Apology

Initially you'll be angry and may even start despising me, then you'll start wondering WHY, and then if you had known me better you'll understand and gradually everything will just fade away.


I can only say SORRY at this moment and if possible bear with me.

Sunset

Few days back I had an evening flight from Chennai to Kolkatta. It was a clear day and when the flight took off the sun was going down. I had a window seat and had a clear view of the beautiful expanse spread out over the horizon. The sky is big, infinite, but once up there, it's almost like it can be touched; maybe if we walk long enough we'll reach the other end.

The sky had worn a pale turquoise gown splashed with white, spreading itself over the velvety-indigo waters of Indian Ocean. The smoky, ethereal clouds were just sailing smoothly, suspended in the beauty of the dusk. It was like looking at a vast field of cotton-soft snow sprayed out like surfs on wave. The Sun was an orange ball slowly sliding down behind the cover of clouds, adding a purple-orange hue to their snow-white complexion. It looked like a patch of the sky was smoldering among that vast serenity. The rapid change of colors was so brilliant that I was mesmerized by it all. It was the canvass of a brilliant, eccentric artist who was just splashing the fabric with a riot of colors. The blue was dripping into the golden-orange, spread over a dash of white. The hypnotizing watercolors were mixing up creating one masterpiece after another. After a while it settled down and the horizon lit up with a orange-red glow as if set on fire. I couldn't take my eyes off that infinity of space and water which was clearly separated in two halves by a boundary of smoldering embers.

Gradually the display of colors mellowed and soon everything was covered in a luminous coat of black starry night. It was almost time to land and as the flight was cruising down, the city beneath us looked like a field of brilliantly sparkling diamonds; the ground was scattered with jewels, shining and shimmering. It was the befitting climax to the perfect sunset. Within a few moments the flight touched down into reality.

RED

I have to admit that I'm cursed with a very volatile temper, which just starts boiling at the slightest provocation. My old man always say "People get angry only when they are deprived of what they want". There can't be any simpler explanation for our anger. But this anger has become a necessity in the "Country of NO" , where being angry gives you an upper-hand when it comes to face the ire of a mob who's tired and frustrated of fighting a losing battle against the everyday social evils. Somehow it just gives you the jagged edge of a popular "YOUNG ANGRY MAN" image.


Often the discontent just seethes below the surface just waiting to erupt into a rage. The outbursts maybe far and in-between, but when it does, there's no holding back to the monster let loose on a rampage. It just destroys everything that comes its way. It seems like a crimson haze has veiled the vision and the only way out is to resort to a violent outburst. Its just so scary when you think of it on the hindsight. But like a bullet fired, we can only helplessly regret our actions once done.


Its been a long and arduous struggle to control the beast within. Wise men say that if you can control and cultivate your anger then there's no weapon more powerful than a calm man's wrath.

With crossed fingers...

The greatest bane of growing up maybe the loss of innocence. The innocence of fighting with friends, always having the assurance that we can always patch up. Times have changed and so have the ways to deal with friends. Now we always have to stay on our guard, to be politically correct, to be diplomatic in dealing with raw emotions. The spontaneity and exuberance has given way to plastic formalities. Our egos have grown up to be such monsters who can maim or even kill the friendship of which people used to give examples, which were like prized possessions, dearer and closer than even the ties-of-blood. Even when we realize that so much is at stake, so much to be lost, even then, we are paralyzed by our pride to react, to reach out to cling to the last straw which might save us from drowning in the abyss of distrust. Friendship is that diamond which can withstand the hardest of blows, still sparkling brilliantly in the rays of trust, but which can kill if you try to swallow it rather than your vanity. Trust, loyalty, understanding and integrity are the four pillars which support friendship, even if one them fall, the other columns supporting the edifice comes crashing down.

Everybody comes to their crossroads in life where they can take the easy way out or stick to the hard path.

It's never easy to choose but we should decide wisely, with our heart.

The glowing tip.

How many times do we take time to appreciate the beauty of a glowing cigarette. Mostly we are too involved to even notice the brilliant glow of it. Before we lit, it's just another tobacco wrapped white paper with a speckled yellow filter at one end. But as soon as we lit it, it evolves into something which shouldn't go unnoticed. And here I should point out that serious smokers take a lot of care while lighting one, the way they hold it, particularly not to sooten the stick. Once lit the glowing ember is hypnotizing. The serpentine smoke slowly rising, parts reluctantly, leaving it's memoirs of ashes. Soon the tip is burdened with it's ashes and the luminance starts getting obscured. Then we jerk off the ash and give a drag, rejuvenating and revealing the glory of the tip, the smoky blue stream waving and swaying with the air. When the air is absolutely still and we hold the cigarette with a steady hand, the smoke will rise vertically, dignified to some distance before changing it's mind and starts flirting with the air. It's really amazing to see how the insignificant stick burns out with grace. We should really respect the fire at the tip of our fingers and stub it, not throwing it away carelessly to perish unnoticed, certainly our fag deserves this much attention.

Adieus to you my friend, my companion.


P.S. IRRESPECTIVE OF YOUR SUNSIGN SMOKING WILL EVENTUALLY TURN YOUR ZODIAC INTO A CRAB.

Puja of '08...

It's Autumn and for us Bengalis that translates to a season of festivities with the grandest of them all, Durga Puja. It's been two long years since I last celebrated my Puja at home. I'm an aethist, and so the religious part hardly holds anything for me. It's really the congregation of friends, the contagious smile on everybody's face, the warmth in greeting strangers, the nip in the air, the sound of "Dhaak", which allures me to be a part of the celebration. Even here in Chennai, a few Puja's are there, but it's very nuclear and lacks that general exuberance and genial atmosphere. So I prefer to stay away from them.


I have grown up counting the days for the Puja's. It always used to be the time for the month-long school holidays, the time for getting a lot of dresses and gifts, the time to start bursting crackers, happy times with uninhibited freedom to stay out with friends. I grew up with these anticipations for the whole year until it culminated into those 4 days of pure euphoria. And even before I had time to savor it all, another long wait used to shake me up from my elation. I didn't mind, eagerly waiting for next year while reminiscing the last year. But now times has changed and the uncertainty of the hiatus perplexes me.


The time since I came here, I have felt a general lack of enthusiasm among the people during the festive seasons. Personally I feel that people in the rest of the country share a greater feeling of camaraderie and celebrate with greater fervor and excitement. Maybe this fact along with the knowledge that all my closest friends are having a blast together back home, is acting as an anticatalyst for me this festive season. The days which would have been charged with energy are passing by blandly. But there is always a next time and even before the Puja's are over I'm eagerly waiting for the next Autumn, full of colors and fireworks.


WISH EVERYBODY THE BEST OF TIMES THIS FESTIVE SEASON.:-)

The namesake

When I was a young kid, I remember calling an ancient lady as "Mahabharata" because every few alternate days she used to come to our house at dusk and then read out verses from the Mahabharata and explain the stories to me and my elder brothers. She normally used to come in the late afternoons and chat with my grandma, mother and my aunt about the going-ons under the different roofs which she used to visit, just like ours. Once she was done with her renditions and comments on the worldly issues, she would take out the old, dilapidated thick volume of the Epic from the room where our family deities were kept and worshiped. The thick volume, I vaguely remember now, used to be covered in a maroony, moth eaten velvet cloth which might have been red when it was first wrapped around the book. Then she used to place the volume of text on an X-shaped wooden cross, and carefully unwrap and open the book to the page where she had taken her break last time. I don't remember to have seen her ever starting from the first few pages and my memory tells me I never saw her finishing the last pages. It almost always used to be the three-quarter of that thick volume where she started. The bounded volume was in itself a testimony of the times and generations of readers who have gone through it's sheets of wisdom and tales, and in the process had gained an ivory tint and tunnels for bookworms. I lifted it occasionally and it took a real strain on my back to do so.


So by the time the dusk set in, and our mom,aunt and grandma had finished the evening Puja, me and my two cousins were all huddled up to listen to that day's tales. Even the ladies joined us and then "Mahabharata" with her wrinkled face and strained vision started reciting from her namesake. It was a shrill voice but which was equally apt at describing the modern tales of common households as well as the ancient tales of valor and betrayal, the myths of lords and larger-than-life humans. She used to chant the Sanskrit verses and then after every few lines explain it in vernacular. Many a days, the power would go out and we'll be sitting around a kerosene lamp with shadows playing with the mythical characters which seemed to come alive with "Mahabharata's" hypnotizing portrayals. And soon she would finish yet another episode of magnificent fable, leaving footprints on our impressionable minds.


I don't remember when she stopped visiting our house, which was such a gradual process that by the time I really noticed it, I had grown up for B.R. Chopra's epic TV serial. In all those years I never really got to know her name, certainly she had an existence beyond the gossip circles and the Epic but for me she'll always be the lady who illustrated the mythology in all it's grandiosity and detail.

A session of boredom...

Following the tradition of torturing the students to mental-numbness by the boring lectures and the extremely uninspiring academic sessions, our Dept. arranged for a seminar by a certain Indian professor settled in Australia. Although not totally skeptical, still I have certain reservations in accepting that this chap will fly all the way to deliver lecture to a bunch of intellectually retards. I don't know the specifics of how the authorities managed to rope him in, my best bet lies on that, he might be on a vacation here and grabbing this opportunity somebody from our College requested him to do the honours of paralyzing the hapless students minds for a couple of hours, as if the contribution by our esteemed faculty to this effect were not enough.


Thus after writing a test and hoping for some relief, we were lured into this trap of a seminar, in the name of attendance and getting to interact with a supposedly academic figure. As it soon turned out, we were boxed with a huge bore whose supremely entertaining idea of the seminar was to present us with some lame Powerpoint presentations. Within half an hour all the students were dozing off to his monotonous lullaby of a lecture. But definitely they couldn't afford to sleep it off, what with HOD and all the staff fixing their hawk-eyed gaze on all of us. We were given an hour's break for lunch and told to return to attend the afternoon session, or else forget the whole day's attendance. As most of us are totally attendance-starved, so we returned back with full tummies and eyes loaded with sleep.


The farce of a lecture started again and that Australian-imported-incredible-bore again started off with his perpetual grin. I was wondering throughout the whole session what he was grinning at? Maybe at the thought of getting so many scapegoats for audience who wouldn't buzz even when subjected to such lengths of inhuman test of patience, which I'm pretty sure all his Aussie students avoided, even if that meant chopping of their limbs.


The seemingly infinite session finally came to an end and everybody started clapping out of relief, at the thought of finally getting out of the same room, shared by one of the most intellectually-pathetically-bored person we ever came across. And thus ended our excruciatingly paralysing tryst with the Australian-imported-boring-specimen of a lecturer. Hope we never cross each other's roads again. PHEW.....

Suffering from Blogger's Block, that sounds like mutilating a phrase to it's corpse, but that's how it's going on for the last one month. Hope to get well soon.

yraiD

The title is the mirror image of "Diary", though not exactly, but the reason I spelt it reverse will be clear soon. This post is for those of you who maintain a diary, others can also go through it but it'll be a little dull for them. Many of us maintain a diary in some form or the other which means "a daily record, usually private, esp. of the writer's own experiences, observations, feelings, attitudes, etc". Some do the chronicling in hardbound executive diaries while others may opt for a more casual notebook kind of approach. But its really not the package but the content in it that really matters. Now I for one happen to keep a diary, which I can't really attend to regularly, rather I return to it occasionally. Now it so happened that the other day I was organizing all my books and among them found my last year's diary. I skimmed through the pages and felt like I was reading a page from somebody else's. I started recollecting the events which I had almost forgotten but happened only a few months ago. Then in a certain section I was a bit pensive when going through a particularly emotional phase. Then a pang of disappointment hit me when I realised that I have looked over so many things that I had promised to do last year. Then I stumbled upon a few nice days where I was having great fun which uplifted the gloominess.

It really felt a bit nostalgic and quaint revisiting the days gone by. Do you guys go through your old diaries? If not then do it and when you open it, go to a random page and start reading it. It just feels like being transported in a time machine, the difference being that we know what's in store for us. Still it refreshes the old memories, some trivial events which might have felt so consequential at that time but so insignificant now, the broken promises and the abandoned hopes, the achievements and the pleasures, all come rushing back. Visiting old memory lanes, I wonder what it'll be like when I'll reread the same pages maybe after another thirty odd years.