Thoughts About “The Great Indian Kitchen” Movie
I love the Netflix series, The Crown. In the recent season, an episode really stuck with me. Margaret Thatcher is known as the iron lady of U.K. She did many things that people didn’t like, but she was very strong-willed in getting things done. I don’t even know the political nuances of what was wrong with Margaret Thatcher, but that is not my point.
In a scene, Thatcher is having dinner at home with her family. Her husband, her son and her daughter. Thatcher is the prime minister of the UK. But at home, she cooks by herself, and she pampers her son. Her son does ask something in an entitled manner, and she acknowledges it and gets it done. This really pisses off her daughter.
It may be fictional. But that scene is so true, and I have seen it in many families in India. Patriarchy is not enforced only by men. Male chauvinism is not an exclusive territory for men. Many women enforce patriarchy in the family.
(Another scene I was reminded of is from the movie Django Unchained. Samuel Jackson is black, but he enforces slavery. I am digressing.)
I got reminded of all these emotions about patriarchy, male entitlement after watching a fantastic Indian movie, The Great Indian Kitchen. We all are easily lured by the taste of food, its authenticity, and the elaborate processes of preparing Indian food. But this movie shows the insider view of a kitchen and what it takes for a woman to manage it. Not just cooking tasty food. Doing the dishes, managing the kitchen, taking care of household chores. The stench of the food waste, the perennial leaky faucet and a boatload of mini-chores to prepare a meal. It is truly a full-time job for which no credit or salary is being paid. Instead, women become invisible. If the mother-in-law is not there, the wife steps in. If the wife is not available, there is a sister. If she is not there is another woman. In the name of family values, and tradition, the male psyches and patriarchy can crush women’s aspirations and dreams.
I wondered how different I am from a typical Indian male, who pines for a “housewife”, who is submissive and doesn’t question hierarchy. I am truly lucky and fortunate in this aspect. Even during my school days, my mom and dad never shunned involving my brother or me in doing household chores and doing basic cooking to look after ourselves. My mom was a working woman, which was not usual in the middle-class milieu we were brought up. So I have never had an inkling of condescension for household chores or cooking or doing dishes. Maybe it was a blessing I didn’t live in the traditional joint family with our grandparents, uncles and aunts, which always casts women to certain roles and duties. This mentality helped me manage my household when I was living away from my parents for 15 years. I never understood or resonated with the Indian male’s need for “a simple housewife”. I have always been attracted to women with aspirations be it career or being an entrepreneur or being an artist. Someone who doesn’t want to get slotted as a “housewife”.
But watching this movie was like a big punch in the gut. It is a great wake-up call to count my blessings and rethink how I want my son to be when he grows up.
If watching a 90-minute movie can kindle so much of thoughts and discussions and talks with my wife, I call it the best movie of 2021 and a time very well spent.
Uncanny Valley and Garbage Language
Recently I read the book, Uncanny Valley written by Anna Wiener. I picked it up because of some rave reviews and it was featured in many top-10 non-fiction books of 2020.
It is a memoir about a person who works in the publishing industry of New York venturing into the tech scene. She tries her hand at a flailing tech startup in New York. She then moved to San Francisco. She works for Mixpanel as customer support and then quits to join Github. She seems to strike a chord and befriend Patrick Collison of Stripe. She opines a lot about the scene of SFO. She about Tyler Cowen, Julia Galef, and various people and shares her view.
The book is very well written. The author seems to be a down-to-earth person but she seems like a bickering person. Someone who is an outsider with some strong views and couldn’t come to digest the changes in Silicon Valley. I could not resonate with a lot of the problems she was facing.
I had the same problem with a graphic novel-based memoir, Good Talk. I could understand their point of view but I don’t resonate or agree with the writer’s judgment. I totally didn’t understand the point of why this book was celebrated so much. Is it because she is against the grain and criticizing Silicon Valley? Or is she an insider in the New York publishing coterie who knows how to market and distribute a book well? I persisted through the book to find out views that are something new and that are not already acknowledged by the intellectuals of Valley.
She complains a lot about the garbage language that the tech startups in San Francisco use. She might have taken a snapshot of that and captured it in her book. But I think she misses the point of emergence. Language evolves, morphs, and grows. Personally, I might not like using the term “Let’s double click on that” or “Let’s pin that down for a moment” but what is wrong with it?
When I was new to the startup scene, I was curious about the term “copy text” or “copywriter”. I was baffled at that term and used to ask what the fuck it was. But slowly learned what it is and I see that it’s a remnant of the publishing and advertising industry. I might have hated that term for a day or so.
My point is: in my son’s generation terms like “outro” are commonly used and people get it. We all are aware of the introduction music or intro title. But people simply get that the “outro” is related to the end of the video and move forward. They don’t ruminate about this term and classify it as a garbage language. Many people still are finicky about using the term “pre-pone” and emphasize using the term “advance” or “reschedule”. But the joke is on us, as people who “prepone”, the “outro” music is moving forward and do give a damn about me and likes.
Vulnerability - a Superpower
As a techie, the word “vulnerability” brings a lot of negative context into it. When I was a developer, the security teams would raise critical issues to address the vulnerability problems. It was a no-brainer for my team to address them.
Coming from that background, I found it puzzling that “Vulnerability is a superpower” from the likes of Brene Brown and others.
I first encountered it in a different context in a book, “Five Dysfunctions of a Team”. The writer said that being vulnerable brings the teams together. It didn’t resonate with me at all and I was baffled at it. I thought the writer was using the wrong term for sincerity or honesty.
Then I came across Joe Hudson’s VIEW sessions. Joe says that you should be vulnerable to people and blah blah.
It was then I started to dig deep into it. I found an excellent writer, a researcher about shame, Brene Brown. She has written and spoken a lot about it. Her works were the biggest find for me in 2020.
(Will write what I understood and where I am with respect to vulnerability in the next posts)
Lessons In Personal Finance 2020
I learnt a few key lessons in personal finance in 2020. I didn’t actively seek to become better in personal finance. Luck and happenstance pushed me to know more and take some action on this front.
Here are my key lessons:
- Power of Compounding
Enough has been written in the FinTwitter and other finance blogs about this. But trust me, this is truly the most important lesson I have learnt. Money like many things in life compounds at a different level. There is no right rule on when to cash out. It depends a lot on your life situation, but if you do the basics right, be patient and give time to do its job of compounding, you can see phenomenal results.
(…to be continued with lessons from inflation, insurance and investing)
- Understand Inflation
If I say that every ten years or so, I take half of your money from the bank account and burn it, will you be happy? But that is exactly what inflation does to our money saved in a fixed deposit for a long period of time. (Of course, the bank will try to give paltry interest rates to match the inflation rates.)
There is a reason why the crypto movement is taking place and has strong views on fiat currency and central banks.
But as a normie, I need to understand that inflation is around 7% to 8% and we have absolutely no control over it. Governments and central banks may decide to print more money for various reasons. But we are part of the system and hard-earned money goes through the problem of devaluation because of this.
Whatever decisions we make with our money, let’s keep this basic lesson about inflation in mind. All the asset allocation or diversification strategy has to take this into consideration. This is not to say that you cannot have money in fixed deposits in banks. You will need to have some money which can be easily taken out for the emergency reason. But if the bank deposit is your main personal finance or wealth creation strategy, then it is a huge problem.
(… to be continued)
Fear Triangle - Q&A Edition
Jason asked a few questions in my post about Fear Triangle. I want to ruminate about it in this post.
I came to know about Fear Triangle through Joe Hudson in the Art of Accomplishment post. He frames it as Shame, Blame and Guilt. Interestingly, I found this in my mythology rabbit hole and used very well by the psychotherapists
The main question was this:
What happens after you jump out of the fear triangle? What’s the name of the role you become (compared to hero, villain or victim)?`
(Caveat: I am just an enthusiast, not an expert. I am trying to understand my emotions better and take care of myself.)
I think the purpose of the fear triangle is to understand its manifestations. If you are feeling shame/blame/guilt act like a hero/villain/victim, it is highly possible that there is some fear that needs to be addressed or thought about in detail.
As human beings, we don’t really jump out of this triangle. In a minute, I may feel all three feelings (shame/blame/guilt) on various things. But the moment I recognise there is fear, something changes in the manifestation. Joe has some good exercises and a mental framework for handling this. His suggestion is to “love your fear”. Because your fear is not your enemy. It is an evolutionary instinct to protect you from something.
(There are times when you say fuck-off to that fear. But more on that on another day)
Religion and Me
I consider myself an atheist. To be precise, I am a non-believer. I love rational explanations. I accept my ignorance and move forward and be curious. But nowadays I think that you can be religious and atheist at the same time.
I love the power of religion. As an institution, religions have survived centuries, evolved and still impact people’s lives. In India, there are more than 30 million gods and every group has their own favourites. People talk about the myths of Krishna or Rama like they are alive and contemporaries. This is precisely what makes me attracted to religion.
The power of a good story. Every religion has some fantastic stories associated with it. Be it a messiah walking on water or a god who can help churn an ocean of milk to get nectar. These myths are crucial for building a fan following.
Fans are really important because we humans are social creatures. We want to belong. To belong to a set of people who share our views or stories or values. We derive meaning in our lives by belonging to the community. It is crucial because the people in the community see us and accept us for the value of the community.
For a moment, we can replace religion with some other words like “low-carb-eating”, “vegan”, “iPhone users”, “feminists” or “Roam app users”. It is the same as a religion. A group of fanatical (in a good way) users who believe in something and argue for it. Yuval Harari says that everything is a story. Religion, nationalism, human rights and so on.
But it is the story that gives meaning to human beings. Because without the stories, we are clueless and we lack that basic instinct to bond with each other.
Personally, I love the stories in mythology. Especially, as a non-believer, I find it fascinating to observe the similarities across cultures/religions to construct a world and let humans live in peace. Ironically, we lose our peace in terms of these stories, which may be a good point to ponder over in another post.