If it's Tuesday, it must be Purim

It's Tuesday and I went to the polls to vote for the my representatives in the Virginia House of Delegates and Senate as well as some Fairfax County officials and ballot measures.

When I ran for office myself I used to hear people say "what's the use of going to vote, it doesn't matter who I vote for. They all do the same thing once they get elected.

I used to protest that it did matter. Republicans, I would say, are dedicated to protecting the interests of the taxpayers and they are for smaller, more responsive and responsible government. Given the chance, I would continue, Republicans will change things for the better.

Since taking power in Virginia and nationally, the Republicans seem to have lost their foundational beliefs. Once elected, they are no better than their Democratic predecessors when it comes to pork barrel projects and funding the ever increasing size of the state and national governments that they had previously promised to hold in check. In this case it didn't take absolute power to have absolutely corrupted Republican elected officials nationally.

Purim is the Jewish holiday commemorating the redemption of the Jews from a Persian King's despotic Prime Minister named Haman who sought their annihilation. The hero and heroine of this story are Mordecai and his niece Esther who are able to turn the tables on Haman and save the Jewish people.

This festival has many deep spiritual and esoteric undercurrents and meanings but on its surface seems to be the Jewish equivalent of Mardi Gras. Costume parties are the norm and there is a much quoted halacha (commandment) that one should "drink until one cannot tell the difference between Mordecai and Haman."

Standing in the voting booth, trying to decide whether to vote for Democrats who promise to spend more tax money and a Republicans who promise they won't but do anyway, I feel like politically there doesn't seem to be any difference between Haman and Mordecai.

I think I need a drink!

Why Peace in the Middle East is so Elusive!

Robert J. Gould - In Memoriam

In 1995, software giant Microsoft corporation introduced a product to help computer users who were experiencing problems with their software or hardware. If you didn’t know what to do in a given situation, this animated figure would jump in and help you. 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year it was unceasingly helpful and friendly. It never said no and when you were done with it, 99 times out of a hundred, you had the answer to your question. The software program that could and would solve all your problems was named …………“Bob.”

I always suspected that Bill Gates must have modeled his program after our Bob, because helping people was the quintessence of Bob Gould’s life. He lived to serve and help others. Whether it was in the public arena – where, as many of you already know, he was involved in hundreds of policy debates and political campaigns, or in private – where he acted behind the scenes to help scores of family and friends with difficult situations, Bob was available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

In our family, we had a simple but effective contingency plan for any emergency – Call Bob. When our four children were young and my wife asked me for detailed instructions for how to carry on in the event something would happen to me, I was able to reassure her with this advice – “If anything ever happens to me, Call Bob, he’ll know what to do.”

And know he did. I’m sure that I am not alone in this room when I say that he was there countless times for us during business and personal crises. He never sought the limelight or took credit. His advice was always on point and well thought out and the only downside was that there was never a way to repay his generosity in kind. Bob never asked for himself, he only gave to others.

In a world full of smart people, Bob was the smartest person I know. And not just book smart, although if you’d ever had more than a momentary conversation with him you’d attest to the fact that he was – in fact – a genius. No, Bob had great wisdom. He prioritized his days so that he could spend his life with Denise, who he adored and the children he so loved. Bob was pursued by many companies and firms who offered him great sums of money to move from Charleston to Chicago, Dallas and New York. Each time, Bob said that there wasn’t a value to be placed on being able to take his kids to school each day or to be able to have lunch with his wife on a regular basis. That’s real wisdom.

Our Sages tell the story of two twins growing up inside their mother’s belly. For nine months the boys grow strong together - nurtured and protected in their mother’s inner recesses until one day a great catastrophe occurs. The world as they know it starts to shake and rumble; the walls of the womb close in on the boys. In horror they scream as the sky opens up and the one twin is sucked from his brother’s grasp. The remaining twin is heartbroken and in shock. He cries out in his sorrow “Brother, brother where have you gone? What has happened to you? Why did this terrible tragedy befall you?

Our sages say that this brother – like us – is hampered by his limited perspective. What he sees as a death is, in fact, a birth. A birth into a life more wonderful and spectacular that can be imagined in the womb.

The sorrow that we feel, the sadness and loss, the grief and emptiness that naturally follow a tragedy of this magnitude, are feelings that we feel for each other and for ourselves. No tears need be spilled for our friend Bob Gould.

He lived a life worth living. He gave to others. He loved and was loved passionately. His days had meaning and his name will be honored by all who knew him.

If, as the holy texts say, “the righteous shall sit at the right hand of the King of Kings” then we know that our beloved Bob is even now at the side of the throne.

Weight Watchers

I've been familiar with Weight Watchers nearly all my life.

My father was an early devotee and we sampled lite cuisine for many a meal. I credit the Weight Watchers cookbook with teaching me to love fish. As awful as it sounds now, my Mom used to prepare a buttermilk sauce for Sole that was out of this world.

As a teen and young adult, I had no need for Weight Watchers or any other diet plan. I ate what I wanted and burned the calories off with Ponce de Leon-like ease.

Soon after my wedding, however, I noticed that somehow, my sides were bulging in odd ways. It was as if breast implants had failed and slid down and to the sides.

"Love handles," were what they were affectionately called. (Affectionately is a euphemism for "said by family members who can get away with saying anything.").

In 24 years of marriage, I've been weight watching in the traditional sense. That is to say, watching my weight go up and up and up. 180 and athletic became 220 and pathetic.

So I'm on the wagon now. Watching the points and trying to get active. Muscle mass is "use it or lose it;" so I'm working out a few more minutes each day.

Truth is, after so many years of resisting this type of reform, I'm enjoying it. Meals and work outs are spent conferring with my wife and this only adds to the things that we enjoy together.

I'm feeling better and now that I have to track my points and read labels, I'm somewhat abashed at the amount of calories and fat that I used to consume at one sitting.

Today was my third Weight Watchers weekly gathering and as I heard people tell the stories about how the choices they made affected their physical well being; how exercise and diet helped diabetes and other chronic ailments, it occurred to me that the whole national health care debate is missing an important component - lifestyle choices.

This is not to say that the topic has been totally forgotten. Anti-smoking forces have been saying for years that increased cigarette taxes were only fair since the non-smoking population shouldn't be required to pay for the increased burden on the health care system caused by the personal choices of the smokers.

How then, is that any different than the increased burden placed on the health care system by the lifestyle choices of overeaters or couch potatoes? How about drug users or fast drivers?

When is it appropriate for the citizenry to put constraints on the lifestyle choices others make as a prerequisite for the health care that they are willing to pay for?

In anticipation of that debate, I'm going to have a 1-point fudgsicle.

Phew! I was sweating that one

Wanderlust Part I

I recently returned from India where I spent 10 days on a business trip to Bangalore. This city was an incredible experience at every level. Having never been to India, I wasn't sure what to expect, but every day brought new insights and I am eager to return soon.

Personal - The Indians I met brought new meaning to the word hospitality. Before this trip I thought the Arabs were the most gracious hosts; but the Indians were as generous and thoughtful as the Lebanese, Palestinians and Jordanians I know -- and then some. Not an hour went by that someone wasn't wondering if I was: comfortable, hungry, tired, bored, thirsty, lonesome, overwhelmed, etcetera. At the end of every day we would start to plan out the next day and they would ask me when I wanted to start our meetings. When I would say "whenever it's convenient for you," they looked at me as if I was speaking Swahili. They didn't have any ego or pretense in their corporate hierarchies. When we went to visit fab shops or engineering firms, CEOs took time out of their day to lead the tours. No task was too menial, no kindness was overlooked. If you are looking to go somewhere with a "personal touch," I recommend this area of India highly. One anecdote: We were producing a prototype that required powder coating (a process for painting metal parts) and one of the parts wouldn't be ready until 30 minutes after the powder coating shop closed. The owner of the shop was telling our chief engineer that he would need to close up and go home since we were already late. I pulled our engineer to the side and told him to offer the man double the price of the entire coating job to stay open the extra 30 minutes. He looked at me in an almost hurt way and said "In India, the most important thing is not always the money. A personal touch is always the best thing." He told the man that I wanted to go out and have a glass of tea with them while we waited for the last part. The man was very happy that we invited him and kept his shop open for us. I felt like such a crass American.

Cultural - I only took one day to tour and was able to visit the palace at Mysore, a wetlands sanctuary, a Hindu temple and a Christian church. There are only about 25 million Christians in India (about 2% of the population) but they are heavily concentrated in Southern India and so Bangalore and Mysore have many churches. I saw a dozen or so large churches and cathedrals in the course of my normal travels. The Indian Orthodox Christian church is not Protestant or Catholic. It was established around AD 48 by St. Thomas who visited Kerala (adjoining state to Karnatka - Bangalore's state) and as such is more like the Greek Orthodox church in it's history and organization. The firm that hosted my visit has several hundred employees who are split about 40% Christian, 40% Hindu and 20% Muslim. My driver was Hindu but had a crucifix dangling from his mirror while one of the Christian executives had Hindu idols in the pockets of the car doors. Bangalore also has significant Muslim neighborhoods in which Christians and Hindus shop and work.

Economy - Demographers predict that India will overtake China some time in the next couple of decades in terms of population. In terms of education, I think India is probably ahead already. If Bangalore is any indication of what's going on in the rest of the country (and it's probably not, Bangalore leads rather than follows the nation in terms of high-tech) India will surpass the Chinese sooner in engineering and software design. Notwithstanding what I just wrote about the wide variety of cultures in India, the clear national religion is education. Every family strives to send their children to the best schools, institutes and universities. The colleges may exist in a sea of poverty, but their campuses are pristine islands of learning and achievement. Every Indian I spoke with told me of either a) their educational pedigree or b) the educational achievements of their children. In India education is wealth. Money is not nearly as important in the culture as education.

One day we needed to go shopping for some timing belts and bearing assemblies. The streets were lined with book vendors who had hundreds of titles stacked 6 feet in the air. A few were novels, some more were business non-fiction; but 80% were science, software and engineering titles like "Fluid Dynamics," "Mechanical Devices," "Programming in Perl," etcetera. Chemistry, Physics, Software, Electronics were all subjects about which you can buy scores of texts from a hundred Bangalore street vendors. The neighborhood where we were building our prototype was filled with hundreds of machine shops with lathes, casts, drills, punches, presses, brakes, etcetera. Interspersed with these shops are offices with engineers working on the most advanced CAD/CAM/CAE packages turning out elegant solutions for customers around the world. Outside, the streets are dirt, the sewers are open and barefoot children and livestock share the roads with trucks, scooters, motorcycles and bicycles. 100 yards away, HP is building a 2.5 million square foot state of the art software center. Progress is coming to India in this way. Dirt roads take educated engineers to cottage industry offices where they design and manufacture software and hard goods for GE Healthcare, IBM, Microsoft, John Deere, Catepillar, HP and a host of other multi-national companies.

One company we visited had 10 advanced CNC machine tools making parts for Canadian and US customers. In my conversation with the CEO of the company he told me that he had started his business in a small shed (garage) 6 years ago and now has 180 employees in three facilities. (The funny part of that conversation was that he was showing me a part coming off the line and told me that it was made for a company that he was visiting next month in WV. Turns out the company is right up the road from my farm.)

India does not see itself as a low-cost producer. The firm I was visiting has architects on contract to do renderings in the Phillipines and Chile where they believe the quality is higher and the wages equal or lower. They are looking to Bolivia and Vietnam for accounting and to other countries besides China for manufacturing. They recognize that their political infrastructure makes it hard to compete with China in manufacturing and would like to establish themselves as a knowledge-based economy.

Political - I didn't get to spend too much time on politics while I was there except to note that one day we were warned not to go to a certain area of town because of a riot happening there. There was a march of Muslim "students" protesting the killing of Sadaam Hussein. This protest turned into a riot with shops sacked and cars burned. Bangalore is in the stable South of the country. This sort of thing is pretty rare. While I was there, several people were kidnapped and killed in the north of the country where Muslim/Hindu tensions are much more pronounced. We don't hear much about this in the US, but it is a serious and ongoing conflict. Likewise, the Indo-Pakistani conflict is as serious a threat to regional stability as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to Middle East peace.

There are not many countries that I feel compelled to return to immediately, but India is definitely such a place.

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