Skip to main content

Hearing Flush

There are many ways to feel about this news about someone flushing the toilet in the Supreme Court in the middle or oral arguments. If you are feeling charitable, you may choose not to make much of it - people no matter who they are sometimes need to use the bathroom at the worst possible time. That's why the mute button exists. But if you are not feeling such compassion, you may wonder if the people appointed to these positions for life take what they do seriously enough.  If their engagement on the job is at about the same level us one of us who needs to go offline for a few minutes to attend to the HVAC repair guy or some such while a meeting is in progress.

What the likes or us do or don't do matters little in the grand scheme of things, if we missed a few minutes of a meeting on account of being pre-occupied with non-work activities, the consequences if any could be overcome in a day maybe a week in the worst case. Just about no one would be impacted. We are not at all consequential in the world - we get that and the world gets it too. Whomever flushed in toilet here is in a bit of a different pay-grade or so they want us to believe. 

Seems to be that such an inopportune flushing of the toilet is a sign of the times we live in. Those in positions of power and authority have decided they don't need to do the jobs they were assigned, elected or appointed to do. The trappings of power and privilege serve as a proxy for the value that they are supposed to deliver. As long as there is a perception of the wheels turning, there is no need for exerting themselves much more. 

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...
Post a Comment
Read more