It had to happen. I had allowed it. Forced to. But the final acceptance was mine. It was like death - inevitable. And so it came - silent, the steel gleaming in the fluorescent light, a mechanical vampire piercing the skin. A blood test.
Bhorer alota janlar pashey chup korey bosheychilo. Pordah shoratey nishobdey khatey eshey joriey shulo. Thanda ekta halka Hawa galer ek pashey dilo chumbon. Robibarer shokal. Bhortao jano olosh.
The right to live. Is it God given. Or is it the right of a human. How do you define to live ? Is the anabolic and catabolic activity enough. Somewhere the definition of euthanasia hits against the Hippocratic Oath. Somwhere medicine and values overlap.
Feelings says the scientists are chemical reactions. So the amor part is basically a complex Ph D chemical equation. Reason for this, says the researcher, is related to the selection for best offspring. So all were preset and we buy Archies cards.
Why ? Oh why ? The love triangle has to be there. With each vertices pulling in all together different planes, torques and forces - mechanical engineer's nightmare ? The son. Wife. Mother. The core of serials.
A sad baby plant stood beside a tree. The tree gave it shelter and care. The baby plant grew as a creeper and covered the tree. The tree was dying but still stood by the baby plant.
The tempest of the music. The silence of the music. The thunderous melody. The piano tinkles. The violin's melonchaly. All the colors of emotion. Expressed without words.
mother suffers the agony of labor pain before a new life comes to earth. So is it with a poet and his thoughts.
Maybe someone somewhere at sometime had a thought. The thought was carried in the wind over the mountains, the deserts, the oceans. And a new leaf kissed the sunlight with that thought. So I write.
In dark and despair night, I asked God to show me light. An angel came and waved her wand. A dust of stars lit up the land.
Where there is a lost world where the dinosaurs roam, where there is a solar wave just waiting to crash the Gondwanaland, where the a boy and his pet tiger mouths philosophy, where the Mr Right gets Miss Right. Ah. The films. A dalliance with dreams.
The last of the idols are in the trucks. Frenzied dance from not-so-sober gentry. The portable fluorescent lamps highlight the curling smoke of the bursting crackers. The "Tasha" belts out evergreen oldies - a mournful rendition. Adieu mother.
Fragments of old songs juxtaposed to percussion. The ratatat of crackers. The swoosh of fireworks. I look at the Goddess with her tongue sticking out. Somehow it seems She says - Look what I have done. The sound smoke was this what I wanted as devotion ?
A loner does not have to suffer from loneliness. There is so much to hear from the morning birds, the sounds of life getting live, the chatter of the rains, the tinkle of the dew, the smell of the night. His world is full. (inspired from Antaheen)
The last strokes of a chrome yellow setting sun stripe the wind torn banana leaf before it loses itself in the pink and mauve sky. The day's wait for the night is wearing off. The evening plunges in.
riends punch a hole in the space of your life filling it up without your permission. And when they are not there, even nature fears to trespass the sanctity of the emptiness.
Wren & Martin. A thick red grammar book. Teaching the nuances of Queens English. Thirty years ago to a boy. Now the boy is a father and the book links the Generation Gap. Space time warp as Mr Spock would say.
Another year passes. The burnt smell of crackers wash the jetsam of memories to the consciousness. The flickering lamps finally fall asleep into the womb of the dew drenched night. Happy DIWALI.
Sometimes a situation stands before you. A dream you were wishing for. Then you stop and ponder. Is this it ? Is this what your life had been waiting. Like the Russian roulette, you press the trigger. And pray God does His best.
It is a classic dramatic atmosphere. Psychedelic lights. Three quarter sleepy people in divine stupor. Time moving in slow motion. The priests mike spiritual somethings which presumably rises the devotional quotient. Me ? I am sleeping on my legs.
God tests his disciples. I have no doubt. So at twelve in the night, when I should be in horizontal bliss. Here I am in a temple chauffeur to my pious family. Devotion is a lethal cocktail when multiplied among masses. May God bless.
Did the earth shake or the sky lit up ? Did the cherubs sing or the flowers bloom ? It was just a incidental accident of two people meeting. A comment on Jab We Met now on POGO.
The marriage of emotion,creation,passion and pure engineering - Howard Roark. Ayn's Rand - Fountainhead
Even as the violins flirt, and the piano tiptoes into the realms of delicacy, as the clarinet peeps in and the flute rises to its meloncholy, the percussion holds it all in the Rhythm of life.
Bhorta ashbey rater sathey ekka dokka korey. Halka golapi ghomtar fyakashey neeler parh tana. Raat jaga klanto Tara. Bhorer kuashar hatchanitey tarao shadha diyechey. Ghasher upor shishirer bheja Kanna Shurjer alo eshey muchey diya shokal hobey.
Any Time Money. The devil incarnate. I am standing in front of one. As the coffers get filled. The shutter is down and the queue is peeping down for that glimpse of the evil. A Disinterested guard with a bolt action rifle chats.
In 1917, Franz Kafka wrote in The Silence of the Sirens, "Now the
Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their
silence. And though admittedly such a thing never happened, it is still
conceivable that someone might possibly have escaped from their singing;
but from their silence certainly never."
Raat kokhon esheychilo bujhini. Asholey diner tibro Roder alotey rater chayatakey dekhtey pai ni. Bujhini je godhulir alo diner stobdhota noi. Chilo nishiter ahoban. Dine dekha chehera gulo tai tomoshatey- ekakar tartomyoheen manusher protichchobi.
Rains. And the weeping skies. The first itch of winter in the air. Like a sudden smell of a rose seeping in. And u don't know why or how. Just as it is supposed to be. Just another change of season, the know-alls nod. A ruddy nosed poet smiles.
Specks of light dot the houses. Forced mirth of a joyous time. Some staring in enlightenment. Some confused in a blinking state. Edison shrunk into twinkling LEDs.
The cold has taken the night in its warm embrace. The night sky has a shade of faded luminous red. The sadness of the day has dripped down in gentle tears on the grass below. The night darkens silently like the sigh of a lost love.
Fantasy is not truth. We call it filmy. But imagine the love and labour if someone can make a fantasy come true.
Passion was never understood. The spewing foam crowned waves know it. The hysterically laughing winds know it. With passion is pain. The incompetence of unfilfilment. The pain and joy of self destruction.
The first chill kissed the air today in the morning. A sadness like a mild dew settled in. The sun was downcast gloomingly looking at the grey clouds around. By evening the cold had the world in a warm embrace.
Look at the sky. The stars that light up the smile in your face had burned themselves billions of years back.
From the first stroke of the brush, from the first scratch of pen - the joy of creation. To the first kick felt of the unborn baby, to the first rose that blooms-- you celebrate the ecstasy of giving life.
English. An imported item. However we have tried to Indianise it, the essence remains like an obstinate chewing gum. Rampant comas, substituting Indian sentence with English words - we tried all. But Sir never turns Mohashoy. Neither does Thank you.
A dream never sinks like the Titanic. Rather it is a steady etching of the belief which you just watch happening stupefied. It sinks without protest but as a fait accompli. There is just a bubble escaping of the underlying hopelessness.
Passion. YOu cannot set a rule to it .Neither can you set a boundary. It's a wildfire that engulfs, burns to embers for the joy of burning, its creativity seeding teh seeds of its own destructin. Passion. Talked about. But not understood. Degraded to madness.
Now the hobgoblins plod the earth. The fairy was could not find a soul and went to the stars. God said, "Oh my God" and jumped to heaven.
The poet and the programmer both trying for the perfection. To one, it's illogical emotions. To the other it's logical devoid of emotion. One living in the annihilation of the other.
A conversation. Spinning another. One word. One thought. Pulling in another. Incoherent connections. But somehow the melange of thoughts conglomerate into touching one's soul.
Something takes you , pumps in the adrenaline in the sweet rush of sheer ecstasy. Suddenly at the moment of glory - you realize it is just that- a momentar. Like a drag on a fag. It's after all a multicellular organism fighting for existence.
Tears. Exquisite emotions crystallized in sparkling dots tracing the contours of the eyes, waiting for the others to join, and then eroding away the pain inside in silent sympathy of a kindred soul.
Just scratch the Christine Diors, Guess, Gucci and the D&G. What stays is the culture and education which created the self. "if you prick us, do we not bleed ?" - Shylock from Merchant of Venice.
he problem of a poet is that he does not even leave the conscience also - let alone the mind. An omnivore that does a tango with the words and thoughts.
One searches for a dream. To believe , to trust, to hold tight, to put faith in, to fall back up on, to escape, to rejuvenate, to put a smile in place of a frown. Sometimes the dream turns real and you have touched heaven.
The idiosyncrasies, the imperfections,the moles in the characters make us not absolute, but human. So u can then love an imperfect human being perfectly. Absolute is what u respect in awe.
The kites do not fly. At one point they soar languidly in the vertical drift. A black speck in the smudged blue sky. Lost in itself. Lost in the primal pleasure of being just itself. A creature of nature.
hings have memories. Somehow immortalized in time. In the scratches of the desks, in the broken dolls, in the handle less cups, in shirts we have outgrown, in the ink stained Atlases, in the beads of a broken necklace.
The sky is a faceless blue today. A texture less blue slaty dullness propped on sap gteen trees zebra striped with shifting shafts of a fading sunlight
The Apple is a curious thing. First it makes Adam fall from heaven. Then it falls and Newton applies for patents. Then it loses a bit and gets frozen in a Mac. And now scares the doctors away.
Oil. Oh my god. Mustard oil does a tango with cholesterol. Refined oil is supposed to be kind hearted (pun intended). That leaves the tel (oil in Bengali) that just leaves u brain dead. Aantel - the intellectual.
When we were kids, we used to have clubs where they showed movies on 16mm projectors. More than the movies, we enjoyed the comments of our kakus, kamas, dadas & boudis. TV was not there. The whirring of the reels, the anxiety of reels not arriving - all added to the charm. No, with choices, that charm is gone. Adieu childhood and its innocence.
In a theater. The movie is a fantasy. For truth would be a documentary. Just a momentary escapade from reality. Interval. A brief transport to the series of heads peeping above the chairs. Popcorn punching. Suddenly u wait again for the fantasy to be unfolded. The reality is then too drab in this moulin rouge atmosphere. Back to reality. Bullets do not fly here but flies do. Men do not have n packs and neither do the women walk with hour glass figures. It is the same old story - the fight for love and glory. And there is no black or white. Only grey.
he holes on the ground mark where the pandal had been. Strewn paper cups and plates. Remains of joy and laughter pasted on the forlorn trees. A tired wind picks up the leaves and drops them half-heartedly. She has left. Shubho bijoya.
God has great plans. He let's people meet to know that they exist. He let magic happen. And in the deepest night, we see Him in the flush of dawn.
Dashami. It's best that is. Each one to his own defences. Or offences, whatever u choose. For the idol has immersed. Redemption is one year hence. So be happy being mortals again. In all the shades of splendid greys
Like the first ray of sun, an idea shoots up. The words stand in queue like obedient students to express them. I do some permutations and combinations. The FB post is born.
hichdi. Literally it means a mash of everything. But add the devotion, add a hungry stomach fasting for being pious and a wee little bit of ghee. And u have a lip smacking item from the cordon bleu chefs.
Sometimes a friend appears in a moment in life. Who shows u a world that also existed in parallel. You enter that world and touch a sense that never existed. It is best that the worlds exist separately. (phatikchand)
And God said what did you pray ? Oh. I said. All the things I was supposed to pray. And that ? That was a shloka. I said. I did not understand. And could I? God asked.
ujas. The REndezvous of the Adonis and the Venus. In their homo sapienic avatar. In the best adaptation of the barks (read clothes) to impress. And suppress the billet doux that will follow. And the aahs and the ishshs. :-)
After all the pilgrimage to the holy pandals, a righteous halo seems to be emanating from my head like a police beacon. :-)
A puja is like a program. The main priest goes on in the main thread. The supporting classes spawn the associated jobs.
Sometimes u get a sense of deja vu. Like u have lived the same life before. The same days. The same talk. The same reactions. Like the film The Groundhog Day. But it changes if u have a twin. For u enjoy this sense of companionship of empathy.
Sap tami. The day twinkles into a mauve evening. The lights cheer up. The dhaka come to life. The Goddess smiles with benign kindness at the melee. And man searches for spiritual upliftment.
Sanskrit. Very few understand. But all communal prayers are in this. So we pray without understanding in the hope that being the carriers of the secret communication between priests and God, our souls are getting a spiritual spring cleaning.
Sorry god. Not only have u to listen to a plethora of demands of all and sundry but also bear the brunt of mindless composers trying to achieve musical nirvana. And bless cars whose spritual (no puns ) connection is yet to be comprehended. Amen.
Heaven is but a temporary space. To breathe and exhale. Like the sheer joy of seeing the shaft of sunlight breaking through a break in clouds. Transient. A function of time. Let it go. The camera could never capture that. And the words also failed.
The clay. Easy to form shapes. Experimenting. But once the pyre is lit. It is moulded. In the form destined. To breathe back into the moist earth you wait for the apocalypse. The idols are formed.
When the body is tired, it lets the mind go. The mind is another wanderer. It peeps into the crevices of the mind, clearing the cobwebs of memories and spawning away thoughts on its own. And I type these ephemeral colours.
I have a grudge against the poets. How can they create beauty and leave them before the uncaring eyes of the world ? But then God did the same, didn't He ?
The spirit is never broken. It may lie subdued, camouflaged in the mundane life. Then one day a bird sings in an unknown tune. The spirit soars high rising to heaven. Resonance says physics. Nightingale says the poet.
Sometimes the cause is not worth the fight. The tragedy is that when you realise it, it is too late. You continue still for the sake of appearance. Or maybe Nweton's Laws of Motion
I am always fascinated by words. Letters in collision,in collusion, in confusion, in tandem, entwined, encircled, encompassed, infused to impart a sense to the thoughts that had dawned. As I type this, the same dance of life I see in the letters.
It is a mystic dance. All dancing to the same tune but in different formats, different styles but in the same rhythm. Brownian movement but all synchronized in chaos. Dedicated to the mesmerized masses that throng the Pujas.
Prepositions - a necessary evil. No earthly reason for their amorous attitude towards certain words. Like chicken pox, it happens to all. You just grin and bear its atrocities
Words sometimes are like magic. In the tantalizing beauty of metaphors,puns & similes, they appear just the way the writer wants them to be seen. And like the magic, the sense is somewhere else. (Hirok Rajar Deshey)
Sometimes you wait the whole day looking at that moment when you stand alone in front of your image, your twin and analyze yourself. You are then free of the make believe bondage and ego. Sometimes when you miss the moment, the day just turns listless.
We meet each other for we were destined too. And then realize that our roads had crossed like ships passing in the night. Dedicated to all my lost friends in FB.
The day drags on, hanging precariously to the seconds hand pushing the seconds to their limits. The sun glares furiously at the day's laziness. The wind had called a truce and decided to wait and watch. A Sunday.
The night sky has a beauty of its own. There is a tinge of red. A light wash from the city lights. And the stars, suspended in twinkling animation have a song of their own. A song they had sung when the first Neanderthal man had looked up.
Pandemonium. Puja shopping. Wondered why grey hair turned black. And how could clothes make people beautiful when beauty is skin deep ? I guess in the world of Garnier all is make-believe. Even the hysterical spirituality.
Listen to a composition. The main instrument plays a truant - flirting, nearing the edges of the rhythm's precipice but then hanging there for a languid moment falls back in tandem. (listening to Louis Banks )
As we grow up, the spirit of the Pujas take a pragmatic approach. The fairy tale appears as surreal as a Dali painting. Maturity has its growing pains.
I wonder when a positive number turns to negative. I mean, after you crossed zero, you go on adding decimal places and voila - there is a changeover. Intense feelings is similar - there is a sudden predictable metamorphosis. The problem lies with the insensate.
The romance of listening to Birendra Krishna Bhadra early in the morning,when even the sinful night appeared pious,is gone. Instant availability removes the yearnings of the heart, the expectations and the fear of loss. And mahalaya lost its charm.
A complex man is like a perfume with a base tone and when u unravel u sense the overlying tones. Sometimes like a Christie's novel it may appear to simple to be true but that is the coup de grace. (Towards Zero by Agatha Christie)
For the sake of familiarity and practised response, how often we try to categorize people and situation in acceptable norms.
Meetings - small eddy currents of pet notions,theories and ideas - sometimes washed down by hysteria but always resulting in hysteresis loss.
voice is not just a manipulation of vocal cords. It brings in the essence of the culture,education to it. The intonation has its plethora of speaker's intentions. Communication ? To hell with it. A voice needs to sound good.
The cypress has a sad song to sing. When the wind whispers wistfully. And the moon sheds its silver tears and the night stands as a sentinel in some pagan ritual. The soul seeks a resonance with a spirit long lost. It wanders.
Sunday lunch. Always used to be tender lamb cooked in "handi". Now it is first Googling on exotic recipes and finally loosing the comforting sense of familiarity. "but the joy & fun like the seasons have all gone. " (Kingston Trio)
I asked the beautiful stone "who made u". "The sun burnt me. I cried with the rains. The wind scratched me. And I survived to be what I am. " (Looking at rock formations in Grand Canyon)
