a dead bird

It all started with a dead bird falling, plummeting out of the sky to land at her feet. From then on, everything was downhill.

Spent the day at the lawyers yesterday in a bizarre tangle. The law in this country is so fucking ridiculous. No wonder we’re still mired in the dark ages. Jurisdiction capacities are given to people who have no legal background and who adjudicate on the basis of emotion. As a result, even if one has a watertight legal case, it counts for naught (syk).

Spent the day pep-talking and rallying up morale. Leadership is bloody hard. I want to send a note to her, saying : enjoy your blood-money, bitch. But of course I will remain a professional to the very end.

Yet, there is a glimmer of hope, that we can put all this behind us, soon enough and move forward, and deal with the larger problems that is our job. I look forward to that day. I have learnt a lot in the last two days about people who talk about ethics, but in the end, come groveling for money instead. I have lost my faith in someone who I thought was above the materialistic fray.

Never-mind.

Am reading Step Across the Line by Salman Rushdie. It is surprisingly good for someone whom I have hitherto regarded as a pseudo-intellectual. There are some passages that I find quite relevant, specifically the concept of ‘respect’. Rushdie talks about how we live in such extreme political correctness, that we have to give ‘respect’ to those who preach messages of hate etc. Respect does not mean that the critical faculty cannot be exercised, that one cannot disagree, disavow, shame, tear down. He also talks about the writer as a moralist, as one of the few purveyors of truth left in a spinning world. It is the duty of the writer to a) discover and b) stand up for truth. But so few writers recognize this moral imperative, merely existing as tape-recorders, observers of trite encounters. Also talks about how few writers have the will or ability to tackle the larger topics, to write about national arcs of narratives.