Brain Drain

I've been following the story of Charles Lieber and see it as the proverbial canary in the coalmine. He was once the most cited chemist of his generation, former chair of Harvard's chemistry department, a man who brought in over $15 million in federal research grants and was widely considered a Nobel Prize contender, is now running a state-funded brain-computer interface laboratory in China. There might be a satisfying spy-thriller angle to his story but it seems like Charles Lieber didn't defect because China recruited him. He defected because America failed to keep him. More likely than not, the same system that failed him is the same system that is quietly failing hundreds of researchers whose names we don't yet know.

Colleagues who knew Lieber have described him as a man of almost pathological ambition, someone who worked six days a week, grew the largest pumpkin in Massachusetts because if he was going to grow a pumpkin it was going to be the largest one, and who had, by his mid-50s, done nearly everything a scientist in America could do except win the one prize that mattered most to him. The Nobel. People who knew him well believe the China relationship was, at its core, a Nobel strategy. A larger network, more graduate students, more prolific output, more international prestige. The $50,000 a month the Wuhan University of Technology paid him in cash, sometimes in brown paper packages, was almost beside the point for a Harvard professor of his standing. China was offering him scale, speed, and the infrastructure to do science at a level the American system had stopped being able to provide. He lied about it, repeatedly and on the record, and he paid a price. Two days in jail. Six months of home confinement and a $50,000 fine which is roughly one month's Chinese salary.

What Lieber found in Shenzhen is what an entire generation of American researchers is discovering: that the gravitational center of serious science has begun to shift. His new laboratory, i-BRAIN, gives him access to dedicated nanofabrication equipment and large-scale primate research facilities that were effectively unavailable to him at Harvard  because the American research model has become structurally incapable of deploying capital at the speed and scale that frontier science now requires. The fragmented US system of competitive grants, regulatory approval processes, shared equipment, and institutional bureaucracy was designed for a world in which America had no serious rivals. That world is long gone. China named brain-computer interfaces a national priority in its 2026 five-year plan. The Shenzhen ecosystem surrounding Lieber's lab has been funded with billions of dollars of government money. The building his institute will eventually occupy covers 750,000 square meters and is still under construction. The sign at the entrance to the broader campus reads, with a bluntness that almost demands respect: "Innovate with the Party." America's equivalent message to its scientists, delivered through the NIH grant review process and the indirect cost rate negotiations and the replication crisis and the adjunct crisis, has been considerably less inspiring.

This would have been unthinkable twenty years ago. For most of the twentieth century and well into the twenty-first, the traffic in scientific talent moved in one direction. The best minds from everywhere in the world came to America. They came for the universities, the funding, the freedom, the meritocracy whether real or imagined, and the simple fact that America was where the best science happened. China was a place you left to do serious work, not a place you went to. The researchers who returned to China from American institutions were going home, making a sacrifice, trading opportunity for family or patriotism. Lieber is something categorically different: a native-born American, a Harvard institution unto himself, who looked at what China was building and concluded it was the better bet. 

Lieber was never charged with transferring a single piece of intellectual property to China. He was convicted of lying about his involvement, which he did, on video, in terms that made his defense attorney's job nearly impossible. The prosecution made enough noise to damage American science's relationship with Chinese researchers for years but it did not stop Charles Lieber. He served his sentence, waited out his house arrest, and is now in Shenzhen doing the work he always wanted to do, with better equipment, more funding, and the full backing of a state that has decided his field is a national priority. A former NSA general counsel called him Exhibit A in the failure of American legal deterrence. He is also, less comfortably, Exhibit A in something else: what happens when a country decides that winning a geopolitical competition is more important than actually building the conditions in which its best people want to stay.

Cutting Ties

In the modern workplace, particularly in fast-paced work environments, project-based teams often forge tight working relationships that can blur the lines between genuine mutual respect and simple professional necessity. For M, a product manager, this distinction became clear only after she and her colleague T, a senior technical lead a couple of levels above her, successfully wrapped up a major project.

While the project’s success relied on close collaboration, and M always credited T’s technical brilliance openly, she also believed their rapport was rooted in genuine professional appreciation. But once both had gone their separate ways, first M, then T, she reached out with a congratulatory message about his career move. T never responded, and remained silent despite being active on LinkedIn. M had never announced her move so did not expect anyone including T to congratulate on it.

M’s response wasn’t impulsive. She reasoned that if someone she regarded so highly couldn’t find the time or willingness to engage with her after the “mandated cooperation” of a shared project ended, it was a clear indicator of T’s true view: M wasn’t seen as a professional equal, nor someone for whom T might ever advocate, refer, or expend any political capital. There was never a personal friendship to fall back on, just the transient teamwork that certain jobs require. The project that they had worked on had been high-stakes enough for someone at T's level to roll-up his sleeves and contribute heavily. Maybe that was a one and done kind of thing for him, he did not expect to deal with people at M's level habitually,

Given these dynamics, M saw no reason to maintain a professional connection on LinkedIn. She wasn’t acting out of social disappointment, but as a pragmatic professional assessing the value and reality of her network. In her view, true connections are built on mutual acknowledgment and respect, not just the residue of forced collaborations. In the end, LinkedIn is a tool, not a trophy case. The quality of one’s network is defined by relationships with real substance, where both parties see value in remaining connected. M’s decision to “clean house” was less about closing doors, and more about making room for connections that genuinely matter and that are mutually respected. M's story has echoes of A's in it but they are quite a bit different as well. 

Going Bimaru

Reading this news about medical students in America avoiding residencies in states with abortion restrictions coupled with stories about doctors fleeing red states, reminds me of things I have observed growing up in India. All states are very far from equal in India. I grew up in one of the more distressed ones home and Kolkata is home now. Kolkata has been draining talent for decades because the conditions in that city (and state) go from bad to worse. There is now an abundance of retirees and legions of services providers for the frail, ailing and elderly. 

Elsewhere in India, some states have enjoyed an influx of talent combined with decent governance. Over time, this has produced two kind of India - one the BIMARU kind and the other that is modern, progressive, dynamic, optimistic and poised for even better things ahead. The people from the two flavors of India have little in common to begin with and the disparity of their circumstances continue to pull them further and further apart. We already have a solid underclass from the failed states of India like West Bengal - the last time any of us Bengalis felt proud to talk about our provenance was maybe fifty years ago. My younger friends and relatives who have long left West Bengal to better pastures home and abroad don't ever intend to return to Kolkata. 

These folks are much like these doctors and medical residents fleeing states that are regressing to a primitive time. From what I have seen in India, the drain starts with one kind of talent for a specific reason - in America, doctors responding to abortion restrictions but that changes the tone fundamentally for the overall population and decisions they make about where they will live and work. A young couple hoping to start a family will likely not want to be in such a state if they have better options - they want both good pregnancy care and be prepared for unwelcome accidents.

 A single professional young woman will likely not want the state will not come in between her and her doctor. And it follows from there, the state will get stigmatized as a place where people with options in life don't go to live. Often the individual decisions will be based on perception of problematic and regressive and not wanting to be seen as someone who associates with all that and has no better options. We seem to be on track to create a BIMARU class of states in America. 

Sans College

The travails of Gen Z joining the workforce makes for sad reading. The bar to make enough money to stay afloat and pay off student debts (if any) is becoming ever harder to reach. Education for the sake of learning and personal growth is a luxury that some can ill-afford. Young people need to have a vocational lens from early on which makes some wonder why they are even wasting time in college - all it leads to in the end is a very expensive piece of paper that they will now have to pay off in addition to their ongoing living expenses - there is no apparent sense in this. 

Parents of our generation and older do not know better and don't have a crystal ball to look into the future. Will employers twenty years out care at all if you have a college diploma and would it ensure that you increase your income potential? The truth is that we don't know. It would only take a few large employers to change the hiring climate drastically. If they started to say that they need a high school diploma and being able to get through their entrance exam to have a job. The new hire will be in training for the next two years at a very low pay to make them fit for any type of job in that company. If the person chooses to leave they will have to repeat the same process at another company. 

But once trained in one they will create mobility for themselves and not need to re-enter through that first door over and over. A plan like this could work for employers if there is a business value attached to it - say it provides the company with the exact skills and qualifications to be successful in growing their business, reduces attrition and company culture is built from the ground up. 

This process does not work if people who at the end of their training period simply leave. But there could be ways to mitigate such flight risk by making such candidates feel unwelcome in the larger marketplace. If the market placed a premium on stability - completing the training and having 2-3 years of steady employment at the same company, it would reduce the propensity to jump ship too soon for this process to make sense for the employer. In the tech business the skills to do the job are very different from what a person studied in college - they would be lucky if there was even a tangential connection. 

Accenture launched an apprenticeship program in 2016 and has since hired 1,200 people, 80% of whom joined the company without a four-year-degree. Earlier this year it expanded the program with the goal of filling 20% of its U.S. entry-level roles — everything from application development and cybersecurity to cloud and platform engineering — from apprenticeships.

Giving Up

In the last week, while traveling abroad I met a few American families with daughters around J's age. The had either done a study abroad program or are currently doing their masters in Europe. Consistently, the young women do not look forward to returning to the US. They are doing what they can to stay on - they see the quality of life as being much better overall and specially for a woman now. 

One young lady told me she does not want to waste her life trying to fix what is broken in America - this coming from a law student with interest in constitutional law. Instead she wants to take care of her own life and find a place where she can live without having her rights taken away one by one.  She described it at as a level of broken that can no longer be fixed in one lifetime. This conversation was extremely reminiscent of those I had with friends in my college days - just about everyone agreed that there was no way to fix India and certainly not something they would put any effort into. The scale of dysfunction was dizzying and impossible to fathom. 

We felt we had a much better chance of making it if we kept the focus limited - getting our own lives on track and helping immediate family along the way. Decades later, that is what everyone I went to college has done - and successfully too. An overwhelming majority left India. Those that stayed behind now have very privileged lives with enough money to create a thick layer of insulation between them and all that is broken about India. They live there but they don't live the experience of the average Indian. This is what survival entails. These young women have given up on America in much the same way - this is no longer the country they can relate to or feel they have any claim in.

Naming People

Desi names being mispronounced is what we have come to expect as the norm in America - the fact of having a Vice President who has a "challenging" first name is not going to change that. When someone gets it right, we think the person is well-traveled, well-read and cultured. In the workplace, the collective jaws of my brethren can fall to the floor if Parineeta is pronounced correctly for instance. We certainly don't expect it. It's not a matter of if that name will be butchered, we are interested in the creativity that goes into the act of butchering. Some of the variants are more impressive that others - it shows the person made quite an effort to get it as wrong as they could. 

A woman I worked with has a rather simple desi name but there was this one dude who took issue with her being assertive and willing to call bullshit when she saw it. He mispronounced her name like an act of revenge every chance he got. S was gracious to ignore the stupidity and get on with her life. I remember feeling aggravated each time he did it - but she was too cool to care. It was plainly evident she thought too little of the guy to get bothered by how he pronounced her name. 

A few years later at another place I worked,  a desi woman was referred to by her last name habitually because these folks could not tell her first and last name apart though they had absolutely nothing in common. K was a young person, a few years out of grad school, so I felt the urge to rescue her but when I thought of how S behaved when faced with something similar, I decided to hold back. K was a sharp as a tack and did not suffer idiots anymore than S did. Maybe there was a common theme here. 

Not Agreeing

I needed time to process the events of Jan 6 and all that followed since that time. Friends and family overseas said we were no better than a banana republic. There was pity more than there was surprise - for great things falling apart, watching the end times. Closer to the action, I found myself unable to overcome the numbness. I know a lot of folks who are ardent supporters of the president in question. Many don't hide their affiliations. When I came across this poll, I could not help wonder if the sentiments are representative of these people I know as well. Political differences can place people who are otherwise friendly to each other and have things in common, very far apart. The results of the poll are a stark reminder of how far and apart those universes have come to be. There is no place to meet in the middle anymore.

Many of my Bengali friends and relatives were ardent communists back in the day. My parents were not. I recall the adults having heated political debates when our families got together. As kids, we would listen-in amused by the colorful epithets each side used to malign the other and how some mild-manner uncle who would not hurt a fly would make incendiary remarks about breaking and remaking the system from the ground-up. It was a ton of hot-air and people bullshitting because it was a form of entertainment for all concerned. Once dinner was served, everyone would return to being friendly with each other, it was as if that political grandstanding never happened. Come election time people voted according to their loyalties and hated it when the other side won. But none of that diminished the human connection between the two sides. 

Those same relatives are still squabbling over their politics even today though there is no communist party in the mix anymore. The fight has moved on to include other actors. They still don't agree, and argue passionately about their positions. Yet, when one of them is sick and needs help, they don't hesitate a moment to call the person who hates their political persuasions with a burning passion. My father and my maternal uncle would be just such a pair. Yet, there is great love between them undiminished by all the crazy arguments and name calling - they will do anything for each other. If that scene were to be replayed in this country, I don't want to imagine how badly things could go and that is a tragedy.

Ice Cream Jingles

Very interesting story about who makes the jingles for ice-cream trucks in America. Something I have always wondered about but never bothered to find out.

.. the ice cream truck business has a strange quirk: it typically sees a bump in the wake of a financial meltdown.

COVID-19 has been no exception.

A record unemployment rate coupled with stay-at-home mandates has been good for ice cream trucks: scores of people are signing up to drive them, and sales are booming.

“You have a huge labor force available right at the time people are at home,” says Mark. “It’s the perfect circumstances for a little bit of a revival for the industry.”

Reading this brought back memories of J in her pre-kindergarten days with my mother during the summer. She would rush to the balcony of our apartment when the ice-cream truck passed by. Once in a week, grandma would buy her an ice-cream. In the tooth-fairy days, J had an independent source of income to pay for her treat. When she started piano lessons, I did notice a strong affinity for the Entertainer. It was the one piece J did not need reminders to practice. Thinking back that could have been the subconscious connection to the ice-cream truck memories of her early childhood

Museum Grade

Seeing the gorgeous art work of Bisa Bulter made me think about how people express themselves through their choice of clothing and jewelry. When I first came to America, I wore my saris to Walmart until I came to realize that as a new arrival to the country, I should focus on blending in instead of standing out in a grocery store. There is a time and place to show pride in my ethnic roots and heritage but do that while shopping for produce was misguided. Then I started working and it made even more sense to blend so people would hear me and not just get distracted by my attire. And so began the process of shedding my identity over the years to the point I am invisible in a crowd because I am very much like the average. Even today, I feel like the real me when I wear a sari and ethnic jewelry, when I can be colorful like the plumage of a tropic bird, my eyes look alive with kajal and my face with a bindi. 

Yet, for very large chunks of the last couple of decades, I have lived not feeling and looking like the real me. My desi friends and relatives find their escape in their parties where they do get to show up in beautiful Indian clothes and jewelry. Sometimes, a visit to the temple can be a venue to do that as well. I always experienced a sense of entrapment in both places - it was like playing a role on stage. A big costume party with props that are meant to invoke the home country - food, music, deities and more. This is not real like waiting for a bus at the stop on the way to work, wearing a sari like most other women and for all that to be the average. Bisa Bulter's amazing quilts, the colors and the energy do represent the real life of a people. In their natural milieu it would be average, not worthy of going up on the wall of a museum. Such are the very small sacrifices people must make to make a new home in a country that they were not born in.

Circular Economy

 Love reading about innovation like this - combining building rubble and tire waste for road construction material. 

This recycled blend is the first to feature a mix of rubber and rubble precisely optimized to meet road engineering safety standards, according to the team. It does offer greater flexibility than conventional materials, which the team says should make it less prone to cracking, all while offering a greener approach to construction.

If this the perfect solution and does it pose no environmental hazards is hard to tell. There is a certain monetary and environment cost to producing net new road construction material. The monetary cost will drive the quality of infrastructure and it's maintenance. In my state, the conditions of the roads can vary a fair bit based on who is responsible for their upkeep. The state, city or county. 

Counties range from wealthy to impoverished and the quality of infrastructure signals this loud and clear. With (assuming) a lower cost material made out of waste, there could be more parity in the quality of roads and therefore in the economy. If it did turn out that the environmental cost of the new solution is a bit higher than what we have currently, maybe its ability to equalize access to opportunity may act as a decent counter-weight.

Glass Floor

There used to be the notion that if you were smart and worked hard, there was room at the top for you in America. Many of us immigrants came to the country believing this to be true - there were success stories that illustrated this as possible. 

One of my elderly relatives was toiling away is an obscure banking job in India back in the 60s with no prospects of growth or change. He had great attitude and hustle but that would not get him anywhere in Kolkata back in the day. 

He immigrated to the States. Started out as a bank teller, worked a large number of side gigs including catering, event planning and owning some fast food franchises over time. He also moved up in his bank job and retired a senior executive. Both his kids went to highly selective colleges and are doing well for themselves. P had lived the American Dream and was an inspiration for family and friends in Kolkata.

Just about everyone who had a relative in America could tell you such a story. For kids like us back home, it confirmed what we believed to be true and we wanted to take our chances as well. I have seen many of my peers rise to levels they could not have aspired to in India. They were smart, industrious and also happened to be in the right place and the right time. The doors indeed opened for them in America and meritocracy prevailed. 

I am afraid, those were likely the last doors to be opened and our kids may or may not have been able to squeak in. Unlike P's kids where it was a foregone conclusion that they would go to the best colleges and experience a tremendous upward mobility because they were good enough for it and their parents had worked hard to get them there, today that is far from the case. I believe there is a lot of truth to this Huffpost article.

Vignettes Of Change

Recently, I have been reading some reminiscent books written by former Obama staffers. Those years were fascinating for me given where I come from. From the outside looking it, it appeared like change that come about before its time. There were consequences as the years following showed. In a way the experience paralleled India coming into independence in 1947 a secular country with its constitution written under the leadership of a Dalit Buddhist, Dr. Ambedkar. The out-sized dreams for India ended up being very far from attainable. In a sense the overzealous push to get India caught up to the rest of the free world after hundreds of years of foreign servitude, set us back a hundred years more. There is a time and pace for change and neither can be forced upon a people or a country.

2008 was the beginning of J's interest in American politics which runs strong to this day. I was sucked into the excitement of the times by my then seven year old. She was a believer back then as it seems some of these authors were. David Litt in his book My Hopey Changey White House Years was hard to like. The author seemed to be processing internal conflict by writing this book. As of its writing, he had not determined what those years meant for him. While being part of the creative process is interesting sometimes, such was not the case here. Litt sought to view things as a net positive but there was some strange mix of hero worship, self-deprecation, confusion about life overall that made it a hard sell to the reader. It was difficult to stay with the book and see it through even though Litt is a very talented writer.

The next one of this genre I tried to read was Who Thought This Was a Good Idea by Alyssa Mastromonaco. A very different tone and style from a mid-career professional not swooning over hope and dream. Mastromonaco does not come across a fan-girl but more a woman with big career goals and the grit required to achieve them. However, the long form description of her tampon travails in the opening chapter set the tone for her book. It was imagery that stuck and not in the most helpful way for her cause whatever that may have been. She did clarify that being known as the one who brought tampon dispensers to the woman's restroom in her place of work is not how she wanted to remembered by posterity. So a reader may assume her book was meant to serve some other cause.

At Blocked

The best cure for writers block is writing. This piece of wisdom came from an acquaintance who once wrote. Following a transformational life experience, it is hard to speak from the heart which was the point of this blog. The heart is not where or what is used to be. I seem to have a stranger living inside my head. The two of us don't speak the same language or think the same thoughts. They make me reconsider all opinions, beliefs, loves and hates of the past in new light. In that sense, the years are decades that shaped me are now invalidated. So there silence, alien ideas that are hard to grasp though they come from within and a crippling incapacity to write. All this time, I have missed the therapeutic value of writing.

As an exercise to come in alignment with the stranger in my head who I am beginning to learn about, here are some mutually agreeable thoughts about Facebook.

There has been much talk about the recent elections in America having been heavily influenced by fake news promoted by Facebook. People have their worldviews reinforced by seeing more of what they want to see or believe. So we grow more entrenched in our positions, vindicated by fake news as it turns out. But the success and even existence of Facebook is predicated on our need for pretense and deception. Fundamentally, Facebook is less technology company and more grand experiment in human psychology and manipulating it for financial gain.

My childhood friend A is in a dead marriage for fifteen years now. He calls me sometimes to talk about the suffocation, about pretending to be Facebook Happy like everyone else he knows. He talks about doing time as long as he is able, about doing the right thing by his two children. His family pictures are snapshots of perfection they are meant to be. There is large contingent of Friends congratulating him on his wonderful kids and beautiful wife. He politely thanks them all. He lives a lie every time he posts one of these vignettes of his life, gets innundated with Likes and cheering comments. He chooses to broadcast the fiction not because he cannot separate it from fact.

He is hardly alone in doing so. A is using Facebook exactly as it is meant be used. Just like the fake news feeds that caused so much uproar, each person is feeding a constant stream of their deseiratum - unfolding a false narrative of themselves to their Facebook Friends. Collectively we curate an alternative reality of our society whose bounds depend on how much influence we possess.

Those fake news feeds belong squarely in this universe and should not be singled out for censure. Indeed, there is no place for truth or real news on Facebook. It would be at fundamental odds with the point of its existense. If we can no longer create our alternate realities on Facebook complete with "news stories" that affirm them, we might as well not be there.

Two Million Minutes

As a parent who was educated in India and is now raising a child in America, the subject of Robert Compton's 2 Million Minutes is something I can relate to effortlessly. It is well documented how American kids are falling behind when compared to their peers elsewhere in the world. Compton brings those statistics to life, takes viewers into the lives of six above-average high school students from America, China and India.

The film depicts how kids from India and China spend the entirety of their high school years (two million minutes) preparing for the entrance exams to get into one of the premier institutes of learning. They have no life outside that and a decision about career is locked in at seventeen. What is more, that decision is most often made for them by their parents.

In both India and China students grow up in society that emphasizes academic success almost to the exclusion of anything else in a young person's life. Xiaoyuan, the Chinese girl in the movie, studies music but making a career out of it would be considered inconceivable. The boy from India, Rohit kicks a ball around when he is able to - in lieu of being coached professionally for football as his peer in America might be.

The American kids are a lot more self-assured - they have a full life outside the classroom and books. The social emphasis on academic success is almost absent. To that end, a community's spending on sports frequently exceeds that on education; parents don't expect kids to give everything they have into scholastic achievement. On the positive side, they are not required to know who they will be for the rest of their lives at seventeen. Trying several different things before they find their true calling is completely acceptable.

While Compton's exploration of what ails the American education system maybe a little one dimensional, he is certainly not off base. It is generally true that American kids (when compared to their peers around the world) don't work hard enough, they are not challenged enough and they are not nearly as ambitious. The expert commentators in the movie tackle the reasons why.The lack of cultural expectation in America for kids to excel academically is possibly the biggest contributor and that is not emphasized enough. The kids in India and China are a product of their enviornment, take them out of it and they would be no different from their American counterparts.

I am a product of the Indian education system and have an appreciation of where it has helped and how it has hurt me. I am now learning about the American system even if by proxy through my daughter. Two Million Minutes is aimed at shaking Americans out of their complacence about their assured preeminence  in a globalized world.

It is definitely a very timely wake-up call but to take away an all gloom and doom message for American kids is probably unwise. The ideal system of education would be somewhere between the Indian/Chinese and the American ones. It would emphasize academic rigor along with social skills, creativity, team work while nurturing emotional intelligence and an entrepreneurial spirit. With that combination, any kid would be set up for success in the world of the future.

Overheard At Lunch

Recently while out at lunch with a friend, overhead an interesting conversation between two men at the table next to us. One appeared to be in his late fifties and the other in his mid thirties. The younger guy was seeking the other man's opinion on whether to hold or sell the stock of a certain company. The older guy was of the opinion that the stock price had gone as high as it probably could and now with health care reform in the offing, the company could be negatively impacted.

A large chunk of the business this company did was made possible due to inherent deficiencies of the health care system not to mention the prohibitive costs. If the government stepped in and did something to improve matters, then any business who viability depended on such inefficiencies would be hurt. The younger man agreed with this analysis. It is interesting that they did not think that government intervention would mess things up even more and create a cornfield of business opportunities.

I found the conversation revealing in many ways. The rationale seemed to be that if free enterprise was allowed to flourish and it turned every available lapse in processes and systems into an way to make turn a profit, all would be well. When lives and livelihoods are dependent on being able to exploit problems rather than solve them, resistance to even a whiff of a solution is only too understandable. Any idea that even tries to place the collective good over that of the individual would be considered socialism in such a framework and therefore be unacceptable.

Imagined Reality

After watching the movie 21 recently, I was intrigued by the story and read a little about the real life events on which the movie is based. The first thing I ran into was that in reality, the team of Blackjack players from MIT who made millions in Vegas by devising a system for counting cards, was predominantly Asian. In the movie, there are a couple of Asians in supporting roles on the team and not the big players that they were in truth. The composition of the math classes at MIT was no reflection of reality either with Asian students being pretty hard to spot. The Angry Asian Man has this to say about Hollywood :

As we all know, Hollywood studios seem to have a great of resistance to creating interesting, fully-fleshed, three-dimensional roles for Asian American actors. They seem to think we can't carry a movie, and more often than not, will instead create roles and stories for pretty white people instead.

For similar reasons, American desis ends up being caricatured as a cultural stereotype on the rare occasion they get to share screen space with the mainstream white actors in a Hollywood flick.

In the case of 21, I would guess there is a strong streak of denial as well. Denial of the disproportionately high math and science achievement among Asians in America. To deliberately under-represent them on an MIT campus specially in a math class cannot be attributed to anything else.

While cinema can present an alternate reality that finds favor with the biggest part of their audience (who perhaps want to believe this to be the "truth") it cannot extend it magic far enough. In real life, MIT's Blackjack teams and the composition of math, science and technology schools would remain predominantly Asian or Asian-American. It would take far more than wishful thinking to turn that into the alternative, imagined reality that Hollywood purveys.

Homelessness

There is almost no news to hear, see or read these days that is not sombre. You build a certain level of resistance against it over time but this story on the plight of homeless people in America broke through it. I have grown up in a country where the homeless are out in the open and impossible to ignore. For the most part, no one does anything about them and life just goes on - for them and the rest of us. While there is a lot to be anxious about in India but the average person with an education, a job and a home to live is not worried about becoming homeless.

What is different about the American homelessness story is that a "regular" person with an all the trappings of a "normal" and "functional" life can suddenly find themselves homeless. Once they are there, the barrier to re-entering the ranks for "regular" people who have homes becomes very high. It seems like this terrifying line which once crossed can be forever. Simple things like going for a job interview can become an insurmountable problem if the job-seeker has no where to park his belongings, or has no money to commute to work until they get their first paycheck.

Listening to Eric Sheptock reminded me of the character of Chris Gardner played by Will Smith in the movie The Pursuit of Happyness. If one is super-talented and blessed with extraordinary will-power like Gardner , then no barrier is impossible to break - for most homeless people, however the obstacles in their way to economic and social recovery would be impossibly daunting. In light of all the bad news about the economy, growing joblessness, the rising tide of foreclosures and the like, this a chilling reminder of what can happen - potentially to anyone. A combination of circumstances in a bad time can be what it takes.

Colors In America

The response of two readers to Hua Hsu's article in The Atlantic The End of White America ? do a great job of explaining the assimilation experience of immigrants in America.

One reader Claude B. Fischer writes :

"Hsu gets it wrong by focusing on the cultural froth, like music, food and clothes. The real story, at the deeper level, is how much and how quickly the children of immigrants from many continents apart come to adopt WASP culture ..."

He goes on to cite the facets of WASP culture that have universal appeal to immigrants of all stripes. Marrying for love, the pursuit of personal success. He calls it "the culture of personal expression and personal salvation, material achievement, voluntarism in social matters, and egalitarianism"

Another reader Ryan Karerat who is Indian American, writes :

"There may be no "white culture" but white people still dictate our societal norms. To become a cultural elite in America, one has to whiten him-or herself."

I can't help comparing the non-white immigrant experience in America to the unique way in which Parsis have assimilated the local culture and enriched the lives of Indians they have come into contact with - some in small ways, other very profoundly. They have made good on their promise to be like sugar in milk, but have not given up their unique identity. While some Parsis may argue it has become too much of a good thing and their survival as a distinct race is at risk because of their ability to blend in a little too harmoniously.

If a people have lived in a foreign country for over thousand years and yet managed to preserve a distinctive character, that should in all fairness count as a good deal more than mere "survival". Apparently, the dragnet of WASP culture is America is far too strong for immigrants to resist. As a result none of the non-white ethnicities that come to make this country their "home" will be able to emulate what the Parsis have achieved as a community in India. It is hard to tell whose loss will be greater - the milk's or that of the sugar and spices which failed improve the medium they were thrown into.

Progressing Disease

This interactive map showing the disappearance of jobs all around America, is nothing short of scary. It reminds me of full color MRI scans of diseased body parts - with the progression from health to disease so pronounced that it simply cannot be missed. Then again when you consider the the short time-line for the series, it is possible that things may not be quite as dire as they appear or at least not trend in a precipitously negative direction forever. If the author's goal has been to extinguish any glimmer of hope that reader may have had about the future, this visual is the perfect vehicle.

For a message of hope and perhaps grace under pressure - a much larger time-line would have helped. It is amazing how the choice of book-ends for a set of data can make all the difference in what gets conveyed - I experience this in my line of work everyday. Numbers can be coaxed until they fit the story that needs to be told. Yet, the very same numbers can suggest many alternative versions of the truth. So, while these maps are particularly disheartening to see, they are likely neither the full story nor a good prognosticator of what is to come.

Cultural Insensitivity

J's class has spent the last month learning about China and I was really happy to see them do so. Up until now, their world has been limited to the state they live in with occasional forays into the country. The kids got interesting projects with themes related to China assigned to them and if they were willing to look deeper and further than Wikipedia or Google's first ten results per key word search, they could learn quite a lot. I wished they had rounded off the month with some Chinese food and music in the classroom - it would make for a lovely finale.

This is exactly the kind of learning I never got to enjoy as a child and really wanted J to have. The kids were challenged to come up with the most unusual facts on the subject they were researching on a given week. This required looking beyond the easy to find sources of information, reading books instead of browsing web sites and generally stoking the urge to discover more.

So, it came as a surprise and more than a little disappointment to see the reading comprehension passage the kids were assigned at end of the project month. The story was titled "The Chinese Bowl" in which a little girl breaks a big, heavy bowl "Made In China" accidentally and is worried it may be one of her mother's antiques. We are told that her mother has things that are hundreds of years old - dishes from England and furniture from around the world. Naturally, the girl thinks this bowl is a Chinese antique.

In the last line of the passage the mother walks into the room and asks her "Did you see that ugly little bowl I got at the hardware store for the puppy's food ? I think it's too ugly to keep"

I found that very offensive in the context of the month's theme and the title of the passage. I asked J what she had thought of the passage and she said "I didn't really like it". Apparently she had got the same vibe as I had from it "being rude to Chinese people" in her words. J is possibly more than a little sensitive about this being a minority herself and having a close buddy who is Chinese. In one fell swoop a month's worth of good, positive work was undone.