Fragile worlds...

Contemplating reality... Thats what I was doing today in the half an hour break that I had before the Board Meeting commenced. We live in such a fragile world. Our world, the world around us, our colleagues' world... There are so many. Worlds within worlds. Tiny microcosms of life, blood and heart beats, beating within the worlds that engulf them. My world has changed so rapidly in the last few months. "From where to where!!" sounds like a joke, instead of a phrase, in light of the distance and space that I have crossed, within and without!

My colleague's world changed drastically when he lost his wife in a Deepavali mishap. She had leaned over to call out for kids who were bursting crackers and her 'nightie' caught fire from a diya on the floor. One day she is there - mother, wife, daughter, sister, neighbour, architect, confidante and the next day she is a charred and burnt remnant of who she used to be. Without trivializing the pain she underwent, I wanted to cry for my colleague more than anything else and did so. He was a shell of who he used to be. Jovial, friendly and always a riot, today he is a numb person and smiles emptily.

A lot of us who make up the 'working force' of the company that employs me, marvels - not without trepidation - at the alarming fall of revenue and the rate at which we are having to chnage the internal structure of the company.

Then came along the Mumbai blasts. Some people thought it was one of the worst tragedies to strike us! Again, not to trivialise the event or the lives that were lost or the pain that was unleased or the wealths that were destroyed - but is this truly the worst tragedy? What about the Bhopal Gas tragedy? What about Godhra? What about the Babari Masjid riots? These do not feature in the largest terrorist tragedies to hit us because WE were responsible for those. We do not have Pakistan to blame for it. We have ourselves and our politics and our government. So we pick up and move on...

Our worlds are so fragile... so fragile that we ignore our internal tumors and concentrate on external cancers, so fragile that we never contemplate our lives without our loved ones as that is too terrible to even think about, so fragile that people do not believe rumors of down sizing or "right -sizing" till they get the pink slip....

How do we go on? For how long can we hold on??