a blog is for thinking aloud

Such an unfamiliar state of being: copy finished and I am waiting for the car. But then, it is also almost 3 in the morning. Well, the thing is, I finished reading Harry Potter. I loved it, my unequivocal reaction, thank you. And I am awfully sorry that it's gotten over.
I now have an account on Orkut as well as Facebook. It's slightly manic, if you decided to get serious about it. You have to keep tabs on one account after another to check the latest progress. Siphon friends from one network to the other, and so forth.
I have had long gchats with Debasis sir. It's rather very lovely to talk with him once more, and yet he was always just a step away.
I was reading The Viceroy of Ouidah until this Potter frenzy started, with everyone shouting out endings (bloody pilfs, and I do NOT mean A), so you had to get your hands on it, and get it over with. But may I say what a lovely pleasure it was. I efinitely don't think Hogwarts was dark. It was sun and well, magic. The boy has not read the book, but even then, might not like the fluidity that the magic's about. No, I think he will, if he reads it, and knows this is what I am talking about. Not just magic being imagination, that's so just the surface of it, but of will, choice, the post-modernist (or is it post-postmodernist) way of looking at things: you are what you make yourself. Then again, that sounds so like the Renaissance man. Rowling so gets that, although she must drench it in soppy love and we are all good. Y'know, what I am trying to say is that the vehicle is a spot clumsy, but the idea, you cannot but love it. But then, maybe it's cuz I have really hardly read anything. And inarticulate as usual. And then, what's new.

If rape is inevitable, lie back and enjoy.

Came upon this for the first time in the Presidency magazine in first year. In office, pretty late. Things are not as out of control as you would like to fancy it to be. I just want to believe they are. Can I say I ache to go back to freer days, freer to move, to imagine, without the trouble of having to translate it into facts. I feel like writing again, to make things whichever way I want it. To lose me in it, if one may say so. The Tale of Genji: make up your face to be what you want it to be. This perfect perfect surface, brittle and seamless as china. Clink it and a chink will appear. Will go away to a rarefied world among clouds, The Aeneid's Elysium, where Aeneas's father Anchises (I remember) would be. What is this clutter, the sadnesses of a rag-tag mind, the rage of a mind (y'know, looking like one of those cancer-marked lungs, markes of tobacco). I really really want to lose myself in, well, the subliminal: get a high, with nothing to hold you back...Jhoom barabar jhoom gives me flight... Wild with all regret/those things that are no more, Koel Poorie doing a turn, with those wild wild eyes that seemed to have lost everything.
There is no one there, I would have wished in another time that he would be, I'll wish tomorrow. But let me go away, go away to my world of books, where the mind can be let to fly. Come with me, come with me. I cannot ever ask, request you to come along repeatedly. I don't want to forget what I have loved. Don't think I can for very long. Please know, please know.

Posting after such a long time, and there's lots od work to do. But yeah, that's very satisfying, of course the quality is another story. Well, about us, I, well, y'know, you can be angry and sulk for the luxury of it, or you can be robust about it, look at the other person's point of view, get over the anger and move on. Yeah, I'll do that, but what can I say. That I am angry, and I don't care two hoots about who might think what. Or rather, that I do, but that that's not the end all. There is the moment, and you can choose to embrace it, or crib about what's not right, and how it might have been perfect if x and y factor were alright. And I just feel angry, at what feels like cussedness, weariness. And I don't want to drag him out if he is going to feel not right, forced, I dunno what about it. I want to do my work. Ami dukkho pelam, na onno keu dukkho pelo, ei niye ami ar bhabte parchhi na.
I had a very good birthday, the happiest I remember in years. Quite usually, it is the ones nearest you that bring the tears to your eyes again and again, who for reasons of circumstance, are not a part of your happiness. And it is perhaps yet a luxury to indulge hurt. I feel angry, and wild. It's like that birthday, when I could only cry, and baba, blast him, sent ma to ask if I wanted to go and eat somewhere. Like hell I would, and be told later how much money got spent eating out, and how we could have saved if we made the same thing at home. I will waste no time for those who can't take things as they are, who hang on to past actions, and count every sin you have supposedly committed. I would rather keep away, though I might love. Keep distance.

There's much to be said for sanity, I think. It's different from doing whatever thrills you at the moment, for the sake of the thrill, without thinking of consequences, what people call irresponsible action, I suppose. It is not as heavy as it sounds. Irresponsibility for the sake of it isn't anything more than very easy fun any longer. It's a different course of life you embark on. It's a different kind of happiness, one I find myself reacting very pleasantly to. The surety of presence, of being anchored, perhaps once again. I blabber, not much sense. Somewhere, I ask my mind to please be considered in what it does.

"A member of the working middle class. A bonafide contributor to the economy and to society as a whole, even. For the first time in my short and largely frittered life, I was going to be productive."
http://positivelylowbrow.blogspot.com/2006/04/lets-face-it.html

That's how I feel. Felt. Stifled. And this too:
"saw no reason to give up everything I held sacred (the right to loaf, the freedom to sleep till two, the liberty to watch television all day until my brain began to atrophy and so on). "
This I would have perhaps continued to do awhile, like Jaydeep continues to perhaps. If I wasn't shit scared of never landing myself a job at all. I miss the footlooseness, I do. Of not having any commitment, or responsibility. It's one of the things you teach yourself, to cultivate patience. For the sake of your own needs. For shelter, calmness. Though ever so often, you wonder if you don't want to hurl it all away, your own good, with a vicious kick (yeah, that's funny), to leave yourself completely bereft, and incapable of wanting. Why people love the desert, eschew lands of plenty, and want the aridness of not having. That dream I'd had once, of a desrt girl, and I was scared by the gleam in my own eyes. Because it didn't care to wait for anybody for what it/she wanted. I wish I could be that to get what I want.
And needless to say, I did not ask for the quoted person's permission to quote him. He goes by the name of Leo, apparently.

Y'know, the people you come together with, after a while their qualitative merits cease to matter. I mean, they are with you regardless of whether they act badly or well, they are a part of you. That is a rather pleasant feeling, the assurance of presence. That apart, there's the job. Egad! people are depressed, and I never did count PR as one of my special skills ever. I can't quite think what's about to happen, and how I'll find meself dealing with it. Well, there's the boy, thank heavens, and the nocturnal parleys. A feeling that seeps into you.

I had a rather nice day yesterday. Went to the Oh Lord! MD'S review, met people there which was rather nice, had a boring lunch, bought underwear, stuff of trauma, really, met Shubhayu, which was really really nice. We sat in this nook, one of the thin golis that lead to courtyards of old apartment mansions. This one was on Park Street, a few houses after T3. There's this rather wide berth there, where you can really stretch your feet and lounge, and we sat there for a while and talked, as cars passed by, people came to dump stuff, people decked up and stepped out of houses, 'lots of activity', he said. The weather was nice, after-drizzle and all that, and we'd met after one really long time. We stepped into T3 after a while, rebutting ichhes of going into Olypub. He smoked and smoked, and had hideous sugacube after sugercube, ugh ugh ugh. But his youth, and his openness to things, his freedom, the master he is of his own time. some of it is cause he's still a student, but it's a lot a state of the mind. And there's a lot to be said for a friendship like this....

well

Reallt tired and desirous to meet the boy. Had two great days, one day of fun with the kids. Got our bags, watched 15, Park Avenue, My Brother Nikhil, met cousin and cousin's wife, and was rather surpised at how happy they seemed. They are really newly married, y'know. It's not mundane. And reality struck home with Park Avenue, and Nikhil was baba all over again. I wanted to tell the boy everything, did too. And I wonder about what O calls post-adolescence. What is it all now? It is rather very different from college, and there seems to be nothing to loving but love, quite unreasonably. Endless pleasure, and happiness, for no reason, apparently, save a person. Well, I forgot what I began with, so..

.

I got very scared today. A dada of ours asked me to smile. Is it so bad? Will I become like many I see in the room? Where do I belong, where should I be?

Barbados is a lovely word

There's someone here who's into blogs, so I can't post save when she ain't here. Well, I've been dying to scream out to the world that I have 'follicular tonsilitis', one manifestation of which is this huge wart in my throat that I can see- it's white with pus: grotesque, completely, hee hee. I certainly hope I will gross out people who read about it. And then, there's antibiotics, which make you feel out of this world, quite literally. All I want to do is to be left to myself and to sleep. Instead of ruddy office. Tobe shei woe niye ar na i bollam. And the boy and I had such a good chat over phone last night that I took so long to get over it that I fell asleep without eating. Now this none save ma know yet.
Ar it's generally not pleasant to feel that there's cotton wool wedged up your throat. And then, intimations of mortality. Bhoy lage, if you have to die. I so don't want to die.
I began reading Love in the Time of Cholera jedin office jai ni over this thing. I think it's rather rather nice. Majhe majhe khub ichhe hoy, jodi anek din pai, to live like the old days: sharadin boi pore katiye ditam, break only to eat, or bathe, fall asleep over the book, wake to read. May be get out for a brief while.
Summer is for receding inside yourself, to find happiness, standing on the verandah deep at night, feel the breeze, be happy. Lightness, freedness. And let me yet say, there is great joy in loving the boy, to be allowed to let be, to call and say I feel vomitty. Oh yeah, it sounds simperingly saccharine. But it's well, all of what I was saying earlier. I am rather happy.

pluperfect

A post for rip:

Well, it is about kindness. Of joking away sadness, panic. What O has done over five years, for me and dare I say, for so many of us. I miss it very much. I don't want others to take life as darkly as I end up doing ever so often, to forget the happiness and believe doomsday to be near. The happiness of space, the unbearable lightness of being. To see a rose and smile in fulfilment.

There is also something to be said about a white shirted fair gent noticing you at the end of his day. Nothing to do with the gent as such, just you.
Well, my back's aching awfully, and I can hardly make sense. I want to go home, though I know I can finish the copy if I push myself enough. I also tramped with that jumble of a knap to a hotail on the bypass, after I had listened to a seminar on IT management at something on Little Russell Street. Souffles suck, chocolate mud pies are brilliant things. As are taxi drivers scared you might turn out to be a gangster or something. At least that's what I imagined, kept asking er por kothay jaben, eta ki apnar guest house, tumi apni, general befuddlement. Amar bhishon pithey byatha korchhe. Period.
The whole post was not for rip.

can't take it anymore. am i losing it? feel at the end of my tether. desperately want a break, to get away. happened quite suddenly on monday. sunday i was fresh and happy & monday, i was somehow dragging on like i hadn't stopped in a long while. and the end of the week is lined with assignments, absolutely snowed under. what can i do?

can't take it anymore. am i losing it? feel at the end of my tether. desperately want a break, to get away. happened quite suddenly on monday. sunday i was fresh and happy & monday, i was somehow dragging on like i hadn't stopped in a long while. and the end of the week is lined with assignments, absolutely snowed under. what can i do?

Day

I got Leonard Cohen. I am not going to Gourbhanga. Should I be methodical and sad?
I filched a NatGeo from O's place. Haven't told her yet. Will I be righteous and depressed?
I took the easy way out again, didn't I.
On other terms, I have to decide much more in advance that I am quite conclusively going to go. The situation didn't suggest itself. N went off for his Advanced Course today. O goes in May. I met a very quiet, niriho French author. I wanted to sit down and talk with him for a long time, the dishevelled man with ash blond hair and perplexed eyes. You were so sweet to me. Such small units of grace, come alive and frame your day.
I'd had a lovely day yesterday, perhaps an aftermath of that: wrote the story in a prolonged leisurely way (for which in trouble), it was that rare rare time when you don't feel someone playing strings with your nerves, and you are free to think, to pick and choose what you shall include and what not and why. Bought food (tasteless biryani from Rahmania), went over to O's feeling guilty for not having bought ma's Poila Baishakh sari that still mean to give. Sat with kaku kakima, sitting around, listening to them planning train tickets for her course, it's home, in dimensions I don't quite know. I was more comfortable between them than I have been for a while. We had chips, we had tea, food, ice-cream, I had golap jamun. The humdrumness is so pleasing. We talked, and that she is rather very much desperation, that she is studying so much in some desperation. And we fell asleep, eventually. I in the other room. The comfort of a bed after a very long time. Cuz I choose the floor now. I woke up in some darkness, the coolness of the room. Went up, smiled, kaku kakima were cooking, came away. It was so pleasant.

coming close

Was leaving the room the same time as K. There are two glass doors on the way. As he walked away in the other direction, there was his outline, through one door, and then the next. Is this how it will be, me looking in front and seeing him, as he walks away?

.....

I have nothing to write, so. Life trundles on. WHY, the same inevitable pattern?
I hardly worked today. Don't feel too enthused about it.

.

It is very strange where I am now. I feel lonelier than I have felt in a long while, like in a sea, o very vast. Alone in an unfamiliar world. There's no one here now, I find that so difficult to encompass, and upstairs the world's a flurry of frenetic activity. It's like a drug, and once in it, you can't bear to give it up. I don't know what shall happen, cannot say. He holds words to heart, and what I said today might be given back to me tomorrow. Such uncertainty, and you a mere spectator. I feel very very lonely. It becomes more and more frequent that I find myself amongst those less wise than I. Which had never been the case before. There is no one to rely on but your own wits.
What he says makes sense, I suppose. Which casts a very poor light on what I have been doing. Indeed none of the skills, save kichhuta by default ayotto kara, which you can't do without. Oh I had yearned for someone intelligent. Those that are expect you to pick up stuff. I haven't. "We need to be looked into," he said. How hideous we must have become. Afraid I don't make much sense, I am keying letters in some desperation, because I can't think. There is no peace at all. Very sleepy, and the day had begun well. O you, you, you, why are you human, why don't problems melt away of their own accord at the sight of you. They do, but not to be brushed away under the carpet. Excuse me. I don't know what I feel, what I must do. Insensate, balm
O O O O, the Shakespehearean rag....it's so elegant, so intelligent

.

I am gonna be screwed. I have a story to write and I am here writing. I had a paneer roll, and one from office offered me biryani, which i graciously declined. My blog must seem so cloistered, what with talking about only work, and o-very-personal woes. Some more: the boy is ill. I don't like it. I hope he is better soon.
C leaved day after and we didn't get time to meet, all of us. Have grand plans of meeting C tomorrow somewhere, whisk her off to lunch, leave her standing bloated and scoot off to office. God, when we were young. I desperately need to taste some of it again. It's like being physically parched, age, work, responsibility, paper, relationships be damned. Where's the fuh-uh-un??? O would surely be scandalised.

blue

Well, I have a couple of gray hairs. I haven't seen them though. That's completely besides the point. Saw this blog www.oktoberblues.blogspot.com . Of being a free radical, drifting along. I would write like this about six months back. Then people, ties, job wrangling you down. Losing focus of what you liked. Forgetting to feel light. I refuse I refuse. Life shall not be like this. It can't all be like squealing eagles piercing their beaks into you randomly. That's bullshit, anyway.
C is in Cal for five days, and we've a precious pocket of 9 to whenever - two hours, I think - at night, for us to feed and have fun in. A going away to Bombay, bloody her, and O is here for the moment. I want to leave.
Life must be lightness, am I in the wrong place. That blog made me remember what I liked. I wonder what'll happen to us, though. And the days trundle on, in their bloated consumerist way.
I want the Net. I want to blog deep into the night on my brand new comp. in a dark room, with strange music playing, and not worry about tomorrow since it'd be my off day. I would wake up, iron and listen to music, something nice would happen which I'd enjoy immensely, may be a concert like the one we had at JU, with the three of us that day. Might even like to meet S. Basically an extra day would be nice.

twirling smoky fingers......

Here after a long time, mainly cuz don't have Net at home. K & I got my computer, he fixed it, our baby, it is. But life's kinda different after that. A black presence, beautiful and all, surrounds your existence. My mother superior went away, and it's a bit of not so friendly madness au bureau. He is a source of relief, surprisingly. There isn't much left to living. Save office, and he. Occasional bits of friends, snatches - whiffs of JU, long forgotten home, happiness, warmth fading away, the real world. Lonesomeness. And that's what I had liked about The Namesake, about Nikhil's loneliness, of growing up, of time, when the warmth of old friends falls away, and nothing can be as nice as what you left behind. It is also the serenity of age, K says, and I know. K is gold. It was something I found yesterday, realised rather. Brilliant, and beautiful to boot. Fiery beauty, quite. And what is now there is quiet, barely masked sometimes, but you can see what's happening, how it will shape up, perhaps. All of which I love. It is perhaps truer than you know, you are given what you need, at the time you need it most. It is not about grasping a person and possessing him, more about being let to perceive, to see, know.
Well, that. Apart, little music, fewer books. It's just too scattered, life is. Akhon para hobe na. I am not fighting it. I wish for a good day everyday. With minimum mental frazzlement, ravaging. Get back home, to oblivion, of pain from office for the night. Find something to work out the day after. It's overwhelmingly lonely, is all I can say. And I am not alone. Several my age, my kind - and there are more than I thought. It's not bad, a way of living, happens to everyone, shedin The namesake dekhe ato bhalo laglo, like a balm to frazzled soul. This too shall pass. Jhumpa Lahiri, Nikhil, Gogol. And he opened the book, and sat down to read. 24, I shall be. In July. Time flies. So. At such speed. All you can do is hang on and live. Where you dunno quite at all what's going to happen. Why baba died, the way ma and I are now - why; what happens to us. And you live wondering whether things don't fall into place sometime. Child of ruins, we are. We all. Something has died, and the rest is an attempt at salvaging, as serenely as you can, without losing your mind. The gold's not there anymore. And that's inevitable. For all. And yet we love, and love deeply, in serenity, and find a kind of sadder happiness that is nonetheless more lasting than the flash of brightness that was youth.
Remember when you were young, You shone like the sun..