August 2024
Bio Note: I am just coming out of a hiatus that seriously worried me. There is always the fear of 'never again'. Suddenly, something triggers the need to write. Then a new fear raises its ugly head: does it still work?
Only Another Meeting
David’s droning on.
He has a laser pointer.
Wears a dark-grey suit, light-blue shirt,
dark-red tie. His shoes polished to reflect
all of us sitting around the conference table.
Some are newbies, still excited
by the novelty of having been invited
to partake in yet another presentation
on our boss’s ego.
Title slide:
“Global Innovative Leadership Module”
Yes, of course, my dear.
Wouldn’t you love it?
First slide please:
“Marketing deals essentially with identifying and
meeting human and social needs”
Yes, of course. And then we scam them.
Right? Right!
Oh, look, over there, Brett from International.
The other day he pooh-poohed my idea
and presented it just now as his own.
What a jerk.
Next slide:
“Market can be seen as the wide variety of consumer
groups. We can distinguish several types of market:
Consumer Markets; Business Markets; Global
Markets; Non-profit and Governmental Markets.”
Oh. My. God. Not that again. David really
is into this stuff. Makes him look good, he thinks.
Most of us take stealthy looks
at our smartphones under the table.
I see the mic in front of me.
We could call Ian from the offshoot of our company
in the UK to be bored too.
I don’t like the long, smug face of that
marketing director of theirs.
Also, I heard rumours.
No, not sex. Money.
Next:
“Marketing planning is a 5-step process to make a
product more desirable:
• Analysing marketing opportunities;
• Selecting target markets;
• Designing marketing strategies;
• Developing marketing programs;
• Execution or managing the marketing effort.”
Yay! Luis just sent me a WhatsApp:
We’ll have dinner at Lara’s Bistro tonight.
The Magic of the Word or the Blind Girl Reads Braille
There is a world under your fingertips.
There is a world that tells you about worlds
under fingertips.
And you shut your eyes, even though they don’t
distract you with everyday objects, just to feel your way across
Samarkand, the silk road, and to meet your blind fellow traveller
whose fingertips take steps to take her across steppes.
There is a world under your fingertips,
and you can just travel deep inside yourself,
imagining the green of emeralds, sheiks, and daring maidens.
You get up awkwardly onto a camel,
or you spend the rest of the afternoon
in a forest that smells of pine, moss and decay.
What is green?
A rumour has it that Tiresias was blinded by Athena
after he saw her bathing.
What did you see?
There is a world under your fingertips,
and now you know that Schopenhauer was wrong.
You can transcend the everyday point of view
because you are not hindered by shiny things.
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