Being Unequal

The work permit journey in America is one I had known and endured for a long time. The news that came over the weekend about the $100K fee got me thinking like many others, about what this means for expat Indian professionals and their families. Former NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant reacted by suggesting that the policy, which restricts global talent from entering the US, would stifle American innovation but benefit India. According to Kant, the restrictive measure creates an opportunity for India’s top engineers, doctors, scientists, and innovators to fuel growth and innovation within Indian tech hubs such as Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, and Gurgaon.

Kant believes that with the US “slamming the door” on foreign talent, the next wave of research labs, patents, startups, and technological advancements will be centered in India’s rapidly growing urban technology centers. Global tech giants who already have a strong presence in these cities could see a surge in local talent and innovation as highly skilled professionals opt to stay in or return to India rather than pay the exorbitant visa fee or face uncertainty in the US market.

This would be absolutely wonderful if tethered to reality for anyone who is adversely impacted by the policy. I did return to India as a single mom decades ago and tried my very best to make it work for me and J. I had the unwavering support of my parents and was fortunate to find a job in large global company in the midst of the dotcom bust. Considering my circumstances, I could not have been luckier. Notwithstanding, I was not able to last more than a year. Life on work visa in America was extremely complicated and catastrophically limiting for my career given my responsibilities as a single mother. I endured it lacking better options, specially back home in India.

If even a small part of Kant's claims were true back in the day, I would have stayed in the country of my birth at least until I had recovered from the most bruising event of my life. I simply could not for more reasons than I can count. This is the reality I have known and lived. To this day, young people seek any and all options outside India because what is on offer at home does feel enough in any dimension. Kant talks a big game that aims to appeal to "patriotism" and "duty" without real value for the person who is being asked to make many great things happen in India. The message is that America is clearly rejecting you so stop complaining, come home, and brace to fight the ceaseless uphill battles that it takes to survive.

Starting from approximately the same place several decades ago, China has rapidly developed a world-class ecosystem for high-level employment in technology, research, and manufacturing, investing heavily in STEM education, modern infrastructure, and innovation hubs that support large-scale domestic job creation for millions of graduates. Major cities such as Beijing, Shenzhen, and Shanghai rival global tech capitals, with local firms offering competitive salaries, advanced research opportunities, and robust career advancement, ensuring that Chinese talent has significant incentive to remain and thrive within the country. Government policies, including STEM-targeted “K” visas and expansive funding, further consolidate China’s reputation as a top destination for both domestic and international skilled workers.

Conversely, while India produces massive numbers of STEM graduates, its domestic job market remains less developed, with limited high-end opportunities concentrated in IT services and a continued reliance on global outsourcing. India’s skilled workforce often seeks opportunities abroad due to underemployment, skills mismatch, and slower growth in advanced manufacturing and research sectors within the country. Despite national initiatives aiming to strengthen local industries, India’s diaspora continues to power global tech economies, contrasting sharply with China’s increasing success in retaining and engaging its own top talent domestically.

Rental Grandma

I had lost both my grandmothers well before the most turbulent years of my life. My mother is not able to provide what J seeks in a grandmother - this is has been true from the time she stopped being a toddler. Time stayed still for my parents but moved on for both of us. I am not able to bridge the gap that can resulted in the process. 

Reading about grandmas for rent in Japan made me think this would great to have around the world. The elderly could feel useful in the world, see that they were making a valuable contribution and all of us who ever needed a grandma and did not have access to one could benefit. I am sure my mother makes a fine grandma for the kids in her immediate surroundings who are now J's age. There has been no loss of context or cultural disconnect that grow between her and J as she visits to her home in America declined over the years, J got busier. The person she knew best was a toddler and that is what she anchors to hopelessly.

According to the OK Obaachan website, they have been getting a lot of requests for an incredibly wide range of uses, such as teaching how to cook, mediating family disputes, writing things with nice penmanship, and babysitting. They are often also called upon to act as pillars of emotional support and have been requested by men planning to come out as gay to their parents to be present when it happens.

From what I have observed, the hardest part of aging is the feeling of irrelevance. That can take a person who is in good physical and mental health, into someone who is experiencing all around struggles with aging. Maybe a service like this can help reverse some of that. 

Teaching Chemistry

As someone who loved chemistry in high school and did not feel like that love was returned at all, this interview with Morten Meldal was very heartening to read. The fault is not with folks like me who might have gone on to have a professional life that involved chemistry but had no shot. Everything was made to feel impossibly hard and out of reach.

One of the things that I would really like if we could make chemistry part of the general education and have pleasure-driven teaching already from the first grades in chemistry, visualizations and so on. 

Pleasure-driven means that it should be very easy to consume for the students. Not all students come to school with equal ability to make abstractions or see images and so on. But if we make the images for them, if we are able to show this imaginary world as if it was something they could really see. To make cartoons of our chemistry world in order to make them understand this and not invoke any of all these calculations that you often have in chemistry at any early point but just let them be free and let them watch instead of let them use in the beginning. I think we could really reach far with that.

That was nowhere close to my experience in high-school and from what I could tell it fell far short for J as well. She was good at chemistry and had some natural feel for it unlike me but that did not help her dive as deep into it as she might have wanted. Watching chemistry in action, learning the stories about what it makes possible in the world starting as early as elementary school would be such an amazing gift for kids.

Want Most

I've never had the need for the Instant Pot in my kitchen but have gifted a few over the years to young people starting out on their own. I've been told by atleast a couple of them that it is the most useful gift they ever got. It really does work as advertised and a big fit with the target consumer for a reason. Notwithstanding it has filed for bankruptcy. For the average person, the logic does not add up at all.

From the point of view of the consumer, this makes the Instant Pot a dream product: It does what it says, and it doesn’t cost you much or any additional money after that first purchase. It doesn’t appear to have any planned obsolescence built into it, which would prompt you to replace it at a regular clip. But from the point of view of owners and investors trying to maximize value, that makes the Instant Pot a problem. A company can’t just tootle along in perpetuity, debuting new products according to the actual pace of its good ideas, and otherwise manufacturing and selling a few versions of a durable, beloved device and its accessories, updated every few years with new features. A company needs to grow.

One might ask why a company needs to grow so compulsively. There is a world where Instant Pot never sold to private equity. Instead of chasing mass-market domination, it kept a lean team, made modest production runs, and treated its millions-strong Facebook community as its main sales channel.

No sprawling product lines, no desperate holiday discounts. The revenue engine wasn’t endless new cookers but high-margin accessories, recipe subscriptions, and colorful limited editions, something like KitchenAid’s iconic mixers. Manufacturing scaled only to meet predictable demand, avoiding the boom-and-bust cycle of the pandemic.

Profits were steady, if unspectacular. The brand stayed beloved, its cult intact, quietly thriving as a durable, slow-growing kitchen essential. In this alternate timeline, Instant Pot didn’t need to be everywhere. It just needed to be indispensable to the people who already swore by it.

Mismatched Pace

The phenomenon this NYT article describes has existed for a long time and did not materialize just now. It is not an American phenomenon either. Most of the men of my father's generation that I know are very much the product of said "mankeeping". They disintegrate physically and emotionally once the wife dies. In the overwhelming majority of of cases, the men had outsourced social connection with largely including stay in touch with children and grandchildren to the wife. They just needed the highlight reel that the wife would provide and go on with their lives without having to invest in keeping and building a bunch of relationships in life and the messiness that accompanies it. Having been the primary bread-winner and provider for the family, it seems to think this is a fair division of labor.

Dr. Ferrara, who researches male friendship at Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and Dylan Vergara, a research assistant, published a paper on mankeeping in 2024, after investigating why some men struggle to form close bonds — a growing and well-documented issue.

In a 2021 survey, 15 percent of men said they didn’t have any close friends, up from 3 percent in 1990. In 1990, nearly half of young men said they would reach out to friends when facing a personal issue; three decades later, just over 20 percent said the same.

Dr. Ferrara found that “women tended to have all of these nodes of support they were going to for problems, whereas men were more likely to be going to just them,” she said. She sees “mankeeping” as an important extension of the concept of “kinkeeping” — the work of keeping families together that researchers have found tends to fall disproportionately on women. 

I would imagine modern men continue to be this way because of what they observed the men in the lives do growing up. The conditions have changed dramatically for the women in the meantime. They are equal in every way and often better. So they have no capacity left to mankeep. 

Understanding Meaning

The news out of Kolkata is generally depressing. All my family and friends who live there see it as hopeless place where things are all but certain to grow worse over time. My friend S was telling me the the other day that speaking Bengali outside Bengal can be problematic these days so many choose to not to speak it outside their homes. Somehow that conversation triggered a the need to watch a Bengali movie and its been a really long time since I did that. Happened upon this one which is ironically a long ode to Kolkata. Some people I knew back in the day would have shared the sentiments the characters in the movie expressed about the city - that it has a heart and soul, that it grows on you over time. Those same people have turned indifferent or pessimistic now which is particularly sad to see. The movie featured two of my favorite Tagore songs, my mother would play them on vinyl and often sang along. 

The words form my earliest memories of the language. I was too young then to understand what they meant but could tell that they moved her deeply. It was usually in the quiet mid-afternoons when she was done with her domestic chores and had some time to herself. She seemed to be far away in her mind though she was physically with me. Looking back it was my first time I recognized even without knowing it that she had a world that she'd never allow anyone into. Anyone who was foolish enough to try would only end up disappointed. Watching the movie was an interesting experience in the range of emotions it triggered for me even though the storyline was too contrived and overboard all around for my taste. The protagonist is checks every box of the Indian woman to the point of absurdity. They hope to humanize her by showing that she enjoys her alcohol and drives fast - but for that she is the modern day Sita. 

Visiting Parents

I haven't visited my parents in Kolkata often enough and definitely never stayed long enough. Every time I've been there I was glad to have checked the obligation off my list and get back home. This essay is very relatable to me:

.. our relationship to our parents’ homes is a complicating factor. Going back to our childhood homes as adults is inevitably a collision. This collision is kind of fun for some of us: We get to alienate our partners by regressing a bit while enjoying the indulgence and shared eccentricities of our families. Others experience this collision as disorienting and lonely. Was I ever really at home here? Do these people know me at all? Would they rather we just FaceTimed instead? There are very often new people living with our aging parents, people we sometimes don’t know very well. Even as adult children, it can feel odd to spend time with our parents in houses that can’t accommodate us anymore. It can be tempting to feel sorry for ourselves, as if something that was promised us is being withheld.

In my case, the place I am going to is not my childhood home. My parents bought this house many years after I had left home. I was already a mother by then. Maybe it is better this way but not by much. I do get the sense, my parents are satisfied with the video calls that happen often enough and like their own space to be as they have grown used to being. My presence produces a disruption in their flow that is harder and harder for them to deal with as they grow older.