Soliloquy - Talking to the Mirror

Your eyes seem to speak a thousand words that I understand just fine,

Or do I? For it maybe my own thoughts, lost and sublime.

Gone are the days when we used to be scared of the world outside,

It's time for us to step out and lose ourselves in this new life.

No wonder it always seems so wrong to talk out aloud and face our fears,

For it is true that many a times they have come back to move us to tears. 

We speak to let people know what lies beneath our happy smiles,

They might be stories of love or of our feelings put away in aisles.

When the heart is torn knowing that you never can be who you really are,

That is the time you know that things have gone just too far. 

You pushed yourself too much to understand the rest,

But it is never going to pay off, since you never can be the best.

It is time for you to accept everything and be happy the way you are,

'Cause there's nothing more soothing than the peace you get when your soul is no more at war.

“Theory of Musical Masochism”

I just came across a thought that should have crossed my mind a long time back. It would have definitely saved me a lot of precious time and tears. I named the phenomenon I came across, the “Theory of Musical Masochism”.

This epiphany took place, one day when I had hit a major low point in my life and I dreaded everything and every person around me. The only thing that made me feel better was the playlist of tragic songs of love and deprivation that was playing on the infinity loop on my MP4. I was sitting in a park, with a beautiful backdrop of high rise towers, green turf and happy kids playing and giggling incessantly, but it just seemed to make me feel more miserable. Trust me, when you are feeling doleful and people around you are making merry, your job of self soothing becomes a thousand times more difficult. Well, I am getting ahead of myself here. Coming back to the epiphany. Seven songs down, while I was desperately trying to hold my emotions back, the eighth song started playing. It was Shania Twain’s “ Up !” For those of you who haven’t heard this country classic, it tells you that when you have hit the rock bottom point in your life, it can’t get any worse, since you are already in the pit, and it just upwards that you can go now. So go ahead and live it “Up”!! Well I was not ready for this song, because I was hell bent to make myself feel more miserable but for some reason I let it play. By the time the three minute song got over, it had spelled magic. I felt the burden shift off my heart and mind at the same time. I gathered some courage, contemplating whether I should or should not listen to some more happy songs, since it was making my job of remaining sad and debarring myself from every happiness, difficult. Finally I decided, to listen to some more happy songs. Within the next ten minutes, I was feeling much lighter, and it took me a couple of minutes more to understand what I was doing to myself.

I have seen this as a trend that many follow. Whenever we are upset we line up all the tragedy songs and listen to them one after the other and torture our souls in a manner that it wasn’t even tortured by the circumstance that caused the pain in the first place. We forget the fact that it’s not difficult to be happy but somehow we deny happiness and then tag it as elusive. That day onwards, whenever I feel low, I tune in to songs like “Koi kahey, kehta rahe” instead of a “Tanhayee-tanhayee”. Dwelling on a much happier playlist now.

Stir Up a Soup Storm…!!

I just had a close encounter with something very normal in an everyday life but surely it felt totally eerie and peculiar this time…Remember all the movies of witchcraft, which we used to watch as kids and adolescents. Movies like “The Craft”, “Stardust”, “Practical Magic” and who can forget the top grossing and all-time favourite “The Harry Potter” series. One common thing amongst them all was the “witches’ cauldron”, in which they would put a variety of really strange herbs and potions and  other unthinkable, gruesome ingredients to stir up a storm and sometimes use it like a mirror to see into the future.  But we all know (or we at least, believe) that such a thing does not exist.  Right? Absolutely!!

I too thought the same until I came across something funny yet very interesting yesterday evening when I went into the kitchen to make some soup for myself. It was getting a bit cold and misty outside and I felt that a cup of Hot and Sour Vegetable soup would surely help me from dozing off at that odd hour. Now this was one of those ready to eat/drink stuff that you find stacked up in the stores nowadays. I took a steel saucepan and filled it with some water and added the contents of the packet into it and started stirring. Once it was mixed smoothly, I lit up the wok and put the saucepan on simmer. Since, I was totally out of work, with plenty of time to wile away, I started stirring the contents in the saucepan as it slowly started to get heated up and changed from opaque to translucent. I stopped stirring and turned up the heat by a notch…those of you who have some experience with ready to eat stuff (soup specially) will know that the vegetables that look so real in that delicious cup of warm soup, look like mere dust(green, orange and yellow in color) when you put them in the saucepan. This patch of vegetables (cut weeks ago, frozen with preservatives and artificial colouring agent) spread itself out on the entire circumference of the saucepan. To me, it looked like a lush green surface with flora and fauna all over it. “Pretty Pretty!!” I thought to myself. But as soon as the soup came to a boil the beautiful patch of fauna I had been admiring started shrinking rapidly and in a matter of seconds it was lost in some hot bubbling soup. “Whoopsie daisy!!” I thought, “did I just see the apocalypse or the end of the earth as some scientists claim?”. That is what they say right? There will be floods, tsunamis and volcanos erupting as a result of the earthquakes, and many such theories, and all this since the climate and the environment around us is changing at a rate unimaginable. Is this the future of the earth that I just witnessed in my cauldron (read saucepan) with unsuspecting ready to eat soup powder and water in it conveying to me a message that really needs to be taken into consideration.

Well, for me these five minutes were really eerie, call it the effect of delusion that the fever has caused in me, or the medicines or simply a thought of the “Global Warming” phenomena working at the back of my mind, courtesy movies like “2012”, “Wall-E”, etc. that has managed to give fuel to my imagination.  Whatever happened, it really worked in making me do my bit to save the world from turning into a big saucepan of boiling soup!

Friends who would like to experience this out of the world “Look into Your Cauldron and See the Future” experience, please let me know, so that I can give you the right specifications of the soup powder, quantity of water, and the exact size of saucepan to be used, for you to bring about a successful experiment.  It surely is Souper-natural!!

Disclaimer: I am still recuperating from the viral!! ;)

How Does A Child Think?

Ever wondered what goes on in the minds of the little ones around us? The generation Z is here and is all set to work their wonders on everyone around them. You find kids nowadays to be smarter, quicker and more alert than we were during our childhood. Well the reason to this lies in the second line of the article itself. They are the Generation Z, a generation of kids who have been exposed to the internet, telecom, and media ever since they started uttering their first word.  They learn their ABCs in their smart classrooms, they absolutely need to watch the rhymes on the YouTube, or the DVD players while they have their lunch, dinner, or the baby meals in between, and of course, they realize how important it is to  remain connected to the rest of the world, so it takes no time for them to learn how to dial a number in the phone and don’t be fooled, the person who receives the call at the other end, is the exact same person the child has been meaning to call. Gone are the days a child would make blank calls by just blindly redialing numbers.  I am wonderstruck by the intelligence level of these kids.  But does this mean that kids are growing up way too fast and the innocence is not a long lasting factor in them? I thought a lot about it. But the answer was Negative.

Children might be growing up fast but that has nothing to do with their childlike innocence. The more I spend time with my three and a half year old niece, the more I realize they are no different than we were in our childhood. The other day I was at the hospital for some family exigency, and I noticed a unique scene. Amongst all the hustle and bustle, and all those perturbed faces, I saw a little girl aged around four standing in the middle of the lobby and singing the national anthem at the top of her voice, or so it seemed, as I could see her, straining her vocal chords as much as she could. It did not seem to bother her that she did not have any audience. On and on she went until after the fourth time; when she decided to go back to her family and sit down to rest her throat. Children surround themselves in a beautiful world of thoughts, imagination, and fun and frolic. They perceive things differently than we as adults do. They wear their heart on their sleeve, but at the same time they are forgiving, loving and they seek the same from us. For them issues do not last more than half an hour. They are bold, they speak their heart out, and they love themselves. As we grow up we start losing these quintessential qualities, and are surrounded by inhibitions, and that is where we stop growing radically, and reach a stage where we keep growing but at a decreasing rate.

So the result of all the technology, media, the world wide web, smartphones and the simple and spontaneous innocence, mixed in a jar called the child and garnished with a lot of love, gives to us the kids today. We can no more feed them the stories of the Wee Willie Winky, or the fables and ask them to do or not to do something; we have to reason with them. Make them see logic behind every new thing we teach them. Because we should realize, unlike the olden times where our only source of reference to any subject or topic was our parents and grandparents, kids nowadays have something called the internet, which answers all their questions (maybe not always in the most appropriate manner).  They are more inquisitive and less patient, and we have to be a lenient but firm friend to them to make them grow into the perfect citizens of tomorrow.

The Doe-Eyed Damsel

“There is a lot to do in life rather than zeroing in on the perfect color of crimson for a wedding trousseau”, thought Tanaya, sitting on the porch of her palatial villa, in Ballygunge Circular, one of the most posh localities in the heart of Kolkata. It was just a couple of months to go before she got married to the perfect man any girl could ever get as a life partner. Being a typical case of born with the silver spoon, Tanaya was not a typical brat, with her head in the clouds. Her parents had left no stones unturned, to turn her into the clichéd, high society diva. The convent educated, piano playing, globetrotting beautiful damsel was everything a 24 year old wanted to be, but her heart lay somewhere else. The wealth, the glitz and the glamour of her own high society life made her feel claustrophobic. “I wish I could be me!” thought Tanaya.

Later that evening, Tanaya and her family went out for dinner to Park Street, the place for the party people in Kolkata, with some of the best pubs and restaurants, in the city. They entered the Blue Fox, and ordered Chinese. “Tani…” said Mr. Basu, Tanaya’s dad and an MLA in the ruling party in the State, a well know businessman and a socialite in Kolkata, “what are you thinking of dear? Almost every time I try to talk to you, you are lost in your own world...What is the matter?” Tani, who was staring at the contenders of the table beside hers, turned to look at her dad, and with same thoughtful manner she uttered, “Do you really love me Baba?”, “Not again Tani...why do you keep asking me this, you know sweetheart, how much I…”, “ Whatever…can we order some drinks as well?” said Mrs. Basu “…and what boring music are they playing here, it would have been better if we could have been to the Manchanda’s party instead of coming here, for a so called family dinner”. Tanaya looked over at the family she was looking at all this time, just like her family, a father, mother and their teenage daughter, eating, laughing and feeling each other’s emotions without being nudged to do so. Tears started welling up her pretty eyes. After forcing the food down their throats the Basus went back to their daily lives. Mr. Basu to his office for a meeting, Mrs. Basu to her friends late night party, and the doe eyed Tanaya to the Nandan.

Nandan, the cultural capital of Kolkata, the place for art exhibitions, musical programs, Film Festivals and poetry recitals. The only place where Tanaya could connect, in the entire city’s hustle-bustle. Here people were really not bothered, about what others say or do, there were people from all walks of life, students, teachers, professionals, lovers but all with a true passion, a passion for creativity and passion to preserve the culture of this old city of Kolkata frozen in time. This was the place which rendered to Tanaya the peace that she yearned for. In this tantalizing world of opportunities, rarely do you get to do what you really wish to, but Nandan unleashed that person in every such tormented soul to come out of their trepid souls and be what they really are. Tanaya took out her handmade diary, from her jhola, and started penning down her thoughts. Her own soul and Nandan’s ambience seemed to be speaking to each other:

Life is a puzzle, pretty and fair,

Take it on and live it, everyone does dare,

Some find solace, and some despair,

But life moves on, coz it can’t stop and care.

Look into your eyes, and see what they say,

Could you win this game and be the Master of this Maze,

Or would you sit in a corner, eyes in a hollow gaze?

It may seem too much of a trouble to make,

A place in this world, with so much at stake.

Sit back and think, does it make sense,

To brood over matter and make it more dense?

Live life to the fullest coz you get it once,

Think over it, do you want to miss this chance?

Life is a gift that you earn every day,

Why not make the most of it,

In a happy and desirable way!

She read through her lines once again, and in her own words she found the answer to her questions...her questions about life and love. The answers to the despair and gloom she felt, and a whole new life unfolded in front of her. She looked up at the sky with gratitude in her heart, and alacrity in her soul to start a whole new life in a whole new way.

The Eternal Spirit of Durga Puja

The broadcast of “The Mahalaya” on the AIR during the wee hours into dawn.  The hypnotizing fragrance of the  Chhatim (Chethuang) flowers flooding the  atmosphere around us.  The breathtaking pandals of different shapes and sizes, dedicated to different themes imaginable and unimaginable. The absolutely tantalizing and unavoidable street food and the special bhog on the Ashtami. Last but not the least, the sheer happiness of wearing new clothes on all the four days of this much awaited festival of the year.  Durga Puja to me has always been a strong stimulus to all the five senses, bang on at a time. Ever since I have been a child, the idea of Maa Durga coming to earth (and I thought specifically to Kolkata) to her maternal abode and we celebrating her arrival with so much fun and frolic, was exhilarating. The streets would be flooded with people all with the sole purpose of pandal hopping and hoping that they can cover as many pandals as possible in those four to five days. Along with the new clothes came new footwear that would bring along with them unbearable foot sores, but nobody would really bother about them cause they were on a mission altogether. Hopping pandals relentlessly and eating out as much as possible.

It has been over three years that I have been staying away from Kolkata, all I could enjoy was the four days of celebrations sans the fun of shopping (which would start months in advance) and waiting for the pandals to get built to completion.  In these three years, I started feeling that I was all grown up and was growing indifferent to the hype of the Pujas. This was particularly not a pleasant feeling. In fact I felt very pensive. Slowly as the days passed by and the Puja days came closer, one day my husband suggested that we should go to Kolkata and celebrate the festival with family. This would be his first Durga Puja celebration in the Shaabiki (traditional) way, as he does not come from a Bengali background.  I was pleasantly surprised by this proposition and immediately started planning what to shop for and from where, which he took as a nod of agreement.

We reached Kolkata on Saptami. The moment we landed in Kolkata, the beautiful fragrance of Chhatim filled my lungs, like air floods in after holding your breath for too long. Moments into the city, we were fighting heavy traffic, but I was all lost in those small decorative light bulbs, making different patterns and shapes, wrapped all around small homes to big buildings and giving the effect of a city immersed in lights. Twenty minutes into the city and nostalgia was settling in me. I could not wait to start pandal hopping, eat some delicious Shorshe Chingri (Prawns in mustard curry) made by mum, and most of all my ears yearned to listen to the Dhaak Beats. Soon after we reached home, and immediately after a sumptuous dinner, we set out for some Puja special sightseeing. It was around 3 a.m.  and the streets were flooded with people. Being an old city, you get to see a lot of old buildings in Kolkata along with a number of new apartments mushrooming here and there. The lights that covered them brilliantly hid the age factor for them.  The narrow lanes were cramped with people of all ages, kids with balloons and cotton candies, teenagers taking mug shots in front of every pandal,  the elderly, looking intently into what has gone into the magnificent pandal architecture. The by lanes filled with the fast food and street food stalls, peddlars of different kinds of wares, henna tattoo artists, astrologers with green parrots in cages,  it’s an absolute hustle-bustle of activities. Pandals depicting themes like the Sistine Chapel, the Louvre, Kashmiri Shikara, made with captivating detailing amazed everyone. All this along with the ethnic rhythm of the dhaak made the ambience ethereal.  A few hours spent in admiration of the Puja and the essence made me feel much better. I was back to want I longed for.

My hubby too, was mesmerized by the lights, the fragrances, the pandals and specially by the number of people on the streets, pandal hopping at the wee hours into morning. I served as a guide to him, explaining every ritual, every sign and symbol we came across, and every conversation threw me back to the time I had first learnt about each one of them myself.  I relived all the Durga Pujas I had celebrated till date. The feeling it left in me…Inexplicable & Priceless. I realized just like the puja essence had grown into me all these years, however far I am from my city, its people, its traditions and culture, I am still strongly rooted to it. Inseparable!