Uninitiated

How does it feel?
To see yet never comprehend,
To start a sentence and not finish,
To swallow the sudden lump in your throat,
To grope in the dark and find no one,
To shuffle uneasily in sultry afternoons and not conceive
To lovingly look into stony eyes,
How does it feel to bear life for months and deliver death?
How does it feel?

Life in the times of terror

Yet another act of terror has been inflicted upon us by the unabashed enemies of humanity. Footages of the dead and injured interspersed with interviews of key witness, the sheer helpless babble of our rulers, and the desolate faces of people who have just lost someone very precious in life keep filling in the prime slots. In a few days things will be back to normal and the media will report about the resilient spirit of the Ahmedabadis and Bengulureans just as it did about the Mumbaikars and Hyderabadis.

I often wonder whether our resilience has anything to do with the conviction of fighting out the enemy or it is just plain apathy towards the issue at hand primarily because it didn’t happen to us but to somebody on TV. In our desire to just get on with life we are becoming easy preys to these sons of Satan. And even our efforts towards amelioration have come to cipher because in our hearts we know

मुझे जो मेरे लहू में डुबो के गुजरा है
वोह कोई गैर नही, यार एक पुराना था.

Life in such times is a collage of fear, despair, tyranny, and cynicism. Is there any hope?

The world needs a dialog- a dialog between the freedom fighter and the terrorist.

Life is Elsewhere

The lonely afternoon would draw me towards the window time and again. From the third floor of our apartment the view down and towards the horizon was dull and mundane. The apartment stood on the opposite side of a row of budget hotels. Children were very apprehensive about these hotels and the men who frequented them. There were lots of kidnap and rescue stories of children attributed to these hotels. These rumors were mainly planted by worrying parents who didn’t want us to venture out on to the main road. But back then the fear was real. Our building was surrounded mostly by shanties with red tile roofs, a common feature in the Calcuttan suburbs in the 70s & 80s. Adjacent to our apartment was a two storied building which incidentally belonged to one of my classmate. Their affluence was attributed to the white owl which had appeared on their terrace on a full moon day during the auspicious ‘Kartik Maas’. Today the Vidyadagar Setu takes a curve exactly at the point where this building stood.

Down there within the empty spaces between the shanties a few children were playing marbles. Towards the horizon a Double Decker bus was slowly laboring upwards the bridge running parallel to the tracks terminating at Howrah Station. The occasional crow would call out in an afternoon that had certain uneasiness about it. Papa and mama were both busy attending my younger brother who had been hospitalized because of meningitis. At the tender age of seven, I was the master of my daily activities except for that brief interlude when Raju, the office peon would come with lunch for the day.

I would often wonder at the fate that awaited my younger brother. Once I had asked dad whether he would be cremated or buried if he died at this juncture since he was too young. He didn’t answer. Once or twice in a month I was allowed to meet mom and my brother at the hospital. He was still in coma.

On that particular listless afternoon it suddenly occurred to me that everything around me was part of some story that I was dreaming and that real life was someplace else and in some different form to which I would wake up as soon as this dream gets over. The idea enamored me; it worked as a pressure release valve.

Decades later among the din and bustle of life as a businessman, professional, and parent the idea lurks somewhere in the deep recesses of my heart and comes to my rescue whenever things get difficult.

Call me a romantic, an escapist or anything else which defines it.

But even today life for me is elsewhere.

The beginnning

The desire to write something phenomenal as an introduction, the urge to appear clever, and even the dilemma regarding as to what was apt for this medium and what was to be saved for award winning master pieces led to this delay running into quite a few months. Most of us have this tendency of dreaming and visualizing that one different thing we want to do in life, but it’s quite surprising that even the first step towards that remains elusive. We all need to make that start someday and today is the day for that wish of mine.

I wish.
I wish to write.