Inventions.

This is the time of the year when evenings mean getting on your rooftop and looking sea ward for the rain(considering you are a dreamer). The rain-clouds would arrive in packets and then grow into a nebular mass of grey, just like you imagined. The sky would radiate electric branches everywhere around you. The occasional blue light would pique your loneliness and help you to look into the obscenities of your semi-dark surroundings.

The rain would start soon, tip-top, like the rain. You would decay with the rain and flow through great drains, canals and rivers, following the tedious voyage of natural processes. And then one fine day a part of you, the best of you, will become a cloud-a nimbus and come rain over her place.

If you are lucky she might be on the roof that day, waiting to get drenched. (She is the dreamy type too, you know.)
Well that's all you can do, rain over and over again.

So you see, if you don't get to touch her in this life, invent a way to do so-

like that word-pecker who dissolved

in the rain.

For railroads without railway stations (SEVEN)

As the train whistles past the

silent silvery

moonlit fields

I

feel the distance

between me and the world

oscillate like infinite pendulums

in action.

The sky is not pitch dark- it should

be. They have stopped

crying.

"Tears are impractical waters."

The officers took her in a while

ago- the girl who fell from the upper

berth and kept on sleeping,

perhaps dreaming too?

Here in railroads without railway stations

Everybody's awake for the end

of the road, but tonight

I

just want to sleep like her.

A folk song in Kashmir (SIX)

Here in Kashmir the rain is blue, with

the clouds that rove in autumnal hue.

But if I speak of the hills around

they kick my bottom with a

frosty mound.

Here in Kashmir the sky is quiet

the land is strewn with mines that bite.

The dreams of death sings not afar;

The winter wind frills my

door ajar.

Here in Kashmir the tourists come and go

as the snow make them sing Jai ho!

And when I see them come this way

I throw them all my love and

pray.

Here in Kashmir they name her bomb-

She grows like a puss in her mother’s

womb.

Marquez, A tribute.

When I first read Gabriel Garcia Marquez, it was not out of a sheer love for literature that propelled me towards the magic, it was the desperate need of a young boy to connect with a girl he was in love (infatuated?) with. The fallacy of youth is riddled with serendipity that when looked back through time would always make one smile. Some love remains and some fades away, like houses weathered through time, but when magic strikes your mind it remains with you forever. Some people find it absurd, some people laugh at it, some people just wonder with a scientific curiosity - but magic too is like that girl you are in love with, whom you could make out from miles apart in a crowd, whose every detail you notice with a profound clarity that it almost borders the modern word ‘creepy’ and yes, whom you notice in everything and everywhere- in coal mines and snow-capped mountains, in the leaves made of grass and then you sometimes wonder “what the hell”; whom you see in the past and in the future- mostly in the future, happy and smiling, forever.

As the earth shook the ground of that Aztec city, Remedios the beauty winked from heaven and said, “You send me up too early wise man, but tell me was life worth it?”

He too would float up in that ether of peace leaving behind a void of wisdom, still weaving all that beauty in his head, waiting for the right words to pinch in Remedios’s heart.
“Life is always worth it, when you have loved enough.”

We all have our second opportunities on earth,
that’s what he taught us.

RIP Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1927-2014.

Scheherazade

When a writer and a whore meet there is often a general tendency of an effervescing fortitude in the atmosphere. The streets that day were lit with the general lights that would go out in dawn and he sat by the footpath, legs crouched, watching over the bypass as the traffic sped by leaving a blur of light- in his mind and everywhere within him. 
He consumed all of this. 

He desired such blurs; such indelible marks that would always allow him make words pubescent children frolicked over. Everyone was writing about love those days, and how their heart desired, and how it felt and how it missed, and about the coterie of pretty lovers who could save the world; and yet the world of the other went on- spiraling down the steady road of decadence. Humans always try denying their animal nature, but animal nature hardly denies them.


‘Why do you write political novels?’
‘A writer must work on something he doesn’t understand.’



The midnight traffic thinned like his receding hairline. He stood up and walked towards his apartment. Scheherazade had missed the last bus.

No stories would be told tonight.

What is funny?

What is funny?

1. Funny is a poster of a waxed doll. 

2. Funny is a prank(threat?) call made at an wee hour.
.
3. Funny is a blank text-message, philosophically.

4. Funny is F.R.I.E.N.D.S. with friends, or alone.

5. Funny is long hair, high-doggies, and zombie Che-paintings.

6. Funny is the red/blue rain and auto-rides.

7. Funny is the price of a flake of gold.

Funny was college and now you're old.

Elections are here, medearie!

India's Press Freedom Index at present is worse than Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Colombia, Zimbabwe, South Sudan and many other seemingly 'regressive' countries that will surprise the hell out you.

Although the fictitious nature of any social survey can be put to question what's important to note down here, is the progressive Indians who think industries and more jobs will change the society for good is a farce. Otherwise, boy-gangs in fancy cars wouldn't go out and eve-tease girls at night. If that's development for you, fuck you.

As a student in erstwhile Presidency College, I saw how a CPI(M) aiding daily sensitized news and changed the entire version of a teen angst-story into a political battle. We live in a society where media manipulation is at large. With the recent predicted Namo Sarkar, that's what's at stake - already dwindled freedom of free expression and speech.

You take food out of the stomach, you do that, but the resilient humans live, but you take thoughts out of their minds, suppress them into your way of thinking, that's unbearable for most, that's what creates a Nazi Germany. I understand people working in a hierarchic system who are used to licking their superiors ass and have no say in their lives whatsoever don't get it, but think for sometime before acting.

I believe that's what your education was meant for.

One day in the city hospital -Calcutta

A crying baby caught my attention. I do not like crying babies. It was morning and my otherwise jovial nephew demanded, he be entertained. I am fond of him only when he is playful. Again in small doses.

Afternoon meant the sultry heat, and I hopped into the heart of the city. I had to take care of some 'work'. On account of having a green card, I sat a while in the general ward of a renowned city government hospital today and watched nameless subaltern faces huddle across their demi-gods hoping they would heal them. The luxury of being jobless, comes in handy with lonesome observations. Too many questions and curiosity clouded their faces, too many sickness clogged their veins. At times, their gods would chide them for being inquisitive. It's what gods do. But they heal too. Here for a minimal charge. And they know that too.

These hospitals on any regular days seem like a war-ravaged camps where injured soldiers are treated after a great war. It looked like something I had seen in movies. So much rush. So much health. Being an elite its convenient to avoid such places, it's very convenient. I conveniently avoided touching anyone in this summer heat. Sickness may pass through their skin into mine? It was a mistake to wear half sleeves and get in a place like this after all. That's all I could think. Situational shallowness?

I have seen many great men of my time ponder over 'society' and how it should be, and 'what should be done'. I have seen my contemporaries vehemently argue with each other on 'social systems' and measuring man with laid out rules and benchmarks, forgetting the essence of humanity perhaps, refusing to believe that humans can't be just good, that without law and order and 'social systems' there would be an animalistic anarchy. Predator and prey.
They are right. Aren't they? Open your eyes, read newspapers and all you see is an ever increasing decadence in the idea of humanity. I wonder sometimes. How different is it since we stopped living in the caves?
How different?

Perhaps my political friends are right. But can social systems teach one to be good to another? It doesn't take opulence to survive in this jungle. It's surprising if you ever try to survive you'll find you hardly need much. But we compete, the poor with the poor, the rich with the rich, for the want and not the need. Most of the times. Yes, perhaps our situation makes us good or bad, or shallow,or higher philosophical beings, but a system where one could obliterate all the ills could make us good to one another. May be it's only through restraint and order that love can be taught. I am not big in ideas of what should be done or what needs to be done, but a little act of kindness like paying two bucks extra in a public transport for people like me, doesn't affect our lifestyles. That's what I demand from myself even in my shallow days.

A crying baby caught my attention. I do not like crying babies.

"Baby of Rubaya Begum, edike. Porte likhte jano? Jano na? Accha.
Ei test gulo korate hobe. Beshi taka lagbe na chinta nei. Arekbar eta neeche giye dekhao ora bole debe kothay jete hobe. Ato kotha bolcho keno? Ami ja bolchi mon diye shono. Haan bhalo howe jaabe."

I also met a girl today after a long long time. Some people brings out the good in you. (Not relevant)