Just to show off a bit

Just a few photographs that i took from the hostel terrace
(Basically, at least i wont feel like i'm not posting for a long time now)

Finale

Two Windows
A Door, a shelf and a table

A distant, spartan cot
And books strewn
All over

Is all that remains
When...
...it is
...All Over.

VAIN...

Vain attempts to evoke a dead soul
Familiar cries of anguish
And the feeling of a large gaping hole
The dismemberment ,
Parts of one unified whole
Like the million pieces of glass
A moment after its fall
No time to pick up
Nor a second to look back
In a moment one changes
And dons another role
A new face , fresh expressions
New words .new talk, new ways and needs
Newer expectations too
An upheld hand amongst the muted numbers
And the moment of silence
Follows...
And seemed like it would never end
Eternity.

Am trying something here. hope it achieves the end i want it to...

umm...

Am quite embarressed actually for having such a LOOOOOOOOONNG post after not posting inspite of tremendous goading by all bloggers alike. sorry guys next time onwards smaller but more regular posts....

Bah! Kolkata !

Alongside of course, i lived a strange life in school for around three to four years of life. I was in so to say No man's land. For the bengali population in school i was an alien who astonishingly spoke better hindi and english; what a shame for a true blood bengali. And whats more i didnt even have an accent when i spoke in either of the languages only i stuttered when it came to bangla. No proper culture at home they thought i suppose. Swimming was the one passion, well that was bengali enough i suppose at leas, southt calcuttan to swim at the great dhakuria lakes. Had a strange time actually swimming and studying in a school trying to experiment with itself and us of course.
Sometime in the middle of all that i had to begin to choose an identity for myself at least to the effect that i side with either of the two major communities at school maru's as the marwari's are perhaps not so lovingly called and the bangali, that i was supposed to be and accept as my true identity. Somehow the idea of making a choice did not quite appeal to me for whatever reasons. Invariably then i could not be very close to the more ethnic and traditional groups in either of the communities. Not that i 'minded' but it was still stupid to be expected to make a choice like that.
Right from school then i had a great deal of travelling to do since i lived in the south and studied in the west of the city. The daily bus rides were fun as i befriended almost every bus driver who could drive on our bus route and would normally sit with him in the 'cabin' of the bus. Good banter with them at least it was different than what i would otherwise get.
Apart from school and swimming where i would normally get along well with the trainers as well as all the swimming junta, the two main regions where one would chiefly have to unteract was at home in the company of the guys and gals in the neighbourhood, and again at home in the sense of the great extended family that we seemed to have.Around '96-'98 i began getting along with a group of considerably elder friends who would play cricket on the streets on weekends when the traffic was low and that was the first time i actually got to meet typically calcuttan people. So there i was slowly becoming a 'rockabaaj' a term normally used to refer to young unemployed youth who would sit on a comfartable 'rock'(normally an old fashioned smail staircase to usher people into the house and talk about anything to everything under the sun, form gossip to hardcore arguments in national politics.
My freedom to move about the city too grew with time and it was the puja's that really made me feel that one need not be an ethnic 'bengali' to be a calcuttan.
But Puja's always overwhelmed me with it sheer liberal nature and all embracing-ness that the bengali could do with for the rest of the year too, the sheer economics of seven days Puja in kolkata makes up for more than half of its annual economic transaction( or so i think !)


High school and college were however devoted to fests, quizzes, plays, romance and of course loads and loads of dope. In fact now that i think about it most of my high school i did nothing but quiz and watch plays and talk endlessly over the phone. Calcutta Telephones with all its idiosyncracies still rocked back in school and boy i spent half my time over the phone. The remaining time especially college, was of course dutifully spent on long adda's over tea, coffee, G, and of course music, films and literature.


Academics were on principle not taken seriously. It wasn't hip enough to be serious about acads in my dictionary.
No wonder then that i still get time to write long, crappy posts like this one, refuse to accept that this is bad writing and publish it all the same, hoping i might get one more post if i actually get to writing what i originally wanted to...

Ah ! KOLKATA !!

One of the most endearing images that kolkata can 'gibh iu'. somehow the love for city is also for the always charged and always lethargic tempo it has. Most of my life having spent in the city i realise that though for the first year or so i could not speak bengali to save my life ( i picked it up from political grafitti and mini bus headings) to slowly forgetting (almost) hindi my second language after english (or was it the other way round) Around then i discovered Ray, his movies books and discovered the warmth the city had. i turned a bengali but my senior relatives kept insisting that i must be missing delhi and what not. true i spoke to my bro in hindi but now it was getting more and more interspersed with bengali. true i listened to hindi songs mostly apart from compulsory mix of rabindrasangeet, nazrul, adhunik, baul the works . woke upto a plethora of singers from hemanta to shyamal mitra, suchitra mitra to purna das baul. around then came Suman Chatterjee and he along with some others filled me with joy about the nuances of the beauty that the city had to offer. to be honest had it not been for satyajit and suman and i know i risk being mauled for putting them together opened me upto bengal. i started with tagore moved onto sunil ganguly, a bit of sameresh and then to keep up the hip quotient also dabbled with joy goswami and jibananda. come on u could not claim to be bong and not read jibananda!!!
To be continued.....

Hi !

Found this amongst some old stuff:

A torrid time in the train
an hour and half off schedule.
Things made worse by the rain,
even if you dont go by the rule.

A night to remember,
the diamond sky, filled with stars
with people around that came from Mars
looking a li'l sinister.

A man asleep at my feet
makes me shift my leg uncomfortably
A snore fom three lofts away
where sleep three on a seat.

And yet, neither of the two
seem perturbed by the thundering.
poor me, sitting alone, thinking aloud.
And wondering.


this was just around 5 years back, coming back home on a train, having been annoyingly fallen in love with seth's golden gate for the n th time after having first read it when my brother was in the state iwas in then, just after the all important +2.
wondering now whether folly committed is reversible or not ?