home. It was brilliant. I was completely soaked through, but it was an awesome feeling! A warm shower and hot tea were perfect to round out my evening.

Growing up has many advantages, but when did I become so uptight that I couldn’t truly experience the rain anymore? I would encourage everyone to let go a little and play in the rain – at least once a decade! 🙂

Paul Graham’s article about cities focuses on Cambridge, Silicon Valley and New York. Each city, according to Graham, sends a message:

Cambridge says “you should be smarter” – it is the city of intellect, the city of ideas.

Silicon Valley says “you should be more powerful” – it is the city of startups.

New York says “you should make more money” – it is the city of wealth/finance.

I’ve had the good fortune of living in all three places and I disagree with Paul about his take on New York (I also have a quibble about Silicon Valley, but we’ll get to that).

Cambridge definitely has the intellectual vibe. You feel it everywhere you go. But Cambridge is tiny. TINY. Once I graduated, I moved out of Cambridge and it was a completely different story. Davis Square is where Tufts is. It should be diverse, but every evening as I walked home from the T¹, old white men sitting on their porches would stare at me as if I were from Mars. I’d walk by thinking “Come on, people! It is 1997!!! What’s so unusual about a brown chick?!” Then there’s Boston. Can you say homogeneous?? Even if it had every smart person in the world, I hope I don’t have to live there again.

Silicon Valley is wonderful. I spent seven incredible years there. And it is definitely about startups. But it is not just about power. It is also about money – where more money puts you higher on the status totem pole. A lot of discussions in Silicon Valley² are about who made how much by selling to which company at the right time. And even if the crass component of “how much” someone made is not front and center, it is hovering in the wings. The infinitely more elegant “he’s done”³ is a commonly heard phrase.

And now we come to New York. I’ll be honest – when I moved here from Silicon Valley, I was quite miserable⁴. I missed California – the attitude, the people, the work, the weather, the calm, the space… everything. But as I spent more time in NYC, the more I started to enjoy it.

Yes, New York has its share of finance “neanderthals in suits”, but you really don’t have to see any of them if you don’t want to. In NYC, I can go days or weeks without having a conversation about technology if I so choose. And I’ve gone 5 years without having a single conversation about finance. In Silicon Valley, even the accountants and lawyers work for tech companies! In NYC, I meet people who have never heard of Twitter, Skype, TechCrunch or Valleywag. These people are dancers, artists, museum curators, actors, yoga instructors, photographers, architects… and that’s just in my building!! And none of these people are focused on making more money – they are focused on making an impact on their field – on being the best dancer/artist/curator/actor/yoga instructor/photographer/architect that they can be. I don’t know where Paul lived, but I have never felt like finance people are crawling all over NYC. Not once.

Professionally, my life in NYC has been about film and technology. There are some great startups in this city and every day, I see more being formed. And NYC is the indie film capital of the country with one of the best film schools in the world.

Personally, I’ve been privileged to go to the finest museums in the world – The Met, MoMA, Whitney and Guggenheim, attend stunning opera and ballet, watch free concerts in the park, eat at some of the best restaurants in the world, visit art galleries that are discovering wonderful new talent, listen to leading classical artists from India and the rest of the world perform here, attend lectures by Nobel Laureates, and take some wonderful classes in writing and film.

New York really has almost everything you can ask for. And because of its variety, it allows you to tailor your experience of it. You could see New York as just the artistic capital of the world, or just the culinary capital of the world, or just the indie film capital of the world. Or, as Paul did, the finance capital of the world.

And to me that says that New York is an incredibly diverse, incredibly interesting city. To someone who is open to the wealth⁵ of diversity that New York has to offer, to someone who is willing to sample the different facets, the city’s message is loud and clear – you should have a rich life!

1. the Tube, Boston’s subway system ↩

2. This article and this one both capture the wealth focus of Silicon Valley ↩

3. Implying they are set for life and need never work another day ↩

4. In fact, back then, R would never have believed I could write a post like this 🙂  ↩

5. Pun intended ↩