Tired of playing rewind on the legal case before me, hoping that I would finally focus this time around, I gave up this round and let my mind have its way. It’s a strange entity-the mind that is. It always wants to live the lives of two separate people-the relentless tug of war between “focus” and “wanderer”. Eventually, it seems that “wanderer” always takes the lead.
But today, in particular, “focus” was fighting a duel already lost. How could the detached legal memo that would someday lead me to the promise land of “meaningful career”, possibly compete with the background cacophony of Bandra or painted images of Chechnya?
“For a party to fulfill the elements of bystander recovery for the negligent infliction of emotional distress he must 1) be a close relative of the victim, 2) be present at the scene of the accident and be aware that the victim is being injured, and 3) as a result of experiencing the accident, suffer serious emotional injury that is accompanied by physical symptomatology.”
Whoa, right? I know, you’re probably thinking, “Where did that come from?”
Well, that’s what my mind has been battling with all day! After reading that statement in my legal memo for the umpteenth time, “focus” was given permission to take a guilt free nap.
Last night, I stepped outside of myself once again and watched as I engaged in a conversation about that week’s most surreal NY Times article. This time it was about the condition of Malawi prisons and decrepit legal system. There were graphic photographs of hundreds of black men jammed like snails into tiny cells that had the capacity for less than a fourth of them. Until mid morning break, they slept on their sides, permanently glued in that spoon like position, silently praying that that night, they would not be the victims of sex starved men. Some of them lived like this, without knowing why, for more than a decade. One meal of porridge a day and drinking water from the toilet if they were lucky.
I watched as I described these horrific images to the man next to me, as we sat amongst young “intellectuals” in a shishi restaurant located in one of those quaint, yuppie neighborhoods in the upscale part of town.
Why do people…why do we spend Friday evenings discussing such horrendous realities as we sip our bottled H2O or pinot grigio? Why do these images, presented in story like mode, fascinate and intrigue us?
Sometimes, it hits us that these “images”, brought to our doorsteps, IBMs, and Blackberries, are, in fact, not imaginary. Nor are they merely evocative photographs from the National Geographic’s 100 Best Photos.
They are real. The people, captured through the imaginative eyes of the artist, are real. They are depictions of real people.
Real black men born into the same world as mine, packed like spooning snails in dark cement rooms in a place called “Malawi” that if you wanted to, would be able to locate on world map maybe just XXX miles from us.
As I write these thoughts, an email from Chechnya evoke more images. In the middle of the night, bombs are heard exploding outside the windows of a friend’s apartment.
A telephone call to India, with the wonderful new Reliance minutes, allows me to hear noisy scooters mingling incongruously with bartering vendors outside another friend’s apartment in Bandra, somewhere in the heart of Mumbai.
And here I sit, in the southern United States, fixated on this idea of one world. Because for some reason, I’m becoming more and more convinced that it’s all a sham. “Unity” “Solidarity” “One World”-all of these ideas have established the façade of a single unit that is divided by inequality and disparity.
And then people like you and me intellectualize and ruminate for hours about how these conditions can possibly exist in the same world as our own. We soothe our heightened senses through philanthropy and “human rights” initiatives. Internationally authoritative bodies are created to break down the complexities. And NGOs flow like the uncontrollable tears of guilt ridden conscience throughout the campos, ghettos, slums, ghams, (etc) of this “world”.
Out of complete fixation, I began having one of those ridiculously “deep, I’m high on weed” sort of moments and I had the urge to research the etymology of this word “world”. But since I didn’t have online access at the moment, I ventured to think about this on my own.
Isn’t the word “world” only supposed to encompass one entity? But if it’s a single entity (or unit), like my body or your automobile, shouldn’t all the individual components of this world work in harmony to create a smoothly functioning system? Sure, my body or your automobile may break down once in a while…the imbalance of nutrients or insufficiency of transmission fluid sometimes results in temporary lapses in harmony. But there is never a complete systematic breakdown unless the body is attacked by an incurable disease or the automobile is so ill maintained that one day it coughs its last breath and slowly sputters to death.
But the entity called “world”, despite endless battles with horrific imbalances and insufficiencies, just hasn’t seemed to experience this complete systematic breakdown yet. On the contrary, while some parts are dying a slow death, other areas are thriving, fully functioning components that have the energy to discuss for hours, over intoxicating beverages like rich, dark Kenyan coffee and full bodied, Italian wine, about the slow death of our fellow “organs” and “engine parts”.
Wow…I guess in this particular entity called “world”, some components are pretty insignificant while others run supreme. What a strange entity, don’t you think?
