Catharsis

Of yore and fore I write hence...

I am constantly amazed by the ostentatious diligence with which stubborn change proves its permanence. Gliding through things I never thought I could manage to pass, I am left wondering how much more could I, would I change. I wonder if I may enumerate all that I scrambled, stumbled up on, volatile it may be.
I have confused all desires with needs, the desire of a confidant tangled with the need of an anchor.
Recently, I was "celebrating" a weekend, the "weekend" way. High and not dry I watched Dev D, the epic of eternal love of the quintessential bacchanalian at heart, tempered with optimism. Dev, the lover, the protagonist, the antagonist, the loser does not die bleeding at his lover's door in this novel rendition of the story of love and punishment that I grew up to idolize. The idea is not to punish unrequited love, but to question why love went unrequited in the first place. We have all loved and lost at some point in life, not necessarily a love of romantic kind.
My mother, who happened to watch Dev D the very night I did in a humongous drunken revelry, called me the next day to restate to me the newly fangled idea of "optimism". Climax! My heart does not really go out for Dev, it cries for Paro, the other lover, the other protagonist, the other antagonist, the other loser. The egotists cry in their own names, sing in their pain and throw complicated nonsense in the name of family, society, onlookers. Paro gets to nowhere, to a marriage which cannot be consummated, step-children almost her own age and ofcourse she has to tear her heart with the thoughts of decadence of Dev.
My thoughts have no Chandramukhi, for I know not her, neither do I know if she walks in beauty and talks in sugar. But I want not Dev D, if Paro must cry, so will have to Chandramukhi and not bag Dev, the lover, the loser.

Played ambiguosly by "हसरतों की दिल्लगी " (Farce of Desires) my heart says to
You, I wish I could say 'rot in hell', but then I wrote your name in sand and let the waves wash it away;
To the other You: The piper plays.

Nothingness

If only it matched a little less, only if it met a little more.
If only you could say yes, only if I never had said no.
If only I could sing in tune, only if you thrashed no words.
If only nights weren't awake, only if you nudged all morns.
If only, only if.

Thanking You, Sincerely

No, the last post is real rubbish. Tonight I am supposed to be sleeping, because I have a class to attend tomorrow, and attending classes is something I have not done in a long long time. But when did I say that I would do things that are expected from me.
So, what am I doing at 0254 hours? I am scrambling through my collection of hindi music, struggling to identify my mood, besides constantly refreshing facebook pages. Lame.

I had a bad dinner with a close friend, someone with whom I rarely agree, but it was a pain today. Suddenly, I realize that everything in life is falling apart. I want a new life, with new people, people who do not know me, and do not claim to know me.
I had the strangest of chats today. Somebody slyly prodding me, teasing me, tantalizing me to give relationship advice. Me? Am I not the one who broke every nice thing with my very own hands? When I was young we had a home-science class at school. It was the only class where I could lay prostrate on the floor and look at the ceiling while my friends painted, concocted snacks, stitched and made merry. I never did homework at school, I never had a classwork copy, I mostly never had pencils with me. My bag used to be as full of rubbish paper then as it is now. So, home-science.
I did sometimes stitch (there is this card holder at home where your wedding card will rest), and I painted sometimes (that nib painting I did and re-did and re-re-did over weeks) and that tiny glass painting, I over painted. Ma, you had given me a strong chiding that evening about how I made something beautiful, and then re-touched and revamped it so many times that it was finally rendered ugly. Could you, at least, not have said it so bluntly? It stares me back in the face today.
But then there is this utterly silly habit of washing away everything with tears. Lame, again.

Oh so coming back to the present, I am still struggling to find the right song for tonight. And here is the battle in my mind about everything. Micro-voltmeter, Nano, CPM, India, Obama, film music, proverbs, Dirty Dancing, you, cetzine. And then I want to scream out. No I am not crazy. I am but a little sane. With that drop of sanity I am trying to drive forward, counting days, finishing one job after the other.
Yes, you were right, some things are certain. Like I will have my exams on so-and-so dates, I will graduate, I will have a career, I will get married, I will try to have a family, I will make them grow as sane as I am. I will get tired. Finally, I am an orthodox old-fashioned croon. I fight for equality, but never flinch from becoming a dying word. I quarrel for my rights only to give them up for the ones I want permanently in life.
I could never earn my living by writing, because I cannot write for a deadline, for someone who will throw my words down the basket, for someone who is pocket-pinching. But I also cannot reconstruct formulae and fabricate strange theories of nature.
Where I am today, I long for a vacation down Seyechelles, on the reclining chairs with an umbrella-adorned cocktail, and somebody paying the bills. No I do not want to earn myself a richer life, I want someone to do it for me. Too much to ask for?
I want to practice dancing, learn Bharathnatyam, learn French properly, write short-stories, try world-cuisine, stare at the ceiling, advice people, gossip and travel, while he earns it all for me.
Somewhere in the streets of Oxford are candlesticks I fancied, and in Paris a pair of rings I can only dream of.
Platinum, round and shiny.
You.
Some things are certain.
Others are just illusions.

Forever

When you said "somethings are certain", I believed. Now I know nothing is certain. The sun may not rise tomorrow, gravity could just stop working, flame may not attract moths ever again. Nothing is certain.

The universe changes, the only constant is me. I wish you were there waiting at the other shore, like ever before.
How I wish, how I wish you were there.

Yellow brown leaves

Now this is called autumn. An autumn that sees tans and spates in the eye. For a heretic hermit that I am, it is an utter pain-in-the-you-know-where to pore into texts and have nightmares guised in blazers. And so to anoint the pain, I embarked on a crash course of F.R.I.E.N.D.S.
The show is miraculous (not that I am the newest addition to the already bursting sack of American Television enthusiasts, but it made me think in an antithesis of maudlin characteristics that I posses).
It is magical how none of them are, as Obelix would say, "well covered". Though Chandler vacillates between bloating up and shrinking down, every 10 episodes...and this isn't the primary objective of me going tap tap tap here.Tsk tsk.
Anyway, getting back to what I have always wondered about, since I started watching the harmless Different Strokes, and eventually graduated to the more bawdy, The Nanny. Is that forbidden Americanized sense of "love" catching up? What is all about, afterall? As I spend the autumn of my quarter-life crisis I am tempted, if not forced, to question how do these semi-adult relationships work?
Do they really stand on the cliched postulates of passion, honesty, equality, sharing and what-nots? Or are these the slagged after-math of the bygone era? As an eighteen year old, I would be stumped watching celluloid men and women flinching out of weddings at the last moment. It never occurred to me what the big deal about getting married was. When one can be in a relationship for a long time, or cohabit, what deters one from taking the vows?
Perhaps because, however dishonest or brazen man has become today, the vows still remain sacrosanct to a few of us.
For most of us wont be there to have and to hold from that moment forward, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish; from that moment forward until death do us part.
After all the raving and ranting about the sanctity of vows, what pricks me is the volatility of modern day relationships. All we do is go round and round in big-small circles, where do we reach at the end of a cut-throat day at the desk? People freaking out a few hours before the wedding doesn't surprise me anymore. The truth is distressing to the core. The first kiss can't last forever. And today when entertainment is all about "reality shows" where the contestants are crying, throwing up, biting bottoms on-screen for fifteen-seconds of fame, everybody needs a breather.
Juliet was the luckiest. Her era had ballrooms, dovey-eyed suitors, swords, confidant(e)s, pigeons and gardens of lillies and roses. Also, her time did not see mobile phones, instant messengers and emails. She loved and died at fourteen, while the fire of being "Romeo and Juliet" was still kindling.
What do we have today? Sex? Distrust? Insecurity? Side-drinks of flings while the long drink of a "relationship" ferments in crystal?
The worst analogy that I can draw at the moment is that love is like curd. (Now nobody throws the shoe at me for this). Take it off the heat and consume at the right hour. Keep it a little longer and fermentation goes awry.
So much so for anti-climax!

That time of the year again...

Goodbyes have been year-long. Trying to hold clock hands tight to not let time slip by. And yet again is back, the hour of soused adieus.
Nobody would know better what it feels to stand where we are than those of us over-living the winters of our Kgp life.
To those of us graduating to a broader life, I urge, please forget not peace, load, frust, Chhedis, Eggies and the 2.2.
Years may not bring us all back together, our photographs will mean more than just keepsakes.

I am alive

Yes, I am. Just didn't put much time in for thought, lost in the mire of daily mundane catastrophes of a minor scale. Alan Parsons decided to push me back.
Is there you, anyone up there who really has his/her eyes in the sky, and can really read my mind? Is Lucifer not my friend?
How much have I failed myself since I last cribbed here? Lets count.
# I haven't been able to locate the warranty card of my broken camera yet.
#I have no clue about what is going on in the class.
#I have stopped listening to music.
#I am watching stupid series (of all the things left to be done and undone).
#I haven't since long given a thought to Peter Higgs.

Ten days back, I tried to Breathe in the Spring Fest and bade it goodbye in bed. Then I saw a fair enough magic show in Kshitij and a jugglery-cum-choreography-cum-trickery show which left me wondering if there really was a dearth of artists in India that prompted the very genesis of the show. Or perhaps, more appropriately, we are all xenophiles.
Another question that has been bothering me for sometime now is if I really want to go to the US of A.
Right now, all old (wo)men hold reins of my life.
Right now, I have a confused heap of questions.
Right now, I have a monthful of random sweet memories.

..and it was called Yellow

Where will I be two years hence?
The rain,railings, and the moonlight from behind the trees; this is definitely not one question I want to think of now.
Where was I two years hence? Struggling to look good for saturday night dinner? Combing my hair the extra stroke?
Where were we one year hence? Sitting on that broken bench under the neem tree close to the cycle stand. It was called yellow. We have fallen in the vortex since, we haven't moved a bit since, we have crossed miles. Life could have been different, life should have been different.

Teachers' Day

What is it? The 5th of september? Its two months ahead of time. I think of those who taught me the table of 7, the different Vitamins, the tenses, letter writing and questioning. 19 yrs now, I first went to school, wearing a mickey mouse set of shorts and tee. The elastic was loose and I held my pants tight. "What is your name?", "My name is Putku Resham Sarkar". That was it, two years of kindergarten , and a lifetime of friendship, even after she was gone. Ms. Meenaxi Verma.
This evening was a double decker bus, I went up the deck. Four seats ahead were a couple, cootchie-cooing violently, three rows behind me were two school brats, extra-energised after hours in class screaming and screeching over some electronic game. I sat looking at the raindrops on my window. With every falling drop, it was growing foggier. The lush green poking its arms into the view of my reminiscences, I figured those face which I had forgotten. I still don't remember what she looked like, what they all looked like. A wheelchair, a play-room, a doll house, a huge swing, the sand below it, a rocking horse, those windows...

Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep

And can't tell where to find them.

Leave them alone, And they'll come home,

Wagging their tails behind them

They didn't come back, they don't come back.


Standard V. Yellow walls and tin thatched roof. We repainted the carrots and apples on the cardboard, we learnt the vitamins. Do you still live at the end of the lane?
I will go there to find you. How many daffodils have bloomed since?
The yellow is gone, the thatched roof isn't there. There stands a dungeon of bricks, blue light streams in from the roof, ther aren't too many left whom I know, there are still lesser those who would remember.

A thin face, a nasal screech. Oh! I made so much fun of her. There were no reasons, I was just too happening then, and I didn't want the happenings leave me. But, she fought me, she fought for me, she taught me to walk like a girl, she asked me to comb my hair. She stood up when I was in utter teenage despair of being deliberately unheard in the ghetto of the influential.

Thay are all gone. Some I can search for, some I can email, some about whom I can just think and sigh.
All lost in the maze of memory, faceless, moments frozen in time.

Deception Point

Why I stand to loose,
why you won again?

Is this the end, my friend?
Or must I loose again?

Dil Nahin Chahta Hai

When I first saw this film, I was 16, and not sweet. But I thought that the film was cool, defining by the parameters I then considered to be cool. The concept of independence and not inter-dependence in relationships, the freaky idea that somebody might remember every step you would take. But, then I had also not heard of the song, "I'll be watching you" by Police. All said and done, I enjoyed evry bit of the movie, loved the gigs, frankness, irresponsibility, smart clothes and HAIRDO.
Now its approaching to be six years thence, and I still remain cramped in the shell of the movie. The only difference is that now its stuffy inside. Wherever I go follows the slain evil, Subodh. And boy, was he uncool?! ABSOLUTELY.
He remembered the date and time he proposed to his girlfriend, which by this day's norms is not in vogue really. But then I believe when I shall be a parent, I probably will remember sharply (perhaps also capture on celluloid) the moment my child will first stand up by himself or walk. But again, it'll be my child for heavensake. And ofcourse, lovers and romantic liasons should be kept apart from particularities of dates and times.
I would love to be more of Shalini, the quinessential urban chick, who looks independent and well dressed, if nothing else. And she also believes in the independence of individuals in love. I would also love to have some traits of Akash, who believes in , "jo apni zindagi jiye, aur mujhe apni zindagi jeene de".


Unfortunately, I am neither a bit of Shalini nor Akash. I am but all of Subodh. I interfere, I crib, I depend and I remember. I fill Gigabytes of my memory with whens, whats and hows, instead of formulae. And in return I expect to be appreciated. I also try to direct, off-stage, instruct significant others about what to do, how to behave, and what not!
I am totally uncool. I am a misfit, I am a looser. Ironically, I assert firmly to myself that I am not. I also claim to understand and appreciate music, again my reach is arms less of the entrance gate.
Plain simple, I am uncool, or perhaps I am that Ugly Duckling whom H.C.Anderson loved and nurtured.

Dear Bloggie,

Sorry to have embellished your dress overnight. I don't think you liked those shades of pink much. Are you comfortable with the new things I stitched on the sleeve?
I am still stuck in Serampore because the country is going crazier by the day. BANDH. I couldn't even see the doctor. My doctor is an attrociously funny man. It took me two fifteen minutes to get through him on the phone (mind you, he receives calls only between 7a.m. to 9 a.m.). After a hell lot of digging, I got another appointment, to miss another lab.
Did I tell you, I messed up the last sem 'orite. But, that is fine, routine. I will certainly miss being myself once I miss messing up things.
Unbelieveably, I spent the whole of last evening humming Rabindra Sangeet with my young cousin and grandparents. Now that is AMAZING! because I happen to have been born and brought up far far away from bong-land, and my knowledge of bengali litreature surpasses all limits of embarrasment for my parents. But paradoxically enough, I absolutely have my heart and soul embedded in rabindra-sangeet. The words, the tunes, the feeling of them falling on my ears push me to another world. A world where pain is joyful, where sacrifice stands out for selfishness, where autumn brings the smell of little white shiuli flowers, where autumn brings in the fragrance of Rabindranath's poetry (I was luckily forced every autumn to learn dancing on his pieces for cultural shows on Durga Puja) , where God and beloved are reached out to by the same piece of poetry. And I also learnt that there have been many musicians who had sworn by Rabindranath to an extent that they vowed to never sing anything other than what he wrote!
The works of Rabindranath are so vast and varied that it is commonly believed that one cannot read and understand at the sme time his complete works in a lifetime. And it is so beautiful that there is no parameter or situation in life that cannot be described or be drunk by his words. It is one of those small things in life that I have personally realised, and if I could do so with my meagre breadth in the subject, then I wonder how much is the span of that man. He lives on in any life that has ever touched his words.
Thank you Sir for making me one of the blessed ones to be touched.

naa chinitei bhalo beshechhi

Being a GOOD girl

....is TOUGH. And the Rheometer is BORING. It shears and churns and churns and shears and shows crazy values, and undecipherable graphs. The air-conditioning is cold, and acetone is BAD for skin. Sambhar is a tiring meal, and Rasam is all about cheating on sambhar. Television is dangerous for health, and orange juice ROCKS.

crazy blog, crazier blogger.

Managed to survive two splendid night-outs,
#1: RRI canteen extension called "the village"
#2:RRI guest house bed over a free local phone

Differnt people, different topics, different laughter.
Talked of ghosts, dreams (especially the psychologically tiring ones), campus in general, people, politics, more people, more politics, love stories, stories of love, girl friends and boy friends, and just friends.

Made me realise how mundane I am, inspite of all the self proclaimed denials of being one. The everyday me is sacked in a pair or dirty denims, crushed t-shirt, ruffelled hair and spectacles. And think of it, I have been audacious enough to think I am a little out of ordinary. No glitter and better than gold.
Eye opener:
have to wrap up a few more samples, pack my belongings, clear my office area, clear my papers in the office, get my pay cash, and behave LIKE a good girl. take a flight, register myself, start on with the grind again. Life is tough dude, I mean regular life is tough.
Phone bills to explain to my own self, a room to clear up, fresh clean copies even at the end of semester, dots against my name on the attendance sheet, punctured tyre of my bicycle...life is ordinarily complexed to evade explanation.

I don't like orkutismic fever, but I have never been brave enough to just delete my profile from it and disappear.
A new year peeping around from the corner, a new semester to crush n grind, a month full of experiences to weighten my bag forever. I have learnt so much, rather realised so much that now I wonder if all this "extra-ordinary" living is worth it.
Time to be the everyday me again.


P.S. : please don't post your comments on my scrap book or mail. It helps to relate better in here. And I have no problems with identity and stuff.

Red or Blue?

Just as much as I can understand of the difference between sambhar and kutoo, is as much I can make out about life and the turns it is taking.
Last night on a talk show, Sanjay Jumani, a celeb numerologist fought it out agianst the Bard, saying that all lies in a name. It is your identity, it is all about you. A little twist and injection of extra alphabets, and your life is on the smooth track.
Now coming to life. with due respect to all grahas and nakshatras, if two star crossed people meet, fall (or whatever) in love, and decide to take the next step, what happens?.
By ideal Hindu astrology, life goes berserk. Or try Zodiac.
Suppose they change religion, then all these planets and stars will not pull their strings anymore the way they do now, will they? Then they will have some other stars and other planets playing games with them. What if they put signatures on official letters, instead of tying knots? Will the same stars and planets still haunt them?
Getting into a bit more urban mode, what if they plan to live in sin, because holy matrimony is just not a smooth solution for them? Will their kismet still kill them, or bring in domestic unrest?
Does love not matter still? Are those dark brown scratches in our hands that all we have to follow in our lives? Will we always remain victims of our own guilt of having let go our love for the sake of stars? And why will stars afterall bar anyone from true love, if it is?

gibberish

And then I decided to sit upstraight and type. It takes a lot of pain, a little solitude and a saturday midnight to get tapping.
The one feeling I always I wanted to treasure is a victim of espionage. A character assassined to notorious fame by a certain Mr. Farhan Akhtar spies on it.
I looked back after ages, that too on being pulled and mauled into doing it. And yet, I am my own convict, I hurt myself.
When noone cherishes taking into the past, why must I keep resorting to it? Even the dearest of memories should be let free,

But if you could heal a broken heart
Wouldn't time be out to charm you

A bike, ten rupees, and a life

Oh! did I just decide to write again? this time I will not put up the link. Lets it be true to its name, Oblivious.
My hall t-shirt bears the motto
ATTITUDE if it is to be...
it is up to me.
I didn't buy one, I think I don't have an attitude. This is the life of a grown-up adult, with a righ to vote in democracy, and the right to marry by choice.
Voted, I haven't yet, and marriage is not something of choice. Most of us marry, produce offsprings, to carry forward the human race, carry forward attitude or no attitude. And they discuss at family parties, "Look at Sunny, the same face as his father's, little short though, seems he carries that from his mother."
Can we marry, produce offsprings and save ourselves from carrying it forward? Shit, I am writing crap again.
Attended a lecture today, on some Brane-Model , couldn't manage to put my brain to it, so it started wandering.My guide sat a row ahead, and I wondered that he is such a qualified man, a torchbearer in his field, what does his wife do? This place we live in is 45 minutes away from the main city, which itself is not much of a city actually.
When he married, he too must have had a thought of carrying forward a few certain things, must have sought a wife suitably shouldering upto her spouse. What does she do today? Board the 5:30 pm bus to sit through it for 45 mins n get back grocery, stationary, sweet candies et al?
Is it all?
Could it have been the other way round? That a woman decides to stay in a place far thrown from a city, lavish a life of being renowned, spend summers abroad and expect the man to cooperate and stay there as well, and go for a job too?
Hypothetical.
I called up at Airtel Customer service at 0200 hrs. Waited for 4 minutes before I could hear a meeky voice speaking in hindi. I barked and cursed and sweared and what not. My outgoing call facility has been disrupted. While the wait was paining me, what pained me more is the melancholic beats n tunes they playe dto make me wait. How could they have possibly gauged what my mind wanted to hear?
I wonder where life is taking me. This month it threw me at a new place, where faces are friendly and unknown (maybe that is why they are friendly). My mind keeps working every minute, every hour till I sit down here and go tap tap tap. Then everything comes to a stand still. I end up writing blogs like this, which I never mean, which I never think of having in my mind, which will possibly remain as the worst souvenier of life lived once upon a time.
I wrote one paragraph which I deleted. I must stop now, before i fall a prey in the hands of my own cruelty.
I stop.

from a winner to a blogger

"He slept under the moon,
he basked under the sun.
He lived a life of going to do,
and died with nothing done."
And I have feared these words like evil spirits for as long as I can take my mind back. Everyday, I face a 'going-to-do', the days almost invariably wither with nothing done. Time dipped deep in thankless jobs of the day (they call it 'Tempo' down here). I am still of a victim of the strong currents that flow in this air, air beautifuly laced with arsenic. It is now hard( almost impossible?) for me to now re-realise that this is the soil where I so badly wanted to land upon.I have taken to blogging, my newly found alternative to verbal cribbing and nagging. I don't know how long will this sustain, as I have run out of writer's tapping (ink is now outdated, writers are now tappers). Another bane of the arsenic. I have failed to understand and state what is that assigned task that the almighty sent me with. Is it to just sit back and listen to other's (vague) victories? Or cram lessons from beaming demure dolls about stories of one particular "GOD" played what stunt to get what, while I sit clicking my mouse to demolish monsters?
I read confused. Believe me I am. I am also a self made persecutee of my own silence. This silence is another arsenic.
Last night, when it was dark and there was no one to torch the surroundings,I saw a thousand more stars in my sky than on a night before. And thence, in Floyd-al philosophy,
"I knew the moment had arrived
For killing the past and coming back to life "
Now is the time for some vodka and grass. Muster up the all showy courage of a man high on narcs and make it up there.
By the way, don't you feel special to be ordinary?

Under baptism

In the begining, I was a belief. Held strong in young hearts and in a serrated manner, not-so-young hearts as well. I became a
myth, a vapourised myth. Customarily I witness this transfiguration take place all around, with all my comrades (no red flag
here). Now I have risen up, what remains of my mortal being is just a molecule, I am not even a vapour anymore.I wander about, trying to locate my old allies. They are all molecules now, identical, identityless. In the moments that have
passed by taking me along from a belief to a molecule, I have learnt to forget my origin. I am still a molecule, vulnerable to
furthar disintegration. In some corner of this cornerless world is brewing a science to disintegrate me further.Tremors, wooble, shake.Here I stand (still a molecule), a gargantuan edifice prides high behind me. The blue yonder is curtained by luxuriant trees
stretching wide about. The path ahead miragiously still looks straight. There is no conclusion to this street, it comes a full
circle. But still remain a molecule, a delusioned molecule. I still harbour an impression of being a belief. I still imagine that I am
yet to disintegrate, and yet die a thousands deaths everyday.I am still oblivious of my anonimity.