What If?

What if something distant and unknown became dear and familiar to you?

What if the tiny speck that meant nothing engulfed your every sense?

What if the truth that you knew turned out to be one grand whole lie?

What if in darkness you found the light that you always sought?

What if the past that you discarded forced itself into your future?

What if songs that were dead played again and made your heart beat in a new rhythm?

What if closure brought you closer?

What if confusion and uncertainty gave you bliss?

What if your weakness became your greatest strength?

What if blue became your green?

Would you still be you?

In Search Of

Wild and free
Sea winds of my mind,
Waves of illusions.
Ripples that bind,
This world and that,
Like hands entwined.

Moist breezes,
Twilight looms,
Leaves rustle,
In a familiar tune.
But alas!The ears they lie,
The leaves were not what they used to be.

This sky is that,
Blue and one,
The mind reasons,
What the heart doth shun.
Morning dies,
In want of a sun.

Moist breezes,
Twilight looms,
Moist eyes,
Filled with gloom,
Looks through the haze,
For that world,
The eternal womb.

So I Leave My Boats Behind

One of the first concepts you learn as a student of Economics is that, of trade-off.
A seemingly innocuous word,it is fundamental to the subject in so many ways.In addition to that,it has a deeper philosophical meaning.Tricky concept,I tell you.
Ask the Rolling Stones.They hit the nail on the head.

"You can't always get what you want,
But if you try sometime,you might find,you get what you need."


But then what if my wants and needs are one and the same?

I've got what I wanted for so,so long.And Lord knows,that's what I need too!
I've dreamt of this throughout my undergraduate years.
To study in one of the best departments in India,under some of the most eminent professors,among some of the most intellectual students and in that unbelievable campus where one can break free.Leaving home was implicit to this dream and I hadn't wasted my sleep on that.

But now when I have to go,REALLY GO,the truth hits hard.
Every tiny nook and cranny of my home breaks my heart.
The sofa which I used to bump into everyday,scream out some expletives and get a scolding from Ma on how callous I was.
Those little toys on my bedstead that has borne the brunt of so many of my fits of angers.I broke them and mended them and now it's their turn.
My bed.So many lazy afternoons,rolling and tumbling with a story book in my hand;staying awake the whole night(well,almost) before exams,right from school with heaps of notes and books strewn all over;those long phone calls in the dark;crying myself to sleep;the drama every morning to wake up :it has been there,seen all of that.
My desk,which is NEVER in order,but now.My wardrobe,which made Ma faint everytime she opened it is now empty.
I just have to look around and the tears,they come.

And then there's Ma.
Dad's there too.But the man can cope better.He's gonna eat all the chocolates in the fridge,listen to music all night,be cranky,sleep and snore and give me a zillion phone calls to keep evil and boys at bay and somehow get by.
But Ma.She has always been the 'silent lucidity' type.And I know how difficult it is going to be for her.She has promised to drown herself heart and soul in research,but I know,in the heart of hearts,that's not going to be enough to keep the void away.Just as in my case,a new city,new friends,a new life can never replace her.Where else will I get my Mommycuddle,my punching bag,my greatest inspiration?

There are so many people I'll miss.Funny thing is I didn't even meet all of them on a daily basis.I'll miss Dadu and Didu,although I have a sneaky feeling Didu,as soon as she gets hold of my number,is going to drive me crazy calling me up ten times a day to make sure I haven't accepted food from strangers!!I'll miss my GuruMa,and my music classes.I'll miss riyaaz.I'll miss my hapless driver,my gardener,my neighbours,my walk-in-the-park friends,especially the Dadus.I'll miss my Xerox Aunty.I'll miss the Phuchka man.I'll miss my friends back home: PriD,the marathon phone conversations,the inane text messages,the cold wars,the drunken-library-jaunts and Sumo,the movie sessions,the talks,the questions that made me cringe,the Sumoisms that are so dear to me. I'll also miss the ones who are elsewhere : Oi,Punch,N,Ob.I'll miss my college,beautiful and ancient.The corridors,the rooms,the canteen,Paramount,College Street,Einstein-Xerox Dadu and so on.
I'll miss that particular crust of the sky I see from my window.

I could go on and on about what I'd miss and what I'm leaving behind.
But I would be lying if I said that every now and then,my heart does not give a skip and I don't shiver with excitement thinking of the unknown road ahead.
That is the classic trade-off.
I'll try dealing with it.
How well,time will tell.

I don't know when I'll be blogging again.
Or maybe I'll start a new one.
But this will be a part of me,just as all the things and persons I've mentioned in this post are.

I raise my glass to the old and the new.
With love.

"So I leave my boats behind,
Leave them on familiar shores.
Set my heart upon the deep,
Follow you again my Lord."

Silver Bubble

It is midnight and I'm here, perched on my chair.
I have just finished painting my nails with considerable degree of difficulty.
I was never very good at it and never did show much improvement either.
I'm trying to keep my toes as far away from one another to prevent further damage.
But I like looking down on my painted toe-nails, in its restrained vibrancy of mute silver.

I just finished watching Up in the Air.
It does paint with beautiful poignancy certain facts of life.
Excess baggage or no baggage, both lands you in a fix.
Career goals or no career goals, both can make you look like a living embodiment of failure.
Commitment or no commitment, both offers suboptimal solutions. The former can leave you hurt and betrayed. The latter, makes you look like a cold hearted conniving man-eater.
Freedom of choice allows you to put yourself in chains.
Existentialism. Thou art a puzzle!

Clouds are pretty, aren’t they?
They lack specificity.
Life’s pretty too.
(Not always. Like right now.)
However, I never liked the cloud imagery for life.
It’s fundamentally flawed.
Life is specific. Its cause is existence. Its result: death.
Joni Mitchell might have looked at both clouds and life from both sides and concluded that she really didn’t know either, but that doesn’t qualify clouds to be a metaphor for life.
I've come across several people interpreting Both Sides Now in that way.
You cannot say it is wrong, but it peeves me!

Every cloud might have a silver lining.
Life doesn’t.
But my toe-nails do.

Deal with it.
I do while “looking down on creation”.
Even, if it is patchy in places.

Proof Of Life

Life has been on hold for sometime now.My blog bears testimony to that.My last post was last year.Years changed,months too,but the date of the last post has been the same for almost five months.

Yes,inspirations have had a recessionary trend.But there have been a few upswings.Some big enough for me to have typed up a flurry of words,but I've kept away.Rather,been forced to keep away.There has been a lot of stress and work,let downs and time crunch,brought on by varied affairs of this great plan called life.And I have been making an effort to beat the doldrums.The uncertainty of my situation here isn't helping much.

Crossroads make for great songs.The multiple choice questions it deals you in life are quite cumbersome otherwise.

My blog has never been another social networking site for me.My first blog post clarified that.It doesn't matter whether I have millions of readers.I don't give details of my relationships,I don't carry out character dissection and social homicide of people I don't like and I'm faintly controversial.However it is comforting to know that in spite of that there are some people,and a few (pleasantly surprising) like minded ones,who are regular readers of my irregular posts.The number of followers have doubled since the last time I checked and I am moved.Some, have even been worried regarding my long sabbatical.And although my blog isn't an obligation,I think I owe all of you an explanation.And hence this post.

When you put a caller on hold for too long,chances are that you won't find him waiting when you at last manage to get back.The line goes dead on the other end.
I don't want my blog to die that way.
I don't want it to be a self-indulgent,temporary obsession that fades away into oblivion.

This post,dear reader,is your proof.

Sweet December

Winter is not my season.
It's cold.
The sun sets early.
It gets a tad depressing.

But I love December.
Especially December in Calcutta.
Yes,it's cold.
The sun sets early here too.
But there's a sense of warmth associated with this month and the city soaks it up and surrounds you with it.


December brings with it the routine trip to New Market, resplendent in its old world charm :the merry, christmas decor,the heavenly smell of freshly baked cakes and brownies from Nahoum's wafting through the air and children with the cutest head-gears.
Park Street resembles wonderland in all its Yuletide splendour.
Flurys looks like that house of goodies from the fairytale Hansel and Grethel.Only there's no wicked witch here.
It's true that the footfall increases by a dizzying amount and you need to queue up for your favourite sizzler,but you'd hardly see people complaining.
There's this infectious sense of well-being and bonhomie all around.
It maybe a far cry from the reality,but a little escapism didn't hurt anyone.
Come December,and down comes the Kashmiri Shawl-walas,winning our hearts and the bargains with their genial natures.Then again,bargaining isn't the priority of the season.The Circus,though trampled by the sands of time,rolls in and you see that big colourful tent at Park Circus Maidan.
December is,as it always was.


December brings back memories.
December for the good 14 years of my life had meant the longest vacation of the year.
It meant the Nativity Play at school;singing for the choir with hideous make-up that made my cheeks look like that of a clown rather than being rosy.
December meant writing inane holiday notes on each other's hands and arms and the thrill of keeping it hidden from Ma who didn't approve of the skin being used as a replacement for paper.
Shivering on our way to school,cursing the skirts,and then basking in the winter sunshine before classes began : that was December.
Rubbing my hand vigorously to keep them warm,letting someone see how cold it was,which later I realized was his juvenile excuse for simply holding it,for a good two hours.That was December too.
December memories, from bygone years still keeps me warm with its sepia aura.

December brings with it an eventuality.
The hope of a new beginning in a discrete time scenario.
The sigh of a huge relief for all the bad times traversed.
A promise of tomorrow,with a fond recollection of yesterday.

Yes,it's cold.
And the sun sets early.
But there's hardly any darkness in the December I see.
All we gotta do is to look for the light at the right places.
And very often,the chances are that it's within you and me.
December doesn't bestow heavenly light on you.
It simply helps you seek it for yourself.
That's my December.Sweet December.
:)

Potpourri IV

It's been sometime since I gushed out another installment of my potpourri.
There were either too many things on my mind to tackle at once or too less of it to make me bother.
Anyway, not much has changed except that I'm 21 now. I still remain uniformly random in my thoughts, with divergent lines of reasoning emanating from the single thought processor in my head. It can be disconcerting sometimes, I tell you! But how else would I have a Potpourri without my vagaries?

Oh well, Orwell : If you want the BEST jolt that reality can ever deliver, Orwell is the man. And by jolt, I do not mean he'd horrify you, nauseate you or gross you out. Unlike the path chosen by some of our modern authors, to make reality harsher and more gruesome than it really is, Orwell’s non-fiction offers them a lesson in balance and artistry. I was reading Down and Out in Paris and London. It is amazing how Orwell skillfully executes his duties both as an author and a journalist. He writes what he sees. He presents Paris through the eyes of a plongeur, devoid of all the beauty associated with the place.' Poverty is what I'm writing about' he says and he paints the great redeeming feature of poverty so well-its power to annihilate the future. You find an undercurrent of Socialist thought but Orwell, like a true journalist maintains a beautiful equilibrium between what he sees and what he feels. He points out how unemployment weathers a soul. Then again, amidst all the dreary accounts, you come across Bozo, the tramp. And when Bozo says, in spite of having the sky as his roof in the freezing cold, that "The stars are a free show; it don't cost anything to use your eyes”, I cannot help but be amazed at the resilience of the human spirit. Reality is harsh. It might not be beautiful. But Orwell shows whether one chooses to make it hopeless or hopeful, is a personal choice.

Mayer's Snare: Once you've started loving John Mayer's music, you are trapped. You cannot dislike him. Even if you don't like him as much as the last time you checked. Battle Studies proves that. My first reaction on listening to this much awaited album was disappointment.Frankly,the songs were too Pop for my taste and after a Magnum Opus like Continuum or Where The Light is, Battle Studies does fall short of expectations. But then I went back and listened to it, over and over again. And as always, it grows on you. My top picks are definitely 'Who Says?'(Basic Mayer tone, simple, quirky), 'Perfectly Lonely'(Probably the best written song in the album) and 'War of my Life '(The song that has some congruence to the name of the album, semified aggression).'Half of my Life',IN SPITE of featuring Taylor Swift is not hideous surprisingly. Now, the bad apples. Crossroads : I've always maintained when you try re-inventing a classic like this one, make sure it's better than the original or just shut up! Mayer’s rendition of Crossroads made me cringe! Hate the tone. Hate the bass work. The other bad apple is indeed Heartbreak Warfare. I mean we all know that Jen Anniston's been a lot of pain, and he needs to vent out. But the expression is clichéd and rather OTT.For the love of God,” Clouds of sulphur in the air, bombs are falling everywhere, it’s heartbreak warfare!” Lame imagery .This, being a post-break-up album, I did draw a comparison with Blood on the Tracks. But I guess I shouldn't for there's just ONE of that master-piece. However, Mayer does try to do something new in this album and I do give him credits for that. He has made a conscious effort to break away from his Blues mould. I don't know whether that's a good thing or bad, but I'm very excited about the future of Mayer's music.

The Tree Swingers: Laugh all you want to, but I've been obsessed with Orangutans lately. I’ve been watching Animal Planet and NatGeo all day and watching their antics. They are the most adorable creatures I've ever seen. From those needy-wise- eyes, to that absolutely delectable 'smooch-face' they do; from making the funniest leaf hats for shade or simply sitting there, majestically, they indeed are an amazing animal. It’s a shame so few of them remain. I wish I could have one as a pet but I guess the wilderness is where they truly belong. What amazes me about this species of primates as opposed to the others is their love for solitude, looking down on creation from up above the canopy. No wonder Sukumar Ray used them in his poem where he writes "Holde shobuj orangutan,It patkel chit-potang'. :)

The Truth Files : I've been a X-phile.Not the creepy kind but moderate one.It is the best Sci-fi series ever! Yes, the genius of Chris Carter did begin to fade towards the end,but then the beginning and what followed was magic. Mind-boggling plots, suspense you could cut with a knife and Duchovny-Anderson sure deserved the Nobel prize for chemistry! From corruption, to extra-terrestrial life; from denying information to citizens to passion-play, it was one gripping potpourri of sorts! And in the light of some recent incidents in my life, the X-Files tagline has suddenly become like a portent. The Truth Is Out There. And for those who hide it, it’s going to catch up with you soon you dastards!Sooner than you'd imagine and too late to run for cover!

I was feeling, to express in Sylvia Plath's words "very still and very empty; the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo."
I don't feel the same now.
I am a part of the tornado now,living the hullabaloo.
Or will be, for a few days to come.