What I’ve Learned Lately #4
On India, reflecting, coding, kickstarting, and reading.
Every now and then, I write a letter about what I’ve learned lately. This was the fourth one, sent on January 17, 2012.
After six days in Chennai and four in Mahabalipuram, tonight I’m coming home. Is all travel about juxtaposition? Still, the contrasts here feel startlingly sharp. Watermelon juice, silk scarves, golden insides and outsides; a gap in garbage collection, safety in bottled water, rowdy autorickshaws. I’ve loved it here, and some realizations will sink in only with time. But while the memories are still new, I wanted to share some of what I’ve learned lately, here and before: on India, reflecting, coding, kickstarting, and reading.
India
On January 6th, I slipped my silver laptop into a black bag (forgetting the charger!), hurried to the train, and made it to the airport just in time to board a flight to Houston to Frankfurt to Chennai, India. On Monday, my team of six piled into a van and traveled to the Chennai offices of the Mahindra Group, pulled along a the current of honking cars and scooters. We were not alone: as part of a new initiative at Harvard Business School called FIELD, all 900 first-year students embarked that same day on week-long projects with over 140 corporate partners in eleven different cities across the world.
My team was excited when we learned about our assignment — to devise new activities and services for Club Mahindra Holidays, a timeshare network with thirty-five resorts across India. But nothing prepared us for how much we would learn about the company, the industry, the country, and each other over the course of the week. We left our last lunch with our project sponsor, Hari, convinced that we had the best project ever. In talking with other teams, though, our conviction was not unique…and I think that’s a mark of the promise of the program. Working on an intensive, imaginative project in an unfamiliar place — even for just a week — gave us a reason to ask questions: of people from every one of our company’s departments, of customers with varied needs and stories, of our teachers, and of ourselves. I started the semester hopeful and a little skeptical about the scope of the program, but I’m ending my time here excited to see it grow.
A few realizations and observations that jumped out at me:
- Religion is everywhere in India. I suppose that’s true of most places in the world, but the mix here is so different than what I’m used to that I couldn’t stop seeing it. Hinduism is the default, with blue-pink-gold-green temples to Shiva and Ganesha and Lakshmi(and many more) stationed every few blocks. At least in Chennai, Christianity has a strong presence, too. The 2001 census recorded India’s overall population as 80.5% Hindu, 13.4% Muslim, 2.3% Christian, and 1.9% Sikh. But even just 2.3% of 1.2 billion is still almost 28 million adherents of Christianity. This leads to my next realization:
- A small percentage of a big number is still a big number. India’s population is huge, and so the math starts to look very different from what we’re accustomed to in the U.S. Targeting a niche market? That niche may still hold many millions of people. Wondering why every one of India’s twenty-eight states has a different mix of official languages?Thirty languages here are spoken by more than a million native speakers. The scale of everything in India is mind-blowing.
- You see men wearing jeans and t-shirts, but almost all the women wear sarees…at least in Chennai. And the women who aren’t wearing sarees are usually wearing tunics and pants. Men and women alike wore bindis — traditionally, “a dot of red color applied in the center of the forehead close to the eyebrows,” though many of the bindis I saw were of the sticker variety. I’ve never been in a place where local, everyday fashion was so different from what I know from the U.S. That in itself was an amazing cultural experience. We visited a number of silk shops in Chennai; my favorites were Nalli (for the sheer size of the crowd) and Cottage Industries Emporium, geared to visitors but with great prices and high-quality goods.
And a personal realization: I think I finally found the limit of my appetite for adventure. When I first arrived, I felt ready to try almost anything. Slowly, though, the novelty faded and I started craving familiar, far-away comforts: pizza, 3G, reality TV. Even the internet — a miracle I appreciate all the more after experiencing it on the other side of the world — feels different in an off-kilter time zone, thirteen-and-a-half hours ahead of San Francisco. As I’ve tried to relax over the past few days post-project in Mahabalipuram, I find myself hanging on to the thread of hotel wi-fi, tugging at the rush of news at the edges of the day and sinking into the silence of the afternoon. Yet last week, while I was fully engaged in the project, the longing didn’t feel nearly as loud. I think I’m ready to go home — this time. But it won’t be long before I adventure again.
Reflecting
The last days of December hold a natural pause. In 2010, I spent those days thinking about vulnerability and strength. This year, I found myself reflecting on empathy. 2010 was a year of recovery for me; in 2011, I found the energy to focus outward again. Every pause needs a quiet center, and this year, What We Say Matters helped me see how I’ve grown and how I need to grow still. I want to thank Buster Benson and Gwen Bell for bringing the book into my life. Knowing how much it meant to both of them, I knew it might mean something to me.
At base, the book is about recognizing your own needs and understanding those of others. Without needs (for food, water, love), we would not be alive. And so needs are what connect us to life, not something to be ashamed of. As someone who studiously avoids imposing on others at almost any cost, this was a new concept for me: one I’m still not entirely comfortable with, but am trying to be. Here are a few passages from the book that stuck with me:
“Our culture fosters an assumption that many women absorb: Women are not to have any needs. Many men seem to absorb the teaching from the culture that men are not to have any feelings. Of course these rigid notions are a strategy to help people feel safe. But the irony is that we feel much safer in relationships when we are clear about our feelings and needs.”
“Remember two things about the distinction between strategies and needs. Strategies are ways of getting needs met, and needs are never in conflict; only strategies are in conflict. At any given time, there are always many strategies that can meet any particular need. When we cling to a specific strategy as the only way to meet a need, we suffer if that strategy does not bear fruit.”
“Whether I am making a request or a demand is not determined by the way my sentence sounds. Instead, I know the difference by how I feel inside my body if the request or demand is refused. If it was a request, I will just ask again in another way and attempt to find out what might be keeping the student from meeting my request. If my request was really a demand, then I will react in my body, often with feelings that come from thinking that the student should do what I am asking.”
“Making a request is a way of giving your partner the gift of being able to choose to give you what you want. And giving to the people we love, when it comes from deep in the heart, is one of life’s greatest pleasures.”
If you find that these passages resonate for you, now or in the future, I recommend this book with all my heart.
Coding
With six weeks between semesters, I knew there was plenty of space for progress. On what? Anything I wanted! (The gift of time is so foreign, I’m still not sure how to use it sometimes.) I decided to try to make progress on learning to code.
I’ve been interested in computer programming for a few years now, dating back to a speculative course description I wrote in 2009 for a class to be called “Coding and Decoding.” For the record, it’s a class I would have taken then and would still happily take today! But along the way,I’ve relied on dear friends and the internet to help me inch toward understanding. At this point,I’m as fascinated with the process of learning to code as I am with coding itself. I love the introduction to Learn Ruby the Hard Way, which I recently discovered via fellow traveler Robin Pam; it’s so good that I want to share a big chunk of it, emphases mine.
As you study this book, and continue with programming, remember that anything worth doing is difficult at first. Maybe you are the kind of person who is afraid of failure so you give up at the first sign of difficulty. Maybe you never learned self-discipline so you can’t do anything that’s “boring”. Maybe you were told that you are “gifted” so you never attempt anything that might make you seem stupid or not a prodigy. Maybe you are competitive and unfairly compare yourself to someone like me who’s been programming for 20+ years.
Whatever your reason for wanting to quit, keep at it. Force yourself. If you run into an Extra Credit you can’t do, or a lesson you just do not understand, then skip it and come back to it later. Just keep going because with programming there’s this very odd thing that happens.
At first, you will not understand anything. It’ll be weird, just like with learning any human language. You will struggle with words, and not know whatsymbols are what, and it’ll all be very confusing. Then one day BANG your brain will snap and you will suddenly “get it”. If you keep doing the exercises and keep trying to understand them, you will get it. You might not be a master coder, but you will at least understand how programming works.
If you give up, you won’t ever reach this point. You will hit the first confusing thing (which is everything at first) and then stop. If you keep trying, keep typing it in, trying to understand it and reading about it, you will eventually get it.
But, if you go through this whole book, and you still do not understand how to code, at least you gave it a shot. You can say you tried your best and a little more and it didn’t work out, but at least you tried. You can be proud of that.
Tough love and straightforward encouragement are what every beginner needs to hear. It’s hard, but it’s possible — and it’s worth it. I’m a firm believer in the potential of web-based learn-to-code tools like Codecademy, not least because they help route around the hardest hurdle — setting up your development environment — and because quick wins build momentum. But their positioning implies a promise that’s too easy to break: that you’ll emerge with the skills and confidence to build something from scratch. As the introduction to Learn Ruby the Hard Way insists up front: sometimes, the hard way is easier.
If you’d like, you can follow along with me (the hard way) here: http://blog.dianakimball.com/tagged/coding. The more fellow travelers, the more we can decode together.
Kickstarting
I’ve been thinking about the crowd-funding platform Kickstarter a lot lately. This makes sense, since my feeds have been joyfully filled with friends’ projects rocketing toward their goals: my friend Audrey Auden’s project to publish an illustrated hardcover of her (riveting!) novel Realms Unreel just closed 133% funded, and my friend nickd’s project to publish a quarterly design pocketbook called Distance is closing in on its goal with 280 backers and counting.
And just today, Matt Haughey (whom I know a little bit from ROFLCon 2008) published a fascinating article on how not to run a Kickstarter project. For me, his article helps to underscore that Kickstarter projects are about communication above all else. They’re about communicating a vision, communicating a plan of action, communicating elation; responding to criticisms, requests, praise, and sometimes silence.
I’ve long used Kickstarter as a meaningful way to support the dreams of the people I know, butI’ve recently taken to funding the projects of people I don’t already know. There’s something so thrilling about being the first person to fund a project from out of the blue, like playing the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus. Try scrolling through the list of recently-launched projects sometime, and pick one that sounds sincere and exciting. Pledge $5, or even $1. It’s not the money so much as the message: I believe in you, and you are not alone. What could be more powerful?
Reading
Since I last wrote, I’ve gotten myself into a lot of trouble with books. The good kind of trouble: I’m reading too many at once. The storylines have started to morph and crash together in my head. With twenty-four hours of travel ahead and my trusty Kindle by my side, I’m looking forward to more morphing and crashing. Here are a few I’ve finished and a few coming up:
- What We Say Matters: Practicing Non-Violent Communication, by Judith Hanson Lasater and Ike K. Lasater. Referenced above: I loved this one.
- Realms Unreel, by Audrey Auden. (Free to download if you’re an Amazon Prime member!) Last time, I recommended this novel on the strength of the first draft. This time, I’m recommending it on the strength of its final form. If you loved Snow Crash, you’ll love this book. Hyper-current filaments woven into a gripping, timeless plot. I read it in a day. If you’re interested in reading it but you’re not an Amazon Prime member (or you don’t own a Kindle), definitely reach out to Audrey on Twitter at @audreyauden.
- Debt: The First 5,000 Years, by David Graeber, and The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, by Steven Pinker. These two are inextricably linked in my mind, and not only because I started reading them on the same day. Throughout history, violence has been used to extract payment of debts and debt has been used to justify violence. I like to alternate between these two books and just marvel at how deep the impulses go. Thanks to Josh Diaz for recommending Debt, and to my dad for recommending The Better Angels of Our Nature.
- Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City, by Greg Grandin. This was techbookclub SF’s last selection, and it’s all about utopias and industry and how things and ideas travel from one place to another. I was reminded of this book when I visited Auroville yesterday, an artists’ colony close to Pondicherry with utopian leanings of its own.
- Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room is the Room, by David Weinberger. David is one of my favorite writers. About technology, but also overall. He uses words artfully and intelligently, and his sentences are as catchy as they are true. This book is about what happens when knowledge becomes the network itself — in other words, what’s happening now. I read the first half on the flight here, and hope to finish it on the flight home.
- A Concise Guide to Macroeconomics: What Managers, Executives, And Students Need to Know, by David Moss. Assigned reading in preparation for a second-semester course on Business and Government in the International Economy. I’m planning to read this all in one go on a train or plane sometime in the next two weeks. It may be assigned reading, but it also comes highly recommended by fellow students. I’m excited to read it in part because my dad’s a macroeconomics professor, but the only Econ class I took in college was microeconomics. It will be fun to understand more aboutwhat goes on inside his classroom!
And finally, two fun recommendations that crossed my radar today: Jack Cheng’s interview for The Setup is rollicking and imaginative, full of good sense and daydreams.
I want a piano that plays colors or a typewriter that clacks smells. I want a pencil that scribbles stardust, an edible notebook whose flavor profile changes based on what you write inside. I want tools that make me feel like I’m trudging through the mud, tools that require some kind of physical mastery, that feel alive when you use them, like a cowhand’s steed. Why do we have to slouch here in front of these glowing screens? Why can’t the work we do be a higher expression of beauty, both mentally and physically, possess the grace an olympian propelling herself backwards over a wobbling high jump bar?
And Rookie Mag and its Tumblr are just completely delightful. Tavi (its founder and muse) is an old soul styled by the future. She’s made Rookie into a celebration of all the best parts of being a teenage girl, and a few parts I’d forgotten, too.
Coming Soon to a City Near You
If you’ve read this far, I have exciting news: I’ll probably be somewhere near you very soon! Tonight, I’m flying back to San Francisco; Saturday, Erik and I are headed to Las Vegas for the weekend and then back to San Francisco; next Wednesday, I arrive in New York City; next Sunday, I’m back in Boston. In March, I’ll be at SXSWi, and I’ve still got room for a few more trips in the spring. Wherever you are, I’d love to see you. In the meantime, I love letters, too.
Let’s send them back and forth.
Diana
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