Love, Marriage, and the Human Capacity for Multiple Connections

The following discussion may challenge some deeply held assumptions about love and relationships. My intention is not to criticize marriage or monogamy, both of which work well for many people. Rather, I want to explore whether our understanding of love may be broader and more complex than the relationship models we typically accept.

 

Many of us experience deep emotional connections with multiple people throughout our lives. Yet we often feel uncomfortable discussing this reality because society tends to assume that meaningful romantic love must be directed toward only one person at a time.

 

For heterosexual people, these connections may occur with people of the opposite gender; for gay and lesbian individuals, with people of the same gender. While attraction is often part of the experience, I am primarily interested in something deeper: the human desire for intimacy, emotional closeness, and genuine connection.

 

Why Does Marriage Exist?

Marriage is one of humanity's oldest social institutions, yet we rarely pause to ask why it exists.

 

Historically, marriage served many important purposes. It provided a framework for raising children, organizing inheritance and property rights, creating economic stability, and strengthening social bonds between families and communities.

 

These functions help explain why marriage became such a central institution in most societies. However, the historical reasons for marriage do not necessarily determine the full range of human emotional experiences.

 

The question is not whether marriage has value. Clearly, it does. The question is whether love itself is as exclusive as our social institutions often assume.

 

The Nature of Love

 

Human beings routinely maintain multiple meaningful relationships at the same time. We love our parents, our children, our siblings, our friends, and our partners. We do not generally believe that loving one person diminishes our capacity to love another.

 

Romantic love is often treated differently. Society tends to assume that if romantic feelings develop for a second person, the love for the first person must somehow be reduced or invalidated.

 

Yet many people's experiences suggest reality may be more complicated.

 

It is possible to deeply love a long-term partner while also feeling a genuine emotional connection with someone else. Many people report such experiences, though they are often reluctant to discuss them openly because of fear, guilt, or social judgment.

 

The existence of these feelings does not automatically mean someone wants to leave their partner, nor does it imply a lack of commitment. It may simply reflect the fact that human beings are capable of forming more than one significant emotional bond.

 

The Lifecycle of Romantic Relationships

 

Research suggests that relationships evolve over time. The intense passion that often characterizes the beginning of a relationship frequently develops into something different: companionship, attachment, trust, shared history, and mutual care.

 

This evolution is not a failure of love. In many cases, it represents a deeper and more stable form of love.

 

At the same time, the emergence of a meaningful connection with another person is not necessarily evidence that an existing relationship is broken. Human emotions are often more nuanced than simple either-or categories.

 

For some individuals, these additional connections remain friendships. For others, they may involve romantic feelings. The challenge is not that such feelings exist, but that society often lacks healthy ways to discuss them.

 

Polyamory as an Alternative Model

 

Polyamory is the practice of engaging in multiple loving relationships with the knowledge and consent of everyone involved.

 

Its central principle is not unlimited freedom or the rejection of commitment. Rather, it is the belief that honesty, transparency, and consent are more important than exclusivity itself.

 

Polyamory is not for everyone. Just as some people are naturally drawn to monogamy, others find that they are capable of loving multiple people simultaneously without feeling that one relationship diminishes another.

 

A polyamorous perspective asks a simple question:

 

> If it is possible to care deeply about more than one friend, family member, or child, why should we assume that romantic love is fundamentally different?

 

While there may be practical and emotional challenges in maintaining multiple romantic relationships, the same can be said of monogamous relationships. The presence of challenges does not necessarily invalidate the model.

 

The Fear of Intimacy

 

One consequence of strong social expectations around exclusivity is that people sometimes become cautious about forming deep emotional connections.

 

They may worry that emotional intimacy could develop into romantic feelings, creating conflict or forcing difficult choices. As a result, some people keep important relationships at a distance.

 

In doing so, they may miss opportunities for authentic connection and emotional growth.

 

A society that allowed more open conversations about attraction, attachment, and love might make it easier for people to navigate these experiences honestly rather than suppress them.

 

A Societal Attachment Style?

 

Psychologists often describe individuals as having secure, anxious, or avoidant attachment styles.

 

I sometimes wonder whether societies can exhibit similar patterns. Cultural norms may encourage people either to embrace emotional complexity, fear it, or avoid it altogether.

 

Many cultures seem uncomfortable with the idea that love can take multiple forms simultaneously. As a result, people may feel pressure to deny or hide certain feelings rather than explore them responsibly and ethically.

 

Whether this represents a form of collective avoidance is an open question, but it is one worth considering.

 

Toward a Broader Understanding of Love

 

My suspicion is not that polyamory is superior to monogamy. Rather, I believe that different people may flourish under different relationship structures.

 

For some, lifelong monogamy is deeply fulfilling. For others, ethical non-monogamy or polyamory may be a more authentic expression of how they experience love.

 

The important question is not which model is universally correct, but whether adults should have the freedom to pursue loving relationships that are honest, consensual, and respectful.

 

If we can accept that human beings differ in temperament, personality, values, and life goals, perhaps we can also accept that they may differ in how they love.

 

A healthier society may not be one that prescribes a single relationship model for everyone, but one that encourages honesty, consent, compassion, and emotional responsibility regardless of the model people choose. 

Morning Magic | My Poem

   How do you describe magic of morning,

Whose spell could be broken by just a sigh.

I wish I had a device,

Which could capture this surprise.

 

Silence of a sleeping child,

Freshness of a blooming rose,

Serenity of a water stream,

Allude my wildest dream

 

Little drops of cool water on the skin,

Smooth air of cotton pushing around,

Fresh air of elixir,

How do you describe this wonder.

 

The freshness, the serenity, the silence of the morning

Is so ephemeral,

Does describing it destroy the awe,

Isn’t that the Heisenberg’ law? 

API: An Unsung Hero of Digital Revolution

Let us imagine that you want to develop a cool gadget, but you don’t have any idea about how to go about doing so. For example, you want to develop an Alexa or a Siri type of device. Someone with no programming background would think on the lines that I first need to learn programming and then I will learn how to do voice recognition and then I will learn how to do natural language processing. But it is actually much more simpler than that.

People without programming background are not entirely wrong thinking that, as During courses on computer science, these subjects are taught. I remember that as part of our course in computer graphics, we had learned how to draw a line, how to draw circle and other polygonal shapes. We had also learned various artificial intelligence algorithms some 15 years back. But I don’t remember ever using those even though I would have drawn many complex shapes on the screen, and I have used some AI algorithms without exactly knowing how they really worked.

How then all of that really works. It works similar to how we drive a car without knowing how does an internal combustion engine work. We know how to press accelerator, how to steer, how to change gears  and how to apply breaks. This process is so simple that it does not even require basic education.

In programming there is a similar role played by what is known as function. You provide the input to the function and it returns you the result of the computation. And a collection of such functions with well-known and stable interfaces could be called Application Programming Interface (API). Let us again take the example of a chat bot. There are many organizations that provide online and offline services such as LUIS from Microsoft, Hangouts Chat from google and Amazon Connect chat from who else, Amazon. You just need to choose programming language of your choice and download the code to call these interfaces and do some basic programming to send the voice that you capture from your device hardware using another set of API.

What an API does that it lets you and me, who have no idea how to do speech recognition and natural language processing, do these tasks as if we are experts. It also makes it possible to scale for those few who have perfected these technologies. Actually most of programming is about using various APIs to get the task done with very basic programming skills. That’s why many students who are right out of college are able to create AI based solutions. Actually we don’t even need college for that. I think, students who are around 10 to 12 year of age are capable of learning these technologies if they put their mind to it.

So whatever new algorithms are developed they can be made available through API to others who can put those algorithms in the service of their needs and develop amazing products for you and me. This makes me think that APIs are the unsung heroes of our digital revolution.

How to Reach out to More Users with Inclusive Design

This post is about why user interface should be designed by keeping in mind needs of people with disabilities.
Natasha, a young HR executive was traveling to her home town with her fiancé for her wedding. Her wedding was just a week away and both of them had great plans for the future. But as fate would have it, they met with an accident colliding with a truck. Her fiancé died on the spot and Natasha suffered serious injuries. Upon awakening, she found herself in a hospital, and she realized that she would never be able to see again. Already crippled by the irreparable loss of her fiancé, she now had to deal with a new way of life and had no idea how to face this predicament.
This could happen to anyone of us, and such things do happen to more than a billion of us. In the United States alone, there are 74.6 million people with disabilities (Health, United States, 2012, table 48). Think about it, 1 sixth of us find it difficult to hear everyday conversations, watch this beautiful world, or do things independently. In short, many of us find it difficult to do things that most of us take for granted.
To understand some of the challenges faced by people with disabilities, let us consider following 3 thought experiments.
You are watching a movie, but the speakers are not working. You can see everything, but cannot hear a thing. This is how a deaf person experiences the world. It becomes a challenge even to carry on conversations with your friends and colleagues. Thanks to mobile texting, deaf persons can now carry on conversations with others although with difficulty.

Now imagine yourself watching a movie on a broken or distorted screen. This is how a blind person would experience the world. So you cannot read books, see pictorial depictions, and look at other visual things. you would find it difficult to obtain a book that you want to read because, until recently, printed books were the only format available. Though e-books have now begun to make a dent in this problem, only 5 percent of the books are available so far.
And imagine yourself in chains either handcuffed or in shackles. You would experience challenges in moving around and accomplishing simple tasks independently. awkward Instances like a woman having to attend to natures call in the open in presence of male colleagues occur only because of lack of accessible facilities.
So what should be done? Can we really work around such problems?
Digital technology has opened doors for various people with disabilities. A person with hearing difficulties can communicate with others using SMS and emails, a person with blindness can use a software that can read out information in computer and Mobile phones, and a person with physical difficulties could work effectively if his or her environment is barrier free.
But just because these technologies exist, does not mean that people with disabilities can work smoothly. Often designers of mainstream products do not realize that inadvertently they create barriers for some of their users. For example, In order to build a dazzling user interface, we often place a pretty picture replacing plain text. But pictures cannot be read out or resized, so such pictures become barrier for many people with disabilities. Let me be clear, I am not against a good looking interface, but we need to be aware of the consequences of our actions. So we need to provide an alternative to any information that is presented as a picture.
So you would say, I got it, but what am I supposed to do? And the answer is: the interface should be programmatic, not be dependent on one sense alone and there should be multiple ways of interacting with it. Oops! what is that? Let me explain.
As we discussed above, we can add  text material in 2 ways. we could just add the text, or add an image of the text. But there is a problem with adding an image. An image cannot be read without OCR, so image can only be useful for someone with sight alone, but text can also be read out with the help of a special software known as speech synthesizer, the types you see in science fictions. You might have come across speech synthesizer in your day to day life as well. in many mobile phones, the  name or number of the caller is announced by a synthesizer. So add a text instead of an image, and if you cannot avoid adding an image, describe that image using alternative text.
But accessibility is more than making the information available in text. Another aspect is to provide structure to the text as well. For example in web applications. A heading could be represented either by highlighting it visually  such as bold etc. or by using a heading tag. In the first option, a software cannot programmatically determine whether a bold text is a heading or not. So the better way would be to use h1…h6 tags. Similarly, you could arrange tabular text either with spaces or css, or with a table tag. As before, spaces and css  cannot be interpreted by the software to mean for tables, so tabular text should be mark-up with table tags. In case of applications on mobile devices or standard computer, using standard components makes your application easily accessible. If, however, you cannot use standard components, then you need to use accessibility API available for that platform. For example, UI Automation is a good accessibility API for windows.
Similarly, if your software can only be operated with the help of mouse, many people who depend on alternative ways such as keyboard or joystick, would not be able to use it. One advantage of making a software accessible with keyboard is that it can also be used by advance users, who are good with keystrokes.
Have you ever wondered why elder persons find it difficult to read a few websites or applications? With age, their eye sight deteriorates, so reading small print with colorful background becomes difficult. So resizable text with good contrast would be very helpful in such scenarios. Good contrast and resizing would also be useful for people with regular sight in unusual lighting conditions.
If the language of your user interface is simple, your software can be used by people with wider reading abilities as well. If there is an audio, there should be text alternative known as captions for people who cannot hear. In short, alternative presentation and alternative input mechanism should be provided to cater to broader needs and capabilities.
Accessibility is not just  something nice to do, it has economic rational as well. You can increase the number of users if your software is easier and accessible. Do you know that an iPhone can be used by a blind person, hearing impaired person or a person with mobility difficulties? Steve jobs could easily ignore accessibility in iPhone but he was not a person who would ignore such things. He cared to make it happen or the systems that he had setup at Apple made it happen, but what we learn from him, is to pay attention even for things that may evade an ordinary leader. iPhone has not only transformed mobile industry, but it has also transformed accessibility for people with disabilities. And that would have been one of the reasons for the success of Apple devices.
Let us return to Natasha’s story and see how she was enabled. One of her colleagues, who is blind, trained her on a software called a screen reader. Using this software, she could now Read and write emails, browse the web, and make PowerPoint presentations and more, as effectively as before the only difference being, she now listened to speech instead of looking at the screen. So when you design your software, make sure that you don’t create barriers for Natasha.
I have only highlighted a fraction of what needs to be done in order to make software accessible. So if you are motivated enough, you could start by looking at Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) for web applications. And Engineering Software for Accessibility, a book, by Microsoft Corporation for windows based applications. There are similar guidelines for IOS, Android, and other platforms. And yes, remember to get your applications tested by someone who is a person with disability.
Note: the story in this article is based on a real incident, but the name is changed to preserve the anonymity.

How could We Use Google Assistant to Make Learning Fun

In my previous post, I discussed how my family is using Google Home to spend quality time together. We enjoyed so many things together such as listening to stories, playing trivia quiz, listening to jokes and host of other things. We could also ask for meaning for a word that we didn’t know, but my son didn’t want to proactively ask for meaning. I want him to learn better vocabulary, but the existing vocabulary quizzes are SAT level and he is in sixth grade.
So I wondered whether I could make a custom quiz for him. To my pleasant surprise google has made it very easy to create quiz either for personal consumption or for the world at large. Actually the official terminology is testing; there is no option labeled as personal consumption. The main point is that when you make it available for testing, it becomes available on devices associated with your account. So when you develop a quiz, you could test it on your own account. But who stops you to stay in testing mode for ever and keep modifying for your hearts content!
So how could we create a quiz? Like me, you would be thinking that it would require you to learn programming, or learn advance skills such as machine learning or artificial intelligence techniques or some amount of natural language processing. Well, all those things are used to create and run the quiz, but we don’t need to do that. Nice and smart folks at google have already done the hard work so that we could just use simple tools and enjoy the outcome.
We just need to create a Google sheet and the template of the sheet is also provided by google. There are 5 columns, first is the question column, second is the correct answer column, third and fourth are incorrect option columns, and fifth is the additional information which would be spoken with the correct answer. The comments in the google sheet also tell you that you could add additional columns for options but I didn’t try that.
If everything goes well, google will create your quiz and voila, you could run it in the device that is associated with your account. You could also publish it for the world, but I guess that would require many iterations before you would want to do that.
For detailed step by step instructions, visit the following guide: Build Actions for the Google Assistant (Level 1)

Making study material more inclusive for people with blindness: Learning from CFA Institute

In August 2018, I got the news that I have passed Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Level III exam. CFA is a very rigorous program consisting of 3 very intense exams. The content for these exams is heavily quantitative. It could be even more tough for a person with blindness as a blind person has to get the course material converted in a suitable format. But CFA institute made the course material accessible by making material available online and equations in math ML format. Yes, you guessed it right, I am a person with blindness myself.

To understand what I just said, it is important to know some background. Technology has made a huge difference for people with blindness. There is a special software that reads out information in computer or mobile devices. This software is known as screen reader. You can see these screen readers in mobile phones as Talkback in Android or Voiceover in iPhone. This technology is somewhat similar to a navigation system that informs the upcoming route. To be precise, a screen reader depends on two technologies. For speech, it uses what is known as speech synthesizer, and for Braille output, it uses Braille display.

Before screen readers, blind persons had to depend on one to one help such as a family member or  friend who would either read the books or record them. Some organizations working for people with blindness would record commonly used material. But such material would be only available for subjects that are studied widely, that too with great difficulty. Some organizations would also convert books in Braille, but since this is a laborious process, only limited books have been available and they are bulky.

Due to modern technology, blind persons can read electronic content, but not any content. A content has to be made available in a proper format. This format is known as e-Pub which is becoming more and more popular among publishers. But just making books available in e-pub may not solve the problem. For example, Some publishers might put images in the e-pub, but images are not readable through screen readers. In order to make it accessible, the material needs to be in plain text or HTML. For technical subjects that have equations such as mathematics and other math based subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering, or finance), a standard known as math ML should be used to specify equations. Math ML can be embedded in e-pub books.

The traditional methods such as recording or Braille books were not scalable, so very few people could benefit from them. The few lucky once were those who had support of a family or an organization. But if we make mainstream course material more accessible just as CFA institute did, we would be able to make many people with blindness independent. This does not mean that such material would only be available for someone with a screen reader only. The same accessible content would be readable through Braille using a special device known as Braille display which converts print to Braille instantly without requiring huge infrastructure. People can also use Braille printer to create Braille books from e-pub books.

With earlier methods, I often struggled to get material. Whereas with CFA material I didn’t need any help as content was properly formatted in text, and  All the equations were also formatted in math ML. The only help I needed was for understanding diagrams. It was easy to find a solution Even for this, I could print them and request anyone without any financial knowledge to trace the diagram with simple board and pen. This would raise the diagram in reverse and I could understand them. For this, I needed someone’s help only for a percent or 2 of the time.

Needless to say, CFA institute has shown a way forward for the empowerment of persons with disabilities through accessible course material. I wish other institutes could learn from CFA institute and become more inclusive.

Google Home review

This father’s day my son planned a surprise gift with the help of my wife. Both of them went out to the market and got me an amazing gift. I got Google Home as gift for the father’s day.

We were like kids with new toy! Initially we asked it to play various songs and it complied. We were so thrilled that we could say title of any song and it would invariably be able to recognize those songs. Interestingly, it understands various Indian names such as titles of songs in Hindi, Punjabi,  or Himachali. Not only songs, it also provides news if you just wish it good morning or ask directly. Google home can also provide weather updates, details of the songs played, complement you if you ask for it, and many other interesting things.

I also asked it for some financial terms and it could fetch the definitions from Investopedia. It can fetch definitions from Wikipedia and many other sources as well.

Then we discovered many other features such as spin the wheel in which google home comes up with funny comments, or fun facts, or lucky trivia which is a good way to spend time with a bunch of kids or grown up friends. It can also help in improving vocabulary. just ask for SAT vocabulary or GRE word games.

All that was so amazing but we discovered another gem in store for us.

My son asked my wife to tell him a story but after a couple of stories, she could not think of a story that he has not already heard. So she tried Google Home again. And low and behold, google home obliged her with a very nice story of a Golden Goose.

We can now spend quality time with our son listening to various short stories. And we are thankful to google to have created such an amazing product that helps us to have a story time even we may not remember so many stories. Well the truth is that parents often run out of stories no matter how hard they try. At time we read many story books but could not keep up with the demands of my son who always asks for more stories. He would want us to tell him 7 – 8 stories in any night. Though we may not be able to come up with more stories, Google home is able to do so with ease.

There are so many features that we discover every day that one blog post is not enough for that. Recently I asked for contact details for a shop near our home and it could fetch that as well. I also read that it can help with online shopping. Google home is going to revolutionize the way we live our online or offline lives.