Countable and Uncountable

2012-01-27T21:51:00.002+05:30

"Mein har roz, lagataar aise hi phone karti jaaungi. Jab tak jawab nahi milta." :)

2011-12-06T00:38:00.001+05:30

Dear Penmanship,
You were sick for a while,you had a tumor on your back, when your tumor burst the maggots attached you and ate away your flesh. they made it into a large wound of about 10 inches. one could see your bones!and when your wound burnt under the sun, you sat in front a cold steel door.
the door opened and others found you. they sedated you and killed the maggots inside your flesh.Now you are healing,Doing better everyday.
and after four months, we meet again :)

2011-08-21T20:51:00.003+05:30

Before Mr Dracula drank her blood and sucked the lady dry, he spoke in his expensive taste of the eccentricity in Gaudi and his spectacular Sagrada Familia of Spain, The Japanese gods and goddess,about Art Nouveau and 20th century modernism, Turkish Deserts and the world's largest orchestra.

And when he bit her flesh,the Lady nervously dabbed her pearl necklace and only wished that she doesn't sound too unintelligent to question what he was doing.

2011-08-06T01:31:00.003+05:30

after a social suicide, you tend to lose your reputation with all lousy acquaintances, who you had been trying be rid off all along. Only true friends, family and love remains.

"And this morning I woke up
feeling like a little French village
the Nazis suddenly decided to pull out of
after a particularly cruel occupation." ------------- George Bilgere

2011-06-11T02:31:00.002+05:30

Thamma,

Today I felt as ashamed and lonely as a little child whose friends mocked him for being an Orphan.

for the sake of a trivial argument, a close friend suddenly picks up and says,
" Well, you didn't get to see your dying grandmother"

Adult relationships are tricky and i have not been spared.

But i resist like an old blind man who holds out his stick at all who push him around and make fun.

Shantiniketan

2011-05-27T19:24:00.005+05:30

I woke up and i touched the man's pale jet-lagged skin, the hives and rashes spread unevenly on his body. I chuckled because it felt like i was touching a reptile.

But what did i really see?

I reached over to kiss and there in that moment i was cursed with Shantiniketan's legend of Unrequited Love.

Now, in the forest mornings, my heart reflects a green-yellow
and in the nights, a cobalt-blue.

the unrequited ghost of my love is now among the many spirits in the forest, whispering like the wind into the Poet's ears, who is perhaps still writing somewhere.

One with its trees, One with its soil, embedded inside the very legend.

2011-05-11T05:09:00.002+05:30

As i argue/holler/grow defiant of my living, my friends lose their patience over my existential angst. They say, Relax! the burden of the world is not on your shoulders,
I deconstruct, destruct, lose sleep relentlessly.

But almost always remember:

"To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget." - Arundhati Roy

2011-05-09T00:10:00.004+05:30

In her long years of exile, she was like a poet's imagined forest, full/quite/overwhelmed in moonlight. Her longings echoed in her songs and ripened passion and madness in the forest darkness.

When Love invaded and took her away.

Now an average lover, living amidst limits, everyday she searches the insides of her body for a wild-fire.

2011-02-12T02:45:00.000+05:30

I think a lot more than i write lately, i am in this sense of lapse where i cannot speak about the things i wish to speak of.

I still don't know how i have dealt with loss so far in my life.
All i can remember through distant, distant memory is of the early winter evening when on the steps of the Ganga, i lit a candle beside the plate with all that my dead grandmother loved in food, turned around and left.
"It's our custom and once you light the candle you must leave, do not turn back" heard in the voice of the erudite thakurmoshai

And I remember the beautiful Tagore song that my brother played on the back drop in his phone,the sunken faces of my father and my brothers as much as i remember the smell of the soft cotton from my grand mother's saarees.

2011-01-18T11:46:00.000+05:30

Every day when the bell rings they all huddle up in clusters. Rats go with rats; termites with fellow termites, pile up in smaller cars and scurry off to their tribes elsewhere.

I put on my bag and walk on a long journey back.

Mama says “But you must have a friend to roll around on the grass and watch the sun with! Guppy you’re such a lonely boy”

I once made friends with Fat Freddy, who took away my marbles and bit my hand. I said “Mama, I aint making no friends, friends bite!”

It was the feast of St. Mary’s and we all had to dress alike. Friends wore similar clothes, lovers wore similar hats and families were under big and colorful umbrellas.

And I was in my porch with a bottle, Mama had said something about being Lonely, so I breathed lonely into the bottle and thought that I would watch it grow every day and become a boy like me.

And some day we both shall be men.

As it goes without saying that in this world there are happy people and there are sad people and there are poets!

2010-12-29T20:20:00.000+05:30

and on a very cold evening of kolkata winter. my frail, old grandmother finally dies.
December 27th, 2010.

i am not home yet.

2010-12-10T01:24:00.000+05:30

My grave inability to follow orders has got me thinking that if life was a long servitude then i would make a bad servant.
On my 23rd birthday i finally accepted that my ambitions were far more dismal than that of my parents for me. that their little improvisations of my very ambiguous plans are in fact now beginning to hurt.
Blameless, those poor souls had served and saved for their family and prayed so that one day the little mortal should rise to their mediocre heaven.
But I being me, am lost in the count of one to ten, unable to comprehend why each must come after another.

Someone once said, that in the history of our existence there had been no inventions, that we had only discovered what was already there in other forms. I had always wondered, if that was true then how did we ever think of Freedom, something that doesn't exist in all celestial nature where everything is bound to one another, how do we actually feel it while running wild in an open field?

It is way past my bed time, tomorrow i shall be summoned once again to turn a wheel in the world's machinery.

And having created my own moment of freedom, i feel like an Inventor all by myself.

2010-11-02T12:01:00.000+05:30

The walls are off white and there are soft lights, hung from the ceiling or clamped on the floor.

In it we are two.

The house is full of things bought with little money and a lot of love, every patch put together with a lot of trial and striving.
so much so that its commodities are like little children that demand care.
you have do it everyday without fail.

and Love,Its acknowledgments are now as obvious as the day and night. There are more important things to remember, life's machinery to run.

It is said that Euphoria can only last a moment but sometimes while traveling back from work, as i see faces resembling people i already know..

I do wish to have remembered myself seeing my very first sunrise and what i must have felt.

2010-09-30T03:10:00.000+05:30

That was the very first night, something got taken away from me, that night of our adolescence which we were so eager to grow out of.
When we first kissed in the closet. you were impatient and i was fascinated,
trying to gather all the romance from the kiss even though it was mutually experimental.
Then came love, and then the end of it, life happened, livelihood emerged, prerogatives, desires, complexities, struggles appeared and I got baked and toasted like a nice cookie.

in small measures some parts of myself loosened and dissipated.I left some of myself in numerous places, countless nights and days.

Sometimes I think that i am no better than wild cattle trying to outlast the desert
Just when i remember that one day in early childhood when I had tightened my fist and held it over my heart.

Even if the entire being dissipates, I don't think that fist could ever be opened.
That part of myself safely locked away.

2010-09-07T23:26:00.001+05:30

Untitled, as you have changed from decades to centuries and still remained without a name, so have I wondered around all through these years in search for your namesake.
When you were a woman, I was a shy sophomore. I was unforgivingly romantic and shuddered at the idea of taking my clothes off. I was punch drunk in love and I couldn’t put my feet together at any instant.
When you were anonymous friends and fleeting lovers, I was bright, aspiring and pompous. I was a trickster, cheating over cards on the table. I moved along with the lights and the gypsies.
When you were the man, I was the woman. I made a home and lit it with lamps. I gathered and waited. loved and remained at my place, stationary. I suffered irrevocably.
Untitled, I have left with a note. In it I promised you love and remembrance. I am not a seamstress otherwise I would have sewn my biddings together instead of making them into a bundle with a knot.
In all these years as you changed from man to woman to life and to me, I could not name you as you. But all my biddings, my hopeless romances, my letters, my poems remain yours undoubtedly.
Keep them. They are for keepsake.

2010-08-28T20:19:00.000+05:30

I am in the process of taking back. giving away some and letting some go.

2010-07-29T17:40:00.001+05:30

As you destruct everything you build eventually, find new things and meticulously construct again. I wonder how naively i hold on to the sand and gravel and every thing that gets worn and worn and worn.

I had always thought of you as the Dreamer and of me as the Courageous, turns out that it was you who had been brave while i clutched on to my dreams which needed closure.
Last night as we spoke i was amazed at how self sure you were with disentanglement.

I wondered if i could ever disentangle myself or stop loving the man who crosses seven states, takes 38 hours of long general compartment train journeys every month to come see me and be with me.

I'd rather have him leave me, one day when he realises that he doesnt love me.

I wish you an eternity of such courage and even greater happiness. and some for me so i can be less miserable tomorrow, lesser and lesser each day.

Here in Life, I can only think of my smallish little house in suburnban Calcutta and My ailing grandmother reaching her end.

2010-06-11T19:04:00.000+05:30

and there were days of extreme clarity. those days were few but were memorable.
the mind was agile and the heart, restless to remove all clutter from life.
On such days, I could say No, say Yes, be definite, be assertive.
See life as if i were detached from it.

Till night came and I swung back pendulum-like to the larger meaninglessness of life.
to all the blur and lull again..

You see, I wanted this to be about those days that stood out like brighter spots
but i cant not dedicate to the dim as well.

2010-05-29T16:08:00.000+05:30

on certain days when she paid close attention to her inner voice. she discovered that she hated slamming doors, stepping on dog poo, things spilling over. hated the voice of her landlord, mouth blisters, friends calling in on weekends, spitters on the road and RnB.

she discovered that she liked her t.v on mute, songs in foreign languages over and over again, the piano,baby cat paws, eating mango pulp, not speaking, an empty house, frizzy hair, bubbles and her grandmother's memory.

she realised that the only things she was passionate about were the monsoons and that fish were her favourite pet.
and on evenings when she sat all by herself and paid close attention to her inner voice, she felt really happy.

2010-05-10T23:25:00.000+05:30

I had always wanted to do special things for you, even in ordinary days I wished to take you by surprise and make you something wonderful.

I have loved you in my reluctant-mediocre self consciousness and dreamed of the sunny mornings when we shall be together again.

Happy Birthday.

2010-05-06T23:21:00.000+05:30

I have learned lately that steady and changeable interact and inverse themselves in everyday Life.that in some university, kids with above 180 IQ are trying to crack the math of it all by the application of Calculus.
I always crack up with articles on Modern life and Loneliness whenever they mention the Happiness Index to validate their theory. If I could really have a measuring scale for happiness then perhaps i would have put it out in the living room. It would have been more welcoming than the three little Manchurian fellows on the mantle.
A very drunken friend once explained to me how life was a random order of chaos and that we were all at collision with other beings, creating a permutation and combination of circumstances.

the world gets more ridiculous everyday and thus even if hope runs out someday humor never will. I have had many changes in life lately but i wish to speak nothing about them. I'd rather just doodle aimlessly and i am happy with that.

2010-04-01T03:15:00.000+05:30

I wind-up my clock, so it shows the South African time. count the number of days till it rains so i know exactly how long i waited for it. In all Life, I had found very little ease in sharing greif. Telling of it never really changed anything, it just made me uncomfortable. So i always sought peace in my own recluse actions.

"Fear feeds on Fear and Pain too...and then its all a downward spiral" I said to someone a while ago. and each day as i go through High-Low's and brief hopeless interludes. I say " Dont be Afraid - Dont be "

To all this I have come to think How hopefull am i really? How fearless am i?

would all this unsolicited fear and each of my rebuttals denying the fear ever really sum up to something sizeable?

Do the brave really win? or is it mythological as is heroism and history? To that effect could I be called a brave one?

Whatever happened to objective reasoning free of passion.

2010-03-15T04:57:00.000+05:30

you lived across the street on the hill ward side. over there, the sun sank in splendor every evening. I'd often look up at the orange sky and wonder if i'd ever see anything more beautiful.
i lived in a tiny hut with a fig tree growing near by.

On one such splendid evenings i decided to walk up the hills, i was about to lose my little hut as i had discovered cracks on the roof and depleted walls. I suspected that they would be washed down to somethings resembling little mud pools, by the next rains.

You stood there amidst the clouds settling on the slanting trees on the hill top.
I spoke with you and perhaps hoped to share my misery in the fear of losing the only thing i had built.
You looked at me with a strange sort of kindness and appeared majestic- God like.
Took out your shepherd's stick and said " Not unless I poke the clouds".
And i had feared you ever since.

2010-03-05T00:24:00.000+05:30

It was as if all had to mean everything it could, at once. all had to fall in place and this was the very instant being waited for.
I wondered whether i was naive to feel pity for the meaningless excesses that would be left out.
In a utalitarian world, things began with a purpose. it had to be a fixed commodity, could be measured and assessed in terms of more utilities.
And here i have been, forever putting more punctuations than needed and staggering along a longer route home.

Most of the life that i have lived so far, i had been preoccupied with my daze and day dreamings
As an adult i was encouraged to make friends and be more participative in such social functions.
I realised that there was this crazy interdependance involved in each one of them and that they too are misjudged on the basis of outcomes.

I am post collegiate. I ought to find a job and a place in the world.
And all my wavering thoughts gather amidst the holy mess of my room and unsyncronised life.

These are the most unproductive days..:)

2010-03-05T00:14:00.000+05:30

2010-01-29T21:56:00.000+05:30

The Blog page looked bare for a bit today, i realized i had gotten too used to see it the way i had arranged it. I thought perhaps i should change it.

My 90 year old delirious grand mother had gotten even more delirious. she had been moving around in circles from one room to another, looking for my school bag.

I heard of that over the phone with maa and chuckled.

as a kid, i lay nights awake, picturing-imagining her die. i used to cover my mouth and sob silently with god-awful fright.

over the years i presumed that i'd gotten over it and when the day came i'd get by and be just fine.

In the end, after hanging up, i covered my mouth again... and cried.

My Blog, I have decided to keep it the way i had arranged it.. i couldn't possibly live in its absence.

2010-01-21T22:34:00.000+05:30

Like a very long story is unimaginative, i wonder how to write one for you. :)

2009-12-30T00:45:00.000+05:30

i often wonder.. if i deliberately keep things vague. a lot of what i say sometimes seems very ambiguous and my writing seems almost cryptic. who could trace it back to what i actually felt.
things of little and much consequence, all made into secret letters... filled with symbols.

i smiled thinking if this was a treasure map or my odd shying away from things..
and how long i have been at it.

:) this time... more explicit!... more explicit!

2009-12-24T23:21:00.000+05:30

There is a tree I have seen growing over years. I wish to make a poem for it some day but i think that writing about it would seem autobiographical. and I lack the skills to narrate..
If i knew more words for vivid, more colours than red or blue.. and if maybe i would have known what the rain laden monsoons were called otherwise ....
who knows i could probably have said .... that there are leaves, perching birds... and there are colours... and that the rains make it sway..

2009-11-24T23:43:00.000+05:30

So we have soothed in the calm. it is harmony and there are lights everywhere. we think about our intimacy and wonder if it eventually would be set in stone.

we spot our territories. those preserved versions of ourselves. they are still important but of less consequence.

we remain happy for days at a stretch. Mind works with less vigil and clutter.

We wonder if this is the end of imagination. if this is where we turn dumb and mute.

but, then i see you looking over the fence with a lost glance and i feel that i couldn't possibly fathom uncertainty.

It is winter and as we stride along the field, i wish i could tell you that i feel wonderful.

2009-11-03T23:58:00.000+05:30

we did not leave our names behind, not even dug prints of our paws on the walls.

you said we needn't claim everything.

that those sheltered caves needn't love me back.

it was a chanced discovery that led to what they call a life altering experience. As you and i stood there, for a moment i saw the whole universe.

And as you pulled me along and we walked away turning our backs... i glanced at the caves once..

i think never in life again will i be yearning..as much as i was in that moment to say... " I was here" and hold something by it.

2009-11-02T15:16:00.000+05:30

Dear Firefly,

it is the Autumn that makes all of Autumn vain. when you lie on your back underneath the sun

the breeze stirs you up and reminds you of wilderness.

Your in Love... and you will stop at nothing. You will not reason, you will not see... you will not do anything that makes your love a little less Incredible.

it is night and as i speak of a purple... you talk about violet.

You have lost your mind... and i have too.. both on different things.

2009-10-23T02:40:00.000+05:30

The ghost of my deceased grandfather who's socks i once tore up just to annoy him, had visited me few nights ago and taken away everything. turned all my thoughts into ghosts like him who touch no ground because they have no feet.

we cant trace those who stay afloat. thus, i hadn't written a word ever since.

i feel majorly unoccupied now, having nothing to do besides the telly or the phone.

the thoughts have run and the words too... but everything else remains

isolation, solitude, the nights and the dim.

If only i could convince myself that i am slightly delusional then maybe i'd be a lot more hopeful.

2009-09-13T01:28:00.000+05:30

The one who used to clench his fists to soften his hard heart ..

i knew him well

and his poor, unobtrusive heart which flowed in ebs, noiselessly...

and he always compared it to the fossils or a rattling car.

and thought he's lived his whole life in the absense of it.

2009-08-19T22:48:00.000+05:30

Sometimes it's difficult to make out if there is someone on the otherside of the phone at all, i barely talk back or respond.. but maa goes on and on... if she sniffs disappointment or anxiety in my voice. The most pointless and irrelevant detail is brought up, little scraps from here and there.... which mostly end up in me saying.." Maa, stop bothering me ... not in a mood"

I remember, as a kid.. i flocked behind her all day whenever i sensed that she was upset. she would be unattentive doing her chores.. but would somehow feel my empathy.

and I always thought that my mother and I were completely different people...

2009-07-21T00:57:00.000+05:30

When i was a child, i used to say that trees didnt speak because they were caught up in deep thinking all the time. I carried on with this imagery for so long, and even now maybe it still remains some where in my mind. The other day, i drew out a fresh green plant as a symbol for myself and my imaginary person seems to be quite much... some day maybe i'd wind up in a house by myself.. as my thoughts shall leave no room for others to visit or stay...all kith and kin shall be dead..nd all lovers left... so that they lead happier lives with others..

memories, i will store in pickel jars... nd thoughts shall flow with white linen curtains as sunlight filters in through them...

2009-07-07T14:45:00.000+05:30

Someone i hardly know remarked: you know, for your own kind.. you think too much, are unusually suspicious, tend to talk a lot but go write short little poems instead". i chukled.

i am alarmed at how gooey i have got off late since the monsoons.. perpetually fluttering eyes and dream mushing even in sticky, patchy bus rides.
these days i can manage to de-annoy myself, to be a little distracted from this squarish life and act like an anthropologist living amidst the village within myself and meticulously documenting humanity ...

p.s :)

2009-06-24T23:35:00.000+05:30

So, i am going to write a little about the arrived Monsoons in the city..
Not a poem.. because Monsoon's nauseated with poetry.
yet with every wet step, dark clouds gather and in my heart what was lifted, drops back again..
yes, it is the same recluse memory again that makes me love everything about monsoons... or else i couldnt see it.
may be it is... my own neurosis. :)

2009-06-07T14:54:00.000+05:30

Now you're telling me ....You're not nostalgic
Then give me another word for it ...You who are so good with words
And at keeping things vague

Because I need some of that vagueness now, It's all come back too clearly
Yes I loved you dearly
And if you're offering me diamonds and rust
I've already paid

Joan Beaz & her song for Dylan...

2009-05-24T23:43:00.000+05:30

The first time, u dont feel anything.. or maybe see pink, blue or red. To me, Good Sense prevailed. I realised I have been sticking my toung out for too long now.. thinking it would mean something... I have been foolish.

Its done with now, Now i am Free Falling :)

2009-05-17T00:46:00.000+05:30

The sea had always made me sullen. i always think this is what oblivion would look like.
i once told a friend, "dip a message or a finger and it would be lost forever". i told M, i am fascinated by her loving. she loves like a fortress, and i sailed to one such in the middle of the sea that holiday. they said it was the only one which could not be taken in, that it always defended its contents..
thought of M so much that day... it was the only thing that kept me from all the salt, brine and sullenness...
and as we drove into that sunset, in a car with a bunch of strangers, i imagined that there was love where the roads led inward and made circles around a reckonning of 'being in love'. that it wasnt puzzling or complex.. but slow jazz

2009-04-26T00:19:00.000+05:30

Mostly i doodle around my writing. it's never really conscious how i come to each word. i walk down the evenings on sideroads near the sea and that part i am really selfish about. i would take no one along. sometimes these evening walks seem symbolic to the larger truths about myself and my indulgent nature. My writing too is perhaps figuritive. I dont really know whether i have turned every experience and activity in life into something i could use. I know that if i did i wouldnt want it that way. i write with a lot of weakness and insecurity and also with a lot of love. i guess we all live as people and not as gods and goddesses. and there's the whole point.

2009-04-15T23:43:00.001+05:30

My name, i did not choose. it was given by my beloved Grand mother. As a little girl, i always felt it was unfair not to have let me choose my own name. but now i think i couldnt have managed it.

when i was five i wanted to be called 'Shomi' so that i dont forget my best friend who i left behind while changing cities. somedays i wanted to be called Leela because she was my faviourite character from a book.. I have always wanted to be 'Mia' from Pulp Fiction. and then one day someone lovingly named me 'Mausami'. all my life i have sought after different things and named me differently each time. thinking i were it.
our names should suggest our personalities. but our vageries are such that one name limits it somehow.
well.. i could not go without a name but maybe thats why i never name my posts.
none of my writing bear titles so they could be ambiguous.
honestly, i could never decide on one and also giving a title somehow makes writing more authorised, directive.
when a friend quriously asked for the reasons.. i thought to my self "shotti to!"

2009-04-14T13:18:00.000+05:30

"Mom o' dukkho bedon o, Mom o' shofol o shopon o', Tumi bhoribe shourobe.. Nishi dini shomo tumi robe..nirobe.. Hridoye mom'o."- Robindronath Thakur.

in quite.. firefly hums...nd expresses love.

2009-04-11T21:55:00.000+05:30

After long years of keeping grudges like a sophisticated adult. one day of screaming, crying and badmouthing everyone feels therepeutic.

today the monkeys rampaged my neighbourhood. they tore down most trees, stole from houses left everyone intimidated.

more than for food, it was as if they struck for their shrinking habitats. every hate word with utter vengance.

in the end.. by the sight of them disappearing in the horizon like bandits or the turks after rampage.

and as my personal aggression subsided... i felt an equal calm..

i felt like them

2009-03-28T17:57:00.000+05:30

When it died, instead of burying it, i tossed it up aiming at the outerspace so that it becomes an other worldy thing and doesnt haunt me.
the satellite caught it and while i was watching the telly, the news lady spoke of it.

i tossed it up aiming at the outerspace so what bound me to it breaks, so i forget or only distantly regret. so that its becomes into an asteroid, a planet or something else.
the satellite caught it and brought back it's ghost.
i should have buried it instead.

2009-03-23T02:21:00.000+05:30

i dug it out from a directory which keeps everything and
Remarked: "i wonder how hot/cool/beautiful/stunnin/attractive u are that ppl jus cant resist u.."
i am deeply sorry for annoying
hehe

2009-03-19T16:43:00.000+05:30

the funny part is that stories we write in parts of what we remember
and not the whole of what we remember.
memory might account many things including billboards and signs or even patterns in cutlery..
but that bit we dont mention.
like if i were to write a story about my dad.. it would most definitely be about how he loves airplanes.. like a young summer school boy. completely fascinated by them.
about mum.. i would write of her indulgance in cooking for me.
all my life i'd thought if only i could do anything to take away her regrets, but the sight of her preparing my meal when only a side of her face i can see, there is a strange feel of content in it and there are no regrets.
and such short exerpts, brief encounters would make my whole story.
there would be so many days, so much else left out... but i guess thats the nature of a story and a story writer.

2009-03-03T23:03:00.000+05:30

Unknowns write poems in a journal everyday.
they are poems of love.. mostly.
i read,re-read, recite, hum.. go back and forth, murmur,sing, take off, brood, reminisce with them.
everyday i stare out from the rider's seat in a bus
and that view of the glimmering sea looks like the window to a wall clock
and in it a box with me in a birdy cap, stuck to a spring.. waiting for the hour to tick.

2009-02-27T22:37:00.000+05:30

You rode so many miles man frnd.. that when u spoke of them, i tried imagining how much more would they be from both my arms stretched apart. for i have never known of miles the way you have. i have only read of their connotations in stories where lovers part.

and when you reached over the mountain, looking down at the endless abyss, i heard drums rolling and thought to myself..." One leap and he will cross over into the chasm, we all want to go after death.."

i thought i'd never see you again.

2009-02-24T20:58:00.000+05:30

A dwarf woman doesnt hold her man, she clutches him
steps on her toes and rises through his body like a creeper
striving so that her kiss lands on his neck,without him bending, without him noticing, while he looks on to the other side..
so it could be made into some surpise from being a regular act of love..
the tiny feet tip, the calves stretch and the little fingures curl to make a fist off the shirt..

and that is the love she swears by..
a love which looks above, perseveres and reaches for the higher...

they say that love is a leap one has to be inspired enough to jump..
but on a perfect Valentine's, i'd wish to be able to tip than take a leap...

for my Little Women..
For Their great loves and tippings...
For Rubai and Tania...

2009-02-10T23:47:00.000+05:30

For every one of the greats have said that men should come out of the spell of being a gregarious lot and seek their individualism.that conformity is not a cool thing.
but at every point in your life when you discovered some thing meaningful in a book, painting or a piece of poem..it was made by some one else. a unknown man or a woman.

if that kind is also conformity... a kind of borrowing someone else's and calling it your own...
then this is how i look at it... i think although things mean differently to each one of us...
the soul remains the same...
for it means that all of us strangers stand on the fence line of a large circle with the one dotted centre...
if its a good thing or a bad i dont know..mayb we should think of a third determinant besides good and bad for such things...
today wen i read one of the comments on my post..i suddenly thought of this... and i realised..
that the most amazing relationships of my life have formed on this probability...

2009-02-03T23:40:00.000+05:30

life, and then a pause to think, to put a word against it.. and what could possibly come up from a twenty year living.

but tonight.. i am really happy. These few days that are past had taught me some thing about myself which i aspired for but deep down never contained. when time came, i discovered it in me... ambiguous but robust and undetterable.

sometimes i look in the mirror and tremble with awe at the colossal courage that i bear.... and whatever that i have made of my self and my life.... seems a good job.. worth living for.

As the world fell apart and fell back in place...as hope went out and rushed in..like a moment of bloodlessness.... i stood on my own little feet to see it...to fix it... i chose be alone.. all by myself.

they say no man is an island, that there is vulnerability within each one, that we are all bound and bonded in some way....

for a little girl.... breaking free from these barriors... for once in her life..is the taste of the absolute freedom.. which she thought was only hypothetical...

now she could live the rest of her life.. with her 'greatest moment'...

this moment will live forever....and so will she...

2009-01-26T14:40:00.000+05:30

if i ever were to make my house of love there would be a very few to live in it. all i would do all day would be to see them moving on their steps, in and out of the rooms... reading the newspaper, speaking on the telephone,staring at the window. and i..i would wind up in one corner...with all the love in the world. the love that i have for them and the gentleness with which they love me. sometimes i would get gooseflesh thinking that they all are right before me, with their hearts beating steadily, their organs working well... that they are so perfect in flesh and blood that it all seems indestructible.
We all know of love and ourselves the way we know of the moon or the bomb or a rotten egg..

2009-01-11T20:10:00.000+05:30

Burn for me...
The nights deepen and the fires burn out...
I lose my trace and diminish...
Burn for me..
so i shall make lanterns of you...
put one in each corner of my dark little hut...
So he finds it in his way back to this place
this house which is his, which is mine...
Burn Firefly..stay...
love
Reema

This post is dedicated to my blog and Rubai...both stand as my space of expression and finding...

2008-12-21T23:07:00.000+05:30

On one such highly romantic evenings
I will be walking down the most romantic street
Singing my favourite love song

Old Joe’s, the karaoke bar, the brothels, the cemetery
Walking past all the places made famous for love..
Walk until I reach the river edge

I shall dip my legs in the water, sit there for a while
Thinking of you as you live in another continent
Picture you, stooping over books or moving from one room to another.

And as the city lights fade,
My romance will come to a close
And i shall see sparks in heaven..

2008-12-21T23:01:00.000+05:30

And I have been waking up every morning with a feeling that
This world would come to an end. that all would be lost and gone.
It’s distressing at bang though but things change, things pick up as the day picks up.
Once I met a girl who said she was a rock star. Said she put on black pants and black paint and wore her black wonder bra in each of her rock concerts
Although blue was her favourite colour. Although black she thought made her sexy.
Then she spent the next half hour and also the only half hour of us knowing each other in convincing that she was for real.
The other day at an art gallery with ‘abstract art’ on exhibit... i wondered.
I saw those bold, inexplicable colours, brush strokes, hand paintings... and i wondered that even if it didn’t need meaning, how does the artist decide where to begin and where to end.
With things that are solely beautiful and meaningless otherwise, how does one begin and end with these things.
And then I equated Art with Love. Found them both absurd and rash.

And these are random thoughts thought at various times of the day or may be the week.
Sometimes I wish that i didn’t try so hard. that I came out of this spell of constant sense, reasoning and defending. That I lost my mind once in a way so I cant remember any. Not even my name.
Then I think how ridiculous you are, and how ridiculous I am in loving you.
And it’s something that I find oddly and darkly comic.

2008-12-09T15:47:00.000+05:30

This silence which fills this room, this house and me
Is not the wretched or the mourning kind
It’s a quite life, an animal with soft paws.

There’s so much of you to think of, so much to remember and keep remembering
That these walls, the air and me…meditate
be still, without movement
So that you come afloat and stir within us…

2008-12-03T02:11:00.000+05:30

If I ever crack what love is….
I will run looking for you… once when I find you… I will tell you all about it.
You will be busy doing your regular chores of the day…
I will flock behind you like a trail suspended in god’s space.
And I will tell you all about it. all day long, all night long...
My eyes will roll, I will lift my hands up in the air,
Go on and on with shrill pitches in my voice.
You may listen to me, respond to me in the beginning
And later on ask me to stop with mild resignation,
But I will talk, trailing behind you, watching you do your chores
and my eyes will roll, my hands raised in the air….

2008-12-02T23:46:00.000+05:30

Like the smell of cinnamon
Or the smell of home grown mangoes spread underneath the bed for ripening.
like the calm settling and the dust settling at dusk.
the game of Ikir-Mikir.
like the first knowledge of Boy love Girl stories.
a collection of New Year and Birthday greetings.
Like a picture of deep, sleeping fishes of the aquarium which never sink.

I want to feel some real beauty. I want to write some real pleasure.

2008-11-23T01:03:00.000+05:30

It’s been a long time since I have written in complete sentences. In wholesome and plausible paragraphs about something relevant.
I don’t know why I do things I do. Why I pick ways, stick to them unnecessarily and then one day, drop them.
Life today is good. Not very indulging, not very aimless.
Yet I don’t know why I keep writing about it and nothing else.
Doesn’t anything else matter?
Some days back I was reading an article on Narmada by Arundhati Roy.
It was fact based. But was written with so much of passion.
Her passion gleamed through the words.
And I thought to myself…..
“ Poor little writer girl…. Trying to save the world in red and blue tights”
I wondered if saving a human settlement around a river would ever give me sleepless nights!
If 50 million displaced, homeless people ever mattered.
Will nuclear armament be as relevant as losing my virginity. Though the former could kill us all, and the latter a harmless progression in emotional and sexual life.

You know one of the most difficult things in the world is to come to terms with your own self. Both your greatness and your weakness. And sometimes when you cannot feel enough, just because it doesn’t hurt you.

2008-11-12T01:44:00.000+05:30

I read it once, I read it twice.
I tried to memorise it in a way I had never done to any of my history lessons.
Then I gave up.

I tried to reason with my self. I tried to rebel with it.
I questioned in a way I never had to any of my lovers.
I gave up on it too.

I realised that both, being me and loving the things that I love are beyond my keeping and knowing..

Now, this moment, I am tying words… and my favourite song is playing in the background.

And may be this is far less than being able to do things.. but it does suffice.
It does suffice.

Love God For The Poor Soul

2008-11-05T20:19:00.000+05:30

“ I don’t like too many things hanging on the wall, I don’t think its fancy.
I would hate it if ever my home had those kind of walls...”
“ Besides I keep wondering from time to time why so many artistes have sung
Leaving on a Jet Plane in their voices again and again. Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell so many of them. It gives me the creeps, why cant they leave Denver’s alone?”

Harry spoke while he ate his subway. His fingers digging into the sandwich and spilling the contents. The sauces were all over his face and on the napkins which were supposed to be used to wipe and clean.

So you made love to a blue coloured woman with waist long hair and ten hands? I asked.
Like I told you, he said.
I looked at him, watched him eat.

He ate his sandwich. Ate every bit of it, in slow and in love. He bit off the crust and the sides first and kept the centre for the next bite.

And…As he ate the olives, he closed his eyes.

2008-10-30T01:36:00.000+05:30

“I am counting my breath, in numbers one to hundred”
You said.
Today a thing happened. Nishi Nath died. Which my mother corrects “ Say Nishi Nath passed away”
His body was a pack of bones, his face looked like a woman’s. No hair left anywhere. Death looked painful and scary.

“Each time we do something sinful, an hour or so is lessened from our lives” and you believed in it so much.
On new year’s eve ten years ago, at Pom’s terrace as we kissed and we were twelve
In that moment of silence so awkward, you said the exact thing.
“I am counting my breath, in numbers one to hundred”
And I didn’t know what to make of it.

As I saw Nishi Nath dead today. As death looked painful and scary.
I finally got it. And I smiled.

2008-10-25T22:52:00.000+05:30

Dear Firefly....

Beneath the old wooden bar and the water leaking ceiling which gives away to a patch of the autumn sky…
In that aging house with old, broken walls.. the plaster coming off in places
In that old bed with iron rods where your grand father breathed his last.
As U n I lay…with our tummies big and bare..
After a wholesome Bengali lunch..
As we giggled like we always do.. over silly things…
Like who had a better back or a bigger bust, who fell in love first,
Whose stomach tied a knot on being kissed on the lips?
I realised how much u loved that fellow who’s gone away now and how much you loved me.
And each time we moved the iron bed creaked, such obnoxious noises.
Silly girls

2008-10-21T01:38:00.000+05:30

As we lie awake in this night.
Lets leave this bed, get up and set off in our little red jaguar.
Lets drive until we reach the end.
At the tip on the mountaintop, lets sit with our feet hanging.
Lets sit and cry and cry even more.

Cry for all the woes of this world.
All sorrow and loss.
Cry for the dead people, poor people, mad people, deaf, dumb and blind people.
Cry for the American war. Cry for Lady Di.
Lets not brood or be sullen of these things. Lets genuinely be sad.
For how one life was never enough for love, brotherhood or hate.

Lets hold each other.. comfort and ease each other.
For our inadequacies, for our indifference.
Both to one another and to every thing else.
Lets confess that we lied when we said that we loved ourselves,
When we said
lets say we didn’t care to love enough, we didn’t love enough to care.
Both this world and we in it.

Lets cry for us.
Lets drive away with the radio on full blast. It’s nicely quite now.
Lets not smoke our cigarettes tonight.
Lets not contemplate, lets not reflect.
Lets not lie awake.

2008-10-14T00:46:00.000+05:30

Life has a ridiculous way of putting two and two together. Each time you set out to do something different, you fall all the more into its grand spell of classic clichés.

There are scores of men in this planet, black, white and brown; chauvinistic, humanitarian and paranoid. Successful, overtly successful and self-acclaimed disasters! Yet you wind up falling in love with that one man you cannot have, who does not fit into your life or your choices! You land up being the exact sobbing, winning spinster of the bloody mills n boons you so hate.

The most notoriously sentimental, overtly emotional films make you cry. Though you know it’s a marketing gimmick, intentionally playing upon your tear buds, but you just cant help yourself even if you think of a horse or an elephant while watching it. You still hate it, it still makes you cry.

On the perfect days of the month when you in all probability are supposed to be getting your period, you decide to wear a white skirt! and to make matters even better you set out on a eventful day without the slightest clue and absolutely unarmed. The mother of all foolish acts old and contemporary.

“Dream….when I want you in my arms, when I need you and all your charms, whenever I want you all I’ve gotta do is ….dream..”------- The darndest song could never be done away with. Your great grandmother too perhaps had her romantic fantasies singing along this song. And there are countless such mushy dimwitsadded in your list of favourites. John denvor, floyd, louis Armstrong.

Day by day you develop this sullen love for poetry. In your escapade You invariably sift through the one which reads “ Grand Collection of Classic poems.”
The poems are hideously romantic, and their ideas have innumerable poor offsprings in other novels and poems less creative. Stale, worn out and painfully long… aah not to miss the difficulty of language. And yet you dig into them like worm does in a book…as if you couldn’t have enough of it.

You read of Tagore and the women in his verses, of Keats and how he died young loving and writing most of his poems for this one woman who was blunt and knew nothing of poetry or art neither paid any heed to his love. You see a Satyajit Ray or a Stanley Kubrick classic, read about their craft n their vivid imaginations, google their images…stare at them for hours together… getting gooseflesh at sights of what they’ve created…. thinking… Yes these were indeed the brightest that ever shinned.

All this and much more…so much has been said, so much has been done… yet you wind up learning of their existence in your own discovery and loving them all the same, thinking what different have you….from the rest. As for me.. I believe that truly I am a master of clichés.

2008-10-07T18:37:00.000+05:30

I cannot find the tombstone for you
I can tell you where to look for it.

Macabre died at the age of 90.
And the tomb of macabre lies where he was born.
At least that’s what people speculate.
He was fond of yellow marigolds.
“ Strew them all over my cold, dead body”
His dying wish was never fulfilled.
Take some along with you if you can.

Macabre was born an epileptic
His limbs were fragile and brittle
He liked painting landscapes
“ My sky is purple and My hills are pink”
His drunken gibberish.
Paint a little hut on his rugged breast..
Fill it with walnut brown colours…

His tombstone bears great secrets
Perhaps all the secrets known, unknown
Stolen mangoes, hidden treasure boxes smuggled letters, and secret lovers.
He kept them and died with them.
Who knows, Maybe you too will find whatever it is that you look for.

If you do find the tombstone…
And there you spot an envelope with my name written on it.
Don’t read it, I beg you, don’t open and read.
It’s a letter that I wrote to you.
The kinds which we write but never mean to send.
Macabre’s tomb guards it with great concealment.

And god knows what is scribbled in it. What doom shall beget if the contents are ever read…
“Dear, sweets
I harboured a little crush on you, and kept it for quite some time.
But that night as you slipped into my room with my roommate friend
Meekly requesting me for privacy…
A tiny chunk of my heart broke off…
And I have never loved you ever since…”

2008-09-29T11:51:00.000+05:30

My mind bends like a bow; my heart feels heavier and larger.
My body feels warm, my breath unsteady.
All the nice things taste placid…all placids taste right….
Its isn’t depressing, it doesn’t make me any happier either...
It just lingers on and on… unstoppable!
And that’s the worst part.

2008-09-27T00:49:00.000+05:30

The marvels of existence are hidden in inconspicuous details, its only a matter of time when we see them and if we choose to see them. Who knew where my salvation lies…

2008-09-17T01:10:00.000+05:30

You told me you played soccer. Could eat two plates of Kobe sizzlars all by yourself. Were scared of horror films, threw stones from your second storey window at people walking down the street, the street dogs alike. Hated gooseflesh on your skin. Liked poetry and women with round bottoms. Found books boring and mushrooms gave you rashes. Liked the smell of the sea and a lot of chilli in your food.

P.S: I tricked you into eating mushrooms once, in the dumplings that my mother served. I hoped you would catch an allergy and a disease and die of it eventually. And I never had to see you again…

2008-09-05T00:45:00.000+05:30

when love was love.. and the ones who trode in... fools!..it was then you told me for the first time..and i have been trying to understand ever since.

now wen we have outlived our lives...sailed away with the tides of time... i have been thinking of it again...as you bring it up again... in disquise of a casual comment.

but dear friend....

it is unscrutable. i can feel it with my heart and soul...but never really understand...

2008-09-04T00:51:00.000+05:30

I don’t know whether it is pathological or any other kind that I am not aware of… or maybe just a habit in itself…as involuntary and unreasonable as it is meant to be. But my ‘habitual’ act of scribbling in my favourite Ms Word sometimes gets me thinking… is it a talent, an avocation or a dependency?

When I started writing for the first time rather consciously made an effort to write I believed that I had things to say…opinions to state and quite a hand at words to do so… I intended to display. I intended to outshine and show that I had a talent.
I guess we all have this thing about being special… and it cannot be underestimated by being called a wish…its more of a need which mostly becomes an obsession.

But as the times changed… life changed and migration happened. The experiences that I went through, the feelings that I encountered made me see myself in a way I cannot possibly imagine I could have. And it continues to change everyday.

Of all things great and small, I realised that writing had meant a lot more than I thought it did. It came with much simplicity and a lot of ease. It has neither a head nor any hands or feet and most of all was without an agenda. It had no lands to conquer or hearts to win. It is about many things and many people but has got nothing to do with any one else. It isn’t a thing to be bartered or a traded. It isn’t a weapon or a tool.

It is personal and intimate. More for me than any one else.

My true companion and perhaps the only one…

2008-08-17T01:13:00.000+05:30

The city pressed upon me; shops, cinemas and business houses spoke in unambiguous accents. Only the people said nothing. They bought the evening papers, hurried to a tube station and disappeared. Ceasing to exist.

Move in living images, he said. Rhythms, shapes, colours, forms they are yours. They are all yours. In them is embodied the language with which the laws of the universe brighten existence.
And dance in musical phrases for him who waits.

Nissim Ezekiel.

Mind and Matter

2008-08-16T17:10:00.000+05:30

Of all other things that I owe to my bachelors degree in media… this one is far more important and probably my greatest accomplishment as a human being.
It is a revelation in all senses of the term…and I don’t know whether I came upon it all of a sudden or through gradual thought and speculation.
But one day right after my culture studies lecture, after a heavy and gruelling session of cultural debate with Lavanya, my professor. I said to myself:
“ A Thinking Individual is far more powerful than an Opinionated one. An opinion arises from a judgement and judging something that has always been an open ended concept is foolishness”
And everyday that I have lived since then, I have been trying to understand what I had realised that day in class. Its seeping into me grain to grain and leading me to a ( I wouldn’t say better coz I don’t find comparatives relevant enough anymore) but to a more meaningful understanding.
In the 15th century, Rene Descartes, the greatest humanist of all times said “ I think therefore I am”. These words made a lasting impression on my mind. I thought that it is most definitely the wisest thing ever said.
Then I read Karl Marx and he said… Economy determines Human Consciousness!
This statement totally contradicts Rene… it said that something as Involuntary and autonomous as human thought is infact none of these, its not a matter of aesthetics. It’s determined and driven by how one financially operates and makes his or her money.

It was not that difficult to identify the large extent of truth in it.(I deliberately choose not to say absolute truth coz again I don’t believe there is any such thing as it) as the facts lay in front of me.
I, Reema Bhattacharya wouldn’t be here writing this blog if not for the various economic turbulences in my country and inturn in the world which eventually led to social and cultural changes.
Sometimes when I read stories dating back to the Partition of India 1947, I wonder how important a role it has played in my life and in making me who I am. If not for the partition then my grandfather would never have migrated to this country from Bangladesh. Those were such atrocious times, thousands of people killed, women raped and evaded. What if I was in one of those wombs, which were slit open with swords? And yet for this bloody, political upheaval I have the opportunity to be a part the modernised, urban and prosperous India.
I think of Reformation and how it bred the spirit of capitalism. Where everything was thought to be an opportunity to be tapped into and in making the most of the resources one has, lied god’s will.
I think of the Industrial revolution and how it changed the world forever. Made the village folk migrate to cities and become the working class and the rich even more powerful and colonising. And these colonisers inturn came to my country invaded and exploited it but also brought along English education and large-scale production. The industrial revolution gave birth to democracy when the working class gaining economic power demanded rights to vote.
Humanism, feminism, fundamentalism all such ideologies, all great events in the history of the world are all spun in a web and have shaped me into being who I am and what I think.

I belong to a country, which is the oldest living civilization in the world. A country of multiculturalism. A country where each of its regions n parts has a different language, ethic and history. Apart from the freedom struggle the various parts of India don’t really have a common history. A country with no official language ( Hindi is not definitely one) and yet all is unified under the great umbrella of The Grand Indian Culture. And it is a formidable brand worldwide now. I am not criticising it but the whole thing and its paradox intimidates me.

No matter how much I study, analyse or speculate, I don’t intend to be the knower of all, as I know that it’s impossible to be so.
But there are just somethings that I know for sure, I wont do again.
I would never accept a seat if offered on a bus or train.
I would never be sceptical to talk about sex, politics and religion.
I would try never to be judgemental. I shall listen, understand where it’s coming from and accept.
I would never stare a weird eye to a person with a vernacular accent.
I would never condemn, criticise or patronise anything as if I were passing a verdict.
I would never save up to be a nice woman with a nice job and car to ride in with a well earning and doing husband, children added! Life’s more important than that. I have lots to achieve for myself and for the people who need to be helped.
I shall never settle for any profession or companion who doesn’t relate to my ideologies.

I would never stay in one place forever. The world shall be my oyster and I with my hands shall hold it up and explore it………

THE EPITAPH

2008-07-27T22:51:00.000+05:30

10 Things I wish I had said to specific people…at various points in my life….(you cannot take names!..)

I had never acknowledged it. I had never known to acknowledge. Or perhaps I was living in denial while it lasted. But maybe the first instance of love in my life was with you. I detest the day you were taken away from me…and I have never cried ever since…now that many years have gone by… and you are no more to be… I still remember you…. You’re my first find….and my first loss! I shall keep you and remember you…hoping that you will come back to me one day but knowing that you wont…

You’re a bastard and you know it better than I do. I am glad…I never kissed u back!

There is no secret handshake to me… there is an ultimate pre-requisite but no secret handshake! Now that I have said it. You should know.

Don’t go away… though I may never come to say it… though I may wave to you good bye…if you choose to leave… but don’t go away..

I will take care of you!.. And isn’t that something I have always done?… then why are you still so afraid. Trust me if you truly can.. it is not an obligation. It’s a choice.. an involuntary choice. And I will choose you over anyone else!

Get over me…. don’t make me your sob story to gain sympathy or make me feel bad about myself!…the truth is you despise me. You always have. But now you cant hide it. I can smell the stench. If I have wronged you…. Then maybe you deserved it!

You are the most remarkable young woman I have ever seen or known. More than anything…I deeply respect you for who you are. If only you believed me… if only you believed me this one time…. Like you do for everything else. I cannot see you like this. You should know. I cannot see you like this. Listen to me. Believe me. If only….

Your shallow. You’re uncouth and ugly. There is nothing you hate or love because you cannot tell between the two. You’re too thick to know the difference. The only thing your good at is lying. And lying blatantly. I have no issues with what you are personally. But stop dragging me to your level. It enrages me more than anything else. I am not like you!. Get that straight!

Stop! Just put an end to it right now! No I cannot reciprocate. I don’t love you! I don’t want to lie to you either.

I really don’t know…. What were you getting at?… what do you try to say each time we speak to each other? I feel this… this extraordinary sense of love and you fill in most parts! But there is this strange divide that keeps me from you and you from me. I really do not know what is it all about!… I cannot deal with it..and I cannot let it be either.

DARK GLASSES

2008-07-13T12:43:00.001+05:30

Slip into that favourite cocktail dress of yours, once again
Don the jewels that match your emerald eyes,
Puff some rouse and colour those cheeks with splendour
Fair maiden, you look lovely tonight.

Slip into that favourite cocktail dress of yours, once again
Go dancing in the winter rain with charming men by your side
As your high heeled shoes twirl in twirls round the night
And your hair runs loose from its gaited might…
Watch the eyes that follow them, hear the hearts which beat..
Fair maiden, you look lovely tonight.

Slip into that favourite cocktail dress of yours, once again
The rum looks fine and nice for a lady’s taste
Hold your glass firm and high and Raise a toast to Love and Life.
Though love sickens and life dampens by the day
Fair Maiden they are hidden from your sight.

As wit and humour befail the charming men
As the night progresses into the hollow depth of the night
You sit by the bar; you laugh at all the silly jokes you hear…
And soon its time for the last dance of the year.
As your high heeled shoes twirl in twirls round the night
And your hair runs wild from its gaited might…
Watch your eyes, they droop.. as the kohl melts away
Watch the pallor reappear on your roused skin
Look around you and see those vile men who on New Year’s Eve boasted of their vain love
Lye wasted and drunk…calling on to other women.

Slip into that favourite cocktail dress of yours, once again
You look lovely as you did in all the other lovely nights…
As love sickens and life dampens by the day
Fair maiden, wear your pair of dark glasses again
And Let them be hidden from your sight….

Nonsense’s Muse.

2008-07-09T20:53:00.000+05:30

When your heart is empty, your head is empty!… The proverbial cliché inspite of being such a cliché is so darn true! When heart’s empty every thing else is meaningless.
This is not a night of bliss, I am not at peace.
I had a rough day, had a fight with my parents, a cold discussion with a Luke warm acquaintance, struggled my way through crowded trains and buses and the rains added on to make matters worse.
The events of the day have caused me to become refractory and annoyed, I argued, I fought and I complained. Life isn’t fair, there is no acceptance and there is no complacence, I said. But what I face now is a trouble greater than all, the most difficult and distressing..
What I face now is the very dreaded writer’s block, which is again if I am a writer. Considering the fact that my writing has not exactly eulogised nature’s beauty or the futility of human relationships, banished hunger and poverty or changed the world. Neither am I sure whether all writing is intended for that solely. However, though not of the latter but I am sure of it being a block of sorts. See, the thing with me is that I have always had words with me to an extent that I overused them sometimes. Every emotion brought along a splurge of words to describe it. Words were my only folly and in them was my respite.
But today is not like all those days. It seems as if a niche hole has been carved out in my heart and soul and I can clearly look through. Thoughts have not ceased but thinking with words has. So however gravely I feel like expressing my dejection today, I cannot. For some obscure, vague reason, I am not being able to. It’s like going for a funeral of your closest friend and realising that your tears are stuck. They have refrained from flowing and you cannot express your grief. And trust me its worse than the loss by death.
Am I turning into an intellectual lightweight? Or was I always one? Or is this what they call a block? although I don’t trust what ‘they’ say in the first place.
This is all very paralysing. It’s a strange confinement. I feel entrapped within myself. The inability to write, to be inspired to write, to be moved enough to be inspired makes me feel very…. Inadequate. And I hope it changes soon. Changes for good.
I think we all need a Muse, a prompt that stirs you and stirs in you…. Words otherwise are a façade only and the bubble might burst any moment.

2008-07-09T20:36:00.000+05:30

Imagine a night, a night sky and a night sky dotted with stars.
Imagine looking at the starry, bright lights in the sky…
And you stare at it fixedly, mesmerised yet again…
Quizzing through all the words in your mind, all the words you have ever known, ever learnt, to find the exact one which accurately describes what you feel right now.
And you can’t find it, cant think of it, as always.
The wonder of it all amazes you, and you are lost before you know
Tracing the trails of the stars and your thoughts that follow.

Whenever, I think of Life as an entity and have this sudden urge to sum it all up and to reason it. All heaven and earth, happiness and grief, success and failure, good and bad, war and peace, the rich and the poor, love, hatred and me…. how it all fits and how do I fit in it…this is how I can think of.
Life is like looking at the night sky, seeing the fireworks and watching the great thunder dragons unroll in front of you…
The way you cannot reason its magnificence, you cannot reason your life as well, the wonder and the thrill that it incites in you…. Life does to you the same…

THE VERVE......

2008-07-09T20:30:00.000+05:30

I have arrived…
Rather, reached…
I can see where it ends now…
I can see the end…
No, it isn’t where I began
Life hasn’t moved in a circle…
A quest you see was not my purpose…
All I saw was a long road ahead of me..
And I took to the road…
I walked it….
There are a million things I had seen,
A million things I have known…
Yet there are questions in my mind….
And I wonder till the day…

There are a million things I had wished for
A million wishes came true…
Some didn’t
Yet I haven’t given up on wishing…
There are things to wish for even today…

I am neither cold nor warm…
I am alone but not lonesome…
I am not the wisest that ever existed..
I don’t feel foolish either..

Life doesn’t seem insatiable
It seems fulfilled…
It feels complete…
I never got to know what it was all about…
But I lived it never the less
And I must say… I lived it well

I can see the end now
It isn’t familiar…
It isn’t home…
But I can see where it ends now…
I can feel what is felt…

A quest you see was not my purpose…
All I saw was a long road ahead of me.
And I took to the road…
I walked it all the way.

2008-07-09T20:08:00.000+05:30

There’s a thought for every thought
A word for every word…

There’s a song for New found love
A song for separation…

There’s a story behind each new story
There’s an end that ends every tale…

There are superlatives to describe all passion..
Bob Dylan to speak about the blues….

But the reason why I was born
Is unknown to me…
And loving the lady I am born from
Is infact a greater mystery…

I wonder what it must have felt like to held by her for the first time..
Somewhere deep within my nascent senses and my newly born perception and abilities…. I must have felt something……
When I was born, a mother, in her was born too.
I wonder how she felt
I wonder how it made her look that first instant..
For a young woman who took life as an adventure
Was I a much desired end or the new beginning..
Was she overwhelmed? Was she scared? Was she prepared?
Can you ever prepare yourself for the first glance of motherhood?
What was it, how was it…. I shall never know.

But that moment isn’t lost… perhaps its safer in obscurity..
Just some part of Maa and myself that I cannot reach….I cannot know…
And thus I cannot change…
Love you Maa hopefully just as much as u love me..

To Maa, who taught me not to sleep hind side up, lest I get bad dreams…
I never corrected that habit..She loved me never the less…..

Reply:

2008-05-14T16:26:00.000+05:30

I really don’t know which is more difficult,
Holding on or letting go
I don’t know which is more important
Holding on or letting go

I do know that both require a lot of effort
And may be I haven’t tried hard enough
And thus I have failed…

I could not hold on to you…
And now I cannot let go….

I will not plead
I will not explain

I did not hold on to you…
And now I cannot let go….

From The girl who loved once upon a time....

2008-05-13T13:05:00.000+05:30

Jaake shokole mone rekheche… taake aamar mone nei…
Jaar kobita raatre shuniye baba ghum pariyeche…
Jaar gaan, jaar golpo pore mone hoyeche… ei jiboner mule
Aaj taake aamar mone nei….
Taar kono sriti nei…
Taar kono gurutto nei…
Aamar jibone….

Shotti aami onek dur chole eshe chi…
Bhule gechi tomake…
Bhule gechi aamake!
Happy Birthday neways….

tagged!

2008-05-13T12:10:00.000+05:30

8 things I am passionate about:

Self
Life…
Literature…
Religion
Music..
Bike rides..
Dance
Day dreaming

8 things I wanna do b4 I die

Live eight times over each day….

8 things I say often!
Huh?
Fcuk
U suc
Dhut teri!
Indeed
Mora ekta!
Wat nonsense!
Gawd! I swear so much!

8 books I have read recently

Shantaram
Tokyo cancelled
The culture code
Ruskin bond collection of short stories
Unaccustomed earth
Gawd!!... eight nothings!

8 songs I can hear over n over again

Serve somebody ( Bob Dylan and almost all of his… any of his..)
Road tripping ( RHCP)
Imagine (lenon)
A song for u (jack Johnson)
Bad news
Diamond n rust (joan beaz)
Jamaican farewell (harry bella fonta)
Can u give me sanctuary ( doors)
Aamar shonar horin chaai! ( papa's verson of Rabindranath Thakur)
Krishnokoli aami taarei boli ( Rabi Thakur again)

8 things that attract me abt mah best frnds!

Changeability
Caprice
Friends-4-the-momentness

Ex idealist turned I-hate-this-world-wild child turned drunk-philosophers eventually 2 become sobered down-sophisticated-citizens commenting on weather, politics, hunger and global warming!

Da fact dat I no so less…of them

8 ppl who shud do dis tab!

Minakshi
Neha
Rik
Tania
Aamina
Arjun

The adventures of Miss M

2008-04-20T23:57:00.000+05:30

[ P.S I am one of those people who are very self conscious or maybe off late I have grown into one.
Everything I say or do has to totally make sense. Be correct]

Andheri station. 7.30 in the evening. People rushing past. One has to see it to believe it. Scores of people. As if the war is over and men are returning home. Just with busy and gloomy faces instead of the happy ones. Me returning from work as well. Dazzled and confused by the over whelming traffic. Wont let it show. Have to look smart and an experienced traveller. Otherwise it’s a cue for the pick pockets. Train’s coming. The lady announces. People go ballistic and scurry past faster. There’ll be another train in less than 5 mins. People go ballistic neways… scurry past faster neways. I don’t . The reason being obvious. I am intelligent. However, I had to show that even I am chasing the train. So I run like I am being chased. What happens next?.. well… I trip and fall… people around me…come to a stand still… “laga to nahi beta…” “are you okay?”… my ears turn red. As they always do whenever I am embarrassed. I get up slowly with some help and avoiding any eye contact. Realise that I have torn my sandals. No one in this world can talk me out of wearing heels. I just wont give up on them. My ears red. My face red. Unable to control myself I break into giggles. My fellow on lookers start laughing as well. Suddenly the gloom from our faces is gone. The exhaustion is gone. I return home with my torn slippers in my hand. Bare feet. Made many acquaintances. I accidentally bump into them once in a while.

[P.S The people who know me… know that there are very few occasions when I do things right. And that I make the sweetest clueless faces when I goof up. Whenever I goof up]

2008-04-19T21:45:00.000+05:30

In life there are many mediocres.....love will surely not be one of them..... when i will love...
it will be extraordinary.....
yes. i will love...nd it will be extraordinary....

So much for Happieness…

2008-04-16T00:40:00.000+05:30

Well… lets see
Way past midnight..
A bed
A book
Preferably fiction or fantasy
Dim lights…
Or
Ms word
Pen and paper would do also
Pensiveness
Aloofness
And beautiful words to express it

Summer…
Stormy and rainy afternoons of summer…
A favourite song
Bob Dylan would be wonderful
Any other good song would be great as well..

Journeys
A window seat fought and elbowed for..
A view
Concrete or Green
Moving and changing shapes every moment
Favourite street food
Unhygienic and full of germs..

Love
Purely strange
Partly stupid
A lot of indulgence
Lacks understanding leaving most to imagination
Well lived
Never regretted…
Even at the loss of it….

So much for happiness…Every year thousands of people kill themselves thinking that they are not happy.. well I could say that I am happy…

A song for my song

2008-04-16T00:36:00.000+05:30

Days
Happy days and sad days…
Good days and bad days…
Days of great achievements..
Days, which sink to the puddles of the commonplace…
And all through…
It ain’t a lover to love.. or a friend to understand…
A song is what we need…
A song is what we have…
Songs
Hum them while you’re driving…
Hum them when you’re bored…
Hum the romantic ones while you flirt..
Hum the beautiful ones when you’re alone…
Sing them when the dawn brakes…
Sing them when dark clouds gather…
Leave the old on a singsong note…
Only to begin another…
Later on play the old rhyme again…
Reminds you that you have memories…
In the voice of the one who leads
In the voice of the one who follows
Pied piper or peter pan..
The dictator or the democrat…
All and anon…
Have their favourite songs…
Favourites…
The better shall always be…and shall always remain..
Varied moods, varied emotions and varied lives….
A favourite for each varied one..

So this is ode to all my favourites songs…. The songs that have kept me going all through and the ones that linger in my mind always. The songs I deeply love….
Thank you…

Last act...Last scene

2008-03-23T18:28:00.000+05:30

Lady : I think its going to rain today…..

Gentle man : how do you know..?

Lady : The sky…

Gentle man : The sky…?

Lady : uhuh…

Gentle man: those are drifting clouds mah lady… they wouldn’t pour here….

Lady : but see how the sky looks…. hefty and so full of itself…just the way it does before
It rains…..

Gentleman : drifting clouds Marie…deceitful drifting fellas….

Lady : deception is a tool more handy to man….than to nature…

Gentleman : man is what he is at nature’s behest…

Lady : That’s an excuse more than an explanation….

Gentleman : it ain’t

Lady : it is…. It is cynicism

Gentleman : big words!… quite capture the imagination…don’t they…

Lady : big words when used correctly…quite capture the imagination…my dear

Gentleman : so you know all about words and their meaning

Lady : I know what I know…and I hope to know more…

Gentleman : if you know all then why do you leave things to hope?

Lady : I have no liaisons with hope… it ain’t a mortal counterpart you see..

Gentleman : then what is it…?… a convenient escape route?

Lady : it something as opposed to knowing….higher than believing and weaker than
Desiring…..yet sometimes knowing and hoping become the same…

Gentleman : Dramatic Romanticism….

Lady : No I ain’t romanticising, I am just hoping that It rains today…..and I know
That it will…..

2008-03-20T20:54:00.000+05:30

I have sworn that I will not write long blogs again… and I think it is wise on my part to swear so…

Reema bhattacharya: At age 26 you will die from wounds delivered by a blender after trying to make your sixteenth magarita of the day. (And it's on 3:00pm, shame on you!) I found it funny…do u too?

2008-02-20T00:29:00.000+05:30

"minakshi: haha...reema gehrai achii hoti hai.. jab tak woh tumhe apne aap me samet na le..is baat ka khayal rakhna.."
I regret listenning to and not listenning to her advice....

What we call Reflections

2008-02-19T01:09:00.000+05:30

They say that all happy stories are the same but every unhappy story isn’t… it always has a new thing to say… a different point to make….
But don’t all stories begin on an unhappy note and end on a happy one…
Isn’t the unhappiness only to add the element of difference to each story…
Isn’t it in the nature of grief to eventually transcend into joy?…
Many would agree…Many wouldn’t.
For the past few days this is what I have been thinking about but even amidst my deepest thoughts and to my best judgement I cannot come up with anything… or rather something close to satisfactory…

“ Words are meant to express oneself…to bring out the ambiguous world inside of you.. Speak them with clarity, write them with truthfulness and honesty, be humble and believe in their humility…Reema..
Don’t twist and turn them, don’t complicate them unnecessarily….
You hide behind your words my dear….
But a day will come when your seemingly wise words will deceive you instead..
And you will be lost behind them forever…
Don’t be a writer of words Reema…. Be the storyteller you always wanted to be….
A delightful storyteller…. that’s what writing is all about…” said a certain Mrs Canteenwaala who happens to be my lit teacher and my most loved lady… when she read a piece of mine….

What she said was not merely an analysis… it had meant much more to me… it had trickled deep down and triggered a volley of emotions in me…
Her comment given with the events that took place in the past brought out a different kind of realisation in me…a kind I was not aware of….

And I questioned myself…
What has my rationality given me?
Hasn’t it taken away much more?
Isn’t all this articulation mere pretence?
O how conveniently I lie to myself… how nicely and skilfully I pacify and make amends… make compromises pretending to myself that I don’t.
I am indeed a make believer… and my own illustrative and extravagant words have made an unfailing irony out of me….
And this façade of poignancy that I put up…
it is no more than a folly..

And today at the event of a distant some one being ill and going through a lot of pain..
At the sight of a dear one shedding tears of grief and hope for her beloved…
I would say that I am sad…
That this melancholy has taken over me and I am overwhelmed…
It has invoked in me…. my inner disharmony, my inner conflict with the choices that I have to make and my reluctance in making them…..
I am confused with disbelief, my hypocrisy stands right in front of me…. staring at my face accusingly.
From the time I was born…I have been told that whether its virtue or vile…. I need to believe in either one of them… as I grew older I came to realise that it actually didn’t matter much as to what I believed in…as long as I had a belief! That it is all what is required of me….. and in the process have I built this canopy around and over wherein I have made both sorrow and joy impervious to me…wherein I sit silently... calmly sipping my cup of coffee over great loses and telling the rest of the world and myself that “ it doesn’t matter”. Reading out to myself lofty and fervalent poetry to disillusion myself …dissuade myself from acknowledging that fact that I am heart broken..that I have lost out on love.
Yes I do have a belief…and my belief is that I can fix everything, that I shall never let go of my disposition that I will always do what needs to be done…..
But now all I can see in myself is a void….an ill-fated void in the name of belief !…
And this void stretches far beyond me….it reaches to each and every one who is aggrieved tonight….
Probably that is why I see the same plea of helplessness in the eyes of my dear friend as I see in mine…
I hear similar cries of denial from that distant acquaintance as I put mine to silence.
So as I suffer silently
He does too
And she does as well…
Perhaps we all do
Perhaps this is how we are all built…

This grief is heavy, this grief is hard but it is also Healing….. This storm will die down like all others…. And all what is lost shall be found again….
It will bring along with it acceptance and deliverance.
The hatred, the anger and the fear will perish
And eventually everything will fall in its right place, everything will be fine… we will live and we will learn...…

And “ The happy ending” no matter how cliché it becomes with time … will always remain the undying favourite….

Then one day perhaps when I will be able to live as boldly as I laugh…. Love as vividly as I dream….
I shall remind my self…. That it is indeed in the nature of unhappy stories to end on a joyful note…
That unhappiness is momentary and is used to add the element of difference in our stories…..

Love
Reema

Of evenings unnamed

2008-02-11T16:56:00.000+05:30

… It was a moonlit night
Stars shining
Breezing
Windy cold winds

An unexpected winter in a city unknown to seasons
The city
A lovely city
Establishments..
Monuments..
And Achievements…

A city where the night fires never burn out
Of travels and voyages..
Pilgrims
And Sinners
Immigrants
And Dreamers

Two lost souls
Obscured in ancience
What is to be?
Of what has become
Oblivious of both
Of what binds them….
Of what separates…
Of what is lost…
Of what remains….
Unknown …
All of it unknown…

One speaks of the Rain..
Ceaseless
And endless
Clouds….
Dim
Silent
Immense

He speaks of lands
Far off lands..
Grassy
Vegetative
And green

He speaks of the dust
Of the cowboys
Their stories
Legends..
And myths

He speaks of forbidden love
And of forbidden women
Sinister glances
And expressions….
Love..
Their love…
Unabashed love..
Uncontrolled love
Fake love..
Fickle love..
Stale love…
Passionate fakeness..
Passionate love….

Yet there’s the love we all look for…
Yes there’s the love forever…

The other one speaks of the city of temples
Of sculptures
And sculptors..
Artisans
And Courtesans …
Musicians
And poetesses..

She speaks of the chandeliers..
Tinkle tankle..
Shapely
Neatly
Glass cut sounds of crystal
Unmatched in clarity
Grandeur
Burning bright
Immaculate magnificence.

She says…she likes looking at them
Staring at them for hours..

She says she likes the flute
It reminds her of something
A song probably..
Old
And cherished
A memory that fades not.

She talks of dreams
Her dreams
Vivid ….
Blurred….
Hated ….
Coveted ….
Dreams of deep slumber
Dreams of wakefulness

He says he cheated his lover
She says love in turn deceived him
Therefore he looks for what he had found already
She says
Its proposition
A manoeuvred tragedy
His watchful eyes cannot see

Every day that ends
Every moment that passes by
Love deceives
Future conceals
And life teaches..
And we…
We yield to each and every
We yield to all..

A moonlit night it was…
Stars shining
Two lost souls
Unknown to the world
And to each other unknown
Star gazing
And Conversing
Parallel conversations..
Seamless
Loveless
And luckless…..

Dedicated to a splendid evening spent with a dear friend on the gliding rocks of Nariman Point.

To Romeo with love…

2007-12-30T18:35:00.000+05:30

“ You are the most unromantic girl I have ever met”
Spat came the reaction for turning down a non-prosperous but interesting never the less offer. And yes, it is not this one time a thing like this happened, a decision such as this has been taken, a remark such as this has been made… the same story rolls on over and over again and I, Reema Bhattacharya thus continue in my 19th year of singleton.

“What kind of youth was hers? She never even had stars in her eyes nor let her hair fly loose over her cheeks. She had never given way to storms of emotions, never sought a lover, not even when the dark clouds gathered in the sky during monsoons.”
--- Ismat Chugtai
Those words when read for the first time made a lasting impression in my mind, in ways known to me alone, I identified with them. They were so true and untrue in so many ways. My lines faltered, I mumbled and stammered while reading them aloud to myself. I was full in grief, awe and fear at being expressed so unabashed and blatant within printed words, which were originally conceived and scripted by another.

“ But I do have stars in my eyes….each time I see the blind sky.. and they shine..not from the heaven above but the earth below…they shine..in my eyes. My tresses carry more than just infatuations in them, they are care free and insane…flying in all directions…”

And then it occurred to me,
It was not being unromantic…but being too much of a romantic was where the problem lied with me.

Hmmm, it’s funny… I would agree, sometimes when I think of it, even I laugh at it. it’s both hilarious and tragic.

Most of my friends, acquaintances, people I know often speak of love. They speak of it like a thing too known and familiar yet profoundly confusing. Various people..various opinions yet all of them trickle down to the same conclusive lull of dilemma… also all their passion, emotion and expression of love revolve around the one person they claim to love. It is as constant or variable as is their beloved.

But what I ask is that, could the entirety of love be confined within the dictates of a relationship? Is love.. love when its personal or when its universal, When it’s all over in the words…or when it lies like a thing obscure? Is it in the dreams we see…or in the ones which we cannot remember?….

Scientifically, love is a hormone induced in the human body so that it could stay with its mate long enough to procreate and support its offspring until it is capable to survive on its own. Not long ago even I believed that love is all biological and evolutionary….once, my sir asked “ what do u think makes the earth go round…. Is it fear or is it love”….Fear !….i said promptly…. “ Sir, the so called genesis of our existence…our god!…we fear him…that’s why we pray to him, offer him sacrifices.. because we think that he controls our destiny…and he has the power to alter it at his own discretion…” “ Fear…sir is an emotion which acts like a metaphor….like a whip of the savage god we serve------- Power!….the only god we serve.”

“ Splendid!… infallible argument and impeccable logic indeed.. but my little girl as you grow older and wiser…and see the world at close and distant quarters… you will see the irony in it all. Do you know what is defined as irony?…. it is when the real meaning is completely opposite of the one that is implied… you will then realise that the word which governs all heaven and earth… which lies at the core of the universe is not Hope or God…. Its Irony…”

I didn’t quite understand it then, I mean what he said and what he meant… but with every passing day I seem to continually comprehend it and believe in it even more….

Perhaps it is irony…. Which clouds our understanding of the world and its ways and of things like love… perhaps they are never meant to be understood at all….

And as for me…I don’t want to make an attempt to understand it in any way the rest of the world does… for me its not love..but the anticipation of it, the manifestation of it… the irrationality in it…is what is worth falling for it….

How could I possibly find a soul with a heart in a city of stones…. A city where men and women fancy themselves for the favours of stale love…

What I dream of is an elusive character. A perfect composition of hopes and fears imperfectly balanced. The David copper field with his lost and sad eyes… eyes which don’t see where they are supposed to go but see where they belong… “ To be careless about what’s important, to be expressionless about what’s Dear..” that is what I will learn from him….together we will revel through land and through oceans be the last generation of humanists of our time. Our world will of poetry, of art, of philosophy and of literature… of politics and of science and all the feeble evils that govern this feeble world. But what shall be immortal…would be our undiminishing zeal and zest for life. the catastrophic fear that lies when a fool is armed with a dangerous weapon, a fear of that kind shall be hung in the silences of fate….as we look it in the eye…taking command of our lives.

And then one day….. He shall as magically disappear into obscurity…as he had once appeared before me…as if it were all a dream like Hitch hicker’s space odyssey and then on shall linger his memories within me…. Reminding me.. of how I loved, and how I lived…..

Yes it is indeed the irony in it all….. therefore love is never love….hate is never hate..
You are never you…..and I am never me…..

Dear readers

2007-12-04T21:33:00.000+05:30

the best is yet to come....and its on its way...
love Reema

My beloved sad days..

2007-12-03T15:14:00.000+05:30

“ I have never felt so compelled to write before this. The compulsion is more personal than anything else. These are one of those moments when my mind is totally lost in a hysterical crisis of my intellect. An enormous turmoil churns within me and I don’t know what to make out of it. I feel ugly, unkempt and bitter… an agonising hatred for myself seems to have over powered me somehow and forces me to hate myself even more each day. A horrific sense of shame, a satirically meted out self-pity and a tragic conflict of purposes have made a tremendous and unfailing irony out of my little lived and a lot pondered life.”

2007-11-30T19:59:00.000+05:30

Another day…another year…another age passes by….
Hmm…and yet I grow in mind, body and spirit….
No…no more such starters…

From sneaking out for the night…and moving lost round and round…
From getting slaushed…and dancing like a mindless freak
From staying out on the streets all night and seeing my day through its end…with the sunrise of the morning after….
From still being unhappy with the insatiable quest for happiness in the end….and beginning the next day with the exact same heavy heart…..as the days before…

All being said and done….
There just remains one thing to say..
HAPPY BITHDAY TO ME……

The king and the fool....

2007-11-26T18:01:00.000+05:30

THE KING:
Time does not wait for you or me..
Days pass and years pass..
You miss your best ones
You move away from your close ones.
Friends change, people change!
But your heart has those precious moments etched in it.
Its always there making you happy at sad times and sad even at happier times.
Your heart has those moments in that corner where no one can see what it is.
When others ask by seeing your face you just smile and say
“Nothing”……

THE FOOL:

And “Nothing”….it will be for most part of our stories…
Stories that bear the marks, the stretches and the scars of our growing up days…
Tales of our agony, dilemma, hysteria….
All blended in those brilliant hues of youthful passion…
A passion that had no equal..
Laugh and be merry we will be told…
Our journey has just begun…
What makes us soo world-weary?
As infants and as adolescents we believed we knew everything there is to be known
About this world and its ways…
As we grow old…we realise that we know so less…
In those helpless and lonely moments…perhaps there’ll be one consolation….
Memoirs of our euphoric tales hidden behind…
“Nothingness”…..

schizophrenia....

2007-11-26T17:58:00.000+05:30

“Oh it is a very fatal disease”….. “ Sometimes there are no early symptoms…!”… “ My uncle died on schizophrenia…” Mam….. Schizophrenic people are mad people basically…..right?”…. No!… not exactly!!…see you shouldn’t see it that way!!!….but mam…its one and the same…”… and soon after the bell followed!!!…Instinctively the students got up…and began to leave the class… teacher un finished! Conversation unleaded…. Meaning… misunderstood which is far worse than not being understood at all…

Margo who was always the last bencher…as always got up at the last…left…after every one else had…
Margo…a quite and reticent fellow….remained in his world of silence…and barely reminded the world of his existence…. Dark, shinny and observant eyes hidden rather skilfully behind heavy weight, high power glasses…a kind face… mislead by Expressionlessness… a perfectly carved out soul buried underneath a hefty and obnoxious body…an enterprising and imaginative mind veiled by obscurity….
In a world where every other thing is relative….his silence seemed to be the only thing that was absolute….and undeterred!..
It seemed as if no pain, no grief, no joy…remorse or shock could stir in him…. What lingered only…were the sounds of his ambiguous pathos…. Unspoken no doubt but felt never the less…. Far from the façade of this world of flamboyance…in some remote and undiscovered corner existed his heart…its beats…understated and submissive, just like the boy himself…

With his heavy steps…Margo walked the length of the school corridor…and walked little more all the way to the bus stop…10 good minutes…
Waited for a while for the bus he usually takes, climbed it….and went away.
The bus was moderately crowded!… fairly enough for Margo to manage a seat…
Margo sat by the window…as the bus rolled on….
But today he saw something really strange…. Wherever he looked….outside the window or inside…the sight was unavoidable…
Wherever he looked. .he saw faces.. lost and dreamy…
Every one seemed to be out on a purpose… purposes which made them appear busy.. and occupied….
But their frowning and busy looking faces could not hide their eyes…
Eyes which when seen carefully revealed all….
Eyes which seemed to see what could be seen…yet believed in an alternate reality… the eyes…along with the faces…were lost, dreamy and absent mind….
people from all walks, people of all types, places and cultures…beautiful and ugly.. rich and poor…well read or illiterate…. Bore within them a common stigma.. a dream of an undivided heaven.. a belief in an existence quite different from their own…

Margo thought to himself… “how are we… different from the ones who are diseased with schizophrenia? ….why aren’t we called the diseased as well?”….. schizophrenia is a state when the human mind deems what isn’t real as reality… “but that is something we all do…each one of us…in ways known best to ourselves…”…. “Then why this divide between sanity and insanity…”…
“ Hope”…..he said aloud to himself unintentionally startling the man sitting next to him…
“yes…hope is the word which the common man uses to hide his schizophrenia…”.. His obsessive belief in an alterior and better reality…attains acceptance when misquoted into words like “hope”…
This world is indeed an eerie place…and the cons of men lie too deep and too perfect to be corrected…

The bus halted abruptly…and all what it contained uncontrollably jerked forward… and so did Margo… from his thoughts…
His mind remained idle for a while…and then thoughts flowed in again….

“Kubla khan”….by Samuel Taylor coleridge…fascinating poem.. Margo thought to himself.. like the ethereal world of a perfect dreamer…painted in colours unknown and then one by one….he remembered the stories that he had read.. the poems, the plays.. the comedies, the tragedies… the great wars of troy…. The mythical lords of religion…. The mystical travels of Ulysses…. The Iliad, the travels of the magi…. Joan of arc, the Nostradamus code…the genesis, the theories of all…
Everything illusionary…and vivid…yet unanimously acclaimed to be masterpieces….
“Hmmmmm”…. Margo sighed and smiled to himself…
“Fiction…he said to himself…is the word used by the men good at their words to hide their insanity… their schizophrenic tales are read as their creative benevolence.

“ Yes it is indeed an eerie world and the cons of men lie too deep and perfect to be corrected.” and that is why when learned men with carefully parted hair and ironed clothes speak prooflessly it becomes a hypothesis and later a theory, they call it science…. while men too naïve to know the games of pretensions are called lunatics… and it is largely true and finds evidences wherein the glorified theories of Marxism….proposed by Karl Marx.. Find no realistic implications and are completely economically fallible. Yet governments have and are following them…nations are run with those principles.. such are the ways of the world….such is reality: the greatest illusionist of all times…..

Margo got down from the bus in his usual spot… the twilight had set in… it submerges every good and evil in its profound aura of oblivion… and Margo too disappears in them…. Never to be remembered because he together with them remain eternally forgotten……

....My fair lady....

2007-11-24T13:36:00.000+05:30

The Old..…. The new, The Rhetoric…. The Reality…

“ If you ask me, I know not …… if not asked, I know”

In lonesome and contemplative moments, when I close my eyes and utter the word ‘woman’ to my silent self, trying to gather the vastness in her constitution, the essence of her existence, this seems to be the only phrase lingering within me which with all its skilfulness and witty articulation rightfully describes the paradox called ‘Woman’.

According to Greek mythology, the lord of all gods Zeus, created man first. Initially all was well and Zeus was very pleased with his earthly beings, then one day they did something gravely wrong and defied his laws. Enraged Zeus greatly detested the turn of events and decided to condemn and curse mankind. A curse so powerful that it in one hand was empowered to nourish evolution and one the other, possessed the ability to cause wholesome destruction. And that was when, in order to punish mankind, he created Woman. She was like an elusive dream, like the ever-widening horizon, the closer one got to it, the farther it seemed. Her form was impeccable, her beauty…unparalled, Her eyes had the precision and the accuracy of an archer. Her words were charming, capricious and treacherous; they spoke of the thrills that lied in the perilous world of the unknown. But most enigmatic of all was her age old, Spartan heart which hid within its veil of anonymity, numerous tales, accounts, and experiences of grief, happiness and desire.
And from then on began the journey of man through eras that marked the various stages of his evolution: From the age of barbarianism to the dawn of civilizations.
His has been an eventful journey marked by numerous encounters with the forces of nature, toiling for the purpose of food, self exploration for the attain enlightenment, dealing with the hopes and despairs of life and most essentially unravelling the mysteries of woman, the woman who was his companion in all tasks, someone who enabled him to attain material, spiritual, physical and emotional totality, The companion who was an integral part of all his activities, his household and his society. Her presence was as definite and commonplace as other natural aspects that governed his life yet there was this sense of mysticism in her that intrigued one and all. An invisible yet invincible force seemed to constitute her being and her soul seemed to be an undiminished and undisputable source of power and creation.
From time immemorial, several attempts have been made to explore, experience and express the obscure world inside a woman. She has been the object of deep curiosity,
admiration and study. Collecting the bits and pieces of her entirety in numerous poems, parodies, portraits and musings, The ideal woman of our imagination yet seems to be in an insatiable pursuit of fulfilment which still remains unattained. And then there is this constant conflict between the Ideal and the Real. Where the ideal woman seemingly lives in eulogised mounts of philosophical and cultural utopia, and the real woman toils amidst the tragedies of life making difficult choices between virtues and vials.
Such an observation is in all terms very superficial and one-dimensional.
The ideals that existed in the historical and religious texts and the epics do not stifle reality within the confines of stereotypes and clichés…. When carefully observed and rightly understood they stretch far beyond and depict a picture more contemporary in thought.
One such influential character in the Indian mythology is Sita who has played a significant role in modelling the ideal woman character in the Indian society.

Sita – Wife of Shri Ram, who followed him selflessly through fourteen years of exile and is supposed to be the epitome of righteousness, chastity and virtue. A character like Sita would seem extremely fictitious and as a phenomenon that happened only in myths with very little realistic relevance. But if observed carefully, the characterisation of Sita alone speaks much more of the real Indian woman than the modern woman herself. From, being demure, diligent and assertive to standing up and vehemently and fighting for her rights, Sita is reflected in every aspect of an Indian woman’s personality, she is in every choice a woman makes, be it personal or professional. Sita was some one who by birth was of high decree, she was found by king Janak, while he was ploughing in the fields, as is said to have been born from the earth. She left her life of comfort, extravagance and hierarchal respect to observe and safeguard the resolution of her husband and lived the life of a forest hermit. She honoured her Gods, respected her Father and her husband, saw Lakshman as a brother, and followed a life of humility and chastity. She was a woman who had very little expectations and demands and lended out unconditional love and support to her husband. She in turn was honoured and respected by all, She was held at high regard not only because she Shri Ram’s wife but also because of her principles. She was a role model for women in her time as well. She was a perfect woman, blended in her were the brilliant hues of beauty, wisdom, endurance, love and loyalty. But that one instance of her crossing the forbidden line better known as the Lakshman Rekha changed her life forever. Sita represented that aspect of the Indian society, which still now remains highly impressionistic and speculative. Which believes that a woman is virtuous and holy as long as she does what she is told. As soon as she over steps the line to seek the unknown she is bound to make mistakes and commit sins. Post the incident of the lakshman Rekha. Sita got abducted by Ravana, and from then on had to face various difficulties and accusations which finally led to the agni pariksha, where a woman like sita had to prove her chastity by passing through the fire.
In real life ancient or contemporary, every woman passes through phases where she has to compromise and sacrifice. Even today, it is the woman who leaves her family and follows her husband to a new life. Today’s confident, educated, bold, industrious, and fearless Indian woman has somewhere deep within…a sita, which no matter how much she argues to be fictitious, impractical and an outcome of man imposed pseudo morality, she strives hard to compete with. Deep within her lies her enigmatic soul, which remains, unchanged from the time that it was created.
We then realise that the concept of Ideal and the concept of the Real are two forms of the same soul. Within the real the ideals exist and within the ideal exist the real.
So in Sita as well there existed the instances of a modern self respecting woman that led to her resolution of not returning to lord Ram even after he apologised for putting her loyalty and her love for him to test, and also waiting for her forever. She foregoes her duties as a wife, which was and still remains to be the quintessential obligation of a woman only to protect and safeguard her honour and pride of womanhood.
A woman therefore would fundamentally always contain the unabashed desire for freedom of the present and the reticence of the past. Such is her genius and such is her folly.