Brief Encounters: A moment of ethical dilemma

When you are not enclosed in an air-conditioned vehicle, the drill of treading in Delhi’s jammed roads on a sweaty July afternoon takes torture to a whole new level. Sitting in an endlessly stuttering auto-rickshaw, waiting for the signal to go green, I plugged in my earphones and switched to coke studio playlist to drown out the traffic cacophony. Just as Lucky Ali started humming into ‘O Sanam’, someone tapped on my knees.

CAUTION: Jargons ahead!

Business meetings might not be as fancy as the power suits of the attendees. They involve a lot of multi-tasking between grasping the colorful chevrons dancing on screen, deciphering graphs, crunching numbers,  and above all understanding/delivering a story that can bring us close to a decision. Amid all this chaos, imagine a clown pops into the room, juggling balls on a unicycle. How’s that for a distraction? Well, sometimes we don’t need a clown. Overused corporate jargons do that task.

Unfortunately or not, in a company, jargons spread like an epidemic. They mix into our vocabulary like salt in water, and before we know it, we are already using it our official and even informal conversations. In fact, sometimes people use them deliberately to pass as professionals. These jargons might sound smart at times, and some of them are even too harmless to notice. While others are more like speed breakers in a formula one race track, unnecessary and fatal to a conversation.

Here’s a list of 12 weirdest jargons that I have come across in conversations and articles:

Dear Nepal

I hope this letter finds you in the best of spirits. No. Hope isn’t the right word. Hope is timid, and expresses neither conviction nor promise. I’d rather pray than hope. A prayer has faith, a cosmic push towards a better future. And I am not sure about the best of spirits either. How do you carry the idealistic burden of keeping high spirits despite life destructing catastrophes? So I pray. I pray this letter shares some of your pain and restores faith in the struggle that is life.

Sitting miles away from you, I just felt the ripples of the doom that was cast upon on you, and it was heart shattering enough. The feeling of ground shaking beneath my feat, the sensation of walls shuddering against my back, the realization that my home, my safe place, wasn't a safe place after all, brought me face to face with the fragility of life as we know it. It is funny and horrifying at the same time how for a couple of days I could not sit at one place without flinching at every movement around me. I would periodically check the ceiling fans, chandeliers or mirrors for a sign of aftershock. The long crack on one of the beams in my house, that wasn't visible till a couple of days ago, now threatens me and mocks me for my erstwhile plans of adorning that place with decorative lights. The memory of sitting in a corner, shivering with fear, and waiting for the tremors to stop still gives me sleepless nights. My mind inadvertently draws safety plans and I evaluate all feasible options to take my family to a safe place in case of any emergency. On the outside, all of us wear a mask of nonchalance and share the stories of our experience with the earthquake like last night’s episode of a thrilling television series. But on the inside, we fear and question, ‘Are we close to the end yet? Is this how everything will go to dust?’

Wanderer