Musings

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 r...

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...