Monday Morning Blues

Monday morning, 9:30 AM, Teynampet Signal.

I screech my bike to a halt as the light turns red and settle down for a 90 second wait till the traffic starts moving again. My mind wanders to what I might have left pending for the coming week at office on Friday last. With a sickening feeling, I realise my TGIF mood had been quite pronounced last time around, resulting in cramped deadlines and potential showdowns with my superiors today. And what's up with this blasted weather? The more it rains, the more sultry it gets, I think, feeling my shirt sticking to my back...And to top it all ,Iam running late for work. God! Why did there have to be Mondays?!

My eyes stray to the huge movie billboards on the roadside, hoping to find some visual relief there, but Iam arrested by a strange sight in the traffic island at the centre of the junction. It's only a typical 'mams' ('traffic policeman' in Chennai lingo) with a Veerappan mousetache and a Santa Claus tummy, directing traffic. Only, there is nothing else typical about him. With arms whirling and neat pirrouettes, he transforms the job of traffic-direction into an art form. An autodriver whizzes by, greeting our 'mams' on the way. He responds with a wave and a grin. The scooter ahead of me oversteps the stop line by a metre and our man is onto him in a flash, admonishing him with sarcastic wisecracks which make everyone around him smile. 'Mams' is the centre of attention and he knows it.

Is the same sun beating down on him? I wonder, noticing how cool he looks. And how can he be so excited about his monotonous, thankless job as if he was a scuba diver off the Great Barrier Reef? I guess it's because work is never fun or exciting because of what it is, but because of what we put into it. We might be aiming for that dream job of ours which would supposedly give us all that we are looking for (which is not a bad thing at all), but we have to be alive to the present where most of those elusive goals might be just waiting for us to find them. I guess the 'mams' knows this much better than most. And suddenly, I feel alive. How long will the feeling last, I don't know.....

3...2...1....The lights turn green and Iam off!