Untitled Ventings

The last week's been funny.

I do time trials against a setting sun in the evenings and write and read this and that most of the other time.

But at nights, the same dream that had left me sleepless for most of June last year comes back. Again and again, as nightmares do.

Its a stark setting, there is this conference room with a bunch of people around a table -- some half-asleep, some barely there, some pecking away at their laptops -- a management review meeting is happening.

And I have just being pronounced guilty.

"What do you do anyway?" has always been the question here. Sometimes voiced, sometimes not, usually very subtly stated of course.

"You don't deserve what we pay you" has also been always the accusation here {when the recession happened, my ROI was naturally the first to be questioned (purely a case of fingering because I had NEVER not delivered something asked of me)} sometimes veiled, sometimes not, never stated of course.

Let me cut back to the dream.

So I have just presented what my team has been doing for the last two months. All this has already been reviewed by my reporting head (and management by default), we have been sending weekly status reports.

My own reporting head has also never brought this up. Its been understood that my team will facilitate and support all techno-marketing-whatever-you-call-it activities and "marcomify" (as phrased by him) whatever content is sent over. Even if the content is a mish-mash that has been "captured" from this and that source and rewritten to be muck and "rewriting" which again meant getting a headache in just 10 minutes!

Psst...my team consists of only one writer. Yes, yours truly and him alone.

Now that I have presented the presentation, a gent says "Not happy with you boss!" Then he even kindly raises his voice and repeats the same thing yet again. As I have already said, the conference room is full of people, this is not a one-on-one review and I report to someone else.

So this was no off the cuff, casually uttered and unintentional jibe. This was evidently something far more than a rap on the knuckles. Something akin to "public mein pant utaarna" by somebody for whom I had bent backwards, never refusing anything, doing everything asked of me in the spirit of passion, leadership, blah, blah....

So a bit of me died that day and this dream started coming every night. I had decided to quit that very day and two other incidents that happened thereafter vindicated my decision.

ONE -- I am told that my reporting head feels that all I do is "put a comma here, a semi-colon there, and so on", by someone in management who had said the same thing to me a number of times earlier (of course jocularly, with marked bonhomie, a nice smile, et al). So a bit more of me died.

TWO -- And then {post a lengthy internal debate post which I am told my team of three will be an independent department again and will be AGAIN solely responsible for putting up a full-blown website (supervised by the techno-marketing excel sheet types of course) when I look at the work in hand and ask for resources, I am reminded of my hearing disability twice (but the same damn phrase) by two gents from management. Again, a bit more of me died.

Continuing there after these two things happening would have been like living on a dole or feeding off someone's far from veiled kindness.

So I quit, wrote Moving On and I had thought I had moved on.

But then this dream comes again and again.....

The Road

Paved,
cobble-stoned,
or the bottom of a river of dirt,
the road doesn't go anywhere,
it is just a way,
s t r e t c h i n g
in between
the here and now
and the deja vu of wherever
endless in ambiguity.

Night of the Scorpion

I remember the night my mother
was stung by a scorpion. Ten hours
of steady rain had driven him
to crawl beneath a sack of rice.
Parting with his poison -- flash
of diabolic tail in the dark room --
he risked the rain again.
The peasants came like swarms of flies
and buzzed the Name of God a hundred times
to paralyse the Evil One.
With candles and with lanterns
throwing giant scorpion shadows
on the sun-baked walls
they searched for him: he was not found.
They clicked their tongues.
With every movement that the scorpion made
his poison moved in Mother's blood, they said.
May he sit still, they said.
May the sins of your previous birth
be burned away tonight, they said.
May your suffering decrease
the misfortunes of your next birth, they said.
May the sum of all evil
balanced in this unreal world
against the sum of good
become diminished by your pain.
May the poison purify your flesh
of desire, and your spirit of ambition,
they said, and they sat around
on the floor with my mother in the centre,
the peace of understanding on each face.
More candles, more lanterns, more neighbours,
more insects, and the endless rain.
My mother twisted through and through,
groaning on a mat.
My father, sceptic, rationalist,
trying every curse and blessing,
powder, mixture, herb and hybrid.
He even poured a little paraffin
upon the bitten toe and put a match to it.
I watched the flame feeding on my mother.
I watched the holy man perform his rites
to tame the poison with an incantation.
After twenty hours
it lost its sting.
My mother only said:
Thank God the scorpion picked on me
And spared my children.

By Nissim Ezekiel from The Exact Name (1965)

The Truth about Dhanya

His old skin
is like the ground
on which he sleeps,
so also, his rags.

He cannot
stand upright
or walk without pain,
does odd jobs
for the ten families
of The Retreat, collects
a few coins every day,
uses them for tea
and smoking.

Given food, he eats,
otherwise, he goes without.
Quite a cheerful chap, really.

Nobody minds his presence
as he stumbles around the place.
He's lucky, in a way,
isn't out in the streets, begging.
We look after him
and he makes himself useful.

That's all the truth about Dhanya.

By Nissim Ezekiel from Poems Written in 1974

Jeet Thayil

"I think one very fine way to tell the development of a society is how it treats its poets, its gay people, and its women. And in those three areas, we really are backward. I believe that two generations from today, there may be value placed on all of this. Young people today read poetry, they buy books, they read poetry on the Internet. The Internet has taken poetry out of that academic conversation, which has to happen if poetry's going to live. Say `poetry' and there were a lot of people who were turned off already, who had forgotten that a poetry reading is just a man or a woman speaking to you. Poetry needs to resonate with you if it's going to live. It's human speech, and it's the most beautiful speech, it's elevated in a way we can't have in our normal lives; it contains the best of us." -- Jeet Thayil in conversation with Nilanjana S. Roy for Hindu Literary Review, full story is here