The joys of grandfatherhood

Many are the joys of grandfatherhood.. 

Some of you may remember I wrote of my weeks of depression and how conversations with my grandson kept my spirits aloft even though I only saw him on my computer. But then last week he flew into town with his parents and I could hold him in my arms, it was really different. And when he wrapped his chubby arms around my neck, gave me a kiss and said "dada", it was bliss indeed!

Truth be told, there's nothing better than being a grandparent. It is only now that I realize the real joys of grandparenthood. You have all the pleasures of parenting with none of its obligations. And your grandchildren respond in kind. Our grandchildren accept us for ourselves, without rebuke or effort to change us, as no one in our entire lives has ever done, not our parents, siblings, spouses, friends - and hardly ever our own grown children. Indeed, I came to realize that perfect love does not come until the first grandchild!

And what a bargain grandchildren are!  You give them any loose change, and they give you a million dollars' worth of pleasure for the rest of your life. Most often when they create mischief and mayhme , they can always run to grandpa to escape the wrath of their parents. Of course grandparents are there to also help the child get into mischief they haven't thought of yet.  But there is a down side as you grow old. While an hour with your grandchildren can make you feel young again, anything longer than that, you start aging quickly! 

Just watching him get up each day, discovering new things with joy and wonder is a particular delight. For him everything is new and every day has a miracle hidden inside it. And as he meanders around, he teaches you to look for the beautiful little things in life: how a window remote works, how the little wooden spoon makes a wonderful drum stick, how the raindrops fall from the heavens. While every day is not always beautiful and good, he manages to find something good and fascinating in it. 

Looking for that good will also teach us to be grateful for what we have and worry less about what we don’t have. It will help us to find contentment and happiness in the small things. So does his perspective teaches us that life is made up of everyday miracles. Truly grandchildren are God's way of compensating us for growing old. 

And an unexpected joy of grandfatherhood is watching your son become a loving and doting father!

Wait or procrastinate

Just when we thought that we had the procrastinators on the run, out comes this book recommending the very opposite. It says you should wait till the very last second before making a decision or taking any action. Our family is split evenly between the procrastinators and the quick decisive ones and so this book comes at a very discouraging time for me since I am not a procrastinator!

Frank Partnoy's "Wait: The Art and Science of Delay" is about the value of waiting. His examples range widely, and so does the time scale of the delay involved: the elite baseball hitter's ability to wait the extra milliseconds to "find" a pitch; the comedian's ability to wait a few seconds to deliver a punchline; the skilled matchmaker's advice that blind daters suppress their snap judgments and wait a full hour before deciding whether they might want to go on a second date; the innovative company's ability to hang on to creative ideas, for months or even years, until they pay off. "We are hard-wired to react quickly," Mr. Partnoy says. "Modern society taps into that hardwiring, tempting us to respond instantly to all kinds of information and demands. Yet we are often better off resisting both biology and technology."

For example, most people are taught that you should apologize right away. But in most cases, it tuns out, delayed apologies are more effective. If you’ve wronged a spouse or partner or colleague in some substantive, intentional way, they will want time to process information about what you’ve done. If you acknowledge what you did, and delay the apology, then the wronged party has a chance to tell you how they feel in response, and your apology is much more meaningful.

In technology, the story of how the Post-It Note was developed at 3M is a classic case in the business innovation canon. Mr. Partnoy recounts how the inventors of a new adhesive, casting about for ways to use it, were inspired to create bookmarks that would stick inside a book but leave no residue. The management at 3M thought the bookmark market was too small to pursue. Employees at the company eventually started to use the sample "bookmarks" for writing notes—completing the creative act by discovering a valuable purpose for the invention. The story is said to show the value of serendipity, or perseverance, or the eureka moment. In Mr. Partnoy's telling, however, the moral is different. He focuses on the 12-year delay between the invention of the adhesive and the launch of the notepad product, emphasizing that the inventors and the company were content to wait and keep the project alive in the hope that something would come of it. 3M's policy of letting employees use 15% of their time for new projects, later one-upped by Google's 20% time policy (since eliminated), may have had something to do with its ability to delay gratification but the delayed decision led to a path breaking innovation!

But too much waiting can't be good, can it? Twelve years is a long time to procrastinate for results! Mr. Partnoy is not so sure. He recommends waiting until the last possible moment to make decisions or take positions, on the grounds that waiting gives you the benefit of all the time you possess, allowing ideas to form and thoughts to coalesce. He cites technology investor and guru Paul Graham, who notes that even when we are procrastinating we are not doing nothing—we are doing something other than what we are "supposed" to be doing. Sometimes the task we avoid turns out to be less important than the one we choose to focus on. And perhaps other people will do the things we are avoiding!

These strategies don't always work, of course. Delaying a task could mean forgetting important information when we finally get around to doing it. Procrastinating can leave you with a meticulously organized closet but no money left to buy clothes after you pay the late fees to the IRS and return the advance on your novel. Paradoxically, minimizing important commitments can be a bad strategy for the procrastinator, since he will then have proportionally more unimportant things to capture his time and attention. 

Historically, for human beings, procrastination has not been regarded as a bad thing. The Greeks and Romans generally regarded procrastination very highly. The wisest leaders embraced procrastination and would basically sit around and think and not do anything unless they absolutely had to. The idea that procrastination is bad really started in the Puritanical era with Jonathan Edwards’s sermon against procrastination and then the American embrace of “a stitch in time saves nine,” and this sort of work ethic that required immediate and diligent action. But in recent studies, managing delay is an important tool for human beings. People are more successful and happier when they manage delay. Procrastination is just a universal state of being for humans. We will always have more things to do than we can possibly do, so we will always be imposing some sort of unwarranted delay on some tasks. Some scientists have argued that there are two kinds of procrastination: active procrastination and passive procrastination. Active procrastination means you realize that you are unduly delaying mowing the lawn or cleaning your closet, but you are doing something that is more valuable instead. Passive procrastination is just sitting around on your sofa not doing anything.The question is not whether we are procrastinating, it is whether we are procrastinating well !

There are a few who have taken action the procrastinators. A publisher in Argentina decided to light a fire under those of us who sometimes procrastinate when it comes to actually cracking open a new book. They’ve printed a book that goes away if you don’t read it. No, the actual book is still in your hands, but as time passes, and the ink is exposed to air and light, the actual words go away. On average you have two months to read their publication, before it turns into a lovely blank page volume that you can then use as a journal. Sad to say, this experiment could have used some time to procrastinate before rushing into print.

Perhaps the way to go is to call procrastination, "managing delay". Now you are not procrastinating, you're managing delay. And that is a very important lesson in life and business, which is to delay gratification. People are better off and they're happier, they make better decisions, when they're able to delay gratification. And that's true whether or not the time frame is milliseconds long or months long or years long. 

As the psychologist Robert Sternberg says: "The essence of intelligence would seem to be in knowing when to think and act quickly, and knowing when to think and act slowly." 

The arithmetic of our bodies

From the DNA that encodes us, to the fingerprints that characterize us, to our place in the universe and our friend counts on Facebook, we are mathematical marvels. So says Steven Strogatz in this rather interesting piece:

"Let’s begin with what our bodies can teach us. We all know that toddlers learn to count with their fingers and sometimes their toes. Those appendages are called “digits,” and it’s no accident that the same word refers to the 10 symbols 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 in the decimal system. Our bodies are our first arithmetic teachers."

"But what is less widely known is that our bodies are also trying to teach us higher math, if only we’d let them. Look at a baby’s first hairdo:

Courtesy of Sheila Larson

The cowlick at the center of that cute little swirl is, in mathematical parlance, a “singularity,” a point of confusion where the baby’s hair can’t seem to decide which way to grow. On the back of the cowlick the hair falls to the left; on the front it grows to the right; and on the sides it falls forward and backward. What makes a cowlick “singular” is that a variable (the hair’s direction) changes abruptly and discontinuously there."

Singularities reflect nature’s attempt to resolve mismatches, to enforce continuity against all odds. When disagreements become inevitable (between hair directions, or wind directions, or time zones), singularities confine those mismatches to the smallest space possible: a single point. One of the most remarkable features of singularities is their persistence. They have a kind of permanence to them. As you grow, your skull and scalp get bigger but you never lose that cowlick. 

Or take a close look at your fingers and palms. See all those neatly patterned fingerprint ridges? On small patches of skin they run nearly parallel to one another. That’s nature enforcing continuity again. But when different sets of ridges collide head-on, it’s hard to keep everyone happy. Each ridge wants to stay parallel to its neighbors, but also wants to merge with the newcomers. The collisions create unavoidable discontinuities — singularities — that are not only of interest to palm readers and the FBI. 

In 1965 Lionel Penrose, a British medical geneticist, pointed out that fingerprints and palm prints obey a universal rule: no matter what your personal pattern looks like, everybody with five fingers always has four more triradii than loops... The irony here is amazing. The most distinctive feature we sport — the geometry of our fingerprints and palm prints — is also the least distinctive: the same topological rule holds for all of us.

Using topological reasoning like that shown above, Art Winfree, one of the world’s great mathematical biologists, predicted that rhythms ranging from heartbeats to sleep cycles would have their own North Poles, states where the phase of the rhythm would become singular and the cycle could cease. His ideas were confirmed experimentally and are now regarded as important clues by doctors and biomedical researchers working to unravel the mysteries of cardiac arrhythmias.

Of course, Leonardo was there first. Leonardo envisaged the great picture chart of the human body and believed the workings of the human body to be an analogy for the workings of the universe. According to Leonardo if you open your legs enough that your head is lowered by one-fourteenth of your height and raise your hands enough that your extended fingers touch the line of the top of your head, know that the centre of the extended limbs will be the navel, and the space between the legs will be an equilateral triangle.

He predicted the following arithmetic of the body:

• the length of the outspread arms is equal to the height of a man
• from the hairline to the bottom of the chin is one-tenth of the height of a man
• the maximum width of the shoulders is a quarter of the height of a man
• the distance from the elbow to the tip of the hand and from the breasts to the top of the head is a quarter of the height of a man
• the length of the hand is one-tenth of the height of a man
• the foot is one-seventh of the height of a man

Life before screens

A recent report suggests that modern urbanites spend a greater and greater portion of their lives in front of their TV screens. According to the A.C. Nielsen Co., the average American watches more than 4 hours of TV each day. That means that in a 65-year life, that person will have spent 9 years glued to the tube! 

I remember a time when our life was bereft of screens - no TV, computers, Ipads or iphones. Heck, I even remember the time when we had no radio. It was 1948 and the three of us kids were pestering our father to buy a radio. Mindful of its potential for distraction, he extracted a solemn promise from each of us that we would only listen to the radio for the "Children's Hour" and the news! The TV and computer screens entered our lives only decades later and when they came it was years before our lives became entangled with spending hours before these pesky screens that took away a larger and larger parts of our waking lives.

These screens brought the world to us with all its splendor and mysteries and entertainment. A click provided access to the world's knowledge and to words of the wisest statesmen. These soon became our reservoir of knowledge, music and soon even movies. But even in its wonders lay a trap for our minds.

The biggest trap of watching too much TV is that it could become a safe way to escape your own life instead of looking at it square in the eye. People who gossip have the same problem. Their lives aren’t interesting enough so they feel the need to know everybody else’s business and spread the word to whoever will listen. The person who watches television for hours on end is no different. They end up so wrapped up in the lives of others that it becomes their entire life.

Also when you watch TV, you’ll find that it does all the work FOR you. You don’t need to “create” in your mind like you do when reading. When you read, your brain has to use its imagination to come up with the smells, the tastes, the sounds, the pictures, and the feelings described in the book or article but when you watch TV, all of that is already done for you (at least the hearing and seeing part). If you ever wonder why your brain feels so “empty” after watching television, that’s exactly why. Your brain shuts off because it has no job to do. Use it or lose it indeed.

The fact is that TV can easily become the biggest time thief of all and yet, people don’t realize it. They don’t become indignant at the opportunities in life that they lose. It’s amazing how people take the time to buy the best security for their home so their precious belongings don’t get stolen, but when it comes to protecting their mind and their time, two of their biggest assets, the doors are wide open for easy pickings!

 Finally TV can be just as addictive as any illegal substance on the market today. It’s easily accessible, pleasurable, and makes you forget your troubles for the day.  This is the worst part of watching too much television. You watch one show and when it ends, the TV says “Coming up next…stay tuned for blah blah blah”, so you become curious, you watch it and you like it and BOOM, you add another rotation to your weekly TV schedule. Those hours add up and once you get vested in the shows, they’ve got you for life.

In recent years, the situation has become even worse with the advent of IPADs and cell phones. Indeed nearly a quarter of people now use these second screens while watching TV. If you add the computer screens and the smaller screens of IPADs and cellphones, I am guessing that those four hours per day will double or even triple. We are rapidly reaching a stage where people would prefer to do all transactions through screens big and small rather than directly. I am sure many of you have been in households where the entire family is sitting in the room but each one is glued to his or her own screen and the sound level in the room is zero as no body is talking to each other!

When it’s all said and done, in too many cases, watching so much of life on screens- television, IPAD, or cellphone- may provides a safe escape from looking at your own life, but just as surely it deteriorates the mind, makes one unproductive, and can lead to a dangerous addiction. 

A love of the screen can truly be one of the most dangerous drugs out there on the market today and the sad thing about it is, most people don't even realize it.

Thank yous in books

I was finishing my autographic book a few years ago ""A Passion to Build" when a dear friend of mine sagely advised me to make sure that the finished book had neither an acknowledgement section nor an appendix. Curious at this advise, I asked him why. His sage reply; " If you do, you will lose both your friends and many of your readers: the former because you have not thanked them enough and the latter  will only read the sections of your book that have their names on them!"

Now Sam Sacks of the Wall Street Journal, in an article, rails against the commercialisation of the book industry today. And he takes off against a surprising part of the industry- the author of the book. He criticizes the authors for caving in to the publishers and always attaching a separate chapter on acknowledgement at the end of the book.

Acknowledgments typically open with a statement to the effect that, although writing is lonely work, the author could never have completed his book without help and support. They are the Thank You Oscar speech of the writer. And like the Oscars, the thanking is long and tedious.

Of course, it is right and proper to be grateful to the people who helped you in your endeavor by sharing memories or thoughts or in other ways, and if it were done less obtrusively, there would be something sweet about crediting them in the book. But because the acknowledgments page functions primarily as an extension of the book’s publicity, it tends to become far more than that. What seems to be far more common is for a writer to offer his thanks in such a way as to announce the tremendous effort he himself put into writing and revising the book. One author humblebragged that his first draft was so marked up that he’d had “first-year French essays that came back clearer.” This undercurrent of faux-modest self-promotion runs like a viral strain throughout every acknowledgments page. 

After the professional shout-outs comes the collegial name-dropping, when writers thank the published novelists who taught at their M.F.A. programs or lectured at their writers’ retreats. Friendly as this may seem, it often has the comical side effect of counteracting the efforts of the book’s publicity department, since the authors being thanked are usually the same people who have written the blurbs. Perhaps readers already know that book publishing is an insular, back-scratching industry, but does it have to be revealed quite so openly?

Next our scrupulously thorough author will thank the fellowships and grant organizations that subsidized his work—and here we have the pleasure of seeing a novel transform into a billboard. Even the acknowledgment page’s fig leaf of justification—that it would be churlish not to credit the people who helped midwife the work—now vanishes, because, pace the  US Supreme Court, corporations are not people. When a writer thanks Yaddo, he’s not being gracious to anybody; he’s just telling the world that he went to Yaddo.

Typically, it’s around this point that the author will turn his attention to the little people. The difficulty here seems to be similar to that faced by a couple choosing their wedding guests: once you start putting second-tier names on the list, it’s impossible to know when to stop. The author is usually reduced to a rolling eructation of proper names, like this case in point: “Kevin Spall, Angie Fugate, Josh Mosher, Heather Shultes, Kandy Tobias, Sue Lube, Jenny Taylor, Mike Shubel, Rich McDonald, Andrea Koerte, Rick Goss, Christina Ballard, Frankie Hall….”That particular list may well continue for another forty-two names. 

It’s all meant to seem very generous, but readers are within their rights to be skeptical. For one thing, the gratitude is unwarranted. Despite protests to the contrary, novel-writing is necessarily solitary; however well-meaning they may be, friends, family, lovers, and colleagues will only ever hinder the process (the most they can do—and it’s no small thing—is forgive the author for ignoring them). But on the off chance that they really did help with the creation of the book, how meagerly they’ve been rewarded! Is it really so gratifying to be recognized in print when your name is included on a list that looks like the bcc line of a mass e-mail?

Finally, the acknowledgments page will conclude with the sort of crowd-pandering favored by stumping politicians—with expressions of awe and humility for the author’s supportive parents, brilliant children, and devoted spouse. Apparently having dedicated the book to these same people in the front of the book was insufficient as a gesture. Even so, you’d think that they might have a little more respect for the book that they have presumably worked hard on. 

Instead, why not reserve your thank-yous for your Web site, where the interested can seek them out? Or, as some canny authors have done, hide them in the small print of the copyright page. The best solution of all, of course, is to write a few masterpieces. Become great, and all the picayune biographical details that bored and annoyed us will suddenly become numinous with secret importance. We’ll want to know all about your editors and childhood friends and Starbucks baristas—you’ll be giving them true posterity.

"Until then," says Sam, " adoréd authors: spare us. Readers of fiction are an embattled lot, and the buzzing of book promotion is only one of many distractions that cut into the extended quiet needed to disappear into a novel. We’ve already ceded to a fair share of compromises. We know that the blurbs are very often polite exaggerations and we know that the jacket copy is pablum; we even keep quiet when it’s obvious that your author photo has been retouched. All we ask is that you don’t let that same commercial rot spread inside the book’s covers."

Innovators of the year -2012

Since 1999, MIT's Technology Review has selected 35 exceptionally talented young innovators whose work  a distinguished panel of judges have agreed has the greatest potential to transform the world.

The list has become an important recognition among technologists at startups, in industry, and in the academy. Over the years, TR has had some success in choosing women and men whose innovations and companies have been profoundly influential on the direction of human affairs. Previous winners include Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the cofounders of Google; Mark Zuckerberg, the cofounder of Facebook; Jonathan Ive, the chief designer of Apple; Helen Greiner, the cofounder of iRobot; Max Levchin, the cofounder of PayPal and founder of Slide; David Karp, the creator of Tumblr; and MIT neuroscientist Ed Boyden, one of the inventors of the emerging field of optogenetics, which makes it possible to control thought and memory. 

But why restrict nominees to technologists under the age of 35? What's with the youth chauvinism? Don't you think people 35 or older have the capacity to be truly innovative? After all the history of technology is replete with examples of world-historical innovations by people in middle, late-middle, or even old age. Of Thomas Edison's 1,093 U.S. patents, only about 300 were filed before he was 35 years old. Steve Jobs was 52 in 2007, when he first unveiled the iPhone.

According to TR editors, the reasoning behind the age qualification is mainly journalistic. The list of innovators is not primarily a list of the most innovative people in the world, because such a list would inevitably be composed of men and women well known to our audience. Rather it is a list of young people, because TR hopes to introduce us to personalities of you may have never heard but who will in the years to come set the world on fire with their potential to transform the world.

Some members of the latest list of young innovators from around the world have developed consumer Web services you might have used, such as Spotify or Dropbox. Others are making more fundamental breakthroughs that have yet to be commercialized, such as more efficient engines or improvements in optical communications. And a few are blazing trails in fields that didn’t exist before, like pop-up fabrication of tiny machines, or cameras that can see around corners. But all 35 of them have something significant in common: their work is likely to be influential for a very long time. Of the 35, 5 are Indians!

In this new list for 2012, a few worth special mentions:

Ryan Bailey

Shining a light on faster, cheaper, more accurate medical tests

Sarbajit Banerjee

Windows that block heat—but let it through when you want them to

Burcin Becerik-Gerber

Using cell phones to negotiate energy-efficient settings in office buildings 

Qixin Chen

Improving demand forecasting for electric power to save fuel and reduce emissions 

William Chueh

Pulling hydrogen out of water with the help of concentrated sunlight and an inexpensive material

Mircea Dincă

Using sponges to improve and store alternative fuels

Daniel Ek

Making online music a paying business, without forcing people to pony up for one song at a time

Rana el Kaliouby

Teaching devices to tell a frown from a smile

Ken Endo

Adding spring to robotic limbs by doing away with some of the motors 

Christina Fan

Prenatal testing for genetic conditions from a sample of the mother’s blood

Abraham Flaxman

Combining different types of data in new ways in order to track and slow the spread of disease in developing countries 

Danielle Fong

Making clean energy pay off by storing it as squeezed air 

Saikat Guha

Letting advertisers send targeted pitches to your mobile phone without ever seeing your personal information

Chris Harrison

Liberating us from the touch screen by turning skin and objects into input devices

John Hering

Securing our smartphones from spyware and rogue apps, with a little help from the crowds 

Drew Houston

Hiding all the complexities of remote file storage behind a small blue box

Prashant Jain

Tuning nanocrystals to make tinier, more efficient switches for optical computing and solar panels

Bryan Laulicht

Finding an adhesive that protects vulnerable skin

Nanshu Lu

Soft, flexible electronics bond to skin and even organs for better health monitoring

Shishir Mehrotra

Turning a Web video phenomenon into a profitable business by making ads optional

Shannon Miller

Making engines super-efficient by getting them to run at extremely high pressures 

Ren Ng 

By tracking the direction of light, a camera takes pictures that can be refocused on different objects in a scene

Juan Sebastián Osorio

Monitors specially designed for premature infants help detect breathing problems 

Joyce Poon

A tiny roller coaster for light could help keep data ­centers cool

Hossein Rahnama

Mobile apps that tell you what you need to know before you have to ask

Ben Silbermann

A smartly designed social network for sharing images and interests

Christopher Soghoian

On a tear against bad privacy practices online, he urges companies to change the way they operate—and sounds alarms if they don’t.

Pratheev Sreetharan

Mass-producible tiny machines snap into place like objects in a pop-up book 

Leila Takayama 

Applying the tools of social science to make robots easier to live and work with

Bozhi Tian

Artificial tissue that can monitor and improve health down to the level of individual cells

Eben Upton

His ultracheap computer is perfect for tinkering

Andreas Velten

Spotting tiny problems with help from an ultrafast camera

Zheng Wang

Slowing light to help chips cope with optical data

Baile Zhang

A new type of invisibility cloak made from a common material can work with larger objects 

Weian Zhao

Spying on cells in their native habitat to develop better tests and drugs

India in the news

In the past week, India has been front page news in the US. In one article in Washington Post, which raised the ire of the Indian establishment, the author questioned the ability of Manmohan Singh to lead the country.  

"India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh helped set his country on the path to modernity, prosperity and power, but critics say the shy, soft-spoken 79-year-old is in danger of going down in history as a failure... the image of the scrupulously honorable, humble and intellectual technocrat has slowly given way to a completely different one: a dithering, ineffectual bureaucrat presiding over a deeply corrupt government."
Singh will go down in history as India’s first Sikh prime minister and the country’s third-longest-serving premier, but also as someone who did not know when to retire, Guha said.

A second article examines the development of the Indian diaspora over the years- how the arrivals of Indians starting in 1960 went through a few phases of growth. In the early days, most were engineers and doctors who stuck to service jobs for security. Starting in the eighties as they became wealthy, they started to branch out into new enterprises but it was the nineties where the offsprings of the first generation of engineers captured the computer industry and really became entrepreneurs. They are now in their next phase fully integrating into the community and reaching out for political office from their terms in the administration. 

"After a decade of quietly building behind-the-scenes influence," says the article, " Indian Americans in the Washington area — as well as in California, Pennsylvania and other states — are entering public and political life in record numbers. This year, six Indian Americans are making credible runs for Congress, two are serving as state governors and dozens more are either holding or seeking seats in state legislatures."

Many older Indian Americans in the Washington area said in interviews that even after achieving economic success, they continue to shy away from partisan politics. In the Washington area, the most important social hub for Hindu immigrants is a large, ornately decorated temple in Lanham. Older temple leaders and other Indian Americans here described spending years immersed in work, family and worship, quite apart from American society.

“When I came to this country I had nothing in my pocket. For years, it was always the same mentality — only work and family. We created an island in a new country,” said Prakash Hosadurga, 50, who owns a construction company in Bowie. “We were successful, but we were slow to move into the mainstream. We never raised our voices, and we never learned to have fun. It’s the younger generation that is changing.”

Today, the Indian American population has soared to more than 3 million, and Indian names and faces are becoming a familiar part of American life. An ambitious new generation is moving up fast in a variety of high-profile fields, from Preet Bharara, the U.S. district attorney in Manhattan, to Kal Penn, a television and movie actor who became Obama’s outreach coordinator and spoke at the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday. 

In the early days, many first-generation immigrants shied away from politics as unsavory and irrelevant to getting ahead. For the younger generation, it is different. They look at President Obama, and he reminds them of themselves  — educated, motivated, tolerant and also dark-skinned, with Asian roots. And for them now the skys is the limit.

The big lie

In recent weeks the conservative press in the US has been touting a documentary 2016 produced by Dinesh Dzousa. This so called documentary attempts a rather ham handed take down of Obama and so it has the right wing raving. Yet even a cursory examination reveals a distorted mind at work with little relevance to truth.

Fortunately a few people have decided to challenge the essential premise of the movie as well as the book that it is based on. Here is one of them - Bill Maher- who has his own comedy show: