Friday, December 30, 2005

Perspectives


(Reads the same as "healer" but branches off :)


I think I’ve had enough. I’ve had enough at work, enough of this traffic, enough of everything.

It has been a pretty tiring week. For that matter, it has been a tiring month and perhaps even the whole year. The work has been relentless, coming at you in waves; particularly within an organization in major transition and transformation, where the understanding of what needs to be done and commitment to it varying from apathetic non-existence to complete-harmony; and the underlying tension between those two extremes. The past three days at work was an offsite planning session – it was ugly – there were quite a bit of disagreement amongst the group; the opinions proffered and the engagement to the cause spanned the spectrum of ridiculous to the passionate. Of late, I find such meetings to be emotionally tiring and at extremes, draining. It seemed to me that such meetings had become retrograde, regressive and a forlorn exercise in mental regurgitation and jumping through hoops needlessly

I’m jolted to the present as the car brakes to a halt – an auto driver has cut in front of the car. I realize that the there is a traffic jam building up. As the speed slows down to the crawl, I see the traffic slowly turning into the chaos – slowly, starting with the bikes, then autos, then cars and then bigger trucks, start passing the line of vehicles on their wrong side and stack up the breadth of the road and slowly choke up the lane for oncoming traffic slowing them down; the traffic in our direction has stopped. I see a lone traffic policeman struggling to keep the order. A moped tries to thread the needle and pass between my car on the left and kerb; he nicks the car and looks back sheepishly; my first instinct is to get out of the car and talk to him; but then I see the absurdity of the situation, the traffic is so logged that I cannot even open the door; I stay in and loudly curse my luck !!!

After what seemed to be eons later, I see more cops coming into the intersection just ahead. They switch off the traffic lights and start directing the traffic; with a one of the sergeants screaming at the truck driver who wanted to get ahead on the right side. As the traffic starts moving back again, I reach the intersection; right on the cue, that dame, Luck nudges the policeman to stop our side of the traffic and start with the other roads…

…As I sit contemplating my misfortune and cursing my luck, a small by-play on the sides catches my eye. There was this small girl not older than 9 years with another kid about 5 years doing a mini-circus routine of acrobatics, gymnastics and whatever routine they could fit in, in the confines of the narrow kerb and a set of small iron-rings. First she does a two hand somersault, then one-hand and then without them. She slowly builds up the crescendo as she adds rings to her routines; first she contorts her body to get through the ring, in what seemed impossible; and then introducing the other kid into the ring routine it became all the more enthralling and engrossing… The routines almost morph into a ballet and the hoops and rings become an instrument in her deft maneuvers…

The dame luck certainly seems to have smiled on those two kids, since the traffic jam had provided them with the captive audience. As I see them perform, it dawns on me – sitting in the AC comfort of the car, being driven around and getting paid to be at an agreeable place to do work… now I’m not so sure if I’m the one who is going through the hoops…

No comments: