On loneliness..

Its a Sunday today. I have interacted with two faces since morning (not that my week days are any different. I just see a few more plastic smiles and cement faces in office). Firstly, my bai who worked and went away silently and secondly, my newspaper boy who made me pay his monthly bill. In addition, Delhi seems to be headed on a definite and irreversible path to summer from this week on. Other than this, nothing remarkable happened today.

Before you write me off as a lonely, grumbling candidate for the loser-of-the-week award, please sample how my Sundays used to be while at Law School an year back. I shall also compare my Sundays with certain practicing advocates I'm acquainted with and prove to you, my discerning reader, how a law firm and certain legal departments in reputed companies or banks are propped up on the servile, routine or rather half-lives that their employees/associates spent at office and beyond.(Okay, no prizes for guessing that I may soon leave my job for taking up litigation!)

While in college, the word often used by me to describe a Sunday on the next Monday when guys sometimes asked what I did over the weekend was, 'Bakarchodi'. Of course, the incredible word might encompass a large variety of activities within its fold. A typical Sunday could ideally begin anywhere between 10am to 3pm depending on how much you drank on Saturday. Thereafter, you indulge in stimulating conversations with firstly with your roommates and then with others over the holy drink-Chai. Depending on whether the other guy is interested in talking to me, the conversation may range from girls, porn, college politics and professors to how politics influenced the allotment of a moot to a certain somebody in college. The evenings may usually be spent at movie theaters, rating girls(and the movie also). Of course, the way girls are rated by a guy may have no bearing on the girlfriend(s) he might fall for eventually. I have seen absolutely choosy and merciless raters end up with the most atrocious girls. Forgive me for deviating from my beloved Sundays..

Having given you a glimpse of my Sundays of time past, I shall now entice myself and you, my dear reader, with the possibility of how my Sundays could be, if i took up practice. Since, i have no first hand idea of practice forgive me if my surmises, half-guesses and hearsay information are a little off the mark. The day may usually start from anywhere between 5am to 9am with a bundle of files which may have to be read by the end of the day either because you have to plead them on the next day or because you have to brief your cocky senior. This is the payment which you make for the entertainment which may soon begin. Clients soon start poring in with unparalleled gossip material; often better than college gossip and always better than your routine office gossip. Clients may range from wives complaining about their husbands who cheated on them, an employee grumbling about his boss you might also know personally, to petty cat-fights which blossomed into juicy family disputes. Evenings may usually be spent, fervently discussing with office folks, the prospects of a show down between your senior and a certain unfavourable judge.

The future looks challenging and enticing and the past is a source of satisfaction and nostalgia. It is only the present which seems to have slipped into a vegetative state for me. I have no intention of stirring you, me dear readers, to rebellion against your respective organisations but I can only hope that you are not in the same boat because if you are in the same boat as me, look up at the flag fluttering on the mast, on which you'll see written large enough for the world to see-'Suckers'!