Assimilation: a height of disconnect ?

A learned colleague and I landed up discussing the Immigration and assimilation. Of course, the context is The United States of America. The setting where this discussion took place was on a man-made Navy island in the deep south state of Mississippi.

It all started with a complement from my esteemed colleague (a 3^rd Generation European American) saying “Not many 1^st generation immigrants can communicate and articulate as well as you do”. My response was long but in short – "I had an opportunity to work for consulting industry where I had no choice but to engage with individuals from many parts of the world and many walks of life." 

As it goes – you become what you do (consume) and get exposed to.The abilities are result of one's exposure to the America and what they do. 

That triggered a common complaint “Immigrants should assimilate”.  The response was my story and then some, about the immigration and immigrants: here in a very summarized write-up:

I came to USA to make money, with a goal to go back in 2-3 years. With an early assumption, that there is no way this (money) can last and that, what else USA can offer beyond money. 

These two aspects of the thought process – 1. Goal to make more money and 2. “what else the America can offer more than my own country” defines majority of immigrants, at the beginning. Many continue with this exact same feeling even after multiple decades! :(

A primary objective of any immigrant as they land in USA is to get settled. It is easier to do so when you can communicate easily, and in many cases, preferably using your own language.

A human tendency is to do what is easier. That drives immigrants to communities where they find people from their own countries / regions. Italians to Brooklyn, Indians to Jackson Heights, Rich people to upper east side and so on. 

Point being “assimilation” is not even on their “To-Do”. That is not something that immigrants perceive of any value. Unless they must work in an industry like consulting, that some of us do.

I did shorten a longer debate that we had, but hoping that it could drive the point home, that “expectation of assimilation” is one very misplaced expectation and measure that is, in lack of better words, a “self-inflicted wound”.  Immigrants have no idea that locals expect assimilation and locals have no idea that assimilation is least of immigrant’s problems.

Unspoken / undefined expectation of  Assimilation by the natives and mostly oblivious immigrants about this expectation are something like these:

   

Having said that - Assimilation definitely has a value and should be nurtured. May be a better approach (or question) would be to think “What can WE, the natives of America, do, that help an immigrant value assimilation that they can benefit from." In turn we all will be happier and assimilated. 

Is there a solution? – yes, there are many: one idea that may help: every new immigrant (or Non-Immigrant) should be introduced to Volunteering. Introduce a requirement for all new residents of USA that they should spend 40 hours (as an example) in their first year, participating in any volunteer opportunity of their choice. Upon completion of doing so they should be celebrated and awarded somehow.

How? - Someone smarter than I, would sure have a solution or two.

Let us add Assimilation on OUR "To-Do". 

Relearning Indian Heritage by practicing Yoga

My wife has been practicing yoga (one may say an American Version) at a local Yoga Studio called Yoga Tribe for few years now. A local group, developed by a gentleman named Jason, who is trained by big names like Bikram Yoga.

It started as a gentler alternative to Boot-camp routine. Honestly, it took me a while to digest the idea of Caucasians teaching Yoga 😎. Finally, I managed to start few months ago.

My experience has been pleasant, humbling and most importantly learning.
Learning was not what I had expected or even sought. Yes, that was naive.

It is incredible how the teachers at this studio has embraced the yogic everything and have achieved an expertise where they, very successfully, are imparting a training for.

Purpose of this blog is to capture some of the learning, not in any particular order or connection.

• Almost every session starts with child pose or Corpse pose, and literally every session ends with Savasana. While I did not question it, our teacher today, Jenna (a flight attendant by profession) described it vividly. 
• Savasana is a representation of being dead. 
• Balasana is of being a child
• A symbolic representation of living a life (in that hour): From Death to Death, may be a representation of a belief of reincarnation. 
• OR a symbol of a one's life: from birth of a child to death, a circle of life.

• Once a session ends in Savasana, You wake up in fetal position (Parsva Savasana) a symbolic move of being 're-born'. 

• And finally you express gratitude for everything that you have and prepare for rest of the day. 

• It is like hitting a re-set and aligning yourself to the goodness of being a human.

Interestingly many of the reasons that take me back to a yoga session are the same reasons why I used to visit "Ramkrishna Ashram at Rajkot".

• Amazing positive energy.
• Celebration of individual and internal strength.
• Celebration of humans as we are.
• A strong foundation of "We are all same, equal". 
• An absolute rejection of ideas of comparison, material and anything evil. 

I am re-learning the heritage that I took it granted for and I have to thank my teachers at Yoga Tribe for. 🙏

A revelation, a re-learning :
Yoga is probably the strongest description of what is being a Hindu means. There is no "ism" in it, no rigid commandments, no directives, just one simple suggestion - Be Human.

Side note:
The main hall @ Ramkrishna Ashram, an incredible architecture to induce peace and calm.

We are what we consume!

The National Museum of African American History and Culture is an amazing reminder of our (human) barbaric past. Slavery: The concept of Human Trade, was at the foundation of  the industrial revolution.

One may ask: what triggered a 'need', if you may, for slavery. The reason will sure astound you. It was our need to consume: sugar, tobacco, coffee, cocoa, and later cotton. 

Slaves provided the very fundamental labor force, without which, the trade, shipping, plantations may not have flourished as they did.

A conventional wisdom says that, if, information was available, about the facts, that "the sugar I consume enslaves a family for life", one may not have consumed it.

Question is, would you really have 'not' consumed it?

Fast forward many decades and talk about iPhone and FoxConn, just as an example, nothing against Apple or FoxConn, per se.  We worry about less human, if not inhuman, labor practices of China or (un)Fair trade practices in South America or Africa or India or child labor!

As this is being written, this was a week were White Supremacist raised their heads (in US), again. Where do they get an idea of being superior? May be, just may be, slavery had something to do with it!?

Think bit harder, do you really know or guarantee that what you consume does no evil? Ironically, we live in an information age.

The world, today, has many more forms of consumption, TV, Vehicles, Media and most importantly your very own, precious, perishable time.

A conscious consumption, is indeed a guarantee that a fellow human will not be ill-treated.

We are what we consume: let us consume to be Human. It is a long journey between human being and being human, let us travel together.

Tesla Vs. B-Class

Since our purchase of our first electric vehicle and experiencing it first-hand, we have gathered some more parameters of comparisons an electric car.

Specifically speaking Tesla. The key question remained - why would I spend $1300 a month to lease Tesla vs $300 a month for B-Class. ?

Here is a short comparison:

All wheel drive vs. Front wheel drive: as you may have guessed the key reason for Tesla's electric performance (pun intended) is the fact that it has two engines (models of 2015 above), so to speak, which drives all wheels.

Double the size of the battery: B-Class comes with 31 KWh battery pack vs. Tesla's base model S comes with 60 KWh.

Chargers: Tesla comes with four charging options including its super fast charging option. B-Class has only two AC options which gives you the fastest speed of full charge in 4-5 hours. B-Class does not even come with an option of DC Chargers which some others has an option of.

Free Charging: while free charging is still an option via many free chargers in our area, Tesla offers free pubic charging options to all their customers. This means, literally, FREE GAS when you buy Tesla. - A value of at least $200 per month.

No dealer hopping: Tesla is bought online, just like you would buy toilet paper. No haggling, no shopping no dealers cash and none of that. Interestingly you can now by pre-owned Tesla too.

In Summary: It is an individual definition of value which will decide if Tesla's high performance, long range, quick charging options, free charging, simple clear transparent buying process without any feeling of "I may have paid more! :)) - is worth $1300 a month.

You may also be interested in my other posts:

From MPG to MPKWh

From MPG to MPKWh

Since Tesla announced that they will be launching a model for $49K, electric car had been an option we were trying to exercise. Tesla did not deliver their promise of 49K Model S but they indeed created a huge demand for Electric Cars. As I write this there are 335,125 electric cars on the road, only 10% of them are Tesla. The sales of electric cars are growing at 150% year-over-year.

Still, 336,500 is meager 0.5% of 50 Million light-weight-vehicles on the roads of America.
[ Visit - Chargepoint for latest count ]

It was Sunday, around 8 PM; we received delivery of our very first Electric car, Mercedes Benz B-Class. Our first ride home, some 20 miles, subscribed us to a new mileage term – we got 3.5 miles per Kilo Watt Hour (KWh). That intrigued and triggered a series of questions and intense research for next one week, as time permitted.

Kilo-watt-hour is also referred to as “Juice” as gasoline is referred to as “Fuel”. It feels like we went from junk food to natural, raw, organic healthy food! Wink! Wink!

1 KWh is also called a Unit, if you monitor your electricity bill. Our cost of 1 unit of juice is 15 cents or 19 cents depending upon the consumption that month. Thus to drive a mile, at say 19 cents, it will cost us 19 divided by 3.5 = 5.42 cents.

Our gasoline car, Camry drives 30 miles per gallon. Current gas cost is $3.60 per gallon. Thus to drive our Camry a mile, it costs, 3.60 divided by 30 = 12 cents.

B-Class comes with a battery bank of 28 Kilo-Watt-Hour capacity. Thus at 3.5 miles per KWh it would have a range of 28 x 3.5 = 98 Miles. 98 miles is when it will run out of juice if not charged. This of course assumes you drive without AC or any other juice consuming amenities!  

Thus it is likely that we will be saving around 50% of transport cost by going from Miles per Gallon (MPG) to Miles per Kilo-Watt-Hour (MPKWh). Not to count the carpool advantage and pride of helping the environment! again ... Wink! Wink!

Please look out for the next installment of Juice – “The freedom and choices of juicing it up”.

The enabling Infrastructue

What it means by an enabling infrastructure:

It was Feb 01 2015. Midwestern USA was being pounded by a blizzard. Both the major airports of Chicago, O'Hare and Midway, were shutdown. The air travel was at its worst delays and cancellations.

I was flying from sunny Orange County to Minneapolis and to catch a connection to Midland MI. Completely oblivious, I had no idea that the Midwest was this bad until I landed at MSP and the gate monitor said my flight to MBS was cancelled. This is the only flight to MBS everyday.

No issues, once I am away from home I do not care where I sleep, until it is a Marriott! :) I walked over to the nearest customer service area, captured a desk, picked up the phone (direct reservation line), explained to the agent and sent her off to find me options.

At this moment I understood that Airline was not going to offer a hotel accommodation because this was a cancellation due to weather. While I was on hold I pulled out my laptop, connected to Internet - went to my corporate portal, went over to my booking engine. Searched for hotels next to Airport, found two - most airport hotels (hotels near airport) offer a shuttle service. Confirmed that they do.

Meantime the agent on the phone needed some information and correction, it took approx 20 minutes to get all booked. I called the hotel were I would have stayed and changed my reservation, called rental car and changed it, all the while I was on hold.

Because of my elite status with Marriott and rental car company, all the reservation changes happen seamlessly and in literally a minute without any penalties.

I landed at MSP around 6:45 PM, and was watching Super Bowl in my hotel room at 8:15 PM.

New England Patriots won after all that controversies of the deflated ball!

It is important to recognize that I had never put a foot into Minneapolis, before.

Next day, I had my full morning breakfast, worked till noon  and headed to the Airport. There was no impact to the required productivity of the project. I could participate in key calls. 

Morale of this story is: this is what it means by enabling infrastructure.

- clearly defined processes within airlines and infrastructure to get to them.

- airport infrastructure of WiFi and its consistent functionality.

- hotel services and processes clearly defined and consistent across the globe.

- the Marriott consistency and familiarity

- ease of use of corporate portals and technology which work seamlessly.

- not to mention - clean and abundant toilets and washrooms.

Infrastructure is not limited to physical aspect of it: it is not roads, cars and malls, alone: it is an orchestra of effective processes, clear and concise communication, effective tools, well trained humans, honest and focused objectives, and a need to excel supported by the physical infrastructures.

PS: The context of this post is developing countries. When McDonalds, Malls and roads pop-up in these countries - the feeling of "infrastructural sufficiency" evolves. The intent of this post is to define a level of maturity required to enable the human growth.

Part 1: Lessons from my composting experiments

As with anything else, internet is like the space. There are less active and productive satellites then there is that debris of defunct junked satellites.

Composting is one of those subjects where there are many schools of thoughts and actually many different ways to achieve composting.

We also have traveled a distance in a journey of composting and this is a summarized knowledge (at the point of time) which may help.

Things we want to compost:
1. Kitchen scraps (vegetarian)
    - Raw kitchen waste - Peels and other  waste as a result of cleaning of fruits and veggies.
    - Cooked / post consumed waste - What we throw away into sink and use trash disposal.
2. Lawn cuttings and garden waste produced by periodic cleaning  exercise
3. The power packed Fall leaves

Two key methods of composting:
1. Active composting
    Active composting is where we use any kind of worms to help us convert trash to treasure.

2. Passive composting
    Passive composting is where we pile things up and turn them periodically.

One - For Kitchen scraps, of all kinds - Vermicomposting is recommended and most productive.
Second -For Lawn cuttings and periodic garden waste - Pile based composting on the ground or
in a compost bin which can be easily turned - may be good idea.
Third - For Fall leaves - a separate pile or compost bin is recommended.

Now a key question everyone comes across - so you want us to have three composters ?
Simple answer Yes. Though, let me explain a bit more and ensure that it need not be a lot of work.

Stay tuned for part 2:
Part 2: Our experiments and learning from Active Composting