The Consequences of Earshot

I've always been a merciless eavesdropper but much as Alaphia points out here about its merits, it has its own consequences... on one's sanity!

We have a Flexidesk system at work - Flexidesk is companyspeak for "Let's see if you can reach early enough to catch a chair, the number of which outnumber by 2:1, the building's occupants". A.K.A. "Gotcha".

What this hustle means is that one's neighbour varies everyday, an absurdist human lottery of sorts... the glorious gongura-pickle eating South Indian, the Frenchman going brrrppoooofff all the time, the Arab who seems to hiss at/curse everyone's grandfathers, the stinky nerd with the shiny Mac, the woman with hula-hoops on her ears impeccably complemented by a Chanel No.5 forcefield and the occassional tobbaco chewing Texan. All stereotypes duly make their appearance at regular intervals.

Today, however, is an outlier of a day. There is a plain looking 55+ year old man next to me. Harmless almost, until he gets on the phone. Wears a tie, really looks white but speaks Sinhalese to his relatives. He varies his accent depending on whom he speaks to and presents his complicated surname to Brit callers in two simple syllables. He calls his niece on the office phone to tell her friend about not mentioning his Tamil origin on his UK visa application.

Needlessly funny at most times, he tells a caller to hold on for a second while he weeps in the corner and comes back. To another, he shares the discovery of his professional incompetence by the company (in a hushed tone) and shares his new responsibilities which may include shredding blank paper and fetching vanilla tea. He has been apparently reassigned as part of a management shakeup (he shakes himself, his chair and MY desk, somehow communicating the agony of it all, down the thin copper line) and is awaiting his new role.

He explains to his cousin how senior managers in the firm are practititioners of the exotic language of Jar-Gon-Ese and also how his new boss was supposed to turn up to tell him what to do but has been AWOL for the last 5 days and so he enjoys the sun in the office atrium but has regretfully left his suntan lotion at home.

Then he calls to check on his aunt in a care-home. On being told that she is asleep, he signs off thus "Tell her that her little nephew, 'S' called and that he is praying for her daily".

The wonder, the horror. Yet another day winds down.

Image sourced from here.

And I too suffer...

"...but always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer..." Bertrand Russell in The Prologue to his autobiography.


I just finished Susan Sontag’s “Regarding The Pain of Others” and it was a such a strong reminder of all the reasons why I love reading and how a powerful compendium of words can ram home unpalatable truths. In this book, Sontag makes an unflinching study of the many images of human distress and dissects our thinking as we consider such images. In doing so, she not only spells out the tenuous limits of morality (during wartime, especially) but also marks the larger manipulation of memory that human society chooses to live with.

Some excerpts from the book:

"...and the pity and the disgust that pictures like Hick's inspire should not distract you from asking what pictures, whose cruelties, whose deaths are not being shown"

“When Woolf notes that one of the photographs she has been sent shows a corpse of a man or woman so mangled that it could as well be that of a dead pig, her point is that the scale of war's murderousness destroys what identifies people as individuals, even as human beings”

“It is the same intelligence whose weapons of annihilation can locate the enemy to the exact second and meter, wrote Junger, that labors to preserve the great historical event in fine detail.”

“The exhibition in photographs of cruelties inflicted on those with darker complexions in exotic countries continues, oblivious to the considerations that deter such displays of our own victims of violence; for the other, even when not an enemy, is regarded only as someone to be seen, not someone (like us) who also sees; but surely the Taliban soldier begging for his life whose fate was pictured prominently in the NY Times also had a wife, children, parents, sisters and brothers, some of whom may one day come across the three colour photographs of their husband, father, son, brother being slaughtered-if they have not already seen them.”

“Photographs that everyone recognizes, are now a constituent part of what a society chooses to think about or declares that it has chosen to think about...what is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating; that this is important and this is the story about what happened with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.”

“The problem is not that people remember through photographs but that they remember only the photographs… to remember is, more and more, not to recall a story but to be able to call up a picture.”

“Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.”

“Whom do we wish to blame? More precisely, whom do we believe that we have the right to blame? The children of Hiroshima or Nagasaki were no less innocent than the young African American men (and women) who were butchered and hanged from trees in small-town America… A stepped-up recognition of the monstrousness of the slave system that once existed, unquestioned by most in the United States is a national project that many Euro-Americans feel some tug of obligation to join. This ongoing project is a great achievement, a benchmark of civic value. The acknowledgement of the American use of disproportionate firepower in war (in a violation of one of the cardinal principles of war) is very much not a national project… would be regarded-now more than ever-as a most unpatriotic endeavor.”

“We don’t get it. We truly can’t imagine what it was like. We can’t imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can’t understand, can’t imagine. That’s what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right.”

The book is available at Amazon for $9.36. Capa's falling soldier picture from the BBC site here.

Characters on The Underground

The man with the glass-ball – 16th January 2010 (Piccadilly)
A wild haired man with blonde hair curly and pointing in all directions. Large eyes, small jowls on his cheek, tiny chin. Stands next to door leaning on glass partition. Takes off coat. Rolls up sweater sleeves. Takes out a glass ball about the size of a small football. Holds it on palm then turns palm upside down and holds ball on top. Then glides it to crook of elbow. Up and down. Left to right. When Holborn hits, takes it on left side and makes a block gesture with his right. I pretend to look the other way and get off at Notting Hill Gate.


The girl without makeup – 19th January 2010 (Central)
Indian origin; camel haired coat, stockinged feet, Padukone lookalike, more rounded. No rings. Unusually large calves, firm and stockinged. No makeup. Plain well tended nails. No lipstick, no mascara, no rouge, no nail polish, no eyeliner. Maybe coming in from the gym? Rolls eyes to side and I see them... black. Black flat shoes with small silver bows. The crowd pushes us nearer but I edge away from the brush of her hair. It is, after all, a disturbing feeling. Gets off at Chancery Lane.


The kid with the touch-screen phone – 10th April 2010 (Central)
Little blonde kid, lavender crocs, tights with metal studs around the ankle, plastic hair-band. Black short-sleeved tee that reveals gangly, long arms. About 8 years old. Fiddling with a Palm Pre encased in florescent green rubber. Looks up at Mom who's busy reading a magazine. Turns away and licks touch-screen with tongue to see if it works. Tiny delighted smile when it does. Briefly struggles with thought of sharing discovery with Mom. Decides to. Mom nods, smiles and turns away. I nod to the little discoverer in acknowledgement. 1845 hours on the Central line.


Image from this Evening Standard article with Tube Trivia