When there is no business

  I didn’t know what to do with my business cards when I quit my job for good six month ago. There were three boxes, each containing 100 cards. I neither wanted to throw them into dustbin nor leave them unattended. Finally, when I cleaned the cubicle, I took them with me. At home, they found a safe place in my bookshelf. One day, I saw my six-year-old daughter Mihika building a castle using them. It was nice to watch the light-blue cards falling one after another. Not a great fall, but a fall indeed -- caught between the vibe of blue and white. When she was not in creative mood, Mihi would throw the cards all over the floor. The first two letters (highlighted) of the two-word name of the company would stare at me from different angles. A kaleidoscope of  ‘I’ and ‘e’. One day, I was surprised to see the old cards finding a place in my card-holder, replacing all the relevant ones. Here too, the ‘I’ and ‘e’ stared at me from each page.

Mihi’s game with cards at times ended in ‘disaster’. Once she tore a couple of them, separating the ‘I’ and ‘e’. But this helped me identify the two letters closely. ‘I” looked like a snake, and ‘e’, a frog. The first was about to swallow the second, but with its mouth holding backwards. A frog was saved every time Mihi tore a card. But I never allowed Mihi to save the frog every time, as I never liked the idea of tearing the beautifully designed cards.

A couple of months later when I took up my new offer, I suddenly became a ‘card-less’ journalist. I wrote my name and phone number on the ‘plain’ card of the new company and gave it to people who I met during press meetings. But still, the thought of old cards disturbed me, spreading a peculiar flu all over my body. A solution of dust and spider-net... Finally, Mihi came to the rescue. As part of her regular card-game, she was practicing a simple but different one this time by hiding the cards in between the innumerable pages of the book. BUSINESS CARDS AS BOOK MARKS...