K for...

                                                 


Quietly he came and touched my shoulders when I was trying to find my way all by myself on a hot summer morning. First look at him and I found a friend. It is rather difficult to describe my relation with him but I can definitely say this much that we have always been in love.

I fell in love with him the day I took the train that took me away from home. He was waiting at the station. It was as if he was waiting there for me. Quietly we walked side by side without saying a word and the vastness of his being started engulfing me.

Man he had colours! Colours that I had never seen or ever even thought existed. I was perpetually awestruck. His shades mesmerized me. I could not believe that it was possible for some one to contain that much. The stories he had to tell, the scenes he had to show were beyond anything that I had ever known or imagined. He was larger than any form of life I ever thought was possible. There was nothing about him that I could ignore.

I used to stare at him while walking on the road or traveling by bus or just while sitting at my window. When he used to tell me his stories I listened with all the concentration in the world. The passion he had when he spoke about Independence and the student's movement of the seventies was more than anything that I had ever felt. The sadness in his eyes when he spoke about the people who stay on the road would tell me that he knew them from so close that at times it was difficult to understand that they were not the entirety of his being. He loved the buzzing noise of intellectual and pseudo-intellectual murmurs at the Coffee House and also the coziness of Cafe Coffee Day. He used to laugh at me when I cursed the rain and the water-logged roads. I used to laugh at him when he got stuck in a traffic jam. We cried together while sitting at the Park Street Cemetery on a lonely afternoon. Our first kiss was at Nandan on a stormy evening. The nights were always about open terrace and the city sky-line. Whenever I went home for holidays he used to come to the station to drop me off and stand there waving at me till I could hardly see him. Our conversations were weird. They always began with the meaningless frenzy of people trying to go from one place to the other. The mad rush of evening metros, the fight over an auto, the murderous buses and we used to laugh at the traffic police and abuse the government. But all of those always ended with my promise to come back to him wherever I might go.

One day we took a tram to the opposite direction, the other day we walked on road bare-foot. Another day we just sat at Esplanade talking about life and its idiosyncrasies. One day we also watched a movie at Nandan and took a walk from there to Elgin Road Crosswords. We watched theater on every other weekend. We never got tired to walk from St. Paul's Cathedral to the Race Course. The launch ride to Howrah station always had to be on a rainy day and our first visit to Princep Ghat awaits another day to complete the story. Everyday he used make me fall in love with him a little more. Even with the weird people he made me meet. The fights that I had because of him and the lovers I declined because of his jealousy never even for once made me doubt my love for him.

On the last day that I was with him it was raining again. When I looked at him I realized that he was sad but then I knew he will be fine and shall wait for me patiently till I came to him and we start our whirlwind love story once again. That day Kolkata made a promise to me too. He promised that whatever might happen he shall always make a place for me when I return and wait for me at the station just like the first day.


---------------------------------------------

Yes. Kolkata was never a graceful ageing lady for me. Kolkata was the tall young man with big eyes, in punjabi and jeans and chappals with a stubble. Oh a black leather-band wrist watch on his left arm and a weird sense of humour.

Journey

Travelling was never about reaching the destination.
It is about the journey.

It is about meeting new people.

                                                            Knowing them and their place.

Mixing with them and having fun their way.

Keeping them as memories.

Not knowing how to reach your destination.

                                                         Journey is about getting lost.

                                                            And then finding your way.

Journey is all about finding a place for yourself.

                                                 And again setting out to search for a new one.

photo courtesy: Vinayak Iyer Sambit Sukla                         

I

Believe me I tried but then I never understood you.

I tried from my point of view and then from others.

Yet you always seemed inappropriate. 

I tried to ignore you but then again I failed. 

Finally one day I stopped questioning.

Stopped wondering why do you like moths better than butterflies

And why you forget faces but remember the shadows.

Accepted you with your wide open eyes which saw nothing. 

Only I don't tell anybody that I know you.

Dear I, you never fail to amaze me.

Home

                                                 



It came up as a sudden realization on that first day when I was going off to stay in Kolkata. As I walked out of the gate of the house that has been my home for the last 17 years I realized it was more than a building. It was the place I first laughed, got scolded and cried, brought back my first report card and prepared for my first dance performance. The walls of that house were my first canvas. The lawn my first playground. It was the place where I fell down from a tree and broke my arm and brought back my first pet. Learnt cycling and sang the first song. It was the place where I made memories for the first time and learnt to preserve them in  nooks and corners that went unnoticed by everybody other than me.

                                   
                                       

When you walk into my house through the gate the first thing you would come across is the garden. I remember my evenings passed by watering the plants with my father. Clipping the dead leaves, trimming the shrubs and then just looking at them till it would grow dark and then, us gardeners would go inside the house for the evening tea.

                                      

Upon entering the house if you are observant enough you would know that it has too many doors. Every room has been given a door wherever possible and at times impossible. There were few doors which were never opened because having them there made no sense. The windows were not very big and that is one thing I hated about the house. Though our house was a quarter that looks exactly like the rest of them in the row but we had special parts. We had two small storerooms in our house. Now the storerooms could have been filled up with furniture or boxes or whatever but as luck would have it they were filled with books.


                                       

Ancient looking books, not so old books, almost new books, brand new books--- name it and it's there. Every year during summer vacations we used to bring out all the books from the shelves and the cupboards and put them in the sun to rid them of insects. Each one tends to his or her own books and Ma always had the most number of books and ended up asking me for help. She had books like Communist Manifesto, Crime and Punishment, Franz Kafka, Jean Paul Sartre, Leo Tolstoy Short stories collection, Poems by Mao Zedong and what not! Uncountable number of bengali poetry books. Name the poet and she has his collection. Rabindranath Tagore, Shakti Chattopadhyay, Sunil Ganguly, Jibananda Das, Krishna Bosu, Binay  Mojumdar, Shankho Ghosh, Joy Goswami, Kazi Nojrul Islam, Sukumar Ray, Nabonita Debsen and many many more. I used to wonder how could she have read all this till I found out that she has read all her books, all of Baba's and then of mine and much more than that.


                                                     

Many of my friends are of the opinion that I get attached to people very fast. Well that's not entirely true but then to tell the truth I like people in general. I have been brought up that way. Though practically speaking our family was pretty small but our house never had less than six to seven people living with us. First there was Babai who apparently was not my father's real brother which I came to know after Babai passed away when I was in class-III. They were just friends. My parents not even for once thought that it was important for me to know that what exactly is my relation or their relation with this man and trust me it wasn’t important at all. That man was nothing less of a father to me. He was the reason I never got to complain about not being able to play with my father or run around with him or fight with him because even though Baba would just stand at the door and watch me and Babai having a pillow fight or me dangling from Babai’s biceps, I never felt that it isn’t normal.

                                               

Then there was Gopal. She came to our house as my governess and became family. She came to look after me when I was 6 months old and even a day before she died I had heard her telling my friends about how I would not leave her on the first day itself. I was her child in the truest sense of the term. She looked after me all day. She knew what I ate, how much I ate, when I felt sleepy or when I would fall sick. She could take me in her lap and tell how much I weighed. I could not sleep without her. I could not eat anything but the food cooked by her and at a point of time I knew nothing other than her. She had two daughters and was abandoned by her husband when the younger one was a month old. She came to India from Bangladesh to look for her husband and as she did not have a passport never could go back. May be it was her who taught me that giving up is never an option. I remember it was my class-II annual exam and Ma got pox all of a sudden. Baba had to shift to my grandparent's place because he was a transplant patient and any sort of infection could be fatal to him. There was nobody to teach me right before my exams. That lady who had gotten married at the age of 13 and could just barely read and write taught me. After doing the household chores and taking care of my mother she would actually sit down in the evening with me, study the stuff herself and then teach me. She would go to Ma and learn the English words from her so that she can teach me. The night before I went to write my test she had told me “If you don’t do well everybody will call me illiterate.” I did well. I had to. She passed away when I was in my final year school. She passed away in our house. For the first time after that, I realized that she was the most important person in my life for all practical purpose because without her I did not even know what to eat and how much to eat.

                                                 
                                                

My parents were teachers and so was Babai. They used to give out tuition classes till the government made it illegal for professional teachers to give out such classes. My mother had three batches of more than 50 students a day. They were all my brothers and sisters. I played with them, fought with them and not even for once did I feel that they are just my parents’ students. Carom was a big issue in our family. Not just Baba but maternal uncle and cousins all were carom freaks. We had a huge carom board in our house which was always set. Nobody ever took it down the table. Anybody passing the drawing room can try a hit and a game can start off any moment. The students were mad about carom as well. Every day morning going to school was war! Us against Ma! Her last batch ended at 9a.m and then would start the carom marathon. First it would be Baba and some students. Ma would come and take him away by the collar so that he can also get ready for school. Then it would be me. I was so small that I could not even see the board properly just by standing so used to stand on a chair to take my shots. Ma would again come and pull away the half-dressed me and shout and curse her students who were also getting late for their school and after a while inevitably my frustrated mother while criticizing some badly taken shot would sit down to play herself. The mornings, my evenings, my nights were always filled with events.

                                        

We used to celebrate everything. Republic Day, Netaji’s birthday, Gandhi jayanti, Christmas, Diwali, Durgapuja, Rabindra Jayanti, Football world Cup--- everything. My cousins used to visit very often and so would Ma’s friends. Every weekend was some special occasion and if nothing good enough was happening we would hire a VCR and watch movies the whole day or call over some friends or faily and have cultural sessions where people would read, recite, sing and even at times if Baba allowed liquor in the house, dance. There couldnot be a day that would go wasted. You have to enjoy every day. Every moment. It has to be significant and productive and most importantly memorable.

However with all this nostalgic reminiscence I still believe home is where you make memories and family is the people you make them with. Just that much.

                                   
                                        

Growing up

It is one of the worst things that happens to human beings.It does not benefit the human race in any good way that I can think of. Just makes them a hell lot complicated and confused.

The first thing that growing up does is make one conscious. You become conscious about everything. The way you talk, the way you walk,the way you behave and even freaking about the way you look! I mean seriously, that is not even in our hands. What the hell would you do being conscious about something that you are not responsible for? If you don't have sharp features (like I don't) what exactly are you supposed to do about it? You are made that way for God's sake!

You also become conscious about what other people think about you. Well the fact is they can not possibly think anything good about you because sadly they are also grown ups. They doubt you. They doubt your actions and your intentions because growing up has also taught them not to trust anybody as it has taught you not to speak your mind.

You lose your sense of humour. Anybody cracks a joke and you would start sniffing for a hint of insult. You can not laugh out loud either. Every time you would feel like laughing out loud in a restaurant the fact that some stupid grown up, who has lost all energy to laugh in the process of frowning at others, might frown at you too would stop you.

You don't understand passion anymore, neither do promises mean anything to you. All you can do is crib and cry and then cry and crib a bit more. You expect a lot out of everybody even when you know that expecting is not the way relations work. And the worst part is that you know you are the one ruining it for yourself.

It's also sort of sad to grow up. You don't have anybody to blame anymore. Everything is your responsibility now. Even your heart breaks and feeling lonely. You can't go and cry with people because they expect you to behave like a grown up. Anything remotely close to a confession might end up sounding like cheesy dialogues from some crappy Hindi movie and trust me only grown ups know what's cheesy because they can't believe that a word can actually be spoken out of true emotions.

So finally what I am trying to say is that stop growing up till you can help it because after a point it'll get the better out of you.


                                       


p.s: And you need not feel guilty about not growing up. It has never served any great purpose. 

Falling out of Love

Enough about falling in love.Let's talk about falling out of it.

(Oh my God it's a bad feeling!)

I am already out of it. I don't know how to come straight about it and I feel guilty for falling out of love. But then again I can't possibly accept that to the other person who still thinks that everything is fine and we are still the couple that the world and the mother of it envies. I walk around with a burdened soul and start throwing tantrums about the smallest things. Things about him or her that were cute at a point of time now are irritating. I don't understand calling up every day or texting every hour. I don't understand the dependency anymore too. Gradually I start to rationalize my change in my mind ('getting a job has made me realize how tough life is and I can't be dependent on anybody.) I keep on telling myself  'It's ok. It happens all the time. People fall out of love. It's no big deal.( Basically I don't know 'cause I am not the one getting dumped!)

 And then finally one day the other person realizes that there is something majorly wrong. At first I deny a confrontation and then one day I burst. I tell them how it has not been working out for all this while, how I have been feeling that there is no point dragging the relationship as it will turn bitter (as if it will remain very sweet otherwise), how I feel that things have changed between the two of us.

The other person will be lost. The first thing that will come to their mind is 'When the hell did all this happen?'. The next thing very commonly happens to be 'There must be someone else'. They just don't seem to get the point that one can fall out of love even without falling in love with somebody else.Lot of questioning and having no proper answer for a while.

And then finally the leech would let go and for the rest of his or her miserable life keep on asking the same stupid question over and over again to somebody or the other or just to themselves--- 'What did I do?'

Well the point is they did not do anything.

It's just that I am too much of a sissy to stay with you because deep inside I know that I am not good enough.

                                             

                                             

Effort

How would you define effort?

Is it how you try and please your boss? Is it how you make your girl friend happy? Or is it how you maintain a good relation with your boy friend’s mother? You put in a lot of effort to buy them gifts, make them feel special or just keep them from firing you. That is usually how we see effort. Everything that we do to keep our world in place and may be add a few more lights to it.

These however are not really efforts. Sorry but these are your needs. You need them and thus you are putting in a little bit extra work to make things right for your own self and keep them that way. When you work an extra hour at office you are not making an effort. You are just making sure that you boss stays happy with you. You pay that extra buck for the perfect gift for your girl friend and you make sure that she loves you for that. You are again not making an effort.

Effort happens when you go out of your way to do something for somebody whom you don’t want anything from. Effort is that desire you have to see somebody not even remotely related to you in anyway having a good life. The kind of life you would want to have. Sadly it is a desire many of us have but very... very few of us actually manage to act upon.  However the ones who do are the real people making an effort.

These are the people who after working the whole day, fight their way through the worst traffic jams to go and teach a few kids so that they have a bit of what they actually deserve. These people also spend nights staying up till late after slogging off at office, working on magazines that do not fetch them money or even recognition. They do it just to help a cause. They go off to the remotest parts of the country for months to work. They find out more about such other people who are out there making an effort to change what is given. To do something about the wrongs those are there in the society, in us.  The things that are talked about but not worked upon. They do all this even when the NEED not have done it. Because the rest of them don’t. People talk about illiteracy but they do not do anything to make the children understand the importance of education or make it interesting to them or to empower them in any way so that they can grow up to become earning individuals. They talk about health conditions in rural areas but they do not actually do anything about it. Read the newspaper, draw a frown on the face, blame it on the government and then say ‘the NGOs are just making money for themselves’ but never go out and actually find out about the real scenario.

Good news is that we have a few exceptions who know that efforts are made when you don’t gain anything out of your work. You just grow by it.

                                                  

Done

Yes.

I am finally done with setting up the new and more legible look for my blog.

Fortunately I am suffering from a very delayed bout of fever. Two months away from home and I had not got one chance to lie down and boss around people without any guilt pangs. And as I am legally allowed to do all that now I took some time out and re-did my blog. Lots of time it takes mind you. Hopefully there won't be any more complains about how illegible my blog is and thus no avoiding reading my posts.

Happy reading.

                                                           

Cacophony

The Planet never stopped spinning and midst of all that, they tried their hands at what they called Creativity. The world saw it as Cacophony.

                                                   


                                                        

Bangla

"There she goes again!"

If that is what you think just move on to something else because right now I am going to rant my heart out. I am going to write and write and shamelessly express how much of a clannist I am. I am going to tell you how  good I feel to be a bengali and how much of self inflicted pain I am in when I have left my home.

I am going to rant about how miserable I feel when I have to say that there is nothing left in Bengal. How terrible it feels to think that going back home, to Kolkata might just as well mean not being able to live my dreams. I am going to rant about all of that.   

Having lived in Bengal for the good 20 years of my life I have learned to believe that I am blessed with a culture that is rich and dynamic. I have been customized to a mind set where my support for communism is independent of my vote for the Left Front. I am inherently political and eternally cultural. 

I am. I can not help it.

I can not help but boast of the fact that the leading poet of our country Gulzar Saab says that he married a bengali so that he could learn the language. I can not help but feel privileged that I can choose not to read anything in any other language than bengali and still not be able to read everything even if I read all my life. Tell me how do I suppress my happiness when I find out that without even having to look for them I have a collection of two thousand brilliant songs to refer to at every moment I need. I can not stop feeling that rising enthusiasm in me when I read the poetry of a young bengali poet who writes not because he wants to become a poet but because he feels that is the way to express.

Yeah yeah! You have heard all this before. And that is the best part because I share this feeling with most of the bengalis out there.

So what if we are lazy asses? So what if it took us 35 long years to realize that something is wrong with our government? So what if even after knowing that the new government is as bad or worse we will keep on saying 'Its just her second year in power.'? So what if we are ready to give another 35 years for her to cause some more damage? We still have a Binayak Sen.

We are a race where we love to live by examples. One Rabindranath Tagore and the entire community turned poet. One Sourav Ganguly and one can find cricket coaching camps right left and center. One Sushmita Sen and the all bengali ladies are beauty queens even without trying.

We love noodles and rock music but trust me at the end of the day we all are more than proud that wherever we go, to any part of the country or the world we shall always find a 'bong' too happy to discuss the latest Rituparno film.

p.s: This post is not intended to hurt any sentiments of any other culture or race. Its just that I am too much of a bengali. :D


                                     


                                    

And then again

Tell me that you love me.
Tell me because nothing in this world sounds more beautiful.
Nothing is so heartlessly painful.
Tell me because you want to say it.
Because I want to hear.
Tell me because you mean it.
Right from the bottom of your heart.
Tell me as I have known and felt
The utter meaninglessness of the phrase.
Tell me because nothing makes me feel more alive.
With the deaths and decay,
The coffins and the pyres
That are buried and are lit,
Every single day
I feel it was us.
Tell me because I know there is not a thing
That you can do to show me
How much exactly would your love measure up to.
Tell me because i won't doubt you.
Because I'll listen to you and rest in peace.
Tell me because I love you
More than I have ever expressed
Or you have ever felt.

and the things i love...

 and now i shall speak about the things i love...

i love these yellow flowers...they brought colours to my life...colours so vibrant that everytime i close my eyes those colours come rushing to me and a smile...a very pained and forced smile. :)

i love this station...its a lonely little station ignored by most of the important and many unimportant trains in its line...but i love the station...it is one of the very few stations that gives me a destination...brings me to peace and tells me that i am home.

i love this school...i'l tell you why...the first day that i stepped in here i felt a sense of belonging...though i ma not a student...not even remotely related to this school but somehow this school makes me feel proud...very proud...though i never stood first in class here..but whoever did i am more than proud of them.

i love this duck...i love it becauseits a duck...because it quacks and walks around and swims and lives...i love it because it exists..

i love this butterfly and the flower behind it...they are helping each other...i love the way they look...and i love the fact that they dont care that i love them

i love this scene...its been there even before i existed and it exists without me...i love it as it makes me feel so redundant

i love this picture...see the contrast...i love the contrast in the foreground and the background


                                     

i love these people...they are the most hardworking and sincere lot of young men i know.

and i also love you...because among all the things that dont wait for me to love them but still are extremely important for me you definitely are a part of those few.