Deborah Liu's Take Back Your Power or A Philosophy of Life for Women to Live with Less Editing

In the last year or so I have become a sort of an YouTube connoisseur, should be clearly evident from my posts here. This has led me to wonder whether I should keep my only streaming service subscription, Netflix as I rarely find time to indulge in its myriad shows anymore. My only current gripe about YouTube is there are no channels about women's life/philosophy from a personal angle or general woman-related career woes channels. 

I have not had success in finding some generic woman-hosted channel where a generic woman talks about anything and everything. I have found a few good ones by women navigating life solo or after-sixties-advise, but even those are about a specific topic like solo 60 year old leading an RV life – that is a very specific niche if you ask me. I want an everyday person talking deep thoughts, giving away random information no one is asking for. Maybe I should start one.

This also brings me to the book I want to talk about today - Deborah Liu’s Take Back Your Power. It is a kind of book I have not seen many women write. There is Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In and Brene Brown’s books, but they are experts in their areas, not regular Janes. I want to read ordinary women talking about their life, struggles and careers and their woman-on-the-wire acts. Deborah Liu is closer to the terrafirma most of us regular women inhabit than Ms. Brown or Ms. Sandberg. Although Liu was not that much of a normie either – her last job was as the CEO of Ancestry.com. So she has clearly played at a higher level than most of us.

The reason I connected with her book is that she writes about the awkward middle part and her entire career has been in tech, just like me. She felt like a woman like me dealing with the strange human politics that come with being a woman trying to operate in spaces that were not necessarily built with women in mind. And having spent most of my career in technology, this part landed harder than I expected.

I have lived some version of almost every story she tells. I have been the woman in the room who knows the answer, a titled leader of the team and still has to calculate whether saying it will create a problem. I have been talked over. I have watched someone repeat an idea I just said five minutes ago and suddenly everyone becomes fascinated because a man said it.

Liu talks about Hillary Clinton being criticized in law school because some people felt her presence was taking a place away from a man who could potentially avoid being drafted. What struck me was not just the unfairness of that situation, it was the psychological message underneath it: a woman's ambition is not neutral. Her success changes the equation. She is not just trying to win, she is making someone else uncomfortable by existing there. After enough exposure to that kind of message, you learn to manage yourself. You soften your words. You add disclaimers. You make yourself easier to digest. And then one day you realize you have become incredibly skilled at editing yourself!

This is where Liu’s discussion of women being caught in a double bind really resonated with me. I have personally experienced the strange contradiction of being told to be more confident while also being subtly punished when I am confident. I have also been told to be more vulnerable by male leaders, and I understand what they are trying to say. They want everyone to see my human side. They want me to establish an emotional connection. But what my male bosses do not understand is, vulnerability does not always carry the same meaning depending on who is showing it. A man in a leadership position can admit uncertainty and people often interpret it as authenticity. A woman in a leadership position can do the same thing, and while people may show empathy in the moment, and I believe many genuinely do, there is often another calculation happening quietly in the background. Is she overwhelmed? Is she weak? Did she really know what she was doing? Maybe that sounds cynical, but when you have lived inside these environments long enough, you notice patterns. You start understanding why many women become careful. It is not because women naturally want to be guarded. Sometimes the armor is something we build because we learned that walking around without it has consequences.

One of the ideas Liu puts forward in the book with some statistics is, lesser percentage of women have sponsors, and there is a distinction between mentors and sponsors. I think many people, especially women, are given the advice: “Find a mentor.” And that is good advice. A mentor can teach you, guide you, help you avoid mistakes. But Liu says women do find good mentors, but successful men usually have sponsors not mentors. A sponsor is someone who puts their own credibility behind you. Someone who says your name when you are not in the room. Many people who succeed have had someone along the way who opened a door. The myth of the completely self-made person is one of our favorite stories because it makes success feel clean and simple. We are all standing on somebody else’s shoulders, whether we like admitting it or not.

The Arianna Huffington story about burnout also felt painfully familiar. We have built a culture where exhaustion is often treated as evidence of commitment. The person answering emails at midnight is dedicated. The person who never takes a break is ambitious. The person who sacrifices everything is serious. But sometimes people succeed despite those sacrifices, not because of them. There is a difference. 

I do have some complicated feelings about Liu’s book-title though, the phrase “take back your power” has the danger of making everything an individual responsibility. Yes, people need agency. Yes, we cannot spend our entire lives waiting for someone else to rescue us. At some point, you have to speak, act, take chances, and move forward. 

But sometimes the issue is not that someone lacks confidence. Sometimes the environment is actually difficult. A person can be resilient and still be exhausted. A person can be capable and still be fighting unnecessary battles. I have no interest in telling women, “Just be tougher and adapt.” That is how people end up spending 30 years becoming excellent at tolerating things they should have questioned. But I also believe in the power of individual choice. There is a moment where you stop waiting for permission.

So after reading Take Back Your Power, I do not think the lesson is simply “be more powerful.” That feels like a very corporate interpretation of a much deeper idea. The more interesting question is: what kind of power are we actually trying to build? The power to impress people? The power to win every argument? The power to finally prove ourselves to everyone who underestimated us? 

Or something quieter? The power to speak honestly. The power to create. The power to stop shrinking. The power to live a life that actually feels like yours. Maybe taking back your power is not about becoming someone bigger. Maybe it is about spending less energy pretending to be smaller.

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Reading Ramayana in the Roaring (Twenty) Twenties

Ramayana and Mahabharata are two great epics from the Indian subcontinent. Many of the thirty three million Hindu gods and goddesses make guest appearances in these two epics. Some like Vishnu gets to play the main characters in his two popular avatars, Rama and Krishna, in these two mega mythological texts in Sanskrit. Bhagvad Gita, the best known Indian scripture, is a part of a section of Mahabharata called the Bhishma Parva.

In my mind Hinduism is the contemporary of Greek religion (Hellenism) and Indians worshipping the million gods is how West would have been, had it not been won over by the trinity of Jesus, Allah and Yhwh. Both Hinduism and Hellenism are polytheistic featuring their main players in two opposing teams - Devas and Asuras for Hinduism corresponding to Olympians and Titans for the Greeks. 

Like Hades, Zeus and Poseidon, Hinduism has Brahma (the creator), Vishnu (the preserver) and Shiva (the destroyer), a slightly different yet similar take as the Greeks' dividing the Big 3 by assigning them the three realms of the heavens, the oceans and the underworld. If the monotheistic Abrahamic religions had not overrun and relegated Greek and Roman gods to the mythical pavilion in the western world, I am sure we would have wished Zeusspeed instead of Godspeed.

Why are we talking about these epics now? Recently in my search for coffee-table books, (that is what I mainly use the local library for these days,) I chanced upon an illustrated Ramayana. The last time I heard Ramayana (def. Sanskrit: Rama's Journey) in full was when my mother narrated me the whole story every evening over several months during my grade school days. Two score years seemed to be the right interval for a refresher.

The Illustrated Ramayana published by DK is a well written, well put together, well illustrated book, suited for both the advanced Ramayana scholar, who can find plenty of things to nitpick or for a beginner like me.  The illustrations which range from Raja Ravi Varma to Pahadi to Mughal paintings to glorious temple art from South India or Angkor Wat to Indonesia to performances and native art forms by artists from Thailand or Rajasthan(India) or  Nepal, makes every page a visual treat leading the narration forward.

Like every great epic, there are thousands retellings of the epic in every region and every language South-East and East Asia. The book also draws from these alternate story paths and present them in conjunction with the original narrative, supposedly written in Sanskrit by sage Valmiki. Valmiki, known as the first poet (adi kavi), because Ramayana is the first poem, like Alfred Hitchcock, has a weakness for cameos. In Ramayana he is a an important character in the seventh and last canto (or kanda in Sanskrit) called Uttara Kanda and he is also present in Bala Kanda as the narrator and the live-in tutor for Rama's twin boys - Lava and Kusha.

The oldest retrieved manuscript of Ramayana only contains 5 kandas and are missing the first kanda - Bala Kanda and the last one, Uttara Kanda. Because of the stylistic differences and narrative contradictions many scholars believe that these two were later additions to the epic and therefore Valmiki didn't write himself into the story. The five kandas, excluding Bala Kanda (1st canto) and Uttara Kanda (7th and final canto) are Ayodhya Kanda, Aranya Kanda, Kishkinda Kanda, Sundara Kanda and Yudha Kanda. 

Almost every religion that started in India - Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism have their versions of Ramayana. So does almost every country in South-East and East Asia, except perhaps Vietnam. Every one of them highlights the same ultimate and supreme ideal Rama stands for - "Dharma"  which is what every human being should try to achieve - the right way of living through moral and virtuous conduct. Practicing dharma is the only way to get rid of our karmic baggage and attain salvation. A heavy message, nevertheless, a beautiful book.

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One Hundred Years with The Problem of China

One hundred years ago, Bertrand Russell identified the potential, the promise and the puzzle that is China in his book "The Problem of China." Russell is a multi-dimensional personality who has started to interest me during my recent expeditions in philosophy. I picked 'The Problem of China', on a whim to understand Russell - the philosopher thinker, born to an aristocratic English family, curious what he had read in the tea leaves about the slumbering dragon China was at the time. 

Bertrand Russell spent 10 months in China starting in the fall of 1920 to July 1921 teaching philosophy at Peking University. He arrived in China towards the end of the May Fourth movement. Chinese intellectuals were looking at Russell and other western philosophers like John Dewey to propose solutions for 'fixing' China. While Russell did not provide any silver bullet cures to fix the Chinese system, he remained a strong advocate of China in the West for the rest of his life.

Bertrand Russell (seated on the right) in China

1920s China is a version of China that no longer exists except in history books. Yet I found Russell's century old observations and analysis prophetic and far-sighted. It also gave me a hint why Chinese people and Chinese culture with its invisible roots still binding it to Confucianism would accept certain things that people living in other modern societies would not accept without a fight. 

Excerpts from the book:

"In China, though wars and revolutions have occurred constantly, Confucian calm has survived them all, making them less terrible for the participants, and making all who were not immediately involved hold aloof."

"It has been customary in China, for many centuries, for the literati to be pure Confucians, skeptical in religion but not in morals, while the rest of the population believed and practiced all three religions simultaneously. The Chinese have not the belief, which we owe to the Jews, that if one religion is true, all others must be false. At the present day, however, there appears to be very little in the way of religion in China"

For the world of the future to be in balance, this is what Bertrand Russell proposed in 1922

"in the long run, the Chinese cannot escape economic domination by foreign Powers unless China becomes military or the foreign Powers become Socialistic, because the capitalist system involves in its very essence a predatory relation of the strong towards the weak, internationally as well as nationally. A strong military China would be a disaster; therefore Socialism in Europe and America affords the only ultimate solution."

Remember the paragraph below was written right after WWI. No historian could write about China without delving into its relationship with Japan.

"A war between America and Japan would be a very terrible thing in itself, and a still more terrible thing in its consequences. It would destroy Japanese civilization, ensure the subjugation of China to Western culture, and launch America upon a career of world-wide militaristic imperialism."

Here is prophet Russell again,

"To sum up: the real government of the world is in the hands of the big financiers, except on questions which rouse passionate public interest. No doubt the exclusion of Asiatics from America and the Dominions is due to popular pressure, and is against the interests of big finance. "

Why are Chinese people the way the way they are?

"In Chinese poetry there is an apparent absence of passion which is due to the same practice of under-statement. They consider that a wise man should always remain calm, and though they have their passionate moments (being in fact a very excitable race), they do not wish to perpetuate them in art, because they think ill of them....In art they aim at being exquisite, and in life at being reasonable. There is no admiration for the ruthless strong man, or for the unrestrained expression of passion...

...Nothing astonishes a European more in the Chinese than their patience.....They think not in decades, but in centuries. They have been conquered before, first by the Tartars and then by the Manchus; but in both cases they absorbed their conquerors. Chinese civilization persisted, unchanged; and after a few generations the invaders became more Chinese than their subjects...."

Russell's outlook for China from a century ago

"China is as yet only slightly industrialized, but the industrial possibilities of the country are very great, and it may be taken as nearly certain that there will be a rapid development throughout the next few decades."

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Thoreau de la Walden : The Hipster from Concord

Walden is my chill-with-a-book book, my meditation guide, my psychedelic trip without psychedelics. I took that trip again this weekend and I want other people out there in the vast wide world to know that you too can take tickets for the same ride. That is why I am writing about Thoreau and Walden, lying in my backyard hammock at the dark hour of 11 pm, listening to crickets, enjoying the slightly nippy late summer air – it is as much Walden as it can get in the rural Pacific Northwest.

Thoreau, came to me late in life. In my late thirties, I stumbled across Thoreau in my quest for a true American thinker, and found the first American anarchist. I realized that the concept of civil disobedience that I had credited Mahatma Gandhi with and on which much of India’s freedom movement had hinged on, got main street cred through Thoreau’s essay on Civil Disobedience in 1849, twenty years before Gandhi was born. When MLK referred back to Gandhi’s civil disobedience movement to push forward his dream of racial equality, the idea of civil disobedience completed a full circle. A modern American construct, expounded and practiced by Thoreau came back home to roost during the Civil Rights era.

The people who resemble Thoreau the closest in this day and age, to me, is not the Sierra Clubbers (for Thoreau is often credited as being one of the people who laid the foundation of the modern environmental movement) but the Antifa. I often feel that the black hoodied hipster with long hair from Portland (OR) protesting police brutality could be Thoreau, if he was present in the present day. When Thoreau defended John Brown in his ‘A Plea for Captain John Brown’ before even other fellow abolitionists would take up a stand for John Brown shows he was the original American anarchist and practiced what he preached.

Reading Walden again, I am struck by the timelessness of the work and how contemporary Thoreau sounds even now, almost two centuries after he had penned his masterpiece. Here he is anticipating the meat-free destiny of man kind, the creation of PETA, vegetarianism and alternative meat - “...whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of human race, in its gradual improvement, is to leave off eating animals….” He condemned hunting although he had been on hunting expeditions as a teen. Here is Thoreau again from Walden, “no humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he does. The hare in its extremity cries like a child. I warn you, mothers, that my sympathies do not always make the usual philanthropic distinctions.”

Thoreau sounds relatable because there are a lot of similarities between his day and the times we are passing through now. Whether it is the millennials who cannot afford to move out of their parents’ homes or the matter of black lives being a hot topic again or the polarization of the nation into conservative south and liberal North/West, 150 years hence we are fighting about the same things and feeling their effect as Thoreau and the U.S populace did in the mid 1800s.

Thoreau lived at his family home, he worked at his family’s pencil factory, paid his rent to his family. Later on, he learned surveying to take it up a vocation. He is the millennial brother-in-law, who will baby sit your kids (he did this for Ralph Waldo Emerson’s kids) while you and your wife goes out on a date in town. He is the same millennial who abruptly quits the rat race to live off the grid in Alaska (Thoreau had to settle for Walden because Alaska was Russia’s at the time), in a tiny home he built all by himself. He was a minimalist, an environmentalist, an abolitionist fighting for the rights of slaves, a vegetarian, a tiny home builder building a home using recycled materials and a disobedient civilian before any of these were considered cool.

He was a white man from Massachusetts, who could quote Vishnu Purana in the 1850s. You have to understand Hare Krishna movement was still one hundred years in the future and Beatles was yet to discover Mahesh Yogi and transcendental meditation. Thoreau says that Vishnu Purana says (I have to take Thoreau’s word for it, despite being born in India, I have not read Vishnu Purana), “The house-holder is to remain in his courtyard as long as it takes to milk a cow or longer if he pleases, to await the arrival of a guest.”

Just like us, currently bewildered by shipping delays in Amazon and shocked by empty shelves at Walmart, Thoreau was utterly surprised by where the things for his daily use (in the days before his life at Walden) came from. Most of our stuff in 21^st century comes from China by the way. That’s why the shelves are looking forlorn at big box stores these days, thanks to the Covid triggered supply chain bottle-neck, Chinese govt. restrictions and to a small extent to that minor traffic incident at the Suez canal turnpike. Here is Thoreau again on learning the pots he used at home was made by an actual potter who lived in town and were not the ones passed on down unbroken from our Mesopotamian ancestors, “I had read of the potter’s clay and wheel in Scripture, but it had never occurred to me that the pots we use were not such as had come down unbroken from those days or grown on trees like gourds somewhere, and I was pleased to hear that so fictile an art was ever practiced in my neighborhood,” Thoreau could have made a solid career in stand-up comedy if he was alive now.

Many intellectuals classify Walden as fiction and Thoreau as a loser, a cynic disappointed by the system and the order of things. But Thoreau is much more than Walden. Walden is just a field-guide for all the could-have-beens if we were brave to jump off from the gerbil wheel we all are endlessly running on. Thoreau stands tall because we are still talking about him, the issues he stood for and the stands he had taken are still as relevant today as it was then. 

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