How death happens

Hmm, this has almost become a quarterly blog. Well, what can I say? So many things have been happening workwise that I should say I’m lucky to be able to breathe.
There were a couple of things that I sorely wanted to blog about.

Like the crow nest in front of my office which will perhaps never be filled. Two crows were trying to build a nest since quite a few days. There was nothing that couldn’t find a place in their nest. Twigs were passé, they even wanted to put a bucket handle up there. I have no idea about structural design, but am pretty sure the bucket handle just wouldn’t have fit in the fragile nest.

And, in the end, it was the nest that killed one of the crows. They had put in a lot of plastic thread in there, and, I don’t know how it happened, but yesterday I saw the crow dangling from the branch of the tree, still bound to its nest by the nylon string.

Is this what they mean, when they say, life is what happens to you when you are busy planning other things? Sometimes, death happens that way, too.

Like it happened at Stephen Court. I drove past it a week ago, and the building looked gaunt, violated, and out of place on shiny, cushy Park Street. What’ll we do about tribals being shot down in some remote village when we can’t get things right in the heart of this metropolis?

Kolkata is full of such Stephen Courts, so where will you even begin? They pay much less rent than the prevailing market rates and the building goes to waste. So, people walk past dangling wire bushes and up creaky staircases, thinking some idiot somewhere is responsible for all this. The owners of the building are nameless, perhaps dead, even, and everyone else continues in a state of inertia (and some false pride to do with heritage buildings) all too common in Communist Bengal.

This is not the first major fire in the city’s recent history, and something tells me, it’s not the last, either.