Office Busyness

‘Urgent!’ said the paper the came to my desk at 6 PM just as I was packing up to leave. At last! It was early days in my working career and, hitherto, I had not had that feeling of importance that comes to a person who has to urgently do something for his office. Maybe it was not that special glow that one gets when one has saved a child from a burning house but it came close to it.

I sat till 8 PM working out the prices to be charged for the products that a new customer had sought from us, left the paper on my boss’ table and left home feeling like a knight would probably feel after vanquishing a dragon. Unlike the knight, however, it is not given to lowly junior managers to know what the result their efforts had had but that knowledge did little to diminish the feeling of accomplishment I felt that day.

Little did I know that over the next one year I would have a lot of such wonderful occasions. I was working for a boss who was very generous when it came to distributing that special feeling of importance among all his subordinates. If he had a note to dictate to his typist after office hours, he ensured that his entire staff sat late with him and enjoyed the pleasure of feeling the satisfaction of doing urgent work. What is more, he also had this generous habit of calling you to discuss mundane matters just as you are about to leave so that you had ample opportunity to feel that glow. Suffice to say that within six months that special feeling had become so ordinary that I no longer felt like looking down my nose at people who were too unimportant to be kept late in office. How true is it that ‘Familiarity breeds contempt’.

The same boss was also the person who rid me of the unnatural respect for the words, ‘The boss is in an important meeting’. I was once in his room and he was in an expansive mood that day talking of how he cracked CA in his long gone youth. His PA pinged him about some phone call from one of the manufacturing units and he snapped into the phone, ‘Don’t you know I am in an important meeting? Ask him to call half-an-hour later!’ So, now I know all about important meetings!

So, a year into my working life and with all my illusions about urgent papers and important meetings totally gone, I received a reasonably massive file with the same superscription “Urgent’. I opened that file lackadaisically and quickly browsed through it. When I reached the last page my eyes opened wide in surprise. It was the same paper about costing of products that I had sat late for the first time and put up! All that had happened with that paper was that it had traveled up and down my office, seen more people there than I had and returned to me for review. That must have been one patient customer if he was still waiting for the prices of those products!

Dark Pursuit: The Lost Shinmahs - Review

(It is a tough ask for someone who normally does not do book reviews to do one for a book self-published on Amazon by an author who is a friend. But for the fact that the book is in my favorite genre – Fantasy – I would probably have declined. The link on Amazon relating to the book and the blog-link of the author are

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009PPG64K

http://shinmahs.wordpress.com/)

Fantasy-writing, in general, has normally relied upon or borrowed heavily from existing myth and legend. In the west a vast number of books have been written re-interpreting the Arthurian legends. Celtic myth has supplied authors with material to spin their fantasies as, indeed, has the Graeco-Roman myth. In India, fantasy has made a nascent beginning and, again, it has its roots in Indian myth or legend.

In a mature market like the west fantasy that spins tales with no readily discernible symbols from existing and well-known myth has also found space and appreciation. In India, such is yet to take place. The author of this book has spun a fantasy about a world that may have some mention of the Atlantis equivalent for India – Lemuria – but the fantasy elements have no instant recognition factor because they spring mostly from his inventive mind. This, probably, is why this book has failed to find a publisher and needed to be self-published.

The tale is about Adoy, who is unaware that his parents are people with uncommon mental powers – the Shinmah – and he, himself, has the same powers. With the dark warlord of Yashin – Khomer – out to hunt out and destroy all the Lost Shinmah, he makes a perilous journey to Liguanea where he is to get his mind trained. Book-I of this epic fantasy series tells the tale of his travel to Liguanea and the perils he faces in Liguanea in the course of his training and ends with a confrontation with Khomer.

The book is a fast and pacy read. The author has managed to maintain the tempo of the story throughout the book and the language is better than quite a few published books from India that I have read. The inventiveness of the author in creating his world and the plotting of events right up to the climax of this book is worthy of appreciation.

There were two issues for me, however, with the book. The first is that the characters are, by and large, monochrome. In other words, the good are good and the bad are bad. A person can be good but too proud and ready to take insult or unwilling to change or any of the myriad shades of human obstinacy that can make even the good have friction with each other. My second issue arises from the first. With such frictions, one can expect strands of the story playing out within the ranks of the good other than the primary strand of opposition to the main antagonist. The author has targeted Young Adults, it would appear, and has decided to make characters less complex. In my opinion, the tale would have been elevated to a different level had he fleshed out his characters.

Nevertheless, the story holds the reader’s attention for its sheer inventiveness, pace of the narrative and plotting of the events. All in all if you want a light and pacy ride into the realms of fantasy this could be the book for you.

Sophisticated Behavior

The more I see of what we see of sophisticated behavior, the more convinced I am that it is all about telling the world how much time you have to spend on the trivialities of life. We, Indians, have been utterly remiss in adding our own elements to the world-view of sophisticated behavior and it is about time we started to redress this imbalance.

This piece is a guest post for the-NRI and you can read the rest of the post if you follow this link.

http://www.the-nri.com/index.php/2012/10/sophisticated-behaviour/

Those lovely blue eyes - Part IV

Click Here for Part-I

I had never understood why I felt such rage and desire for vengeance. Violet had callously used me for her purposes without caring for me and I, after knowing about my condition, had no particular desire to live. So, why should Vince evoke so much rage in me? Every time I had tried to think about it I had felt an unreasoning panic and despair. It was no different now.

Billy should be coming any time now. Abruptly, my entire plan for escape and vengeance against Vince seemed foolish. Even if I managed to make my way to Billy’s cell – which was the logical place for the tunnel to start – why should Billy not just knock me out and escape? Even if he did take me along what made me think that I could evade recapture and prove able to kill Vince? Billy was a dead man walking anyway. I felt melancholy and had almost decided to do nothing when a glimmer of an idea sparked in my mind.

Billy walked in.

“Whaddya want, Scholar?”

“Listen, Billy! You know what I can do to your escape plans.”

His hands clenched and he glared at me impotently.

“I need you to kill a man, Billy!”

“Don’t ask me that, man! I never done no murder”

“Your choice, Billy! I am a dead man tomorrow and I have only you to rely upon. Either you swear to me on your mother’s soul that you will kill him or I shall squeal the moment you go out that door”

There was a look of pleading in his eyes and his mouth opened and closed soundlessly.

“Billy! This guy always has at least twenty-five grand in his safe. You could beat the combination out of him easy. You will need the money for your mom. So, why don’t you just promise me? He just has two bully boys with him. You and your friends could handle them all”

After much hesitation, Billy agreed and swore as I had wanted. I gave him the directions to Vince’s apartment and he left.

* * *

It was a restless night for me. I knew that, even if I had been mistaken in Billy’s superstition about promises to a dying man and his love for his mother, he would go after the money. Vince was bound to threaten him with his uncle and even Billy’s pea-brain would realize that killing Vince was his only way to keep the mob off his back. I found myself in the surprising position of desperately wanting Billy to escape.

Sirens hooting and people running here and there in the morning heralded the success of the escape. My execution, however, could not be postponed. A harried Warden came to my cell to seek my last wishes and was surprised when I asked him to be able to watch TV.

Billy may not succeed, may not succeed today or may not succeed in time for me to get the news. I was still on tenterhooks wishing to see whether my plans had succeeded. While waiting nervously for the news I wanted, my mind wandered over to my days with Violet.

She had been much the same as she used to be before she met me when we first started sleeping together. Over the weeks, she had started taking pains to make her face – not the garish come-hither make-up she used for street-walking but the softer make-up that a girl adopts for her man. She could never really be clean – but her attempts to stop being slovenly and sudden tears when she failed were so endearing. As a cook, she was a disaster but she would never stop making dishes for me. The memory of the look of bright expectation on her face which turned to crumpled disappointment suddenly moved me now and I felt the prickling of tears in my eyes.

Abruptly, my mind was dragged to the news. “Is this the start of another gangland war? Mafia Don Galliano’s nephew was found sodomized, brutally tortured and battered to death with two other people..” The excited voice of the TV anchor receded to background murmur to me as a tremendous wave of satisfaction roared through my entire soul. Vince was dead and Billy’s goose was cooked. Whether the AIDS or the police or the mob got him was immaterial. I had succeeded beyond all dreams.

All the anger and hate in my being were wiped clean – and left me face to face with my guilt and shame. All that anger at Violet and fury at Vince was only a camouflage for my own guilt. Guilt that my accusation of callously passing on AIDS had lead to her confrontation with Vince and her death! Guilt that I had not been with her to protect her! And guilt that I may have been the one to give her AIDS and not the other way round! Had I not been a drug addict and given to indiscriminate use of needles? How was I sure that I did not pass on the HIV to Violet?

I realized that I had been in love with Violet all along and she had loved me more than I deserved. A love so sublime that, in the face of a sentence of death, her only thought had been about putting me in danger and not fear for herself! And I? I loved her with all the love that was there in me but all the love that I could lavish could not even rise to offer comfort to her in her time of need. It shamed me to see myself so clearly.

I grieved for Violet for the first time. All that I had to show for my life was Violet’s love for me. Somehow, at that time, it seemed enough to justify my life.

The warden came in with his cohorts to escort me to the execution chamber.

I was strapped to the seat. I closed my eyes.

Maybe there is a life hereafter

There was a needle prick.

Maybe I shall meet her again

There was fire in my veins.

Maybe I shall look into those lovely blue eyes. And wipe out the hurt.

Maybe......

The genesis of this story is the broad plot outline given for Indifictionworkshop by Sandeep Nair. The story is also carried here.