The day is slowly dipping into darkness. The team meeting is taking more time than anticipated. Nine independent representatives of various disciplines involved in the care. Each one of us is important and indispensable. Sounds just and fair; in principle, on paper.
In actual practice, at least in my lineage of work, such meetings have to be led, navigated and if need be dominated. Ruthlessly. Else it turns out into a fugue of syntaxes, accents and agendas with each one paying tribute to his English teacher. In times such I buy myself the best medication which comes totally free of cost..TIME. As things settle down I sit in silence thinking of fairness and democracy…and I come up this question…
Isn’t it unfair on the adjectives if all are equal??
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That moment after the tedious meeting where all of us switch on our mobiles back.
You have 2 new voice messages. J’s Irish accent warms my ears: She is, in essence asking Me, S and A to come over to her place on the weekend. And, if we come up with excuses, she adds with a wicked laughter which carves me into a left handed smile "hek hek kho choon choon k maaaaarongeee" (supposedly ek ek ko chun chun ke maroongi) which is product of A’ s preaching of the hindi version of 'I'll kill last one of you…'
The second message is from S asking me to call back, which I do, she asks me with five pleases to come to Oxford street to help her with shopping for B’s birthday next week . I say but we did the shopping last week, no but she doesn’t think his tie would go with her lipstick.
Ah Women what a continent?
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Driving at this time of the hour would be worse than the Chinese water-torture, so I decide to take the tube instead, but before that I have to take the bus to Notting hill so that I can hitch the central line from there. As I am walking outside, the cold wind cuts across, and it starts drizzling like some magic animation…..sometimes I really wonder does the united kingdom really need the meteorological department and those weather reports?
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The starbucks burps the faint wist of the chicken from night’s dinner that I elobarately cooked. I think cooking is the most underestimated thing in the world .First it gives you a chance to experiment, how else would you find out the taste of chicken with mint sauce? Besides I can swear that my spatial and temporal organisational skills are far more enhanced after I started cooking, 'the salt has to go in only when things are just heating up, not before not after'....and that beauty in frying the onion golden brown ? That’s all fine, was it Churchill who said that one of these days humanity has to get across this great absurdity of having to grow an whole chicken for just breasts and thighs?
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I take the front seat of the upstairs in the bus and soon I have different view, I notice the T-mobile U-fix advert. Hmmm the first time I saw the tv version of it I wanted to buy a drink for who ever that came up with the idea, its an epitome of marketing…if your market is already acquainted with the product you got to maintain interest, and this advert package flows effortlessly and buys curiosity as well. Everything suits just right, including the most neglected department in commercials music!
So much for presentations, Now those are the rules of marketing, not when you are talking, the whole great postmodern idea to use a PowerPoint for everything seems stupid. Sounds fine in presentations, but not while teaching, reading a paper etc; how wonderful it was when H last week came in with some OHP and started talking like old-days, my philosophy is if you want to talk you should know the stuff and discuss with the floor not stand there and read from some four-bullet-points- a-slide formula. I belong to old school there , the new is nothing but a state of the art crap designed to hide our fallacies?
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Well speaking of old schools I didn’t go to that old a school which runs the same old vivaldi piece always while transferring/awaiting telephone calls? Would someone please change it for something different Mozart at least?
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The tube is strangely empty, an executive probably returning from long day's work and a young student reading a book; since old habits die hard, I try to catch a peek at the title…Saul Bellow’s Herzog…my thoughts wander and are arrested several years back in memory when C in the college whose appetite for books can only be matched with his opinions, unwanting to disclose the obscenely minuscule amount of money he had bargained the used-book asked me..
what are you reading now?
Lord of the rings.
Stop that and start this, I finished in two days, if you finish quickly, we can have good discussion.
He adds quickly, I think it’s the best thing out of America after the Bulb and Simpsons….
I take look at the title, six letters H-E-R-Z-O-G.
Rest in peace Saul Bellow, a true writer worth a million words..of honest judgement.
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As I get walk out of Oxford street station, a warm air fresh with a million perfumes splashes across the background of gentle growing bustle….
S looks gorgeous as ever. She thinks the last lipshade doesnt match with his tie.She hurries me to a shopping mall ...
This one ?
Umm
This one?
Umm Umm
Think I need to share my theory about the female psychology of selection here, take my word it is based on lengthy hours of observing the female mind at shopping from very young days..and when I say female mind it includes across all ages mum, aunts, sisters, girlfriends, friends of friends etal.
What usually happens is that the selection is instantaneous and invariably between two and at the maximum three options but the female mind unlike the male one is so overawed and gobsmacked by the abruptness of it all, that they tend to(or pretend to) safely consider all options and thus spending more time.But when it finally comes to decision, it again boils down to the initial options of which the ultimate selection stretches to an eternity.Now this is the most important time for the male company, never ever even by mistake commit to any of the options now, because if it turns out to be good you dont get the credit if it doesnt you sure will with all the interest.
So all your responses should be kept to umm umm. Consider it as a sort of sensory deprivation.
What follows is a complicated rationalisation for their choice or if otherwise a return within three days.
As she continues with such rationalisations, I hover around the vicinity. In front of the balcony there is a huge portico with a fountain at the centre. The water dances up from the mouth of a colossal granite fish. People move by; civilization here is an experience, to say the least.To the cosy left there is a huge teddy bear above which a discount is displayed , the price tag from a distance seems aburdly cheap even to be graced in this designer shop here, I hurry towards for a closer look and its 10 times more than imagined; all because the first digit of the tag is faded. I smile at myself. As I return and stand there looking from a distance at the teddy in tandem with people around, I notice a girl, around 10, watching intently the bear from the distance and hurrying earnestly towards it as if she discovered something, very dear and important; her mother follows her. As she realises her disappointment, a grim pale of quick colour cuts across her face and she looks back to her mom and her mom perceptive of what her daughter has experienced smiles blandly at her as they walk past in silence.
I am filled with being so light against the brutality of the force of what I just saw, it would have been anywhere across cultures, languages classes and continents...I cant find a piece of paper but Im glad to have my digital talkbook, and I begin recording.... attempting to feel the thought and think of the feeling in this moment simultaneuously- a mute witness to a happening which my experience can only interpret as if the whole civilisation and its culture is laid open inside out and I discover this new space within myself ,the space that grows and fills my everything, but the space as it turns out is painfully empty. It is indeed funny to think how money is pursued as a means of happiness , especially when life doesn’t pardon money, of all the things.
S returns and tells me that she has chosen pink daiquiri .
I speak within myself, Dear Sir, holder of truths of now and forever,in life and death, stand me in goodstead.
