I was waiting for my flight. Thought it would be a great time to catch up with my daily birthday wishes. Tried calling as many people as I could. One of them was Neal. Unfortunately his number stated that it was not a working number any more.

Which was a shame I thought! Last year, I was away on vacation and I had wished him thru email. He had written back about his exciting work in Dell and the healthcare industry. The year before that was also an email exchange. Three years back, I had written to him from India. He had, I still remember, talked about his excitement in working in Dell and the healthcare industry.

I had no idea through all these years that he had been fighting cancer.

Not being able to get thru to him yesterday, I wrote a longer email to him from the plane. And I got a response an hour later. It was from his wife Donna. The email in front of me – that I stared for many minutes at – let me know that a few months after our last birthday email exchange, Neal finally succumbed to his cancer.

My head started spinning in the plane. There were too many flashbacks…. remembering those days over a decade and a half back when we worked together – Neal’s jovial nature, his energy level and above all his ability to keep a positive outlook in a rather acrimonious business culture we were in those days. I just could not believe he was no more.

Above all, I regretted that I wrote emails to him the last few years and did not talk to him to wish him. What a shame!

His wife ended her heartfelt email to me thusly – “My husband was a good man”

Unbeknownst to her, I was nodding my head sitting in the plane – “Yes, ma’m! Truer words have not been spoken”.

Neal Feldheim, as short as the road was that we traveled together, you made it immensely joyous for me.

May you be in peace…

“One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die”

No, this is not a nomination process for dads to dare to put pictures with kids to declare their love. I will leave that to mothers. 🙂
Jokes apart, this is an wonderful rendition thru some simple pictures by an Ukrainian lady explaining the unique relationship most dads and daughters share.
Very simple pictures. Very powerful images.

http://atchuup.com/dad-and-daughter-relationships-art/

I am not a movie person at all. Far from it. I can count on my fingers how many movies I have seen in the last twenty years. And I am pretty sure, I do not need a second hand for that.

But I have duly noted that there is a lot of energy in Hollywood (and outside – including but not limited to – my Facebook friends) about lack of diversity or worse, discrimination against non-white actors, writers, producers etc in terms of getting nominated for the Oscars. The best I understood of it – in spite of a plethora of non-white talent in just about every category, apparently, this is the second time in succession, no non-white candidate had been nominated.

Seems unfair. Seems something we – white and non-white – should be rightly angry about.

I am no movie buff, but it seems to me that these kind of things should be taken out of the hands of a few people who may knowingly or unknowingly become biased or even worse, corrupt! To start with, should we not avoid letting just a couple of guys decide the nomination? Methinks we should have tens – hundreds – no make that thousands of people who can participate in the nomination.

But the problem is the we cannot let ordinary people decide true talent. That would be like American Idol style text messaging going on to select a winner. Only people who are credible authorities in their field should be allowed to nominate. You know if you are a writer, then you can nominate only writers. But only after you have screen credits from at least two movies. For actors – since I do not think acting is that difficult 🙂 – we should make it a minimum three movies.

And we should also disallow any “gaming” of the system. We should let everybody put in five choices (in order of preference) – so that we capture the whole gamut – but no repeats allowed to unduly bias the choice. In fact, points should be taken away if anybody repeats a choice.

We should further have somebody overseeing that no aggressive campaigning is going on. We will call such a person a “czar” – because I love words where the leading “c” is silent. We need somebody with the track record of disqualifying nominations if they break rules.

Finally, who is going to do the counting? Lawyers are out. Supreme Court is out. While we are at it, let’s take Florida out too. We will get back to them when they finish counting their chads. Meanwhile, why not give it to some private company whose business is counting? Maybe an accounting firm? I like PriceWaterHouseCoopersLiebrandt because it completely messes up Microsoft spellcheck.

I think with that we will have a well democratized, unbiased process that is based on peer recognition. I think it is as simple as that.

Well, with one small problem. I found out after doing my research that the above is EXACTLY what is done!!!

Now I am confused. I know I am angry. I do not like the results. But I am not sure what I am angry with that gives rise to that result.

Am I the kind of guy that is supposed to vote for Trump? 🙂