A false sense of security

Conversation with gay friends a few years ago:  "don't be fooled by the rainbow lighting in the white house. the world is not as pro gay rights as we are led to believe"

We all learned that the folks who went and registered themselves under DACA were naive. They were signing up to be on a round up list when the administration changed.

See the same thing with the MeToo movement. Women are being lulled into a false sense of security and are coming out and naming accusers. 

All those so called Twitter supporters might as well be bots who are echoing election messages for money. People who are sitting on their couches with their laptops, typing frantically on social media, offering their words of support and hashtags, cannot do anything when it comes to actually backing these women all the way to get justice. 

The country(ies) are run by the rich class that is actually part of the problem. The political class, is definitely part of the problem as power has corrupted folks into thinking they can get away with anything and usually it is a case of people scratching peoples back. 

The media will move on to the next best thing, be it toilet paper intentionally left on DJT's shoes as he boards the next plane or Melania's faux pas in Africa. 

Meanwhile the poor women will go through being shamed all over again, be forgotten with the next news cycle and the same guys who were accused will come back to their day jobs using their money, power, influence to haunt their accusers and make them disappear. 

The ones that set the example are always the creeps. Very rarely do we see justice (which again seems disproportionate) for a Cosby or a Weinstein. 

The most powerful man in the world today thinks it is okay to grab women by their body parts and he is still out there. 

So many folks were named as part of the metoo movement. The standard Modus Operandi for the perps seems to be :

1. Why did you not come forward earlier?

2. How come you cannot remember details clearly?

3. If 1 and 2 are answered, they plant a fake accuser whose credibiilty can be questioned and then use that to say "all accusers are not credible" 

4. shaming using multiple methods

Have seen this over and over and over again. 

My kid came and told me "who will believe us if something like that happened to us? no wonder no one comes forward and accuses anyone because no one will believe the woman!" and my answer was "I will definitely believe you. I am your dad". 

It is a sad day if your daughter has doubts on the world when it comes to people believing a woman's word against a man. 

Sincerely want women to band together on this. Women need to believe other women. 

Ladies, if you know a woman who believes "boys will be boys".. "locker room talk" etc. please convince that person that it is not acceptable and it is wrong. Maybe a woman can change the mind of another woman?

Nothing is worse than a mother endorsing such behavior for a son or a wife endorsing such behavior from a husband. 

I grew up in a very male chauvinistic society. Then I ended up in a country where women think they are in much better shape than any place in the world, only to see again and again that it is not much different. 

To all those brave women who are coming forward and naming accusers, the world is not ready for you. My kid is right. One man believing her is not enough. The world will come back and get you. So think twice before you come forward. All those retweets won't save you as they pale against money, power and influence in the real world.  It is not a million candles burning for you. It is one candle and a lot of mirrors. That one flickers and dies and it is total darkness. 

The most powerful country in the world saw a circus to nominate a SC judge who will decide many cases that determine the fate of women and we saw what happened.  There is no chance for ordinary people to get any justice. 

Wait a few years, till something big happens. Something real. Not Twitter rage. Some new laws and regulations when it comes to meaningful investigations and consequences for folks found guilty. A time when a woman goes in front of a panel of people where the percentage of women on the panel is same as the percentage women out there.. even then you should think twice.

A sincere request to all those who are encouraging the women who have come forward for more details on their revelations, or asking more folks to come forward.. please stay behind them to the end. Retweeing might make you feel you have done the right thing, but you are actually doing more damage to people because at the end of the day they face all the conquences while you will still be on your couch with your laptop doing the same thing. 

This post is doing the same on the other side of things, and that is not lost on me.  I am on a couch writing this, but someone needs to caution these women that they are not being backed up as they might think.

The world is not ready for Metoo

Wish it was!

When sanity gets fooled

A few words of caution...

Remember the Iraq war? The war that was falsely co-related to WMD's and cost so much in lives and is turning our kids futures a little darker than it needs to be? Remember how that war came to be?

There was a mass hysteria in the US for retaliation and not many stopped to think of the consequences. To top things off there was the "You are not patriotic if you don't support this war" rhetoric?

That always reminded me of my previous company where a bunch of middle managers would say "Let's do what is right for the company. Let's do blah blah and blah..."

The relatively new (read <3 years experience) engineers would look at each other and go "but that is stupid. if you do blah blah and blah it is not the right thing for the company!" but some older wiser folks would advice us to "let it play out". Eventually things will come to light that said ideas are not good for the company. As a collective though, the young ones got to keep their jobs and not be thrown out for calling the "emperor naked" and the older wiser ones had enough headcount to get their stuff done. The whole thing was a wasted exercise and would sometimes take up months of your time chasing wild geese!

Most of those folks who prefaced their sentences with "let's do what is right for the company.." would end up in the management fast track and be out of sight within a year or two flying to far away places on company dime doing more things that were right for the company! In a culture like that, lot of folks who could not in good conscience "let it play out" would leave, a lot of good effort would be wasted and the worse case was monetary gain not realized for the entire employee base!

Same thing happens to a country and what do we have? Lives lost in the hundreds of thousands, a future generation ending up with heavy debt, a wave of next generation terrorists created and a world destabilized for years to come. 

I now see my friends in India going through this spiral with the Delhi Rape Case. Physical, chemical, biological castrations are being suggested as potential deterrants to future rapists.  Do not see how that will stop a castrated and possibly more frustrated individual from shoving some other object into some poor woman. Maybe you should ask for a Lobotomy instead of a castration if you want to hold down that line of logic?

If someone doesn't speak up, India might end up enacting laws that would not be much different from the Taliban run Afganistan and we all know how women fared and are still faring in Taliban controlled areas. They will be raped in their own homes with no way to let the outside world know and with no one to come castrate their menfolk who made or interpreted the law to suit their needs against the better interest of women!

The public hangings and stonings and castrations are going to be a bandaid or a cast in the sense that the damage is done and it is a punishment after the fact. Hailing such calls for castration as a sign of victory is not much different from what happened when we went to war with Iraq. Years later you will realize that while most rapists continue to go undetected, some poor kid who hands a girl a love letter will be wrongfully convicted and castrated! We will create an even more sexually repressed class of men and one shudders at the thought of that prospect. We have our legistlators watching porn in their phones while being in the Assembly! So enough said..

Just look at the TSA for crying out loud. One guy tries to set his shoe on fire and now millions of people around the world end up removing their shoes, belts, get x-rayed repeatedly and harassed in the name of security while their chances of getting killed on the ground by a drunk driver or deranged gunman with a semiautomatic are much higher than being blown up in a plane with shoes and you still hear of cases where folks smuggle things through just to prove that the TSA are stupid!

Most laws are only as good as the infrastructure that is set up to implement them and the common sense that goes into the laws. As a daddy of two girls it is not easy to sleep knowing there are folks like this out there. I remember very vividly getting flamed badly for a blog post where I had questioned the safety of India, because my parents cautioned me about a place near Delhi called Nithari where some guy killed and ate people "silence of the lambs" style almost ten years ago and also because I happened to be an NRI at the time.  

Now everyone seems to be telling me that "this type of stuff happens only in Delhi". This is not Delhi specific.  It happens everywhere! Delhi, Philadelphia, Karachi, Beijing.. everywhere and there are different stats coming from all these places which have different laws and social norms and cultures. 

Please think this through before passing laws that will eventually not do anything to stop such crimes, be abused more likely than be enforced properly and have a long term net negative impact! 

Do these laws really reduce the occurance of rape? If yes, by all means go ahead. If not, do what it takes to prevent rape. Punishing at that point doesn't do much.

There should be an educational excercise for young adults and children. If the school system is not going to provide that, as responsible parents, we can do a sit down with our kids and have a conversation with them when they are ready for it. 

This is not different from the Sandy hook conversation we had to have in our house. It was tough but it had to happen. Going to tell you guys of an actual conversation that happened just a week after Sandy Hook incident.

Jr. wanted to go attend a Christmas party at a friends place as some of her other friends were going. Personally didn't know the girl or her parents and Jr. had never mentioned her as a close friend in previous conversations. She also mentioned that her friends dad knows Obama personally.... because her friend has shown pictures of her dad with Obama! So I made a casual joke saying "I cannot allow you to go unless I know two things. Do her parents own a gun and does she know where that gun is? If the answer is yes, then definitely you are not going!"

She threw her hands out in frustration and made a sincere face and said (brace yourself for this)

"Her mom is innocent. She can't have a gun. She is Chinese! Chinese and Indian people don't have guns Appa! You of all people should know that!"

In one sentence she pretty much zapped me! So I asked her nicely "how do you know that?" and the response (brace brace brace) "We talked about this in school and asked our friends who has guns in the house and only non Indian and non Chinese people have guns in the house!"

It took me a good 30 minutes to explain to her that :

a. Not all Indian and Chinese households are gun free

b. the biggest college massacre in US school gun violence history at Virginia was carried out by an Asian kid

c. Not all "non Indian and non Chinese" households have guns

d. Innocence has nothing to do with gun ownership

These were no easy conversations with a girl who just turned 10 with her very smart 7 year old sister lapping up all this information .. so she can use it in her school survey!

Coming back to laws, just remember one thing! We live in a world were most of the rules were made by a powerful minority! Every now and then, the tides turn on that powerful minority when the powerless majority gets a say. Be it the French revolution or India's independence or the Arab spring  the same thing happens over and over again. 

We also live in a world were most of the rules were made by men and they have done well to protect their interest across the globe. Most solutions to problems that women face never go far enough to address the solution if the solution involves changes that men have to undergo! Most of the solutions center around how women have to change themselves or conform to a different guideline. 

Unless that changes and more women join the legislative and administrative ranks, the right laws that protect women will never see the light of day. It is also a crying shame that those women that do make it to those positions in India are siding with the men once they see power! 

Please take some time to think about real solutions that will enable a woman in India to be as free in every way as a man who walks by her side. 

My previous concerns of raising two girls with certian cultural and social norms is now paling in comparision to new concerns about the world we live in! 

Go have that conversation. Have that discussion with your friends and don't let the anger and rage drive your actions. 

On the gun control side, the solution was to put an armed policeman in every school to protect the kids from bad guys who might come shooting. Just think about it! On the men side it is to castrate, stone and hang rape accused! 

Today one of my friends pointed me to a comment on a youtube comment that "none of these problems will happen if women wear a hijab and we have sharia law in India!" 

Hence the post in-spite of saying "No social minded posts!"

More on the mystery of how women choose men?

If you have been reading this blog long enough... posted "this" way back in 2007. Little has changed except said Ferrari is now married and we dont see too many photos of his wife in white salwars.. that is a sidebar discussion.

Back to the main theme.. do women choose men because they resemble some early version of their dad.. A version they have of their dad when they were toddlers and consider that the "best possible version of a guy"?

The research is still ongoing. This morning, I went to pick up FIL who arrived from India at SFO. It was hilarious to see him walk out in the same shirt I was wearing. So had to take this picture after coming home!

Yes, my shirt is faded thanks to all the chemicals in the Cupertino water and his shirt still retained a lot of the original color.. but we look like two people who could have played Benjamin Button!

His memory is not that good now. We both got the shirts gifted by my co-brothers dad in Australia a good 8 years ago. It is absolutely cozy and is one of my favorite airplane and rainy day shirts. Apparently FIL likes it for the same reason!

This is scary ladies!

Women: Jewelry :: Men : Memory

What do you buy as a 30th birthday present for your wife?

Jewelry did you did not buy for her in almost 8 years of marriage..

What does the wife buy for your 30th birthday?

A 128 MB Lexmark CF card as an added bonus to your first digital camera.. (please remember, 128 MB was the best of the line in those days.. it was a LOT of memory.. you could take 400+ pictures on that card)

What do you plan to buy for your wife's 40th birthday?

Possibly more Jewelry

What do you want for your 40th?

Possibly more Memory

Yep, that would just be a fair exchange..

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Mbuni's Mbuti's and Mbubi's all found in the Woodland Park Zoo, Seattle

After a tiring and exciting adventure at the Olympic National park in Washington, a trip to the Woodland Park Zoo seemed to be the best option for the kids.

We have heard a lot about this zoo but never visited in our previous trips to Seattle. This time we entered when they opened and exit when they closed the park and must have covered every alley way in the zoo map (including a visit to every restroom and snack stall!)

This was by far the best zoo trip with the kids. Seattle apparently does not get that many days with such gorgeous weather. So people flocked to the park, even on a weekday and the animals were also well behaved. Chances are they don't get to see such nice weather either!

Zoo animals usually just show their behinds to show people how they feel about being in the zoo (which they did in plenty this time also), but for once they also came close to the people, fence, glass wall etc. to give the photographers a chance!

For some reason, the many women who visited consistently reduced the % cloth cover by about 50% compared to women outside on the street. These women were more scantily clad than women in California beaches or Disneyland on Memorial day weekend. Now, that must set the bar pretty low. The shorts that some girls wore made my shorts look like pantaloons!

Needless to say, the desi family dynamic in any place where there are way too many scantily clad non-desi women who constantly feel the urge to come tell the group that the embroidered salwar kameez with mirrors and chamki's is gorgeous, gives rise to some funny moments... (most of which are blog worthy, but will not be posted because my kids read the blog).

The menfolk, who are seasoned veterans, when it came to looking at cleavage that reminds you of the grand canyon, straight on and ignoring it effortlessly were checking the other men to see if anyone flinched. I think we should start calling it a game, aptly titled "vishwamitra". The first one to stare, gets hit on the head by his wife and the entire family.

To summarize, we saw,

Mbuni's : Mbuti's : Mbubi's in the ratio of 2 : 200 : 2000

not to mention the other animals.

You can use these photos to quiz your kids. Name the animal or bird by looking at the buttshots!

Sorry for the couple of x-rated shots there.. Must have been one of those "love is in the air" days in Seattle, and in case you are wondering...

Mbuni = Ostrich in Swahili
Mbuti = Woman wearing a shorts/skirt where ass cheeks are visible in Sundari
Mbubi = Woman clearly displaying bra or a clear lack thereof, again in the ancient extinct language called Sundari (a close cousin of Swahili)

You get to see the faces of the animals and birds in the next post, so do check back tomorrow.

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