life's a kick

There is a huge House (read organisation). Different people in the House are responsible for different functions. Someone takes care of cleaning and hygiene, another person looks after all the purchases, a third is responsible for maintaining the kitchen and taking care of the nourishment of its residents, another one tends to the garden and sells its produce, someone for upkeep of library…and so on and so forth. There are way too many people in the House. To accommodate them, apparently gainfully, each person is headed by a series of bosses. The work is still done by the same person to who the job is assigned, but added to her burden of work, is the pain of reporting to and acquiescing with the whims of her seniors. More often than not, it involves writing lengthy reports, making powerpoint presentations, and creating complicated excel charts for most commonsensical things. After all, the seniors and the seniors of seniors need to do something! Alienated with the real taste of f...

It was the second time I felt it of late. That four letter word. Fear. I was reading Disgrace by JM Coetzee. All I knew that it was well past 11. I know this because I was quite sleepy, but determined nevertheless, to finish off the last few pages. Absorbed in the scene where Lurie is injecting deadly needles in the veins of hapless animals…I first felt it was some sort of a stir within my mind. That’s when I heard the bed (on which I was sitting) thudder against the floor. Damn it. It was an earthquake. I immediately stood up, a little unsteady. Sounds from kitchen, clink-clank of steel utensils shifting to find a new balance, corroborated my fear. My first instinct was to run and wake up my parents. Save them. The blood in my legs curdled. They felt like trunks too heavy to move…no longer a voluntary body part…oppressingly adamant. In the few seconds that the quake lasted, I imagined waking up my parents and rushing them downstairs to the open park in our society. As if I was th...