Musings

While Goddess Durga descended from her heavenly abode in Kailash to the thirsty streets of the City of Joy, here’s what I was up to… As Kolkata got attired in her festive couture, Leaving the glare of city lights, I had my little tryst with nature, In the land of pines, tall and evergreen, Where apples greet the eye, in climes serene. At the foot of the Himalayas, in the state of Himachal, Gracefully sits Shimla, the erstwhile British summer capital. Higher up the rugged slopes lies India’s last village, At Chhitkul, in a tent, I stayed put in willful hermitage! Stayed up at night to watch the stars dance, The shutterbug in me, ever ready to capture the clouds in a trance. I thought of the Kolkata girl, adorned in her saree As I shivered and shook, in my fleece jacket, my teeth chattery. I felt I was far away from the Goddess, From the rhythmic incantations and all the divine goodness – Until the Kailash dazzled my eyes with a rare feast, Illuminatin...

Amidst the shimmer of electric phantasmagoria, Brighter glimmers the humble and earthen diya . Wake up – beckons the forgotten dhaaki, Be part of the revelry – the blessed, the lucky. Caught up we get in scriptures voluminous But outfits to adore us are garnered in surplus! Seek we joy, deliverance and spirituality, Adorned in dearly bought garish superfluity. Appetites assume a gargantuan proportion But starve we within for love and attention, As click, click – goes the selfie shutter, Aiming to set many a hearts a-flutter! The tide of humanity, swept by devotion Endures traffic snarls, in patient redemption. The fury of nature scorned, threatens to spoil Dexterous craftsmanship, the fruits of toil. Worship we the fierce and the mighty, The slayer of demons – a female deity. In a country where women grovel for liberty, Taking after the goddess yet shunned in actuality. Rooted in tradition, warped by modernity Are festivals in India far remov...

Mini met one of her best friends after five years since she had left school. She was glad that nothing much had changed – Nanda’s broad nose was still lifted up a bit every time she grinned; she had retained the nasal twang in her speech; she was brutally honest and humorous; she loved to gorge on the kind of stuff Mini loved. Above all, she was one of those few people who never judged Mini but stood by her like a rock with her through thick and thin. Mini arrived at the book fair with her college friends, cautioning them beforehand that she would ditch them soon for Nanda, and they didn’t mind at all! Amidst browsing through books and debating on their prices, Mini and Nanda had great fun, critiquing the Bengalis’ gargantuan appetite for every edible thing that was being sold on the Milan Mela Grounds. “We should christen it food fair,” Mini reflected, ‘with a few books on the side.” They couldn’t stop giggling at the long queues in front of the fast food stalls and the lav...

It was for the umpteenth time that Mini was shifting to a new rented flat, in a strange location, far away from the neighbourhood that had witnessed the many tumults that had left her family reeling, after their initial flash of brilliance in the early nineties, when they migrated to the City of Joy from their dim suburb quarters. As Mini left behind the bemused eyes of her neighbours, the struggling smiles of her friends, the silence of her otherwise restless kitten, and the rooms that once breathed with the melodies of her gifted voice, she staggered with the weight of her luggage and the memories that would haunt her forever. She wondered what her new address held in store for her, after having lived in four homes already, in a span of four years! Numerous mistakes triggered by utter lack of foresight, and many ruthless deceptions later, Mini’s father, the least favourite of the Three Fates, stowed his family away to the neglected ground floor flat of a wealthy landlord. V...

As the shafts of autumnal sunlight struggled through the half-shut windows, striving to cheer up the morose creature within a flat of the three-storied apartment of her umpteenth neighbourhood, Mini, the nomad, sat there, alone, by her bed, wondering if she truly belonged to this world, speculating where she had gone wrong, praying for things to sort themselves out. Her mind altered between pain and vengeful thoughts. Like Macbeth, she envisioned stabbing the ones she loathed – like a child, she cowered from the thought of ending up behind the bars. But how was her life different from that of being imprisoned? Did she really have the freedom to live life on her own terms? Mini started recalling her own past, in her bid to discover where precisely, she had gone wrong… Before her eyes, flashed her own face, much younger, innocent, and not yet marred by adulthood and suffering – which she concealed so well. She could hear her little voice, see the gleam in the eyes of a child wh...

The transition seems so effortless in the mouth of an onlooker: ''shift the corpse; carry   it ; cremate the   body ..." and so on. It is never pleasant to be addressed as something inanimate and yet, that is our common destiny. A person very much alive to everyone gets reduced to a mere   body , almost untouchable, the moment his heart stops beating.  Paradoxically, death evokes varied reactions in people: from an outburst of emotions to sweet reminiscences to quiet acceptance.  The knowledge that the person will never be amongst us in the way he used to be, that he/she will be transformed into a handful of ash and the stinging truth that each one of us will be doomed in the same way sooner or later - is what arouses the bemused concoction of emotions in us: fear, helplessness, the sorrow of separation, the unearthly hope that there is something beyond death; no wonder we cry, hysterically and heartbroken. We weep for a loved one - the pain is akin ...

Small is big I was reading the  Mahabharata  the other day. It seemed strange to me that Guru Dronacharya would so cruelly ask Ekalavya to give up his thumb as Gurudakshina - I wondered what the great teacher would do with it, until I realized that it is impossible to be an archer without a thumb. In order to test this, I tried writing, cutting, and throwing, without using my thumb and eventually understood how precious this little appendage is to me. Indeed, the small things that we own are most precious to us, from the small engagement rings on my parents' fingers that stand as timeless symbols of their love, to the tiny clip that keeps my locks from covering my eyes. Who can forget  Uncle Podger's  attempt to 'nail' a picture on the wall? It was no mean feat, after all… All that I had beheld in my life and would continue to, comes down to the little iris inside my eyes - what use are one's eyes without the gift of eyesight. Little DNA strands can prove an...

A bustling place by the day, a town dons a different avatar at night - quieter, darker and deeper than what one would perceive of it in daylight. A blend of romance and realism, a town by night is a phenomenon to reckon with... Soon after dusk, the dark townscape gets speckled with the bright electric lights illuminating homes and offices, and it is no less marvellous than the sky overhead that is dotted with stars, as though there is an imaginary mirror between the land and the sky, like a river reflecting the adorned sky in its dark water. The town does remain busy, only in a much subdued way. Now the stations and bus stops wait for the daily commuters - the friendly vegetable seller, the querulous fishmonger, the solemn clerk, the fatigued student, and the lonely vagabond. The look of toil and drudgery is etched on almost every face, as each person prepares to retire to the comfort of one's home. It is reminiscent of T.S. Eliot's   Preludes   - as if the dying evening...

Just as television and music help to de-stress our minds, a time comes when man tires out of his daily diet of mostly bland food. Running to a fast food restaurant is quite similar to taking a taking a vacation or immersing oneself in a sensational novel. However, contrary to the healing and educational effects of a vacation or book-reading, consuming fast food is more a bane than a boon, though temporarily therapeutic, nevertheless. The lust for fast food primarily comes out of boredom with home-cooked meals. People conveniently choose to forget the bitter truth that fast food is greasy, spicy, loaded with trans-saturated fat, and even food colours. It seems that the only thing they care about is the lip-smacking taste of cheese burgers, rolls, shakes and fries. It takes them to a world of pure bliss, where food serves to drown all their fears, sorrows and inadequacies, filling them with ecstasy that was hitherto unknown. In other words, the urge to consume fast food is more psych...

On my way back home from my workplace, I see some familiar faces, one of them being that of a lottery ticket seller. He got me thinking of many like him... A lottery ticket seller is probably the most sought-after man. It must be fascinating for him to watch thousands throng to his shop every day, each one hoping that fortune would smile upon him some day. He is the witness to numerous displays of hope, happiness and heartbreaks, yet we know very little about him. He is not as important as the ticket he sells, after all. A lottery ticket seller is likely to be a rather insignificant-looking person: more noticed for what he sells than for who he is. It is needless for him to convince his customers to buy the tickets he has for sale. One can imagine what he goes through the moment he begins his day. He is barraged with a salvo of screams, requests and questions from all those who believe in gambling with their destinies! He surely feels sorry for the faces he sees everyday - fac...

At first it was annoying to hear the tawny tomcat demand fish every morning by meowing away outside the window of my dining room but a few days later, I was surprised when I realized that I had started missing him. It became ritualistic to have him around at our meal times, morning and night. About a year later, the tomcat became quite chubby, courtesy his Piscian diet and my unuttered vows of love. Then came his family of two kittens and their elegant mother. One of them was white, streaked with grey, and the younger one, orange, a shade that was a tad lighter than his daddy's. The white, shy one always eluded my grasp and the orange one was impossible to locate, until one winter night. Sensing some unusual noises in the kitchen, I decided to unlock its door, fearing that I might find a thief that must have entered through the back door right next to the kitchen, in our moment of inattention (Yikes!), and got locked up. Well, this intruder was none other than the tiny Garfield...

Since time immemorial, man has had this uncontrollable urge to be the master of time, expressed adequately in his desire to pursue time travelling, to perhaps change a vignette from the past, or to catch a glimpse of the unknown future. Sadly though, such ambitions have remained confined to the pages of fiction. Though much about time remains mysterious and hypothetical, it is an undeniable fact that, time, after all, cannot be conquered. it travels fast when we need it to wait, and does not seem to pass over when we wish for it to. In other words, time is as we perceive it, and we begin to value it precisely when we run out of time! It is time that reaps lives, and time that renews, time that turns sweet relations bitter and brings arch enemies closer ; time that erects boundaries, and time that erases differences ; time divides and unites, destroys and preserves, helps us recall and forget. Time has witnessed the rise and fall of empires, and likewise, the rise to stardom and ...