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Rex G Kinder (Rednik)
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Category:
Biography
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services LLC
ISBN-10: 1877059382
Type: Fiction
Pages: 165
Copyright: June 1, 2003
ISBN-13: 9781877059384
Price: $8.00 (eBook)
Apart from frequent mention of aeroplanes and airlines, "The Warp" is a collection of eclectic short stories.
It deals with emotions, humour, bad taste, stupidity, grief, flashes of brilliance, and horror; just some of life's interesting things. The author sees them all like the threads in a tapestry, while the people comprise "The Warp". The writer's chance has been to meet a lot of wild people, mostly involved, in development assistance in developing and transitional countries. We read of Remulas, a PNG Renaissance man; Chingai the disturbed and accommodating woman of Mindoro; Pete the dispossessed engineer from Zimbabwe; Gopal the good Brahman of Imphal; and Aziz and Francoise as they travel in Tajikistan and Afghanistan. Our writer's chance also has been to correspond with an unusual Dane. They have not met, but co-wrote three of the stories. "The Warp" will make you laugh and question why you are doing so. It has no contents page, and should be read from the front to the back. The last chapter is an essay rather than a story. It discusses the events in New York in 2002 in a way that will make you think, or even get angry with the author. But then that’s life!
Contact Rednik for paperback copies (rednik.rcspl.com.au $10.00 + postage).
Excerpt
The Warp
To warp: arrange strands of yarn or thread so that they run lengthwise in an ordered way. Oh that people could do that! People are unmanageable, but a person may be very smart. Each one of us succeeds or doesn’t. Who is to blame? Whose decision is it to stay, go, vacillate, procrastinate, act, make love, hate or take their life? My peers have done them all and more. They are the Warp, the life, the death, but not the hereafter.
Who said this? Rednik.
Always, when one job starts to run out, I begin to look for the next iteration. As a freelance consultant, it doesn’t matter in what, I remain at the mercy of the market and its perceptions of my value and competence, and hope that the airlines will get me where I need to go.
Often people have said to me, “You’re so lucky. You travel, live in exotic places, and have experiences that ordinary people only dream about.”
I admit that the life of a jet-setting consultant sounds wholly attractive, but it has its drawbacks too, just like all jobs do. People in my field find that many of the locations in which they and their colleagues work are isolated and inherently insecure because insurgency, civil insurrection, more recently terrorism and lawlessness are not uncommon in such places. Health conditions can also be difficult and travel time, and circumstances generally, are pretty arduous. We can find ourselves over a few days or a couple of weeks, in the steaming tropics, hot dry desserts, sub-tropical and temperate areas, or freezing our balls or little girls off, or whatever, in the middle of winter at high latitudes. I mention these things because many people think that the work is glamorous and exciting. This is not so, although it is very interesting. When it gets exciting it can get dangerous. Have you ever flown in a Tupolev or a Yakolev? These days even a Boeing can be a bit suspect.
I wind up in these places because developing Nations and those in socio-economic transition require assistance. For some reason or other I ended up doing this sort of thing. Sometimes consultants are not very welcome in countries achieving slippage in their development. If you were a bureaucrat within your public sector, and some Waller came along and said, “This needs improving.” What would you say? Most probably it would be some.thing impolite.
A colleague of mine once, in a country somewhere in South-East Asia, said to me, “We wouldn’t bloody well be here if every bloody thing was bloody perfect!” And he was right, but probably he was not correct. Practising within the profession is not straight forward, is not always suave, and it definitely isn’t easy. In a cross-cultural environment consultants need to be more than sensitive to a host’s cultural and societal mores; they also must be competent to work in that culture or society.
So, invariably my sensitive reply to those acquaintances’ observations on my good fortune is something like,“Bullshit! There’s no bloody luck in it. There’s only study, hard work, application, risk and more hard work. After that, you have to keep up to date on what is happening in your fi eld.”
A certain amount of opportunism and good karma should not be avoided or under-estimated. Opportunism is a disease to catch, incubate, and allow to flourish. In the end though, it’s up to the individual. In this case it’s me, and sometimes that’s lonely. I’m accountable, you see. Are you?
The other matter I should clear up is that in comparing myself to others, I am comparing mainly my lifestyle with that of the average suburbanite. You know, how most of our friends from school end up; spouse, children, large hairy dog, triple-fronted brick veneer house, ludicrous mortgage, Volvo station wagon, club on Saturday, footy on Sunday, heart attack at forty-eight.
Now that you have labelled me an arrogant, egotistical opportunist, and maybe an S.O.B., I will tell you some tales, and I suppose that’s what they are, tales. But it is the people, not each occurrence, that make them worth telling; like when a priest, a rabbi and a consultant were travelling on an aeroplane. There was a crisis and it was clear that the plane was going to crash and they all would be killed. The priest began to pray and finger his rosary beads, and the rabbi began to read the Torah. The consultant began to organise a committee on air traffic safety.
I see the happenings like the threads in a tapestry and the people are the Warp. They hold it all together, sometimes tightly, neatly and with the organisation of recognisable patterns. More often than not, the Warp varies in tension and the threads change direction, and follow the roads of chance. Is there really a butterfly in China?
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