Relief

It was just another day. Yet another day, of hitting new lows, of feeling isolated and lonesome, of abject surrender and disillusionment until...Until I got a call from a very special person (best friend is an understatement for him). We don't talk everyday. Infact we talk once in months!. It's been eons i've seen him. But when we spoke, it was as if we were  still teenagers, frenetically hopping from one coaching centre to another, eyes full of dreams, our newly discovered bodies full of experiences! (in a strict sense of personal, self-discovery though, but why am i even giving a clarification!)He was probably high, and I was low! But we spoke as if we were still in class X, as if we had just met an hour back. And I felt so positively reassured, of not having to be alone in Mumbai, of not having to spend too much, of not having to be ALONE at all. Perhaps that is what friendship is, the feeling of absolute comfort, beyond the selfish pillars of P&L accounts. Perhaps it is something more that I am still not able to comprehend. The call left me with a lasting sense of security, of assurance, not only of a comforting person, but of my roots, of my foundations, of my comfort zone. This one is dedicated to you, my comfort zone :)

Sometimes the darkest pall of gloom

Brights up by a conversation most inane

All it takes is a pal, held close to bosom

And memories, of a time carefree and insane

The times ahead will try to gulp

Us, like acquisitions and hostile takeovers

Let’s not pledge, nor be candy floss-pulp

Let’s be us, of the same chai, undies and pullovers!

Us of  teenage, of ambitions and mistakes

Us of  weed, and seeing Time go slow

Us of the unflinching hatred to dictates

Us of reaching new highs and newer lows

Theatrix-Tohfa (adapted from a short story by Sadat Hasan Manto)

A humble effort by Theatrix-the passionate Theatre club of IIM-K, and an integral part of my stay here. It is the rehearsals, the uncertainty till the last second, the thousand goof ups that only we notice on stage- all these give me a welcome breather from the insane, monotonous academic pressure at IIM-K. Theatrix instils pride in each of it's members, a vent for creativity and a confidence to hold our heads high. I am sure to post more of our work here. Like each of my works in this site, my poems or my reflections, the process of labour at Theatrix is similar and the testosterone rush as the curtains fall and the applause begins- no less than being kindly appreciated for a poem.  I wish I had a video of the nukkad we performed at Roobaroo, real proud of that work too

Directed by : Debtanu Dutta
Adapted for stage by : Ashish Tickoo

Meenakshi--the deity with the eyes of a fish

Meenakshi

Fishes are said to feed their offspring through their eyes. And, I just do'nt seem to grow up, silly everytime.....

Meenakshi

I find you still

At peace,like a photograph

Or a memory, framed forever with newness

That feeling of a First

First touch,first loss,first tinge of blush

That feeling of new-ness.

Your Piscean, Aiyangar eyes

Calm with centuries of wisdom

Betray a ripple now

Someone must have mentioned Bertrand Russel

Or some retard must be taking vigorous notes,minting money

The ripple spreads now

Like the mad race of life,like teenage hormones

Brimming on the large lakes of your eyes

Stretching the crescent of the lips.

You will draw the leash now

It's too early for full-moon
"I'm not the Konkan coast"-you'll say
"Caressed and tormented alike by promiscuous waves"

Yours is not beauty ephemeral

Nor seed of wars,pain and misfortune

You've sustained life for centuries now

The Well of Zamzam, the wealth of the Ocean

You're mine, my son's and every man's on earth

Yet greed holds no stake, you are beyond possession

So your smile is put on a leash now

All urges to express restrained

However much the poet may plead

Or peculiar evenings with their irresistible clouds beckon

However much the woman inside may burn

The smile must be restrained lest the World goes for a churn

Because you protect

Because you don't want another Pokhran,Nagasaki or Amrit-Manthan
So the poet shall wait till the world grows up

And continue to set ripples on the lake of memories

Till you pull memories,him and the lake

Into the origin that is you....   

HUNGER

I had a dream last night that whatever I have been scribbling on a Diary for a year now,has been published!!...so,a slight exemption to my vow of secrecy,the others will be best read in print!!!!!!!

This dates back to exactly an year from now.

HUNGER

It is spreading now,slow and thorough

Through my parched throat,through the wet lungs

Through my tired heart,pumped into every aged artery

Searing through my boiling skin,peeping through centuries of oblivion

The hunger is spreading,slow and thorough.

It emanates from faraway ,forgotten Byzantine Empire

From its riches,filth,blessings and sins

And surges through the Penis and the Pineal alike

Till my existence curls into a single foetus of craving

Her navel,waist and ribs,looked at sideways

Still wombs the Empire

And as I starve over millenia of wasted food,beverage,human skin

The Queen of Sheba smiles,lopsided.

A Symbol Has Died

I have always maintained that I can write only when an idea has sufficiently germed inside me,so much so that it yearns to come out into recognition and that craving stifles all my preoccupations and for some divine moments I am One with the idea. It is really like childbirth. But this particular piece,was written to vent out a suffocating feeling inside,to literally write my way out of trouble. This is not a product,this is an excreta. I have always wondered about mothers who abandone their child at birth or those that commit foeticide. What reason on earth can compel someone to kill a part of her own,an extension and proof of her divine creative self.Well ,i can now say that I have lived the life of such a mother.What is about to come is an orphan,a product of a selfish carnal desire and not an offering to the citadel of pure creativity.So dear reader,you are forewarned.

A SYMBOL HAS DIED

I had read somewhere that the Brain saves and interprets things in terms of symbols. For eg,if I say “Apple” the image of a red oblate spheroid hits a particular part of the Brain. Ever since I understood and begun to think, I've always had a feeling of thinking in terms of symbols,as if all speech,all words had their origin in some obscure,yet significant,symbol. For eg, when I think of 'being there beside you' ,I think of a rock,and when I think of that huge rock,I feel I have actually thought about my father. The symbol f gloom is a dark,wet monsoon evening when there will be no cricket,the symbol of a threatening loneliness is a deserted corridor in my school with the classes in progress and I coming late,stranded afraid in the peculiar suffused light of fear.The symbol of spirituality is Poulomi,she comes to mind when I think of a White Dove,the symbol of insecure love is Dwip-Tito,now that we've grown apart(not grown apart really,growing away from each other with our love feeling threatened by the physical and psychological distance in between),the symbol of safety is Maa's oval red bindi,worn right after her ablutions,and of course,the symbol of all things beautiful is the Girl that I love. The symbol of trust.........

A symbol seems to have died. A swift,sudden death,but painful all the same in its searing swiftness and sudden absence. But as it died,it also made me live a few lives,perhaps to make me aware of the intransigence of all things human,and the futility of emotional attachments.

The words came slowly. Leaden,innocuous words,words that do not even map a symbol to my brain,but inside they were laden with Trojan horses,each carrying countless infidels with shovels and boring drills. Once inside,they unleashed the borers, scraped away every trickle of resistance,every remnant of my fading sanity. I have always wondered(not sure exactly at what) when a boring machine drills onto the ground and spits out splinters of concrete. I led the life of Earth being bored at.

I had once seen a freshly severed foetus at a drain in Kalighat. Vermins and flies had a field day on it,as they swarmed over an almost sticky,fetid odour and I had wondered if this was disgust that I felt. I was never sure,but now I became disgust. Disgust to me was an unkempt,old insane in my childhood,with saliva all over his beard and a bare torso full of stench of infection. And now I could see him.coming to me,coming closer,being me.I remember my first hash trip when I had actually peeped out of my mind and body and seen my cage,and the heart within. And I remember taking pity,and mildly condoning my glaring dirtiness,my prejudices interlinked with some inherent goodness. They both shone in a natural,virgin glory.Raw,human emotions,and failings and that had never invoked disgust. Presently,I became the old ghost of my childhood,I became disgust for some time.

I had always wondered,in basic Science classes about what a vacuum was. The complete absence of anything was something I never could fathom. I understood it then,when suddenly I became a complete absence of everything. My mind,always throbbing with emotions,always talking to me,became silent as a corpse and the warmth of all my contradictions was replaced by a definitive,freezing emptiness. As if things end here,never to be again. I lived the life of vacuum.

Ever since 9/11 happened,I have wondered about all those who came to work the next day,how they must have failed in the absence of the colossal towers. Even the ones who did not lose an immediate family,must they not have felt a sense of loss,an emptiness within? The twin towers must have grown so deeply into their existence that they might not have granted special privilege of attention to them. Trust is somewhat of the erstwhile twin towers for me. It has been there ever since i've been,and to have seen it not there in a long fell swoop,I lived the life of a 9/11 victim.

Now that the oozing has stopped,I am left stunned at the lack of reaction to this death. I have only died once before,a complete death, but I was born again with my core intact. But the death of a symbol is the end of an integral part of my thought and as thoughts make up my existence,it is a partial death.The emotional type that I am,I had thought I will let out a long sombre wail and tears will once again inundate the barren lands of battle,all in the comfort of my solitude. That would have meant that like all damaged cells in the body,this too shall be replenished. But to my shock,and remorse,my mind seems to have settled in a comforting numbness,making the verdict deafeningly clear.It's not a symbolic death after all,its a death indeed of a symbol. And now I'm left hoping that all this was nonsense,that the human mind does not think in terms of symbols at all,and the emotion stays as it is,with or without the symbol.

The Mind Of The Matter

It's been ages,i say with shame,that I have actually written anything,anything at all. Not that there wasn't anything worth writing,i've had an eventful time in the last 9 months it was a terrible sense of mental laziness and a fear of going through the labor of childbirth all over again.Good news is,i could write down something tonight,and however incoherent it might appear(it does..it will in a short time) i would like to believe it will hand me back the only thing I do with heart. All apologies if you tend not to like it dear reader :P







Far from the confines of the skull
Floating,fearless,not swimming
(Swimming speaks to me of death in hushed whispers)
Misty-eyed in a swirl of lucid consciousness
In an ocean,in The Ocean
Of love,hatred,pain.hemorrhage,gangrene,and of Love
I had a bird's-eye view of the Cage.






My cage,strong,slouched,robust,dark
Lit scorching by the eyes,the penis and the pineal
And strengthened by layer upon layer
Of bones,muscles,corpuscles,greed,lust,exam grades and greed

Purely meek,like the dense mass of vermin that line up the neighbourhood vat
Purely weak,such that every puff of consciousness,every breath
Of salvation,tore apart the ribs and the spongy dark red blackness within

Crushed,like dreams,like castles built in hostile beaches
Like dreams that lived in the castles,like memories
Of the hands that built those castles,crushed meekly

And I wondered how I fit into it all this while
I have been a misfit all through.






Floating in wave after wave of clarity
Thinking,becoming the thought, in vast swathes of omniscience
Fast losing the long nurtured sense of self,scared and eyeless
I looked for a fellow Mind
Instead I saw the genesis of the cage and its kin.

The eyes were meant to see and rate
The good,the bad and the ugly of other cages
And pile strata of tailormade truth

Eyeless,the Truth is singular outside the cage
The truth is She

The core and whole of it all,the cages and what is left
All dreams,pain,laughter and hissing pain
End up,and begin,to end up again in her

Like the sea that returns all that it takes,the sea itself
Dissolves,merges and forms in her.

Marijuana,Camos,Pink Floyd,dead cells
The cycle of karma and emancipation
Anger,lust,greed,gluttony,blasphemy,wrath--the purest and the fiercest
move meekly in and keenly out of her
As She undoes all creation,to create again
with her pets ying and yang.

And before I slept off to falsehood again
Before the doors of my cage were to open
I screamed into the walls that were She
" She is the truth "--is only half true
The truth is She.


And since I saw the whole of her,I could'nt make out a face
And since I've been searching without knowing what
And I feel thirsty all the time.

PRIYADARSHINI

"there are,on the average,about 20 traffic accidents in kolkata every month"

"Ei Karunamoyee..karrrunamoyee...kolyamoyee...seat khali..assun assun.." --
the conductor did not scream his advert,and that was what woke me up with a jolt. I was minutes into a Garia-karunamoyee -- apparently conductors in the route are too gentle to shout ( they are usually gentle except when it comes to granting student's concession)--and this conspicuous absence disallowed my drifting into slumber.

I know this beautiful lady who resides in Gariahat. Calling her on includes listening to the sales pitch of every hawker,the hustle of a streetfight over a wrongly placed paan spit,and the misfit Beethoven playing between traffic announcements. It appears as if the whole old city,with all her cosmopolitan vibration is breaking through us,thus inevitably(and perhaps unwittingly) providing a noisy disquiet of privacy. Try taking your beloved to an afternoon in the Indian Coffee House for first hand demo.
Coming back,this friend of mine says she cannot sleep in quieter places because of the conspicuous absence of the din that resides in her subconscious ,thus playing a part in all routine,pre-meditated responses. Thus was I jolted back from a siesta that never was.


The clouds had sewn darker as they boarded,while a breeze brought a soothing old melody from afar.
"Oi seat tai boshun" [Sit there]
--the conductor pointed to a forlorn single seat.

The man was dark and reeked of family life. As is so often the case with such men,he had on an unstarched khadi that bore bites of bidi, and proudly wore his travails,struggles and sacrifice in a faint smirk. One never notices their trousers. He was a father,bringing his daughter from school.


The daughter was a playful young flower,probably in the early embrace of puberty. She was not fair but there was a glow,of innocence or of promise. She wore the essentials of her generation-- a heavy schoolbag and grim spectacles,over her blue striped uniform. You noticed her uniform because the suffused light beneath the dark veil of cloud whispered to you to take note. While the pallid weather waited in anticipation, the father took her schoolbag on the one free hand. He was bringing her home.


I was once hopelessly with a girl (she's blossomed to a beautiful lass now) back in class 5.She ,shockingly, liked a sophomore moustachioed Guy. I understand now,it was conniving Mother nature at that age,that charmed her to look for an object of hero-worship,a MAN of freedom and a past (of achievements and disrepute).Our girl evidently hero-worshipped her father.

"kota baaje re maa?" [What's the time, maa] [Its comon among Bengali fathers to call their daughters, maa]

"Baba,12ta.."  [baba, it's 12]


"Tor 12ta baaje ni toh?!"--(chuckle) [old, silly joke]



The kid looked around with a little unease,and then broke into convulsive giggles.By then She was sitting on his lap because there weren't any vacant seats,because he had asked her to :

"Maa amar kole-e bosh" [Maa, sit on my lap]


She sat happily,but she had shot a furtive glance at her bright surroundings. She seemed vulnerable,but she was secure with her father around,she smiled brightly.

"Patuli,2to" [2 tickets for Patuli]

--she paid from her purse while Father looked away with a solemn contentment--kids love their first taste of authority!

A heavy woman,her dark belly visible from beneath her pastel brown saree
 presently obscured my view. I could still hear her chirping,interjected by Father's dim,affectionate mumbling. A toddler behind them asked his mom:

"Maa,shibthakur ki khub raagi?" [Maa, is shiva a very angry god?]

And without vision or hearing I could feel She dissolving into peels of laughter and feel father gently patting her back. Just as in foolish first love the familiar road,hazy smoke with its lonely beggar screaming hunger,its fearful mongrel and screeching auto,suddenly appears new and wonderful,so did a sudden memory appeared to clog over my thinking.

There was a stout tree rooted in my childhood that bore white flowers every day.I remember once sitting intently beside,missing an entire scorching day of Cricket,fights and blessed corporation tube-wells,to actually see a flower bloom. The flower  never allowed me,but I remember a vine that crept on growing,like a knot,around that tree.And then I saw her again,sitting on his lap chin up,melting into tides of mirth and occasionally looking at the people around with slight hesitance. Why was that for? Approval?Pity?But why so,when she looked so proud,both of them and the moment?

"kaku ekhane rakhben"  [Uncle please halt here]

--she muttered while the conductor ensured that the bus came to a safe complete halt. The Sun reappeared again crushing hopes,of rain in particular. Father stood up,bag in his shoulder and her fingers clasping to the free hand. She winced once at the sun that was about to blind the world with merciless clarity. He stepped down the stair first,daughter followed coyly,leaning on her father,smiling sweetly all the time--it was impossible not to notice the admiration in her eyes. SHE WAS BEING TAKEN HOME.

His stick made a metallic clang on the road,he adjusted his dark glasses once. The plump benign woman now sat at the solitary handicap's seat ( it spelt 'handicaft',perhaps evolving from handicraft,a crude irony really if one considers each mortal as GOD's handicraft). The man from the dark walked content beside the wise school girl. Father had brought back the little girl home through the perilous traffic.