Why Maradona is the greatest footballer

I posted about a low key yoga athlete who passed away suddenly at the age of 50.

Within a week, another sportsman, far more famous and supremely gifted died at the age of 60. Many can argue about his conduct (on and certainly off the pitch) but what he can do with the football, nearly no other humans on earth can. For that, in my book, he is the greatest footballer that has ever lived. 

The following obituary penned by Bobby Ghosh states the case well. It is one thing to be a brilliant player surrounded by other brilliant players. But Maradona made magic out of mediocre materials.

By 

Bobby Ghosh

, 

26 November 2020, 02:45 GMT+8

Soccer fans are fortunate to live in a time when two superstars are simultaneously making the claim to be the best player in the history of the sport — and more fortunate still that we can watch the contest between Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo play out, week in and week out, live before a global audience of billions. Thanks to YouTube, I can watch high-quality videos of their most compelling performances, and of every goal they’ve ever scored.

When Diego Maradona was staking his claim to the title of best ever, most of the world could only get a quadrennial glimpse of his genius, when he turned out for Argentina in the ’82, ’86, ’90 and ‘94 World Cups. Growing up in India during that period, I never saw highlights of his performances for FC Barcelona or Napoli (a city where he’s still regarded as part deity, part royalty).

There are now some video highlights online that preserve a grainy record of him in his pomp — including THAT goal against England in the Azteca Stadium on June 22, 1986. But these only hint at what he was capable of. They don’t constitute sufficient supporting evidence to the argument that he was the best ever.

What makes it harder still is the even scarcer evidence for claimants of previous generations: Hungary’s Ferenc Puskas, Spain and Argentina’s Alfredo di Stefano, Brazil’s Pele, the Dutchman Johan Cruyff, Germany’s Franz Beckenbauer, et al. That they played under different conditions and rules, and in different positions, makes the argument moot, anyway.

We can’t, then, know if Maradona was technically the best to have kicked a ball.

Nevertheless, I’m here to argue that he was the greatest of all time. And my case rests on the simple fact that he, more than all the other claimants named here, came closest to defying the dictum that soccer is a team sport.

For most of his career, Maradona played in teams that lacked any other world-beating players. Run your eye down the list of the Napoli squad with which he conquered Italian soccer in 1986-87, and there’s not a single other player who would make it to a Serie A hall of fame. He had a slightly better supporting cast in the Argentina sides that he took to two World Cup finals — winning it in ’86, and coming agonizingly close in ’90 — but nobody would argue that Jorge Valdano was to Maradona what, say, Jairzinho was to Pele in ’70.

It is one thing to be a brilliant player surrounded by other brilliant players; in this regard Messi and Ronaldo have been exceptionally fortunate with their club teams. But Maradona made magic out of mediocre materials.

What makes this even more remarkable is the weight of expectation he carried on his diminutive frame. When he signed for Napoli in 1984, the club had never won the Italian league, and yet its fans immediately began to dream of championship glory. The “pibe de oro,” or golden boy, was as much talisman as captain and player.

Other footballers — Messi among them — have since had to cope with comparable pressure, but modern superstars are surrounded by a scaffolding of public relations professionals and psychiatrists to help them. Maradona, lacking support off the field as he did on it, nonetheless delivered the “oro” for club and country over and over again.

Until he didn’t. It was probably inevitable that the burdens of his genius would eventually crush him, and they did so in spectacular fashion. But he withstood them long enough to cast in bronze — like the plaque commemorating THAT goal outside the Azteca Stadium — his claim to being the greatest of all time. 

RIP, Diego Armando Maradona, GOAT.

© 2020 Bloomberg L.P.

Photographer: Alessandro Sabattini/Getty Images Europe

Yoga

 M introduced me to this. She's a passionate practitioner and in fact has even attended a teacher training course.

I could well comprehend the benefits. If I don't stretch before a workout, the pains (arising from tight muscles and tendons) are sure to afflict me. I saw Yoga as a well structured and extended stretching in its most fundamental form.

As one progresses, it is not just about stretching but also about strengthening especially the core muscles and in an a functional way. There were several sessions where my muscles felt the workout more from yoga then even the most strenuous gym sets.

M set me off in the direction but as we was away, she got me a few virtual teachers. First Boho beautiful whose workouts she was following and I tagged along. Boho was too advanced and she then introduced me to Lesley Fightmaster. I would say she was the one who "taught" me. 

There are three reasons why her lessons worked for me.

1. She had really good descriptions of what to do that even without looking at the screen, I could follow the various positions she was describing

2. She had a gentle soothing voice (well, they all have) but in her case, she also soothes by reminding us always that one doesn't have to be perfect and that was really heartening to here when I know I am twisted up wrongly

3. She had these most wonderful life quotes at the end of her session which somehow always spoke to me. I don't know how she finds these lines, always so apt. 

The reason I am writing about her is that she passed away suddenly and I thought of how she is a loss to the yoga community. In her own way, she has made the world a better place and just goes to show you don't need to be a world leader to do your part.

In the final video (recorded for thanksgiving week) just before her passing, it was about gratitude.

Be thankful that you don’t already have everything you desire.
If you did, what would there be to look forward to?

Be thankful when you don’t know something,
for it gives you the opportunity to learn.

Be thankful for the difficult times.
During those times you grow.

Be thankful for your limitations,
because they give you opportunities for improvement.

Be thankful for each new challenge,
because it will build your strength and character.

Be thankful for your mistakes.
They will teach you valuable lessons.

Be thankful when you’re tired and weary,
because it means you’ve made a difference.

It’s easy to be thankful for the good things.
A life of rich fulfillment comes to those who
are also thankful for the setbacks.

Gratitude can turn a negative into a positive.
Find a way to be thankful for your troubles,
and they can become your blessings.

~Author Unknown

I am thankful M introduced me to her videos. May her soul rest in peace

A Moment in Time: Watchmaking at the Start of the 21st Century

How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard

 The last half year is one of the best periods of my life.

·       Professionally, I was totally consumed by up to 18 hours/day of work as governments all over the world turned to us for help and I had to deal with many overworked colleagues along the way, some of whom manifested their stress poorly

·      Politically, my home country’s back door government has descended further into ever more nefarious dealings while the country slides ever backwards socio-economically

·       Socially, it’s depressing, especially not being able to meet friends for the first few months and even now, I am still not able to meet clients and colleagues at scale

·       Spiritually, the fact that churches remain a restricted gathering place meant I haven’t stepped into one physically throughout this period, though the online masses and informative podcasts helpe

Y   Yet, despite all of these challenges, this has been a most wonderful period for me. And that is saying something, as I have now lived through more than a hundred half-year periods. So, what makes this period the top percentile?

Only one thing: being in the presence of my immediate family extensively and over meals and family activities, intensively. So, despite all my work and social difficulties, emotionally, this is my happiest time. I penned 8 blogs in this period, beginning with one in April about parenting styles and concluding earlier this month on being able to run together with my children, achilles tendonitis notwithstanding. I guess you already know the cause of my joy; this is the happiest moment because my family is together

I wish we could have spent more time together, but alas not every single minute of the day was spent together, and even when we are together, it’s honest to say that not all the minutes there were pleasant. As usual, being all well-educated and even more well-opinionated people, there are differences in opinions on just about everything: from car sharing schedule to insurance purchases and scholarship obligations. For me, and I trust for you too, it is often at these times when our opinions are most sharply divided that we find the essence of our love.

 It is when we are almost at the point of hurting each other with our words and thoughts that we realise that we cannot be torn apart. Both sides will find a way to reach out and as we do so, we find that throughout all our differences, there remains always a common core: that we always have the best intentions for each other. How the intentions are translated into action differ, but the intention is always good. That is the essence of our love as a family. We are always wishing and wanting the best for each other.

J left for UK two weeks ago to do his Masters and M just left last night to begin her second year. I miss them so. The words of Winnie the Pooh capture the sentiment so well

Old Upper Thomson Road

Sometimes, urban planners can lack creativity. It is one thing to name a road after the chief engineer who designed it. Quite another to name the road above it as upper. And what really takes it to the next level is to build a new road next to it, re-use the name, and call the original road old. Well, that is where we were at over the weekend: the Old Upper Thomson Road. In its heyday, it was more than just a road, it was also where the Singapore Grand Prix took place. 

credit: timeout.com

For the past 20 years though, it has been our family exercise track; and especially over the last 6 months as we all sought escape from our circuit breaker lockdown at home. Over the weekend, M & J joined me on a circuit I had tried several times before the last few months. We ran from our place and up and down the length of the Old Upper Thomson Road.

It's such a pleasure running with them. The last time all three of us went up and down this road was maybe 10 years ago, with Meg on her bicycle, Josh on his roller blades and me on my pre-achilles tendonitis legs. Josh in front would sandwich Meg in the middle. They were both just gaining confidence on their new modes of transport and I, as the cheerleader-in-chief would urge them on and also, to pick them up when they fell. I must say that I have been more responsible for their scars. It is fair to say that I subscribe (in this case, literally) to the parenting school of hard knocks. I would push M down the slope and her mom would watch in horror of her darling veering off!

The scars have long healed; and J then M have been exceeding me in all sporting activities since then. They are literally "citius, altius, fortius" than me. As they live up to the Olympic creed, the chance for the old bean to do something together with the faster, higher, stronger younglings is a much cherished one.

So, yesterday, in the rain, coached by a well-informed J who kept us on a LSD (long steady distance) pace and led by a beautifully-gaited M (even when the sole of her shoe gave out), we ran together for more than 80minutes covering nearly 12kms up and down this famous road.

The achilles heel is aching all day, but oh-so-sweetly when one thinks of the cause!

For our 3rd act

While most of the world were under some kind of lockdown, D and I opened up two new fronts for us, which hopefully will prove to be the right future-proofed decisions.

Being movie buffs, we both liked the fact that the films were works of studios with a full organisation of producers, screenwriters, actors, stunt workers, prop makers, costume designers and of course directors. So, for no other reason than the word sounded cool and the meaning of it interesting, I had used CP as an ‘entity’, a-la Hollywood, to present works we had created for our significant moments. This is an early example of how CP featured.

 

So far, we have produced no cinematic masterpieces though I must say J & M are two joint works that we continue to be proud of.

At the end of March, we set up CC. Over the years, we have been investing in various assets, including in start-ups, and we have been pondering over how best to hold these: whether in our own personal names or through a private limited company where we can manage these more professionally. D’s decision to move on from her full time job clearly meant she now has more time to attend to our holdings. We hope we have invested wisely to date and so we set up an investment holding and advisory company and we will eventually pool our value-creating assets here. With me already past my golden milestone and D about to do so, we thought we would use this as one of the vehicles for our 3^rd act together. We can then grow this together and also share our experience to others.

At the same time CP first found its way into our lives nearly 30 years ago, a small seed was also planted in my head. Having earned a government scholarship, studied at its national university, found a first job in one of its world class company and about to marry one of its (premier school) citizens, I naturally thought the world of the country. A country not of my birth but one had chose to go to freely to seek a better future. I didn’t think twice on applying for Permanent Residency. It was a no-brainer, as the saying goes. And throughout all that time, it has proven to be a true no-regret move, so much so that I was never faced with the need to take the next step of actually becoming a citizen.

 Four events over the last four years soon changed that.

• ·       First, both J and then M won important scholarships in the country. J with the highest level of Government and M with perhaps its most important world class company (even better than mine). It is clear that their future is here.
• ·       Second, the PR (good as it has been) is actually not permanent and tied to the holder having a job. As I approach my 3rd act where I would be likely self-employed, it makes sense to have greater assurance of permanence in a place where my children will be.
• ·       Third, as we move into our new place, our old house will become a stranded asset as a PR-owned landed property cannot be rented out. So, there is a small economic rationale as well.
• ·       Fourthly, the situation in my own home country is going from bad to worse. The small glimmer of hope in the 2018 General Elections has been snuffed out with back door moves earlier this year by Malay-Muslim lawmakers and the PM-to-be whom I had the chance to advise may not be so.

      So, in July, with D’s help, I applied for citizenship. It would take a couple of years to process and in the meantime I must confess I sometimes get “cold feet”. For all its faults, the home country is a lucky one blessed with abundant natural resources, and these resources are only getting more valuable as humans fail to look after Mother Earth. Moreover, it is a country where if one has the will, a way can always be found! Exacerbating that, the host country post a wake-up call GE, begins to debate issues of looking after the local core in a manner which I felt failed to take into account the very reasons for its success, and the parliamentarians even suggest policies that had dragged my home country downwards.

      I guess I will keep experiencing these vacillations. That said, I have two assurances. First, in the near term, the best outcome for my home country still pales in comparison to a weaker outcome of the host. Secondly, in the longer term, my children will hopefully be in a position to make a difference and keep this country progressing.

      That these two future-proofing decisions are taken now, three months apart, is not a co-incidence. Things happen in tandem. Events lead to a chain reaction that comes back full circle. It is indeed true that D & my (and therefore CP’s) best works are the two younglings.

 

For your 2nd act

 “When one door closes, another opens”; you may have heard this phrase before and it is certainly applicable to many aspects on one’s life. But I never quite thought it could be applicable across lives. What I meant was when Malaysia shut its door on me (for the Reciprocal Green Lane travel), J got his approval to travel to the UK to further his studies and M got invited to present to CAG’s senior management and 100 of her colleagues on the findings from her work during the internship. Now, these are wonderful doors to open.

 

The fact that I thought of this quote, and even felt that it was applicable across different individuals, is a good indication of how I think of the two of you in our (your parents’) lives. We see our lives as joined with yours, and that is why over the precious 6 months we spent together we felt free to discuss deep issues intimately as well as intimate issues deeply with each of you.

 

This half year has been God-sent especially for me. Both of you are now in your 2^nd act: young adults now making your own way in the world; and if mum’s and my own 2^nd acts are any guide, we were increasingly focussed on ourselves. I know both of you will be too. So, this past period has indeed been good for us to have had so much of your time.

 

I said to J last night that as part of my job, I size up a situation (or a person) quickly. I needed to do so as I need to absorb as much knowledge as possible before I make a decision. An occupational hazard therefore is I can be judgmental. Combine with the ability to express myself clearly, confidently and also loudly, I do know I can be overbearing in conversations and you both have probably experienced that more times than you care to remember. I am saying this here in this letter because I am not afraid of my weakness. I know it is there and I know how it has developed, and you can sometimes (maybe not often enough) see me trying to moderate that, mostly by using humour and that hearty laugh of mine.

 

credit: eurovision.tv

So, as your 2^nd act stage lays before you in the coming years, doors will keep opening and closing and sometimes you will find that closed doors are just as good because it forces you to go look for opened (and better) doors elsewhere. Many of these doors are inside you, like your strengths and weaknesses. I would encourage you to celebrate your strengths and also embrace your weaknesses: recognise them and work on them just as I am able to laugh at being judgmental.

 

I love you both dearly

 

 

 

 

It's all about balance

I came across a LinkedIn post from a colleague who put forth  the Top 5 attributes of leadership.

1 Try and take yourself out of the equation when you are taking a decision for the organisation

2 Always face reality, be authentic but give hope and purpose

3 Don’t ask people to do what you have not done before yourself

4 Surround yourself with strong people and help them succeed – they make you fly too

5 Keep your feet on the ground and your eyes on the stars. But never let your feet leave the ground

As I reflected on these, as I always do when encountering words of wisdom, I found that all these statements have a common trait: balance. Be it about reaching high but staying rooted. Or providing hope but being real. Of helping others and helping oneself in return.

I then also thought if such a balance can be found in one person, or in this case one leader. Can you really take yourself out of the equation when you are one of the, if not the most, key person in an organisation when taking a decision? How does one find the balance. I felt that the trick is going beyond one. The way to balance is to have at least two people (with opposite traits), in a creative, no-malice intended, shared purpose tension.

This became a topic of conversation with D during a weekend afternoon drive.  She cut right to the chase by quoting from the good book. 

"It is not good for man to be alone. I will make a suitable partner for him." (Genesis 2:18)

I find this so true. It is not good to be alone. Having someone with a shared purpose, who means no harm, and yet who holds opposite perspectives (like D being the deep roots while I provide the strong wings) is the answer. By answer, I mean the sought after ultimate state of being. Outside of Christian traditions, the Taoists hold as the central theme the Yin-Yang balance and Buddha himself learned to not go to extremes: the story goes that Siddhartha upon realisation of the suffering of his subjects, left his life of comfort and his family and became an ascetic to seek an end to miseries of mankind. 

He studied with prominent teachers and mastered all the techniques. He followed the teachings of ascetics and mistakenly believed the way to freedom was to completely deny bodily needs and any pleasures. Despite his strenuous determination, Siddhartha's efforts were futile and after some reflection, he decided to accept nourishment and cared for his body and changed the way he was seeking enlightenment. 

The bible speaks of marriage as being a celestial unbreakable bond. That a man shall leave his parents and find his half and what God then puts together shall not be separated, for the man and the woman has become as one.

This brings me back to the point about whether the leadership attributes can be found in one person. The truth of the matter is yes, even if you only have half the attributes my colleague had described. Because you are only half a person. Your spouse completes you and brings forth the remaining attributes. The organisation you both lead (as one) is the family and in that context, living up to all the five attributes are not that far fetched.

On inequality

November 4th, 2016 is a date that shall forever remain in infamy, especially for Americans. For on that date, their lauded system of democracy, with the rules around electoral college, put into the oval office a vile man called Donald Trump. I call him vile because I don't subscribe to his values. On the same token, he would also call me vile too, given the centrist position I hold on most matters. I am a particularly pragmatic school of self reliance centrist, as so eloquently put in this quote (often attributed to Lincoln).

The truth is he won because he had correctly diagnosed the illness of the country: a deep seated inequality, that is widening with no apparent solution in sight. So did Bernie Sanders by the way. The two men however had identified different root causes, and hence different solutions to this problem. Bernie blamed the rich (from Wall Street to the 1%). Trump blamed foreigners (from Mexico and especially China). Sanders didn't even get on the final Democratic ticket and Trump won against Hillary Clinton who represented too much of the status quo, whom he successfully blamed for the ills. Truth be told Bill Clinton was then a beacon of centricity, along with Tony Blair with his new labour movement and even China's Jiang Zemin then had a non-confrontational foreign policy. The 90's were indeed an era of globalisation and China's ascension into the WTO and the NAFTA deal are poster events of this fact.

A globalised world with lower inter-country trade barriers allowed Ricardo's Theory of Comparative Advantage, first pronounced over 200 years ago now, to become reality and what a reality it is, especially when you consider the hundreds of millions lifted out of poverty in China alone in those closing decades of the 20th century.

It is therefore not difficult for the masses to believe that China took their jobs and China's growth was at the expense of the US (then and still is the largest consumers in the world buying all the China-made goods). The truth is there was another development in the late 20th century that really came into its own in the 21st century: the information age. 

For a long while, information technology made communication easier, analysis faster and record keeping more pervasive but it did not seem to deliver the promised productivity gains. In fact, in many countries productivity growth declined despite the increasing use of technology. However, in the second decade of the 21st century, especially with the rise of AI, the increasing ambidexterity of robotics and the past critical mass of data collections (esp in realtime and remote basis), that we now have many functions performed by (human) labour that can now be done by machines. This ushered in the machine age, esp machines that can learn and increasingly do higher level functions.

It is therefore not at all surprising that the best selling business book is Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st century. It is, to date, Harvard University Press' best selling book. In it, Piketty, observed that the rate of return on capital is greater than the rate of economic growth (in other words return on labor) over the long term, the result is concentration of wealth (to the capital holder rather than the labour provider) and this unequal distribution  causes social and economic instability. Piketty proposes a global system of progressive wealth taxes to help reduce inequality and avoid the vast majority of wealth coming under the control of a tiny minority.

Piketty has later issued some corrections though what he observed was in fact predicted by another giant of an economist, John Maynard Keynes nearly a century earlier. In his essay, Economic Possibilities of our Grandchildren (and indeed his grandchildren would be nearing their retirement ages now), he argued that we will find that the economic problem, the struggle for subsistence, always has been hitherto the primary, most pressing problem of the human race—not only of the human race, but of the whole of the biological kingdom from the beginnings of life in its most primitive forms, would have been solved. Keynes predicted that Mankind is solving its economic problem and that the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high. Indeed in the pockets of my children are smartphones with more computing power than Apollo 11 that safely got astronauts to the moon and back half a century ago.

Keynes anticipated technology would be the answer. Mankind would have harnessed it to solve the economic problem. He thought that  for the first time since his creation man will be faced with a new problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well. He had assumed that the wealth created for us (by machines) would flow to all peoples, thus allowing us to to cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes. He did not mention nor foresee that mankind had not dealt with the distribution of the wealth created by the machines. 

So inequality expanded at an alarming rate and before the 2nd decade of the 21st was barely halfway, we had jingoistic leaders like Trump and Johnson who would persuade their respective populations to withdraw from international/regional collaborations and to put their countries first. Neither would solve the fundamental problems described by Messrs Keynes and Piketty.

Even in well run countries, like Singapore, the electorate voted to have more opposition voices in parliament. Singaporeans too felt the widening inequalities and they too had pinned the blame on foreigners taking their jobs. They also felt (eloquently expressed by a star opposition candidate, Jamus Lim) that the government has taken the side of capital rather than labour. It is little wonder that The Workers' Party (including Jamus) won the seats in parliament.

My children (yes, those with phones smarter than a rocketship) are fortunate to be in the sponsorship and employment of good institutions. So, they will have jobs when they finish their tertiary studies. But when they start working, they will be part of a new generation. They will know that there are others whose skills are not rewarded (or required) by the capitalist system. If they have the inclination as well as the opportunity, they need to find a right way forward for society. One where the economic gains are more fairly distributed not by pulling down the rich or weakening the strong. They have to share the wealth without taking away dignity and  without extinguishing the incentive for humans to keep striving. That way, we can then hope for a peaceful future for our grandchildren rather than staring into the spectre of yet another class war.

Starting Over

These lockdown days have indeed been some strange days. 

Strange days have found us
Strange days have tracked us down

They're going to destroy
Our casual joys

We shall go on playing
Or find a new town

The Doors released this 2 months and 2 days before I was born. And now, more than half a century later, the lyrics make even more sense. 

It’s been 7 weeks of “circuit breaker” here in Singapore, where all four of us are together 24/7, and the days are strange indeed. I, for one, was really pleased to have this time together more than we have ever been before all of our lives. The old maxim that you get quality time only if you spend a good quantity together could perhaps now come true for us.

Then the eternal truth of Jim Morrison’s poetry breaks through. While our casual joys have yet to be destroyed... but there have been moments that came close, especially for me. M shared, as she examined her conscience that she felt strange to see such an imbalance in the dynamic of the family, seeing/feeling that I was not really helping out in other parts of the household, which D attends to. In a separate observation, J (very much a part of this overthinking clan) observed if all I have worked for, including the wealth we have accumulated and the nice house we are now comfortably nested in, are worth the pursuit at all. 

In the background, I have been having issues with colleagues who are either overreacting or in any case misunderstanding my good intents. Still, office politics is par for the course, but observations like M’s and J’s weigh much more, a million times more, on my mind. 

There comes a time when everyone should pause, look back and see what has been accomplished (and not), and move forward. It hurts to get to this point, past my mid century mark, to know that the colleagues in the office that I have given much of my time can be petty and that the family I had spent less time with now are nettled by my lack of share in household chores (formed of a habit of never being home) and then are not appreciating the material fruits of my labour.

This trifecta of “blows” would stop most people in their tracks but I would like to think I am made of sterner stuff. Though I share the birthday of the most famous member of the 27 club, I am not about to throw it all away. 

Bad things, like the good, come in threes. So, with three bad circumstances, I can now move forward and do better. Office politics can be overcome. How M and J feel about the time I have spend the last 20 odd years travelling for work, being an absent dad/husband, and for what has tangibly been material reward, are harder to move from.

On the one hand, D and I are fiercely independent people and we cherish being able to live our weekday lives separately but deep down, we are so together. In the words of one of my favourite authors, De Exupery, “love does not consist of gazing at each other, but at looking outward together in the same direction”. 

So, no, I do not regret being able to build a family in this way. D and I came from lower middle income households and living in countries aspiring to become first world and surrounded by social climbing, 5 Cs chasing cousins, classmates and colleagues, we were swept up in the tides of those times and were fortunate enough to have created better than most. Our fortune were less foretold by the Gods but rather we were lucky (in my case, I had sought luck by moving out here to Singapore) to make our careers in a meritocratic, capitalist democracy. And what did I do in the last 20 years and some: I helped clients become better: more innovative, more efficient. I was good in my work, in fact so good one client called me a “Superstar”, and another said I was a “Special human being” with reference to my Ted talk urging a more holistic measure of the wealth of nations, beyond just GDP. In recent years, I helped governments deliver more impactfully and sustainably to their citizens, and often with less. Was wealth a sought after reward, yes to an extent and past a certain point, the amount I got was often just a barometer of how well I have done towards my objectives.

Maybe that is what they are not understanding and perhaps the maxim is right. Quality time requires quantity and 7 weeks certainly qualifies as quantity time and we have the opportunity at daily lunches and nightly dinners to talk and work this through. 

Another thing that we all get to do (a lot of) is to Netflix. In my case, I also watch YouTube and just watched a VH1 documentary of the last years of John Lennon’s life. After a five year hiatus, as he re-examined his life and connected with what he loved, he and Yoko One came roaring back with one of the greatest music albums of all times, Double Fantasy. The first track is “(Just like) starting over”.

Our life together

Is so precious together

We have grown, we have grown

Although our love still is special

Let's take a chance and fly away somewhere.

The cover of their album is iconic now. Two middle aged lovers in a kiss. The back cover which I only just came across is even better. It showed two strong creative individuals looking out together, in the same direction, at the same destination.

That’s what it feels like for me, at this ripe middle age, to start over. 

A conversation over lunch during this 'circuit breaker' period

We've spent now two weeks together in the same house... probably the longest time we have ever been in each others' company in the entirety of our lives.

Sure when they were babies, D was always by their side but I am mostly travelling for work and only home on weekends.

And we get to talk a lot especially during meal times. J asked a good question on our parenting style.

I said I tried to instill values I find important: passion, vision and courage and gave them examples of how I inculcated that. From enabling J's bug collection to encouraging them to think beyond the near term and being responsible for most of M's scars from letting go of her bicycle or letting her roller blade down the slope at Green Meadows. I can see how some of these lessons have sunk in and hopefully will propel them forward, give them strong wings, as the expression goes.

D on the other hand does not tend to overthink things. She does what comes naturally and the lessons she imparts to the kids are through examples. In her case, I'd call out three as well: faith, filial and help. First and foremost, she leads a spirit-filled life and through her, M & J have also become pious faithful Catholics. She is an exemplar in filial piety, towards her parents, parents-in-law and her care and concern for them knows no bounds. She is also a true friend, always ready to help in all circumstances. These traits which she so fully manifest everyday in life should have transmitted to the young ones and hopefully have given them truly deep roots.

So, there you go, a combination of deep roots and strong wings. Yet, we would be the first to say that we haven't got everything right for like all humans, we have our failings: from being inpatient to having a short temper and insisting on enrichment classes. More importantly, we tried to always do what's right and we did it with all that we have.

That, in a nutshell, is our parenting style.

The Four Rules of Pandemics Economics by Derek Thompson

I have been so busy the last month helping governments around the world navigate this crisis and emerge stronger. I had a number of forward looking hypotheses that I am happy to hear counterpoints to ... from this well written article on The Atlantic

The Four Rules of Pandemic Economics

amp.theatlantic.com

“WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF.”
With this tweet, President Donald Trump summarized a disturbingly common reaction to social-distancing measures. Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick expressed the same sentiment when he told Americans to “get back to work,” even if doing so means more death. Fox News commentators, likewise, have argued that Americans should break free of the shackles of quarantine to reboot the economy.
Call it the gospel of growth: the notion that Americans cannot afford to save tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of lives, if it means sacrificing a quarter or two of gross domestic product.

Read: Reopening the economy is pointless when cities are under siege

While this might sound like an economic argument, it enjoys little support among economists. In a recent University of Chicago survey of dozens of prominent economists, almost all of them agreed with the idea that the economy would suffer if the U.S. abandoned “severe lockdowns” while the infection risk remained high.
Still, the growth evangelists are right about one thing. Severe lockdowns produce a parallel human misery—with millions of unemployed Americans, thousands of looming bankruptcies, and extreme financial anguish.
What are the economic rules of this upside-down world, where opening the economy too soon produces mass death, but shutting it down for too long produces mass suffering?
Over the past few weeks, I’ve asked a version of this question to a dozen economists. What follows is an attempt to distill their thoughts into four rules that should govern our short-term reaction to the health crisis. It is not just a rebuke to the gospel of growth. It is a new playbook for pandemic economics.

Rule 1: “Save the economy or save lives” is a false choice.

Last week, a group of economists from the Federal Reserve and MIT published a paper on the 20th century’s most murderous flu, the 1918 outbreak. Because the federal government in 1918 offered little if any economic assistance to suffering Americans, the local response from city leaders varied widely. Some places, such as New York and St. Louis, quickly ordered social distancing and other interventions, while others, such as New Haven and Buffalo, allowed public gatherings even weeks after the flu reached crisis levels. This variance gave researchers the ability to see which cities recovered the fastest after the outbreak.
“We were expecting that the areas with more [social distancing] would have a worse economy but less mortality,” said Emil Verner, a co-author of the paper and a finance professor at MIT. But early and aggressive interventions both saved lives and triggered a faster rebound in several measures, such as job growth and banking assets.

Alan Lightman: The virus is a reminder of something lost long ago

The infamous trade-off between people and GDP? It doesn’t exist—or, at least, it didn’t in 1918. The reason, Verner told me, is that pandemics are “so, so disruptive that anything that you can do to mitigate that destructive impact of the pandemic itself is going to be useful.” Without a healthy population, there can be no healthy economy.
This simple idea has some weird implications. “In a normal recession, you want to boost demand,” said the Northwestern economist Martin Eichenbaum. “But we don’t really want to boost demand in the very short run at all, right now. We don’t want United to be flying full planes. We don’t want restaurants serving food to dine-in customers. We want everybody to stay in and hold on.”
It follows that we should—as incomprehensible as this may sound—hope for a deep, short recession, caused by a cliff dive in many forms of economic activity. That would be a clear signal that people have gone home and that the face-to-face economy has been shut down to limit the spread of disease.
“The question I would ask of our leaders is: What will you regret?” Eichenbaum said. “Will the government regret that it didn’t save money in early 2020? Or will it regret that we let a viral infection kill millions of people, which also, by the way, led to the death of a lot of great companies? It’s pretty obvious what the worst-case scenario is. You want to err on the side of saving lives.”

Rule 2: Pay people a living wage to stop working.

In a pandemic, public gatherings are a kind of social pollution, and asymptomatic individuals who violate social-distancing rules are like factories that spew invisible carbon. “We can’t ask people to internalize health risks on an individual basis any more than we can expect polluting factories to self-regulate,” Eichenbaum said. “So governments have to freeze the economy and order people to stay home.”

Read: The four possible timelines for life returning to normal

But asking millions of able-bodied workers to stop working creates a crisis of unemployment for which the word unprecedented does no justice. On Thursday, the government announced that 3.28 million people had applied for jobless benefits in the previous week. That’s not just the highest weekly figure in recorded history; it’s roughly five times larger than the highest-ever figure in recorded history. In seven days, unemployment benefits rose by as much as they did during the first six months of job losses in the Great Recession.
Once the government has put the economy into an artificial coma, it must keep the patient alive. The U.S. economic-relief package does so in a few ways. Washington will send to most households one-time payments of $1,200 per adult—plus $500 per child—and expand unemployment benefits, bumping up weekly payments for eligible workers, including independent contractors and the self-employed, by $600 for the next few months. The new law also delays tax filing, suspends wage garnishing among those who have defaulted on their student loans, and establishes a four-month eviction moratorium among landlords with mortgages from federal entities, such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This is a huge and kaleidoscopic response. But it still might not be enough.
Denmark and other northern-European countries are taking a different approach. Their governments are directly paying businesses to maintain their payrolls to avoid the sort of mass layoffs and furloughs that are already happening across the United States. The chief benefit of this approach is that restaurants, factories, and so on don’t have to go through the bureaucratic rigmarole of firing thousands of workers and then rehiring them all when the economy bounces back (and those workers don’t have to waste time applying for jobs, either). They’re putting their entire economy in the freezer for three months.

Rule 3: Build companies a time machine.

The U.S. has about 6 million companies, according to the census, and 99.7 percent of them employ fewer than 500 people. Many of these small- and medium-size companies face extinction during the pandemic shutdown. While their income has evaporated, they still owe wages to workers and rent to landlords. This is a recipe for cascading bankruptcies.
If America’s small businesses begin to fail en masse, the damage will spread quickly throughout the economy. Just imagine the closed wine bars in Manhattan. Without money from thirsty New Yorkers, they can’t afford to buy more bottles from family wineries. Without commercial buyers, those wineries can’t buy new fruit from local grape growers, who can’t pay tractor manufacturers for new equipment. One sector’s problem quickly becomes every sector’s problem.

Read: How the pandemic will end

Financial markets may experience a parallel domino effect. If thousands of restaurants suddenly can’t make rent, their property owners might default on mortgage payments. When their banks suffer catastrophic losses, the financial system will seize up because nobody wants to lend anybody money. This is how a pandemic recession could become the Great Depression of the 21st century.
How do we begin to solve this impossible problem? The Federal Reserve has said it will pull all available levers to keep the financial system alive, by buying up government debt, corporate debt, and a variety of asset-backed securities. But something more will be needed to save America’s businesses.
“We have to build companies a time machine,” Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Michigan, told me. He isn’t talking about the H. G. Wells contraption. He’s referring to anything—including grants, cheap loans, and debt relief—that would allow companies to shift their expenses to the future.
“My local burrito shop, which used to be a thriving business, could go belly-up any day now,” Wolfers said. “But in the post-coronavirus world, it should be a thriving business again. What that burrito business needs is what every business needs right now—a time machine to go from the present pandemic to the future.”
In the U.S. economic-rescue package, that time machine looks like $370 billion in low-interest loans backed by the government. Many businesses won’t have to pay back a cent if they use the cash to make basic expenses, like payroll or rent, and don’t lay off workers. As Slate’s Jordan Weissmann explains, private banks will make the loans to local companies with whom they already have a relationship, and the Small Business Administration will guarantee those loans—at least, until they run out of the roughly $370 billion.
Most economists I spoke with had the same reaction to the economic-rescue plan: Nice idea, too late, and too small. “This should have been passed three weeks ago, and it should have been much larger,” said John Lettieri, CEO of the Economic Innovation Group, a think tank and an advocacy group. Steven Hamilton, an economist at George Washington University, wrote that if the bill is intended to cover 11 weeks of payroll for all companies with fewer than 500 employees, the right figure should be closer to $600 billion. When the U.S. Senate returns to draft follow-up legislation, small-business relief will have to be at the top of the list.

Rule 4: The business of America is now science.

The new rules of pandemic economics are meant to guide U.S. policy during a period of weeks or months—not quarters or years. A three- or four-month freeze is one thing, but a full year of isolation and economic inactivity is untenable.
That brings us to the $100 trillion question: How do we get out of this? A lot more science.

Liz Neeley: How to talk about the coronavirus

Our lack of knowledge about the virus is our greatest weakness in combatting it. Not knowing who has the virus, or who is most susceptible, contributes to higher infection rates. Not knowing who has recovered from, and built immunity to, the virus delays our ability to treat individuals, or release select individuals from isolation. The possibility that the virus is anywhere means that we have to shut down economic activity everywhere. The road back to normalcy is through more clear and public information.
First, we need more tests, which can tell us where the virus already is. As The Atlantic’s Ed Yong explains, that means we need more masks, more nasopharyngeal swabs for collecting samples, more extraction kits to retrieve the virus’s genetic material, and more trained people to administer the tests.
Second, we need sophisticated tracing technology to tell us where the virus is spreading. “Contact tracing” means reaching out immediately to people who came into contact with an infected person, testing them, and recommending isolation if they test positive. While some countries’ tracing methods draw on mobile data in a way that might make Americans uncomfortable, Germany is looking to deploy a national app that has (for now) won approvalfrom its health minister and data-protection commissioner.
In addition to coordinating a test-and-trace strategy, Washington should train its prodigious energies toward defeating the disease as fast as possible, by establishing billion-dollar prizes for vaccine and antiviral breakthroughs and by relaxing regulations to accelerate the approval of new treatments. After weeks of delay, the administration is finally using the wartime Defense Production Act to force manufacturers to produce ventilators and surgical masks.
We need to get people money, or they will die. We need to get companies cash, or they will die. But if we don’t clear the way for health-care workers to treat the sick, or for scientists to treat the disease, people and companies are going to die, anyway. There is no such thing as a normal economy until we contain the virus. But if we can’t contain the virus quickly, we might not have anything normal to return to.