This & That

Some influences and preoccupations:

Insight/Mindfulness Meditation

I was first introduced to mindfulness meditation in 2008 by Ed Garwin - Stanford Physics Professor Emeritus; human being extraordinaire; and a dear friend and mentor to me. I kept saying to Ed that I would look into it but didn’t actually do it until he passed away suddenly and I was invited to attend a Sangha meeting in Montara in his honor - Ed’s Sangha met in an old lighthouse by the Pacific Ocean and that was my first introduction to an insight meditation meeting. Soon after, I went to my first silent 3-day retreat in 2009 at Spirit Rock in Marin County. Ever since, the philosophy and the practice has been a guiding light for me. I have been in a small group sangha for the last 11 years. The combination of mindfulness meditation and the emphasis on Metta (kindness/compassion) has been particularly useful for me during the pandemic.

A couple of resources that I lean on:

Audio Dharma: A site run by Insight Meditation Center, Redwood City with recordings of teachings and guided meditations. https://www.audiodharma.org/

Forest Sangha Teachings: https://forestsangha.org/teachings/audio

Consumer Culture

Having grown up in 70s/80s India, it was quite a culture shock for me to move to the US in the 90s and see the abundance of material goods and the related consumption. After several decades, I still am very ambivalent about the extent of packaging and consumption in the US that creates so much landfill material. When I decided to get a PhD in Marketing, I was interested in studying consumer behavior because I thought I wanted to know why people buy what they do. My doctoral dissertation also came from a question that intrigued me when I first came to the US: how are companies able to offer ‘no questions asked’ warranties/return policies and stay in business. I dived into the world of warranties; economics, psychology and statistics to design a series of experiments to identify what some factors might be that prevent a company like L.L. Bean from going bankrupt when offering very generous warranties. In my research as a business school professor, my interests shifted to thinking about consumer culture and the Indian context, where globalization was bringing the same array of goods to India. This led to co-authoring research articles based on qualitative ethnographic studies that examined the shaping of consumer culture in India’s emerging markets. Currently, I am interested in understanding the impact of this consumer culture in the developed world as well as in developing countries as the burden of waste has become a cause of environmental concern globally. After all these years, I am still baffled by the abundance of goods and things like fast fashion and cheap clothes and the need for these.

The Environment

I first moved to the US to get a Master’s degree in Environmental Engineering and specialized in hydrology and water resources engineering with an emphasis on stormwater management (rather ironic that in my first year in the graduate program and right during finals week that Spring semester, Durham, NC had a flash storm and my apartment got flooded at midnight with a foot of standing water). My master’s thesis used a math simulation stormwater management model (EPA -SWMM) to simulate and assess Duke University’s stormwater system and give recommendations for changes. The thesis was used in graduate classes as a stormwater model reference. I soon after moved on to my PhD in Marketing but after all these years am drawn back to this issue of water management and hydrology as the world sees crises around water management and as we are seeing flooding and droughts more frequently these days. I am currently reading more on ways that we, as individual citizens, can work to prevent environmental catastrophes and am very heartened by Rebecca Solnit’s message of hope around this. Here is her article in The Guardian:

Ten Ways to Confront the Climate Crisis Without Losing Hope - Rebecca Solnit, in The Guardian

And, here is Rebecca Solnit’s newest project to get involved and do something about this:

#NotTooLate - the website for NotTooLate is: https://www.nottoolateclimate.com/