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.