Softening the face of evil

I get really uncomfortable when a piece of history, represented by an imagery or a quote, gets appropriated and included in a work of art without the work attempting to understand the context of that piece. Like this new Hitler chic fad. Or, Che Guevera T-shirts being sold for 1500 in an American owned-brand store in a centre-city mall.

I believe greatly in the power of irreverent humour, of taking something sacred, and smashing it to pieces to exposes the hollow inside. As I read somewhere, we laugh loudest at things that most concern us. All institutions become stupider and stupider since their very nature is to self-preserve, and deny the dismantling of dialectical change. The older they are and the more obdurate they remain in their “faith”, the stupider they become, and the more the need to challenge them with irreverence. Humour, as a device, measures these institutions against the ever-changing conditions and values of our existence and leads to a constant cycle of creative destruction. However, before we lift the crowbar, it is our responsibility to first understand what exactly we are dismantling.

There have been many genocides through history. Many have been responsible for more deaths than Hitler. The great religions (the Inquisitions are estimated to have killed 60 million people), Genghis Khan, the prolonged massacre of the American Indians, and many others we will never know because no witness, no evidence was left. However, we can now view and appraise them from a cold distance because we live in a largely different world than the worlds these men lived in. Genghis Khan was not a war-criminal in his time, merely a rather vehement conqueror. The tortures and massacres in the name of religions were justified in those societies whose foundation stone remained the very religion, and not the principles of universal and fundamental rights that most modern societies are built on. The massacre of the Indians has sunk into a large collective unconsciousness. When America talks about the foundation “this country was built on”, they ignore the blood and bones crushed beneath those very stones. But even John Wayne now cannot get away with justifying that brutal beginning of American history (“I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.”)

Hitler however still remains relevant to us because he engineered the biggest genocide of our own modern age. His legacy was not merely the murder of European Jew, gypsies, political dissidents, but a cold precise, even impersonal, system to achieve the same. Legacy of those concentration camps, as John Updike describes in Towards the End of Time as “those orderly death camps in the middle of the last century which ended forever Europe’s concept of itself as civilized and of the Western world as proceeding under a benign special Providence”.

Stalin is dead and so is, largely, that ugly face of communism. Unfortunately, Hitler, the ugly ideas of Nationalism Socialism he stood for, are still alive. Read Umberto Eco’s great essay that defines fascism, and you realize that the ideas which oppose minority rights, diversity, dissent, intellectuals and propound the violent imposition of a syncretistic faith, are still very much in our midst. And I am not talking about only the skinheads.  

If we choose to make a simulacrum of Hitler’s face, casting aside his hideously inhuman legacy of ideas - of a politics that methodically kills all dissent and difference, that glorifies a mythical past and molds every face and mind to that hideous ideal - what stops us then to extend this to using the swastika or a photographic print of the concentration-camp inmates as a Tshirt logo? Or a battered rape victim or a killed female fetus? Because they’re visually disturbing? Exactly. In the same manner, while Hitler’s face might not be, arguably, disturbing enough, the ideas he stood for and which still remain very relevant to us are many times more disturbing than the ones I mentioned. 

To paraphrase Eco: "We must keep alert, so that the sense of these words will not be forgotten again." And images, if I might add. Chaplin used his own likeness of Hitler to juxtapose the littleness of the man against the impact he was having on the lives of millions. And that’s why he would remain a bigger artist than Matisse who secluded himself from this greatly inconvenient war to paint his beautiful, voluptuous but lifeless paintings.

I am not a fascist. I believe in creative license and if somebody does decide to print a Nazi T-shirt all I can do is shake my head and still support their right to print that T-shirt. It’s only the cycle of ignorance it perpetuates that worries me, because in the bedrock of this doesn’t-concern-me ignorance is found these very evil ideas.

Take a hike

If you enter the boss' cabin demanding a raise, and he tells you to 'Go, take a hike', do you get that hike, or no?

Book Review - Zero Percentile 2.0

Where do you begin to review a book like Zero Percentile 2.0?

Belonging to that inspired genre of fiction where language is but a quickly-assembled vehicle for ideas, it would be unfair to burden the novel with any expectations there. The most that one can complain about is the inconsistency there. The language remains flat and insipid through most portions (sample this bullet-pointed description:  “The principal was tall and fat.”) and mooches along time-worn cliches. Courage is mustered (and never buttered), smiles flit across faces (as opposed to other unmentionable parts), couples “love each other like crazy” and when “thunderstorms, rains and the (sic) blinding streaks of light” accompany star-crossed births, one can sigh and comfortably snuggle to the fact that one is looking inside an imagination and sensibility which has remained underfed. And yet it insists on singeing you now and then with sparks of cringe-worthy inspirations like “a cocktail of different emotions in his heart”, “most aesthetically done lingerie” and possibly the worst metaphor for eyes, ever: “those two communication channels”. Information does not simply get lost in workplaces: it gets “extinct under silos of everyday work”. Moments like these where one wishes that the author would have restricted himself to the “tall” and “fat” adjectives he had displayed such uncanny mastery over.

But one wonders at the quality of editorship when one finds phrases like “most deep”, “thousands of passerby”, “his looked helpless” (unless “his” happened to be hanging out of the trousers at the moment) and when one has to frantically refer and reaffirm that “loathe” still remains a verb despite its repetitive usage as a noun.

But language, as many of these new-breed writers insist, is incidental, if not inessential. In the context of English in India, even an elitist conspiracy against the masses.

So if it’s not about how you say it, but what you have to say, let us examine the plot. ZP 2.0 begins where ZP 1.0 ends and that does not speak much for either of them. The setting is the takeover drama of PureConsultants, a Gurgaon-based software company which has dreams of becoming the biggest software company in the world, an ambition only slightly more exaggerated than Rohit Shetty’s dream of becoming the next Scorcese. An ambition as bloated as that needs a man needs a man with a vision at the helm, and Motu, the bloated protagonist, is just the man for it. A man brimming with business insights, all of which he had realized long before the story starts. Sample a few:

·         “Motu had realized a long time back that if he wanted to attract the best people in the industry he had to build a brand.” (Gaat it? Hire mediocre talent first, let them build the brand, then chuck them all out and hire the best people.)

·         “Companies needed to innovate to stay competitive.”

·         “Motu had realized a long time back that there were no real rules in business except that it needed to succeed.”

Insights which would make a Times-Ascent columnist weep.

To take Motu’s PC to its rightful place under the global sun, is the team. Arjun, the CTO, his protégé, with a broken marriage and a daughter, Diyaa, brought by “the lady who gave birth to her” a little prematurely in the world and suffering from many handicaps -- speech, slumping heads, braces on the legs – (it would be perhaps too much to expect any actual medical condition named) all of which she spectacularly, and predictably, overcomes over the course of the story to win back the affections of the perfectionist mother who abandoned father and daughter. Till then, Arjun and little Diyaa take on the world. As Diya tells her papa:

“You told me yesterday that to have the courage to do something is bigger than the actual achievement. I will definitely try. Don’t be nervous… we will win.” Diyaa smiled at him.

Incidentally, this is a speech given by a five-year old.

Given his challenges, Motu has spared Arjun the challenge of managing his next-big-thing in the hands of San, short for Sanjeev, the quintessential cliché for maverick:

“San was a maverick, liked to live king-size (as opposed to queen-sized), and importantly, always on his own terms. He was a dropout from IIT Delhi. (That ISI stamp of mediocre fiction: IIT!) He did not complete his degree as ennui forced him to discontinue in the middle of III year.” And you thought no one could force him to do anything.

 San arrives “tall” and “disheveled” “wearing jeans, crumpled T-shirt and something that came closest to slippers that usually men wear at night” for an interview, and through the book variously refers to money as “greens” (The only greens I have seen in Indian paper-notes have been the five-rupee ones) , “dough”, anything but money.

 It is a posturing that pervades the novel backed by nothing but air as warm as a fart trapped in an electric blanket. San christens Motu BD, Big Daddy, (rather than the more appropriate Biggus Dickus) and together the product they build is called “Babe”. What this product actually does for their big,big pharma client is never made clear. Alex, the CEO aspirant, dreaming of a merger of nothing less than 200 BN dollars, explains the role of the Babe as “it will give the USFDA what it wants, keep it satisfied, and will take care of one of the most painful parts of the merger” and later to his board as “this product is very important to us strategically. It will lead to a substantial amount of saving on the current expenditure of the company, to his board”. This is as detailed it gets.

Even though Babe remains a pivotal element of the plot all through the novel, its purpose is to only serve as the arena for the most cringing metaphors when San complains about funding breaks, crying how they are not letting his bade turn into a beautiful woman. And, of course, unabashed and unrestrained posturing. Sample this conversation about the Babe between the CEO and CFO:

“What is your opinion on the babe?”

“How do you want it”, she asked.

“Raw and naked.”

When the Babe runs into some issues (Explained away with the same fidgety-eyed vagueness: “older, unusable code”, some unmentioned changes of rules from USFDA), Motu realizes no amount of money and effort can put back together the Babe again. Since no details about the product and the issue are ever revealed, because none exist, one can only watch the drama unfold and wonder that leave aside board-room drama, has the author ever witnessed a module being developed. It is indeed difficult to classify ZP2.0 as a business fiction or, more specifically, an IT fiction, since it is equally clueless on both. When PC, in its earlier avatar of NumeroSoft, gets its first shot, shortlisted for another of those vague projects by the pharma major,  Pankaj, still at the helm of affairs, makes a pitch on why this unknown startup serving Delhi lalas should be favoured over its Infosys-numa and Accenture-numa rivals, with what the author knows best. IIT-IIT-IIT. “Two of the people are here from IIT and getting into IIT is tougher than securing admission in the famous MIT or Stanford.” And then it gets deliberately vague again. “They took turns to explain their parts of the presentation. Each of them spoke very well and came across as thought leaders on their topics.”

The question still haunts us: which genre do you classify such a book in? Language a casualty on the very first page, only a few pages need to be turned to realize that the book packs not even that modicum of details that, one would assume, make a fiction business fiction. The insidious insider account it poses to spill is at best a badly-overexposed , clumsily composed, photograph of a preening half-wit standing akimbo with the Infosys building as a backdrop.

Earlier, a delivery manager apprises Arjun, the CTO, thus: “There were multiple components that had to be plugged together to make it function. One of the most important components is not working well.” These are the vague mutterings which go for cutting-edge tech industry talk.

And as for the author’s knowledge of how Indian businesses works, let this end the discussion here and now: “New age Indians had for long stopped inducting undeserving family members and relatives into the mainstream of their businesses.” Right.

Maybe, it’s about the characters and their stories after all. So let us continue with the introductions.

Then there are the ladies, the love interests, Priya and Jaanvee. Priya forms the love-triangle with Motu and Pankaj, and their story continues, and mercifully, ends here. Janvee described in the same clichéd strokes as San, “eco grad from St. Stephen, MBA finance from IIMA” is the genius CFO who cannot figure out the mysterious company taking away PC’s Fortune 100 clients and poaching their employees, raising its shareholding from .5% to 51% over a period of many months, than do the obvious – ask the clients and the exiting employees. It takes the genius of Motu to make the first crack, even with the mysterious competitor’s ownership of PC now poised within kissing distance of 51%, as he traces the ownership to Pankaj by some judicious keywords on Google search (the details of the keywords left again conveniently vague). Later, even as the countdown to the finale begins, the AGM where control of PC will in all possibility be wrenched from their hands, he finally has the blazing epiphany only to be rebuffed by the CFO:

“What if we make a counter offer at a higher price to buy back the shares?”

“They will raise the price too. Moreover we don’t have the hardcash to pull it off. We will go bankrupt.”

LBO, anyone?

Another thing that the author keeps insisting about the girls is that while their beaus might be obese (Motu) and hygienically-challenged (San), the girls are the perfect realization of that ever-elusive beauty with brains.

She [Priya] was a rare combination of mind and matter which enhanced her appeal” -- leaving one wonder where that appeal had rested before the mind and matter elements.

A beauty with brains [Janvee], she could easily qualify among the top five in the “thinking man’s most wanted women’s list”. None of the men, all of course national icons, are quite mentioned as any figuring in any “thinking” or even unthinking woman’s desire list.

The sexist undertone continues where spinster Janvee’s passion for PC is explained thus. “PureConsultants was her surrogate child, replacing the physical, in-flesh one.” Got it? Same passion, but for the men it is a dream, a vision…. for San, the dough, the fame… but for Janvee it is the repressed mother bursting out.

To be fair to the author, it might be guessed here that the poor being might not have had much of first-, or even second-, hand experience of how females really feel: “[Janvee] never felt a tingling in her loins on seeing a man.” Perhaps shemales.

 And, of course, even as the drama reaches a climax, where PC, for all its Alexandrian ambitions, finds itself besieged by a mysterious competitor and a stalled watershed product, lacking the wits and balls to do anything, the posturing never stops. The finale is set when Motu crashes into the AGM in a helicopter, and hailed by the pilot, an ex-IAF wing-commander, and nothing less, as “one of the best things to have happened to the Indian business”. Arjun, who reunites with his wife conveniently on a chat, uses the moniker – superhero007. A failed marriage, a disabled child struggling against prejudices, PC nose-diving: nothing punctures our preening superheroes’ bloated egos.

The last of the jokers completing the pack is Nitin, for whom Lady luck seems to have reserved the worst of her plans. Infected with HIV in the previous novel, the sky falls on his head when he fires a cheating employee who hereon always stalks him with “loathe” in his eyes. His condition now revealed to everyone by the newly-acquired malefactor, Nitin hits rock-bottom when ostracized by his own colleagues and hounded by the press, PC apparently being new-age India’s beau ideal. “Opinion polls were conducted on him with an overwhelming (and uninformed) majority declaring he was on the wrong side.” Then, Tanya enters his life with a knock, a knock quite not like the pounds of the incessant media always at his doorstep, because “this knock was uncanny, soft and intriguing”.  (I have tried knocking on my door for minutes and never quite managed anything like this.) Tanya is a lawyer out on a purpose, to reclaim Nitin’s lost right to suffer with dignity, because “her father had caught the virus [HIV] on his only (How unlucky can you get?) visit to a brothel on the East Coast in the US.” It is notable how the novelist remains silent on the more significant details like what does Babe do and what ails it, and abundant in detail where none is really acquired.

Tanya writes a townhall speech for Nitin that makes his colleagues, as fickle as film extras, hang their heads in shame and suddenly Nitin is the darling of the awakened media, the subject for Hope, “one of the most prestigious shows on national television” (the author would brook no small regional ambitions for PC), the programme of course running to the highest TRPs ever, even beating Mahabharata, where Nitin confesses his love for Tanya on his knees (To experience the drama, imagine Phaneesh Murthy doing the same for Seetalwad, who’s proved in court his innocence in the sexual harassment case, on 60 Minutes) because alas, the lady with that uncanny knock has left him now, apparently unable to control here tingling loins for him anymore. Because, she reenters his life, buying “most aesthetically done lingerie” and tearing at his belt to let her give him the “priceless present I am planning to give to you” even through two condoms, as she proposes.

Love is in the air, Janvee, that repressed corporate spinster, is being propositioned incessantly by San in business discussions. Motu, even as the drama reaches the convulsive climax  – hostile takeovers, attempted murders, vendettas – is found “humming the Beatles’ number and I love her with the picture of Priya etched in his mind” when phoned by his hysterical CFO. And Arjun, the superhero Bond, is chatting incognito with his wife on the net with all the smug smirk of a Clark Kent since she does not know his identity yet. Once a virus unites them in the PC HO, a fatal attack on PC’s website and not a love virus, they reunite, delegating baby Diyaa’s care to fellow-employees with suspicious propensities:

·         “Arjun sent her away with a junior technologist who loved children.”

·         “He sent Diyaa to a sleeping room with an enthusiastic (ahem!) and cooperative office help.”

(Earlier, an apparently well-endowed doctor tells Nitin, our HIV victim, “I hope I have been able to drive home the enormity of the situation.”)

The plot peaks to the crescendo. An AGM, held incidentally to the backdrop of Mumbai Taj attacks where a lead character dies (Guess! Guess!); the ownership of PC changes hands and then is handed back to Arjun by a Pankaj, friend turned foe turned friend again over shared grief; San, the Anakin, turns to the dark side; and Nitin, perennially fraught with ill-luck, is stabbed and comatose. When, despite his now Lance-Armstrongic status, the doctors threaten to pull the plug out of his life-support (his CEO friends apparently running out of funds to support him any longer), Tanya stalls his evil plans thus: “She brought him home. She converted Nitin’s room to a hospital ward. Along with oxygen she gave him a daily dose of soul-stirring music from her ipod. She often took off her dress and snuggled up to him for hours with his head resting on her bosom, and gave him a…” (Ellipses left deliberately.) My tear-streaked advice to Tanya here would be to close the windows before that striptease since this is a narration by Pankaj.

Interspersed along these various hilarious plotlines are mind-bending revelations like:

·         “The Indian mindset of equating the doctor to god”

·         “As it happens in most love stories with a good ending, Arjun married early.”

·         “Motu’s mind, as is the case with all young people, had no acceptance for stereotypes.” (This one made me chortle aloud.)

In the end, ZP2.0 reads like a reenactment of a corporate drama by an obscure fund-strapped regional channel, by a director as uninformed as the actors. It packs a lot of fluff over two-dimensional characters and a hollow plot. Big-swinging-dickey cockiness borrowed from Wall-Street non-fictions and plastered on Karol Bagh pretenders (where, incidentally they live “blocks” away from each other) with not enough “dough” to buy buttons for their tattered boxers.

A bad, honest attempt might be forgiven. People learn. But it is that conceited assurance that the author packs, of coming from a world “populated by educated people, many of whom have travelled across the world, thus leading to a more mature outlook towards things” that make the readers wish that either the author’s hands be chopped off for typing this excrement and wasting our time or this travesty be stopped immediately. Perhaps, this review would deter a few readers and there would be no ZP3.0.

 

Reclaimed unsettled days

The biggest dilemma when you step out of the stock corporate career is getting up on most days and not knowing what to do with the rest of the day. We tell ourselves that we work for the work, for the money, and if we are such good bullshitters that we can bullshit ourselves, to make the world safer and happier. Perhaps we do, in measures. But nothing compares to the fact that our work structures our life. It gives it an agenda-fitted calendar, deliverables and timelines. It gives us a set of protocols: what to wear, where to go when you wake up, how long to sit at various spots, the jargon, the workflows, the whole hog. At the most, it would give you back your weekends,   which you’ll spend, in all probability, half-thinking about the next week.

These are still early days. But getting up and knowing that the entire day yawns ahead of you, unanswered, too cramped with possibilities is a greatly unsettling feeling. And yet delightful.

A journey begins

A whirlwind end to a year and a beginning.
Between 18th and 23rd I traveled to Behrampur, Murshidabad distt., for a theatre performance and with thick fogs along the tracks and trains delayed by days, was on the road for six days for that one-hour performance.
Returning back, I wrapped the remaining days of my corporate career and cleaned up my old apartment, thanks to a very special friend from Bangalore flying over to help me with that.
After sojourning with a friend in Gurgaon and my cousins in Delhi for the past two days,  I leave for Auli today for a fortnight of skiing. It's so frigging cold out there and the roads so so bad (The drives to Joshimath are never a pleasure in the best of weathers) and I don't really know why I am doing this to myself.

My training  will recommence in Feb second half and I still have not written anything for close to half a year now. To be honest, nothing feels different - it just seems like an extended weekend where I just happen to live out of several suitcases, repacking and shuffling stuff between them all the time.

Hopefully, Auli will break the pattern of these last eight years post-MBA.

Some things in life are like a smile spread in the horizon towards where I march and I am thankful for that.

A few portraits of friends, new and old, that were there with me in these days, tho', I realize now, only a sample from all that were there.

Day 1

Starting a new day, a new life today. Strange how mundane it seems right now, like a lazy Sunday where  I have managed to get nothing on my todo's and hence feeling a little overwhelmed by the time at hand.  It is this lost connection with time that I somewhere seek to re-establish. To disentangle from the spools of imagined arbitrary deadlines tugging at my feet all the time, for all the inconsequential tasks without purpose and ends, forgotten the minute they are done. The motions without the movements.

In the past few years I consciously refrained from taking any direct responsibility where a task would belong to me and me alone and the measure of my worth would be how much I have been able to achieve to the targets set at the beginning. Instead, I took the consultative and coordinative approach, and lucrative as that line of career is, many a time much more than the direct line responsibility, I have doubts about its utility having been so close to the ground and seeing the grease of the cogs, hearing their straining screeches and clangs.

I am tired of dissembling now, of the half-hearted ill-planned plunge everyday into the pits where I do not belong. Of being someone I am not, of pretending to.

Much as the work ahead now looming like a hulking Cyclops and staring defiantly at me with that terrible eye, people are important. So many of them accumulated over the years and yet each as much of consequence as myself. I should never forget that. There would be some worthier of trust and affection, unimpeded, than others and I should never forget that too.

A new day looms ahead. Like every other day. But today I mark with a chalk, an arbitrary chalky beginning.

Stories are neither the beginnings or the ends but how the middle bit is played. The mundane, the routine, sans flourish. That's where stories achieve greatness.

No animals harmed

Line from Edukators

If you keep working for this asshole, you'll lose faith in everything.

Whose childhood is it anyway?

There is something more special about a wedding when the actors are childhood sweethearts. To me it suggests a serious lack of imagination. But to the papers, it seems to suggest something warm, something fuzzy, beside the crap in the nappies.  Where a boy meets girl, and the boy is not a middle-aged superstar hooked to sex and whiskey, and the pristine innocence we imagine on the big screen, behind all the blings and the blitz, still remains.

So I assume from all the coverage on the coverage of the wedding of boy-toyking of Bhutan. Which leaves me all confused when I read that the king is 31 and the "commoner" (another fairy-tale element overemphasazied by the media) bride 21. It makes me ask -- whose childhood? I would say that anyone below 6 is still an infant and seriously too young to commit to a sweetheart. Anyone above 16 has already been pleasuring him/herself for over a couple of years and been sprouting fur on his/her groins for even longer, and can be said to safely having moved from the  childhood to the teenaged adulthood state.
How can a couple with ten years separating them have a choldhood romance together then?

Ride down an office lift

One of the most conscious passages I have written lately. The idea is to effect an escape from the office and the claustrophobic ride in an elevator. One of the challenges I am facing in this story is that the narrator is not the type of person who would voice his thoughts in the English of literature fiction. The narration writes over the character's own words at many places and leaves  a curious conflation of voices, some words belonging to me and some claimed by the character; a very exacting effort. Each adverb and word needs to be balanced, each comma, each semicolon deliberated on for minutes at end. I wonder if this controlled, planned effort takes away from the spontaneity of the writing.
The last rolling paragraph is supposed to stimulate the inescapable denseness inside the lift by its unbreaking relentless progress.

_____

A clutch of people waited at the bank of lifts, more than what he was accustomed to when he left at his usual hour. None whom he thankfully knew particularly well. Of the three lifts, two were on different floors below and coming up, the one in the middle was going from the first basement to the second. No use watching for that. He sidled to the door of the lift on the nearer floor even though it seemed to have been stuck there since he had walked into the lobby. Most of the crowd was herded in front of that door, intent on avoiding others’ attentions beyond a nod or few syllables. The lift started rolling again, drumming ahead its intention with a grinding clatter and then beginning to rise slowly with the low complaining rumble of a pensioner groaning to his feet. The handful split and wagering on the other lift started shuffling towards their lift.  Unconsciously, he squared his shoulders and adjusted the strap of the laptop bag slipping on his shoulder with the other hand. Almost everyone toted laptops like him, slung on a shoulder, but a few carried backpacks. They must be much more comfortable, distributing the weight across the blades instead of printing an aching welt on one. But he was too old now, too far gone up the hierarchy, to be seen walking about with a schoolboy satchel, for that’s what it was, however black and dull and gray. That breathless anticipation as they sat packed, waiting for the hands on the clock to tick in place and release the peal trapped in the bell. The corridors racing past, the reverberation of their buckled hooves, shouts, whoops, gossips, fights – a babel released, everything rolling at once. The day still alive and sunny in its possibilities. Now only the long crawl back home – some of the people here would be on the choked roads for more than an hour – and waiting at the end of it, the joyless fix of television and sleep.

The panel over the door lit with the number of their floor. Everybody was in place now, the other lift now roundly abandoned. The lift clanged in place and in that brief comma before the doors rumbled apart, the tension was stretched like a balloon skin. A long-awaited bus rolling into a bus-stop. Worse. At a bus-stop you didn’t have to worry about keeping up your professional mask. If it came to a crunch, survival upped both civility and dignity.

The doors parted revealing a handful from the nether floors already cunningly stationed inside for the long drop back. They filed in without jostling and largely respecting the order in which they had arrived, but only just. He moved towards the back, anticipating the squeeze to only get tighter with the influx from the other floors. One of the backpackers moved to his front, an exceptionally tall and broad lad, and was now smothering him with his backpack, the embossed logo pressing on his forehead like a branding iron. He shifted his own laptop from the side to the front, poking him on the back of his thighs just enough to make him turn and realise there was someone behind him and that his boundaries didn’t exactly end at the skin on his back. He moved ahead a little, allowing him a snorkel of space. Everyone was in the lift now, packed and ready to be shipped down. He heard the doors shut.

The lift seemed to stop at every floor, moving with a lurch after every pause and pulling its squealing brakes even before it had gained full speed. Every time the doors opened and waited, he imagined a small crowd peeping inside, muttered counsels between themselves, the people packed at the door facing them blankly and awaiting their verdict, a fourth wall briefly disappeared, most of them outside deciding to give it a pass, but a few of the desperate and shameless squeezing inside; he felt the press inside becoming tighter with every stop. Trapped in his wedge of space, there was nothing he could do but absorb the sounds and shaking rumbles. He waited: a hand clenched around the strap of the bag, the other flat against the wall, daunted by its cool steely smoothness, only a callus grazing a scar etched on it. He did not have anxieties of closed spaces but he imagined being trapped like this for minutes, many minutes, because of some failure, and a flutter passed through him like the thought of one’s own death. He trusted himself to stay calm but what about the others? What if someone here got the panic attack in this confined space? Especially this giant who seemed too big for his own and others’ good. From here to the rush-hour.  Over-packed co-existence was the new paradigm.  The price extracted by progress. Claustrophobia was no longer a private phobia but a public menace: privacy no longer a right but a privilege. A raging madness – stampedes, pileups – which had to be confined and contained. The man in the front moved an arm, shaking it as if it had lost circulation. Almost like a spasm. Unconsciously, he turned his head to one side imagining the thick arm landing on his brittle nose in a flailing thwack. Whatever happened between these floors would be inescapable, beyond deliverance. They would be discovered only when the doors opened. A crushed pile tumbling out. The walls were so thick, he doubted if even their screams would be heard. To the people outside, they were something packed, boxed and in delivery. Schrödinger’s many cats. They might all be gassed and dead for all they knew. He wished the frame would not shudder so much between stops. He was beginning to feel a little light-headed and dyspnoeic. He had lost count of the floors they had stopped at but he felt that the crowd was starting to fan out again, people must be getting off. When the doors finally rumbled apart for him, he stepped out with the giddy relief of disembarking from a wearisome ride in an amusement park.