A Globe-Trotting Guru

I have mentioned more than once in previous blog postings that of all the places I have traveled, India has captured my interest more than any place else, and, if you have been following me, you know I have been to a lot of places. I have always found it to be most fascinating and colorful; so the following story captured my attention immediately. It is quite a diversion from my usual subjects, but I found it so interesting that I want to share it with all of you.  I feel a bit of skepticism about it all, but the facts are real.

There is a 59-year-old Indian guru known simply as “mother”. She is a hugging saint who has embraced literally millions of her acolytes all over the world. She has just started a two month North American tour with a staff of 275 volunteers, where at each stop she sits for 15 hours at a clip, embracing her thousands of followers. She has a large following here, but in India she is known as a spiritual therapist and has built a vast organization, an empire, and is the envy of both India’s public and private sectors. She has turned a former fishing village in Kerala into a utopia, a mega-ashram, complete with a modern university, hospital, a mini-mall, and high-rise buildings. Everything works, from the recycling plants to the electricity; no mean feat in India. There are temples, dormitories, restaurants, and no problem getting café latte for breakfast, or pizza in the afternoon. Her people are geniuses at marketing their brand.

She is worshipped and is said to be able to perform miracles, even diverting storms.  Asked how she maintains her pace she says “I am connected to the eternal energy source, so I am not like a battery that gets used up.”

Her organization fills the vacuum left by government. For example, after the 2004 tsunami, by the time the state government even announced a recovery plan 5 days later, her organization was already long at work supplying food and relief. Then she went on to build 6,000 houses. When she gives an order, the work starts the very next day.

She raises a lot of money, about 20 million dollars a year worldwide, but as a church, does not have to disclose a lot of financial information the way other tax exempt organizations do.

As you may have guessed, she was born into a low caste, and though born poor, would constantly give whatever she had away to others even less fortunate, which led to her father tying her to a tree and beating her. She was hugging strangers right from the beginning. Eventually she ran away and survived eating whatever she could find, including feces. 

Of course, there is an authorized biography that has been translated into 31 languages, and printed right at the ashram. It states that even while still young she was kissing cobras, diverting rainstorms, and feeding thousands from a single pot.

Her transformation into the mother guru, as opposed to those who traditionally kept their distance, began in the seventies. She started to attract a steady stream of visitors, hugging and comforting anybody who came near, and the donations followed. And so it began (about the same time I started Love and Quiches in my kitchen, but, of course, my career hasn’t been quite so startling. Not many others can boast her trajectory either).

Now I quote, “And then Amma was crisscrossing the globe to promote her Hindu philosophy, which espouses love, introspection, and selflessness, as well as her many charities, which now include hunger and disaster relief, free health care for the poor, orphanages, and recycling efforts.”

Her trips are becoming more elaborate, and her reach is expanding. She has eight satellite ashrams in the United States. In India she attracts top talent to her university and hospital, much more successfully than the Indian government. They call her the best head hunter there is. People trust her more than the government. And the government often calls on her to get things done, since she is better at it than they are.

She claims she and her “children” never disagree, that they all function as one mind. Not likely, but still. She claims she is the first person to get down into the septic tank to clean the feces, and that I can understand. I spent a lot of time on my hands and knees cleaning right alongside my employees, and I can tell you that goes a long way in building respect. Yet I suspect that she actually rules with an iron hand, that whatever she says goes.

Her hugging sessions worldwide are big business. One benefactor, in 2009, even bought the former home of Sargent Shriver and Eunice Kennedy Shriver, for $7.8 million, and donated it to Amma for a meeting house. This organization really has it all together.

All this from someone, a woman no less, with only a fourth grade education. Remarkable.

Until next time...make someone happy —serve them dessert!
www.loveandquiches.com

Our Brave New World: Is This All There Is?

I recently attended the Women’s Foodservice Forum’s yearly conference held at the Marriot World Center in Orlando, one of the few hotels in the country that can accommodate a gathering of 2600 participants all in one place at one time. They actually have a ballroom large enough to accommodate all of us for the general sessions. The only problem was that it was a twenty minute walk from place to place between events. It was the only exercise I needed during the conference.

Because of my position as Chairwoman and Founder of Love and Quiches, I was invited to some of the smaller, more private events while there. During a luncheon for some of the higher level participants, the speaker was a well known author and consultant (whom I consider more of a futurist), whose vision of the world we will be living in, in the not too distant future, was really scary.

First of all, medical advances will be so vast that we will be living 140 years or more, and we will all have our own personal robots to help us cope. We will not have a need for other people to interact with us; our robots will do it all, including keeping us company. This will allow us to remain in our homes. Is that a good thing, with only our private robot to interact with?

All of us, both young and old, will have his or her own genie, maybe sitting on our shoulders or imbedded under our skin, that will serve as our taskmaster and conscience, storing our statistics, fully prepared to recite our up-to-the-minute blood pressure and cholesterol counts, and to slap our hands when we reach for the French fries.

We will all be wearing glasses with computers in them that will be giving us our calendar reminders, the weather report, our email messages, the ability to make purchases from anywhere in the world, and so on; kind of a science fiction i-phone. So the 21^st century citizen will be more electronically networked but personally isolated than ever. Our connections will become more and more virtual as people become more and more dependent on their myriad of devices. And this by choice.

He also said that higher education will be all online and virtual. There will no longer be a Harvard or Princeton, or any other university as we now know it. Students from all corners of the earth with access to a computer will be able to enjoy a Harvard education, for free or at minimal cost: thousands can take the same courses all at once. Online education is growing by leaps and bounds, and, to me, that is a very good thing. Please understand that I am not against all the wonderful advances in technology. After all, here I am blogging to anybody who happens to log on, and loving it. But for higher education to cease to exist as we know it today -- no more sitting in a classroom, for all college campuses to disappear altogether-- is more than I can contemplate.

In his talk, he described many other changes to the world as we know it that will be coming during the next decades and into the next century. A great deal of it had to do with mobility and transportation. 

This speaker was so definitive and persuasive in his arguments, that you could hear a pin drop in the room. But I was not convinced. I’m not sure where I got the courage, but I raised my hand to speak. I told him that “what he had described to us during his talk may very well all come to pass, but I was not looking forward to it, nor to living to 140 to see it happen”. I then asked him “What about the human connection?” and he in not so many words said we won’t need any; that the technological advances will be so vast that they alone would be enough for us to live fruitful lives.

I hope we have all bargained for a lot more than this. This brave new world doesn’t sound like much fun to me. 

And I will have much more to say in coming weeks about technology, social media and how to use them to advantage, but with balance.

                                                                                                                                                                  

                                                                                                                                                                  

Until next time...make someone happy —serve them dessert!
www.loveandquiches.com

My Thoughts on the Internet: One Year Later

Last year, I wrote a blog post railing at the internet and social media as the root cause of all of society’s ills. I still feel that way in many respects, but have modified my views in others.

A lot has changed since then. My marketing department and our PR firm insisted I engage both on Facebook and LinkedIn and I now have over 500 connections on each, although, gratefully, I do not Twitter (they must have forgotten to make me do that, too). They also gave me marching orders to post comments at least twice a week on each, which is not too hard to do, because I always have a lot to say. What to say has never been one of my problems. What is a problem is that the best time to comment (or so I am told) is on Wednesday and Sunday evenings, the later the better, just when I would rather be watching Masterpiece Theater on PBS, or The Good Wife, or The Mentalist, or Shameless, or Mad Men, or reruns of The Sopranos. They claim those times give the best chance of being read, so I guess the whole world is on line late at night, instead of relaxing, winding down, reading a good book, or going to sleep.

At first, to get started I invited plenty of business people to connect, but now the invitations are coming to me, fast and furious, more than I can handle. I suppose after 40 years in the industry, people know me, or more likely, all the sharp and social media-savvy people that work at Love and Quiches Desserts have helped raise my profile.  Even personal anonymity, which would be my choice if I had a choice, isn’t a good thing for building a business. Or promoting my book as you will see as you read on.

There is other news. Love and Quiches Desserts is celebrating its 40^th year in business, and is planning on celebrating in many ways, including a new look for our website and logo later in the year. Forty years is a long time and it has been quite an adventure; from my garage to going global. Everybody at Love and Quiches is Twittering and posting like mad about all the events surrounding our 40^th.

So, I finally gave in. I gave up on privacy and wrote a book telling the whole bloody tale, no holds barred. The search for a publisher was another study in taking rejection in stride; my education never seems to be complete. “Great story, but too much of a memoir. We do business books”. “Well written, but too much of a business book. We do memoirs.” “Inspiring story, we know the company, but the author is not known nationally, not enough reach.” In other words, I am not Sheryl  Sandberg or Meryl Streep.

It took almost a year after finishing my first draft, but I have finally found a great publisher and am hard at work with my editor. Of course, he is taking the book apart and remapping it, but I think I have a good story to tell. It will take us about a year to be ready to go to press, by the time they edit the edits, read through the finished version many times, design the cover, the table of contents, do the pre-marketing, and so on.

If not for all the newly gathered social media and other organizational content I was finally able to include in my book proposal, I may not have attracted their attention, and they might not have agreed to take the project on. Now I have to hope the book will sell, and we will need every bit of social media presence and reach to help us get the word out. So that is a good thing. And, most probably, the digital version on Amazon and other sources will, no doubt, out-sell the print version by far. Whatever works.

So I am stuck. Social media and the brave new digital world are here to stay…get used to it. Whether you love it or hate it, you cannot ignore it. It has value whether we like it or not. But it will never become my primary means of communication. The human connection is much too important and precious to me to let that happen.

 

Until next time...make someone happy —serve them dessert!
www.loveandquiches.com

Hurricane Sandy: The Effects Are Lingering, Big Time

I never expected to be blogging yet one more time about Hurricane Sandy, but my husband Irwin and I had an experience last week that brought it all home again with a shattering thud. 

Last Saturday, I had a dentist's appointment early in the morning on Long Island; even though we moved to the city 6 years ago I still use my same dentist. So, finding ourselves in the suburbs so early we decided to drive slowly back to the city through Far Rockaway, and the Rockaways, where both of us were brought up, and where some of the most devastating damage was sustained. Whoa, what we saw was very hard to process. Parts of these areas have been on a downswing for years anyway, in spite of being at the edge of the beautiful Atlantic Ocean, but we saw, in most places, not even the beginnings of restoration. What was destroyed will stay that way, it seems, for quite a few years to come. 

Of course, coming to grips with soaring insurance costs, revamped flood hazard zoning maps, heightened standards for rebuilding, its costs, and so on will leave so many out in the cold, with no chance of ever returning to their homes. I guess in the last analysis some houses were situated where they should not have been and heightened building standards are needed, so we don’t have to ever see this movie again, but it hurts anyway.

New York City will be bulldozing hundreds of homes along the coast, and some even a bit inland, so heavily damaged, or already reduced to rubble, that they pose a danger to public safety and to other houses nearby. It’s the same all up and down the coast. On Staten Island, in certain areas, nearly half the houses were destroyed and the rest flooded. Many were ripped from their foundations and carried into the marsh. In Long Beach, on the south shore of Long Island, my niece restored her house and managed to work through an insurance nightmare; but of 35 homes on her block, only three are occupied. And on and on.

Just last week there was another Nor’easter that pounded Plum Island, off the northeast tip of Massachusetts. This barrier island, already made vulnerable by Hurricane Sandy, looked, in the photos, as if it was sitting in the ocean itself, with houses toppled all over the place. The truth is no matter how many sandbags, cement blocks, and what-have-you are piled up in the hope of protecting a piece of property, you cannot stop the ocean. Those homes still standing need to be moved back, way back, to get out of harm’s way.  This is called managed retreat.

The remains of Aunt Molly's house post-Sandy.

Back in my New York personal world and last Saturday morning, we continued driving through these dismal streets toward Neponsit, where I grew up. This is a lovely well-kept area that was not spared any of the pain, either. We drove up and down so many streets and saw the same story over and over. Then we drove down 143^rd Street and just stared. There was my Aunt Molly’s house (she is long gone), a sturdy solid brick house, reduced to nothing more than a pile of bricks. I had already seen photos of the devastation, but not until I was standing in front of the real thing was the actuality of it brought home. Irwin’s childhood home, which we drove past, was not so great either, but my childhood home (below left) looked as if restoration had begun, although it seemed to be sitting on the beach itself. But nothing I have seen so far these last few months quite prepared me for Aunt Molly’s home

My childhood home in Neponsit post-Sandy.

where I had spent more of my childhood than I had in my own house.

On the economic and human front, there is some good and some bad news. Schools used as Disaster Recovery Units are reopening, some just very recently. One of them is St Francis de Sales in the Rockaways, where lots of my friends had attended elementary school, which reopened just a few short weeks ago .The lower half of Manhattan is also slowly recovering, but with many businesses gone forever, and with them, sadly, the jobs. But it has, nevertheless, become a very hot real estate boom town. Amazing!  In New Jersey, Hoboken is still a mess with business down by half for those that remained open or reopened as the months went by. Red Hook in Brooklyn, which literally drowned in seawater, is coming back to life with the reopening of shops, restaurants and supermarkets.

The summer resort area rentals are shot for this summer. Who wants to rent a house that is still standing right next to a house two doors down that is a mere pile of rubble? 

At Love and Quiches Desserts, we are grateful. We never lost a beat. But that wasn’t the case in so many places. Tens of thousands of jobs were lost as a result of the storm. I hope those jobs are restored as businesses recover, renovate and reopen. For recreation areas, beach clubs, and such, right up against the coast lines, things don’t look too good. These are facing a very long recovery. Especially with all the new rules for rebuilding coming fast and furiously, not to mention confusingly. And I suspect the violations and stop work orders will start coming fast and furiously, also, for those that just jumped in there to save their property. No good deed goes unpunished.

It will take years to cover all the scars, but it will happen, it always does.

Until next time...make someone happy —serve them dessert!
www.loveandquiches.com