The Phoenix, the Galloping Horses and the Road to Africa

January 31, 2008

The last day of January.

The last day of a very hectic month, which found me scurrying to Delhi, Noida and Faridabad for content writer and editorial jobs, despite knowing that I am not yet mentally prepared to take up this job, while I keep exploring business opportunities for our African setup, in which I have been actively involved for more than one year.

On both fronts, things have gone with seesaw excitement and agonies.

On the negative side, I see that things haven't progressed much, apart from the fact that we have managed to keep our so-called office-cum-residential rented apartment running by managing to export a few shipments of scrap iron and used oil from Africa to India.

But it is very costly in the sense that you have to pay at each and every step, to every individual and institution concerned, to make any type of headway. If you want your shipment to be shipped and sail off safely, then you should be prepared to let go of a lot of money from your pocket to facilitate the process, because that's the routine here.

At one moment, all the doors seem to be opening to allow me in for a sumptuous feast in lieu of all my labours. Then, in a vilifyingly chiding rebuke, the door is slammed shut in my face, hurting my already bruised red nose.

Many a time I have fallen forward to get a reddish nose.

Like the proverbial Phoenix, many a time I have tried to rise from the ashes to take a golden flight, cutting across the sunrays of a vibrant new sun. But the gravitational pull of higher, stronger realities—the realities of my own frailties, the realities of the invisible throws of dice, again and again against me—finds me falling down to the receiving, ever-gleeful, ever-fiery pyre of futility.

It is the constant pain, constant depression, ever-haunting fear of failure which seems to be eating into my being.

I fear death, but more than death itself, I fear the means adopted by the angels of death. I fear these might be so gruesome, slowly, slowly bringing down your castle of physical being block by block, tonking with merciless hammers in their newer and newer painful avatars—agents which make you die every moment.

Under such circumstances, even death, provided it is blessed to you in a single swipe, taking you off from the needling rake of life and its warm offsprings, becomes a likable thing.

Nonetheless, the world is going on with its stock of pleasures and pains.

The globalized economy is facing the turbulent waves generated by the U.S. home loan market business. The expressway of the world economy is getting newer and newer entrants. We are fastly moving ahead, yet rapidly reverting back on our responsibilities also.

It is good that Asia is progressing, entailing the Western bandwagon, but what of Africa—the tropical land of jungles, mosquitoes, animals and poor humans, mired in civil wars, coups, catastrophes, dictatorships, ethnic wars and genocides, with superpowers still playing dirty to draw out from its famished pockets?

The continent presents a very sorry state in these messy affairs, but still Africa has its fabled charm, which you don't find anywhere else in the world.

So, February 4, at 2:20 a.m., I am scheduled to go to Africa with Inder and Babu from Ludhiana. I hope they find the prospects good and invest in our company.

We, the poor, simple rural group of friends from a Haryana village, who have come out of the well and are trying to punch in an honest way.

Africa as a whole is bleeding.

In fact, it has been bleeding for a few centuries now, after those initial big cuts and gashes in its poor, poorly innocent body by the squirming scimitars of the slavers.

The poor yet rich mass of land has struggled to come to terms with the times. Wars, poverty, hunger, diseases, famines and HIV are the things which symbolize Africa now.

But as they say, the darkest the night, the brightest is the day to follow.

Maybe this saying will have its political, practical example in the form of a rising, prosperous, happy Africa in the decades to come.

On the professional front, I am yet to hear from ELI Research regarding my written test.

Perhaps my style of writing does not suit a content writer's job, whose job is just to pick up facts and figures from the internet, assemble them in a prosaic, lifeless manner so that they can be given a kind glance by some fatigued, weary executive or technocrat.

Perhaps Mr. Gupta recognized and heard the loud footsteps of the galloping horses of my creativity and withdrew into his shell of business insecurity.