When I Was From Mexico....book thoughts on Greencard Warrior by Nick Adams

"Where are you from?" a friendly old man asked me in a Walmart in Minnesota, circa 2005. "India," I said. "Where is that?" "Near China. In Asia," I said assuming he knew where China was. "You are not Asian," he said, still smiling. "Yes, I am." "No. I don't think so. You are not Asian. I know a lot of Asians," he said, not very friendly anymore. This was annoying. I suspected he was concluding that I was an illegal immigrant not ready to reveal my home country. "You are from Mexico, right?" "Yes!!" I said with a smile and walked out not sure what to make of the bizarre conversation. This was one of my first experiences of being a foreigner. I later realized I did look Hispanic :D

In the book Greencard Warrior, Nick Adams is an Australian who faces immigration challenges that can thwart his career and financial standing in the US due to a visa issue. Though the book is entertaining and partisan (Nick is a conservative commentator), it mostly details the procedural issues. It has some interesting drama due to alleged mistreatment of his case by a liberal Vice Counsel in Australian US Consulate.

But for high skilled immigrant applicants from countries like India, these procedural issues are ten times harder and cause huge unexpected changes in life. A recent example is of a neurologist couple and their family who lead a well-settled life and attend to hundreds of patients are asked to leave the country on a short notice because of a documentation error in their immigration papers. They have been living in the US for 15 years and have been stuck in the Greencard backlog for a decade.

One of the good things about the book was to bring to the notice of the Trump administration, the bureaucratic issues with the legal immigration process. Hopefully, this is addressed soon.

Failing Fast As A Writer - book thoughts on The Author Startup

Full-time book authors were generally considered bearded leftist losers who always wore cheap footwear, large chequered shirt and hung out in chalk smelling classrooms of local public schools to talk about some latest book from an eminent author who had succeeded because of political support. Nowadays, full-time authors sport chic beards, wear expensive sports coats and are found typing away on their Macbooks in cozy coffee shops.

I have failed in many things but haven't failed as a published author yet. I was told that publishing a book through Amazon was a piece of cake. The Author Startup is a quick read to walk you through the process of writing a digital book, publishing it and marketing it on Amazon. The essence of the book - everything else can be figured out and is not complicated, but you need to have a compelling story to tell. Takeaway - fail fast fail often as a writer...quickest road to success.

Fantastic Story Of Sad Success... book thoughts on Hatching Twitter

I do fear success (material).

Not just my success but success of my friends and relatives, the institutions I volunteer with, the causes I stand for. What happens when you achieve the American Dream, the Indian Dream or the Chinese Dream? Would you be able to handle success or would you let it rule you leading you to a path that will brings down everyone? Especially close relationships?

Good people get together, become friends and accidentally create Twitter. But as Twitter becomes popular, friends disintegrate, playing politics, finally throwing out the core team members. This is an awesome story captured beautifully by Nick Bilton from its very humble starts, ecstatic moments covering Oprah's first tweet, race between Ashton Kutcher & CNN for a million followers plus many others and it's corporate politics that reminds me of House of Cards.

Delightful read!!!

Staying With Sheryl...book thoughts on Option B

It was a betrayal. I hated Sheryl Sandberg when she moved from Google to Facebook (though I was never employed by Google or did not own any of it's stocks then. I always loved Google for it's products).

Then I read Lean In. That is a stellar book to be read by every career woman and man. I did develop a great respect for her.

Option B is a good read to follow Sheryl's life after the tragic death of her husband Dave. There are few great points in the book about handling personal tragedy as well as communicating with someone who has had personal tragedy recently.

Good book but will need to like Sheryl to stay with it till the end

Sitting At A Corner Of The Party Room... Book Thoughts on The Introvert's Way

"She is an introvert. She is a loser," I had overheard a conversation when I was a kid about a distant cousin of mine. I swore never to become an introvert.

But then I realized during college that some people are great charmers and life of parties. I could never be them. Clearly, they were extroverts and I was not. So, was I a loser?

In The Introvert's Way, Sophia Dembling enlightens us about the way introverts source their energy compared to extroverts. This has got nothing to do with shyness, depression or fear of public speaking and has no correlation to success or failure. Introverts are inherently stimulated by lower sensations to brain compared to extroverts. Introverts comprise of 50% of the population in the US, the country that prides itself for extrovertedness.

The book is a good primer for those who consider introvert behavior to be a weakness. But, the solutions are not comprehensive enough to show a path forward. I would highly recommend Susan Cain's Quiet for a stellar book on identifying successful traits in introvert behavior.

An interesting point that I came across in Upstarts - book on AirBnB and Uber. The venturecapitalists in Silicon Valley look for introverts to bet their money on, as most successful startups (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon) were founded by introverts and CEOs of biggest tech companies (Satya Nadella, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai) are all introverts.

PS: One can never 'not become an introvert' or extrovert as I had planned during childhood.

Trivial Adventures Of A Failed Artist

(My Ice Breaker speech at Memorial City Toastmasters)

The girl stood there, right in the middle of the park. She was wearing a black top and a short, black skirt. It was a hot and sunny day. I walked up to her and said, “I have always liked you as a friend. It is going to be different now.” She smiled and hugged me.

She was an attractive girl but I was very uncomfortable. One - It was a hot day and I was in a dark suit embraced by this girl who was wearing black. Two – Her boyfriend’s bodyguard was standing only a little distance away, observing our every move. Fortunately, just then the director of the movie screamed ‘CUT IT’. Next he said, “Splendid. It is a good shot. Let’s wrap it up.”

She was the female lead of the movie in which I was the male lead. This was a movie scene being shot in Bangalore, India, the city where I was born and raised.

The question is ‘How did I get there?’

You may have heard of stories of a lot of actors who struggled their way to become movie leads. For me, it was a little different. One evening during college, I was hanging out with a friend on a suburban street when a man drove past us. He stopped and came back. He apologized for interrupting us and after introductions; he asked me if I wanted to act in the movies. I was surprised. I asked him, ‘What is the part?’ He said, ‘You will be the hero of the movie’. I thought he was crazy. Then, he invited me to a studio to meet the director of the movie in two weeks. I went to the studio to talk to the director and tell him that I had no experience in acting. But when I entered the studio, there was a press conference going on. The director welcomed me in front of everyone and introduced me as the male lead of the movie. It was all a bizarre experience after that. To cut it short, here is the end result. One of the producers of the movie backed out midway into the project. The director got distracted by another project. The heroine married her boyfriend who was the leader of a local mafia gang. I realized I overact way too much anyway and did not try any other movie projects. Instead, I focused on my technical career and became a computer programmer. Ah! That is a contrast, isn’t it?!

Few years later, I wanted to explore the world of business and management. I joined the MBA program at Rice University, Houston, graduated with a concentration in Finance and joined Air Liquide Corporate Finance team. Now I manage Air Liquide’s eCommerce offerings, which brings together by backgrounds in both technology and business. I am married and do not have any kids yet. Both my wife and I are into spirituality and meditation.

One of my hobbies is photography. It has an interesting beginning.

One January evening in 2006, during my stay in Minneapolis, Minnesota, my friend and I drove up in a Ford Taurus car to the northern US border lake called Lake of the Woods. It is a shared lake between the US and Canada. It is a huge lake but is almost entirely frozen during winter. From the lake bank, we saw some trucks far away on the lake. We presumed that they were there for Ice Fishing. We had never driven on a frozen lake and thought that this was a good opportunity. There was a board by the pier on the lake that said ‘No Diving or Swimming Allowed’. But it did not talk about driving. So, we followed the truck tracks and drove on to the lake.

I was just getting interested in photography at that time and took a quick picture of the car on the frozen lake before getting into the car.

After a few minutes of driving on the ice and snow, we heard a cracking sound. The car came to a stop. I got down to observe and my friend hit the accelerator. The wheel turned rapidly but the car was not moving. The wheel was digging into the ice. We realized we were in trouble. I had seen on TV that in such a situation, you need to shovel out the snow around the wheel. But there was no shovel in the car. For the next excruciating twenty minutes in minus ten degrees temperature, I walked back to the lake bank where I had seen a restaurant. The waitresses at the restaurant who were horrified by our plight loaned me a shovel. I walked back to the car with the shovel in the bitter cold hoping that the car would still be there. Fortunately, the car was still there and my friend had been able to flag down a passing truck. With the help of the shovel and the truck we were able to get the car out from the ditch and come back safely.

I vowed never to drive on a frozen lake.

But all was not lost! My picture was published in a Ford company magazine and they sent me a $500 check.

Now, this was a great incentive for a beginner. Since then, I have shot thousands of pictures, but never hit upon such a lucky shot-YET.

Anyway, after all these years of shooting, now I love the art of making the picture more than the rewards or critiques that come after. I love the work that goes into the process.

This is an interesting insight that I use in other aspects of my life as well. For any project at work or in our personal lives, we spend a major part of the time working towards the goals. Even if we succeed, the elation due to success is fleeting and short-lived. So, life is in the activity.

I try to enjoy the activities, the hustle and hard work of achieving the goals and leave the results to the supreme spirit.

Thank you very much for letting me share my story.

Beggars, Fake News and Google - Book Thoughts on Trust Me, I Am Lying

"In America, even beggars have cars," I was told by a friend when I was a kid of about five or six growing up in Bengaluru, India. This was a time before the internet when even blockbuster Hollywood movies arrived a couple of months or years after they were released...all depending on the whims of the distributors. Most beggars in India are very poor (to the levels unimaginable in the West), dress in rags, live on the streets and mostly suffer hunger all the time. Most beg at traffic lights. As a kid it was difficult for me to imagine such a person in the US to be driving in cars, stopping at the traffic lights to beg.

But it had to be real as I trusted my friend. I believed it to be real for a very long time.

It was a harmless lie that my friend may have made up. But in this age of major news channels and newspapers following blogs to pick up trending stories, it is not very difficult to create a story out of nothing, says Ryan Holiday in this book. He goes on to show in the book about how he created such stories and got free publicity by major media outlets by starting small rumors in blogs that are competing for dramatic headlines to attract attention. In the latter part of the book, he explains that extreme difficulty in managing this monster once you let it out.

Remember, this book came out in 2012, even before the whole fake news racket being run out of Macedonia where a large number of jobless youth are hired for only creating fake news sites (Google 'fake news Macedonia'...interesting read).

This book is an interesting read if you are curious about numerous Google Now cards showing up on your phone that direct you some lesser known sites that masquerade as news outlets but are just grocery-store-check-out-counter-tabloids in electronic format.

Game Of Thrones...in East & West...

"If you stay here longer, you are going to get hurt kid. I am advising you to get out of here before there is a fight," my father's friend who was working for Janatal Dal (S) walked up to my table and advised me. Janata Dal (S) is a political party in India. It was the national election day in 1996 and I was sitting at the polling booth at the BJP (another political party in India) table. The BJP poll booth team had just helped a team of professional fraud voters who go around the city to different polling booths and the Janata Dal (S) team had seen it. Such teams exist for all political parties but BJP fraud voter team was less experienced in corrupt practises then. Now the Janata Dal (S) thugs had surrounded our BJP table and had started a verbal fight. One of the senior people in BJP team had disappeared from the scene, as he was trying to call the thugs from BJP to come help. The unprofessional BJP thugs did not show up till about an hour later. By then the senior party members had talked it out.

Later that year, BJP came out as the single largest party in the national elections and Vajpayee became the Prime Minister for 13 days (whole another story) but I was disillusioned with politics. Coming in as an idealistic teenager I had seen politics at a close angle as a party worker. I decided to stay away from active politics after that and just be an inquisitive observer.

US politics seemed far simpler. You mostly knew what Republicans and Democrats stood for. But the 2016 elections threw a curveball even for the most experienced pollsters. Strangers in Their Own Land is a 70% honest effort by Arlie Russell Hochschild to understand the Tea Party members in Louisiana, one of its staunch supporters. She talks about the life and challenges of the people in lucid details, almost taking you into the living rooms and polluted backyards of her Cajun friends. You can feel her liberal bias in some places but mostly she sticks to getting answers for analytical questions. Whether you agree with the political views expressed or not, you will walk away with a better understanding of the issues and dilemmas of the Louisiana Tea Partiers. Loved the journey.

What A Cheater Reads

"He is cheatin'," she said.
"He is going someplace else and learning all these tricks," she added appreciatively. That was the acting President of the Toastmasters club, kindly praising my speech. This was only my second speech at the club and she mentioned that it seemed like an advanced speech by an expert in public speaking.
She was right. I was cheating. I was reading up on public speaking in this amazing book.
Ted Talks by Chris Anderson is a genuine book about public speaking. It covers all the elements to present a great speech with or without visual aids. The heart of the book is not to give just a speech but to effectively communicate ideas. Ideas can inspire, entertain and invoke emotions. The book gives a framework to effectively talk about them, the ideas. Are you going to learn to give good speeches? Yes, but more importantly, it also makes you a better communicator.
Stellar Book. Highly recommended.