Ode to eccentricities…

Why do I like to dream?
Of living in a tiny cottage with a huge library
In a desolate plateau on a distant mountain

Why do you dream to like?
Or be in love, with the bibliophile-
Yoga-loving, peregrinating, young since 1965

Why does he attempt to whet his magajastra?
So zealously just as did his 19th century forebear-
Cocaine injecting, ratiocinating, eschewing society

Why do they care for foibles of grey matter?
Rather than of heart, why do we mull?
Over the aesthetics of their care and the beauty of our solitude

To be able to brush aside the fly of spleen
From the face of our sense of wonder
To be dazzled by the maverick within, how did we manage?

To remain undaunted by the edifice of reality?

Amdo’s near NID: Reflections on an iconoclastic inn!

There stood before us a little, non-descript shanty,not different from the several others that stood in proximity in any way save for the words ‘Momos’ scribbled with chalk on its wall. Yet, I instinctively knew that this place would be like no other eatery I have been to in Ahmedabad. As we entered the shack, I took a second or two longer than usual to open my shoes-customers are to leave their shoes at the threshold here-because I was enthralled by the view that greeted my sight. I am no good with measurements and I shall, therefore, make no attempts to convey how small the room that housed the restaurant was. In the waning light of the dusk, I could not read the name of the eatery on the hand written menu card stuck on the farthest corner of the wall and it is my friend who read out the name of the joint-Amdo’s. It had no furniture save for the pieces of wood that were placed in a horizontal line along the walls to serve as tables for the customers who ate sitting on the floor. There were some unusual paintings or sketches on the azure-hued walls which, I guess, I could have appreciated better if I could figure out if they were drawn with oil paints or charcoal but the state of euphoric enchantment that I was in, had rendered me too nonplussed to try doing that. There was a little kitchen in one corner of the room where sat a wiry person of Mongoloid features, taking orders, cooking and watching some Hindi film on a tiny television set.
It took me no more than a minute to discover that the place had nothing to offer my palate because it was not serving vegetarian momos today but it was barely anything more than a trifling disappointment for me-my mind was in a state of excited frenzy at having discovered an inn like this one in Ahmedabad.Maybe, there are several others like it but for me who had, during the past five months of stay in the city, been wont to the sight of plush outlets of corporate chains of restaurants in ubiquitous malls and to smaller eateries which proudly flaunt ‘pure vegetarian’ signboards, discovery of Amdo’s was, to use the cliché, like discovering Tutankhamun’s tomb- there was a possibility of experiencing immense excitement. And so I did. As I sat at Amdo’s, staring at the back of the cook or rather at the message printed on the back of the his t-shirt, ‘I support free Tibet’ while my friend ate beef momos with a beatific expression on her mien, I decided to blog about the restaurant the existence of which is apparently not known to shop-keepers running stores at a distance that is less than a five minutes walk away.
I wondered, as I sipped lemon tea in the tiny restaurant, feebly lit by the weak streams of light of the setting sun at the hour of vesper, why am I feeling so ecstatic at this moment? If there is anything to feel, it should be anxiety because there is a great deal of work which I had left unfinished in order to be there. But unalloyed exuberance is what I felt-maybe because the sight of momos made me a bit nostalgic about my home town Guwahati, where every little inn in every neighbourhood have momos as a fixture on their menu-cards. Or maybe because, even when I woke up this Sunday morning I had not expected to find myself in so unusual a place at so beautiful an hour- a visit to a bookstore was what I could imagine as the most absorbing weekend activity until now. But there was another reason too.
The obscure location of Amdo’s, its unostentatious surroundings, its sinewy-looking host and its unusual menu all reminded of the coffee-house of My name is Red. The novel, in its vivid elucidation of the milieu at the coffee houses of 15th century Istanbul, portrayed them as a hub of dissidents, as a place where its patrons drank the socially and culturally forbidden coffee and in doing so, expressed perhaps, in the most idle manner, their protests against the existing socio-religious straitjackets. Maybe, I am being a little too maudlin in drawing parallels between Pamuk’s Turkish coffee house and the little Tibetan restaurant, tucked away in one remote corner of Ahmedabad; there is no blasphemous poet or recusant raconteur of tales of rebellion here unlike at the coffee house. But there certainly is something ineffable about the place that makes it redolent of iconoclasm-perhaps that ‘something’ is the beef on my friend’s plate which is not something the most-renowned and well-established of eateries serve in this city. Given the demigod status bestowed upon the bovine creatures in this land, it cannot be easy for these people to serve beef. Or maybe, there is another reason which makes this place so unusual,a better and profounder reason that I am yet to fathom. But I hope to be able to do that, in the course of my subsequent visits of Amdo’s. Amen!

Poster Perfect!

Every morning-well, almost every morning-I have the pleasure of traveling to work with Rani, Katrina, Kareena or Priyanka. Once in a while, I get male company too when I have Imran or Salman or John or even, Mithun as my co-passenger but it is the rendezvous with the girls that I look forward to. Their company animates me and inspires me to discover myriad of critical hypotheses to debate upon; when with them, I can very easily set aside my saturnine, brooding self and be almost as vivacious as these lovely ladies are. On the silver screen.
I cannot coerce myself here to reiterate the names above along with their owners’ surnames for the simple reason that there cannot be a human being on the face of this planet who offers flower festoons to the gods in temples, and also to local politicians at functions, who can claim to not recognize the people I am talking of by their first names.
These are the names which have beguiled me over and again to enter a theatre only to call myself a nincompoop, fret and eventually to daydream about Caesar salad or baked pasta. These are the names of matinee idols who sell a hundred goods, kindle passions, arouse awe, and inspire the auto-rickshaw drivers of Ahmedabad to ply with elan, their noble vehicles on the streets of the city on the banks of Sabarmati!
Yes, every time, I step into an auto-rickshaw, I eagerly-and now, instinctively- look to my left and my right to find out which film star is accompanying me on my ride; whose posters adorn the sides of the passenger seat? This is something peculiar to Ahmedabad autos-almost all of them have garishly bright hued pictures of Bollywood stars, mostly female stars, on their inner sides. Earlier I used to wonder aloud every time I stepped into an auto-rickshaw, but of course, only if I have company, as to what on earth made these silver screen sirens to agree to get photographed in such costumes which are bound make people suspicious of the refinement of their sartorial sense? Quite contrary to the chic, urbane attires, in which they are usually found draped in the pages of glossy magazines and on the broadcasts of television channels, in these posters they are invariably donning outfits which seem to be out of some pot-boiler that had grossed lakhs when released in the late 1980s but since then, has never been watched by anyone who did not sooner or later, suffer from a serious bout of indigestion. In one poster, Kareena Kapoor is wearing blood-red salwar kameez with refulgent golden embroidery and in another, Katrina Kaif is dressed in a turquoise lehnga-choli with wonderfully matching red-lipstick!
I found the answer to my question when once I came across a poster of Rani Mukherjee garbed in a scarlet wedding saree, and appropriately, gazing coyly at me. There was something odd about it, I thought. It took me a few seconds to notice the source of the oddity-the ghunghat which covered her mien, was a painted one! It left me with no option but to admit to myself that a misprision has been committed, a grave one, by me. What I had nearly attributed to the poor sartorial taste of actresses has probably been caused by the wonderous technology which enables morphing of photographs.
This discovery gave rise another reverie-why do auto-rickshaw drivers prefer to have their favourite ‘heroines’ dressed in so antediluvian a fashion?
Can relativism in fashion preferences, not be frowned down upon-if this is what the auto-drivers like, who can dismiss their taste as tawdry, publicly at least? More importantly, can these posters be considered part of popular art or do they represent a niche cultural preference ? Well, I shall endeavour to investigate these questions, even if in doing so, i expose myself to the risk of being asked, ‘Absolutely jobless, are you not?’

You are so beautiful!

You are as beautiful as the dream,
Dreamt on a winter night
By a traveller, gaunt and solitary
Who had slipped into slumber land
Just as he was gazing outside his mullioned train window
At a distant speck of light, very dim.
It had pierced through the misty darkness,
And unexpectedly warmed his weary, cold body.
The chilly wind that had lashed at his harsh features,
Jaw and cheeks, comforted him no longer!
He was suddenly reminded of hot milk and cookies
Of a tender face, its loving gaze-sensations ancient, vague
He felt were astir in his heart, the traveller, sleepless and relentless
Suddenly pulled up his quilt and meditated upon the gentle face.
Before long, he was in slumber land and dreaming
Of the afternoon when he had cried because his mother
Won’t let him wear his sister’s floral frock!
He dreamt of his grandfather’s pet Doberman
Of his grandmother’s red, woollen scarf
Of his sister’s sketches and his mother’s songs
And of his own bicycle, books and bats!

You are as beautiful as this dream
Haggard and harassed, when I think of you
That love can never be lost,
And innocence never be corrupted,
And dreams never be dead, I know is all true!

Missing Bombay

It was raining here in Ahmedabad today. And i was missing Bombay today...
The cold, damp wind which touched my skin when i stepped out of home this afternoon and the lightning which i watched tearing apart the inky-blue sky at dusk reminded me of my life at TISS. Back then, the touch of the wind and the sight of the lightning were all that it took me to make a trip to the sea shore.I would get excited at the prospect of watching the menacing dark waves rushing towards me from the distant, cloud-shrouded horizon, of munching peanuts near Gateway of India, of getting drenched in the rain and of having Hummus at Piccadily, while listening to the din on Causeway, created by the rain. During one such trip to Gateway on a rainy evening, I and Swathi did all these things and in addition, were stranded for several hours at CST since traffic in the city had come to a stand-still due to excessive water-logging. How i wish now that Ahmedabad had a coastline too; how i wish there was a Band stand or a Chowpati here where i could go to feel the magnanimity of the Sea in sharing the charms of its beauty with me!

On phantom-buses, neighbourhood goddesses and railway time-tables

In our house, there are lots and lots of books. In any shelf in any room that you turn your eyes to, you will beheld at least ten books. As a child, I took to the habit of trying to identify the owner of the book and the year of its addition in our family library by analyzing the book itself.
A tawny-hued book on an abstruse topic like Tropical medicine or Tribes of India’s North-East, could belong to none but my Dadu and it had to be at least a fifty years old. He was a doctor who started practicing in the 1940s in the-then NEFA front, a strict disciplinarian who considered reading as a mental exercise, as a tool of cultivating one’s intellect and was disdainful of fiction.
A racy American thriller with a dog-eared jacket or a tome on Vedanta philosophy with torn pages-and my guesses were inevitably always correct in this matter-belonged to my father; an avid but careless reader who read at bed and while traveling. And while on vacation. And while drinking tea!
A Bengali novel with images of vanity-purse flaunting women and suited men kept with great care, in some shelf had to belong to my mom. She loved to arrange and organize things and she ensured that all her belongings whether it be the-no-longer –usable fountain pen she had owned since she appeared for ‘Matric exam’ or her books, were always kept in their appropriate places. She loved reading romances by the likes of Buddhadeb Bose, Nabanita Debsen and the like but so did my grandmother. Hence, I had the toughest time in playing Sherlock, when I tried to figure who could the owner of Bengali romances be?
A Danielle Steel or a Sidney Sheldon title, if not torn, had to be my chotomashi’s. She sweared by the Readers Digest and sternly rebuked me whenever she saw me eyeing any of her books.
Not that she was the only one to reprimand me for being curious to read ‘boroder boi’; I was told in strictest of terms that I should stick to reading my own books and that I should not get inquisitive about titles which I was too young to read. I, being an obedient child of the first order who also happened to be scared to see frowning countenances around me, never ventured to touch ‘their’ books but read the ones which they bought for me or let me buy at the book fairs with great relish and gusto!
When I was ten, my Dida bought me ‘Chotoder Golpo Shanchayan’ an anthology first published in the 1920s. I had barely learnt to read Bangla then and was not familiar with any of the names included in the list of contributors. It was a winter afternoon and on our way back from the book fair, where she had purchased the book, my granny explained to me, “This is one of the first books I had read as a child. A copy of this book was there in my father’s house. I am so glad that they have republished it; may I read it first, dear?” I had ignored her sentimental request and instead asked her, suspiciously, “You had read it when you were a kid? You are so old yourself.Is it possible that this book was written so long ago? And if it was, are you sure its in Bangla?” My dida had laughed at the question but indeed most of its stories were not written in the Bengali which I could comprehend. They were written in ‘sadhu bhasa’ which was used actively till about the 1940s, I guess. I was disappointed to discover that I could not read the stories myself which had been categorized under different headings such as Horror, Fairy-tales, Historical, Social, Humorous etc. but my granny decided to initiate me to the charms of the book and to refresh her own memories, by reading out the stories to me.
There was ‘Iicha puran’ by Tagore, the now oft-told tale of a middle-aged father who is rueful of his wasteful habits as a child and yearns to amend the mistakes of his childhood by being a child again like his son and of his mischievous son who, fed up of the restrictions imposed on him, desires wholeheartedly to become an independent adult like his father so that no one can scold him for having candies all day! A goddess who was passing by their house, does fulfill the wishes of the father-son duo and the story chronicles the ensuing disastrous consequences. I had laughed my heart out after listening to this story and had marveled if goddesses still ‘pass by houses’ as do vegetable vendors and carpenters?
But even more hilarious was the story ‘Time-table’ by Sunirmal Basu which narrated the story of the misadventures of a group of boys who decided to visit their friend in Bihar during their Christmas vacations of 1928 and ended up traveling by the wrong train and knocking at the doors of a stranger in a different city because they had referred to the train time-table of 1926, instead of 1928! I was so thrilled to think that people traveled by trains, or visited friends, or disobeyed parents in 1928. Yes, yes. it does sound like an utterly silly line of thought to take up but when you are a ten year old with a penchant for fantasising about life and habits in bygone eras, such a reverie is indispensable for you.
On one yellow, soporific winter afternoon, I had found myself crying silently after listening to the story ‘Srikanter nisith abhijan’ by Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay(better known as the author of Devdas) about the rite of passage of a boy during his adventures of a single night with a friend. In the story, Srikanta, the protagonist, makes a heart-searing observation about his friend which roughly translated, would be something like the following-
“Oh God! You have bestowed your bounties on all and sundry-you have gifted mortals with intellect and beauty, wealth and power. But upon how many have you bestowed the gift of courage in the manner you did on------? Why did you make him so brave that unlike the rest of us, he did not, could not, fear even death?”
The other stories had memorable lines too; the one called ‘Pagoler Mela’ by the master of short-stories, Premendra Mitra was about the impoverished kingdom of a worthless king whose courtiers and ministers have nothing better to do than to bicker with each other all day over trivial matters. I had, even with my little appreciation for wit at the age of ten, gloated over the originality of the lines like-
“The powerful army of the vast kingdom has innumerable fine horses. They make their presence felt every day by neighing whenever they are not fed, such fine horses are they!” And there was another one, “The king is so mighty and formidable that there are no thieves in the kingdom. The robbers complain that they can never earn their efforts’ worth there!” All these tales left an indelible mark on my mind; that literary stalwarts of Bengal had contributed to the anthology is indicative of the fact that children literature was considered a serious genre in those days. The greatness of these stories lies in their timelessness; no matter what one’s age is, she cannot but appreciate their riveting plots and the fact that they all enriched the readers' imagination. For instance,the horror story called ‘Konkal sharothi’ revolving around the spine-chilling experiences of a young man who boarded, in a state of fever, what he called a phantom bus, articulates the umpteen sounds which can be heard by a pair of keen ears on a desolate, silent night, is bound to fire a child’s imagination and teach him to not to be scared of the darkness. The best thing about all the stories in ‘Chotoder golpo shanchayan’ was that they treated young readers as intelligent, sensitive beings with strong power of rationalization and a stronger sense of imagination. Never did they tend to be simplistic. Hence, never did they lose their charm for me!

On discovery of notes from the underground, witnessing the fall of the house of Usher and living amidst optimism of globalisation.

The antithesis of the normal man is the man of acute consciousness who has come out of course, not of lap of nature but out of a retort…this retort made man is sometimes so nonplussed in the presence of his antithesis with all his exaggerated consciousness, he thinks of himself as a mouse and not a man…Apart from the one fundamental nastiness, the luckless mouse succeeds in creating around it, so many other nastiness in the form of doubts and questions, adds to that one question so many unsettled questions that it inevitably works up around it a sort of fatal brew, a stinking mess, made up of its doubts, emotions, and of contempt spat upon it by the direct men of action…Of course, the only thing left for it to do is to dismiss all that with a wave of its paw and with a smile of assumed contempt in which it does not even itself believe, creeps ignominiously into its mouse-hole. There in its nasty, stinking underground home, our insulted, crushed and ridiculed mouse promptly becomes absorbed in cold, malignant and ever-lasting spite.

-Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I am a mouse, a missy mouse and I have my ‘underground home’ to which I retrieve to escape the pragmatic world populated with successful ‘men and women of action’ for whom I feign contempt, all the while knowing that my Ma would have had so much less to worry over if I could be like them. That underground home of mine is my reverie, kaleidoscopic yet monochromatic as it is always sepia tinted! My reverie embraces me in its gossamer arms, treating me like Alice but calling me Amelie! I amble solitary on a beach on a stormy afternoon and watch with awe, the ardent romance of the ferocious wind with the picturesque but no less turbulent sea. Suddenly, I spot in a distance, across the heavy, sombre curtain of rain, a gaunt figure with dishevelled hair. I cannot see it well but I know that the figure has dreamy, melancholy eyes that are capable of narrating a thousand ballads of broken dreams and heart-break. I quicken my foot-steps so that I can reach the figure who I think is a poet, a kindred soul lost in the deserted beach like I am but the more I walk in its direction, the more distant does the figure gets. This figure never materialises in my reverie again, until one frosty winter morning, when am sitting by my favourite casement in the ancient public library of my sleepy little hill station and I-again suddenly-spot the same figure, gaunt and dreamy, walk past the mountainous path right under my window. By now, I only know it to well to expect anything from it. Thus, I, the missy mouse, sitting in my mouse hole, travel from mountains to beaches and back to my hole. “The longer you stay in there, the more enfeebled you will be.” They tell me, nodding their heads with concern. I know I should but some how i dont want to. I have reasons for my unwillingness-unlike Dostoyevsky’s 19th century mouse’s hole, mine does not stink. In it wafts the fragrance of the dreams I dreamt of the House of Usher last night and of radical revolutions against parochialism and injustice i read up about. Do i have to venture out of the hole to be able to contribute in them? Well, this is what cant figure out.

On Confusion

What is it that I fear more?
The prospect of a jobless future or
The pigeon perched on the sill of my bedroom window
I cant say, preoccupied with the elusive facial glow

There is Kantian Deontology
And Gender Issues at Work; social anthropology
The Stakeholder Theory is vaguely attractive too
But there is literature of diaspora as well, that I yearn I knew

To love or not to love!
Myself, morality, men-suave or gruff?
To dream of insurrections of the intellect
Or to rue over missing the train to affluence, with its lights of ritzy effect

There is my mind and revolving in it
Are commonplace ambition and petty need
Which woods lead to the avenue of greatness?
Lucre or Barazovian ideals or a mind like mine that is a fine mess!

Swami and friends and nobility!

It is past eleven thirty at night and i have just finished reading,Swami and Friends by RK Narayan.I have read it umpteen number of times before but it occurred to me to now that the last time i had read the classic which Grahame Green had so fondly described as 'one in ten thousand', was over a decade ago. Ten-twelve years ago, the work had left such an indelible impact upon my young and ridiculously innocent mind that I could never help getting lachrymose everytime i read or mulled over the scene in the last chapter in which Swami, the protagonist goes to the railway station at dawn to bid adieu to his best friend and idol, Rajam who is about to leave the town of Malgudi forever. Swami is overwhelmed with utter despondency at the thought that never again shall he get to see or be with Rajam again but the latter, in sharp contrast, is unfazed and even nonchalant to the plight of his friend. In the end, he deigns to accept a parting gift from Swami and even though he exchanges no words with the crest-fallen hero, the latter is hopeful that perhaps Rajam has forgiven him for his mistake...
The story of Swami and Friends with its simple, unassuming narration never failed to make me yearn for a friend like Swami or to entrench my view that true camaraderie is greatest of possessions in the whole, wide world. But these were my feelings years ago, when i was not yet capable of critical analysis of literaray texts, when i did not comprehend symbolism and its role in shaping the characters of the novel. I did not then know that the playground of the Albert Mission school was a microcosm of the colonial Indian society nor did i realise that how idyllic the life of Swami was, replete with innumerable heartbreaks and acts of revolution and bravado.
When i began to read the book again three days ago, I averred cynically, "Try to use your critical faculties in interpreting the droll antics of the ten years old Swami and you will not have to reach out for your handkerchief." But, here i am on the verge of tears again, having made a very unexpected kind of discovery. It, the book, enlightened me that why we-I, atleast-always seek to cherish friendships is not because in this ego-driven, treacherous world, it is wonderful to know people who wont unleash their egos or treachery on you but because-and my cynical self blanched at this discovery-friendship inspires us to be noble!
Swami had foibles galore yet his devotion and love for Rajam was the source of his salavation, enabling him to overcome his apprehensions and meet him; Rajam inspired him to be noble. What would you call me if i said that i desire to feel the same way for my friends? A maudlin fool, perhaps. Or a pretentious wastrel. But never mind those adjectives and nouns, i still want to feel that way. Thanks Swami!

Got friends in my head.....

I woke up one morn,
And in the mirror, viewed
A visage unknown!

But vaguely familiar,
Perplexed yet pleased I stare
And then a voice, I hear

That murmurs, “It is of the girls you see
every morning, in your dreams!”
I recognized the face, smiling just as I did, with glee.
---------Shosha Mitter.


Drivel! I nodded my head disapprovingly as I read my verses. “Its so hackneyed. Its downright silly, actually!” I told myself and re-read my poetastry. But it pretty much expressed how I was feeling at that moment. The moment was, to be precise, 6 pm of August 6 and I was in a class, attending a lecture on Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution. I could see myself, with the eyes of my mind, as a vociferous French radical vociferously criticizing the Englishman’s highly conservative perspective on the Revolution. I saw myself in a Paris tavern surrounded by people also castigating Burke for denouncing the Revolution as sort of an upstart and I suddenly noticed that all these people around me were women, and women I knew well. They were, as a matter of fact, my friends-Sonu, Swathi, Sita, Koyel.
In April 2010, when I left the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, our dear, old TISS, and returned home, I was terribly upset. Obviously. I could not reconcile myself to the idea that never again in the future ahead, would I get to stay with those people again for long. I missed the comforting ambience that their company created and the soothing sounds of their voices in conversation.
Four months have passed and my sense of loss has allayed. Of course. I no longer wish that Swathi was around when I am introspecting or doing Yoga. I don’t anymore miss Sita when I am snacking at mid-night and philosophizing. I no longer hope Sonu was there with me whenever am feeling wretchedly depressed. I don’t mind anymore that I do not have anyone with whom I can discuss my oldest and most cherished ambition to become a wordsmith, with as much élan and abandon as I did with Koyel.
I had reconciled to the idea that they will be together again forever, smiling as eternally as sunshine, only in the snapshot in my mind.
But then that image of the French tavern crossed my mind and I suddenly realized that something has changed in me,changed perhaps forever. I no longer hesitate in expressing my views on issues of politics, caste, gender with confidence. I don’t any longer blame myself entirely every time some unexpected tragedy befalls. I know have learnt to share credits with adverse circumstances.That is so because unconsciously, I have tried to adopt the carefree cheerfulness of Sonu, I realized. I still cannot laugh in the infectious manner in which she did or spread joy with her magnanimity. But I am, undoubtedly, jollier.
I have, again unconsciously, become less apologetic about my idiosyncrasies. Whether it has happened for better or for worse, I do not know yet but I am now more nonchalant towards those who perhaps are critical of my eccentricities, just as Apurva used to be. Undoubtedly, I can never match her level of sophisticated insouciance but I certainly have learnt to enjoy my quirkiness just as she does hers.
There is another thing which I have learnt-its not enough to be sensitive towards others; its not enough to sympathize with someone in agony. Sympathies amount to nothing more than pity unless they are backed by the desire to convey to others nothing is sacrosanct or beyond scrutiny. Everything-customs, mores, institutions-all ought to be questioned and this much cherished discovery of my life happened not so much because of the umpteen books which I have read that advocate the importance of being inquisitive as much because of Sita. I never realized until now that she is the one of the first practitioner of metaphysics i know in person and whom I am trying to emulate.
Resilience evokes respect and it can be expressed simply by doing as little as to assert one’s views, even if laconically. I, perhaps, always knew it but never believed I could ever cease to enjoy the state of lazy confusion until now. It is now that I have realized there is a beauty not only the hazy, cloudy firmament of perplexity but also in the bright sunshine which comes with clarity of thoughts and aims. And who has enabled me to see this immaculately blue azure over my head? It is Koyel. Without me realizing it myself, I have become determined about everything I feel is worth pursuing. It would be long before I come to possess the ineffable strength of Koyel but that I have started trying, I did not even grasp it until now.
Probably, I am only imagining it and what I perceive as changes in me are only the formulations of my hyper-imaginative and perpetually idealizing mind. Perhaps, I need to more pragmatically figure out if I have actually inculcated more optimism, more sang-froid, more intellectual sensitivity and more ardour to pursue-eeks! this is such a cliché-my goals. Perhaps, am still the muddle-headed, maudlin girl i used to be. But I certainly have learnt to understand the warmth in relationships, the sublimity in sacrifices made for friends and the ‘beauty in being different’; I have surely learnt to appreciate the quaint charm of the qualities which my friends possess and that has been because of Swathi. She hated it every time I told her that she is the most mature amongst all our friends but now when unintentionally I try to be understanding, kind or as winsome as she was, I feel vindicated. She is, indeed, the most mature and never mind whether I can ever have her pragmatism or not but I can at least endeavour. Koyel is a lot like Swathi and Swathi is a lot similar to Sonu while Sita and Apurva are alike in many ways. Yet they are all different. And the best or the worst part is that some trait or the other of these people are struck in my head. Or should I say, in my subconscious, subtly and imperceptibly changing the architecture of the labyrinth in my mind! And it here that the story begins!

Promises to keep before i die...

I have been happy, tho' in a dream.
I have been happy- and I love the theme:
Dreams! in their vivid coloring of life,
As in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife
Of semblance with reality, which brings
To the delirious eye, more lovely things
Of Paradise and Love- and all our own!
Than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known.

-Edgar Allan Poe
Following are the things i have dreamt so much about since childhood that i think i ought to tag them as 'things to do before i die'-
1. To script a documentary on the 'hippies' who came to and lived in India in the 1960s-1970s: I think i shall begin the screenplay with a description of the visit of Allan Ginsberg to Benares, where during a boat-ride on the Ganges on a rainy day, he was inspired to compose verses on the Dashasvamedha ghat. In defense of the seeming pretentiousness of the theme, i shall also raise the question what makes some of us, suspicious of religion and disdainful towards spiritualism through rituals usually, view our own customs and traditions through the wonder-tinted glasses of the firangis?
2.To live in a town at least for a year where i can travel around in a bicycle:I think it should be some distant, exotic city like Warsaw or Buenos Aires where i shall go to work everyday in a bicycle without having to fear that people around might comment that its unnatural for any girl who is not a school-girl to ride a bicycle or that the vehicles around might trample me. Imagine how unattractive the idea is to die on the street knowing till the last moment of your consciousness that you cannot blame the car-driver who has mortally wounded you, for cutting short your flamboyant life because the poor creature himself has been pushed to the brink of insanity by the countless hours of traffic jams that he encounters daily on the crater-ridden roads! So, i would like spend the year in Budapest or Reykjavik, thank you!
3.To write a novel called the 'Trashy novel':No, i cant reveal the plot right now because i have not exactly revealed it to myself yet...but i will write it, sooner or later.
4.To read an authentic biography of Poe: Edgar Allan Poe, my tragic hero who lived his life in dire penury and obscurity only to die am undeservedly frivolous death and then was celebrated as a literary genius not by the smug, Puritan America he was born in but by the highly idiosyncratic French folks!

A Couch-potatoe's Guide to TV Viewing

Tonight, like most other nights, my chief post-prandial activity was tv viewing.Or rather, it was tv channel surfing. one channel was telecasting the farcical IPL awards, which as we all remember was held on the day the scandal involving IPL mastermind Lalit Modi was exposed; the scandal that was given the moniker of IPLGate by the media.enough evidences have been revealed and umpteen arguements have been put forth to prove to the world that the IPL was aimed to be nothing save a money-spinner for all its stakeholders. but i dont think that the Indian cricket afficionados care much about it-perhaps, they savoured the unfolding of the IPLGate as much as they savoured watching the IPL matches. it is but natural, therefore, to assume that the same people would also enjoy watching the IPL awards. but why it came across to me as such a travesty of an award function is because all the cricketers who won the different awards had already won throughout the tournament, a number of prizes for their feats and yet, they all sat smiling unfailingly at the prospect of being awarded again. some even performed on stage with Bollywood stars and i concluded at the end the torturous ten minutes that i spent watching the funny show that perhaps, every time a cricketer is signed in for IPL, he is told, "You will get the opportunity in IPL not only to hone your cricketing skills but also, to enhance your glamour quotient.
I changed channel and what do i behold? a more glamourous show and involving not pretentious cricketers but the people they try to emulate-the bollywood stars who watched and clapped,as their collegues cavorted and gyrated, with such earnest expressions as if they have been told that they could save the world from Hunger and Unemployment by doing that!i changed channel within five minutes this time.
On the next channel, there was a man who was talking about his annual turnover from his leather factory.for a moment, i thought that it was yet another science programme about some entreprenuer who has found an eco-friendly way of production but it wasnt-the next speaker was a benign look man who spoke how Dharavi is always considered to be synymous with grime,poverty and anti-social activities and how utterly wrong such assumptions are. i immediately knew that the show would be rivetting.Gradually, the show deconstructed the myths about Asia's largest slum, situated right in the heart of Mumbai.Dharavi may come across as the receptacle of the entire city's filth but the truth is it is here that recycling of all kinds of garbage is carried out so that the rest of the city can breathe clean air.it is assumed that the impoverished and the unskilled languish in Dharavi but the fact is that it is this slum that is the hub of all kinds of low-capital but hugely productive entreprenuerial activities-from the production of designer leather goods to the manufacture of plastic goods, to the mass preparation of nutritious and cheap food items like idlis and vada pav, which are enjoyed by thousands of Mumbaikaars every day. as the amazing show advanced, it highighted how the women of Dharavi have taken the initiative to maintain communal harmony in the area by forming their own welfare board. the show ended with the same benign-looking man commenting that the residents of dharavi have, during the nearly hundred years of inhabitance in the area, built up amongst each other a complex symbiotic relation of economic cooperation which no urban development plan can overlook as insignificant. before the authorities go ahead with their grandiose plan of transforming India's financial capital Mumbai into Shanghai, they ought to look at the city through the eyes of the residents of Dharavi to realise that Mumbai comprises not merely of plush Nariman Point or swanky Malabar Hills but of hundreds of lanes,narrow and dark seemingly,but where thrives a thousands of dreams.
I watched the show,enthralled and at the end of it felt none of the rancour against the Idiot Box which i had felt while watching those strange award shows, and actually experienced a kind of satisfaction. not so much because i could now absolve mysef from the guilt of watching asinine stuff on tv but because telivision and satellite telivion to be more specific, which was a marve for those of us who were kids in the ninetees,still has food for thought to offer, it still can stir souls and shape creative perspectives of its viewers.