NASER

The Past : NASER 

NASER, an acronym I am coining stands for  "News Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Rubbish". Till the morning of the election everyone, even the guys at fivethirtyeight who has predicted things very successfully in the past wrote a post that said "no matter which scenario we pick, Hillary Clinton comes up the winner". Today the US stands where it is because people are disconnected with reality.

There is the Fox news watching folks who believe that all muslims are terrorists and the Chinese are taking their jobs or that Obama is after their guns.. the list goes on. Then there is the coastal mix that has no idea that there are folks who are born and raised in the Midwest who have never crossed their county borders and have lived to be past sixty and their aspirations for the rest of their lives and their children look very bleak. 

There is probably one dude who is going door to door and collecting some info. This then gets amplified and mirrored multiple times with some embellishments and gets called news. We live in a country where 1$ was shown as collateral 31 times to create a debt crisis. Same thing happens to polling?!

Three weeks ago, spent 4 hours voting.

(Put the sticker on my phone instead of my shirt.. it lasted three plus weeks! now it is a bitter reminder of my pass %...)

Today we have the results, but I have to check across different sites to find out if I got an A or a D.  When we wait at airports, Jr. plays a game on her phone called family feud and she keeps bugging me to help her with answers. There when you answer something it goes "you said the answer is Hillary.. the audiene said Trump".. wish there was an answer key to the election that shows the correct answers to all the things you picked and gives you a score and it gets mailed to your home after the exam, err. election is over. 

This time majority of my choices were not the winning choices. Usually it is 50/50. This time it is more like 30/60. Chances are I am way too disconnected with the folks around me. We should all get a disconnect score at the end of an election, be it within your city, county, state and the nation. 

Last night I went for a yoga class and for 90 minutes forgot what was going on outside that hot room. The fact that my hand was sending pain signals every 10 seconds was making it more challenging than thoughts of the election. Came home to find out that Trump was very close to winning and there was a general doom and gloom scenario in the house and neighborhood. There was also a lot of disbelief that this could acutually have happened. 

I did predict a Trump win and got yelled at for it three weeks ago. My prediction was based on two things. The first was related to how Narendra Modi was elected Prime Minister of India. The media world over said he had no chance or he had only a fighting chance, but he came roaring with an absolute majority. The reason the pollsters were not predicting that right? A lot of folks did not tell everyone who they were really voting for but came out in droves to vote for the BJP. At that time, voting for the BJP was associated by mainstream media as a Hitler vote! In my mind, the same thing was going on in the US. Folks who want to vote for Trump, but have a problem associating with the stigma (there were Republicans endorsing him who would not mention him by name) weren't going to advertise it loudly!

The second thing was our own dissonance with what is happening in a large part of the country. In this year I have made one trip to Ohio, one aborted trip to Ohio which ended in a Denver airport sleep in, one trip to Seattle, Austin and Pittsburgh as fas as domestic travel goes. The Ohio and Pittsburgh trip were eye opening. There is a overwhelming sense of despair for folks who have a problem and sincerely believe their problem is because of a,b,c thanks to what they see and hear. The fact that they associate the root causes of their problems to things or countries or folks, that are so far off the mark, does not make their problems unreal. They are vey very real. Folks who were able to screw the same nut into the same bolt for 8 hours a day, five days a week for 20 years and get paid a decent salary to raise kids, put food on the table and pay a mortgage are suddenly jobless. A lot of such jobs were also military jobs making tanks and other things we may not need. If we closed those plants, they all have to make something else or have some other skill. The roof, the food, the kids, they don't go away. Yes, there is a sense of entitlement for some because of their race, but the folks I met or spoke to were not showing any entitlement. They were just lacking a job matching their skillset. 

The Present : Day After Tomorrow

That movie keeps coming to mind. Yes, Trump is now President elect. We did have a tough time explaining to our kids what was going on. It is true that we have a democracy and the we accept the system for what it is.

If someone tells you "Clinton won the majority vote", that is an excuse. The rules of the game is the electoral college and everyone has known the rules for hundreds of years, so both campaigns were playing for the electoral college. If Trump won, it was with the same rules. That part is easy to explain.

If someone tells you "the third party vote is what cost Clinton the election", that is also an excuse. We always knew that Johnson/Weld were going to do better in this election because they were a compromise for people who used to vote for establishment Republicans and the Libertarian folks were not going to vote for Hilary anyways. That was a constant that wasn't new or unexpected.

We are not ready for a woman president. Even that part is easy to explain. There are so many nations out there with women leaders, but the US is not ready for it. Maybe some other woman will be President some day. The fact that Hillary came so close is something to rejoice. Someone asked me during the Primary, why are you not coming out in support of Hillary explicitly. My answer was "I don't like women who stand by their husbands in front of the press to show their support after said husband has just been caught cheating with a girl old enough to be his daughter. She should have castrated the bastard or separated from him, not stand by him and take that crap for the sake of politics". I was lectured on that statement by many of my family and friends that in spite of that she is where she is. I was Hilary neutral.. let's put it that way. My reason for not being enthusiastic was my perception that she can be pushed easily. She did prove me wrong in the debates. 

The hardest part to explain to the kids? A guy who said and did what he did, managed to get elected to this office. If your kids aspire to be the POTUS someday, the value system that you need to instill in them are not ones of family values, compassion, responsibility to fellow citizen and country but whatever Trump stands for. That is a new low as a parent. It is a growing up lesson as a parent. Our kids have to grow up to a new reality and wake up to a lot of concepts a little too early. Forget the tooth fairy or Santa.  Jr. was getting nightmares after reading "To Kill a Mockingbird" which is mandatory 9th grade reading. Maybe it should be mandatory 6th grade reading! but I did have a spin for it.. 

The greatness of the American electoral process is not that a black man was our president for 8 years. It is not that a woman managed to stand for this office and come close to winning it. It is that a man like Trump can be President if he perseveres. That is a very American thing to do. You ignore anything anyone says about you and still manage go grab America. Okay, looks like the cynic in me is staring to come out again. Deep breath. Deep breath. Where were we?

We told our kids this morning that the only thing no one can take away from them is their education and knowledge and the more they share that knowledge the more valuable it is. The little one looks up at me and goes "what I learned in this election is that if you have a rich daddy, you can be messed up and still become president!" and she gives me a look that says "if only you were rich..."  Definitely not the value system conversation you want to have.. but ... 

The Future : A big ship vs. a jet ski... I am thinking Hunt for Red October

A dictatorship is like a jet ski. You can change direction very fast with your hands and the craft responds. It can go fast and there is a good chance to crash and burn. A large and complicated democracy with electoral colleges, senate, house of representatives, city councils, governers, etc. is like a ship. You can be the captain and say "set course for this lattitude and longitude" and that gets conveyed to a first officer to another guy to another guy and finally by the time it gets to change, it is not fast or perceptible. The US is like that ship. There are social experiments that have time scales in the decades. 

Trump is a social experiement. We thought we were going to get golden spangles by mixing potassium iodide with lead nitrate, but were surprised to see an orange sediment in the test tube. The lead was there.. but the iodide was missing! If my daughter reads this, please note that I still remember this from 30 years ago. I will do a pop quiz on this sometime soon. Get ready.. where were we again? This whole election thing is making me go all over the place.  This social experiement has to be supported and accepted. We still do not know how the world will react. I am not expecting wide spread riots like the ones that happen in third world nations when an election is close. There is a lot more tolerance in the US than the world gives us credit for. Trumps words during his run up to this office definitely do not project him as a President for everyone and he is most likely going to be pushed over by the likes of Putin. 

If there is one thing that any President has always focussed on irrespective of managing the way we are perceived by the world, it is the strength of the USD. Trump will not do anything to damage that. If anything that is for sure. That will be the first reassuring thing. 

His biggest challenge is to bring jobs back to the US. Sooner or later the good folks in the midwest will realize that robots took a lions share of their jobs, not the Chinese, not bad trade deals, not Mexicans and immigrants. Trump can make tanks that no military would want to use and stock pile them if that is what it means to put food on the table for that vote base or he can try and line up with the world and realize that good jobs will mean energy jobs and Information technology jobs. Those are the engines for the next decade. Making his constituents happy and getting jobs back automatically involves certain other compromises. That will keep him busy and away from his hate rhetoric.

When I first became a manager, I realized that it is easy to be an individual contributor than a manager. It is not easy to herd cats. Trump has a government job for the first time. Moving from the private sector to the government, he is going to have a massive transition. First they are going to take his phone away and give him one of those kid phones (you should watch Obama describe it in one of the late shows) and that might mean, no tweeting at 3PM.  That is just the first adjustment. 

There is an expecatation from the POTUS from everyone here and abroad. At the least he should meet the expectations of those who voted for him. Let's hope he does that. I am all for a happy midwest where folks prosper again. Hope that hole in the US donut becomes a cream filled solid one. 

On a side note, a majority of my Indian family and friends who are US citizens are sad that Trump won. There are a few who voted for Trump because of one or both of below reasons :

a. He will lower taxes

b. he will put the muslims in their place (they are still friends or family and they took this stand because of things they encountered in their life.. we continue to have an active dialogue on that)

A majority of my Indian family and friends who are NOT citizens are overwhemingly happy that Trump won.

They are happy for one or many of below reasons :

a. He will fast track green card process which has crawled under Obama

b. H1B visas will be a thing again and we can see IT folks come to the US to work

c. The US deserves to have Trump as President as he represents the real US (read it as "you are not any better off than we are")

Everyone has their reasons and biases.

Today was as interesting as any other day on the road (same or slightly more traffic), at work (interesting challenges), at home (sheet rock guy lights a cigarette inside house) and life goes on. My taxes are unlikely to change. Given we live in California, we are likely to continue to show our kids a pro immigrant, pro LGBT, equal opportunity lesson. Sure, I have some explaining to do as usual on my Asia trips where everyone asks me why as an American I got Trump elected ! Folks, was already asked this when he was a nominee. That will pass soon. 

It is possible that my kids will have a heavier debt burden with more wars and unnecessary spending on things that are no good for the world as a whole.. but that is a long term thing that can course correct. Barring a few downsides, this does not change things for us here. There is a fear for certain minorities in certain areas of the country and one does worry about President Trump's ability to control a mob and restrain it given his rhetoric. Most likely nothing like that will happen. The few crazies will act up much like the few RSS groups acted up after Modi won in India, but other than that, life will go on.

There is a mandate for jobs in the US. We have to provide some service or manufacture something for those jobs. Finding what service to provide or what to make in a cost competitive way is going to be the challenge and it is to be seen how Trump will solve that problem. We also have a mandate for a non politician to be in charge because folks think the current establishment politicians cannot get things done. That is true only to a certain extent. The rest is the impact of globalization which most of the population does not understand or refuses to accept. Trump is unlikely to reverse that process.

Given he was unlikely do a lot of things and he did, hoping that he does manage to reverse it.. 

Time will tell. . . 

ps. a humble request to my democrat friends. Do not distance yourself from the process or the participation. Continue to engage in the debate. talk to people who do not share your point of view. if anything my travels have taught me, it is to sit and hear things you don't want to hear, but dig deeper to find why and what drives others to do or say what they say. you can actually learn a lot. if anything go listen to Positively 4th street and imagine putting yourself in another shoes.. that is not a good start, but at least a start. 

pps. It is safe to say that the media world over is lazy. No one actually goes talks to people and collects real data. Indirect references, copying other peoples snippets has become the norm. I can talk to my grandma on the phone over five days, call it a statistic and publish it and chances are, if it fits the story, it will be amplified, embellished and repeated over and over again. Do your own research where possible. Travel if possible. Watch the travel channel, Discovery channel or National Geographic instead of FOX or CNN or MSNBC. Talk to people! Those folks who have never left their county in their entire life, go meet them if you can! 

What makes a high Tax bracket Indian, a Democrat?

The election is over and Obama continues to be President. I am happy that he gets more time to continue the good things he has done in the last few years and also reflect to change his strategy on accomplishing the things he said he would but failed. 

My parents were not watching the election on TV as the only TV that plays local channels is in our bedroom. The TV in the living room has only south Indian Tamil Channels. So they got to watch the election result as covered by the Tamil channels a good 12 hours after they happened. 

When I came home their first comment was "We saw the details of the US Election and how Obama won by ~300 to Romney's ~200 and we are surprised that you said last night it was a close election. How is 300 to 200 a close election?"

Also they are saying "Obama is anti-Indian and this is not good for India! So why did you vote for him?"

Surely, readers of this blog know my Political leaning on Internet based tests show me to be a "Liberal Democrat" and my lifes experiences in India and in the US which is going to cross the 50% mark soon have got me to this point (yes, came to this country when I was 20 and now I am going to be 40!).

Still how does one answer the "Obama being anti-Indian" question? Where are they getting that from? Guess the IT corridor in India is not happy with Obama's tirade against "American jobs going overseas" and the media picks up on it.

As for me, it is great to live the American dream. Really! Came to this country with ~1000$ of borrowed money.. 

$1050 to be precise and was shocked to learn that opening a bank account cost me ~25$. Almost cried at the bank. The USA was as capitalist as Capitalism was allowed to get but one realized pretty quickly that if you worked you got rewarded. There were no gotchas or at least that was the perception. Didn't realize that there were a lot of Americans who were less fortunate than me at that point who did not have access to what I had!

At the end of the day, all said and done, it was my late Grandpa who made me a democrat without realizing what he was doing..

He taught me "Lokah samastha sukhino bhavantu" which crudely translates to "everywhere everything be happy so it be"!

It was basically a "live and let live" philosophy that he came to after what he went through in his life which somehow made me associate with the "we are all in this together" statement that is a cornerstone of the Democratic party. 

We as a family make good money. We are both educated and we live in Cupertino which is not cheap. We live in an expensive house which comes with a high mortgage and property tax, not to mention our income tax, sales tax, gasoline tax, etc. etc. Most of our friends, especially desi's ask me "dude, you vote for Obama knowing he is going to take money from you and give it away to folks who don't deserve it? Your taxes are going to go up? Why do you want to work so hard for a bunch of folks who don't work so hard?" and that usually makes me go on a long winded speech which goes like this..

I have worked very hard to make a lot of people above me richer. Don't think those people exactly deserved my hard work considering the compensation wasn't fair. So the whole deserve thing is moot! I associate with folks who work hard and get shafted by the system.  

Yes, my taxes are going to go up, but will take that gladly if it is a short term thing that will help solve the long term problems in the country. Have put 10% of my paycheck in a 401k retirement account over the last 15 years only to see that it is value is not anywhere close to what it should be because some unknown hedge fund manager is gambling with that money and is getting richer at my expense and all my smartness is not enough to stop that or track that!

As for the people who don't work hard, it is probably a very small minority that takes advantage of the system. It is true that me and my roommate in Philadelphia walked 7 blocks to the nearest supermarket after what was our "first snow storm" (both of us were from Chennai and had never been in snow before and that happiness quickly wore off when we realized that going to the grocery store by foot and having to haul milk was very painful in snow) and we saw a big 6'6" guy who must have been at least 300 lbs with rippling muscles carried a cartful of groceries and he paid for it with food stamps. We didn't know what food stamps were till that day. He hauled it into his car and drove off. Why an able bodied guy like that had to use stamps was beyond us! One cannot use exceptions to make rules. For every instance of stamp use like that I have observed in those days, have seen hard working single parents and grandmas trying to raise good kids in that same neighborhood with stamps.

There will be exceptions to everything, but to quote my grandfather "when one finger in the hand grows too long, you either have to cut the finger off or you have to lose your hand as it loses its functionality!". That was his way of saying "grow.. but let others grow with you as you grow and prosper!" 

Do I do enough for people around me? Probably not! Do I try? Definitely yes!

In a country where you can work hard and prosper and one can pursue their own happiness as their only goal, there are a large group of people who believe that wellness for all is the path to wellness for oneself and that is reassuring!

To all my desi friends and relatives here and in India who wonder why a high tax bracket Desi is voting democrat that is my long winded answer..

A party that has a diverse crowd of young and old, straight or gay, red, white, black, yellow, brown and beige people that watches a president give a speech at 12:30 AM in Chicago that stands together as a true representation of the melting pot these United States are, appeals to me. 

As a technologist who spends a lot of time explaining complicated things to folks in layman terms, the fact that there are folks who believe the earth is not flat and is much older than 9000 years who will be in charge of our technological future appeals to me.

The short of it is "live and let live" appeals to me! 

Now it is time to hope that the President goes through with his promised immigration reform!

Democracy

Today a very well read and knowledgeble Chinese American Colleague (I know he is a US Citizen) told me "India is going to vote today, huh?". They are saying the Beejaaaypeee is going to come back! Aren't these the guys who persecute moslems?

I took him aside and told him that I don't get to vote in India because of my US Citizenship. Got to vote for Obama and that was enough for a lifetime.

Power corrupts. Absoulute power corrups absolutely.

(Most south Indian's attribute this quote to C.N. Annadurai. Apparently it is from Lord Acton)

So no one knows if Obama will end his term or terms with his integrity intact. Still one can always "hope". He is doing things right so far and hopefully will continue to steer change the right way.

That said, it appears as though almost all my desi blog buddies are resoundinly saying that this year going to the polls is a waste of time because all their options are the same and they don't believe anyone is worthy of a vote.

Some have gone far enough to say that the only reason they would walk to the polls is to tick on "I choose not to vote" to make sure someone else doesnt exercise the vote in their name to a standing candidate.

Based on my limited knowledge of today's Indian politics ,explanation to my colleague was :

Congress = pseudo secular communism
BJP = religious socialism

If you have a way of explaining what these two parties stand for in three words or less, do let me know.

Relatives are all just shrugging their shoulders on talking about voting. Their response is "Yaarukkavadhu votu pottu dhane daa aaganum?" (we have to vote for someone right?") and they try to choose the lesser of the two evils.

Democracy is something, isn't it?

So much of this world has been changed, destroyed, remade in the last decade, all in the name of spreading democracy and hundreds of millions of people who are all part of a very large democracy get to choose between the devil and the deep blue sea.

Is democracy something worth losing so many lives across the globe, when politicians the world over seem to be poor choices?

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Irony

Today while driving to work the radio news was all about how Iran has stopped its nuclear program four years ago and GW Bush does not have a case for all that unhealthy rhetoric about Iran and sanctions etc..

Then the news piece suddenly went to Venezuela and how the people did not support some measure from Hugo Chavez!

At this point I heard the President say something like "this is great news. The people of Venezuela have rejected one man rule!"..

I was thinking "I wish the American people had rejected one man rule 3 years ago!"

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By the people, for the people, of the people ???

Yeah, I am talking about the "D" word! Next to the "F" word it is probably the most controversial word in the making.

Cannot help but hear it at least a few times a day, be it in India or the United States.

India : largest Democracy
USA : worlds largest exporter of Democracy

So much of this word that pretty soon it would be Democrazy!!

I am writing about this after I listened to Terry's interview of Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani Journalist, on public radio. It put the word in an all new context!

Democracy is what we want it to be, people. The funny thing is everyone votes, thinking there is a majority opinion out there that has finally made it! Even if the rule of law is not representative of the majority or the system, no one will ever know! Why ? Because the people is a large body and every individual is but a drop in the ocean.

Let us say you are someone like me wondering "why is there more war talk when almost all the people around me dont want the war ?" or "why are we adjusting the clock two weeks ahead, or why are we adjusting the clocks at all ?"...

Then maybe you rationalize the fact that there is war and daylight savings inspite of everyone around you telling you that they are against it, because there must be a great many people in the ocean of democracy who want the war and the daylight savings and they have the majority vote !!

However, they do announce in opinion polls etc., that <40% of the people support the war! Either people say they do not support it and are secretly voting for it or everyone thinks there are a majority of people who must want the war, when in reality it is a few smart people who know how Democracy really works!!

It works using "the other guys must have voted against what I voted for" syndrome!!

In India I used to ask myself "why in the world would anyone do a budget like this? pass a law like this ? etc. etc." and think "I am from the middle class. India is the land of the poor. Maybe the poor majority likes these rules.". But my theory would be dashed to pieces when people who are from poorer segments, like the maids who used to help with cleaning the house and dishes also agree with my ideas or say "they dont want those things either!". Same thing in the US of A with the War!!

Hope the genius in me has finally figured this out!

Now, on the lighter side, you have to watch this video. Puts some things in context while still being hilarious!

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