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...