Women's Education

These are a set of thoughts that I had after reading the book “Educated” by Tara Westover. The next two books I happened to read were “I am Malala” and “Agnisakshi” by Lalithambika Antharjanam. Some of the comparisons I have made here are a result of reading the books around the same time - it seemed to me that they were all detailing the same patterns.


Tara Westover’s book details how the author was raised without attending school with parents who considered anything that the government did as undermining their very existence. What struck me was how the author was unable to see through the things that her father taught her - such as what was considered modest and what was not; what religious observances were required etc - until she had left the household in pursuit of an education. As she progressed with her education, she became increasingly at odds with the values and beliefs that her family held; at some point it becomes clear that the family expects her to choose either them or her education.


Regardless of the choice she actually made, I think the sequence of events described in the book provide a useful framework with which to understand the status of women in many parts of the world. Take for example, Kerala before Indian independence: The more popular prevailing wisdom about women in Kerala states that the status of women in Kerala was exceptionally good - the example that is upheld as proof is the tradition of “marumakkathayam”, which is a custom where the family property of Nair (a caste within Hindus in Kerala) households were always inherited by the daughter’s children rather than the son. The word “marumakkathayam” literally translates into “the custom of inheritance by nieces and nephews”. If one looked at the custom from the outside, it appears amazing that the Nair households had established such a custom where the male heads of the Nair households decided to give their property to their sister’s children disinheriting their own. This is the popular version of the story; one that is fed to uphold the view that the Hindu women of Kerala enjoyed special status and rights when compared to the rest of India.


Painting a picture of “everything was great” by showing isolated pieces out of a mosaic is not only misleading; it is also a disservice to the suffering that many women had to go through at the time because of strict social laws that were imposed on them.


I believed much of what I had heard about Nair women to be true, and was always a little disappointed with the sharp contrast in treatment that the women belonging to the other religions faced - Christian and Muslim women (which came to roughly 30% of the total population when combined) had very different lives - they inherited nothing, and their status was tied solidly to their husbands. They had little say in anything, including who they got married to and where they lived. Compared to that, clearly, the Nair women seemed to be liberated until I took a closer look at the roots of this custom that is supposed to be illustrative of the high status they enjoyed.


The matrilinear system came into place because most Bhramin men had relationships in which their children could not inherit property - only the eldest Brahmin son was allowed to actually marry a Brahmin woman and have children who could inherit property. His younger siblings were only allowed to have “Sambandhams” (translates into “relationships”) - instead of the more specific term marriage - with Nair women. The Nair women with whom they had sambandhams did not come up to the status of a wife; the children born out of these relationships could not inherit anything from the father, including his caste; they inherited their mother’s caste. In order to make sure the children got some type of inheritance, the Bhramin men brought in the system of “marumakkathayam” or matrilineal heritage, whereby they ensured that the Nair women and their children inherited property from their families, rather than the Brahmins having to provide for them. All of this was done to make sure that whatever wealth the Brahmins had was not divided among too many descendents. It is pretty easy to see that the entire system was set up to ensure that the Brahmins remained an exclusive and small community who were wealthy and powerful. That they did so at the cost of disinheriting their own children seems extreme - but such was their thinking at the time, and it eventually led to their downfall as a community.


Even though marumakkathayam is now touted as a system in which women were allowed inheritances, I think it is important to also see the background by which it came into existence.


In sharp contrast to the supposed well being of the Nair women, the Brahmin and lower caste women were treated with horrifying contempt. The Brahmin women were called “Antarjanam”, which literally translates into “those who live inside”, and that was what they were expected to do - stay inside. They were not allowed to leave their homes, and the sun’s rays were not supposed to touch their bodies. They were not allowed to go to school or learn to read. Also, because only the eldest son of a Brahmin family was allowed to marry a Brahmin girl, the number of Brahmin women who got married were few. Many of them led a life of hard labor inside their “illams”. And these were high caste, privileged women who belonged to families with wealth and power.


On the other side of the spectrum are the lower caste women, who were not allowed to cover their upper bodies. They were forced to walk around topless and ordered to show their upper bodies to upper caste men as a show of “respect”. They also had to pay a tax for having breasts!


It is clear when you put all the facts together that most of these laws were brought in by upper caste men for perpetrating their intentions on the other communities. Why no one else opposed these laws or fought against them until the 1950s is surprising to me.


Perhaps the answer to all that is that most people did not question the rules that they grew up with - asking questions requires one to be curious - and I am beginning to realize that most traditional societies discouraged questioning, because some or the other form of social order on which the social order rested would not be able to withstand questioning. Most of the time people start questioning things when they become educated - and that is when they start to see through the hollowness of some of the beliefs they have upheld until then.


This is readily observable in Tara Westover’s case - she went to university, saw people who were Mormon but who lived more normal lives than she did and then she learned to question the wisdom of her father’s viewpoints. She eventually came to the conclusion that her father had a mental disorder. The thing that really allowed her parents to make her stick to their form of life was by suppressing information about any other possibility. Once she had access to more information, it was only a matter of time before she saw through the holes in their reasoning and started establishing her own truths. And the same is observable in Lalithambika Antharjanam’s Teetikutty too. She becomes educated and starts to question the framework in which she was brought up, leading to her eventually abandoning the customs that defined her existence.


In nearly all cases where some sections of society are disadvantaged, there is a severe lack of awareness and education that comes into play. This can be seen in the case of the Hindus in Kerala. The Brahmins were the only caste that was allowed to learn anything. Even among them, only men could learn, effectively sealing the fate of Brahmin women. This allowed the Brahmins to establish the rules they wanted and to bend social structure to their liking.


So the key here is this - suppressing education to a specific segment of people can facilitate their systematic suppression. Worse, the people will start treating the suppression as a normal way of life, and will not know to question it until they are educated.


Now it becomes clear why some societies try hard to prevent women from being educated - it helps to prevent progress and maintain status quo, which are advantageous to some of the parties in such societies. And in that lies the ray of hope - education seems like the answer to all the ills that can befall society.


Just yesterday I was reading about minors who are trafficked into brothels from Bangladesh and West Bengal - more than 50,000 minors are thought to go missing each year, and they end up in the red light areas in various cities in India as well as the rest of the region. Many of these girls have similar stories - they “fall in love” with someone who offers them gifts - phones, clothes, makeup and the like. They eventually make a decision to run away from home, and their boyfriends smuggle them into India where they are illegal immigrants. They are afraid to go to the police, and they find that their “boyfriend” has sold them. They find themselves held captive and forced into slavery in a brothel all too often.


What is common among these girls? They are almost always poor and uneducated. Many of them are from families where the parents cannot afford education for their girl children. They drop out of school early, and either work to make more money


Where does education come in? Narrate such stories to other girls in such groups. They incidence of this happening is much higher in some states, so hearing stories in itself can be a good warning. India is a society that functions a lot around shame - shame for the victim prevents them from speaking about their experiences. Not speaking up however can result in others falling prey to the same type of devious behavior, perhaps from the same people.

Where am I from?

There is a question I usually dread answering when I meet new people - no, its not devious attempts to figure out my age :) The question I dread is "Where are you from"? I have trouble coming up with a consistent answer - I usually change my answers depending on who I am talking to. If the person is non mallu, I usually reply that I mostly grew up in Bangalore and end the matter there. If I get to know them more I might add details about me spending my childhood in Kerala and the rest in Bangalore. It is the mallus I have real trouble with though - here are some samples of what those conversations look like..

I  used to answer that I am from "Pala" which is where my father is from. I have no knowledge of the place, except having visited the house a few times. I dont even know how to find my way to his house on my own...And yet I used to feel obliged to say that I was from Pala when someone asked me where I was from... This is how those conversations used to go:

Them: "Where are you from..."?

Me: "Pala..."

Them: "Oh really, where in Pala?"

Me: "Er... near the Holy Family Hospital..."

Them: "Oh, I know the place.. dont you know so and so.. "

Me: "Er... no, I have only visited Pala a few times in my life, and I have never lived there...I grew up mostly in Bangalore "

Them: "Oh.. Bangalore aanalle.." 

and then they look like I just cheated them. So I changed my tactic after a while and started saying that I was from Cochin. This is how those conversations went:

Them: "Where are you from..."?

Me: "Cochin..."

Them: "Oh really, where in Cochin?"

Me: "Er... Thrikkakkara..."

Them: "Oh, I know the place.. near the temple right?.. "

Me: "Yes.."

Them: "You know my cousin lives right there... they have lived there their whole life.."

Me: "Er... I was only there until I was eleven or twelve, after that we moved to Bangalore. Never heard of your cousin.. "

Them: "Oh.. Bangalore aanalle.." 

and then they look like I cheated them, again. So I changed this tactic too, and these days I just tell them I grew up in Bangalore and that my parents are from Kerala. When people really pick on my answers I sometimes divulge that my father is from Pala and that I was in Kerala until I was 12. 

And now that I have spent more than a decade in the US, I have spent roughly the same amount of time in Cochin, Bangalore and Jersey City. When you have lived for just 3.5 decades and spent one decade each in a different city, how do you define where you are "from"?

Home

Each time I land back in Bangalore, I get all nostalgic about what it used to be like. We moved to Bangalore in 1996 - it was quite green at the time. I spent most of my time around the Malleswaram / Yeshwantpur / Mathikere area, so changes to those three regions is what I really take notice of .. Sampige and Margosa roads definitely were lined with trees, perhaps the same trees whose names they have. My entire trip from home to school and back were on roads that were lined with trees on both sides. There were some mom and pop shops and a few eateries on the way, but mostly Malleswaram, which is where my school was, was a nice and quiet residential area. It was easy to simply walk home from school if my auto driver did not show up for some reason. Even a few years later, when I changed schools and joined NPS in Rajajinagar, we could still enjoy a long walk home on relatively uncrowded footpaths that were still tree lined. In fact me and some of my friends used to wait till the last day of school to walk back home on foot so the cramps that came later wouldnt be a problem the next day :)

Twenty years later, things are so drastically different. I would not attempt to walk from where my school sits to where my home used to be anymore - the trees are all gone; there are large shops everywhere, and the number of people who still reside there has reduced vastly - most folks simply sold their houses and moved to flats since it made financial sense.

Even the IISc campus, which is where I used to live, is no longer the same. They have added a lot more buildings, and the trees are all covered in dust from all the construction around them. There used to be an entire field full of trees with yellow flowers on it - it used to be one of my favorite places to walk by. Those trees are all gone, and it is replaced with a bunch of buildings now. Even Bumgalow no 7, where we lived for about twenty years has now changed. The lovely garden than my mother painstakingly made is almost entirely gone - the plants have been almost entirely replaced with cement. All the flowering plants are gone, and only a couple of the big trees we planted remain now. All we have remaining of the place are pictures we took while we were there. Oh, and memories.

I think sometimes about how differently my children are growing up - there are some trees around, but they only have leaves during the summer :(.. we have no garden of our own, so we cant talk about the trees that the children planted. And we certainly dont have any flowers around. Nor do we sit outdoors and read books or play while watering the plants. For the longest time, I was against buying a home - I felt they made no financial sense. After all the interest and mortgage you pay, plus the commute you add, it makes little sense to actually buy, if you are logical about it. But lately I have been wanting to create a sense of being rooted somewhere - of creating a place that we will always think of as home, where we can plant our trees and memories and little family traditions. I guess having a home is an emotional thing. Maybe that is obvious to everyone else. Guess the understanding came to me only now :)

Hillary Clinton and the Filter Bubble

I was reading the book "What Happened" by Hillary Clinton. Its a book about her failure during the 2016 elections - she relives pretty much every excruciating detail of that election but at the end of it, I got the sense that she did not quite understand why she lost.

I dont think anyone understands precisely why. Normally I would have been very uninterested in a topic such as this one. However, this general election was fought on a new turf - the internet. It was extremely interesting to me how much of the war was actually information warfare. Clinton, by her own admission, is not very technically savvy, and I am guessing she did not understand the complexity of what was going on around her during election time while it was happening. Most likely, none of us did, at that point. 

True, Russian interference might have been a part of the problem. This is one of the problems listed out by Clinton. However, I think that the filter bubble would have amplified the problem as well - once Facebook or Google gets even a minor (or even erroneous) signal that you are interested in negative coverage about Hillary, it will bombard you with such types of items. Worse, it is also likely to show you positive coverage about Trump, because other readers with such tendencies are consuming more such articles. In short, it creates a vicious cycle. 

Dont believe me? Here is an example:

I once happened to click on an article regarding Kareena Kapoor. It was something about her and losing weight after she became a mommy. I was pregnant, and wanted to know what she had done to lose weight afterwards. I am not a fan of hers, never have been, and am unlikely to ever become one in the future. My interest was just in her fitness. However, since reading that article I started to get a daily dose on Kareena Kapoor from Google Now. I did not observe the change in frequency right away. And without thinking I clicked on some stories and ignored others. Soon enough, more and more stories about Kareena Kapoor started to appear, until half my newsfeed was about this lady. By now I realized what was happening, and then started reversing the trend - I completely stopped clicking on the links, started clicking on items that were more interesting / representational for me etc. Also I tried to make sure all my searches were in incognito. Slowly Kareena Kapoor  stopped dominating my feed. I still get about 1-2 stories about her everyday. I dont click the stories, so the algos mustbe figuring out that I dont care anymore.

Now imagine someone who doesnt even know what the filter bubble is. And this person sees some disparaging remarks about Clinton and clicks on it. Soon that person will start getting a steady stream of such topics - and very likely they will keep looking at those feeds because they are interested in knowing whether or not Clinton made mistakes. The fact that they click on the news items will reinforce the "personalization" algos, and they will crank out more stuff that makes Clinton look bad.

Clinton losing the election was very much a result of how the internet works today. I wonder if the folks who wrote it thought about these far reaching consequences when they first implemented Personalization. I am guessing a few engineers who wanted to squeeze out better performance from the search engine (and who probably wanted a promo for themselves) never thought about the adverse effects it will have on the US elections.

It seems to me that I notice such unintended consequences around me w.r.t. nearly everything - antibiotics, for example. Whowever thought it would start getting used so much for raising chickens and cowns? And who ever imagined superbugs that were resitent to antibiotics?

Maybe I am noticing such things because I am getting older. Age gives you perspective.  

A silver lining for the Manifesto

The past few weeks at work have been eventful, to say the least. Much has come out in the news about a doc that a now ex-employee wrote, and much discussion has happened about the doc internally as well.

A lot of my women colleagues feel angry, depressed and hurt by the doc (To be fair, most men are against it too). Some men on the other hand dont see anything wrong with what the doc advocates. And thats leaving the women even more hurt and angry, because that proves this is a general notion that men have, rather than the author of the doc being an isolated case.

I am writing this down to clear my own views about the contents of the doc. I dont agree with it - as a woman, its only natural that I feel that way.

But I am not hurt or angry about it. I was a little surprised by it, I will admit to that. I did not think that men from developed countries thought this way - I had associated these types of ideas with men from countries like India. It was eye opening to see that this was not quite the case.

Personally though, I think the doc helped me.

I am pregnant with my second child, and I think often about whether I am prioritizing the right things.. I wonder if am I being a selfish mommy who wants to have a serious job when I could sit at home and be with my children all day long. I wonder if am I being selfish to pursue my own interests. I wonder if I am neglecting my children by not spending every waking moment with them. I wonder whether it would be better for me to quit.

But the contents of that doc, and some of the responses from men who used to think like that made me realize that a lot of them grow up with this attitude because their mothers did not work outside the home. In my view, there is only one way to change that - and that is to get more women to be in the workplace so the next generation has fewer people who believe this. I think I came to this conclusion because my husband is so supportive of my work - and I think the reason he is that way is because his own mother worked as an engineer until she retired at age 55. 

So now I look at my work as not just something I do for myself - it is something I do for my children as well, in order to raise them as supportive, understanding future colleagues, husbands and/or fathers. I look at it as my contribution to society.

And that makes me resolved to stay in the workforce. So thank you, James Damore.

Office of the First Lady.

So much has been said and written already about a lot of President Trump's policies that I will prefer to keep off of those topics.

Today my topic is about the role of Ivanka Trump in her daddy's presidency. It seems to many that her (and perhaps her daddy's administration's) intention is to sweep aside Melania Trump, who seems more than willing to be swept aside as First Lady and instead create a role of a "First Daughter". A lot of comments on Twitter show that this is the popular  sentiment - some comments chide her saying "What the hell are you doing meeting with a foreign leader" and "Unelected women should not get a seat at that particular table". While I completely agree with that sentiment, what I dont get is why people think it is acceptable for a president's wife to join him in his official duties but not the daughter.

I came to America soon after Obama won his first election - and one of the first things I noticed was how much coverage Michelle Obama got on television. She seemed to go with him everywhere, her wardrobe got a lot of attention, and I also realized that prior to him being elected, she even made speeches on his behalf at the Democratic National convention (and so did his opponent's wife). Why are spouses so important to the presidency?

Where I come from, I dont think the spouses of Prime ministers have any role to play - sometimes a picture of them might crop up in a newspaper because they happened to be close by, but its usually just an accident. No one usually bothers even interviewing them, except maybe in a memoir or  an occasional magazine article, perhaps after the tenure is finished.

Here though, its a different game altogether. There is an actual "Office of the First Lady"; they are supposed to be fashion icons, and of course they better be good speakers because they are going to be making speeches all along their husband's tenure. To top it all off, there is the inherent sexism in the title itself, which suggests that the spouse will always be a woman.

It is interesting to note the history of this role. It started with the spouses wanting to be addressed as "Lady", "Mrs. President" etc - it seems to me they were trying to emulate the role of a queen in a country where monarchy was non existent, perhaps trying to mirror the social setup of other countries at the time. But as monarchies elsewhere collapsed and have given way to democracies and none of the other countries have such an "office" for the spouse of their country's premier anymore, does it not make sense to abolish this whole "First Lady" thing and move on? Like Ivanka's criticizers pointed out, they are not elected and should not have a seat at the table. If they have political aspirations, certainly, they can do what Hillary Clinton did - maintain her own political career and try her own hand at the elections.

The existence of such an office only seems to allow the president's immediate family to create a political career of their own if they wish to do so - and that should not really be the case in a true democracy.

Wishful Thinking

I learned recently that it is easier to go through pain yourself than to watch your children be in pain. Anyone who has held their own eight month old baby while a nurse was drawing blood will know what I am talking about. My baby was screaming his head off and trying to get out of my iron grip, all the while looking straight into my eyes as if to ask me "Is this what you reward me with for all the trust I place in you?"

I felt like I had let him down.
And I can tell you, its much harder than letting yourself down.
Or letting your parents down.

 And then I remembered Theranos. That little company I had read about whose founder hated to have blood drawn and so was launching this company that could stop this whole process and conduct tests with blood from just pin pricks. Just what I am looking for. Just what any parent will be looking for.

I couldnt resist looking up how much progress they had made once I came back home. Unfortunately they dont seem to be doing that well. I hope they turn around though - such a shame to have to insert needles into every baby just to have them tested :( 

The trouble with "doing your own research"

For the last few months I have been hearing the words "do your own research" quite a few times. It was given to me as sensible no nonsense advice by a few colleagues when I was pondering over some medical issues I was having at the time. Usually the advice means "ignore what the doctor is saying, go and read some medical literature yourself".

I was surprised by the suggestion, because from my perspective, the doctor knows best. I rarely question their opinion and authority, if I think a particular doctor is not good enough I just go to another one after checking their credentials. In no circumstance would I bother to sit and read medical literature all by myself. Yet that is what folks around me seem to do - they search and find the latest research on any given medical issue, spend a lot of time understanding whatever those conclusions are and then accept that as the truth. They seem to think that it is the right way to make decisions - by reading all available material on their own exhaustively and then coming to a conclusion on their own. In my mind, this is nonsensical, because to me that is what the doctor is supposed to do - I am paying the doctor so they will do all this for me. What then is the point of me spending all that time reading stuff up on my own? And what makes people think that they can somehow know better than someone who went through years of specific training to be able to make these types of decisions?

Yet here we are - more and more people insisting that they know better than doctors because they have "done their own research". I wonder what causes them to depend so much on their own research. I wonder if they have paused to think about what "doing my own research" really means. To me if one really had to do one's own research, one would have to set up a lab, devise a scientifically sound experiment to prove or test whatever it is that one is curious about and get the funding and carry out the experiment on your own. None of the folks talking about "Doing one's own research" is doing that. Instead they are simply reading published papers and believing that it is the absolute truth - how do they know it was not cooked up? Why is reading the paper somehow "doing one's own research"? Dont they know that a lot of experimental results are fabricated anyway?

I wish people would give more thought into what they call "research" before labelling their literature survey as "research".

The Price of Progress

Its hard not to think about what the future holds for us. In the last fifty years we have seen nearly every sector disrupted because of technology, and it doesnt look like that process is going to stop anytime soon.

One of the things I think about are people who make a living driving. We use Uber pretty often, and I sometimes talk to the drivers to see how and when they started out as Uber drivers. There are some folks who say they gave up their day jobs because this was paying more. One that I was talking to just a few days ago said she had not had any other job for more than one and a half years. And she has a Masters degree from NYU! She talked about how difficult it was to find a decently paying job, and that no one cares about her degree. It was sad to listen to her because I know that sooner or later she will find herself out of this job as well - my guess is that in five to ten years, unless this country puts regulations in place, we will have a self driving car service that will be way cheaper. And these guys will unfortunately not be able to compete against those, and will soon have to find something else to do. Its the same with truck and bus drivers.

Another area where disruption is going to happen is delivery services. All those delivery service folks who are raking in money now because of the popularity of the rise in demand for delivery will sooner or later find themselves out of a job - when the drones figure out how to do it faster and cheaper.

There are so many areas like these where change is happening. Folks who make this kind of progress happen think they are doing everyone a service - it takes away the need to have people engaged in work that can easily be automated, freeing people to engage in more creative pursuits. Their reasoning is : no one should have to sit behind the wheel of a truck for hours at a time to earn a living. Instead, we should have folks who create software that can drive cars around automatically.

Unfortunately, the question arises: what can these folks do instead that will not require specialized skills? The trouble with all the progress we are making is that it removes large numbers of jobs that dont need a lot of skill and adds a few jobs that are extremely specialized and skill based. The folks whose jobs got taken away will never be able to hold the jobs that got created by this type of disruption. We will eventually eliminate the need for unskilled / low skilled labor and only have a market open for smart, creative, skilled and extremely competitive folks who are willing to work round the clock to keep their jobs. And because these jobs are going to be few in number, they will have to work harder and harder to make sure they are not taken away by someone else. And obviously, their work is going to make more and more jobs irrelevant as time passes by. Essentially, we are progressing in a direction where we will eventually put most folks out of a means of livelihood, and the gap between the rich and poor will increase further. The only difference will be that the everyone will have the opportunity to try to get one of those few jobs; the ones who dont will only be able to blame their genes and upbringing.

So what am I proposing? That we call the world to a halt and stop all progress? Grind growth and subsequently the economy to a halt? Where would that leave us?

For a long time I had this post written up until here and I felt I couldnt post it because I had no answers. I thought the answers will come to me in time, but it hasnt. So I am going to post this, hoping the answer will arrive afterwards and it can be added in as an update later.

Update as of Aug 2017: There is a company called Humu that is attempting to solve this problem. There is also some research into Basic Income that Ycombinator is doing, that seems like it is attempting to solve the same issues. Happy to realize that I am not the only one thinking this way and that we are hopefully going to make some progress on this problem.

Ellen Pao vs Kleiner Perkins

In the last few weeks there has been so much going on in terms of gender all around me. I dont know if I am seeing more of it because I am more attentive to these things or if it is really just a coincidence. The first one was the comments from the Delhi rapist about how the victim really was to blame. If it was just that, I might have let it go, because after all I am aware that the prevailing notion among a large proportion of Indian men are somewhere along those lines. Having grown up in India, I would be stupid to think that a large portion of Indian men thought otherwise. But then there was a former Googler who publicly stated that she was sexually harassed while still working for the company and the rape and death threats that she has been facing since the public disclosure. And then there was Ellen Pao vs Kleiner Perkins, showing how regressive even a country like US is when it comes to women's work rights. On top of all this, I am reading Lean In currently, which I guess has made me especially sensitive to the small issues that women face while trying to be in the workforce.

This post is about the trial and what I think are some of the mistakes KPCB made while dealing with Pao. My own thinking about the trial has been muddled, because of conflicting press reports that seem to favor one or the other side. Like in all cases, without knowing the absolute truth, all one can do is form your own judgement. This is my way of clearing up some of my thinking... It is not a full or fair account of the trial, it is just some things I noted about the trial and the firm that surprised me. I have been following their investments for a while now, and I always looked on them with respect, but this trial changes things a lot.

There are several things about that trial that surprised me.

The first one was what the firm's line of defense was. Even in this day and age, in a country as progressive as this one, the way one conducts a lawsuit against a powerful woman who is alleging gender based discrimination is by character assassination. She gets portrayed as an overbearing and aggressive bitch who no one can get along with, the intention being that the jury would be traditional enough to consider likeability of the woman in question more than whether there was gender bias involved or not. In my view, her likeability should not be discussed at all. Whats relevant is whether there was bias or not, and just because a woman is not very likeable doesnt make gender bias any less of an issue. Powerful women only get there because they are tough and are willing to be assertive enough not to back down when others try to push them over. Unfortunately, cultures around the world portray these women as "bad" women. It is less in the US, but it is still there... a woman who is assertive is just not "nice" too. Men simply dont face this problem, they are just seen as powerful and assertive because that is what we expect men to be.

The second one was how the firm in question dealt with someone against whom two of their female employees levelled sexual harassment charges. When the first complaint was made by Pao, he was talked to, but not really reprimanded. The firm says his bonus was cut, but his biggest "punishment" was that he was told the firm's most senior leader had lost faith in his ability to lead the firm. The following year though, he was given a promotion and made senior partner because they thought "he would be a good investor". Only after a second complaint was made by a different employee was he finally let go of.  So in the man's case, all that mattered was whether or not he would be a good investor, and how he behaved with female employees at the firm was not looked upon seriously, whereas in the woman's case (Ms. Pao's) she couldnt be made senior partner because she was too aggressive and difficult to get along with. No wonder Pao is suing them.

The third one was how the women in firm were assigned their traditional stereotypes even in their written performance reviews: Pao's reviews before she levelled harassment charges against them consistently contained "encouraging" words such as "quietly effective" and in an email she was mentioned as having a , "quiet, tenacious leadership". In cases where improvements were suggested, it contained words such as "We encourage you to soften your style". Referring to another female investor at the firm, the same email contained the words "patient, firm, savvy, and mother of two young kids", whereas the same email when describing a male investor did not mention his family status in any way despite him having children as well. While it is fine to describe the family status of employees, I think it definitely is not necessary to call that out only in case of women. In a separate email, while talking about another female employee, the same partner writes : "Her willingness to travel works, unless / until she becomes a mom".

The fourth surprise for me was the "unwritten guidelines" that were applied unequally to men and women. Apparently junior partners were expected to only sit on one board. This was told to women who had the opportunity to be on more than one board, but most men were exempted from the guideline.

The fifth surprise was that the firm seem to have had differing policies w.r.t. offering work to men vs women. Pao worked to hire and mentor another man who was given the opportunity earlier to invest and prove himself. Pao's opportunities to do so were however limited since she was asked to mostly spend time writing press releases and speeches, with her being told that she was being assigned that stuff because she was good at it. Obviously, she would not have been foolish enough to think that writing press releases and speeches for the majority of the time was not going to make a case for her promotion. Eventually the man that Ellen hired and mentored got promoted before she did. The other major incident that comes to light here is that another male senior partner was given a board seat for a company that she primarily did all the groundwork for, because "he needed a win" and because it was "her job to support her senior partners".

The sixth surprise was : The firm was approached by Google Ventures asking whether they could recruit Ellen Pao for themselves. At the time Kleiner Perkins did not want to let her go, because they felt she was valuable enough as an employee and had spent a long time developing her. So they decided to offer her a position on their "digital team" so Google Ventures would not hire her away. Google Ventures realized what was happening and it looks like they finally did not make an offer. (It must be noted that their attorney later twisted this out of context to say that she was "rejected" by Google Ventures.) A couple of years after this they decided that her performance was not good enough and that she will never make general partner. She sued the firm after this, while still employed there, and waited until they terminated her employment.

To me, if in fact all of this is true, there has been harassment. It wasnt exactly one particular event of harassment, it was more death by a thousand cuts (although I will say that some cuts were pretty deep here). Compounding these issues together makes for an unfriendly workplace for women, and I believe that (and some financial compensation) is what Pao is fighting for. It must be obvious by now that I am on Pao's side. Regardless of what the verdict is from this trial, I think from now on I will think of KPCB as on old school firm that has fifties style value systems. I expected them to be different, mostly because of what I had heard of John Doerr's non investing work (which by the way was mentioned in the trial, perhaps to improve his likeability, just the way the defense tried to reduce Pao's likeability stating that she was too assertive to be likeable.). I now see that as just the creation of a public image to benefit his business. It is even likely that it is mostly his wife who manages it; while he stays as the public face of it.

A trial is a tricky thing to handle; most of it is he-said, she-said, with documents to prove some of them, although even the best documented proof can be misleading when taken out of context. I hope the jury is able to wade through the legal battle that is going on and make a just decision. I hope this brings some change into the tech industry, which, although perhaps the most supportive of diversity, is still not supportive enough. Good luck, Pao!

The Indian Startup Scene

Yahoo shut down its development offices in India recently. I think most large software development companies with most of their teams in the US will eventually come to the same conclusion and do the same thing. My guess is that the only ones that will remain are the ones that make their teams there strictly independent and focused on problems facing the Indian market.

Unfortunately, that is not how those offices typically operate - they usually end up doing small projects that people in the main offices in the US think are safe to be handled overseas. It is not like they think the folks in India are less capable or dedicated - it just makes more logical sense to have everyone working on important projects to all be in the same timezone, located more or less close by geographically and able to communicate well with each other. Since that is not easy to do between the US and India, even if a project of importance happens to have arisen at the Bangalore office, it eventually gets moved to the US because it is too important to be done by a team that no one has much contact with.

Also, folks sitting in the US do not have as much perspective on the Indian market (or any other market for that matter) so they tend to miss opportunities that people there would normally see.  Typically I have not seen these offices solving too many problems for the developing world. Historically, I think the number of new solutions that came out for the Indian market from these large companies has been low, especially from an engineering viewpoint. All the new ideas such seem to have come from small startups and not from the smaller offices of the established companies. Even when the established companies do come out with solutions for the local market, it seems like the initiatives originated from Indian employees in the US, not in India.

So from the perspective of the large companies, it makes sense to close down operations in India - if they are unable to innovate for the local market, and it is known that communication can be a problem, why keep these offices running? I know some folks do it because it is cheaper there - but that gap is quickly reducing..people's starting salaries have nearly doubled in the last 5-6 years. It is already nearly half of what folks make in the US, so it seems like in the next 10 years or so the gap in salaries will be mostly gone. So it wont make much financial sense to keep engineers there either.

So is this a bad thing? Are we moving in a direction where unemployment for engineers will once again become a problem? I dont think so - I think India will have its own strong startups coming out soon. There are already quite a few that seem to be doing well, and it will get better over time. The startup scene there is heating up, and college grads there are increasingly opting to work at one of those rather than join a conventional large company with a big name. Eventually we will have our own big names, perhaps ones that will compete or surpass the likes of Google and Facebook. China is already moving in that direction and I believe India will soon catch up. In fact I think most countries with strong engineering education will develop its own version of a Silicon Valley with startups churning out innovative solutions for their people.

I am curious how the next 5-10 years will play out in India, startup-scene-wise.

Dealing with Complexity

Have you paused for a moment to marvel at some of the things we have been doing lately?

Self driving cars.
Drones that deliver packages.
Contact lenses that can measure eye pressure.
Gadgets that take pictures when you just think about taking pictures (yep, that exists).

Only fifteen years ago, I would not have thought this kind of stuff would come about while I was still alive. While I see the upside of all this - in fact I make a living out of the upside, I also see some downsides. This post is mostly about the downsides. It does not mean I am anti-technology. I am very much pro-progress, and I definitely think we are better off today than we were just 60 years ago. I also think that is true on most fronts - we have better medical care, better technology and definitely a better political climate. But I have my times of doubt, and this one such moment.

The first problem I see with such complex systems is the need for specialized knowledge before one can contribute anything. The more sophisticated the stuff you make, longer someone has to spend trying to learn all the basics before they can add on top of it. And once they get all that training, they are not going to easily adapt into another job, because they will need a bunch of retraining. Not many companies are willing to hire just "smart" people and pay they until they get up to speed. Most are looking for specific skills that they can start applying on day one on their new jobs. Instead of valuing experience, most places will hire people who have been "ready-made" for the specific roles they have. Once that ready-made position is no longer relevant, heaven help them if they need a new job.

The second problem is avoiding absurdities in the system. When building something complex, it is always difficult to make sure that all the parts make sense together. In the medical system here, it has come to a point where if you dont have medical insurance, you cannot see a doctor. And the number of times you are allowed to see a doctor for any reason whatsoever is also dictated by medical insurance. Take one of my experiences for example: I had a skin problem, which was on my face and my back. I wanted to see a doctor, and called a skin specialist to fix an appointment. They told me that the doctor could only look at one part of my body during one appointment (apparently the insurance restricts the doctor from looking beyond one specific problem). So I asked for 2 consecutive appointments so I could show my face and my back and avoid another trip to the same doctor on another day. Again, insurance prohibited the same doctor from seeing the same patient in two appointments on the same day. The only thing I could do was take appointments on two different days. What kind of nonsense is that?

The third problem is conveying this knowledge to common people. Take the financial system. I dont think anyone understands the entire system, fully, including the people who designed it. And because people like you and me dont understand it, you are supposed to get yourself a "broker" or a "financial planner" who will understand these things for you and make your life smooth. I recently attended a panel discussion organized by financial planners. Their biggest advice was to get yourself a financial planner and invest as much as you can in your 401k. When asked what a financial planner did, they said it is a "halo person" who talks to your accountant, lawyer, broker, doctor, nanny, knows your family and relatives and decides what the right financial decisions are for you. Apparently they control the actions of all these people on your lives so that financially, it all makes sense. What they dont mention is that they charge thousands of dollars in fees, just like all these other people in your life that they are supposed to "work" with, such as lawyers, accountants and so forth. A lot of people came out of that panel discussion feeling like they had a "lot to catch up on and do". I came out deeply concerned that (a) our system was so complicated that something so simple as "inheritance" required working with a financial planner, a lawyer and an accountant. Its something everyone has to do, so why dont we make it as simple as possible? Why make the system such that there is one loop hole that you can go through to make sure your money goes to your children without paying too much in taxes, but for that you need to do this complicated trust fund thing? Why not just offer everyone the same thing instead of limiting these options to those people who are educated enough to navigate the laws and have money to pay lawyers who know how to deal with it?

Of course, financial planners did not mention the fine print that they charge thousands of dollars for their services. I wonder if them and the IRS setup this system so that the IRS can take a cut out of all the money from people who dont know the system, and the financial planners can take the money out of all the people who learn a few things about the system..

When I was at IITM, there was a T shirt that was made by the students of the CS department that read "Complexities Simplified for Everyone". The complexity they had in mind when they made the Tshirt must have been the algorithmic kind... but that phrase indicates what we need on almost all fronts on which we have made progress. I wish all the new grads coming out of college in the coming years will figure out a way to simplify the various systems around us so as to make it more understandable to the common man instead of introducing more complexity when they join the workforce.

The Rise and Fall of Large Corporations

I was reading an article about Sony's struggles to keep themselves profitable today. It is a company whose products I have used a lot while growing up - there was this implicit assumption that if it was from this company, it would meet a certain quality standard. Today though, the inevitable has already happened. They have been disrupted, and they are feeling the pain.

Microsoft is another example of a company that is becoming more and more irrelevant. These days when I see someone take out a laptop that runs Windows, I think they must be either dated or works in consulting and is just doing powerpoint slides everyday ;). Perhaps I feel this way because I worked for MS a while ago. Perhaps I am wrong about what I think about Microsoft. Perhaps everyone will start thinking Windows is cool and start using it again. Perhaps Satya Nadella can save that company. But my guess would be that it will not happen. They have been disrupted so many times over - they missed internet, they missed mobile, and most recently they missed social. And with each new wave that came along, they tried coming up with similar products to try to beat the disrupting company out of their own space. I wonder why they dont know any better. Its not like the individuals there dont know that this is not going to work - at least at a grassroots level they all know. When they decided to work on a product to compete with iPhone sometime in mid 2008 to hit the market 2 years from then, there were people who worked there who asked why they were doing it - Apple was going to come up with something better by 2010, why were they making something that would have features that were competitive with the iPhone released in 2007? There was no answer coming forth. They did it because thats what "management" decided the strategy was. I guess the management thought that Apple was like Netscape. Clearly, that proved wrong.

Corporations are so much like people.

The birth of a company is a lot of hard work and pain. Its infancy is a lot of learning and work. Then it goes through a phase of maturing and figuring out what its place in the world must be. Then it tries to make a decent living out of its chosen path. After a while, a newcomer eats its lunch and it is left struggling to figure out how to compete. Some manage to reinvent themselves. Most retire. In the end though, all of them die. And these are just the successful ones. There are many others who die along the way. Some die in their infancy, never having managed to take off. Some get killed. Some commit suicide. Banks seem to have a strong preference for suicide. And goverments seem to like covering it up and making it look like it was accidental poisoning.

Whats interesting to note though, is that the life cycle has been shrinking into a smaller and smaller time scale lately. In the 1950s, the average age of a company that was in the S&P 500 was around 75. These days it is more like 10.

Apparently corporations mature a lot faster these days. Just like cattle and livestock. And people.

To fuel this type of insane growth, people are perhaps working harder than ever before - with the introduction of laptops, our work now stretches into our homes, making it harder for us to detach from work at will. And since more and more people are willing to put in this type of work, everyone feels pressurized to do the same thing.

So here we are - a set of people running faster than ever before to make more wealth than ever before to spend on more stuff than ever before, dying faster than ever before with more diseases than ever before.

Sometimes I wonder what the point of it all is. The Amish lifestyle makes so much sense sometimes.

And yet I know I will not let go of my job or my chosen life no matter what conclusions I come to logically. I know in my head that it is all in vain, yet I do exactly what everyone else does. Perhaps it is peer pressure. When I was in school I used to do things to make sure I wasnt going to buckle in to peer pressure. Apparently it wasnt enough - I am still swayed be everyone else's measure of success. I still care about what impressions people have about me. One day hopefully, I will be able to rid myself of that and take a more zen like approach to work and life. And some other day, hopefully, everyone else will feel the same way and do what they love.

The New Royalty

Recently, I read about the 65th Birthday party of Prince Charles that was funded by a "philanthropist" Indian origin couple based in London. The party had apparently cost 500k pounds, and I couldnt help but wonder why any self respecting individual who wanted to known as "philanthropist" would spend money pampering the royalty of a country whose colonization and plundering has resulted in the sorry state of affairs that many countries face today. People from this country amassed great wealth either as loot, pretty much the same way pirates do their job. If it wasnt straight forward theft, they did it by enslaving the natives of the country they were colonizing. I wonder how they can look at their history and not feel shame. Do they teach their children what really happened or do they teach them about "conquests" that brought in great wealth?

It is not just England that has this type of history though - if one looks around the Americas, one can see that Portugal and Spain did the same thing. The Spanish were in fact worse - they usually exterminated the natives if they could not be converted into slaves, and then shipped Africans across the sea and used them to work the land. Why was there nothing similar to the Nuremberg trials for colonialists? How did their conscience permit them to act in such inhuman ways? Why was it not considered genocide? And what on earth was the church doing meanwhile? What was their role in all of this?

But that was not what I started out saying.. So why would this Indian "philanthropist" want to host this birthday party?After amassing more wealth than they know what to do with, I guess they hear a little voice in their heads that tell them that the only thing they lack is "titles". If one wants to buy titles, one must know someone who can sell them, right?

Enormous wealth makes all kinds of things possible - one gets powerful, knows all the right people, can fund political organizations - which means one can have a hand in almost all decision making processes, can fund election campaigns, fund universities - which means one's children will most likely receive the best education, and finally, one can also control the media.

And that is how the New Royalty emerges.
Like Reliance Royalty.
Or Kingfisher Royalty.
Or Mittal Royalty.

Think I exaggerate? One of Mittal's palaces was built with marble from the same quarry that was used for the Taj Mahal. This residence is jokingly referred to as "Taj Mittal". His daughter's wedding was the second most expensive wedding in recorded history, second only to Prince Charles and Diana, and followed by Prince William and Kate Middleton who got the third place. Doesnt that sound like royalty?

So what has really changed over the last 100 years?
It depends on your perspective.

From the average Joe's perspective, nothing really has changed. He is born, he lives an ordinary life, reads about the New Royalty's excesses and has dreams that will never come true.

From the perspective of an entrepreneur though, everything has changed. If one is born with enough ability, ambition, a willingness to work hard, and got a few lucky breaks in life, one could join the ranks of the New Royalty almost overnight. Trust me, this was not something that could be done in the old world. In the old world, one really had to be born into wealth. So in that sense, the world is now a lot more democratic. Any one of us can be Royalty tomorrow. In fact, no one knows who the next member of Royalty will be. What we have really done is taken away the ability to be wealthy from a few who were born privileged and made it possible for anyone to be wealthy. It will still be a few, but it could be anyone.

Since "wealth" is a relative term and being wealthy would no longer mean anything if everyone had it, I suppose this is exactly how we want our world to be.

Perfection

After working on a fairly complicated problem for the past few weeks, I was reflecting on the process of writing software one day. It occurred to me that a good piece of software is not just working code - it is code that the writer spent a fair amount of time perfecting until there are no rough edges anywhere. It is what you get when you have nothing more that can be removed (I didnt come up with that, search online to see who did). Not one line more, nor one line less would do exactly the same thing. (Thats another reference. Checkout Byron)

And suddenly, I was enlightened. It isnt just software where this is true. It is true of everything I could think of so far - cooking, movie making, art, music, structural engineering... pretty much everything.

So.. my learning, which is the point of this entry is: Perfection is a prerequisite for greatness.

Goodbye, Reader.

The announcement about Reader's shutdown came as a shock to me. Even though I work for the company that produced and hosted it all these years. There were enough people shocked by the decision who voiced their opinions loudly to no avail, so I did not waste my energy doing that. Instead I decided to enjoy the time remaining, in what way I could.

And now my dear friend has passed on, to Software Heaven.. I miss you, Google Reader. From June 30 onwards, I watched Facebook streams carefully to see who else seemed to miss you. Apparently not many of my friends. None wrote a word about you. Perhaps we made the right decision after all. Perhaps there werent that many that were using you. Which obviously, in our world, means demise. But if it makes you feel better, I have tried Feedly, and it is not very good. Maybe that will make you smile from Software Heaven?

But your death got me thinking.
About Software life, death and afterlife. It is just like Human life, death and afterlife.

Maybe when I reach my human afterlife (and I am in no hurry to, but when I do), I will get to read with you again?

Deals

Last week, everywhere you looked, that was all you could see - "deals". 50% off this, 75% off that, buy one and get one free, all kinds of stuff to mislead the consumer. It was so tempting to get 50% off stuff, especially when everyone tells you that this is the time of the year to be shopping, the time of the year when the best deals are available. So I went out shopping too, thinking the deals would only be available on that day.

I found yesterday that Macys, the store that advertises and makes use of Black Friday to the maximum has another sale this weekend - with the same 50% off of course. So what were they advertising about last week? What made last week the best week to shop?

In fact, come to think of it, although Macys has good stuff, the pricing is very misleading. There is no "real" price on any item - its basically an auction model, where the goods come in before the beginning of each season (sales for the next season begins way before the season itself, off) at heavy prices. The people who are particular about wearing in season and the latest fashion trends and colors buy those at exorbitant prices. After a while, the same items get marked down, and they have a sale, perhaps putting a discount of 40%. If you are unlucky, you could be paying as much as 40% more for the same item if you went shopping just one day before the sale day. And what happens when the items dont go on sale even after 40% discount? Well, they get marked down lower still. Finally it hits clearance, and they usually cost between 5-10$ at that point. Of course, one has to realize that the ones that end up in clearance are the sizes that no one can wear, the patterns that no one liked, or the cuts that did not suit most people. So the trick to shopping well is to go after it is marked down, but before people have finished buying up all the good pieces. And that is why sales are so popular here.. 

Except... what does it mean when there is a sale every 10 days or so? Are they reducing the price of items every 10 days? Isnt that an indication that their items are way overpriced to begin with? And if the store is not going bust after all these sales, surely they are conning us into paying more than we ought to?

A programming class that I took at Columbia had this interesting problem we had to solve : We had to write code that could play scrabble - we all started out with an initial (random) set of letters. In each round, a new letter would come up for bidding, and all the teams could bid on this new letter to try and get the letter (and win the game by making a 7 letter word). So at each point, when a letter came up for bid, we had to decide what that letter was worth to us and bid accordingly. Through trial and error, we learnt that the only way to get what was valuable through an auction was to put in a bid that reflected the true value of the letter for us depending on the state of our game.

Of course, estimating true value was a difficult problem. We knew intuitively what letters were more valuable or less valuable. But putting a number on it was not easy. We explored all kinds of things to arrive at true value. We never reached the right equations, and our player did not win, ultimately. But it was a valuable lesson, because I am applying it while shopping at Macys now :) .. I look at each piece and decide whether the cost reflects its true value to me. If it does, I buy, and if it doesnt, I dump it. It has proved to be a valuable aid in helping avoid regrets.

Funny how programming lessons can come handy while shopping.

Why I dont want to be a Domestic Goddess

I care a lot about what I eat, and so I subscribe to a number of food blogs. These blogs are maintained by similar food enthusiasts, who try out different recipes from different sources and then reproduce the recipe word for word in their blog along with pictures of the result. Many of them also quote their recipe source. When I first came to the US, I had one of these blogs too. I lost interest in it soon after I realized what a waste of time and effort it was. Besides, I stopped having much free time at hand too. But thats not the what I wanted to write about... one of the blogs I read had a recipe for a dessert which was sourced from a book named "How to be a Domestic Goddess".  The name caught my eye, and since I had given some thought to the whole idea of what good house keeping was, I decided to check out what this author thought was a successful homemaker.

What I found did not surprise me much. It was a book full of desserts. Every recipe seemed to have the same sets of ingredients in various ratios - all purpose flour, sugar, eggs and butter. And then a few other ingredients would be added -perhaps strawberry, pista, coconut etc, to add color and vary the flavor. Much like how they do for ice creams. There was not even one recipe I would consider an every day recipe. And there lies the probelm. Somehow, as a society, we seem to think that good housekeepers are those who can cook foods that resemble products from a bakery or a restaurant. The whole concept of "homemade" seems to be twisted out of form, with many bakeries professing to provide goods that resemble "homemade" and many homes trying hard to imitate the bakeries. One wonders here, who is imitating who? I know some food bloggers who bake a cake again and again and again until it looks just perfect, so they can photograph it, and then end up eating all the different versions. I wonder what makes them do that. What is so "homemade"y about buying industrial products such as all purpose flour and refined sugar and mixing them together with a stand mixer and baking it in an oven that looks like it belongs in a bakery? Arent you just recreating a bakery at home? And why is that a good thing?

For years, I thought cakes were great. Now things have changed, I am all about cooking foods that can be eaten everyday. Well, I mean food that can be eaten everyday without worrying about going overweight or developing heart disease. In some sense I am sort of trying to go back to cooking the way they were doing it in the pre industrial era. I dont know where I got this notion that pre industrial diets were better for health.. perhaps it is this book I read about indigenous diets and how they can prevent disease that was written by a doctor who travelled to different parts of the world to find out what the health secrets of various indigenous people were. She chose 7 different places in the world which she found were "cold spots" for certain modern diseases such as breast cancer, depression, diabetes, heart disease etc. At first she was trying to find something common through all the diets to figure out what we could recreate to achieve the same health benefits. What she found however was that there was no secret ingredient - the indigenous people ate both vegetarian and non vegetarian depending on where they were from. For example, in iceland, people mostly ate fish, while in mexico, the diet was corn, rice and beans. The indigenous people were sometimes overweight, but they showed no symptoms of the kinds of diseases that is common in most developed and developing regions. The conclusion she drew from all of this was that it was cooking and eating traditional recipes, which seemed to be complete and balanced that kept them in good health. So the answer in the end was simple - try and cook the meals your great grand mother made, from the scratch. And make sure you combine foods the way she told you they must be combined...

Gee.. long story. What I am really trying to say is... I think at some point we lost our traditional knowledge of what keeps us healthy and what does not, and ended up looking to corporations and businesses for ideas on what the right thing to eat was. And it resulted in us slowly changing out diets until it became the mess it is today. Dont believe me? Look at some of ads they show on TV... Just a few days ago, while I was reimaging my laptop, I happened to wander around the office and watch some commercials on TV. The first one was for pizza. And the next one was a stool softener. So first the businesses market their foods to you and make you ruin your bowels, and right after that, another business tries to set your stomach right with some more artificially ingested chemicals. I wonder why there are no ads which say..."The only thing you have to do to make sure you are "regular" is to eat the right a balanced and complete home cooked meal".

Hmm this is getting to be a long rant, so I guess I will stop now. Either way, I dont ever want to be a domestic goddess and ruin my bowels.

Shopping - Culture

So far, I used to think of ads as a means by which you come to know of a product / service. I never gave it more thought than that. But if you look more closely, you can look at the ads in general that are shown in a country and get a sense of its prevailing culture. If you look at ads in India, especially the ads that are targeted at women - such as the oils, soaps, cooking ranges or other household electronics, you will notice that the ad shows a whole family and how the woman is able to take care of her in laws, husband and kid better because of this new product. Some ads show the husband and kids playing outside and coming back in with dirty clothes and the woman taking it all with a big smile because she has this new soap with some "proactive" ingredients that will clean everything effortlessly. Similar concepts show up for washing machines too. For oils it shows the woman taking care of the health of the older people in her family. Ads for other products use family too - for example, some product that is supposed to reduce acidity in the stomach shows a big family gathering and people eating a lot and then someone using this product to reduce acidity. I dont know if "family based advertising" has gone down after I left India. I never seem to get time to watch much of TV when I go back there now. But it definitely used to be based a lot on families. I guess the ads are sort of targeted at our psyche that wants the big happy family life. 

The other big class of ads in India are targeted at younger women who are not yet married. For them, it is all about fairness creams and lotions. And that ads invariably show these girls using some or the other product and as a result getting married to a handsome man in a lavish wedding. And of course, that must be the best way to sell anything (similar concepts show up for almost all fairness creams, sometimes for soaps, very often for sarees, and of course, for jewellery), because every girl wants the lavish wedding and the handsome man. As soon as she gets married, I guess she is considered to fall into the other category where she should be taking care of the whole family.

In the US though, the whole family is rarely shown. Women's products are shown a lot, but it seems to only show "earlier" and "later" or just a woman with skimpy clothes looking very made up and surreal. The ads show women of all color and race, and I have not yet seen an ad show what effect the product had on her social life.  Is this because "family" wont sell here? In fact, the only product for which I seem to notice "family" come into the picture is for medicines and restaurants. Some medicine ads show people able to enjoy a family outing because they are taking medication. Does it mean people here only become aware of families when they fall ill? Some restaurants show the whole family eating junk food together. What does get shown most often however is stuff like "Shop until you drop" or "Maxinista / Fashionista" or being "in season", as though having all the latest and best things is an achievement in itself. It seems based on the premise that women will keep buying stuff whether they need it or not. And it does not seem to serve any purpose, other than being fashionable. That makes me wonder if all American women are really like that - do they only care about buying more stuff and presenting themselves with "new looks" every day? No other goals in life? 

Appearances...

While on the train one day, I noticed a woman reading a magazine. I was amazed at the number of ads that contained women in them - I would have thought one wouldnt put women on it, because that would mean you would attract only the men with the ad, and not the women. But if so many ads have women on it, perhaps it is targeting both men and women.

And the other trait I noticed was that all the women had perfect bodies. Each one looked like a gym instructor, and they all wore skimpy clothes. Sitting in India, when you read articles about how ads are "objectifying women" it always sounds funny. Here though, it all starts to look real. Women do look at the ads, and they do try to look like that. I have seen some how spend a long time in front of the mirror trying and re trying to tie their hair and then pull out strands so as to get the I-dont-care-what-my-hair-looks-like look. Others pull their shirts out and let it hang with just the right amount of carelessness. There really is nothing so very casual about "casual" anymore. Casual is a very carefully pulled together look with the entire outfit coordinated according to style and color. It takes just as much time doing that as it does to get dressed formally. But I digress...

What I really want to talk about is how everyone wants to be the skinny girl in shorts and a tank top. And being in NY, thats all you really see. Really. I mean, at least dont they want to wear something different from the other girl? Why does everyone want only white during the summer? And everyone is in black tights and boots in the winter. Worse, even if you were looking for something else, you wouldnt find them, because shops only carry what they think are "in season". So much for variety and inventiveness.

There are so many unwritten rules about dressing here. Women who wear long skirts are always "old". Young women wear short skirts that show as much leg as possible. Only old women wear high necked blouses. So the high necked blouses always come in dull grey or beige or brown. The bright colors are for young women, and they come with plunging necklines. Whoever said older women dont like colors, btw? And why shouldnt young women dress with some modesty? I hate the way the shops assume things about everyone. Why wont they make anything for the stray cases who dont think like the mainstream?