NYC - The City That Wont Be the Same Again

The snow flakes didn’t come down on Christmas Eve last year, the frigid drafts didn’t blast through the concrete mazes, the temps didn’t let their guards down as the weather tycoons negotiated a last minute deal with the Imperial Sun - enough to turbocharge a fleet of million human engines to rev on the NYC streets. It was a perfect setup; the lull before the impending tsunami. The psychedelic Red and Green lights - visible even to the color blinds beamed from the towering Empire States and majestic Grand Centrals of the world; even the jaw-dropping modern marvel called the Occulus glittered in electric blues. Swells of festive spirits streamed through the famous 5th Ave, amalgamating in front  of the Rockefeller Center to behold the “The Christmas Tree” that goes up every year - a time honored NY Christmas tradition. What they were oblivious to at the time was whether this time honored tradition will hold up to its bargain in the Christmas of 2020. 

It was obvious that Humanity that paraded on the streets of NYC, much like rest of its global counterparts were aloof and blind-sighted by this looming catastrophe that had already planted itself in the unhygienic wilds of Wuhan. And so NYC cruised on the fast lane unaware of the head on collision with a fast mutating genome sequence that would decapitate its dogged spirit. Just like everyone we had no godly clue this city of dazzle and hope, immersed in festive joy was about to do a volte-face and turn into a den of darkness and despair. We had no inkling that the lively spirits of Big Apple would be converted into dreadful morgues teeming with graves. America was about to be fortified into a tormented bastion of disease and suffering and NYC would  emerge as its messy epicenter. Humans of New York were about to be slowly transformed into "Suffering" Humans of New York. May be, just may if the heavens and their generals had warned us of a dire disaster ready to strike in a few months time, we would have extended our short-changed reservations into a longer stay. Mankind would have scurried for cover but the Premier and Generals in China had other more sinister ideas. What is agonizingly evident now was joyously secretive back then. The alarming signs were not there yet, the whistle-blowers were crushed so the leaks never happened even as China surreptitiously allowed millions of its citizens to sneak out of their sovereign  limits into Europe and North America. And worse they roamed unchecked unknowingly passing their deadly inheritance to anyone in close proximity. And so we headed back to Maryland, ignorant of the unlikelihood of being back to the greatest city on the planet anytime soon. 

And then few months later, true to unspoken provenance, the pandemic arrived in NYC not from China but from Italy which by then had emerged as a major hotpot in Europe thanks to immense but unsolicited Chinese goodwill. Once it made landfall in NYC, it spread like wild fire, mutating its genome expressions from one human to another. What were once gleaming streets of NYC were now haunted streets flanked by ghostly skyscrapers; a possibility  only viable in someone's scary dreams now lay threadbare as a stark but tragic reality. The flashing billboards and psychedelic lights that used to beam down on vibrant tourists and local, now appeared dimmed. Amidst all this, NYC lifeline - its subways continued to operate but fast turned into a frightening den of infestation as more people jostled to find a seat in a reduced schedules and subsequently found their cellular defense getting breached. Thats when nostalgia wallops me with a thorny cane - this is the same subway I have taken for last two decades every time I visited NYC. Whether I was visiting my cousin who lived in a sprawling penthouse on 69th and 5th very close to Central Park or my other cousin who lived in Brooklyn. Even during my long engagement at JP Morgan Chase in Jersey City where I hustled between Maryland and New York, we would often hop on to the Path Train from Newport station at night and get down either at 33rd street to behold the Empire State building or disembark at the new WTC station to vast ramparts of the Giant Occulus, where a few minutes of leisurely stroll would put us in front of the mesmerizing views of Hudson. 

The moon-haloed walks along the shorelines of Hudson sprinkled with aspiring joggers and avid tourists would always invariably perk our moods. The long spells of fixated sky-gazing  would occasionally get broken by a passing patrol boat or a dinner cruse ship. The resplendent skyscrapers on either sides of Hudson would brighten up the floating firmament. But now perhaps it finds itself besieged in tattered ruins covered with blood and flesh of primates and sapiens. With second and third wave in sight, a brooding skepticism gives way to ill-perceived prognosis. Is NYC on the road to recovery. We still don't know. Fraught with all the deep scars and the fresh wounds stemming from irreparable losses the city suffered or harrowing recollections of their ordeals at home or hospitals, the city like any other would have emotional tales buried deep in their hearts. Something that would be to difficult to dislodge anytime soon. 

Having started my incubation period in the bosom of New York, the emotional connection has always been there and personal too. I was there when 9/11 happened,  taking a class of undergrads,  my faintest recollection is that I had scampered to my nearby rental apartment to watch the horror unfold in-front of my eyes on TV when the second tower went down. The recent protests on the streets of Manhattan against the gruesome murder of George Floyd showcased the strong resilient spirit that city prides on. In no uncertain terms, the city just like other bigger cities like Washington DC declared that it was ready to wage a war on the streets against any form of racial discrimination. The protests were occasionally marred by rioters and looters who black-faced the genuineness of these protests with their poor judgement of actions. What did worry me though was large congregations and gatherings for days and weeks that would have spread the virus many folds and the city that was still on the road to recovery may have suffered a setback once again. NYC has historically endured some of the worst human disasters in the last two decades but it has sprung back up just as quickly. 

Miracle Shake in a glass of Honesty!!!

What follows is a soul-stirring account of how a gesture of honesty pulled an improbable miracle.

As our train Rajdhani Express neared Delhi station only an hour behind schedule on a sun-baked dawn of 18th Feb, our moods found their much-needed alibis to stay perked up and our steps their much needed spring. The local porters had already jumped inside the bogey to scavenge on their willing preys as the train came to a final halt. One of them tag teamed us and got stuck into our luggage. He asked me to wait on the platform as he would assemble all the luggage there. The driver who came to pick us up completed the sanity-check formalities of sneaking under the seats to make sure none of the personal belonging was being left back for charity. Anyways after much rate haggling with one of the porters, we marched off the train station into the Ajmeri Gate VIP parking. Mother and sister were slow of the blocks and took little longer. After kissing goodbyes with the pesky porters, we finally headed back to our destination in Noida.

When I got home everything appeared normal until an hour later a realization of a missing luggage literally swamped me with a horrendous surge of repentance and guilt. Obviously the missing luggage contained my dearest shoes from abroad and a few pairs of them that would now cost a plenty to buy again. I went into a mini-depression of sorts and started vetting all possible excuses to find an unlikely scapegoat whom I can pass on the baton of guilt. How in the world did the driver miss out on that piece esp when he did his due diligence. Why did not my sis look underneath the seat - after all she was the occupant of the lower berth seat esp when I was watching the luggage on the platform. I was still mad at the driver for his slapdash diligence and wanted to teach him a lesson so I called him and told him, be ready for a trip to the station in the evening as we will try and catch this train on its way back and see if we can find that luggage. Such bogus train of thoughts appeared stuck in a traffic jam inside my jittery panicky mind.

While I was jostling with this traffic snarl, everyone around jumped on the consoling wagon that there was no point repenting and that by now the ragamuffins would have rummaged it out of its resting place and fled to their merrier pastures, and that there is nothing we can do now. Even if the rag-pickers were restricted entry since this was a premium train, the local caterers and coach attendants would have jumped on it at the first sighting and shipped it out to the local thief markets. And if by some tango of fate, such possibilities got evaded, the train would have retired to the loco-shed yards for sanitation proceedings and there was no point rushing back to the station. With a sense of resignation and sinking heart I began accepting the inevitable that those shoes were history and by now possibly have already been accorded their own state funeral. Ouch!!

While I was still miffed at this tragic loss and cursing myself for such carelessness in the hours that followed, I also started feeling some faint inner signals although not quite tuned in, goading me to give a 1% chance of a shot in the dark. I quickly brushed it aside as asinine and continued to curse myself some more. I then tried to shake this all of with some sleep and I did sleep some. The driver called around 4ish if I was still game for a trip back to the train station. By then any hopes of reclaiming the missing piece appeared to have dissolved in my dreams itself and my proclivity felt more subservient to my slumberous orientations I was already languishing in rather than a road outing to the train station with a p factor of 0.01. Hell yeah sleep it is. But then I checked with my mom whether I should give it a shot and appraised her of my own inner vibes that were earlier patting me to give it a try, she gave a resounding yes for a go ahead.

Lately when I embark on a long journey I have eased into this habit of reciting Durga Kavach which is like a shield that supposed to protect you from all quarters. So another feeling that had cropped up from some unknown recess of the subconscious at that very moment was that - in spite of this journey being blessed with such recital, the fate had preordained on the contrary and so how in the world did this happen. Betrothed to that my own inner vibes and my mother's response in the affirmative, I opted for the road trip to the train station. The driver was in splits at the prospect of even a slightest chance of recovery and was taking potshots on me through some aliases who happened to be other drivers who had guffawed at him for even thinking the impossible. I ignored his jibes and started launching mercy petitions of my own to the Goddess herself to see if she had some bandwidth available for a favorable judgement. As we drew closer, my faith in a divine intervention started taking some big leaps. We finally arrived at the station 10 minutes prior to the train's departure. Since we were squeezed for time, we took a chance by not buying the platform ticket, and hurried through the flight of stairs through platform No 16. Our train was parked on Platform No 14. We scampered towards our bogey A4 which was some distance from the flight of stairs we took on our way down. As soon as we reached our bogey, I instructed my driver to go and check underneath the berth we were assigned, but before he could hop on I asked him to wait as my glance fell on a bespectacled stocky figure perhaps in his mid 50s whose face looked very familiar. As I dug through my mnemonic graveyard, this face resurrected with lot more clarity. I approached him and queried - Aren't you the same guy who was on duty on this train that arrived Delhi this morning?. He looked puzzled but responded with a muffled "yes I am the Coach Attendant" after a slight pause. So I hastily inquired - "Did you come across a luggage bag  underneath berth No 37, I had a bunch of shoes in them?" - hoping that parting with such details would ensure credibility of the questioner (however to lend more credibility to my own claims I had already lapped up on my train tickets too just in case). The reply that came back next threw me in fits of bewildered delirium  - "Yes I found them and had kept them with me in the closet" and immediately rushed to take them out and handed it to me. He also narrated some previous tale of someone leaving their mobile phone behind and how this guy had kept it secure in his possession and waited for several hours before the owner showed up. This was unprecedented - heart stirring tales of honesty - stuff you only hear in legends. With a pinch of courage, teaspoon of faith and a glass of honesty my delicious "Miracle Shake" was ready to gulp it all down.
 

Totally overwhelmed and mouth-agape dazed in astonishment that souls like him are still gracing the confines of this world, my gratitude exploded with a cavalcade of choicest encomiums and heartfelt wishes. Still in awe of this conscientious soul I told him that noble gestures such as  these will go a long way in escorting him to higher positions of merit and morality and that such deeds find special entries in God's account registers with meritorious compensations of their own. Merely thanking him did not merit the greater gesture and while some can argue it was his duty to safeguard lost items in his jurisdiction, I still felt a pressing need to hand him some monies and so handed him couple of hundred bucks. My bleeding emotions at that point were still uncontrollable and so with ambitious thoughts anchored within, I took down his name, rank and his cell number in an effort to reach out to my own relatives/friends in the Indian Railways at higher positions who can do something meaningful for this unscrupulous coach attendant. Rarely have I indulged in such protracted farewell with strangers but this one deserved every second of it.

Anyways with an obvious grin on my face and feeling of great relief, we headed back with an unrestrained urge to surprise the naysayers back home who had written this miracle off in the first place. But then I don't blame them who would not have?

A moribund lover's resurrection

A lifeless soul once bolted
behind the estranged doors
of solitude and suffering...
on the deranged floors
hopeless and crawling...
his rudderless love-sails
many a times rocked
in oceans of muted mourning...

2006 of winter in flight
suddently his life swung
in hammocks of delight...
When the lady sizzled
in shimmering and white...
cupid-struck his heart
bemused and puzzled
when meteoric showers
of her love drizzled

Draped in gracious honors
with sweetened smile
on all corners
of melange and mellows...
arrived she on blown trumpets
and blasted bellows...
to drive away the
melancholy and the mole
from his forlorn life
that once lay scattered
in its forbidden hole.

When Life gives you Lemons - A coder's take

Another mind-bender - Oh Boy!! So I don't know why I am being asked these million dollar questions that I have no clue how to unlock. If I ever did wont I be a millionaire in the first place. That elusive bulb never flashes in the inner recesses and I am always left struggling trying to connect the dots. I wonder who at Storylane comes up with these kind of questions. Thanks Michael Landau for throwing this at me anyway.


Life in general mimics a chaotic system driven by the dynamics of skewed events on a routine basis. The events can be painful, unprecedented and sometimes bizarre that can drive you bonkers but they keep sling-shooting those lemons at ya really hard and every time one lands in your lap you are left wondering whether to chuck it back or squeeze the citric juices out of it. Either ways you gotta handle it. As I write this my mind is already voyaging back a decade when I was working on a paper on synchronizing chaotic systems such as Rossler attractors using Fuzzy Logic Controllers and I was just so enamored with the AI stack that it did not dawn on me to draw those corollaries with Life. May be it was not needed at that time. 14 years later I see them linearly overlapping well almost.

Synchronizing life's chaos is certainly not easy although its not difficult either. Those logic controllers are always at play to defuzzify the chaos in your life that gets stirred up your way by the masterful fate. Logic controllers in layman terms are brick-mortared with rules, rules and more rules. So when you start as a kid, your slate is clean, there are no rules but as you come through the ranks you are always establishing a rule-base  on which your future dealings with life will be determined - those rules could be a learning curve, a sad experience that has made you stronger, a knowledge driven exercise that is now in your arsenal to bank on. And on top of if you are spiritualist like me who constantly hones on his mental fortitude by virtue of meditation - the effects are unreal. The mind being a great wanderer is now more in control and can be redirected to focus on pressing issues than  loiter aimlessly forever. The toughest thing in this world is not the most complex algorithm to crack, it is to be able to reign in on your mind to focus, reflect and evaluate the problems that stumble out of your life's closet.

When a coder is assigned an application defect to troubleshoot, he attempts to address it in a very impersonal rationalized way, blanking out all assumptions that might deter his chances. Nothing is taken for granted. Similarly that same coder when solving life's problems will approach it no differently - analyze and debug the issue by sifting through the event logs, look for a pattern of events that he may have experienced in the past, isolate the problem and then either provide a temporary hack to stop the bleeding or work on a long term solution. And yet there will be occasions when the defect intentional or not may impact other stakeholders in the ecosystem created around you - could be a tiff with your colleague at work, a quarrel with your wife on not obliging her with a solitaire or a busted day at work. The chaos that emanates from such aberrations in life needs to be handled the way the coder does with a sense of clarity and calmness. If that defect was your own doing, accept it, fix the issue and move on. Don't let your false hubris come in the way of accepting your fault.

When the problems in life are fatalist in nature like a hurricane ravaged home or a severe accident that is life threatening or a health in tatters - akin to those server crashes from hung threads, transaction rollbacks or deadlocks on the database. But unlike the transaction recovery mechanism on servers, life does not offer any such instant recovery solution  while inflicting those wounds. The rehab journey in such situations could be sapping, debilitating and arduously long. The weak would crash into the abyss never to rise again.  The strong desires to rise again some through nerves of steel others through bundles of jubilant energy and yet a few through rigors of spiritual affiliations and faith-driven investments into that superior Unknown.

The intent here was not to bombard you with technical terms but to present an insight in a different perspective through the lenses of a coder and how he interprets, debugs and squeezes those lemons and gulps up his lemonade cocktail  - and I mean literally :-)

The Sacred word that binds them all

Hinduism and Christianity is poignantly very similar. What is Christ to Christians is Krishna to Hindus. The underlying tenet of both religions stems from metaphysics which preaches that there is one and only God which is in the form of light. The only way Hinduism differs with Christianity is in the path that leads to this Supreme God. Many enlightened souls (Aatma) of past and present, merged into this Supreme Soul (Parmatama) through years of spiritual meditation (not to confuse with New Age Yoga). Take for instance Paramhansa Yoaganand ( Autobiography of a Yogi), an enlightened soul who achieved self realization through years of practicing the teachings of Lord Krishna in Bhagwad Gita known as "Kriya Yoga" (Kriya means Action and Yoga means "the state where you unite with the Divine"). Essentially in a nutshell it means - by constantly doing something good, you are progressing towards divinity. From the spiritually enlightened lenses, "doing something good" is far more than physical action, it is the mental action that you perform within by practicing any spiritual methodology for e.g. locked in a lotus posture you are honing into the Christ consciousness (region between your eyes) or silently chanting "OM" or "AUM" "AMEN" in Christianity, "AMEEN" in Islam that will eventually have far reaching consequences.

Buddhism is an offshoot of Hinduism which is very clearly evident by how Lord Buddha attained spiritual enlightenment. He was born into a Hindu family who left the palatial pleasures in search of God. When he was finally spiritually enlightened, it happened in the form of a blinding light that took all over him and thus he merged into the Supreme.

The essence of Bhagwad Gita and thus Hinduism is, "Know thyself (yourself) by performing Karma or Kriya" which in this case is spiritual meditation and you will know God. No one religion is better or worse than other, if one religion can take you to God, it is the best for you. Ultimately what matters is attaining that state of spiritual enlightenment or self-realization, without which you will never reach God.

As for drawing parallels among the three religions we are talking about, the single most powerful thread that binds them all is in the commonality of the the sacred word across these religions AUM for Hindus, Amen for Christians and Ameen for Muslims. This is the sacred word from where the universe is believed to be originated. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (John 1:1 KJV)".

A Techie survives - Hard work or Talent

A programmer who has survived a dot-com bust of 2001 and a severe recession that threatened to relapse into the The Great Depression of the 1920s during the past decade will tell you they have done reasonably well. But it was not easy at all - you had to keep pushing yourself to the limits and beyond with tenacity, iron-clad will and sheer hard work to keep pace with your naturally talented colleagues, hiring and spending freeze, mass layoffs and also in general with the technology in a state of constant flux. There were endless days with minimal sleep trying to scrape through those ever-elusive deadlines that even had greater impact on health and social engagements. And then there were days when it was a do or die situation when the client production system would be down impacting their business and all eyes from the CIO to your Direct Report fixated right on you and you under tremendous pressure to deliver.

It is one thing to be solving a complex problem on your own and totally opposite when that complex problem is under the constant hammer of surveillance. The neural synapses in a state of panic go into a huddle mustering all they can to troubleshoot the issue and save your client from losing millions. Barring an odd failure here and there, when you manage to bail them out on numerous occasions, you start to command their respect and become their go to guy. While this comes with the territory and there are so many techies out there who have have gone through the same rigors and probably did better, it surely has been a satisfying experience for me on a personal level. Recently I got an achievement letter for being the most billable consultant in my company last year by a stretch along with a $200 gift certificate. While this may not sound a big deal, these small tokens of appreciation keep you going.

A high-profile entrepreneur Jonathan Gheller (CEO Mixtent) asked me on Storylane - What is my greatest talent? How do you use it? - I would say I am not so sure (may be knack for problem solving) but I do know that I have bundles of sheer perseverance and grit, that never give-up attitude that has bailed me out on countless occasions. And on those occasions when I have sent emails out at 3 or 4 in the morning notifying your VPs and CIOs that you did it and their praising rejoinders on a Job well done - that sense of accomplishment has been unparalleled to date.

Even the most exciting talents in the world are invariably wasted sans hard work.

 

Dilemma of an IT Architect

At a time when my IT career appears to be stuck in the second gear, a few questions have been springing up lately in my mental corridors. The dreaded of them all is – Have I hit the colossal wall of career stagnation? Being an IT architect have I run up the steps of the corporate IT ladder? Do I have to settle for this for the rest of my career lifespan?

In a typical IT hemisphere, graduating to a Solution Architect or an Enterprise Architect comes with some healthy perks and a degree of job satisfaction depending on what kind of work you are involved in. If you are an Architect in Google or Amazon, clearly you have your hands full and you may be working on the next big thing like a Google Glass or bolstering Amazon’s Cloud offering. Technology dances on your fingertips while you conceptualize and model the products. Breaking new ground and constantly moving towards that finish line adds to the daily thrills along with the pure job satisfaction. The innovation quotient keeps you on your toes all the time. However there are times when Solution Architect role in another Fortune 500 company may lack that excitement buzz. While you may be engaged in some cool stuff like modeling and automating a mortgage business process on an IBM middleware, your innovativeness is hampered by the scope of the project and the choice of the enabler. Even a slightly aging technology starts to hamper your own growth as you see your Google peers hurtle by you.

Before I start digressing too much, the point I am trying to put across is when you are already positioned as an Architect, there is hardly any room to move up the ladder, and when you are stuck working on the same platform/technology for couple of years, your skill-sets start to depreciate and eventually become dated. This sense of discomfiture leaves you wondering – Jeez!! What do I need to do to get my career throttle into the third or fourth gear?

Should one move out into a parallel role in an innovation-centric work culture where the best brains huddle up to write the next Dropbox or an Open Table. Or should one fork out into a managerial position by pursuing an MBA. Even if you land a manager position in some company will you keep up with the agile driven projects, tight deadlines and managing the allotted budget. Bottom line you are sort of severed from the technology landscape specially designing and coding apps. Or should one branch out into an entrepreneurial role by engendering a business idea that you have the conviction to launch as your startup knowing fully well, finding that ever-elusive angel investor might feel like climbing the Everest.

Some of the counter-questions boomerang back - Can you handle the rigors of sustaining a startup, work the long hours, be ready to sacrifice your social outings and ride the storm out during the ebbs with your coworkers/co-founders. Or can you pay for your MBA program and land a decent job Will it bring a sense of closure? Will you not miss writing some beautiful code on your favorite IDE.

The answers to these myriad of options and the dilemma surrounding them will eventually come from within knowing fully well who you are and what you are capable of.