That Wooden Spoon

Stepping out in the morning to go to work, a chilled blast of air attacks me daily nowadays. That moment passes quickly as the body adapts to the winter morning. Equatorial islanders and tropical natives like me brace themselves all over the world when they experience sub-zero winters for the first time. But that is just the beginning every day. The subway and the streets are filled every morning with throngs walking towards their important buildings to sit at important desks wearing important clothes and spinning immaculate yarns to impress the important people on the other side of the table, email or phone. I march amongst them everyday, with my truant left foot which is gradually gaining some normalcy. People bump into each other, apologise, pick up free newspapers, chatter on the phone, cross traffic signals, dash across streets, and push each cell of their beings to get to work as quickly as possible every morning.
I am no different except that I think I carry the Wooden Spoon of the crowds.

In the 19th century, The Mathematical Tripos at the University of Cambridge started a baffling tradition of awarding the Wooden Spoon, an ignominious prize that was given to the student who scored the lowest exam marks. It was an actual wooden spoon (the size of which grew over the years) that the hapless least-scorer had to accept in a crowded ceremony and leave the hall amongst dramatic despair. Over time, the Wooden Spoon became a phrase for bottom-rankers in different fields in numerous universities and organisations across the world.
I enjoy the morning walk to work, the music in my ears and the swarming fast pace of harried folks around me. When a crowd converges at a traffic signal, I find myself giving way to the elderly, the folks with bags, mothers with children, and even blackberry-fighting busybees. That's the moment, when I realise I am going to be the Wooden Spooner of the crowd crossing, i.e. the last person in the crowd to reach the other side, that I snap myself out of my dynamic absentia.

Have we often wondered how many wooden spoons each of us is carrying around? Our weakest points expose us to the elements of uncertainty and the excesses of emotions. As we see a thousand strangers every day, and pass fleeting glances with hundreds, where does the mind stray off? To what forsaken corner of the memory and to what dusty nook of the imagination? Why are there hundreds of brief art movies running in the mind all the time? Why do I sometimes forget to pick up the key but never to smile when I see a wide-eyed kid? Why do I sometimes leave my office pass on the desk, but never forget to say Good morning to the folks sitting near me at work? Perhaps absent-mindedness is selective. Those lapses in time and momentum add up over and over again. I wonder where those moments go. Maybe they gather in a secret meeting behind my back and scheme how to steal more of my moments. The Union of Lost Moments and Vacant Looks. Plotting and planning to swell their ranks by making me more susceptible to the beauty of each day and thus making me the winner of some Wooden Spoon or the other.

I keep thinking of doing something spectacular every moment, but at the same time all those thousands of thoughts need to be kept inside the mind, like a packed train full of commuters, with some plastered against the doors. Derailment is a constant risk, and sometimes a reality. But when the mind is derailed and lies on its side like an elephant toppled in an Indian war epic, there is a constantly flashing light, an alarm to knock me back into the present, to pull me back from jumping into the quicksand of imagination.

That flashing light is nothing but my own voice ricocheting off the walls of my mind and saying - You MUST pass on the Wooden Spoon!

I pull the elephant back up and cross the street in a desperate dash.

Remember, Remember

This week began with a strange 25-hour day, one of those quirky habits of civilisation to adjust where they sit on the scale of time in order to have the Sun shining by the time they get up. On Nov 3rd, when the clocks struck 3:00 a.m. in this country, time was kidnapped, put into a bag, rolled back an hour and then released. So we lived that hour twice.

Romantics and lofty-eyed philosophers would observe this strange phenomenon through various ways. We all got to sleep an hour longer that night. It did not feel strange on Monday to get up to go to work while the sky was still dark. That bewitching hour must have provided the perfect alibi to sharp criminals for committing the perfect crime. Try proving a crime committed at 2:45 a.m. when the accused was actually sleeping at home at 2:45 a.m. One got even more distant from the eastern hemisphere without having to lift a foot. Through that simple act of turning the clocks back once a year, the grey cells up here have to be realigned like grumpy school-goers on a winter morning.

But the promise of the week was not in that mystical hour, but in the hour that came three days later at the stroke of midnight this morning when Mr. Barack Obama took centre-stage at Grant Park in Chicago and breathed in the colossal collective sigh of relief and ecstasy that millions of people around him and elsewhere in the world were having. That moment marks a point of inflexion in the historical graph of the world order, because from now on the flaky, doubtful trigger of cynicism known as ‘ambition without inhibition’ regains its place amongst the collective psyche of both the developed and the developing worlds that co-exist. Whether Mr. Obama turns out to be the beacon that he promises to be will be something that this novel experiment will unfold over the next four years. But this has given a rudder to the American people, and by association, the majority of the world population, to look up and not down.

This momentous event has sadly eclipsed the grave news of the death of one of science fiction's most foresighted and useful pioneer - Mr. Michael Crichton. He died yesterday at the age of 66 after having waged a valiant battle against cancer which he hid from the public eye. The man who authored Jurassic Park, The Lost World, The Andromeda Strain, Timeline, Sphere, Disclosure, The Great Train Robbery and many other fascinating books that marked my bookshelf over the years, is now no more. It's an irrecoverable loss for the literary world, Hollywood and fiction aficionados like me and many of my friends.

With the arrival of a new world leader and the departure of an icon of imagination, is it strange or a sheer coincidence, that today – Nov 5th – is Guy Fawkes Day - the Day of Treason?

But I cannot resist the tickling temptation to salute both by twisting the timeless rhyme of Guy Fawkes Day to suit the day:

Remember, remember
The Fifth of November
When hope wiped your foggy lenses
And a vision shattered all the fences
The world clapped with whelmed senses
And Change ruled all the tenses

Remember, remember
The Fourth of November
A seer of fantasy heaved his last
Preying on Time with a Jurassic past
On the seas of wonder he raised his mast
Tomorrow being his favourite cast

So Remember, remember
This week of November
The Gunpowder of Reason in History’s Plot
I can think of no reason
Why The Gunpowder of Reason
Should ever be forgot

And yes – now I know why I had an extra blissful hour of sleep on 3rd Nov when the clocks changed. The din of the cheering masses through Manhattan all through the night of 5th Nov made up for it.