The Farm Box

This is the gift giving season. Well-wrapped gifts are being exchanged everywhere as I write this. Children and adults alike are full of excitement as they open their presents. I wonder if the anticipation is the best part of the whole deal since there is an added element of surprise if you don't know what you are getting. 

We recently purchased a farm box from a local farm. The farm curates the box with whatever is growing in the farm as of the moment. The contents of the box are not predetermined though they provide a list what may end up in the box. In this way, it is like a surprise gift though one we give ourselves (and what's wrong with that?).

So it was with some excitement that we opened the box when it arrived. As we pulled out the various items, we were quite impressed by the harvest. There were more than two dozen different vegetables and fruits in that box to our amazement - apples, grapes, carrots, lettuce, asparagus, potatoes, and so on. They included many we regularly buy and some we rarely do or things we don't particularly like. This challenges us to try something new or give something a second chance.

'Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you are going to get' as Forrest Gump famously said. As long as it is chocolates, I guess you can't complain but if you don't like chocolates that may present a problem. More to the point, Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans (from Harry Potter in case you have forgotten) which included some truly disgusting flavours along with delectable ones, may be more representative of life than a box of chocolates. You truly do not know what you are going to get next - it could be 'Alas! Earwax!' as Professor Dumbledore found out. 

I retired three months ago and have been adjusting to having time on my hands. The continuing pandemic certainly puts a damper on life in general but I am hoping that the new year will turn out to be like the farm box full of good stuff from the earth and that we will discover new ways to do the usual things and new things to enjoy doing. 

Let us welcome 2022 in this spirit. 

The Chef's Surprise

The diner was nondescript. Like all such places, a long counter was set up in the middle and a row of booths back to back in a row along the front windows. The décor was cheerful and bright. Roy entered the diner and decided to sit at the counter. The place was not crowded with a just a few of the booths occupied. It was a little early for lunch and way past breakfast time. The waiter brought a glass of water and menus for them to peruse. Steve went to use the restroom first.

The menu was pretty much standard with the usual sandwiches and such. But there were a couple of items that stood out even to the casual diner - Prisoner's Dilemma, Warden's Choice, Solitary Special, and Chef's Surprise. Roy became curious and asked the waiter about them and he replied, 'Our chef did some time in the county jail a few years ago. While incarcerated, he was assigned kitchen duty and learnt to cook, eventually becoming the chef. It's a kind of dark tribute to his time there'. 'Does anyone really order that?' 'Strangely, yes. It seems some people want to taste prison food without actually going to jail'. This made sense to Roy. After all, there were innumerable reality shows about prison life whose popularity can only be attributed to this voyeuristic streak.

'What about Chef's Surprise?', Roy asked. The waiter lowered his voice and said, 'I would stay clear of it. It's exactly what it says, a surprise. Now, if you wanted to order that, the chef would come out and talk to you first to figure what kind of surprise to prepare for you'. This was totally out of character for what appeared in every respect a standard American diner. The waiter paused and added, "Also, you will first need to sign a waiver. We never know what kind of allergy or other issues you may have. The last person who ordered the surprise collapsed upon tasting it and we had to call 911. No one has ordered the surprise since'. Roy took a moment to absorb that and the waiter asked, 'So, what would you like?'. Roy decided to play it safe and get a sandwich.

The waiter went through a series of questions before taking the order - "What kind of bread?", "Swiss, American or provolone?", "Do you want fries or a salad?", "What kind of dressing?", etc. etc. Roy was beginning to feel like he was being interrogated though the waiter was only doing his job. After Roy made all his choices, he went away with the order. What a lot of questions for this, he thought.

While he was waiting for his order, his partner Steve had joined him. Steve and Roy were detectives and were working together on a case which in fact had brought them to this diner. Steve was grinning and Roy asked, 'What's so funny?' Steve replied, ' We are professional interrogators and it was amusing to see one of us being subjected to some interrogation'. 'Yeah, I was getting a little irritated there'.

The chef was a person of interest in the case they were assigned to. He was investigated in a heist a few years back but the evidence was not enough to arrest him. The actual perpetrators of the heist were arrested and convicted. However, the money was never recovered. It was strongly suspected that there was another person involved who had made off with the loot and hidden it. The investigators at the time believed that after their term the robbers would contact this third partner to get their share.

The robbers had served time and had been released. They were being watched closely to see if they will go for the hidden money. Interest in the chef's activities too had been revived and Roy and Steve were following up that end. As they sat at the bar waiting for their lunch order, they noticed a certain excitement in one of the booths. Someone had ordered the Chef's Surprise. The chef came out to talk to the customer. Steve and Roy exchanged glances. 'That's our man', said Roy even though they both were aware of it. The customer was a man in his fifties with a scraggy stubble. The chef talked to him for a couple of minutes and then went back inside. 

Roy explained the Chef's Surprise to Steve. As he did, he realized the significance of the order. No one had ordered the surprise all this time and all of a sudden just a couple of days after the release of the robbers, someone orders it? Was it just coincidence? If not, what was his role? I think we should have a chat with this customer', he said to Steve. In all the reports they had read, no one had mentioned a fourth individual. 

Just then, there was a sudden commotion inside and a man with an apron and a cap came rushing out of the kitchen excitedly shouting to the waiter behind the bar, 'He's gone! The Chef, he just left!' Apparently, he just hung up his apron, wished the staff good luck and departed. Roy turned around and noticed with a start that the customer who had ordered the Chef's Surprise was gone too. Had he quietly left the diner? Or was he in the restroom? Roy went to look at the restroom to see if anyone was there but there was no one there. 

Steve and Roy realized what had happened and ran out to see if they could catch up with the pair. It was too late. Roy steeled himself to face the inevitable tongue lashing from his boss as he called him to report what had happened while Steve talked to the staff to glean more information on the chef. Clearly, the new customer had made the rendezvous upon the release of the robbers. Whatever they planned to do, it was clear that the chef had delivered his final surprise.

India Calling

We all know that Columbus set out to find a way to India. When he arrived in the Caribbean, I wonder if he really did not know that he had reached a different land. Or he just decided to call whomever he found there 'Indians'. My money is on the latter.  Either way,  thanks to Columbus, the term 'Indian' has been used to refer to the native Americans. So when we, the real Indians arrived here, it took a while for us to get used to this confusion.

When I first came to America, there were not a lot of us Indians here. Any time we spotted one of our own, we tended to greet him or her and strike up a conversation. Now, as the population of Indians here has grown and as Indians have become prominent in many fields including politics, we barely pay attention to random Indians we encounter. 

A few years ago, I was walking to the entrance of my office building after parking my car. I liked to walk around to the back entrance enjoying the small but quiet garden on the way. As I turned the corner, I noticed that there were a couple of men working on the landscape. One of them said 'Good morning' and I turned and saw a stocky man with brown skin. I returned the greeting and was about to go on my way when he followed up with the question, 'Are you from India?'. 

In my years of living in America, every now and then someone would ask me if I am from India. It was usually small talk and was followed up with some tidbit such as, 'My doctor is from India' or 'I like curry'. Sometimes though it leads to more interesting conversation as this once when I was having lunch with some friends at a restaurant in Santa Monica. The waitress, seeing that we were from India, beamed at us and told us that she was saving up to make a trip to India. We learned that she wanted to visit the ashram of a swami near Pune. The swami's summer retreat was in Santa Monica apparently. I thought it took a lot of devotion to the guru to save up money on a waitress's salary to make that trip to India. 

I recall another occasion when I was volunteering at a homeless shelter. We were serving breakfast to the people there. It was curious to see some of them with phones or other gadgets. There was a young family with their belongings including some furniture and a TV. It turned out that they had been evicted recently but the man was feeling hopeful as he had found a job and was sure of finding an apartment soon. But then another man waved at us and told us that he had visited India the previous year completely astounding me. I wondered how he had been able to afford that. More importantly why he had chosen to spend his money in this manner. What pulled him to India?

How the rest of the world sees India has always attracted a good deal of media attention in India. When you are abroad, on the other hand, you realize the coverage of India is vastly disproportionate to its size. For the longest time, mostly unsavoury news would make it to the papers here. As an Indian living here, you felt a certain responsibility to project a good image and such coverage used to irritate me. These days India does get more coverage but still it tends to be negative. Against this, it is very nice to encounter ordinary people like the above, people whom you would not even expect to be aware of India.

On this day, the landscape worker popped the question and so I stopped and answered that I was indeed from India. He smiled and said, 'I love India. It is so peaceful there'. Clearly, he was not from India although he had brown skin like me and could very well have been. Another Indian would not have had to declare his love for India to me and 'peaceful' would not have been the top adjective he would have picked to describe India. As much as we love our country, the crowds, traffic, etc. tend to dominate our image of India. 

He surprised me further by revealing that he took a vacation with his family every year in India for a month making me very envious. I could only make a two week trip - three weeks if lucky, every other year. It turned out that he was from Afghanistan. I did not probe but my guess is that he could not go home for a vacation given that his country had been at war for many years. As I resumed my walk to my office, the fact that he chose India as the alternative to his home country and that he had felt safe and welcome in India filled me with a warm feeling. 

The Stuff of the Earth

By knowing a single lump of clay, you know all objects made of clay. All changes are mere words, in name only. But clay alone is the reality - Chandogya Upanishad, 6.1.4 

Many of us work white collar jobs which require very little manual labour. I can claim that I exercise my fingers a lot since I am in software. But even this typing does not come very naturally to me. I have to shift my focus back and forth between the screen and the keyboard. At the same time, the hands alternate between the keyboard and the mouse. While all this requires a certain coordination, it is nothing compared to what is required for any skilled work. The point is my job mainly involves the mind. 

Years ago when in college, I had to do a rotation in workshop from carpentry to welding to smithy. Each of these required constant focus and coordination if you wished to avoid any injury. I quite enjoyed the break from the intense academics we had at that time. Smithy in particular fascinated me. Working on a white hot piece of iron on the anvil with a hammer to transform it to an S-shaped hook (with tapered ends to boot) was quite a thrill, especially when the instructor demonstrated it. Never mind that I didn't really end up with that perfect S or tapered ends. Or that it took me multiple rounds of  heating and beating. Or that it left me with a blistered hand for weeks. But it was rewarding to see the hard metal bend and twist in real time.

Doing something like this requires a different kind of concentration from creating computer programs. I like to have a change of pace now and then where I shift from the cerebral kind of tasks that I do every day to something that is more physically rooted but no less demanding. Occasional forays into cooking or baking bread appeal to me in this regard. Some friends of mine have a workshop in their garage where they can do some woodwork but I find that most of the tasks are done by machines now. It's similar to using a bread machine to make bread bypassing the entire exercise of kneading the dough. Now, please don't get the impression that I do a lot of baking and cooking. I do not. Anything that we do regularly turns into a chore.

Recently I have been watching a show on pottery where a few amateur potters compete for the title of best potter. I enjoy this very much as lumps of clay are turned into all sorts of objects in a matter of minutes. Getting your hand into wet clay and shaping it must surely invoke the child in you but it takes real skill to make usable objects in the process. Applying glaze to and decorating the pieces is yet another level of artisanship. The show is eminently watchable. And for a change, it is the judge that often breaks into tears, not the contestants.

Pottery is intimately connected with human civilization. We human beings have been making pots for over twenty thousand years at least. It amazes me that someone got the idea to use clay and make vessels out of it. It could not have been some accidental discovery. I mean they made pots big enough to bury people in. I understand pottery predates the wheel but the wheel must have been a huge turning point in the potter's world. Before the wheel, they apparently used to roll the clay into long pieces and coil them to get the desired shapes. 

Pottery and brick-making were great advances in our history no doubt. Bricks of standard size have been found in many ancient sites. I recall the kilns set up by brickmakers in the countryside that I used to see when I was young. They would be smoking for days. I wonder sometimes if my generation has had a unique experience of seeing the old and new in one lifetime because of the pace of change during the last few decades.

At home, we stored drinking water in earthen pots to keep it cool. On long train journeys, we carried water in a pot. As air-conditioned coaches were not common then, the entire train would bake in the summer heat and the only respite was the cool water from the pot. If you forgot to pack one, you could always buy one at the station and fill it up. The earthly smell and taste of the water somehow reminded you of rain and served to heighten the cooling effect. 

I remember earthen pots being sold by the roadside where the potters set up displays of pots stacked to impressive heights. Nowadays these have perhaps been replaced by brightly coloured plastic pots. The women coming to the community tap to collect water bring these rather than the earthen or brass ones they used to.  I am sure the potters' numbers must have dwindled considerably as a result of the slump in demand for their ware. 

Or may be not. The recent decision by Indian Railways to bring back the clay cups to serve tea may provide a fillip to the potters (by the way, drinking steaming hot tea from a clay cup in the middle of summer is quite an experience, or should I say, adventure?). Additionally, hand-made pottery has actually become an elite thing now. It is sold in home design stores and online. You can get a basic drinking water pot for $35 (made in India and exported to the USA)! I sure hope that you can still get pots and other earthen ware easily in India. But in the age of plastic, they seem to have become a luxury.

Moving Experiences

Most of us have moved houses at least once, and probably more than once, during our lifetime. According to some surveys, moving is one of the most stressful things ranking up there with divorce and death in the family. Strangely, all the reasons mentioned for the stress related to the physical act of sorting things to keep/discard, packing, unpacking, etc. and the need to find a new home to rent or buy. 

Selling and buying houses can certainly be stressful but the really emotional part of moving has to do with leaving friends behind and the need to make new ones especially if you have lived in one place for a long time. When you are very young, even if you did not live somewhere for a long time, this can be trying. My family moved quite a few times when I was growing up as my father used to get transferred every two or three years. By the time I finished high school, I had moved seven times. And each time, I had to go through the adjustment period of being a new kid in class. I suppose this taught to me to be adaptable to new situations in life.

Even after I started working, I continued to move and by the time I settled in my present location, I had lived in a dozen different cities. As time went by, I acquired more things and moving meant more planning and was more challenging logistically. Sometimes a piece of furniture could not be moved through a flight of stairs. There was the time in Bombay when we had to hoist a steel cupboard over the balcony five stories high with rope. Quite a scary moment that was as the specialist hired for the task stood on the balcony wall that was just four inches wide. And he was not wearing a harness. He was cool as a cucumber through all this but we had our hearts in our throats. 

The longest distance I have moved is obviously from India to the US but this was actually quite simple as it did not call for moving a lot of things. Just pack the most essential items in a few suitcases, and you are done. On the other hand, moving from Mulund (Bombay) to nearby Thane seemed like crossing an international border. There was a checkpoint between metro Bombay and Thane that rivaled the crossing of the Berlin wall complete with concrete barriers. The trolls that managed the place were known to harass innocent movers with threats of octroi assessment on personal effects. This was supposed to be more difficult to negotiate than pulling a heavy cupboard up with rope.

My last major move was from Detroit to San Diego when I was transferred and this was relatively painless as the moving company took care of everything - packing, loading, and unloading. The move was still not without drama. The shipment was delayed as apparently there was a shortage of truck drivers leaving us in an empty apartment in San Diego for some three weeks. And then we had the task of unpacking everything when we realized that everything was wrapped in loads of paper. We ended with a mountain of packing paper when we were through! 

We are not the only species that move from place to place. While we adapt to the new surroundings, migratory birds move to seeking to stay in a warm climate and must build a nest each time. Some of them build very intricate and delicate structures. Beavers are known for their building skills while snails and tortoises have no trouble finding a new home wherever they go! Perhaps taking a cue from this, some people choose to live in their RVs which can be very comfortably furnished. They just need to find suitable places to park when they move from one town to another.

Then there are bees for whom relocation is an entirely different problem. I learned about this a few years back when I found a sudden swarm of bees on the pomegranate tree in the backyard. They appeared almost out of nowhere. I mean one day there was nothing on the tree and the next, a gathering of a few thousand bees. I got alarmed enough to call animal control. But before they could get to my house, the swarm had vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. 

It seems that the bees were 'swarming' or in the process of establishing a new colony. Swarming works like this. When a hive gets too crowded, the bees decide to split up and half the hive will relocate. The bees which leave temporarily gather at a location while scouts go in search of suitable spots to build a new hive. When they come back, they exchange notes through an intricate dance, the colony decides on the best spot and they go and build the hive there. Our backyard gets too much sun and hence is not very hospitable to construct something out of wax. All this, the technician from animal control was kind enough to explain to us. You can read more about swarming here.

We humans may have to do something like this as the earth is getting overcrowded and overheated. Will we be able to survive the new conditions? Some science fiction movies paint a rather grim picture where we have to abandon the planet but only a select few can leave to colonize a new one. Maybe like the bees we can 'swarm' some location in space and find ourselves a new planet!

Soapier Than Thou

There are some things in life that you can be sure of. The sun rises every day. The crow trying to cross the road as your car approaches will fly away at the last moment. The other lane always moves faster when you are stuck in traffic. And so on. Of course there is always something in the news that strikes at the foundation of our faith in such things. I am told that the earth's magnetic field may flip directions and in fact does so routinely (but not frequently, thank god!). But at the moment that is not what is exercising my mind. I have had to question something more ordinary which I had taken for granted.

Take the everyday item, bath soap. You apply soap on your wet body, the soap suds grab on to dirt and grime and then they get rinsed off along with the dirt. Simple, isn't it? So it was absolutely annoying to find out that the new shower gel that I recently decided to try bucked this rule. No matter how much I rinsed, the soapy feeling on my skin refused to go away. It boggles my mind that in the name of improving a product or adding new features to it, its fundamental purpose is being eroded.

To make matters worse, when I grabbed the towel to dry myself (after using up a lot of water in vain to get rid of the soapiness), it did not seem to absorb water. It sort of spread the water around while remaining dry itself, displaying a disinterested attitude. What good is a towel that does not absorb water? Something was clearly afoot. Since I did not suddenly wake up on a strange planet, I decided to do some research into this.

I had been noticing that towels in general lose their absorbing capacity over time. But I could not see why that should be. The snow white towels in hotel rooms that are fluffy white with a faint smell of chlorine (evidently for disinfecting them between guests) seem to remain super absorbent. You only need to bring the towel close to your body to see the water drops flying off and attaching themselves to the towel. So what was going on at the home front? 

It turns out that in the quest for ever softer towels, we have been using fabric softeners which counteract the absorbency. In fact there is advice available online (surprise!) on how to keep your towels from becoming waterproof. Wash with vinegar and then with baking soda, etc. Then repeat till the towel is back to being a towel. That seems like a lot of work but the alternative is to buy fresh towels. If the softeners are the culprit, I guess we should wash the towels without using them. I have to give that a try but who knows how many washes will be needed before all the softeners are removed? In the meantime, I discovered that the simple cotton towels I had acquired in India  worked much better than the soft terry towels. As an added bonus, some of them are not so soft and will also exfoliate your skin! I should have known. After all cotton has been used in India from the earliest of times. 

While researching all this, I came across an article that argues that there is no need to shower every day, upending another entrenched belief. This was really turning out to be a big day for questioning what I had assumed were settled things. Astonishingly, the article makes a good case for not showering at all. Think of all the water and the money spent on soap that you can save. If you are still not sold, then I have one word for you: microbiome. Yes, the trillions of microbes on your skin that offer wonderful benefits and protection, get washed away by all the soap that you apply. And there isn't enough time between daily showers for the microbe population to recover. So giving up showering altogether is actually healthier according to James Hamblin who has literally written the book on this topic. He asks us 'to think of our skin as an ecosystem to maintain rather than an outer barrier that should be pristine'. He has in fact stopped showering and he says, quoting his girlfriend, he just smells like a person. That is reassuring indeed.

Still, it does appear to be an extreme step to stop showering altogether. First of all, I actually enjoy a shower. Besides I have been brought up to shower or bathe daily. According to Hindu scriptures (yes, our scriptures do cover all aspects of day to day living), bathing is a daily ritual enjoined on us. But when that prescription was made, a bath surely just meant a dip in the river and certainly did not involve moisturizing soap or the never-rinse-off gel. So maybe there is a middle path here - keep showering but jettison the soap? Something to consider, I think. Anyway if I decide to either stop showering altogether like Hamblin or just stop using soap, I will be sure NOT to let you know!

Remote Work

Working remote is not really new. Many of us have done that occasionally, some more than occasionally. But working from home for such a long stretch is new to many. Especially with all the coworkers working from home as well. While technology makes it all seamless, it has required some adjustments. 

It is hard to believe we are approaching the one year anniversary of this remote work. I have tried to retain as much of a routine as I can. The morning commute, however, is gone. Parking the car, walking into the office and taking a few moments to start the day are fading from memory. I use the desktop computer to connect to my office network rather than using a laptop. This forces me to to have a dedicated space for working. Symbolically I can climb a set of stairs and go to work and not sit at the couch or the dining table with a laptop.

I realized the deficiencies of the 'home office'  pretty early on. Working occasionally from home is one thing. When you start doing that day after day, you find that the chair you use is not meant for hours of continuous work. The lighting is inadequate. The keyboard is not ergonomically placed. And so on. You develop a certain gratitude for the way your employer had furnished your office space however sparse it may be. I have now invested in a new chair but have not done much else. I probably should move the computer into the spare room.

If we just needed to connect to our work computers or network we will obviously not see much of a difference. But when it comes to meetings, the collaborating or conferencing platforms such as Teams and Zoom provide the necessary virtual space. Again such meetings are not new to many but the pandemic has pushed a whole lot of other things including classrooms and courtrooms into the virtual world. It is kind of surreal to see classes for even children go online in a matter of weeks after the lockdown began.

Hackers initially exploited the situation by breaking into zoom sessions and sharing random and/or obscene content with unsuspecting participants. There have also been instances of meeting participants accidentally showing their indiscretions and being merely embarrassed or sometimes losing their jobs as a result. Others have found themselves ill-equipped to adapt to the new technology. The hilarious case of the 'Zoom cat lawyer' is just the most recent example. Who let the cat out of the bag?

Online meetings by and large are not usually as eventful as the examples above but they do have some peculiarities. Children and pets intrude occasionally. Pressure cookers, blenders, etc. go off now and then. Often people forget to mute themselves or start talking without turning off the mute button. Some are not very adept with technology and struggle to share screen content. Others are working on a laptop with a small screen and it is near impossible to read what they are sharing. Many are working on other things at the same time and when called upon to answer a question they fumble and say, 'Sorry, can you repeat that?'. 

I have to admit that this kind of thing had already started happening even in in-person meetings. Over the last few years, people have been bringing their computers into meetings and burying themselves behind the screen working on who knows what. The lights are usually dimmed so that someone can project a document or spreadsheet on the big screen. If the meeting is after lunch, it is an even bet that some people are nodding off.

The one thing that is most glaring about online meetings to me is that there is no eye contact (well, even in regular meetings if they are like the one in the previous para). If you are looking at the screen, you are not looking at the camera and you appear to others as though you are looking elsewhere. If you are looking at the camera, then you are not looking at the others' faces on the screen. It is an oddly unsettling experience. Since you cannot be looking at another person at the same time he or she is looking at you, exchanging meaningful or conspiratorial glances is not possible. Also, when you look at your face (do I really look like that?) you become self-conscious. 

I wonder how teachers are handling the online classroom. Holding the children's attention in person is hard enough. It must be very difficult to connect with children without eye contact. I think they may also be having to deal with parents more frequently now. Especially the ones that are very 'hands on' with their children's school work. From the children's point of view things must be very odd. It is hard to imagine experiencing school in this manner. 

Almost a year of working from home thanks to the pandemic has made for an interesting work-life balance. Rather it has blurred the line between work and life. Work and home life are intruding into each other like never before. It forces us to be more disciplined about the work day. I think it is important to keep work and home separate but a word on this whole concept of work-life balance. Implicit in this is the idea that somehow work and life are antithetical. Work is some undesirable but unavoidable thing to which we must devote just enough time and no more so that we can enjoy life. Strange! Shouldn't work also contribute meaning to one's life whether done inside or outside the home?