Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Doosro ke jay se pehle khud ko jay karein!

I wish, before pouring out words from my rust-endowed, stubby fingers rendered mute for the past couple of months by a rich gravy of thoughts doing rounds inside my ever stringent, unfathomable mental labyrinths, I be not arbitrated. Obnoxious, contentious, cantankerous thoughts Alert.

Wandering cognizance elusively stare at me, caravan of the vast expanse of the clear, blue sky blanketing the minuscule fraction of charted universal existence, threatening to burst out of the very bars that hold them in place. Ghosts of the poetic pasts, leaders of the spiritual mass, and the relatively new ideas of selflessness strewn widespread in the society, negating the very concept of the virtue of selfishness surprise me. Shock me, to be fair. Examining human behavior throughout history and focusing on their choices between alleged morality and selfishness, the pattern of wielding power for personal benefit emerges distinctly. Personal benefit has always been an innately humane trait. But instead of being trained to nurture and channelize selfish desires into productive causes, which appears to be a Herculean task at hand by the sound of it, we have been taught to suppress the gargantuan source of selfish desire into oblivion, lest it becomes too handsome to handle by the non-capitalistic elements in the society. 

We have been led to believe by renaissance authors and compellingly beatified examples, that the sun burns tirelessly to nurture life, that rivers glide through bellicose, prickly terrains to quench humane desires, that altruism assuages the essence of mankind. Undeniably, it's led to leaping strides in humanitarian fields, and not completely circumscribed to mortality either, but it's swept much more under the rugs of in-afflicted, stoic excellence; it has destroyed Tesla's vision of an infinite power-tower, portrayed parental love into an unexplained selfless act of love, slashed down NASA fundings, boomed sweat shops churning out illicit, lovely artifacts into throes of unquestionable business and incarcerated the common desire to stare at the stark imagery of rationality.

Selfless love is an unattainable mystery. The sun's been burning since millions of years to conclusively cringe into a little white star, it's simply outliving itself. That life's bloomed in its course is a happy bypass of age. Arguing that it sends out UVB rays nevertheless would be engorging the argument into ludicrous proportions. The glaciers would have molten and deceased into their own pools of carcass had they not fractionally melted and created rivers. If parental love had been as puerile as universally acknowledged, there would have been a sharp surge in misery, heartbreak and the perception of "expectations" and "falsifications" would not have ripened in the first place. 

Patriarchal inheritance, again not an act of selflessness, is the sole reason why the concept of marrying for love has not originated in its truest essence in this country. No matter how much a person loves his betrothed, the smallest iota of malintentional possibility still holds. The evolution of exponential proportions of respect for vocational degree holders has created a dearth of conformity, and the echelons of selfless love has been thrown out of the window. Last I checked, it was decaying in a marsh of unrealized outcrops, contrary to what was promised by the pallbearers of charity.

"Women have been found to find altruistic men to be attractive partners. When looking for a long-term partner more conventional altruism may be preferred which may indicate that he is also willing to share resources with her and her children while when looking for a short-term partner heroic risk-taking, which may be costly signal showing good genes, may be more preferable." Ambiguous?!

Cellular slime molds conforming to Darwin's theory of survival of the selfless, perish. Paradox, huh?!

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

About that

I write today, not as a backwash of boredom, but because I owe it to myself, to my words, as Plath only put too familiarly, not to let them rust and rot, of lust and thought. Penning them down before they are lost amid the deluge of the atrocious threshold of acceptance that The Almighty has so generously bestowed upon me; before they plunge into the deepest abyss of my subconscious, returning only to torment me in my dreams that I once again, blissfully, forget in a trice, unless they are spiked with images of paisley debutante actors, Alladin-isque jewels or a Lamborghini.


Strangely, the cue to wander away from gloom, entranced pretty strategically up there fails to make my mind take a predictable detour. But then again, some things are harsh to write about. When something happens to us, we write it down, either underplaying it or over-dramatizing it; exaggerating the immaterial, ignoring the essentials. At any rate, you never quite write it the way you want to. It’s poignant Chaitali, a crushing, lamentable insight that people you thought shared the same wavelength as yours, don’t. Perceiving people and letting go of expectations are like trying to find one’s reflection in pieces of broken mirror inside the water. One realizes they exist only when they see their own time-worn faces staring back at them. A moment ago, they had just been an imagery of illusion. But the instinct of holding on to the past, to the unreal, non-existing statuettes of disgruntled intentions is but puerile humane. If you linger too long, they prick you and you bleed. All of it happens in a surreal universe and you don’t feel the ache. That’s the beauty of it. You trudged dreary, hurtful paths in the past and the pain saunters still, but you fail to notice. You have accepted it and have got accustomed to it. You have lugged along the baggage for too long to notice the slack in your pace. The past doesn’t belong to you, and by extension, neither does the accoutrement it entailed. Don’t give in. Don't give up, Chaitali.

Sunday, August 11, 2013

শ্রাবনী সন্ধ্যা

আমি আত্মদর্শন করে পেলাম যে তোমায় মনের ক্ষণে, অঙ্গের প্রানে
তার ঝিরি মিরি শব্দ সকাল বিকেলে ঝরে পরে সেই কানে,
মল্লিকা পৃথ্বীর সেই জ্ঞানে, তরাতল মাটির তাকানি,
চারে দিকে বরণ করি তোমারি গানের শব্দে সকাল,
বাঁশির ধুনে ধুনো, মেঘের বডির রাত,
প্রেমের আলাপ শ্রাবনী সবুজ পাতার মত পাল্টে গেল
সন রঙের সন্ধ্যা প্রকাশ তাকিয়ে বলে পাত!

Saturday, July 27, 2013

Lurking Woods

Had my words ebbed into wishful musings,
A manic humdrum of fluttering dewdrops,
Bursting by bambino pride of new lifing,
Senile fore, fading away, the sun atop!

Fledglings of the morning beauty,
Savage bells of evening jingles,
Famished are woods of abundance,
Perilous waters preen caving dens.

Creaky cliffs, ripe with must
Leather boots and all that dust,
Masking threats of fortitude,
Copious girth of hostile argot.

Decked on thrones of avarice,
sits crowned the peaks of mapled bliss.
Whistling pensive songs to self,
Living the air of common turf.

Vibrant whirls, sacred thought,
Placating the rush of touch-me-nots!
Afresh from dusky dowagers,
Scented droves of moringa lingers!
Hum of the rare sun-kissed yellow, 
not a musing but mere parlance!
I spring to read every card that adorns the myriads!
Pretending to mock them still, with a wistful eye,
I blink back the rush of felicity, with delirious grins sky-high,
The crook of my eyes shrink in frenzy, smiles slightly holler!
Dreams of blackbirds, ravens and rye
Chickpeas, vintage taller!
I live my days, not just trudge
My smiles and beams, no more a grimace

A bow-decked furor, 
O! Word-wrecked love!

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

And the People peered!

It's an overdrawn afternoon in Guwahati. I am hardly back from the week-long trip accompanied by Dad to some undisclosed nooks across the country. Logic and normalcy dictate that I go back to my room, take a long, relaxing shower, put on some Irish music (which I recently dabbled with and therefore, love to flaunt!) and doze. On the contrary, I alighted from the tiny-doored auto, which is absolutely a Guwahati specialty (They make you feel like you hired a cab at half the price. So it seems that you reside in your own tiny space of solidarity, ie. if one's thoughts are not completely focused on claustrophobia.), lugged my way through the lush, green expanse preceding the Computer Center, a couple of outrageous red travel-bags in hand, and here I am, decked in clothes filthy from last night, covered in airplane germs manically typing things, gray, that I HAVE to get out of my system.

A lot happened in the hours that I traveled. It all started with my rushing to the Traveler's store at NSCBI Airport and hurriedly picking up a copy of Hosseini's latest. And The Mountains Echoed, without any ado, as I had been meaning to read his third masterpiece since a painfully long time indeed. Then came the folding of pages as an outrageous act of bookmarking, much to the chagrin of a middle-aged CIL employee, and a self-confessed avid bibliophile. This was followed by a long-forgotten and blissfully so, bout of novel-induced tear-stemming. You think mere words imprinted on sheets of paper have far less impact on you as compared to characters figuratively jumping and pumping salty water into your Dua-layers (sorry! I had been DYING to use that term!) but prolific and profound writers have, time and again, moved the most stoic of hearts. I shall take the liberty of reminding you I was traveling, while I had been reading. Neither social expectations of behavioral composure, nor repeated asking-after of the flight attendants deterred me nor inspired me to make my outbursts a little less discreet. At the end of the journey, I was almost sure they took me as some severely wronged maiden or the victim of a premature divorce.

"It would be trite to say that you're all grown-up, so I won't. But  you do look ravishing, Pari." She pinched the lapel of her raincoat. "What, in this Clouseau outfit?" Collette had told her it was a stupid habit, this self-deprecating clowning around with which Pari tried to mask her nervousness around men she was attracted to."
Sounds too familiar to be accidentally stumbled upon in a novel. Rankles an impermeable membrane lodged much too deep within to feign stoic. Aplomb with the usual menagerie of heart-bound, unswerving and fresh-from-the-back-garden outlooks, Hosseini ruffles the veneers of familiarity, which earlier existed so inconspicuously within our own positrim, that it was almost acceptable to deny its actuality.

"But if the account Maman had given of her life in the interview was a lie, then where did the images of her work come from? Where was the wellspring for words that were honest and lovely and brutal and sad? Was she merely a gifted trickster? A magician, with a pen for a wand, able to move an audience by conjuring emotions she had never known herself? Was that even possible?"
Again, unsophisticated perfectness. Homespun questions, only too justified to be questioned by multitudes capable of abiding to nothing beyond responsiveness. People who find the fact that erratic human behavior and free will, of action and thoughts, are too other-worldly, too crude, too inartistic to be celebrated. Even the possibility of inception of opinions about inexperienced matters eludes them. A fact both to be pitied, for its stark nudity, and admired, for its rationality.

"Mama believed in loyalty above all, even at the cost of self-denial. Especially at  the cost of self-denial."
Self-denial, sacrifice, reveling in the thought of misery and self-inflicted pain-frequently adjudged as sainthood and ostensibly synonymous with being virtuous. That thin line between truth, loyalty and other niceties and dream-slaughter and soul-gashing, often more than less, irreparably blurred by cultural nuances of goodness. Taking the liberty to be a little more capitalistic than I would care giving myself credit for, it would take millions of years, masses of unprecedented visionaries, narcissistic ghetto-dwellers and irrefutable argumentativeness to repaint the divide.

"This is an old habit, this joke making and clowning in the face of badluck, this disdain of hers for the slightest show of self-pity. It has the paradoxical-and I know-calculated-effect of both shrinking and augmenting the misfortune."
What you and I would most likely attribute to a twisted case of "coping-mechanism", Hosseini channelizes this seemingly unreal irony into an entirely different metier of "abandonment". The impatience and intolerance of blatant outrage and partisanship. The escapade into a world of joy, so rightly earned, and expectancy of justice.

"I am not saying Manaar changed everything. He didn't. I stumble around the world for still naother year before I finally find myself at a corner desk in an Athens library, looking down at a medical school application. <Sic. the author writes about other frivolities depicting how effectively Manaar vanished from his thoughts when he was busy upending other and even, less important frivolities, and appearing to abate the idea of how magnanimously Manaar affected him in totallity> But in my quiet moments, in those long rides in the back of a bus or the bed of a truck, my mind always always circles back to Manaar."
What could plausibly define the beauty of it, other than the little piece of artifact Medini (refer my Book-key nomenclature for friends) posted on my wall this evening?! :)

There were more, but the Bong Kaku sitting beside me got enraged by my unethical treatment of books, and busied himself by smoothing out all the previously folded tidbits in the novel while I was gone for the better part of an hour from my assigned seat! So when M reads it later, she can add-on! :P

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Mares of the Noon

Raving monologues, 
Moonlit dreams passe,
Mellow Fur Elise, a ring,
Raindrops ensconcing,
An oath, some wish 
and mere broodings,
Absence of night vision,
a garden of cinnamon,
Peeking through the cracks of time,
A red t-shirt hanging out in the sun,
A crown of unmouthed musings,
Barring memories with wood banisters,
clouding every somber thought,
Little griefs with whispers fought,
Halving lives to past and future,
Ringing bells at depleted dawns,
just a sparse rue captured,
Now, parting wishes teems through the eve,
A kiss goodbye hale received!

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Hello, The Island of BaBaai

Sun baked, rusty embrace of renounce,
undulated, unforeseen cradles of mirth
Harking back, bethinking selves,
One day, one time, one jiff an ounce,

The scrawls and stories I wrote as a tot,
Hurtles back, trusting enrichment and a little cherish,
Fawns and swoons and all that baggage,
O Felicity, O Jonas, O Saturnalia, I thought!

Feigning stoic was never this brute,
I abate the tender rush of flints,
Clinging to devious labyrinths,
the slowest brooks, the gentlest slopes.


Friday, May 10, 2013

Cinders of Cherish


Beautiful lines I came across in An Equal Music by Vikram Seth
Anglicised by the strings of a violin, The Bayonet Beckons...

Perhaps this could have stayed unstated.
Had our words turned to other things
In the grey park, the rain abated,
Life would have quickened other strings.
I list your gifts in this creation:
Pen, paper, ink and inspiration,
Peace to the heart with touch or word,
Ease to the soul with note and chord.
How did that walk, those winter hours,
Occasion this? No lightning came;
Nor did I sense, when touched by flame,
Our story lit with borrowed powers -
Rather, by what our spirits burned,
Embered in words, to us returned.

Thursday, May 9, 2013

The Radio-Struck Fiction

Hear Hear! It's almost been a year, since I've been here.
Meanwhile I learnt how to shop cheap, got to know what exactly a "pint" stands for, opinionated that British accent is the best in the whole wide world, listened to a mean broth of insanely good music in languages I know not, noticed how facebook trolls people with a world of rhyming treats, microblogged amply, quizzed, turned into one nazi-ish and laconic nitpicker, stood up obversely to loathsome requisites and turned a little less loquacious.

Doesn't amount to much, really. The sentence up there was GREviously wrong.

Bing!
Now I was tempted to ramble on about caves for a substantial amount of blog-space, but then that's too personal. :P

Bing!
The constant hoot of the indigenous birds don't help. The chill in here at Guwahati is mollifying. And the fact that every step I take reminds me of a bout of uninviting repercussions (that are incredibly un-bloggable, thankfully strikes the reader!) of the past 10 years, all billowing down on my semi-permeable-no-nonsense eardrums, make me all the more fit to be skinned and tanned alive, to make Rita Skeeter's crocodile handbag look-alikes from. (Read, I am turning thick-skinned). 

Bing!
Wit and humor are the bluish palates of my mind. You meddle with them sir, and you are in for a bout of unrelenting stalking. And with each piece of fact I string together about you, creating a figment of your persona in my own imagination, I realise how much more you can perturb me with the slightest sleight of your sole existence. Kindles a tenderness. Alright, not necessarily. Well, it doesn't, but it did. So as Hagrid said, What's comin' will come, and we'll meet it when it does. Negate the abstraction. Personify.

Typical, one would reflect. But there is this aberration. A scoop, almost. Preternatural laws dictate the seductive power of a good vernacular patois. On the other hand, common beliefs reveal that the multitudes of the penultimate intelligentsia regard verbosity as a way to muddle the mind against the obviation. Social presuppositions are lame.

Bing!
It's high time Science and Religion stopped flirting with each other and got together!