Shriram Sivaramakrishnan
Summer 2017 * Know All Men by These Presents That I, ____________ … so starts the document of General Power of Attorney, calling upon everyone living as well as ever to have lived, to stand witness to the legal proceedings, while leaving out cats and horses from documenting human progress in transactional terms. It matters little to either of them. They don’t partake in any of our proceedings. Cats are busy posing for Instagram, while horses are neck-deep solving their identity crisis – were they once feral after all? And then the I – wherefore has it disappeared from the scheme of things? In which being does it reside at this moment? Its absence makes the document a satire in itself; a reason sufficient enough to justify General and be used for making vague references the way politicians do when they say people. From which the document never recovers; it becomes a white water rapid of absolute boulders and waterfall terms, in which each legal imperative is followed by yet another equally refined profundity; the language ceases to remain combustible. Like italicizing a full-stop, the effect remains nullified, though not by fact. |
*
