Crafting a Heart!

Have you ever thought how beautiful we human beings are? Well, definitely not in the present context of the happenings distressing the world. But its true we are beautiful. And we can’t fetch one because to find one you have to be one. We don’t take care of our soul for sure. Just think what have you done lately to nourish it? How it can be healthy if you don’t feed it well?

Anyways, I am digressing. I was thinking to write about something else.

I am a big-time lover of the series made in our neighboring country, Pakistan. Yes, being from India, Pakistan seems to be our perennial enemy but believe me we were together thriving as a single country a few years ago celebrating all our festivals together. We have parted in 1947 out of some reason which doesn’t even make any sense but believe me I get a different vibe while I interact with people across the border. 

I have two friends from there. One of them is a doctor from Dera Ghazi Khan and another is from Swat Valley in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province. They both belong from different social background for sure but I have noticed one thing in common which I wasn’t expecting. Both of them don’t hate Indians. This was surprising considering the bitter past we had. Just a little bit of browsing in YouTube will depict you the same story if not of mutual admiration. Where you will find digital fights using slurs in the comment section you will also find the mutual love and respect connecting over music or food or something else. So, coming back to where I started, the series made in Pakistan.

My Country - In not so bright light!

I am not at all a news person. I know you will find it pretty repugnant. This apathy is not because it doesn’t affect me directly but because it keeps me wavering in confusion regarding the veracity of the sources.

Let me enumerate a few incidents which claimed lives and affected us in recent times.

1. Definitely “not-to-be-named” Corona. Death: 28,078 Affected:11,52,3552. Floods in Bihar, North East, West Bengal, Maharashtra, Gujrat, Kerala, Karnataka, etc. to name a few. Death: 1900 Affected: 25,00,000

3. Road Accident Deaths: 68,000 (yearly it is 1,36,000 on an average since last decade)* (Govt. is claiming there is a dip in this number) 4. Death of Migrant Labors: 383. No. of people who tried to migrate: 50,000** 5. Menace of Amphan and Nisarg. Death: 100 Affected: 1,00,00,000 6. Communal Violence (considering Delhi Riot only) Death: 53 Affected: 200

These are a few incidents which came on the top of my mind without doing any research. I am sure the numbers will be much more than this. But whom to blame? “THE NATURE”? How had been our proactive or reactive resolutions for it? As citizens are, we in the safe hands?

Let’s be honest. We definitely aren’t in the safe hands. The people who had been embellished with our trusts in all these years after the Independence could have done far better.

5 very uncommon songs you can't miss!

Sorry for such a long delay! I have not been writing for quite long.
Surprisingly, I have lately noticed that I have never written any post on music So thought to write one today.

The title is pretty self explanatory, so without doing any further ado lets get into them.

1. Yeh sama:

Movie: Yeh Kya Ho Raha Hai?

A very old song of Shaan and in a film which everyone forgot including the songs. This song was outstanding. Typical romantic Bollywood song with typical arrangement. But the melody is very good and will definitely keep you in a good mood. The movie was a loose adoptation of American Pie. Two surprising fact about the movie. It was directed by National Award  winner Hansal Mehta (maker of "Aligarh", City Light", Shahid") and the music was directed by Shanker-Ehsaan-Loy

Best Lines: 
Baadal bhee, parbat bhee, nadiya bhee, dhaare bhee
Saare najaare the gumsum
Jaagee havaaye hain, jaagee fijaaye hain
Aaye yaha hain jo ham tum

Pro-Tip: 
Take your girl to some cloudy hill station. Sit on the hill top, play this song in your ipod and share the ear pod, one in yours and one in hers.

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmovWSqaur8

2. Shauk hai:

Movie: Guru

A master piece from the album Guru but I don't know why this song was not there in the music album. Everyone remembers the scene where Vidya confronts Madhavan. The song perfectly portrays the pain with which Vidya was making Maddy understand how impractical and difficult it is to marry a disabled person even though they love each other so much. A must for your music pod. I had to really work hard to get this track back then.

Best Line:
Kaash ye zindagi binkahe binsune so gayi hoti



Pro-Tip:
Listen to this song when you feel defeated and stressed out with your day to day work. Be careful it may lead to catharsis. There is no hope at the end of the song.

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDrpq7k4yN8

The Bed

Beds are probably one of the most personal possessions of everyone. You may go to a socialite party and come back home dead drunk at night or you may go to all the local traffic lights to earn 20 rupees begging for the whole day under the burning sun, in both the cases when you are back in your bed at night you will definitely, at once, sleep side wise on your arms, try to bend your legs and pull the pillow a little closer under your head. That is the sense of comfort it gives you.

Well my plight with my dear “bed” has not been so cozy for past few days. To understand my struggle with it you need to fist understand the anatomy of it.

My bed has this wooden shaft protruding upward towards the head side and the towards the leg side it is flat. But unfortunately, the ceiling fan is towards my leg-side. Considering how hot it gets in Delhi, every night I have to swim in my own sweat. Again, my dear “bed” is shorter than me, so my leg always gets out of its length. I tried to find a solution for this and decided to change its direction by 180 degrees. But, again, I forgot that the head side of the bed was touching the supporting wall. So, after I rotated my bed, my leg was touching the wall and I had to keep bending my legs all through the night.

Anyways, cutting the story short, I decided to buy a new bed, a cheaper one with no head or no tail. So, I went to a nearby carpenter shop and asked for the rates. The rates started from 2000 rupees onward. I decided not to leave her and stay with her with my share of compromise.

Like other sleepless nights, when I tried going back to sleep in the morning with the thin beams of sunlight percolating in my small smoky room, my mind was all at peace. I laid down on my bed side wise, bent my legs in comfort and pulled the pillow a little closer under my head. I thought to make the customary Social media browse and then I will be off to sleep. All of a sudden a Facebook post caught of my eyes.

Just A Thought

Well, mind is a beautiful supposition, like some sweet belief without any proof. It can get you to the unfathomable abyss of abstract subconscious or it can make you subservient to some strong-headed conception. Where ever or whatever it guides you to it always lets you to be the driver of that journey. This “you” is your conscience which is very pure and which needs a lot care to keep its pristine sanctity intact. A beautiful mind burgeons from there to be a beautiful soul.

Stars on Earth!

Since I teach a lot of kids, I am quite aware of the intelligent and well-thought-off tantrums which kids throw whenever they are bored. The central idea of most of this tricks are “Act so lame that the teacher understands that you are not understanding anything”. This trick will bore your teacher and he/she will leave you. No wonder why from the old ages, these small tricks, if not always, had mostly worked. Parents are also fine with it because rightfully this is the age of playfulness and every one of us were in those shoes sometime or other. Fair enough!

Kids gradually learn how to be more persistent with their efforts (remember how diligent you were when you made your first handmade card for your first platonic or would be or existential girlfriend). Kids gradually develop the sense of perspective. (Remember how much thought you did put on to when and how to ask for permission from your father for a night out at friend’s place after he returned from his office). So kids learn and they learn most of the tricks of the trade by their own.

What if, all of a sudden they close all these super-sensory windows which help them to learn?

No prize in guessing, they will stop all these subconscious learning! They only will just grow in their physicality. Mind will remain pristine, unscathed and unbridled. A stale playfulness will remain for which parents will put an extra care to care, hiding all the unsettling questions popping up in their mind every now and then. Society will put a pithy tag of being “special” which is not at all special.

I hope sometime or other every one of us has come across these “special” children who didn’t choose to be special rather forced to be by their destiny. Whence we can literally do a very little to care about may be just by encouraging their tiniest of efforts, appreciating their seraphic smile or making them feel being equally important to us as others are, I am much more concerned with the “Normals”.

Sometimes I think, “am I thankful enough to be Normal?’ “Am I making most of it, being Normal?” When was the last time I felt relaxed and contented being Normal?

Competitions, challenges, stresses are always good till the point they construct  our existential blocks else we will mostly feel being a temporal king ruling our own utopia, gulping mono-chrome liquid sitting in a colourful tesseract of solitude or you can just imagine yourself sitting in your favourite bar on any weekend!

The Weird Soul with a Spatula

I don’t know whether this practice was there in your house or not but it was pretty much prevalent in mine. And sometimes it used to bloat to certain extent that there had been some serious altercation with mum (read Mother).

So, it goes like this. Whenever the dinner time would approach, mum used to give a clarion call“Guys! Shall I start arranging?” (Arranging, as in  the food items for dinner) So, our normal reply used to be “Yes Mumma. Start arranging. We are coming.” Till this everything used to be normal. Now even before all the items were heated properly and brought to the table, she used to start uttering her daily script. “Where are you people? Food is already on the table. It will get colder.” So what she used to do was to keep a buffer time and start calling us since she knew that we will surely be late. A few days just to prove her wrong both me and my sister used to leave our work just at the moment, go and stand in front of here with a pair of red angry eye. “WHERE IS IT READY, MUMMA?”

But whatever used to be, we always used to have dinner together if not there were some individual party or get-to-gather outside.

We belong from a very mediocre family. 

One very good feature of such Bengali families used to be that we always tried hard to set our moral standards pretty high. Another was that we used to considered education with highest reverence. We were made to learn question the status quo but until a certain extent after which the eyebrows of society used to start getting raised.

Thoughts are never OLD!

Things change. Probably that’s the best part of the consciousness we all are in.

With the world becoming more impatient, inconsistent and incoherent, our perceived struggle in life has also rocketed. But still today we like nurturing the childishness of mind, the foolishness of heart and the resplendence of soul.

So, myself being a daylight dreamer, I keep on sailing back through the waves of time into those old-school cerebral chemical plays. Needless to say, today’s effort to write is out of the causation of some wave hitting my shore.

I put my phone in sleep mode and was about to enter my washroom for a hot shower. So, I have this habit of turning on my music high while I go through this relaxing 30 “me-time” minutes. I was already tired while this old Lata Mangeshkar song started playing. “Na jaane kyun hota hai yeh zindagi ke saath”. A pretty old school languid lackluster song. But the lyrics being penned down by Yogesh, it’s bound to be neo-realist and I love it.

I still remember those days from 1989-90-91. My father was in Siemens.  We used to be relocating a lot because of his nature of job. During those three years, we were in a place called Kolaghat in West Bengal. A thermal power plant was coming up and he was commissioning that.

Unlike today’s urban life, we enjoyed a pretty relaxing childhood. Sitting beside the river, dying to watch Gemini Circus, renting VCR to watch movies were the understandings of “having a good time”. And probably the definitions of love, feelings and conjugations in relationships were a bit more less complicated in those days. I was a small kid to understand all those things. But at least in last 29 years this is what my senses perceived and they do give hints like this for sure.

I still remember a particular birthday of mine.

My father generally used to come back from office by 7:30 pm or 8 pm. Bruised and greased. That’s how life in power plants are and he was more of a “lead by example” kind of person. So, after coming back he used to take a long bath and then look into our studies.

On that 25^th April (allegedly my birthday), I was playing football with my friends on the ground just in front of our house as usual. When I came back to my house I found a bruised and greased guy sitting on the dinning chair, blowing up a yellow balloon, lost in midst of sea of a few other colorful ones. He wasn’t even aware I was standing there. Such was his dedication.

Appreciations used to be so organic and subconscious, those days. Neither did I tell him nor I did I make him feel how happily contented I was feeling that day. Probably these yearnings and longings drive us dreams apart from the mundane clockworks of daily life.

Like this, loads of sparkling moments were there. I just presented one small one. And I am sure it’s with you everyone. Appreciating what we have, being contented with our existence, being thankful to some superpower, probably this is what we called maturity. I call it being more humane.

You seldom come across such people whose existence are eternal and ageless, who are equally that crazy as was the first amoeba in the world, who exude just a single word in your mind when you meet them, “LIFE”.

Its wise not to leave them. They will definitely make a “LIFE” for you.

From SIBERIA, With LOVE!

So does it happen to you? Like whenever the name of a place is uttered a certain image appears in your mind? For me it seldom happens. 

Let's play the game. What comes to your mind when I talk about “Siberia”?

Huge stretches of land, meandering road with patches of ice, snow-capped long ranges. Something like that? Well, yes! Siberia is full of black and white beauty. Black rocks, white snow, black sky, white skin. Yes, you read it right. Skin! And that too white.
This essay is not about the nature. It is about the skin that’s ruling the world.

After the long drawn Cold War and the fall of Soviet Union, Russia has been the centre of abomination in many respects. Be it burgeoning military prowess in the business of power, unwarranted sanctions from UN, ententes with notorious polar powers and many more. But one sector where they had been the next best supply in the global market is Fashion industry. Better to put in a different set of words “Fashion and its allied industries.”

Let’s try to visualise another picture from Krasnoyarsk, the third largest city in Siberia.
A beautiful aisle of a huge palace-like communist architecture. Almost 100-110 girls, each in their black coloured undergarment, standing in that aisle, side by side, looking towards the huge windows on the northern wall of the building. Each of them seems to be very restless holding on a piece of a4 sized paper with something written on them in Russian. The girls were from the age 12 onward but no one of them exceeding 16. Today three agencies from Krasnoyarsk have organised this casting meet for Asian clients from Japan. Out of 100-110 girls only 10-11 will be selected and a few especially for the Japanese assignments.

In Love with a Drug Addict

Smoky night! That's what you call it. A few slender tubes filled with inert gases bent perfectly in shape of English alphabets were burning bright. While the lights would have surely caught your eye balls, you would have definitely found out a few gatherings of teens near the entrance of the decorated pub. This is the very place where Sylvia met Adam. The memories of that night are still clear in her head. Similar smoky night, just with an added whims of the biting cold. She was wearing a short tube top with small silver rings all adorning her body. Her's was a group of four "hot chicks". Trimester was over and the girls wanted to have "some fun".
Adam was a lanky lad of 6ft with long hairs and guzzle eyes. Except his eyes nothing actually attracted Sylvia. She constructed these three years of memories just to forget. Was there something? Not actually. It was very eventful. She was kicked out of her house by Adam in the middle of the night just because of her inability to "cope up" with him, her ear drum being torn apart because of few strong thuds on her cheek and ears and also a few careful sessions by Adam where she was forced to see "make out" videos of him with his ex girl friend. Come on Sylvia was the weaker sex and it was pretty natural.
It is always difficult to love an addict. Adam wasn't a bad guy. Just he had his own set of priorities. He used to come back to her thousand times and tried making her understand. What more could he have done? This is what her rationale always were.
The day when she met him.
"Can I buy you a drink?" Adam asked Sylvia. The beats of some random thumping of the ceiling of the pub was pretty strong.
"Dude at least stand on your feet properly while asking girl out." Sylvia wanted to reply.
"No. Thanks. I am fine with my friends" she replied sipping from her glass and looking at the DJ.
"OK. Fine. Enjoy the party. "
"Like WTF. What does he think of himself? Anyways it's better to ignore such slouch."

A few hours later she was about to get in the loo. A sharp hand caught her wrist and took her along. After she stopped walking she could feel his fingers started combing down. She was so intoxicated that she could not figure out what exactly was happening. After ten minutes she could gradually feel that the guy whom she met before was carefully putting the garments on her body one by one. Adam asked her number. She denied. He snuggled her phone from her purse and typed in his number. Things gradually started rolling and she was not even sure on what grounds were they rolling.

At the end of three years she was already in debts because of procuring "stuffs" for him. Adam didn't use to work not he used to study. But he was a brilliant guy in his friends circle. Even among Sylivia's friends. But it always used to pinch her that for Adam drugs were first then it was her. She wasn't fighting to alter the priorities for sure. She was gradually used to with that.
The room was even darker after thirty years passed by. Just a beautiful sleek table lamp throwing away adequate luminance to brighten up the cover of the new book she bought today from Barnes and Nobles. It was "Stolen" by Lucy Christopher. She understood he was in love with addiction but she failed to realize that she, herself, was in addiction to love.

Let's Decide

I was returning from my hometown, Kolkata. As usually it was Rajdhani express since I can't let my mamma get the shock of her life. So needless to say this journey was pretty different from the previous ones. Normally what flows in my mind is when the train will reach Delhi, will I be able to reach home quickly, get dressed fast and reach office within time? But this time there were no such tensions.  Instead of that there were uncertainties. There will be no 'to-do's in office but there will be 'everything-has-to-be-done's in the void. When the sense of accomplishments of deciding not to hold the hands of fate and live a blind life was enthusing more blood through my veins, there was definitely a pinch of apprehension on the abilities that ought to pave the road to glory or to perdition. When I resigned from job a few weeks back, believe me, there was not an iota of doubt. You can name that thing as "belief", "sense of positivity" or just "boiling blood of a poor but an ambitious Bengali". Similar to this there had been a lot of times when I had to take that "hard call" (May be the next version of my Dirty Little Secrets will have a few of them). And I know, most of you had definitely been through similar situation. At the end of the day, the outcomes of these decisions, decides how good or bad were they. There is a Gestation period of every decision. As in period between the day you decide and the day the decision fruits an outcome. And for most of the "hard call" decisions have a long a gestation period. On top of that these gestation periods for each of the decisions are again pipelined  when multiple "hard call" decisions seems to share the same time frame. So my entire concern with all these is that normal day to day life gets pretty fucked up which causes unnecessary stress and we start our catcalls of "work-life balance", "gender equity at work space", "overtime loads, etc.