Go Team Pakistan.

'Go Team Pakistan.'

Nationalism appealed to me when I was young. But soon with whatever meager knowledge I acquired about our country and our culture through various 'literary' readings, I felt more disconnected to the idea of loving lands marked by kings and jacks. I have always supported 'Team India' in a cricket match, except for once I guess, when 'Dada' was dropped and there was a match in Eden Gardens.
'Go South Africa.' I said back then.

Regionalism too appealed to the young heart that knew certain bounds. There were perhaps more deep seated reasons that the physically weak Bengalis (notice the generalization) often associate with themselves-'of being victimized.' I often hear at Calcutta dining tables,
'Had they not divided Bengal, we would rule the country.' After all if we noticed our history books we would find, the freethinking of Bengal became the common sense of the entire nation. The Bengali prudence. How I used to love it. Things have changed a lot since then. A lot.

But alas, putting discreet definitions are not easy in matters of the mind and the heart. Just like marking boundaries on maps. Who can tell what could have or should have happened? Our grandparents who bore the knives of a forgotten time would often tell us scary stories from Barisal or Mymensigh. It's almost hard to imagine if all your life was suddenly taken away from you, all the familiar sounds, the smells, the surroundings, the people you knew....
It's unimaginable for us. But then both Bengal and Punjab went ahead trying their best to forget the peccadilloes of the past. And they did mostly. But somewhere in the crown of our newly born independent motherland, there was a paradise. Even the least romantic of men would say so. But it is no more a paradise, they say. Kashmir was and is still struggling to face the repercussions of the historical error of our 'privileged' forefathers.
I don't know what happened in Meerut sometime back. I know it wasn't right. I am not a Kashmiri, hell, these days I even forget to identify myself as a Bengali, all these identities, they are so important for some people. But your roots make you, they say.

While the better part of the subcontinent is hooked on television gulping their Parathas and Biriyanis I choose to write this, because nationalism doesn't appeal to me anymore. Who you support in a cricket match is your own choice, isn't it? I am not a Kashimiri and today I choose to support 'Team Pakistan.'

Very juvenile of me, you educated folks can say.
Very juvenile.

She is old school.

It was just a few years ago when the cuckoo still sang at my Salt Lake home, and the mornings meant cozy breakfasts and the rush for college. But then one day everything changed. 
'To move ahead in life you cannot get stuck at one place.''

That was what everyone was saying. They were perhaps right. 
So I moved on and those mornings were forever lost in the abyss of the past. These days I just lie down in my bed and try to sleep through the mornings, I try to dream. Two pillows over my head. Nothing in the world can bother me now.
Nothing in the world bothers me here. No body comes. No body goes. It's so peaceful. If there's a little commotion outside the room I can always turn the music on. Louder. I can always pretend to sleep if someone knocks at my door. I often do that.

Today someone knocked at my door. Who dare invade my mornings? It was always wise not to answer. But the person kept on knocking.

'You have got a post.'

The heart leaped a little. A pregnant yellow envelope greeted me. Inside there was a little book. It was a gift from a writer, whom I found somewhere in my dreams. A little piece of paper fell out. As it touched the floor, the ancient scripture written in turquoise shimmered in the virgin morning light.

'To the boy lost in abstracts.
Let's always create.
With love.'

And on this morning, after many mornings, I remembered how to write again.

Poetry Five

I have words that will touch you.
I have words that will touch me. 
I have words that will touch other worlds
Beyond you and me, where synoptic galaxies 
Wander about humming the silence of diamond
Stars and broken men.

I am armed with words, my friend, and yet I long
For the word, that word, which like the constant
Angel, shall bind and moor our hearts
Forever, and perhaps then this world and 
That world shall become One World,
Like us- 
                 'umbrella struck
In the rain'.







What is that word that
                   I look for my friend?

Oh, who is that word? 

Always you.

Talking with you is like living those ancient days, ceaselessly waiting for the unbridled letters to come hoping it will come, in time, and storing up and rehearsing all the things to say, and then obfuscating all the things that would never be said in paper, but in your head, a hundred times.

On the Darkness of the Mining Industry

While Sidhu Jyatha' evokes upon the material wealth of a Gold Mine to 'Felu Mitter' in reference to an old manuscript in Baksho Rahashya, there has always been a certain darkness associated with the mining industry.

Not so golden are we?

(Sad as it is the big things all over the world always seem to be owned by American corporations if one may recall Che Guevara's epic autobiographical account of his motorcycle rides through Latin America, his vivid imagery of the disheveled workers who lived in immense poverty in and around those (copper) mines. My recent visit to a coal district in Eastern India, although Indian owned, would perhaps echo such sentiments. After all, it's a Profit State, where we chew money and buy sex.)

The Idea of Travel

But the idea that travel takes you to ''different places within'' is surely an old one, so my following words are merely a pastiche. 

I remember watching Alan Watts talk about how if we could dream a life we wanted to live and lived it while sleeping, eventually after we have achieved and done everything we wanted to, we would come back to where we belong, or to our finitely limited waking life and that's what we would cherish most. Something like that. 

So as long as I am young I shall cherish this idea of travel and it's immense practicality, hoping it will someday take me to where I belong. 

Somewhere like this, 
Where I won't look back.

You are Invisible Now

As young guns keep posting photographs of your hometown, of your old college, of all the places that you once inhabited-browsed-grazed, of all the faces you'll never meet again, of all insidious crooked corners that you thought only you could discover- you do not see the chauvinistic dumb-fuckery that you so want to associate with it, you see postcards, postcards from the past, and your heart trembles a little, sometimes a little less.
You so want to say out loud, yes, I was there too. It was beautiful. You want to like it. Comment on it. Rewrite those thoughts, feelings. Banter.

'Hear me little darling. I want to be heard.'

But then you refrain, your ego takes you to that place where you consider yourself brazen and safe, safe from those years of nostalgia and longing-surrounded by the invisible walls of solitude, carrying on your shoulders the weight of time- like a stalwart from the past, like those soldiers who went home after war.

Your time was over long ago. You're invisible now.