Musings on the Human Condition

I grew up in a family where we didn't feel comfortable going to our parents for help . My hope is that I wasn't that kind of father but I'm sure I was, at least to some extent. I can count on one hand the times I reached out to my baba (dad) for help. Perhaps there were more and I just remember the more memorable ones? But overall, I think my dad didn't excel at commiseration. I generally felt like I was being talked down to. One of my vivid memories is going to the living room where my dad used to sit in his standard spot on the couch and asking him to help me with the equation of a line. He certainly helped clear a lot of my doubts and explained what y = mx + b really means.  Not to bore you to death, but briefly, y is the vertical position of any spot on a line and x is the horizontal position of that spot (aka point for math junkies). If you assume m=0 and b=0, you get y = x , which means you get a 45 degree line sloping about half way up like a javelin . From ther...

I was reading the book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World . One of the chapters talks about the invention of LCD screen-based games at Nintendo.  And I remembered that growing up my brother Harmeet and I had the game Oil Panic , which was part of the "Game and Watch" series (they added a watch to the game console), which I’m sure baba (dad) must have bought for us on one of his trips abroad.  Harmeet was really good at it. Me not so much. Our kids, Ria and Ronak, grew up playing Nintendo Wii and 3DS (among other consoles), but primarily Nintendo. The book really highlights how the gaming company and global trend was fashioned by one engineer's way of thinking that was more generalist (like mine) than specialist. Read the book to find out what I mean.