Operations, Work, & Life
I am dating myself here, Kirk Douglas, a Hollywood figure I admired, passed away at the age of 103. Here is an obituary in the Guardian. I really miss his old-fashioned masculinity. I adored his longevity and gracefulness in gentle aging. Anyway, the heartless metronome of time beats on, and as a sign of aging, the number of heroes I had is dwindling fast.
Here are 6 of my favorite Kirk Douglas movies…
Leave a CommentLast July, I took the high speed train from Shanghai to Beijing. The trains in China were comparable to the Shinkansen in their speed and comfort. In the business class, the seats could apparently recline flat. Petite hostesses hushed by, offering bottles of water, and serving snacks and local juice brands. As the train hurtled forward, I stared outside the glass windows from my lofted perch of elevated rail-line. I saw divided highways and undivided farmlands, with their almost-prairie looks. Towns that zipped by the window, looked like well kempt oversized matchboxes arranged carefully in a quadrilateral.
Leave a CommentNever meet your heroes. So goes the saying.
For they’re sure to disappoint you, some say.
The advice lives on because some men found their heroes to be made of clay. The exalted heroes they had imagined, with the glow of monochrome Clark Gable luminescence were suddenly all drab and bored. Their imagined heroes were no more. When your heroes fade in such a way, I suppose that what transpires is not just a failure of a single hero, but the collapse of an entire model of heroism.
Yet, there are heroes that perfectly demolish the myth above. Giant souls who expand the horizons of our thought: They prove that genius, humility, and compassion can all at once reside in our frail bodies.
Leave a CommentJA Baker’s The Peregrine exemplifies the best in nature writing. Short staccato sentences set the mis-en-scene and longer descriptions zoom in like a telescope into the plumes and colors of birds, with precision and care. The writing teaches us how to write interesting papers, to expose the brilliance of underlying ideas, even when bounded by rote “rules”.
Leave a CommentAn interesting perspective about growing up in an erstwhile British colony, is that we fail to truly absorb how illogical the spellings and pronunciations in English are. Sanskrit, and a number of Indian languages such as Malayalam and Marathi, possess a long history of codified grammar and detailed pronunciation. So, reading and pronunciation in many Indian languages is almost wysiwig. This is of course not true for English. It is hard to see know the pronunciation differences in words (say, tough, cough and dough) before hearing them.
Leave a CommentSupply chain duels, like wars of conflict, are now increasingly global. Walmart and Amazon are entrenched in a long fight to win over e-commerce market in India.
It has been about 16 months from when Walmart acquired Flipkart to make inroads into India. Now, Walmart in India is making a pivot to B2B.
Leave a CommentA look at how service jobs are changing the nature of US workforce. In Dec 2019, there were more women than men in the workforce in the United States. I briefly ponder why this is the case.
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