Usually I get to a green circle on the outer ring on the left set of dials every night. That means I got my 7-8 hour of sleep. Once in a while, I get a yellow if I do not get enough sleep. And in some rare cases, I get a red – especially in long flights because of the disturbed sleep.

On Friday, I woke up after a good night’s sleep. But was somehow not totally feeling well. After driving to Hilton Head, I slept off in the hotel bed for another long bout resulting in getting nearly twelve hours of sleep for the day.

Felt better after it. Also noticed that the Apple Watch sleep ring had turned bright blue! I had no idea that there was another color for the rings!

Taking a break from blogging from my vacation posts to post this one. This is my 6,000th post. What started as a journey of just wanting to write down my learnings from work life during a year off (second one) then morphed into running adventure logs and then a journal for intersection points and eventually became just a place to write down my reflections of moments of my life. And hopefully not forget how to put English words together to form comprehensible sentences.

I remember my biggest fear when I had started blogging. I had a feeling people start doing these things with a lot of gusto and then the energy peters out rapidly. The question I had for myself was how long would I be able to keep up my energy. I believe I have found an answer to that question.

Fifteen years of blogging. That would mean, I have posted a little over one post a day! Some might suggest that is too much! I think they would be right!!

I hope they are right. Life would be nothing if you did not do a few things here and there that people would be critical about.

I read this a few days back in one of those Stoicism write ups. (Roger Whitney had introduced my to Stoicism). Worth reading for all of us. Although the message will probably not resonate with youngsters as much.

If you’ve ever made it to the end of Homer’s Odyssey, you might have noticed a rather strange part of the ending. It’s a part that’s talked about a lot less than the rest of the poem, possibly because it makes so little sense. You see, despite spending every waking second for ten years fighting to get home, despite overcoming nearly insurmountable obstacles on his way, despite all the carnage of the final battle to reclaim his kingdom, Odysseus does something almost inconceivable the second he possesses what he longed for…

Stop. At least for today. Just stop. Be still.

The author also talks about the book “Stillness is the Key” as a suggested read. As you will see in review of the book I did in April this year, I was fairly unimpressed. I will post if I come across better books (by my judgment).

The backdrop to this is rather unfortunate. If I have my facts right, a young adult from our Bengali community (Rupkatha) posted about BLM in a Bengali forum and a grown up adult Bengali used the vilest of languages to attack her (and some other women in the forum). That had triggered in my mind a thought about how does the second generation immigrant Bengali community view the first generation immigrant Bengali community’s reaction to issues like BLM that is pretty much on everybody’s mind in this country.

Did a video interview with four young Bengali girls from our community Rupkatha, Dyuti, Diya and Puspita – all born in the US. Here is what I learnt:

First, I am simply amazed by the articulation power of young kids these days. Their ability to construct points of views and express them coherently and cogently far supersedes what I remember of my generation’s ability in those days. The sheer oratory skills – let alone the intellectual constructs used in debating a point of view – is impressive. This is why I always feel we are going to leave this world in smarter hands than ours. As it should be.

For folks my age – their message below might be hard hitting (I have tried to soften it without losing the essence). It is important not to get defensive and just listen to their points of views and respect them for that. Perhaps, some amount of reflection, if you so choose.

The key messages I heard from them for us first generation immigrants are:

(*) We should educate ourselves with the history of black Americans. We miss a deeper understanding of black Americans and the struggle the country has gone thru that shaped the platform for immigrants like us to succeed. It is not BLM’s responsibility to educate us. There is enough information out there. Lack of this education can only lead to lesser than deserved empathy.

(*) We need to realize that not saying anything or not taking a position is giving a message of not caring and thus makes us complicit. Especially, when we organize ourselves as a community, we need to realize that we represent a demography – whether we like it or not. Not speaking up when the rest of the country has – only speaks for supporting status quo. This is one of those few cases where not taking a position IS taking a position.

(*) We need to realize that situation is more complicated than just black Americans. On the other side of this equation is police brutality. Police (like military) is something our whole sense of right and justice is indexed on. It is important not to throw the baby with the bath water. Therefore, it is important that we listen to the other side. Regardless of whether we agree or not.

*ALERT* This gets really hard hitting for my community
(*) Speaking up is a function of how much privilege one enjoys. For most of our community, we came here due to our skills (technology, research etc) and we associate ourselves more with the affluent. That tends to be more white than black due to the history of the country. We therefore tend to have a dismissive attitude towards black Americans’ plight.

(*) We have inborn bias for fairer skin color (and against dark skin). [Rajib notes: as a background, in India, at least when I was growing up, a darker girl had far less chance of getting married than her fairer sister – I have a true story from my own family; there was a whole cosmetic industry peddling stuff to make your look fairer. I am not sure how it is now but I suspect biases do not go away in a couple of decades.]

(*) We instill hard work, good grades and staying out of trouble as virtues in our younger generation. Because, as immigrants, that is what made us survive and flourish. But does that teach the next generation how to integrate into a society and community that their parents might have only a cursory and a privileged point of view?

Like I said before – I learnt a lot from these young adults. I hope this is not the last discussion we have had.

Thanks are due to Amitesh for scribing while I was engaged in this video discussion.

Don’t laugh now!

My love for programming has an origin in boredom rather than any computational skills. Certainly, studying computer science introduced me to the art of converting a mathematical formula into all caps FORTRAN. Somehow, though, punching cards and putting it in a queue for the card reader to read overnight was vaguely pointless to me.

It was one of the summer vacations that I got bored at home in the second week and went to Kolkata to find a summer job with a computer company (Artintel). That is when I realized I loved programming. The act of writing voluminous pages of code in a garrulous language called COBOL was not the point. Watching the computer spit out something that people were actually using (these were simple programs to control inventories, payroll etc) was somehow very rewarding though. Plus we had the only air-conditioned room in the whole company. This was in the middle of the heat of summer in sultry Kolkata, mind you!

As my computer science degree progressed, I realized my brainpower was not cut out for research or all the sophisticated computer stuff that my classmates like Madhav Marathe would do in their sleep. Did I mention that there were a lot of Greek alphabets in those courses?

Not wanting to do research meant I had no interest in the USA. (Irony, huh?). But I liked the MBA courses. There was something about Organization Behavior and Managerial Oral Communication that left a deep impression on me. Yet, coding is what I really liked. I remember being part of a team (with Raj Subramaniam, Rupa Batra, G Ramesh et. al.) which did a fairly impressive project in building a computer system to manage railway traffic. Admittedly, my team mates did most of the hard work. But I got to use my color pencils to draw project charts!! (I still have a picture of that project plan on my dorm room wall).

When most of the folks from MBA progressed to Finance and Marketing jobs – where they could actually use all the lessons learnt in MBA, I went back to coding. My first project – CPC – was a life changing experience. Met two of my best bosses – Nitin Chandekar and Raj Sundaramurthy – and an incredible set of team members. My coding was probably not what I was remembered for – but that color pencil pie chart showing how much time we were wasting waiting for the compiler to finish is still something that my two first bosses talk about.

While I came to the USA to code, somewhere, somebody finally realized that I was not that good at coding after all, and put me in a management track. To fulfill my own Peter’s principle and rise to my level of incompetency.

I have not coded for over 20 years now.

Lately, after stopping my posts being cross posted to Facebook, I have focused some attention to my blog site. I started bugging my friend Larry Mason often to ask how to change parts of my site that I did not like the appearance of. Color pencils, sadly, did not work.

Eventually, I realized that maybe I should learn another new skill at the age of 54. Actually re-learn. I figured I am going to learn PHP and CSS to do simple tricks with my website. Larry was kind enough to point me to the source (w3schools).

Sat down to learn it and I realized that I have to start from “deep defense”, as it were. So, had to learn HTML first (about 20 years after the rest of the world picked it up!!).

So, here I am, totally excited after finishing the HTML course and sitting down to figure out how to do CSS coding. I am almost at a point where I can do what I could do with color pencils anyways.

You may laugh now!

While I started this blog back in 2005 – the second time I took a year off between jobs – I never tracked the readership till about ten years later. Towards the end of 2014, I started tracking the unique countries that I was getting reader from. As you can see, it started straightaway with about 40 countries (to be sure, these readers were already coming; I merely started counting from that date). It doubled very quickly from there and ever since has been approaching one of those asymptotic curves. I think it was a couple of months back that I got the last unique – 141st – country.

Still over 50 to go!!

This is really a very hard year for students graduating from college. I should know. I have one at home. To go thru four years of college and not be able to say Good Bye face to face to some of the great relationships you made in campus is gut wrenching. To be thrown out of a college into a job life where nobody is hiring – worse, you will compete for jobs with more experienced people – and most likely next year two batches of students will vie for the same jobs – well, that was not how the movie was supposed to have been written.

Yet, this too shall pass. There is not an iota of a chance that the message of this being ephemeral will land with any graduate. No more than when I told by daughters’ friends once they landed in great colleges to defer their admission, take a year off and backpack thru Europe or South America.

It is very hard for them to understand the perspective of elders. As is it for elders to understand theirs.

Thee following message was sent to me by my dear friend Larry Mason – the same guy who had sent me the “I wish you enough” message first. This time he sent me a Youtube video. I am not sure of the source – it is from 1997, apparently. I have attached the artist’s name as given in Youtube.

The message is equally great for graduates and their parents. Although, chances are that the parents will understand it more.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the class of 97,

Wear sunscreen!

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long term benefits of sunscreen have been proven by scientists. Whereas the rest of my advice has no basis, no more reliable than my own meandering experience.

I will dispense this advice now.

Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Well, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they have faded. But trust me. In 20 years, you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are NOT as fat as you imagine.

Don’t worry about the future. Or worry at all. But know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind… the kind that blindsides you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday.

Do one thing everyday that scares you.

Sing.

Don’t be reckless with other people’s hearts, don’t put up with people who are reckless with yours.

Floss.

Don’t waste your time on jealousy: sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind. The race is long, and in the end, it’s only with yourself.

Remember compliments you receive, forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how.

Keep your old love letters, throw away your old bank statements.

Stretch.

Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives… some of the most interesting 40 year olds I know still don’t.

Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees, you’ll miss them when they are gone.

Maybe you will marry. Maybe you won’t. Maybe you will have children. Maybe you won’t. Maybe you will divorce at 40. Maybe you’ll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary.

Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chances; so are everybody else’s.

Enjoy your body. Use it every way you can. Don’t be afraid of it, or what other people think of it. It is the greatest instrument you will ever own.

Dance.

Even if you have nowhere to do it but in your own living room. Read the directions even if you do not follow them.

Do not read beauty magazines. They will only make you feel UGLY.

Get to know your parents. You never know when they will be gone for good.

Be nice to your siblings…. They are your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future.

Understand that friends come and go, but the precious few, you should hold on.

Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle. Because the older you get, the more you need the people you knew when you were young.

Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft.

Travel.

Accept certain inalienable truths. Prices will rise. Politicians will philander, you too will get old. And when you do, you will fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble and children respected their elders.

Respect your elders.

Don’t expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a trust fund, maybe you’ll have a wealthy spouse… but you never know when either one might run out.

Don’t mess too much with your hair, or by the time you’re 40, it will look 85.

Be careful whose advice you buy, but, be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it is worth.

But trust me on the sunscreen.”

(Artist: Baz Luhrmann)

I was talking to Harsh on his birthday a few days back and he asked me about the not cross posting to Facebook bit. (I stopped a month back). We were discussing his favorite way of knowing about updates – you know, like RSS feed (if you use a news reader), simply email notification etc etc. Harsh felt that , personally, for him, it would be good to have an option of getting email updates.

I promised him that I will set it up. So, in spite of originally being against the idea (I am just worried of too many emails in others’ boxes), last night I have set it up. I am still playing with it – and you might find some changes here and there as I refine it.

But if you want to get weekly updates on the blogs from prior week, sometime between Friday evening and Saturday morning, depending on where you live in the world, you will get a blog digest. You should be able to read the first paragraph of each blog from the week and if it piques your interest, simply click on it – for the full content and picture.

By making it weekly, I am hoping to strike the right balance between too many emails in your inbox and freshness of the topics that I write on.

If you wish to subscribe, you can go to the website www.rajibroy.com and notice the subscription option on the right below the yellow box of “Topics”. Put in your name and email id. You will get a confirmation email that you need to confirm with.

Ishita and Ram, I know you were trying other methods. In case this helps, I am bringing this to your attention.

First thank you to all of you who voiced their opinions. Certainly, overwhelmed by the votes to keep the crossposting on. After thinking about it for quite some time, I have decided to go with Parijat’s suggestion – which is basically – “try it for some time”. I think that is invaluable advice. If we do not experiment in life, how will we ever know what we are capable of? Or for that matter learn about our limitations?

I will stop crossposting for sometime and see how the experiment works out.

So that you do not completely forget me (try as you might), I am going to put up a weekly digest every weekend on Facebook to give you an idea about what all blogs I have posted that week. If any of that piques your interest, feel free to go to the website and read it up.

I have enhanced the comments section (you do not need to put in your email or URL any more – you can put in your name but it is optional) as well as put in a Like button if you want to get a Facebook-like experience. (It toggles just like in Facebook). Looks like some of you already used it last night.

I am not putting in any email subscriber functionality that is going to notify you when there is a post. I figured that would be a nuisance to your inbox.

Before I forget, my blog – which is mostly an anthology of snippets of inconsequential moments of my life – called “History of my Future. First Draft!” can be found at rajibroy.com (which, I am sure you realize is my fullname dot com)

Eighteen long months back, I started an experiment. I got myself off all social media groups – Whatsapp groups, Facebook groups etc.

I have a slightly mixed feeling of the experiment but overall, I do not feel any need to go back to the groups. I certainly regret the fact that I did not realize one of my schoolmate’s dad died or another friend had met with an accident – all of these were discussed in groups. I found those out during my birthday calls with those friends. And occasionally, some friend who was aware that I was not in any group informed me of those incidents.

As a slight aside, somebody let me know that people were showering me with a lot of birthday greetings on my birthday in my MBA classmates’ Whatsapp group. Not sure how many of them realized that I was not even in the group.

I re-joined my middle school Whatsapp group about four months back. Lasted less than 48 hours.

I am thinking about Facebook now. As many of you know, I actually do not post on Facebook. I write (some might even suggest way too much) on my blog – www.rajibroy.com. It then gets crossposted to FB thru a plugin of the platform that I use – WordPress.

The original purpose of my blog (which is in its 16th year and predates when I joined Facebook) was to leave a journal of my life – if anybody in my progeny or even current times ever wanted to know who I was/am and what life I led/lead.

While Facebook has been a great vehicle for me to get those posts out to so many of my friends and find out connections that I was not even aware of, my original purpose was never to try to make my stories popular. I just needed a place to write my stories.

I am wondering whether I should just stick to my blog like I used to and not cross post ever to Facebook. What do you think?

(This is not to say I will quit FB. Every weekend, I catch up with news. I will catch up with some of my FB friends’ posts too – of course, depending on what FB lets me see)