Chanakya Said

I saw this video by Sarah McLachlan a few months back and it’s been stuck in my mind ever since. It’s a must see!

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Last month, I got called for jury duty for the first time. Most people dread this summons, and it’s pretty clear why. You spend most of the day in a crowded jurors lounge, surrounded by impatient people that are irritable for the same reasons as you.

Nevertheless, I found the jury duty salad bowl to be fascinating. Over the course of my day, I eavesdropped on a microbiologist scolding his assistant over the phone regarding a tainted plasmid culture; an overworked social worker (is there any other kind?) that was going to painstaking lengths to support his three children; a snippity saleswoman clearly overdressed for the occasion but insecure about appearing otherwise; and a host of other characters.

With this ensemble, jury duty could hardly be considered a place to mingle. But it was interesting to see the friction growing in the room, as the W2s of DC grappled with the relevance of jury duty in their daily routines.

For me, the day was actually refreshing. I kept hearkening back to “The Stranger,” where the main character is unable to fathom the relationship of one social event to another, or the meaning of imprisonment vs. free agency in his own life. In contrast, most people I came across that day were obsessed with the implications of missing one step in their routines, and weary of the novelty of an altogether unfamiliar experience.

For many, jury duty is like a renegade asteroid disrupting the cosmos. This reaction is completely understandable for the ones, like the social worker, that are literally killing themselves so that their families can live. For others, like the saleswoman, I’m not so sure why she had such a big stick up her ass, other than that she’s always felt entitled to everything glamorous.

When a group of us went in for jury selection, I initially got chosen to sit in the jury chamber. I filled out the jurors’ questionnaire (to the best of my knowledge, so help me Ganesha) and went for a brief interview before the judge and attorneys. If selected, I would have presided over a criminal hearing that, in a nutshell, involved a woman attacking a man with hot coffee and a knife.

The image of this crime is somewhat absurd if you imagine the back-to-back application of these weapons. I left my questionnaire blank to indicate that I had no objections to hearing the case, but immediately began thumbing through the scenarios in my mind. Self-defense seemed the most probable to me, but I formed that judgment based on the location of the crime and the time of evening.

That seemed too uncreative, so I imagined a more whacky possibility. What if the woman was completely dissatisfied with her Starbucks coffee and upon returning home, went into a rage over the hundreds of dollars she had spent on coffee in the past year? What if, in turn, the man that allegedly attacked her was her boyfriend, who by day was a professional clown touring with the Cirque du Soleil? The woman’s fear of clowns - dormant since childhood - could have resurfaced at the moment that she arrived home. Already ready to toss her coffee, she might have decided to kill two birds with one stone, and had a pocketknife with which to do it. She threw the rancid coffee in her clown boyfriend’s face, soiling his makeup and throwing him off guard - she then went in for the kill, which she imagined would make her a martyr among all the children tortured by the morbid underworld of clownography.

Why am I ranting about clowns and Starbucks? well, mainly because I didn’t get selected for the case… but also because the scenario is out of the ordinary and I was stuck in a chamber with people that were absurdly obsessed with the ordinary. Should that woman go to prison for her crime? Maybe. But i just made her life more interesting than most people’s, and if the story of the clowns is true, she deserves a prize, not prison.

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Suppose you only have $50 to spend on gifts this season. For the friends that are impossible to shop for, like myself, how about purchasing a GlobalGiving Gift Certificate?

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Buy a Gift Certificate today!

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