dumbo the elephant waddled across the office to chat up a woman. she, like all other females in the city and outside, politely declined to humour him. left with no choice, he waddled across to one of the men, and threw him a piece of trivia. 'do you know the great politician you share your birthday with?'
the man in question, a sallow youth from cochin who now shared a room in bhandup with five other sallow men, responded with a massive show of enthusiasm. 'a great politician? really? on my birthday?' dumbo nodded and chewed on his handkerchief for a few seconds. 'jawaharlal nehru,' he spat out, smiling benignly until his words were met with a gasp of delight. mission accomplished, he then waddled off to his desk in a corner, looking for an unchewed handkerchief portion to begin work on.
as he settled down to an afternoon of googling other celebrity birth dates, his chief flunkey waltzed in. flunkey was a man who had long mastered the art of sucking up to all positions of authority. the art had taken him two decades to master, the usual period for most college drop-outs without a brain. it was how he had managed to move from the post of 'talentless cricket commentator' to 'talentless cricket commentator-cum-editor'.
bowing a few more times, he breezed through the aisles, reminding everyone of the expensive perfume he could now finally afford after decades of rubbing himself with tender coconut by the backwaters.
outside the office, in other countries, professional journalists went about their business of news gathering. in india, of course, the journalists struggled with their poor grasp of the language, employing cliché after tired cliché — referring to each other, constantly, as ‘scribes’ — to fashion something of seeming importance.
dumbo didn't care. he simply went about his business the way he always had for much of his career. his task for the week was to pick, at random, an indian in america and label this unlucky sod 'person of the year'.
