I’m blunt. It saves me the effort of remembering what I said to whom, and when and why. Having said that, I am also a blunt knife–I take what people say in the face value, believing their honesty even when the stakes are rather high.
Every time, a rather sharp part of my brain shrieks in despair–Liar! Liar! I ignore it like a ditched boyfriend, and move on with the said “Liar’s” version of truth. The habit has costed me a lot of money, tears and immeasurable heartache. But I haven’t learnt yet. As I said, I am not the sharpest knife in the kitchen.
My previous job as a recruiter is an example of how easy it is to fool me. A candidate could tell me that he didn’t make it to the interview since his mother-in-law has died…twice in a week…and I will give him a benefit of doubt.
It is easy to hoodwink me and run away with any loans you can take from me and any valuables I have on my person at that point of time. It is also easy to feign friendship with me only to break my heart later–it has too many dents to count.
Still, I am none the wiser from the experience, simply because it hurts to remember that the world, in general, cannot be believed.
For many months, COVID 19 had been a faraway nightmare, stalking closer everyday but never really touching.
A week back, I got news that a family that is very dear to me was suffering from COVID 19. One of my father’s oldest friends and his wife were hospitalised and their health was deteriorating. His elder son, daughter-in-law and grandson had symptoms too with constant fever, hence they were quarantined at their house and not able to meet him. His younger son was halfway across the country.
He died a couple of days back in ICU without meeting his children–people he had loved and raised with care. His wife was in another ward, and didn’t see him in his last minutes of struggle. I, whom he had accepted and loved with all my eccentricities, wasn’t able to see him, because he was quarantined. He made his last journey to electric Crematorium without any rites. He did not deserve this.
Before you assume that he had risked it and taken a long vacation in Goa or went clubbing… No, he did not venture out of his house, nor did his wife, daughter-in-law or grandson. The disease came to him from his son’s office where he had to go because he had to keep his job–the office where two other colleagues were found COVID positive.
COVID 19 is officially a personal enemy now. It has taken away a part of my childhood. I am usually not the one to cry, but tears keep falling as I can’t stop thinking of the time I had spent in his house sitting, cracking jokes and watching Tennis matches. He was a sweet person who cared for those around him; one person I could trust completely. He certainly did not deserve this. His family did not deserve this.
So, any of us who think that COVID 19 happens only to others and that we can run around being wild while other people are stuck at home–this is a wake-up call. It is your family you are risking, or your neighbours, or your best friend’s family…
So, please, follow the rules:
Wear a mask.
Wash your hands with soap and water.
Wash the stuff from outside with soap and water, including green grocery.
Use electronic payments wherever you can, so you don’t have to touch money, which is one of the biggest contributor in the disease.
Most importantly, if your business can be run from home, please don’t make employees come to office. They too have elderly parents and children at home.
I had never been to sea before. My adoptive parents would just not allow it. Swim in a river? No problem! But any discussion about visiting sea left them hyperventilating.
It was irony to the max, considering we lived in a seaside town. Also, they had found me abandoned next to the sea when I was a few weeks old. They should be thankful to the sea for the gift…
Or maybe they think they stole me…I sometimes suspected that they feared sending me back, as if the sea would recognise me and claim me as its lost property.
It irked me more often than not to be denied so many times. When all my friends would party on the beach, I, the champion swimmer in school pool, would sit at home watching daily soap reruns. So this time, I didn’t ask. I told them I was staying the night at my friend’s place, which I was. And then, in the morning, I went for a swim in the sea in his borrowed swim trunks.
The beach felt familiar…not the seen-in-a-dream/movie familiar, but intimately familiar–like I knew how it would feel like to touch the water…
How the clear blue water would caress my feet with the velvety soft touch…
How the multi-hued plants under water would be tinged in the green sunlight filtering though the water…
How it would feel to hold starfish or ride a stingray in the moonlit nights…
The clear blue waves beckoned me like a siren’s song and entranced, I walked towards it.
My feet were already waist-deep when I noticed it–the skin on my legs looked weird…
Wrinkled…
Scaly…
Until the fins appeared.
The sea has claimed me as its lost property. For once, it sucks to be right!
My day began, as all my days begin, in the shower and it was not until after I had dressed that it became in any way different. You see, it was then, as I loaded my various pockets with pens, keys and loose change, that I realised that I had not rinsed the shampoo from my hair. A brief look in the mirror told me that much. My hair was sleek and shiny, like it had been steeped in a litre of cooking oil, with white lather gathering ahead of the comb like morons at the front of a bigot’s funeral. Anyway, at that point, I had three options as I saw it. Option one was the obvious one: ignore it – pretend that I had not noticed and simply get on with my day. The obvious choice, but rapidly dismissed. I cannot ignore stuff: stuff nags away at me…
It was Petra Jacobs who posed these questions to her fellow bloggers in her blog, Inkbiotic. I decided to ponder over….
Do your dreams ever give you inspiration for stories? If so can you describe one that has?
More often than I’d like to admit. Many pieces of my poetry are based in dreams/nightmares. I guess my subconscious is a better writer than my active brain. My vivid dreams of various breathtaking locales and very realistic nightmares create the base for a lot of my poetry.
One of my frequent dream destinations is an ancient temple on a mountain. Not sure what deity or what religion…but it calls to me. It is dark, mysterious and beyond time. I only get to see it from a distance though. Every time, I spend all my time trying to reach it–walking up the mountain road, sometimes trying to persuade my companions that it is worth it but failing, sometimes stuck in the small colorful market that falls in the way wasting precious hours, and sometimes climbing up and down a maze of overpopulated stairs.
I only reached it once. It was just as dark inside, so still don’t know if it has any deity, and it had a lift that took me to the underworld, where ‘life’ was…as usual. Just a little darker due to lack of the Sun.
Do you feel comfortable writing characters of other races/ genders or with extreme experiences you’ve never had? What are your no go areas for characters?
I mostly write stories that are unlike me and have experiences that I haven’t gone through. My characters do not belong to any particular race. I actively avoid describing my characters, so their stories are universal, since my readers come from 40 countries across 5 continents. (I think penguins don’t read WordPress yet).
I have written both from the point of view of Satan and God. So I don’t see any no-go area in Characters.
Have you ever written anything that you wouldn’t write now? What was it and what’s changed?
I never publish anything I cannot stand up for in the future. So nothing yet.
Do you ever work on a style? Or do you simply write and a style happens?
I simply write. I have no particular style in mind except keeping it simple.
How about a genre? Do you always stick to the same one? Is there a genre you’d like to work in, but don’t know how?
Earlier I always stuck to realism. I tried to make my stories as close to the present reality as possible. But later I tried my hand at horror, nature stories, science fiction and mythology. I loved them all. So I’m expanding my horizon. I would like to try classic poetry, but somehow it seems beyond me.
If you’ve written a novel, what was your method? did you plan it all out beforehand with flow charts and lists? Or did you have a vague idea of what would happen and just start writing?
I cannot stick to a story for more than two days in a row. Novel writing is for people with a stronger resolve than mine.
Thank you Petra, for giving me a chance to babble. Yet again.
Update on the post: After some digging, one of our fellow bloggers found out that the video is two years old. The prince still refuses to present himself in front of the court. Royal disobedience, it seems!
Originally posted on REDFLAGFLYING: Unless you have seen it featured on Twitter, you will be unaware of a loud protest by a fair-sized crowd outside Buckingham Palace in London today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7F4mlcW7QWk This is a protest against Prince Andrew’s involvement in the trafficking of underage girls for sex, part of the Epstein scandal in America. The…
Why do we fear those who are unlike us? Unfamiliar face, unfamiliar race, unfamiliar gender…
What would be a garden with only one type of flowers? An orchestra with only one type of instrument?
How difficult could it be to accept others the way they are?
Welcome back to Song Lyric Sunday. Mine will be short and sweet this week!
This week we have some general words that are used to describe object placement, being Above/Below/Between and hopefully everyone will be able to find a song that utilizes one of these prompt words in the title or in the lyrics.
I wish I could tell you the circumstances surrounding the first time I heard this song, but I cannot. I just know it touched me the very first time I heard it.
”Above the Clouds” was written by Cyndia Lauper, Jeff Beck and Jed Leiner as a tribute song for Matthew Shepard. Matthew was an openly gay student at the University of Wyoming who was beaten, tortured, tied to a fence and left to die in 1998. He later succumbed to his wounds. It is a heartbreaking tragedy.
My history is full of short jobs that I did for fun. Most of them never made it to my resume. It was only once I started working as a sourcing executive for an MNC, in the US process, that I actually stuck to the job. I liked it.
There is no other job that makes you feel both like a King and a beggar, all on the same day.
My work was to find suitable resume in job boards with the needed skills, call them to check if they were interested and share resume with the recruiter to take forward. It was the time of global economic meltdown. People were losing jobs left, right and centre. So, most people were glad for the call. Some left hate messages, but such instances were few and far between.
Since it was a night job, it took a toll on my health, and I moved to a day job in the same industry as a Recruiter–big mistake!
There is no other job that makes you feel both like a call centre employee and a beggar, both on the same day.
Recruitment is often advertised as Human Resources job. In reality, it is double marketing. You sell man to job and job to man. I was never a salesperson.
It was a head-hunting company. My job was to:
hunt for suitable candidates who were best in the industry, AND
make sure that they reached the interview venue, AND
ensure they joined the job.
I hardly went beyond first base, and never beyond second.
First Base: Nearly everyone on the job board had been contacted and rejected. It required cold calling at least 80 people before I could get one good candidate ready to go for interview. My upper limit was 30 calls. I was never the one to pick phone calls at home. My possible suitors would call my home number only to find my parents on the line. That’s why I never had a boyfriend until I got my own mobile phone. It was against my inherent nature to call unsolicited.
W, who was doing well in the same industry told me a trick. It required extensive lying. You call a junior in the target company in the same department, offer them a position that does not exist. Once you have their confidence, you ask them for help to fill another position, which is really the one you are recruiting for. You ask them to refer seniors for the position, and once you have the details, you put the guy on back burner. A great trick for someone who could lie. I am a terrible liar. I have memory of a goldfish, and am afraid that I won’t remember what lie I told and to whom. I might stop mid-sentence to remember what I was saying.
Another way is creating a Linked In network, which may take months, and looking up people on Facebook. I hate Facebook AND Linked In.
So I hardly crossed the first base.
Second Base: I thought sending people for interview was just about sending a reminder message. Apparently, it was about judging whether the person was lying about being late.
I am a gullible person who believes in the universal goodness of human beings. I trusted people when they said they were interested in the job; that they are on their way for the interview; that they met an accident on the way; that they had a death in the family. I openly gave them second chances and third. But as the death toll rose and the accident numbers became higher than the city’s population, I had to admit, I was missing something.
Third base: After one year in one organisation and five months in another, not a single person joined the job. I reached the ocean floor of depression, where I stayed drowning in sorrow of my own making. I couldn’t believe another human being without questions. I was never into cigarettes, alcohol or drugs, else, the time was ripe for the next remake of Devdas*.
That’s when I quit the industry for good, and moved into Learning. It is one place where I help people by teaching essential job skills and, hence, delay their next interaction with the Good Recruiter.
Author’s note: This story is off the record. So, if you are my manager or had ever been one, this post never existed.
Short Stories | Fish-eye Perspective 