Dear Blog

This evening I was given a taste of my own insensitiveness. Taste, quite literally so;

Morning time for a litigating lawyer is the busiest part of his day. It requires shuttling between courts and office innumerable times, making frenzied phone calls to clients, counsels etc, making sure everybody reaches court on time, making sure the papers have reached the courtrooms and the counsels have been briefed on the day’s strategy, documents should be filed at their respective departments by 10.00 – 10.30 am with all the formalities, stamping, punching and affirmation immaculately carried out, in the lower courts if any previous orders are to be noted after filing, you have exactly around five minutes to do so before the clerks start getting cranky, I could go on! Often such overwhelming preoccupation spills over to lunchtime and beyond and by the time we get to have lunch, its tea time! So more often than never, the best way of catching up on lunch is to grab a bite on the go, a sandwich or a fruit.

This morning I jetted out to make for a tribunal about a kilometre away from office and I had approximately four and half minutes to cover the distance. I had a thick bundle of files tightly locked under my right arm and a banana clutched in my left hand. Breakfast! Now, I had to maintain near- blinding walking speed while make sure the files do not slip out and simultaneously peel my banana and eat it! With the bundle tightly clamped underneath my chin I managed to peel the banana. After eating I tossed the skin nonchalantly underneath a lamppost and walked off, who had the time to find a dustbin? Besides during monsoons the whole area looked like a big garbage dump I thought!

The rest of the day advanced like usual when around a couple of hours back my boss instructed me to jog down to the same tribunal and pick up some papers from a counsel. By this time the area around our office resembled a Tsunami hit village, there was knee deep water everywhere and rubbish floated around in it like little bath-tub duckies. I rolled up my trouser sleeves, grabbed my boots and wading through the water I made for the tribunal. Although the thought of the mega-dirty water passing between my fingers and leaving sticky goo all over my skin gave me goosebumps I felt secured that the upper half of my body was clean and dry…….

Before my face hit the reeking water I calmly uttered the four letter curse starting with an ‘f’……

The second I stepped on that slimy skin-like thing I knew it could only be a banana peel, little did I realise that it was THE banana peel until, on my way down I looked up at the lamp post, the very lamp post under which I had chucked the peel arrogantly a few hours back!

So blog, I headed back to office that evening, completely soaked and filthy, with a mouth full of dirt and a heart full of bitterness. It’s okay to be taught a lesson or two once in a while, we all could use a little bit of introspection and realisation from time to time, but going easy on the ‘methods’ could definitely make things better, more so, efficacious!

Karma, old friend, you listening?

Love
Master.