One Birthday After Another (On Turning Eighty)

Yes, I am riffing two things. First:

On Turning Eighty, by Henry Miller, which I used to open my talk with the quote:

If at eighty you’re not a cripple or an invalid, if you have your health, if you still enjoy a good walk, a good meal (with all the trimmings), if you can sleep without first taking a pill, if birds and flowers, mountains and sea still inspire you, you are a most fortunate individual and you should get down on your knees morning and night and thank the good Lord for his savin’ and keepin’ power.

Congratulations Suresh Sethi on Turning Eighty. It was great to meet several members of your (immediate and extended) family, especially Andrea Sethi.

Second, since this event followed many other Milestone  Birthday – coincidentally the lead article in NYTimes the morning of the event! –  celebrations (including, as in The Unbelievable Luckiness of Being, my 60^th) this year:

One Battle After Another is a 2025 American thriller film produced, written, and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Inspired by the 1990 novel Vineland by Thomas Pynchon, the film stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, and Chase Infiniti, and follows an ex-revolutionary who must rescue his daughter from a corrupt military official.

Yes, I saw the matinee show after I landed in Dallas – at Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, conveniently located nearby (check out their Guava Margarita) – and it was pretty good (Rotten Tomatoes 98%). I would place it favorably in comparison to his magnum opus:

There Will Be Blood is a 2007 American epic period drama film written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, loosely based on the 1927 novel Oil! by Upton Sinclair. It stars Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano, Kevin J. O’Connor, Ciarán Hinds, and Dillon Freasier. The film follows silver miner-turned-oilman Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis) as he embarks on a ruthless quest for wealth during the Californian oil boom in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The film was nominated for eight awards at the 80th Academy Awards, winning two (Best Actor for Day-Lewis and Best Cinematography for Elswit). It had box-office revenues of over $75 million (on a budget of $25 million).

Although I have agreed with Picasso on several things (“Master the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist”), I disagree with him on this:

 One starts to get young at the age of sixty, and then it’s too late.

What did I Keynote about? Capitalism, Supply Chains and Democracy with the agenda:

Thanks Kaylon Emeary and Tao Li (and others) for organizing the event. It was great to meet up with David Simchi-Levi (and catchup over a nice dinner, with a crisp Vesper, at The Saint), Haresh Gurnani, Savannah Tang, Raghu Raghavan, Ozalp Ozer,  Hemant Bhargava, Rohit Verma, Alexandre Dolgui, Ming Hu, Nicos Savva and many others, in addition to UTD faculty Hasan Pirkul (Dean), Dipak Jain, Neda Mirzaeian, Kathy Stecke, Ganesh Janakiraman, Alain Bensoussan, Metin Cakanyildirim, Andrew Frazelle, Dorothee Honhon, Bin Hu, Vaidyanathan Jayaraman, Elena Katok, Guihua Wang, Anyan Qi and others.