I always thought Reunions were occasions that a person either loathed or anticipated with a salacious glee. I never imagined a reunion could be such an indifferently sleep-worthy affair...at least for an onlooker, a hanger on. I mean all those movies with reunions were far more interesting than the one reunion i went to, where i wasn't even reunited to anybody. I don't know, something must be wrong with me, or it must've been the company i was in, or am regularly in, or maybe i go to the wrong places where i cannot identify myself...heaven knows what it is, increasingly these days i find it sooo difficult to have fun...well, thing is a reunion for over forty people--that could be fun, if your over forty yourself or somehow that way inclined, or are surrounded by interesting people, or wedding parties--well, you could be enjoying there too, but what i mostly feel is this disinterested detachment. I find it so impossible to identify, to be part of any crowd, what is wrong with me? I know, of course, i mean the moment i walk into a musical concert, any sort from Rabindra Sangeet to Jazz and hip hop, i completely find myself tied into the being of the entire place, swaying to the beats, the melody, the rhythm, the beats...i become intangible, i melt, my body does that is and then i am only a vibration upon the invisible airwaves. I feel my insides melting and i am only music, pure, incorruptible music. I should have listened to my mother for once, and actually tried learning something musical. She tried to give me singing lessons which i completely demolished astutely. She tried over and over and i stubbornly decided not to learn music. But it was in my soul. You cannot fight destiny. That is another maxim i believe in, though i'm not too much of a maxim person. I couldn't realize my love for music, i mean i couldm't understand how much i loved it. How much it effected me, how it made me feel, until...i until i turned 22, i guess. Not just turned 22, but until i entered a certain university. Maybe it is the ghosts of the music past, present and future that linger in its corridors that made me realize how much i love it. I could have been to Julliard. Become an opera singer, or a conductor...i loved it so much. I loved Italian opera though i understood not a word of it. I loved to feel it, therefore as i stood listening to a heartbreaking Bengali song, i realized where i belonged. I belonged to the rock concerts and the ghazal mehfils, the jazz lounges and the dance floor. I belonged tot hose sunsets and sunrises dedicated to purring and raging ragas, i belonged to those who had loved and lost and loved again. And again. Therefore reunions, parties, etc make me feel like a punk in a Mozart concert. I don't belong here. Somehow i hover at the fringes a complete outsider, standing somewhere in some borderline area, wondering, yawning and dying, a little. I've got to stop doing that to myself.

Look Back with Pleasure

I started my day with a dismal bump in my heart and soul. I felt lost, dejected and an abjected piece of nothing. Then i made my usual routine drive in through the chlorophyllic environs of my cantonment town and into a tin box that took me to my dear university, where i heard Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak speak, her paper being "Rethinking Comparitivism" or somewhats like that. I was mesmerized and completely awed and inspired by the absolutely brilliant and supremely cool lady. Brilliant and cool because she oozed with a natural poise, gumption, elan and above all power over most mortal beings present in the room, with a no-nonsense attitude and a f off you numskulls attitude. I loved her, i wish i could be like her, yes I have that kind of ambition. Anyway, what i loved most about what she spoke was her utter contempt of the word "mother-tongue", what she said or what i thought she said, was that language cannot be put into such genderized compartments because (now Priyanka Chakravarty Chakravarty will take over) what i feel is that language is something, like sexuality, individual and highly complex form of expression and i believe that this whole idea of a mother tongue and basing a nationalism on it is really something ridiculous because, you may like some other language that might not be your own and be better at it, love it and like it more than the one you accidentally inherit. Choice of expression should not i think be held in within such constraints as mother tongue choice etc. I love Assamese, i would rather speak in that language than in my "mother tongue", i love Assam, though people should hold a grudge against me for it. I lived there for the better part of my life, my best memories are connected with that place, i love the sound of its language, i would rather choose to be Assamese...Joi Aai Ahom! Assam rocks. I love its green mossy hills and its sparkling trembling river, i love the roads that lead so singularly to the places where you can visit your friends and be welcomed without ulterior motives, or be alone without anyone. I love the timeless feeling when you walk around Riverside, or Kharguli (in Guwahati). I wish to take everyone i like there, especially certain people and maybe they will experience just a little of what i had felt. They will take the same leafy climb to Nabagraha and feel that exhileration in seeing things never seen before and feeling the charm never felt before. They will see the glimmering serenity of a pink sky over cloudy cliffs, sleeping in the background. I have left a part of me there, perhaps things have changed fundamentally, maybe the river dolphins do not come and play so near the park at Riverside, maybe the tin roofs of North Guwahati don't shimmer in the summer sun as they used to, maybe children do not have the utter morbid innocence which we harbored, maybe Lamb road is no longer a cozy nook in the corner with pretty Assam-type houses and old memories lingering in the air, my old school certainly isn't the same, the older buildings with the red sloping roofs are gone, they've built something ugly and modern in its place, the bougainvillea creeping and the smell of wax and fear, something dark and Gothic (in my child's mind it was a haunted castle full of secrets)...and friends. Most importantly friends. I see people here, they do not have the same concept like we used to have...i feel like my dadaji already, jeez... but i feel the rift, the ravine that separates me from the rest of this city that busily moves on...i feel it and by bestest (my coinage) best buddy roughing it in Delhi feels the same rootlessness and alienation. The tears don't fall...they crash around me...and around her and around us all...i can barely forget, the memory theatre holds a play and i sit and watch various shows on various days, unendingly on infinity loop. They crash around me.

Death and a few such meditations

Well, recently it was brought to my notice thanks to a certain course i was taking at the university, how very preoccupied Western culture is by the idea and the fact of death. Indeed I turned a few pages of my favorite books, and checked the cover of my recent Coldplay album (Vida la Viva or Death and all His Friends) and there it was...you know, I never thought about death or dying, in any substantial way. It was there, you died and it was just something like you are alive. Indeed it seems to have been a great preoccupation with my young, little brother who was this fourteen year old and he constantly told me about his fears of dying, of falling into this dark, dark infinite pit and it was a constant fear to him. Until i took this course, i never considered death as anything but some distant far off thing that looms somewhere in the background and which has very little effect on my life. The truth is, I am not afraid of dying and it would matter really nothing if i did not wake up tomorrow. But it is also equally true that while I am alive, I kind of feel i am immortal, not made to dim out. I feel i can conquer the world, that whatever i want and desire i can will it into happening, most times i do will things into happening and some occasional times when my will is not enough and the Cosmic Will and my own clashes and i do not get what i want, i cry and i fight but i live. I do not feel dead inside. I want to live like a flame, while i am alive. I do not want to be constrained by any morbid ideas of death. Durer, Burton, Guercino, Puissant many, many, many they had very successful careers forwarded by death, but when i can dance instead with death's brother Sleep and waddle about in the Dreamworld with the Dream-maker, what should i care for Death. I like to live, i like to extended my metaphorical wings, much pretty and i like wearing Lolita like glasses and watch the world from a distance. Too much exposure to reality is absolutely disastrous for my soul. I'd like to wander in a world that vibrated with the strains of Scarborough Fair. Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme...remember me tomorrow....and dance in some kind of infinite expanse from where nothing can actually cause me any pain. I like to live without pain, sorrow, undisturbed, untouched. It's painful to be in love, to be in any sort of contact with something that would lead me to death. I realized this relation between love and death...what the Greeks would call Eros and Thanatos. Being in love is something like dying a little, Eros leads you to a kind of self immolation and the dying away of a former personality and blending into the One. When you love somebody, you really do die slowly, you try to change yourself, your personality undergoes some sort of a slow erosion and slowly you turn into something really different. Every time you love, you die. Immeasurable pain.

The western civilization cannot think beyond death, it cannot transcend death. It has no place for death in its philosophy really. For us death is only temporal, like life. We die and then we have hope of reincarnation, until the cycle consumes itself with the final liberation, the ultimate achievement of Nirvana. You do not die forever, you may simply be reborn as a crow. There is some kind of a solace there, albeit an avian type. For the West bred on Christianity, only the dark, troublesome arcade of darkness in the domain of Lucifer (ironically the bringer of light). That is what they have and some other really dismal, chilly philosophy developed by surly, disheartened medieval frustrated closet debauchs. I love Christ, i visit a church more often than i set foot in a temple, still, i cannot feel that those clerics writing in Latin, burning people at the spark of a flint were anything more than charlatans who tried to dehumanize a very humane philosophy and way of life. Well, anyway, so the west cannot overcome anything other than their really small way of seeing things, i cannot blame them. Poor fools.

Now and then

I had begun the day, thinking of something entirely different to write but just a few seconds ago, i secretly checked out the photos on somebody's social network and well, they made me feel so...so, so sad. Why? Well, a) because i really, really love that person and wished i was there in those pictures sharing that life or what's left of it, and b) they reminded of my lost forgotten or semi forgotten years with friends who are scattered like pollen seeds at every corner of the country and the globe. They reminded me that i cannot have this person i love so much and then that my friends are no longer with me and what we had is gone forever. Friendships used to be so uncomplicated back where i come from. They were, in my case at least, deep, heartfelt and the Sholay variety. All for one and one for all (though this is The Three Musketeers). We did so much, we enjoyed, we shared and we lost and we laughed and we cried and we pledged joint suicides in case we failed in certain grades while in school or decided to join some banned militant groups instead if the suicides failed. We stopped each other from jumping off bridges or gliding into the river, and held hand while roughing it. When i sit in a rough, rowdy train with no-one else beside me but my loneliness, i remember all those days, i remember those silly pranks, those smuggled booze parties, the lies told to parents for parties at IIT events, i remember the several trips to the tailor to get a 'designer' outfit just right, the proxies and the running over to five star hotel lawns to get a glimpse of cricket players...oh, it really makes me very sad to think of now and then to think of then...(not to mention i loved the movie), its sad when life moves on so cruelly and the things that are left behind are so, so beautiful but also sad. Memories...and photographs, they bring so much, they dig up lost, left behind, dusty thoughts, music, colors, flavors, smells, evocations and emotions and then you get caught in them, you become involved and they put you in a time warp...i cannot seem to get past 2005, i feel the tears on my lashes, i do not seem to be moving beyond. And this time and this space that i occupy, feels like nothing. To me, in my mind when i think behind, last year was 2005. I cannot think that four years, five have passed and i am no longer what i was then, neither are my friends, it's terrible. I do not want to face it.

There is this song, this ghazal pretty well known from this Aamir Khan movie, sung by Jagjit Singh...i love the last stanza, (if i'm right) of this particular ghazal....

hum labo se keh na paye
unse haale dil khabhi

Aur woh samjhe nahi yeh
khamoshi kya cheez hai

Most wonderful, extremely beautiful and i don't know urdu beats French in my opinion as the sweetest and most powerfully poetic language. "Aur woh samjhe nahi yeh khamoshi kya cheez hai" which roughly means, "And he could never understand the meaning of my silence" not nearly poetic and beautiful as the original. I feel this song in my blood right now and in my mood and within me. It's for him that i currently love and adore, worship from afar. He will never know, they will never know too how much their friendship meant to me...(the sound of silence....i love that song too) i do not have words to define my memories. I do not have words to define what i feel. Silence i presume would best suffice.

Trainspotting

I hate any contact with any portentous amount of bulging humanity; for that matter, trains and public transportation in general freak me out. I really, really have this enormous phobia of the mob--that unruly mass of brainless bodies with only violence and anti-social activities on their minds. Now everybody who commutes, what in Calcutta parlance is called "daily-passengery" knows what an icky, disgusting and vile things trains, buses, metros and things that generally involve lot of people squished in a small closed box-like compartment can be. It not only involves an incredible amount of ingenuity to actually plan, board (or as we call it 'catch') any one of these things with the view of getting a seat, or any standing room space. Trains...well, I am a master commuter, well a junior master at least, have been doing it for a while now, 4 years to be honest. Well, most people try and live in places that will have their own standard locals. Well, they are trains that leave from a certain station to the terminal...say, you live in a place Y and have to commute everyday to another place that is Z, and a train connects you from Y to Z or beyond. So, what happens is that if you have a certain train called Y local, that actually leaves from your home station, you at least stand a chance of getting a seat, or a nice standing room. And as your days as commuter pass, you make friends who save you seats, or ones that get off earlier and you usurp their seats then and so on. It is so, succinctly disgusting. I hate it. I hate the whole idea of having to deviously plan and cheat somebody out of a seat. Well, but i know why we have to do it. It is unbearable to stand or even exist in those concentration camp transportation conditions, i kid you not (those pure souls who float about and do not require the blessing that is public transportation). I know what some people would say to my complaint. Have you come from vilayat? What are you complaining for, huh? To those a*h*s and suckers, i will say, DUCK off (hah)!!! I have every right to complaint. I do, because it is I who suffer, along with zillions of mute, forbearing, patient people, who continuously go to and fro, suffering with a look of accute pain and martyrdom. I protest on their behalf. We suffer and the only thing that we sufferees can do is moan and i will take up that right upheld by the Indian Constitution. So there and up...well, anyway, as i was saying, trains well, ha, ha...its wonderful to get to sit and heaven if you can push and pull and nudge and make your way to the window seat first. Some people are always there to take the best seats, I hate them, but there they are and if I am lucky to ever find them empty, its paradise. Because then i can stick my metaphoric tongue at the losers and sit there basking in the nice breeze and if its winter then, the winter sun, watching the sometimes beautiful and mostly ugly countryside from Barrackpore to Sealdah. It is prettier and much less violent on the other side of the river, the Howrah side (there are two major lines, the Howrah and the Sealdah) because it is mostly countryside and paddy fields and prettily green. From Barrackpore to Sealdah, its ok, but not as pretty. Still i love it, love watching the tracks seemingly endlessly running on and on, and the various houses, all waiting, a potential novel, drama or short story waiting within its doors. And the people, some using the tracks for more private affairs, some as instruments of suicide, some as a source of amusement, the enormity of the whole railway system hits me sometimes when i see rows and rows of people waiting at each station, waiting to fight their way into the train and vice versa, it is a fight. Oh the fights. I have seen aplenty. Even ones with sharp blades and stuff. I remember one--some women, mostly ones working at homes as household helps and cooks or at factories, will generally sit on the floor of the entrances blocking and creating general mayhem. So, this train that is infamous for its fight and its crowd, had two factions within its floor women. Now they were fighting for God knows what, their respective leaders stood up starting fighting, one was as dark as the night outside, plump and sturdy, all muscle, the other wheatish, undernourished and scruffier looking. The Dark Lady, wore a green 'tanti' sari with a red border and a big red bindi, both of them were Hindi speaking, from opposite religions. The Stick Insect wore a brown salwar kameez and had her hair platted. Now fisticuffs broke out, were goaded and cheered by their followers, soon they were pulling each others hair, and the Dark Lady's long luscious hair broke its bounds and trailed all along her back and flew behind her as she fought, her pallu blowing in the wind, as the train shot through, her curly hair too blew along with it; she reminded me of Kali, she looked tremendously like that. I can never forget that evocative scene. Pallu blowing, hair flying, anger and mayhem. Gosh. That isn't the worst part of it. From Sealdah main i take the Sealdah south trains. Pure torture. From animals perched on overhead baggage racks to women changing clothes, i have seen it all. All that is left for me to see is a woman giving birth and making babies too. But one thing, Ladies' Compartments are a boon. Thank you for inventing it. That is the only thing that saves whatever little dignity 'daily passengry' leaves within you.
I may sound bitter and frustrated and angry, that's because i am. That's how you Will feel after a while. I have neglected telling you the horrific 'general compartment' experiences, they are too nightmarish and humiliating to ever recall. I let them pass into the miasma of AMNESIA.

Finding Neverland

I have been noticing, for some time now that many people around me and related in some remote way to me or what i do, have this Peter Pan complex. I never would have understood this important part of my personality had it not been for a dear friend of mine, who incidentally suffers the same fate. I, on the other hand, always wanted to grow, had to grow up, i reckon. However, one day this friend of mine, let's call her Zee, she told me, "do you know something, why certain people (a specific male actually, HE-WHO-MUST-NOT-BE-NAMED) are attracted towards you? it's because while we are all trying to live in Never Land, trying not to grow up, you on the other hand, are Peter Pan, you reside in Never Land." All of a sudden, things grew completely clear, the cards fell in line, things clicked and a huge burden lifted from my heart. I was Peter Pan, hah. And i always have tried to deny this basic instinct, haven't I? ME, who has always impetuously taken everything, let it be extra scoops of ice-cream, love or pain; me who has always stood with my hand on my hips, looked upon older, maturer people and felt innocent despite being sullied and befouled by the ugly disgusting world, it was all so clear. Remarkable, how it takes someone else to tell you who you are. I loved that moment of anagnorisis. The world grew Yellow (i love this song, by the way, i love COLDPLAY), that's my favorite color for the world. When things are yellow, they are mellow and beautiful and it reminds me of winter, the favorite time of a tropical Indian year. And when i understood my condition, it was like the prettiest winter sunshine ever, and i felt that a singular strain of guitar string was lifting me away into outer space and Bach was bringing it up with his own serenade, while i floated in the air, flew and swam amongst the clouds, with their blessed damozels looking over the bar of heaven for their estranged lovers and angels plotting revolts. I cut a waltz with Morpheus, oh my dearest, dearest Morpheus, and i held his sister's cold hand just a bit (out of politeness, you can't be rude to your prospective in-laws). And ever since, i haven't cared for what the diseased world feels. Commerce with so-called "reality" leaves me cold, disgusted and gasping for breath. I pity the world that calls for absolutes and basking in scientific jargon will not accept relativity. What is mathematics? The most gossamer-like, fluctuating, relative and abstract thing in the world and yet people will not believe in dreams. Reality, pah! People leave me so, so...hollow, as if Vampire-like, they drink from the core of my soul and live like parasites, on the basis of my spirit. The world tries to steal things from you, the day you decide to stop people from doing that, the day you accept yourself, i think you will have found Never Land.

the problem about loving

Love's this entirely puzzling emotion that you feel, want to feel, do not feel or feel too much. Now i do not want to define something so nebulous that it defies even Matthew Arnold's famous definition about culture! I can best say, it is like this gum you like you chew it and the flavor fills your mouth and it tickles your taste bud and refreshes your mouth and you like it ooh, so much... but then it goes bland, tasteless and you grow tired, you jaws begin to hurt. Then you spit it out, wrap it in a piece of paper, or stick it somewhere(depending on what you prefer) and then that's it. You move on. But the point to note here is despite the spitting out of the gum, you go back to chewing a different one, when you feel like it. That's exactly how love is. When you fall in love...its heaven on earth like the good poet said. and likewise, all things beautiful lose their color, they fade and you have to move on...life is mutable, but the experience is not. Its really something to have that nice feeling inside your heart, even for a few minutes....