magrathea

KHUSAT BUD-DHA

2011-01-28T08:57:00.000-08:00

there are several emotional woolgatherings that could be included into this space, or several secret travelogues could be shared... but time is not right, time is not ripe.

some travelers have left already, some ripe, some unripe.

some travelers walk still, lonely --- because there is just the path and the heart that keeps whispering.

who am I? i ask everyday..

am i truly the angel you say i am? or am i truly the nincompoop i think i am.

Who am I?

my friends my foes my loved ones all

my jalebis and hilsas and matthi chai all.

the world is too big

and i too small.

my matthis my jalebis my luchi aar alur dom.

where is michael chekov and peggy phelan and julia kristeva in this tiny design?

where is tagore? where is tanvir? where is d.r. ankur?

or is it simply borah and solanki and sahoo and all??

who am i? who am i? who am i?

PS: THIS IS BECAUSE YOU SAID TO UPDATE AND YOU CALLED ME LAZY... KHUSAT BUD-DHA....

Another day with Sufi

2010-09-18T11:48:00.001-07:00

What terrible powerful magic do these Sufi masters create with their voices that one is left reeling for hours afterwards?

We had gone to watch a "Sufi-Kathak" performance by Manjari "something" at the Kamani auditorium. The dance was avoidable, but the MUSIC! It just pulls you away into a fourth dimension, your body doesn't remain your own anymore, your inside tears itself out and completely merges with the outer nature - Oh! what power! what beauty! The singers were from Awadh and Rajasthan. And their magic broke through the walls of the proscenium. Tears came rolling to my eyes as my body fought the orgasm! I wondered, were it in Awadh i watched this, beneath a full moon night, with only the sky and the stars above my head and a simple earth lamp ---- what would happen to me? what if I had watched it and listened to it with the desert winds blowing into my face, "duma-dum mast kalandar" going on for hours instead of 10 minutes, oh what would happen to me? I would vanish, disappear, evaporate!

The light designer had completely lost it. Suresh Bhardwaj had called our group "ambitious" in the last class on Light, (and rightly so - we had kind of lost it! ) I wonder what he would call this person. His overdose of Intelligent Light and crass operation was so distracting and painful that my eyes closed by themselves after the first song. And I was kind of disappointed by the dance performance. With the music so powerful and invigorating, the dance rarely broke out and spread its wings into utter emancipation. I wonder why the dancer chose to restrict herself to pretty little stances, when she had the awesome support from the musicians. There was no trance in her steps, no real emotion appeared on her brightly make-upped face. If these are the performers who are taking our wonderfully talented traditional performers out of their native places to abroad and beyond, ( as was said by the narrator, giving a list of all the places the performer has visited), then if I were to travel to Awadh today in search of these Masters, would I ever have the fortune of listening to them and losing myself in their magic amidst mother nature?

Coming to mother nature, had a talk later on after dinner with a pass-out from Bengal, Parimal-da, who is currently working near my hometown Durgapur with local youngsters. His place of work is another centre of another Sufi movement, near the Ajay river, Kenduli, where every year Bauls from all over the state of West Bengal come together for a celebration. He was talking about bringing back nature and the natural into the acting, about trying to find a new method where the Indian actor will not have to borrow from the Western Masters, or completely depend on the norms of the ancient Natyashashtra. Well, it was a long talk, but interesting. But I unfortunately don't remember the details. He is trying to clearly separate out and recognise our wisdom from our imagination, our stage reaction from our real life reaction. I am suddenly reminded of the talk we had on Anatomy during our Orientation. How the body reacts to stimulation from outside, but the Doctor's opinion was so different from that of the actor. Where the Doctor said that an actor can train the brain and the body to emulate the natural reaction to the naturally present stimuli, but never exactly be able to recreate it without the stimuli. And the Actor stood in front of me and said "when do human beings get goose bumps?" I said, when we feel cold, or when we feel fear. "OK, so what am I doing now?" and I saw his hair stand up even as he looked at me, and then stand down.

Which is the magic? which is real? I do not know. But there is always a lot to know. A first to everything.

I finally got up on the rooftop of Abhimanch today. We sang songs. We came down and walked back to our respective places.

PS : the trip to Agra and Fatehpur Sikri was good, but I missed Sonmani, who was down with dengue, too much to actually enjoy. But even then, Jagdish (the sculptor from Karnataka) and Kannannuni (the guy with the Bass voice from Kerala) managed to buy food (chowmein and tandoori chicken) for three at 95 when the others ate a vegetarian thali for 100 rs. each. It rained in Fatehpur Sikri, and the red sandstone was redder than ever. The marble was as clean as it could be. The geometry was, as usual, mind-boggling. The Intricacy, awe inspiring. Ratna Pannicker and Jagdish gave us live concerts inside the Sikri, sitting on the same pedestal where a few hundred years ago, Tansen used to create magic on. The foreign tourists asked for a repeat. The Agra fort was intriguing as usual. more later. I gotta run.

Don't Stop, Can't Stop

2010-09-02T11:10:00.000-07:00

So, its one of those nights when you feel like staying awake the whole night ... with atoms racing through your mind, the blood rushing through your veins...making you feel suddenly alive!

Last night we were awake till 3 am, discussing Love and Faith. we didnt get anywhere. the watchman got worried about his job and asked us to leave - the girls I mean. In the morning I tried watching Agra Bazaar in the Committee Room but couldn't watch it full. Later on in the evening, we went to Nizamuddin, wanting to hear Qawwali, but it started raining and didn't happen. But all four of us had a really beautiful time in the home of Rashida Begum. Finally, I had fulfilled my promise, of meeting her if I got through the admission. Met her two year old grandson Nihaal, a lovely personality. We had Chai. Then we bought Amriti and hopped into an Auto. With the warm amritee in our hands and the rains outside, it was lovely ride through the tree-lined streets from Nizammuddin to Connaught Place. There again, coffee-house, nothing like Kolkata, but something better than nothing. And then, that terrible infusion. That is keeping me awake even now. I want to run and scream and get wet in the rain !! Anyways, then we moved back to the campus, did our diction homework, and then dinner, and from then till now --- COMPLETELY IDLE!! and I want to spoon my brains out!

Somedays are just not meant to fit into 24hrs..they always keep spinning and spinning and spinning...not wanting to end, to stop, to being... I want the sun to stop just below the horizon, so that the Qawwals to bring out their dholaks and harmoniums and start singing in front of the dargah, and I could sit for hour listening to them, I don't want the cup of infusion to get cold, but stay smoking hot, I want the rains to keep falling, I do not want to let go of this day, of these few hours.

Tomorrow will be a new day, I will forget most of today after I wake up from my sleep. I will forget so many of the sensations., This day will become history. I will never meet Rashida Begum or Nihaal ever in my entire life, I will never again eat a warm amritee for the first time inside a runing auto with the rains outside, I will never again, never again, be what I was today. Time will never stop. My blood will keep flowing, I will keep getting older, slowly, minutely, I will go on living my life till the very end.

I don't want to stop writing. i don't want to stop living. but like every good or bad thing in this world, this too has to come to an end. everthing will change. nothing will ever be the same again.

Back from my Sabbatical !

2010-02-07T10:44:00.000-08:00

So another cute guy inspired me to write a blog entry again. (Siddharth, the Striker Diaries, Passion for Cinema).

Life is so unpredicatable. The last two months has gone by in a roller coaster ride. Nowadays it seems like days come and go with a drop of an eyelash. The beginning of December went by in final preparations for Bharat Rang Mahotsav where I was the Festival Co-ordinator for our theatre group. The end of December went by in rehearsing for our new play. Then January arrived, and before I realised the Delhi trip was over and we were in Durgapur for our residential workshop. Things were happening so fast and so many things were happening in such close proximity to each other that it seemed like I was caught in a constant haze. Then came our premier show at Minerva. THE MINERVA. Where once upon a time Royal Bengal Tigers like Utpal Dutt and Ajitesh Bandopadhyay roared on the stage in jam-packed gallery productions. There we were, with a unfinished, unperfected piece of work, which was inspiring none-the less but not with a single member of Uhinee being completely sure as to the final outcome. I particualrly was scared, terrified, petrified. It was Minerva, I had my first substantial bit of acting to do in a production of our Group on a Proffessional Stage, and I didn't have my final set of complete costume till the day of final performance. I was unsure about my exit, unsure about my scale of acting, unsure about my character's mental state of mind. The chorus bits were easy as there was always someone to follow, to take the lead from. But when I stood on that stage with my only co-actor, I felt strangely lonely. The lights were on the two us and when I turned to the audience to deliver a few lines I could make out the fine outlines of the audience sitting in the dark. Like silent sentinels seeking my blood. No, I didn't get cold feet. But yes, I was scared.

When does a person know what he or she is destined to do in their lives?

Does a proclamation come from heaven ? Do the elements of Nature all get together to declare the moment of clarity? Or does the walls slowly close in so that you can only look upwards ?

I know I have no proffessional future in theatre. Nobody has any proffessional future in theatre, not in Bengal, not in India. One has to act in films, one has to work in the television industry, get a government job as a banker or a teacher or a proffessor...but can I?

I dream too big. sometimes Alice keeps me awake, pulling me towards her Wonderland, sometimes Peter Pan whispers soft temptations of Neverland. Then there is always Tagore and Ajitesh and Keya. I do not recognise most of these characters, I still am so conventional that a fellow team-mate's sexual rampage at a team hotel leaves me emotionally broken for days, I am yet to read enough plays. I do not know how to design a portfolio. I do not know how to walk out of this Chakravyuh. Yet I dream.

I dream of a life where there shall be no routine. Where everyday will be a new day to create something out of thin air, with the powers of human imagination and the labour of human body. Where I can someday bring the man bored of his life into a space where he could for a while only breathe, breathe free.

There is no romance in my life at present. And yet there is. Sometimes it all seems like a foolish dream. Sometimes it seems foolhardy. I get angry when I think of tomorrow, about the blankness. I get angry when I am asked questions by my family, my loved ones. And yet I do not get angry. I hear the horns of the buses and autos plying around me on the busy city roads. I hear the birds call on the eucalyptus tree beside my apartment window each morning. I am alone. There is no doubt. But my intellect is not lonely. Only my heart is.

Blind Date Blunders

2009-11-23T09:46:00.000-08:00

Here it goes : the saddening list that keeps getting long.

1. My first month in Bombay, had just settled down in my hostel. agreed to meet this guy from IIT Bombay who claimed to be good at guitar (i'v got a weakness for guys who can play the guitar, not the sitar, not the mandolin, but the guitar). He must have got his first scare when I asked him to wait for me in front of the Gamdevi Police Chowki. That notorius Police Chowki where the hi-profile gundas of the posh Marine Drive region are taken for the initial grilling before being transported to Andheri. So there he was..and at the first sight i felt this incredible urge to stand him up. the only thing i remember regardin his looks was this really dark pair of sunglasses he was wearing - I hate it when a guy wears sunglasses on a date, the primary reason being that i like looking a person straight in the eye when I am talkin to him/her. Anyways, the point is, I didnt stand him up. I walked with him upto the chowpatty, he gave me a card ( no appropriate smileys available for the xpression on my mind) ... in which was scrawled somthing damn childish like "thanx for being my friend" in a really, REALLY bad piece of handwriting. I saw it, I said thanks, and we walked back to the Chowki, where I bade him a fast goodbye and I dissapeared. Pakka 10 mins. Didn't hear from him ever again, I think he might have disliked my nose.

2. Almost after two years in Bombay, which included repeated urges to give up my studies with Microbiology and run back to Calcutta to study Literature at Xavier's I met this fabulous guy on Orkut. On our first date I made him wait for one and a half hours in front of the Parsi Dairy, as I seeked a chance to sneek out of a lecture on Chromatography. Unfortunately, the H.O.D. was guarding the doors to the lecture hall. This date though did result in something meaningful, though completely unromantic - a lifelong platonic friendship based solely on love guru advices.

3.This was in my Third Year of Bachelor's as well - met a guy from Bhopal on YM. Nice, decent fella. I bored the hell out of him though by taking him to the Oxford Book Store. I read Calvin and Hobbes and he preferred Steve Waugh's autobiography. We had masala chai, sat on the marine drive seaface on a very very hot and a very very sunny afternoon and returned home after hellos. He was a nice guy, last known he had moved back to his home city. It was not until much later that I realised Bhopal was a really vibrant city in the heartland of my huge country, at that time, I just thought it was a little bigger than a village and had a huge lake in it. My mistake.

4. Moved back to Cal, struggled with Masters for two years. Love life completely dishevelled. Rather, non-existent. A guy on Orkut (again, yes, again I fall) asks me out. we plan a date. we decide to watch a movie. I wake up damn early on a Sunday morning (which I never do) and take a long bath (which I rarely do) and reach 45 minutes late. (yes, hate me, please, hate me!). When we reach the ticket queue we see this huge group of school students who have come to watch the same movie. 2012. (why did schools change their policy for movie outings on weekdays, i mean, sunday is the only day we used to get completely for ourselves, play outdoors both in the morning and in the evening - we would never come for a movie on a school trip on a SUNDAY!!!). By the time there is only two persons in the queue in front of us, the signboard has started flashing "fast filling". the guy before us takes the last two seats. the guy in the counter says there are two tkts left, one in the first row and the second in a n-th row. so we decide upon Qurbaan instead, at least we would get to watch some steamy kisses. instead our craniums get hammered for two and a half long, boring hours. we get to watch a really woody saif with a bad haircut and kareena lookin like a piece of wood - didnt know a woman could look so cold with all her clothes off, and she was supposed to seducing her hubbie dearest who also happened to be a deadly international assassin. (maar daalo mujhey!)surprisingly bad acting from om puri. Anyways, i wont speak any longer about a really bad movie, in short, karan johar and rensil d'silva jointly collaborated and successfully created the most boring movie date of my quarter century life. I BLAME THEM!

So, there, thought the list wud be longer, but if i missed any then it was probably worth missin so much that i completely forgot about it. hope that these blistering blunders don keep happenin in future, and someday soon, i get to go on a perfect date. at least this much if not more for a incorrigible bohemian like me.

cheers to all who have fabulous first dates, and double cheers to those who get too much of irony.

A few Personal Thoughts.

2009-11-15T08:05:00.000-08:00

I'd thought I would live my life such that there would be no regrets. I guess I was wrong in assuming my own invincibility. Regrets sink in...always, too late. When all the paths of escape have been closed forever, when you realise that your life has truely turned out to be a complete mess, thanks to your own weak personality, inability to have a firm belief in your own dreams, your own abilities. My creative abilities were never put to test before, no one ever asked or enqired about their fighting capabilities. They are asking now, and I am coping, well enough. But all the paths that would have perhaps led me to that destination of my own ambition, lie forever closed. Today, I truely am bereft of all answers when somebody asks me - what is it that you REALLY want to do?

My mind draws a blank. Like hitting a solid wall. I feel spent of all emotions, all human feelings. Like a lifeless zombie, I lay around, try to spend as much time I can, sleeping. So that I do not ask myself this question - what do you want to do right now? I roam the streets of my beloved city, without any dear friends beside me, or any loved ones. I do not notice anything.

Sometimes the sight of a naked urchin bathing in full glory under the water gushing through the municipality water hoses catch my eye. I yearn for that joy, yet realise that that joy may never come to pass my path. Sometimes a dog sleeping on a bed of sand on a busy causeway, blissfully, as if it were his bedroom, makes me wish such a dreamless, peacefull sleep. Yet I do not feel that i still have miles to go, so i do not sleep. Cause, sleep is all i want to do.

Fall into an endless slumber, never to wake up to my own failures, my own impotency, my own disbelief of my self. If they ask me the name of the one person i distrust the most in all human race today, the answer shall be quick: the name - my own.

Habib Tanvir and Charandas Chor

2009-09-02T01:37:00.000-07:00

Kanhailal called him and Badal Sircar the only two rebels of post-independance theatre, who broke away from the proscenium style of the western world and converted theatre into an entertainment for the masses; his creation Charandas Chor is a delight to watch because it brings to us a form of theatre which blends all the elements of the western and eastern traditions and comes up with a unique artistic style that reminds one of the dry hinterlands of central India and the sounds that travel for miles over the grassy plains.

He has used the traditional theatrical method of telling a story through a series of narrations given by minstrels through songs sung in Chattisgarhi. The play itself is dialogue oriented but the design helps the audience who don't know the language to understand the play through the language of theatre. The story proceeds at break-neck speed, each sequence having a simple design. Yet within this simple design can one catch a glimpse of the unique perspective behind the vision. For eg. the temple scene in which we see the villagers and the pujari engaged in a puja. The mandap is designed diagonally from down to upstage, all the performers facing the audience. The tension in the scene though starts at extreme upstage when Charandas comes into the temple and hides within the crowd of villagers and the constable chases him helplessly. The perspective itself adds an extreme amount of depth to the scene - the audience is positioned in such a manner that it doesn't miss even a bit of the parody happening onstage. The humor is heightened by the complete absence of dialogues and subtle physical acting, the atmosphere of tension intensified by the music and the presence of a crowd on stage. The actual god/goddess is invisible...the perspective being an almost cinematic one - "camera in the face".

There are several other scenes as such that increase the very magnitude of the stage itself while Charandas Chor is being performed. One of the most important elements being light. This is probably pone of the most primary elements of Habib Tanvir's theatre that makes it a blend of the procenium and third-theatre styles. Light is used beautifully to create zones within zones and for highlighting within an area filled with light - craft that I had before this only read in Tapas Sen's articles, but actually never seen before this. Again I am reminded of the temple scene due to the perfection of light operation in it. But I must say that compared to this scene the light design in the palace scene with the queen was a little bland i.e. not as interesting.

Culturally we live in a very enriched nation, where the very versatility of different regions makes the native store for inspiration almost inexhasutible. It is this store that Tanvir saab has used very masterfully in designing the costumes -bright pastel colours are worn by all except Charandas, who always wears an off-white costume - technically this contrast highlights him out even in crowd scenes. The Rani's costume is kept brialliantly non-glamorous and yet made royal by the use of specific color and fabric.

The concept of the set is brilliant...almost nothing changes throughout the play and the audience's mind too is given ample space for imagination.

Ravilal Sangde performed as the good-hearted, a little ill-tempered constable, a role previously performed by Habib sahab himself. In my untrained eyes, he was flawless. Tiny gestures like rubbing the biri on his uniform before handing it over, restraint like not lolling his head while sleeping on the temple parapet, it is this quality of performance that lifts the play into a completely different level of professionalism. Chaitram's portrayal of Charandas seemed to have been highly influenced by Raghuvir Yadav's on-screen antics. I would like to believe that I am wrong in this assumption. Nagina Tanvir seemed a little off colour on stage - she seemed to have a problem with her voice.

The play itself is a brilliant sarcasm on the cultural condition in India - our hypocrisies regarding, politics, economics and religion. A sign of a classic - that very grave problems are brought forward in a very simple manner. The production is classy not in design but in execution, it is always a delight to watch a technically brilliant piece of theatre.

Hopefully, the legacy of Habib Tanvir will be carried forward like a beacon by those he has left in charge of protection of his ideals. We live in difficult times, we are both ultra-modern and utterly orthodox and conservative. We eat at McDonald's but cannot sit on the carpet and eat from the same bowl as our Muslim friends. We wear mini-skirts and low-waist jeans and yet do not let go of the hundred rings given to us by our astrologer. We agree with pre-marital sex but cannot imagine the person we marry to be a non-virgin. It is in these difficult times filled with self-contradictions and hypocrisy that a story like this can help a few amongst us to view ourselves from a different perspective with the finger pointed towards ourselves. The joke is on us people, have a laugh!

GUNADHARER ASUKH & DWIJEN BANDOPADHYAY

2009-06-04T00:57:00.000-07:00

Yeah, that's a weird topic for a blog post. The former is the name of this incredible play I saw at Sisir Manch the day before y'day and the latter the name of an incredible actor who played the protagonist in that play - Gunadhar.

Actually I was writing a letter to my sister and my brother in law who are currently in a boring little town in southern USA called Nashville, the home of country music. And I just didn't have much to write about so decided on telling them about this play I saw. By the time I finished it I thought let's try and make a piece out of it so here I am.

So the play GUNADHARER ASUKH has been directed by DWIJEN BANDOPADHYAY who happens to be an amazing actor. One really has to watch him perform on stage to believe what he is capable of at this age. The restraint and timing, the vocabulary, pronunciation and throw - he is the only Bengali Actor I've seen, in leading roles especially, who never overdoes his act. But somehow always manages to hit the bull's eye. What saddens me most is only a few people who happen to watch theatre gets a chance to enjoy this treat, to cherish this level of quality performance here in Bengal. Because the mega-serial-wallahs only want him to ham and the huge TV audience see him in cheap underwear and air conditioning ads.

I am still a greenhorn when it comes to watching theatre. So I have seen very few Great Bengali Actors of our times - Shyamal Chakrabarti, Bimal Mukhopadhyay, Goutam Halder and Debshankar Halder are the only ones I've watched on stage. Shyamal Chakrabarti's intensity, Bimal Mukhopadhyay's tonal innuendos (his ability to bring out sounds from mysterious corners of his body without moving his lips), Goutam Halder's jet set energy, and Deb Shankar Halder's charm. Yet somehow, especially with the last, I as an audience have always been aware of the person I am watching perform. Shyamal Chakrabarty can make me angry and make my eyes burn with tears. Bimal Chakrabarty can make me laugh so loudly I loose all breath with nothing more than a "Thak Bo?" . My friends say Goutam Halder was unrecognisable in "Meghdutam" and "Bor-da". But these plays may never get performed again and even if they do there is a very slim chance that they will have Goutam Halder in them. So I am leaving him out of the discussion. And Deb Shankar Halder - be it Aurangzeb in Shahjahan, the psychiatrist in Aguner Barnamala, or the communist party worker Sabyasachi Sen in Winkle Twinkle - I am always aware that I am watching Deb Shankar Halder perform.

But Dwijen Bandopadhyay has an incredible ability to pull the audience into the play itself. Both EI GHUM and GUNADHARER ASUKH are about complex human emotions. But the delivery of the story is without any gimmicks, the narrative simple. So however complex the issue may be, the communication is always crystal clear. Even though in Gunadhar at the beginning of the play itself the person playing Gunadhar is identified as just as an actor playing Gunadhar and not Gunadhar himself, and that the performance to be presented is going to be a play - yet, as a member of the audience as the play proceeds I find myself accepting Dwijen Bandopadhyay's portrayal of Gunadhar as Gunadhar himself. At the end again the illusion is deliberately and bluntly broken as the play is announced over and the audience is requested to keep an eye out for Gunadhar. Yet as long as the illusion is being played out I find myself accepting that as the reality.

The play proceeds at a breakneck speed propelled on by a tight script written by Pradyot Sarkar. A very well co-ordinated ensemble performance by the entire cast(though a few in the chorus could be more upright and less casual while on stage - especially while narration or while playing the instruments) keeps up the pace. Dialogues are thrown and caught at just the right scale and speed with just the right amount of emotion. Never does an actor step beyond restraint though many a times the emotions in my heart go racing ahead. Even as I vision Gunadhar's mother - when she tears off the sign from her son's back or asks her son to pick out the gray hairs from her forehead, I find myself overwhelmed. Yet, what I watch in front of me is utterly controlled, the expressions simply pleasant. Nothing is enforced on the audience. Its as Kaushik Chattopadhyay said in one of his talks ( the only talk of his that I have attended) - first step down to the level of the audience then lull them into your confidence and then say what you have to say. To say the least, I was lulled.

The use of musical instruments sets the atmosphere and adds rhythm to the narrative. When Chanda cries we hear the soft twinkling sounds which give the illusion of flowing water. No tanpura or harmonium is used, only simple acoustic instruments. The Set too doesn't blind the audience with grandeur. Nor is it static. A single long white scroll with black sketches breaks up the boredom of the upstage space and the blackness of the cyclorama and helps in making the overall visual light. Colour and glitter is added by the set up for the shop. Over all the stage is as un-gloomy and airy as Gunadhar's mind itself. And songs - there are so many melodies sung, so many songs sung by the father. It's always a delight to hear music emanate from an actor's voice - the traditional nature of live music adds another level of sincerity and simplicity to the performance. No mechanical devices.

Yes, it is a dialogue oriented play. But rarely do we see the gestures following the dialogues. The director uses simple compositional tools to create some beautiful moments. As the second half starts Gunadhar's father is heard is heard singing a ditty by Sachin Deb Burman. A young boy sits by his side, his back to the audience, and a bit of blue light is seen on the stage. The curtain opens full and the stage is lit up once again by the normal floods. Just a few seconds and the audience is pulled back once again into the tender relationship between the father and the son. For on full moon nights when the father sits humming songs to himself his madcap son sits quietly by his side and listens to him. The creation of the image need not the actor who plays Gunadhar - but the presence of a young lad heightens the fathers loneliness and makes the composition complete.

There are many such moments in the play. And several adjectives can be applied - simple, easy, beautiful, good - etc. etc. But what I liked the most was the easy expression and clarification of such a complex human emotion. To reach the audience by undoing all the knots. And it was all said in the language of theatre. Almost all the elements of theatre were used in balance with each other. So I was most happy because I saw a Complete Play.

In the language of our generation - satisfaction guaranteed.

VOTE ! VOTE ! VOTE !

2009-04-30T01:38:00.000-07:00

AH ! It's election time. It's 11:30 am and they have already exploded a bomb in Lalgarh. Two BSF jawans injured. Voting at Belpahari has also stopped due to disturbance. Madhya pradesh has also seen trouble - the older type though, booth capturing. Today Bombay votes as well. My dear friend studying law hasn't voted. She has not registered yet. She is, like me, 23. I hope I can get over my laziness and go out to vote this year.

A jobless youth who has a Bachelor's degree in Botany took up a job with a chicken farm - famous chicken farm, for a salary of 6000/- bucks. He says he will work for only a year, until the shop that he and his father owns jointly gets a stable income. Until then my dear comrade, my fellow theatre worker, the most industrious, well-organised, humble and sweet spoken person I have ever met, whose wisdom blind sights us on lengthy group discussions unexpectedly, whom we all listen to...he is going to take care of chickens. Don't think I'm being sardonic. I am happy for him. But i wish i was a wealthy entrepreneur who could use such rare talent and together build an enterprise that would help all like him - including myself. All those who want to dream - in spite of everything. All those who still believe in love in spite of hailing from broken families. Who still prefer to eat simple food in the company of beloved friends than a meal at the most expensive restaurant in town with blood relatives they don't get along with. Who prefer to watch a play than go for window shopping and breathe in air conditioned air with their love interest.

I don't know - i am talking shit again. Its the YUVA syndrome.

Take care and do vote. That's all you can do actually, so at least do that.
:)

A poem.

2009-03-26T03:18:00.000-07:00

Let the blood flow through the veins now.
It's warm liquidity a savior from the chill in our bones.
The brain -box sits ever so still.
But never shall the bugle sound now.
The wolves have all passed over into the shadows
And the dogs have come out to lick our feet clean
Oh! we love their tongues against our flesh.
Lust is the only emotion that runs like a fever up our vena cava.
Everything else is vegetarian. Sanitised. Perfectly precise.
Lets go out now
Into the wild woods that turn us into shadows
And creatures of neanderthal times.
Lets draw cartoons on cave walls
And grafitti on walls dividing nations
Lets spot our fingertips with ink
Thats all we can do really.
The Flowers and Sickles and Hammers and Hands
All symbols of the ancient Gaia
We see them around us -
The witchcraft assails us all.
But the Ancient witches are all silent now.
Their magic spent
They have turned into dust inside the ground.
Some maybe even into stars.
Lets look up at the stars
Thats all you can do, really
Thats all you can do.

On a Wednesday like this...

2009-03-25T00:15:00.000-07:00

Once again i found myself looking down the hairy armpit of a bald, middle-aged man. it was 9:30 am in the morning and i was on a bus heading towards Ultadanga. Wondrous sights like these can only be seen if you are a privileged citizen whose daily travel to his/her place of work allows you to be a passenger on one of the nearly million small sized private buses that ply around the length and breadth of Kolkata, the city of joy. But it wasn't such a bad day after all. it was the middle of the spring....back home in Durgapur even fierce and bored looking train guards were commenting on the new greenery around..."look, the leaves are still young". and the Sal forests were abloom with the most unbelievable shades of green. The grass was new, the buds were just on the verge of blooming out, the birds were constantly composing brand new sonatas, everyday.
HONK!CRASH! BANG!....SAALA CHUTIYA, DAAN DIK DIYE KAATCHISH AY?? SHAALA BAAR KETE REKHE DEBO....uffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff.!

none the least...i finally collected my voter identity card. i was one year late in doing so. but better late than never. i was pleasantly surprised at the efficiency of the election commission..they took only five minutes to fish it out of the hundreds of cards on the table, and as for myself, i was truly ashamed at my own inefficiency. i also noticed one other thing...that all government buildings in India, especially offices like the municipality, electricity board, corporation...they were mind-bogglingly complicated in their layout...and one is bound to get lost..i.e. if one was not born and brought up in this chaotic subcontinent. we kind of get used to getting lost, the loss of time, the chaos that ensues, then finally finding the right place. they say, no one can ever get lost in Kolkata. Help is right at hand.That is if you are not daft enough to ask the young and youngish traffic policemen for directions. most of the time they have absolutely no idea regarding the crossing they are guarding itself. i know. TWICE bitten, thrice shy.

back home, Nachiketa kaku a.k.a. Achinta-da, who owns and runs a small departmental shop at the corner of the Gammon bridge bus-stop, was surprised to learn that i was in my final year of msc. he told another long-time faithful customer of his who had come to buy two gold-flakes that he had been seeing me since i was two feet in height. "ei etotuku chilo..ekhon msc korchey, ay?". it is truly strange that i don't have any problems in smoking in the presence of my mother, or my sister, or my most respected guruma and talgachkaku, but i can never buy a pack of cigarettes from Nachiketa kaku. Achintada got his nickname from my sister and her friends who used to buy cola at his shop,he used to have a beard that made him look like a popular Bengali singer, Nachiketa.Nachiketa has shaved off his beard now. I know Achintada did after he smashed his chin in a motorcycle accident. his father used to guard the shop those days, and the cola sale had dropped considerably. he looked like a ill-tempered Sarus crane.

Anyways, the air-conditioning is making me get a headache. will write again later. till then, hope we don't start hating Rahman's "Jai Ho !"...now that Pussy-Cat Dolls are coming up with a rap remake and Indian National Congress have bought it as their election campaign song.

YO-HO-HO-N-A-BOTL-OF-RUM-!!!

SLUMDAWG ZINDABAD !!!

2009-02-24T07:38:00.000-08:00

EIGHT Oscars mate!...a yo ho ho and a bottle of rum for Danny Boyle...the Brit who finally got the "thing" abt film making in bollywood...thanx to him we saw the younger versions of Raj and Veeru scampering through the hinterlands on trains stealing their way to survival, a Tezaab like rescue sans motorbikes of a younger version of Madhuri from one of the hundreds of dreary brothels of mumbai...and over and all a much more colorful and musical portrayal of the misery of our poor country than the previous award winning versions like Salaam Bombay and City of Joy. and we Indians never tire to take credit for someone else's work. If we thought the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Television of America has gone over the top with Slumdog, then please let us not forget the wallahoo we are making over a British film. of course it brought international honours for a couple of technicians trained in India, but seriously how much honour had we their fellow countrymen given them before this? And also,please spare me the obligation of bending myself over with gratitude for an Academy that is yet to honour their own excellent "white trash" character protrayals... be it Jack Sparrow or the Wrestler...as always the Academy got away with being squeaky clean and politically correct. Bravo Tuxedoes..!!

But guess what, this time around we actually had singing and dancing and drums and half naked men and women dancing on the crystalline stage of the GREAT KODAK THEATRE. and AR RAHMAN singing the third national anthem of India, after Jana Gana Mana and Kajra re (coz, everyone used to and still does to some extent stand up when it starts playing) - i thought i was watching film fare 2009, matlab, Will Smith gave away awards in both the ceremonies yaar...!!

So is the American film industry shifting to a more stylised mode of film making acceptable to the huge south asian market dominated by the song-and-dance-and-happy-endings loving Indian audience? hopefully not.because the Indian audience is not as shallow as the marketwallahs want to beleive us to be. Otherwise Anurag Kashyap wouldnt have been making a pretty good living down here. though we have not seen a huge american hit in india since LOTR 2 left our screens, and hardly any of the oscar winners get to spend more than a week in our multiplexes, still there are a few as always who would like to watch mickey rourkie's incredible performance and the excellent technical work done on Wall-E and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Anyways, Danny Boyle believed in what he was doing. otherwise none of us would have raised our eyebrows so many times while watching the movie and still kept watching it. Till the very end. But I still want to know the good name of the eldest Salim. He did give a swashbuckling performance. Hope to see you in many such performances my dear man.

Take care and until next time...
JAI HO!

Garbage emptying time

2009-02-18T05:20:00.000-08:00

Environment.
What does it actually mean to all of us.? We human beings, the latest in the line of evolution.
For thousands of years we have been slowly walking then running and later flying, constantly forwards, towards a destination that still seems to elude us. Why? What is our place on this planet..the third rock from the Sun? A tiny bubble of water in the vacuum of the universe.

Love
when there is no love in the heart of a man then there is nothing that can drive him till the very end, and back. And hence he simply stands still, at the crossroads of confusion waiting for the right bus to come, never knowing that he was waiting at the wrong bus-stop.

Science.
In the lonely alleyways of our mind, we wonder in amazement. The intricacies always a mystery, the artwork a riddle. We try to understand our bodies and our minds from the point of view of us. And we fail, every time. yet we never stop wandering.

Theatre.
The lights come on and then again it all becomes dark. In the spaces between time and the spaces between the curtains and the human beings stands a monument whose shape changes with every moment, with every movement. It brings the individual so close to herself that she collapses into herself and dissolves into non-existence, just like the folds of time itself.

Google.
That incredible digital search machine.

Bye bye motorwala.

2008-10-08T06:02:00.000-07:00

So the Tatas finally did leave Singur. Its Nabami today i.e. the ninth day for Devi Durga at her Father's place. The Pujas feel a lot quiter this time around. It might be just an illusion tho.

Time to retrospect. count the losses and the over-expenditures. the human race seems to have been hit by a sudden bug without noticing it coming. Money funds are liquidating all over the place and leavin all homo sapiens with something gooey stuck to their fingers. The panic has hardly started yet. But the signs are here to stay.

This month two super high speed electrons will probably hit each other at break neck speed along a no man's land precinct somewhere high up in the Alps and will probably break their necks to reveal a few secrets about the existence of this planet. I remember that primary school teacher who died in the spaceship crash a few years back - her note before death. Of how beautiful our planet looked from high above. As if no factories polluted our skies and no wars polluted our minds. As if the great rain-forests werent really shrinking. The coral reefs werent dieing off. And Man slowly cornering himself into the lonely corner of his office cubicle.

But thats all an As If. She died and vaporised into the early morning atmospheric Suspended Particulate Matter.

When they first started propogating Democracy to the free thinking people of this world they said for the people, of the people and to the people. or something similar. it had the word people repeated several times. i didnt really study my civics sincerely. apparently i am a citizen of the largest bloody democracy of this world. but we are also a socialist republic. no wonder the public opinion is as confused as the newspaper headlines every morning. so why blame the parliamentarians for being election oriented? even we the people wait for the elections to express our opinion. a few thousand people lost their jobs because all of us are either misinformed, ill informed or even not informed at all. and we forgot completely that one of our most important rights as the free citizen of a sovereign nation is the right to information. it had to be made into a law by an act of the parliament so that people finally can raise their voice and ask for the goddamn information.

Some responsible citizens would say that media is the booming sector now, especially the information media. and we have a new subject course in the technology universities called informtion technology. we have computers all over the place. but we have yet to form a network of suppliers and consumers connecting the agragrian sector in the remotest corner of the country to the poshest highrise in our metros. we do not know the price of our own technology. as a matter of fact sometimes we do not even know the actual price of our own underwear. There are just too many festival offers doing the rounds.

So the Tatas left Singur. and the factory buildings now lie empty of the commotion of laborers working their muscles and their brains to create another metal David. Even though the Goliaths seem to be taking the bow out already. most of them will probably be auctioned off in parts by the end of this decade.

Its the small investors and entrepeneurs, the makers and builders of liquid finance in a third world country like ours, who will take the hardest fall. The people who would run daily shuttle services, the canteens lining the highway, the suppliers of the nuts and bolts, light bulb filaments and dashboard accessories. It doesnt really matter. we'll forget about it with a good night's sleep and few extra tranquilizers.

Ex IIT and UCLA trained entrepreneur committed suicide due to bankruptcy. and murdered off his entire family in the process. he was an Indian, though he had been living in the land of opportunities for quite some time now. Some farmer in the hinterland of my great vast beautiful country does that everyday. he doesn't make the headlines. he cant. Coz, Liz Hurley accidentally flashed her flesh coloured panties at some heavenly charity show.

Anyways, the green fields are strewn all over with the long beautiful white grassflowers called Kaash. The weather is still erratic, as it will be for the next half a century. The skies though are still blue. And childhood still a promise that lies far away safe, either in the memory of the past or that of the future.

Peace and Light.

Mother Courage

2008-08-11T01:08:00.000-07:00

Route no. 215A
A smothery Kolkata afternoon
When the weird sun
Prefers to Shroud itself
In a thick grey overcoat
Even though the ambient temperature
reads 45 degrees celcius.
The passengers melting their skin off,
Cling to the iron rods to maintain balance.
Their cotton shirts and sarees
Cling to their meaty flesh,
obscenely.

A mother and a son
She trying to carry 3 big jute shopkeepers
He trying to carry himself.
She waits for the college student to get off
So that she can stretch her fat body out
onto the ladies' seat.

The passengers stare at her son
Potbellied. Neatly brushed hair.
A picture of gallantry.
Except, all his appendages
Bent at unbeleivable angles.
His face screwed up in an
abnormal expression.
And the constant nodding of his head;
He is mentally challenged :
They think.

She, is unconcerned.

Her white bra strap
Peaks out from under her blouse.
Soaked to her skin
In her own salty sweat.

A silent companionship
In a society of patronisers.
Courage doesn't always
Ride a magnificent horse
With gleaming stirrups.

Sometimes it is seen too
On sick city streets
Boring in their mundaneness
In second hand wooden buses
With painted route numbers.
Like, 215A.

Untitled.

2008-05-10T07:28:00.000-07:00

Life hangs in suspended silence.
The noise from the carburators
Travel through a haze of brown gray smoke
And crash against the eardrums.
A silent noise.

The greenery around the open grilled window
On the highest floor of the blue skyscraper,
Look tired.
The cuckoo tries hard
Harder than its tiny voicebox allows
To break through the tiredness,
And the silent noise.

The sound of men
Squabbling over a lost piece of metal scrap
The voice of the hammer
Hitting over and over again
The flat piece of steely aluminium.
Sound tired as well.

Who shall draw the first blood?

Ozone displaces oxygen slowly.
Life gasps.
Sunsets turn redder.
The sky a brighter shade of Turqouise blue.
She looks like an expensive painting.
Safely kept inside a glass cage.
Untouchable.Distant.Cold.

Can colours be so cold?

The color of the earth
In the town of my chilhood
Was a warm red.
Skins turned a warm brown
Baked by the warm chrome sun rays
On long summer afternoons.

The musty smell of ripe jackfruits
Drew the fruitflies to our cricket field.
Their large eyes
The colour of warm strawberries.
Our knees and elbows
Scraped by the warm black streets
Smelled of sticky pus
and grew tough brown scar tissue.

Warmth was a colour in itself.
Barefoot.Careless.Adventurous.

The silent noise
Crashes through my eardrums.
Colors mix into each other.
Lose their identity
And assume a neutral spineless shade.
The shade of colour
On the walls of the shopping malls.
On the shiny hair of ladies fair.
On my myelinated nerve cells.

My corneal rods and cones
Hallucinate frequently nowadays .
A butterfly escapes
The manmade highway choked with automoblies.
It flutters away in zigzag glee.
Inbetween the old brown houses
The bright yellow and green of its wings
Vanish into the blue sky above.

Synonyms remain none.

Conversation

2008-04-24T09:30:00.000-07:00

Through the mist of alcoholic fumes,
The Interpreter's voice
Entered the Actor's cochlea
A poem from the forgotten past;
A few swear words
Thrown at unvindicated challengers.
The city roared past them
Beyond the border of the broken footpath.
The dogs slept blissfully.
The clock ran late.
The stream of sentences broadened into an Amazon
Now growing branches and tributaries.

The Actor's face darkened
Blood rushed up to his brain
His eyes shone like storm lanterns
- on a New Moon night.

The Interpreter was floating now
On a sailing boat on the seventh sea
Far away from where the Actor stood
Beside his shadow
Under the neon street lamp
Infested with dead moths.
Beside the ex-model of the formerly famous painter
Now begging for dropped peanuts
Like da Vinci's infant Nazareth Boy;
Only,
His face was free of lines
And his -
A portrait of life.
Shrouded in a tobacco stained beard.

But His face is free of lines, too.
His skin still taut with flawless youth.
(With flawless Anger?)

The nicotine receptors in the hypothalamus
Get slowly overwhelmed.
The Interpretor's invisible voice
Gets dimmer now
The connection between two human souls
Via a satellite link
Gets weaker now.

The stars shine dimly down
On a tired city.
Its denizens sweating like
Pigs and horses,
Pack into last buses
- to get home.

The conversation reaches its climax.
The Actor nods his final agreement.
He's young,
too young
His knowledge too less
His experience even lesser
- perhaps;
He looks up to the Eucalyptus:
An olive green silhoutte
Against an orange-blue sky.
Swaying,
Swaying in the southern breeze
Its thin long leaves
Spiralling quadrilles.
Its the coolest.
Its long fair body
Shall never wrinkle with age.

Time passes
The denizens return home.

The Actor and the Interpretor
Walk back into their minds
The strings between them scissored out.
They walk so,
Now lost.

Thoughts...

2008-02-04T03:25:00.000-08:00

It was the night of the Blood Red Moon. The countryside lay drenched in milky white heavenliness.The Baul's music - created for the simple joy of creation, floated in through the haze of VitG into the core of my grey cells as the Lead sketched away on the art paper, trying to capture the ethereal voice onto a two dimensional medium and failing with every stroke.

There are still well-hidden corners of the world where the Beauty of Gaia remains safe from the vagaries of civilisation. The rape and plunder of the caveman's innocence has not yet occurred in these tiny realms.The trees can still whisper unsaid secrets into your ears with the coolest voice of the most sprightly North wind. The paths of the eternal vagabond run ahead of her in the color of the red earth. Her feet are Red and her mind Free.

lost amigos...

2007-12-23T03:51:00.000-08:00

Sweet memories remain only
Teardrops in lonely darkness
Love unrelenting and unquenched
Hanging like a misspelt syllable
The doors are closing behind me
The riverbend beyond
Lies shrouded in fog.

I am drenched.

I don't know what assails me
City lights dissapear in the wilderness
Unfinished mugs of Black Coffee
Hours of confessions
Milestones and Millstones
Love in an alien city
Unrelenting and Unquenched
My palms are sweaty and warm
Lingering presence of an alien hand
Gone forever now
Short was the rendezvous
Imperfect and Awkward
Years, days, hours, minutes
Dark clouds pass by
Blue skies remain Forever.

# To all my friends in Bombay. For giving me the most fabulous three years of my life. For going to the gallows together and returning victorius. For being courageous young men and women who inspire and spoil me equally. The path that lies ahead of us is long and passes through all sorts of terrain. But one thing's for sure - its an uphill climb from here. The world lies at our feet. To be conquered and ruled.
All the best. Be good.
Shine like the Evening star - when the sun has set and the night is about to fall.

Black Chattri

2007-11-22T09:04:00.000-08:00

It wasn’t the most convenient day to lose a perfectly new umbrella – that too a beautiful KC Paul classic black Saptarshi – for it was the day the last monsoon showers were lashing thru the already drownded city and, well, Indra was out to prove a point. Nevertheless somebody did pinch it off me from outside the university library – absolutely crazy place to lose a brolly in the first place, meaning who the hell shoplifts umbrellas from libraries…and I did get soaked like a crow on a livewire. …the only people who actually benefited from the entire thing were KC Paul and his erstwhile sons….coz I bought another one of their contraptions a week later…I had too…Meghnad came back for a reprise.

While still on the topic of Umbrellas – did ya know KC paul and his sons have been selling almost a hundred brollies a day every monsoon since 1965???quite whacky eh? and the cool thing is Bengali umbrellas have quite a great reputation in cities outside Bengal as well – like people living in south Mumbai will swear by their tall multistoreys that when the monsoons lash this Filmi city the only umbrellas capable of standing up for themselves against the gales of the Arabian Sea are from the city of Satyajit Ray. No wonder the maestro paid such a rich tribute to the symbol of Bengali Bourgeois in his classic movies. The black brolly shared screen space with almost all his protagonists…from Gangacharan to Amulya; it was perhaps the cheapest and the most active of his gang of regular extras and the most loyal of Soumitra Chatterji’s co-actors.

And it wasn’t just the Bengalis who had a fascination for the black brolly those days. Its thin closed or open curved frame proved to be the point of poetry for film makers across the nation as well as the globe. Remember Gene Kelly dancing away in the Rain in what was to be one of the last musicals to come out of a Hollywood studio, serenading an ode to love and longing which has since become timeless?? Hitchcock used it to accentuate the suspense in his films and Alejandro Jodorowsky to add surrealism to his “first midnight movie”. But I think for me the image that stands out the most was one that came long before all of these. In a country which had just wrenched itself free from 200 years of colonial rule. Its borders still bleeding red from the communal riots that ravaged the newly formed nation – a young clapper who had risen through the ranks in the city of dreams and won his own fight for freedom, released his first movie as a director – Barsaat. And the image of a Muslim Heroine and a Hindu Hero galvanized together in the pouring rain under a black brolly became an image of classic Indian cinema for generations to come both in his homeland and lands beyond.

So it wasn’t surprising that when the Indian government rolled out its first family planning programme in the 1950s (about the same time that the black brolly became such a in-thing in popular culture Left, Right and Centre – I wonder what movie Pdt Nehru and his Gang of boys and under secretaries where watching in the coffee breaks…) this image kinda became synonymous with family planning in India in the minds of the populace. Doordarshan too stuck to it and when the family planning programmes were modified for the coming generations to include the use of artificial contraceptives no wonder some screwed up kid in some alleyway of India’s vast hinterland first used the term chattri as a code for the protective latex. Interestingly that too stuck – for generations to come, as I was to learn as I grew up in the these same hinterlands when I was forbidden to use the term chattri by my more informed friends while looking for my brolly which I invariably left in the most undefinable of places – including on top of incubators and beside UV laminar flows. Eventually I lost that one too…forgotten inside some desk after a particularly boring lecture which put me to sleep. I must have lost like a dozen umbrellas in my short lifetime.

Well – talking about protective covering – I dunno where this particular kind of rubber balloon got its official name from but I do know of a poor little town in France which has suffered much from being its Namesake. (And you thought Kal "Gogol" Penn had a valid reason for frustation.) Its municipality has to deal with lost street signs almost every week but it has put up a brave fight by hosting a museum of famous population control devices. Talk about French sense of humour… Maybe our government can take a few pointers from there as nothing seems to have worked for the nation which gave the world its most comprehensive literature on the art of love making.

And this time around the black brolly can make a comeback in the coffee break entertainment section as well. Be it inbetween the towel dropping acts of Raj Kapoor’s great-grandson or in the hands of Rihanna – the teen wonder queen from the country of opportunities. As its tanks still trample along the gardens of Babylon its young soldiers are probably yearning to run back under her umbrella (or her sexy umbrella cut dresses…) – her dusky voice calling out to them :

“These fancy things,
will never come in between
You're part of my entity
Here for Infinity
When the war has took it's part
When the world has dealt it's cards
If the hand is hard

Together we'll mend your heart
Because ...

When the sun shines
We'll shine together
Told you I'll be here forever
Said I'll always be your friend
Took an oath
I'm gonna stick it out 'till the end
Now that it's raining more than ever
Know that we still have each other
You can stand under my Umbrella”

PS: probably the only liquid pouring down on those young men and women standing sentinels in a foreign desert land is their fellow Jarhead’s blood. Even the umbrellas of the best umbrella manufacturers of Calcutta and Bombay combined – KC Paul and Mohendra Dutta and Ebrahim Currim & and all their Sons can’t stop this rain from wetting their souls. Rihanna’s music and Kelly’s song may be the only protective agent there. Peace.

Tirades of a Drunken Vagabond

2007-11-20T06:00:00.000-08:00

There are just too many thoughts inside my mind and there is no way I can put them in order to separate the logical from the illogical drunken tirades of a youth stricken with a restless desire and insatiable appetite for adventure and the tryst for beauty unspoilt.

There is so much to learn on this planet and its crazy how we as a human population are just wasting our infinitesimally short time on our little rock by simply refusing to see that which lies right in front of our eyes.

Our planet is going up in flames on all quarters and we just don’t want to wake up from our comfy sleep. Its like we are connected to this huge life support machine that feeds oxygen to our lungs and glucose to our brains and we are just happy being as we are – asleep. Its one thing to want to go away from reality for three whole hours aided by the colorful coquetry of Shahrukh Khan and another thing completely to deny ourselves the most primeval right that we posses as animals born free - that to live and to live to the hilt. I wonder how we could do this to ourselves – each and every moment alive.

Do we not see the pain and torture inflicted upon our own kind and rather agree to look the other way? Even worse – if we do look, we look only at the parts that may seem beneficial to us, which we could use to extend our already inflated social images of celebration. As long as there is no liability, as long as we don’t lose our make up, we are ready to walk half a mile with a candle and sing songs written by minstrels of a bygone era when the human mind still had the ability to think freely with wisdom and without fear.

And this aint a phenomena that happens in our little corner of the world alone. Its everywhere you turn to look. Who till this day has stood up for the millions who have lost their homes to wars driven by the selfish desires of a handful of bureaucrats and politicians? I know this sounds cheesy and clichéd but it is a fact nonetheless that we cant deny to overlook any longer. Cause the longer we deny it the longer becomes our existence the existence of a bloody machine, nothing more than a brainless slave toiling day and night to feed his/her children and his/her egoistic desires of self-glorification. There are obligations as individuals – towards our families and towards our social relationships. But at what cost? Are we ready to lose all human dignity in order to feed our hunger for food. Children orphaned by the wars and diseases of older, wiser men agree. They would. But they would never act like the most refined result of millions of years of evolution and the critics of art and music belonging to a generation of human beings who are nothing more than dust now.

Throw away our caches of Leonardo and Ray – cause we don’t deserve to guard them any longer. Throw away the guitars and the sitars which can no longer strum a revolution. Trash the books that don’t have a voice loud enough to wake up the sleepiest of dragons from its comfy nap after a hearty dinner of fresh meat and pull it out of the cave to slay it. What use is our so called advanced sense of culture if all we can feed with it is our inflated egos? The ego of the Homo sapien. Crazy about our latest whacky i-phones and cool reggae hairstyle. It begins and ends with the hairstyle. The music is lost to our deaf ears. For all our advanced communication technology we still can't broadcast a civil war right into the homes of our conscious citizens – coz oh, if you didn’t notice, the technology fad was just a gas balloon. Our citizens need not see the gory part. The blood that has colored the once green pastures of our beautiful rural scenary ruby red. They are satisfied boycotting film festivals which don’t really matter to 90% of the population anyways. Who cares how many die in the ship breaking yards of Kannur everyday or the terrible heat waves of a Desert city springing up in all its glass and air-conditoned glory? Who gives a damn whether children – human and animal, are sold off to flesh trade markets of their own respective sorts? Tanzania is too far away, though once I read a book which brought it into my dreams. Tel Aviv is even farther - though my mouth had once watered for its kebabs and fish fillet. Greenland and South Pole – do they even exist? Do they even matter?

Hey Mr. Al Gore, don’t go into so much trouble to run after a childhood dream. The Dreamers are dead. And the ones who still walk the earth in the garb of innocuous middle class office goers and students shorn off youth and vitality – their colorful feathers fading under the black and brown robes of urban slavery, want to die off as soon as possible. They don’t want to fall in love and follow the most primordial rules of all life on the planet – to have their spirits passed on to their offspring and make their love immortal. Cause they don’t want their children to be born into a world so dead. To be part of a civilization which is only a shadow of what it used to be – adventurers and seekers of knowledge. Conquerers of adversity, minstrels composing praises of Gaia. Wanderers and vagabonds who bridged all impossible distances with their courage and curiosity. Just to taste the surf on their skin on a stormy night . Just to be with the stars on the highest mountain passes. Just to breathe and feel the lungs expand with the green air of the rainforest. Just to sing, to dance, to laugh and love. To live without fear. To love without fear. To be born and to die a free soul. A fraction of a breath on the lifeline of this vast planet.

Stray thots of a Stray DAWG

2007-11-12T02:51:00.000-08:00

Orange SQUASH
Supreme EYE-WASH
Brain Dead MALFUNCTION
Lost Speech DISJUNCTION
Tongue tied CONFESSION
Religious Bigotry LESION
Black coffee DE-ADDICTION
Cocoa-chocolaty POISON
Smoke blue FAG
Twenty pound ECSTASY bag
Lose Virginity TEST_TUBE
Baby born dead INJUSTICE
Society Bleeds BLACK
Rots of Ratty VATS
B;lue sky AUTUMN night
Single star Lost Transition
SNOW-WHITE CINDERELLA RAPUNZEL
Peter Pan's lost Vocation
Angel's dream Lust & Love
Surf of salty Ocean vast.
Sun Burn White Skin
Black Yellow Green thorn
Never Ending Beginning
Here Say Last GOODbye!!!

Notes on Death

2007-10-30T23:59:00.000-07:00

This is not horrible. Darfur is horrible. Serbia is horrible. People starving to death coz stupid politicians always invariably make false promises is horrible. But an old woman dieng of complications due to age surrounded by friends and family is supposed to be ideally normal. It isn't. Its horrible.

We can already perhaps feel It standing behind us. Light shines down on my grandma lieing there on the neat and clean sheets of the hospital bed with the oxygen mask strapped to her mouth. We surround her - make a circle like a fortress wall around her, keeping the light in. But behind our backs, in the shadows where the light does not reach, we can feel Its lascivious gaze fixed on the back of our necks. Its wheezing breath smelling of rot and decay, devoid of all moisture and warmth makes the hair on the back of our necks stand up like thorns in a rose bush. Death, greedy Death, In its garb of hooded black robe. Hiding its mottled white skin under the thick woollen fabric, stinking with the smell of moths and dirt.

It gets all of us in the end. It knows all of us hate it. Want it to go away. Especially when we have once felt its presence in our lives. But it knows we are nothing but helpless in its wake. And so it giggles away in utter glory. To the dismay of most mortals.

But there are those few who challenge it. Keep calling it and teasing it. And those who stand defiantlyin front of it and say - "Come get me!". These are those men and women who have no strings pulling them down - strings of desire, strings of affection, strings of revenge, strings of duty, strings of kaleidoscopic colors attached to silver and grey memories.

It is while I write this that I realize the ingredients of mortality are far more varied than what I first suspected. Mortality doesn't solely reside in the telomeric regions of our chromosomes. Nor in the defective genes in our cells, in the extra cholesterol in our blood sequestering our heart, the wrinkles on our skin and our lungs. It lies also in the wisdom and knowledge that deepens the grooves of our brains. It lies in the loss of innocence - the first heart break, the first fall from grace, the first realisation that the world is far removed from the colors of our childhood. Our mortality becomes more ingrained in our marrows when we fall in love - with our mother's cooking, with the smell of wet earth after the first rains, with the boy with the dimpled cheek and spark of the morning star in his deep dark eyes. Our mortality acquires flesh and blood when we learn to hate - the corruption in the system, our infidel fathers, our back-stabbing lovers and friends, our own unkept promises, our very existence.

It is only those who pass through their lives fully aware of their mortality, with no desire to live beyond death, who become truely immortal. Coz they live their lives as if there's no tomorrow. They live on in the memories of the species; In the winds of time. Their souls gain the ability to speak with generations through their work. Their Souls have a voice that resonates beyond the dark and dusty halls of Death and Its Ministers of War and Famine. They live on in the hearts of the ones they loved and rescued; inthe eyes of their children. They are the Undefeated. The only true Champions.

Blue window

2007-08-20T04:52:00.000-07:00

A single blue window
Opening on a Cerulean courtyard.
Black smoke lines the horizon
Like Kohl around my mother's eyes.
The Brown Earth
Soaked with the first Norwester.
Silver dewdrops dot the cricket pitch
Beside the gravel road.
Afternoons fragrant with the
Smell of fairytales.
A childhood lost in the past.
Never to come back.
Only to remember.

Yellow Brick Road

2007-03-31T07:54:00.000-07:00

Keep walking;
Walking down the path.
The crooked path-
Made of yellow brick stones;
And green algal patches.
Tiny grass flowers,
Blooming through the cracks.
Step softly.
Dont crush the ant-lines.
Watch the butterflies-
White & Blue & Yellow:
They fly around your feet,
As you walk by
Disturbing the atoms in their space;
Fairy creatures greet you.
Tiny fairy lights,
Shine down on your path;
Their mellow light
On your crooked path.
Watch where you step
The grass is still fresh.
And Young

In memory of Life...

2007-03-14T06:20:00.000-07:00

Vikrant was one year junior to me in college. A brilliant student, he showed promise of becoming a good - probably great - scientist someday. He was the most sincere and hard-working student of his class. He was also a terrific son – the kind who wakes up early in the morning to prepare his own breakfast. Hailing from a middle-class Maharashtrian family, he knew the deal. He had to work extra hard for that extra mile up the ladder of success. He was climbing steady. He would get there sooner rather than later.

Vikrant was 19 when he died - Complications after spending almost a month on the respirator. His respiratory system destroyed by the 11th July Bombay blasts.

What a waste.

So many of us go through our daily routine of hard-work and stunted success and end-up lamenting our existence, only to wake up next morning and join the grind once again. And then one delectably self-indulgent day we decide to end it all. We justify – why to live at all if our life is not really going anywhere; it’s just an invisible existence. And we go ahead and overdose or hit the gallows. Never really bothering once to look at the bigger picture.

The bigger picture in which we are the centre of attention. We tend to ignore those who are nearest to us - the ever haranguing mother; the over protective brother; the constantly teasing friends. We get too tired of them and look away. And yearn for the attentions of that one person on the planet for whom we will never really mean anything at all. Strange is human nature.

And then Bingo! – We become invisible to ourselves. We gaze into the mirror to find a complete stranger staring back at us. Most of the time we end up thinking we are a joke. As a matter of fact we are a coincidence – each one of us. If at a certain fraction of a second a few decades ago two half chromosomes crossing over at the right genes without mutations hadn’t come together to produce a stable zygote, which suddenly by a freak of nature started dividing and all these billions of cells hadn’t arranged themselves in the right orientations – well least to say I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this. Even the infinite dimensions of space-time bend to make space for us and our chaotic activities – we may be just an almost non-existent blimp in the vast unfathomable expanses of the universe around us, but we are at least a blimp, not ionized atoms floating on the surface of a really, really, really hot star.

Coz otherwise I wouldn’t be able to write all those nauseous poems with which I irritate my friends. I wouldn’t be able to taste melted chocolate on hot fudge cake. I wouldn’t be able to admire the right dimensions of the opposite sex and excite the hormones that make me a twenty year old. I wouldn’t feel the blood rush to my brain when I deliberately hang upside down from my bed. I wouldn’t miss a beat and become suddenly aware of that heart inside my chest when I see a particularly fine smile. And it’s not just me and my atoms. All humans are guilty of wasting their limited time on this planet performing many such ridiculously futile activities. Even though we walk around with the most evolved brain on the rock – result of 12 billion years of evolution.

As far as I can figure – our only “job” as blimps in the universe may be just to appreciate it. Instead of trying to waste long hours trying to figure who we truly are we should just go ahead and BE – fall in love, have heartbreaks, be demoralized, feel vindicated, watch our heroes fall from glory and lose our idols, lose our religion, lose hard-earned cash. Let’s not regret. Not because the milk is spilled, coz you were probably not gonna drink it anyway. You’d rather drink vodka with whisky and confess your undying love. These wouldn’t really help you in any fashion to prolong your existence or your wealth. At the most you will finally get what the Beatles were trying to say when they sang “Yesterday”.

But because there are enough self-created devices out there hell-bent on mutilating youth and innocence, love and laughter – pseudo oil wars, flesh trade, child trafficking, mine slavery, drug and AIDS, religions created centuries before we were born … we really don’t need to work overtime or give excuses to kill the love that runs through our veins like a rabid dog. For those who escape the above, adulthood is a potent weapon. Very few escape that. If u do – you can proudly say, “I was born free.”

The trick lies in remembering that life is a joke. And you only get one appearance and one stage to play it out. So you better learn to laugh through it – i.e. if you don’t wanna die of boredom.

Keventer's

2007-02-25T07:45:00.000-08:00

It was an overcaste day like today. the clouds fleeted past around us, wetting our windcheaters as we sat at the open roof-top restaurant...it was one of those perfect days that stays in your memory forever... Daj...the "queen of the hills" as far as the typical middle class bengali is concerned...great place to hang out with frnds or family...shoppin, eating, bird-watching...all go hand in hand....and the variety is just mindboggling...

i had read abt Keventer's in a childhood favourite by Satyajit Ray... it was the third time we were goin to Daj as a family...yet we hadnt visited this famous hang-out ever...so this time we decided to slog it out against the cold...there we sat on the open roof top freezing in the November cold..waiting for our orders...

they arrived carried by a quintessential Daj resident - smiling chinky eyes, fair wrinkled face...the plates of steaming hot dogs n mugs of steaming hot chocolate...i was surprised when i woke up this morning, their taste lingering in my mouth....the mustard sauce squishing past my lips, the juicy sausage melting in my mouth...the hot chocolate warming me up from the inside...as it slided down my alimentary canal...i couldnt beleive i remembered all these details ... i cud never remember the intermediates of the glucose metabolism pathways...but here it was...as if cud recall each n every step of metabolism of that chocolate n that hot dog.

Kiddy Pics...

2007-02-19T20:15:00.000-08:00

they are everywhere on orkut.people seem to think puttin up innocuous old photographs in which you cant really be recognized as anything more than a pre-pubescent knicker-bocker, can attract/repel strangers from their profile. it doesnt do either.

i also realized while i was goin thru my friends' profile - the ones who had their kiddy pics, and my own kiddy pics - that, however pretty and promising we may seem to be when we were young, our bones and fat in adulthood turn us into pretty hideous creations of god.after all Homo sapiens is the only species on the planet without any interesting physical attributes. no long necks, no exotic spots, no rhythmic muscles...just a block of flesh with loads of ossified columns holding it up...n a 3 pound electrical box on top, that currently seems to be turning into a vestigeal organ.

to make things more clear i'll talk abt a type specimen...myself.when i glanced thru my kiddy pics from two decades ago i saw this really cutesy-tootsie little angel with a button nose n shiny big eyes. it seems i went thru a series of somatic mutations as i grew up - the button nose turned into a huge samosa, the big eyes became tinier than Mao's...n overall after 16, my diameter started increasing rather than my length. now dont read this as self-mollification - i knw many of my frnds who have gone thru worser n more amazingly miraculous transitions.its a surprise we dont all look like vogons...(if u wanna knw who they are, please refer to hitch-hiker's guide to the galaxy n dont bug me with stupid questions!!).

some of us tho turned out better than expected...

n yet...we like lookin at those worn out photographs...yellowing a little becoz of age...torn at the edges perhaps becoz of excess handling...not becoz we like self-mollification...rather becoz welll we like travellin time...go back to the days when the afternuns were sunny n full of daring escapades in abandoned buildings or factories - not sitting arnd air-conditioned cubicles staring at some damn cold-hearted computer screen which gives u a blinding headache and an addiction for caffeine...when the autumn air still smelled of the essence from the durga puja pandals - not carbon filled exhaust from the fuel pipes of expensive cars dashing past u on a crowded street....when shahrukh still waved away his sweetheart at the doorstep wearing a sexy red n white striped pullover....not jump arnd girls half his age wearing tight spandex trying to look hot...

we all get over it...eventually...those awkward days....

yet every now then it does feel nice to taste an ice-cream in the rain...or intentionally put chalk-dust on ur proffessor's chair....we were all rebels back then...with blood full of sun's energy....

we still are....if we are brave enough to acknowledge it.

Whats this shit called love neways???

2007-02-19T18:02:00.000-08:00

The Oxford Dictionary gives 6 meanings for it...starting with "deep affection or fondness" [CRAP!] to "(in some games) no score" [MORE LIKE IT!!]

i'd say - taking the freedom of being an amateur 'writer' - its an illogical human emotion that seems to run through our veins at mind-boggling speeds and crash through the roof of your brain, leaving you feeling as if you are walking around in a wormhole in which both the past and the future seems to have folded upon each other and themselves to give you magical yet unreal visions... like having shit loads of LSD with caffeine, just less kaleidoscopic....

it scares you so bad that your CSF freezes in your spine. it uplifts you so high that u think u got wings then to your dismay you suddenly realize that you dont - like Bugs Bunny when he crashes down the deep cliff...

it has never stopped amazing us - it probably never will coz we'll never really get the hang of it...a bit like the fact that once you reach the "horizon" of the universe you will find to ur utter dismay that it has probably folded upon itself so that there is no horizon at all.

thats why we keep writing poems n song n other uncategorisable stuff like this shit, about it - never really meaning any of the damn words.coz i've seen/heard couples in true love - they never say stuff like that to each other...

Anyways, its a bad topic to write about - tho its a good one for an amateur writer...you dont really have to crank your brain too hard to get it. its the most natural feeling - the most natural feeling that humans have probably.tho it does make a boring reading - coz u already know this shit, just in a different language...

oh! and one more thing before signing off...Love comes in flashes...its not a perpetual thing like many beleive.it hits you when you're least expecting it and takes you to such a height that you feel you've broken all bonds of gravity - and for those few seconds my friend - you become immortal.

and guess what the meaning of "love game" is according to oxford :

"a game in which the loser makes no score." [HELL YA!!]

PS: for the ignorant idiots who dont know what CSF is - its the clear liquid - cerebro-spinal fluid, stuffed inside your skull that prevents your brain from turning into mash everytime you forget your helmet...

Today.

2007-02-19T05:28:00.000-08:00

The guitar plays in the background..."Follow me" it strums. Its a quite February afternoon. A day off coz a warrior from the past had his birthday today.

its incredible how we humans keep chasing after things that are dead - even tho we knw they're never gonna come back.Memories.Immortality.Salvation.

The masons are building a new sky-scraper somewhere nearby.the sound of the grater breaks the silence.Its a monotony in itself.

Poems, Prayers, and Promises. How ridiculous they seem.Friends.Milestones. The Gray road ahead.

Its snowing in Gangtok.And Mussoorie.And Bonn. My friends are travelling through their lives there too.We all connected and unconnected by the human unrealities of time and space. All of us walk a Lonely road.Yet keepi saying "hi" as we pass by. Sometimes we sit down and have a little chat. The mind breaks free. we write songs. then we move on. Once again. on and on.

"welcome, to the Matrix " they said. Heck. i forgot my i-pod behind.they only seem to have crazy robots around here.even the smell of burnt human flesh n rotten human blood doesnt seem to wake them up. They sleep. with their eyes open. i was hopin there was a 5th dimension.But this is all we got - the 3rd rock from the Sun. Slowly turning lifeless as the greenhouse gases pile up. Can you feel the heat yet??

they exploded a bomb again today.66 people died.Funny number. The DJ on FM Rainbow seemed to be in a hurry when he reported it.

ReDox

2007-02-19T04:57:00.000-08:00

I remember the time when i accidentally drank methylene blue during one of those several hot, humid, suffocating Micro practicals. my tongue turned cerulean blue n remained so for the next 5 days....and for all those 5 days i was mortally scared that i would have to go around with a blue tongue for the rest of my life.Thankfully Met Blu is a redox dye n i live on a planet whose atmosphere has loads of O2.my tongue is back to its furry, weird, dirty pink color...uninteresting and boring like all other 9 billion human tongues roaming this planet...

talking about this planet and oxygen...do we even realize that every breath we take is a miracle?? a fine-tuned orchestra involving thousands of muscles and hundreds of chemicals. if any of those tiny nuts and bolts suddenly decided to take the day off - we are in for it.

so brothers and sisters, lovers and haters, my beloved foes and unworthy friends...cherish every breath. coz with single one of those you are cherishing life and your loved ones.its a beautiful world at the end of the day....no matter what happens:

a despot hangs another despot; a plane crash kills hundreds and two perfectly "stable" countries get devastated as an aftermath; your girlfriend leaves you for a richer guy during a rough patch; your boyfriend leaves you for a babe with bigger boobs...

Remember this :

Orion still gazes down upon us from the night sky and Sirius leads the way.Maybe they appear a bit faded nowadays becoz of all the greenhouse gases we are pumping into the atmosphere...But we are only a speck in the universe.And Orion travels the night sky billions of light years away.

There's still hope.

The New World...back by popular demand....

2007-02-18T17:49:00.000-08:00

Terrence Mallick’s vision of the New World brought us the soft and painful story of a romance between a Red Indian Chieftain’s daughter and an Irish Sea captain – dappled light on green and blue evergreen forests of the wild and free unknowns of untamed America. Then came the battles – rough European settlers against barbaric tattooed natives. The world that was, in which love floated free in the air to be breathed in and out – was turned into a chained, bleeding, panting animal, stripped of all human emotion – fighting for survival with teeth clenched and anger boiling through its veins. It failed. A great continent was conquered. And with it man lost one of the last remaining vestiges of wilderness – forever.

Cut to 1947. Great new things were happening all over the world. The crazy eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes staked all his millions and his reputation on the first flight of the first jumbo jet across the American skies – and beyond. Edwin Land discovered the compact camera with in-built film system. Xerox was invented. Nations were breaking free from the clutches of their colonial masters. Africa, Asia, South America were waking up from centuries of slavery.
It is in these turbulent years that in our tiny corner of the world three new nations were pieced out of a huge British colony. Thousands died – hundreds were left homeless. It was as if the earth was retching blood along the division lines – or so I have read.

From the ashes of a great nation an anaemic seedling struggled to survive. The pace was painstakingly slow. While the rest of the world zoomed past us, we kept on tugging and pushing the relic of a bygone majesty down the road to 10% GDP.
Decades passed – emergencies, religious riots, Naxal andolan – internal aggression at every nook and corner – Kashmir, North-East, Bengal, Orissa, Bihar, Tamil Nadu – etc, etc, etc…our GDP climbed like a snail on a redwood tree. Then was born the first generation of the 90’s. A generation who had not seen the Gulf war, the Babri Masjid, the Sikh riots, the Bombay blasts – they had neither seen C. V. Raman receiving the Nobel Prize, the Smiling Buddha in the Pokhran sands, India’s World Cup win or Rakesh Sharma’s flight to the outer orbit.

A whole new generation for whom the entire history of their nation was stored in a few school text-books to be mugged and retched out onto the term paper. A generation blamed of misguided principles and blind aping of western trends. A generation for whom the sound of MTV was more familiar than the sound of early morning ragas on AIR. A bunch of doping, fagging, English-swear mouthing brown sahibs for whom Nirvana was holier than Mahatma.
The century passed. We entered a new one with guns of Kargil still echoing off the barren hills of Karakorum. The Godhra riots happened. We saw pregnant women being raped and fetuses being murdered – some things we thought were impossible. But we were only entering the new century. USA attacked Afghanistan. Peter Jackson released Lord of the Rings – the Fellowship of the Ring. Two crazy suicide bombers rammed against the highest towers in New York landscape – and the most familiar ones thanks to “Friends”. Peter Jackson released Lord of the rings – the Two Towers.USA attacked Iraq – one dictator against another – for a “cleaning-up” job flimsier than World War II – over non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction. We saw one of the most ancient cities on earth, housing one of the greatest collections of art, culture, literature, religion and ancient science being reduced to a mass of rubbles. Tanks rolled down the carved streets of Babylon where even Alexander had chosen to stride on flowers. A city which gave us the great adventures of Sindbad, the terrific stories of Arabian Nights and the witticisms of Mullah Nasseeruddin – no longer existed. Its spirit crushed under the falling walls of Baghdad museum. Our generation stood a dumb witness and stayed glued to our computer screens reading the blogs of US marines. Rakesh Omprakash Mehra released Rang De Basanti. Seven deadly blasts left the spinal cord of Mumbai in tatters.

There was blood everywhere. The New World was dawning and we saw the planet we were inheriting turn into a desolate landmass.
We were – and still are – all confused. We wonder – where does such reckless hatred come from? Is it born from the heart of man? Is it born from the hearts beating within us? Is it even possible? This is the 21st century for God’s sake. We are not Hitlers or Chengises. Nor Alexander or Ashok. We are supposed to be hip and cool. Work hard, party harder.
Why do we have to break and burn cars from Birmingham to Paris? Why do we have to fight against our own government to get jobs – in Delhi, Paris, China and Chile? Why are our boyfriends dying desolate deaths in faraway deserts? Why do our girlfriends get sold off to nameless addresses? Why are our brothers being murdered by city cops in the London tubes in broad daylight? Why can’t our sisters in Kabul wear jeans for fear of life and honor? Why do our friends die in bomb-blasts on the way home from late practicals? Whats the purpose of all this? Whats the great design that we fail to see?
This is the New World – this is the world we have inherited from our elders. We have to figure it out – ‘cause if we don’t, no-one will. Before it is too late…or is it too late already?

Monday, July 31, 2006

first quarter

2007-02-18T01:30:00.000-08:00

just realized - me and my friends have completed living through the first murky quarter of our murky lives and surprisingly it seems nothing like what it had promised to be when we were still young and innocent....

talking about innocence...if there is really such a thing coz some older people seem to think we lost it the day a certain lady bit into a certain fruit that i dont particularly like...somewhere over the last five years we seem to have lost it, and we realize it only now as we stand on the threshold of the scary bit of out lives - adulthood.

sometimes when i look back i get a certain scary feeling running down my spine-the sort when one looks down into a smoky chasm while standing on a clifftop on a particularly stormy nite.i see a shadow standing in the dark - and i dont quite recognize it. i realize now the feeling is not singular.the oldest and dearest of my friends feel the same - so do the sane ones as well as the control freaks.i dont know whether the wise ones of this world have a term for this - i'd call it the Tween Syndrome.

none of us recognize that person - coz that person would never do the things that we have done - got dangerously stoned on new year's eve n argued over the manufacturing rights of a silly bhujia maker - haldiram's or uncle chips....
- went into a shady redlite area with a fellow gajakhor on the trail of exotic grass
- spent an entire christmas eve on the road riding with friends whom we have barely known for a few weeks...
- went on blind-dates with guys/gals we met on that eternal source of confused love-lives - Orkut...
i dont think that person who stands in the shadows had that much guts...i dont think anyone of us did...and yet as we stand here today waiting for our turn to walk over the thin red line - we are shit scared.at least i am...and so are my soul-mates...dear ones without whom this first quarter of my bloody murky life would have never been such a great mess and be utterly bland and boring...thanx for making my life a celebration of tragedies and comedies...thanx for laughing with me over jokes - silly, cruel and pjs as well.thanx for all the great times we spent together even being far way from each other....and thanx for rescuing my life from being a regular shit hole - at least its an interesting shit-hole right now...

when did we exactly start being so gutsy...i dont think any of us remember that exact bloody moment when we suddenly decided to lose it and our brain short-circuited with our hearts....
as for me i guess i lost it the day dad left us for a second family.i didnt think over it at that time.i put it on one of the several thousand dusty shelves inside the attic of my brain and put several heavy books on it to press it down...hoping it would eventually dissapear or something...instead it grew silver-worms in its spines...n its dusty leaves crumpled and dusted down all the other books around.now its time to bring it out into the sun n give it some air...deal with it as a bull-fighter would - by the horns...the problem is i am no bull-fighter...i am an amateur poet. and i got too much love running through my veins...all of us do.it is like a congenital affliction of the human race.we got too much love yet got no one to attack it with.found no aliens in the outer confines of this vast universe as of yet.the only aliens i cud think of rite now would be a few characters who are perpetually covered with chalk dust and self-glorification.if there was one WMD bush shud've destroyed it shud have been this...it creates too many unnecessary complications...

the world and mother nature seem to have lost it too along with me and my dear friends...innocence and sanity i mean...virginity was never an issue.we lost it the day sharon stone crossed and un-crossed her legs for michael douglas.

2007 started out bad.saddam lost his neck.i hit crazy coupledom.and then came farewell time.its hard to leave behind friends - especially such shitty ones who have filled ur brain with some perfectly useless yet unforgettable memories - like pestonji's ice-cream and sir bending down to pick up chalks....dumb-charades at 11 in the nite at chowpatty or long discussions regarding certain personal columns in midday...talking abt johnny depp till 2 at nite over a open book of organic chemistry or just staring at Sirius on one of the rare clear nites from the hostel terrace.
friends are like that - completely useless yet absolutely necessary for a life beyond mere existence. i cud have been a piece of furniture for all i care, if it hadnt been for them.

that doesnt really mean i'm thanking them for being there...there are several unpaid bills still accumulating...