Its again the time of the year for which i used to wait patiently,, with the school exams winding up a day or two ahead of July end... my birthday provided a perfect time for family outings, cake cuttings and yes receiving gifts.
I was in 3rd yr of my BSc, when Mumbai was wrecked by the serial bomb blasts in the local trains.. two of our college juniors got injured in the terrorist attack and of them passed away later that month ,, and the day happened to be my 21st bday.
Its been 3 yrs since,.. and today on my bday eve , i do not feel any excitement or anticipation.. it wasnt so bad last yr i guess when i had new found love in my life or the year before that when i was at home for my bday after 3 yrs..
whenever i try to plan for my bday.. the boy's face surfaces in my mind and i just cant help feel sad for his parents.. he was their only child.. he belonged to a very humble family and both his parents worked hard to get him thru school and then college.. it was only in the month of july that fateful year that his dad got him the 1st class railway pass to ease his commutation to and fro from college during rush hour. the bombs were planted only in the 1st class compartments of the trains...
He was a brilliant student too... VIKRANT though you perhaps never knew me,,, you have influenced my life in an inexplicable way!!
You made me realise what gifts lay at my disposable bestowed upon me by Life... i learnt to be thankful for little joys that i experienced..for the loving family that i have.. a doting sis... and an understanding life partner,,
Celebrating this day would always be painful,, for i cant possibly forget the pain and shock i got when i heard abt your premature demise,, it left me shattered ,, i cried ,, dunno if it was bcoz u could not pull through or bcoz it was the day you chose to give up your battle for life...or i cried for your parents who had lost their only child, their hopes pinned on you,, you were their bright future,,, you were perhaps the answers to their prayers ,, and you were their escape from a life of compromises and want.
Every year I remember the hours which followed after the news was broken to me, quite innocently by a friend, whereas my hostelites tried their best to keep the news from me.. the way each of us braved ourselves when we met at the Microlab on monday and talked about you, your parents , on the work which had to be done for u,, of the life that lay ahead.. which we had to make meaningful .. as your departure from the world suddenly had awaken us from our self imposed slumber of ignorance.
N yet,, my loved ones, my friends , they insist that i do celebrate my bday,, they reason with me,,, some quite eloquently,, others with great sagacity,, sometimes i comply with their wishes to make them happy... yes i have observed my bday for last 3 yrs.. I have gone out for dinners... invited people over meals,, bought myself cherished gifts,, thanked people for their wishes....and even felt happy and yet there is an emptiness somewhere,,,
Tomorrow again , i have to give in to my friends' request as they want to have a nice time as many memebers of the lab who were doing their summer projects here would be leaving and my bday wil provide them with an excuse to revel admist their busy schedule..
Its a girl 's apology to you who was born, years ago, on the day you chose to end your truce with life....
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Sunday, July 18, 2010
is it compromised fidelity?
I have been wondering just where should we draw the line? Who decides whats acceptable and what's not? When we enter into a relationship we expect the other person to remain faithful to us. If we are melodramatic we also expect our better halves to shower praises on us and if they happen to even as to look at another creature of the fairer sex we go hysterical!!
So does looking at random people on the streets and appreciating them is also infidelity? Probably not. At least i dont think so.
But what would you call this? A girl ( for the convenience of guys to imagine) is in a relationship for 2 years. She is quite a happy person and both of them dote on each other. Yet the girl harbours this secret cravings to know what her previous crushes are upto. As far is known through various sources {read gossip-mongers} she never had any serious flings upto now,, she just had been infatuated with them. Now when everybody thought that she n her boyfriend makes a lovely adorable couple , this rather anxiety of hers has made tongues waggling all over her group of friends,
Now is this cheating ? She tries to talk to those guys over the internet, or other social networking sites,, fortunately none of her crushes are in the same city as hers. Well is she being infidel to her present boyfriend?
or will this not be called cheating if her boyfriend is aware that she is still friends with people she had feelings for?
We have seen in Bollywood movies : once the person , generally the hero, has confessed his sins ,he is forgiven -coz our heroines are so tolerable and enduring.
Or does time really heal everything??
when the confession comes years after the one night stands or stranded nights actually took place and the partners in crime are no longer together, is it easier to forgive [considering again that the spouse is again a magnanimous person]
Perhaps its the other way around,, years after the confession ,, feelings mellow down ,,, the rage is no longer scrapping the wound and above all love prevails and hot tears are shed and the cheat is taken back.
so what is infidelity? Is cheating once pardonable but not if you slip again and again? Is it possible to forgive the person who cheated on yhou just because many winters have passed since that took place and your spouse begs for forgiveness? HOw sorry is he or she ? Does that help anything?
To imagine a third person when your sharing most intimate moments .. is it not cheating too? Here the other person never knows what is going on in his/ her partners mind? Is he / she moaning from your lovemaking or is he/ she craving for the phantoms in their mind?
So coming back to our friend : is she cheating on her boyfriend if she desires to talk to people who once set her heart aflutter? N will it not be cheating to have desires to talk to them in the light of her boyfriend knowing about it?
So again back to square one? whats infidelity ? where should one draw the line?
Whats acceptable ? whats intolerable? WHATS UNFORGIVABLE?
So does looking at random people on the streets and appreciating them is also infidelity? Probably not. At least i dont think so.
But what would you call this? A girl ( for the convenience of guys to imagine) is in a relationship for 2 years. She is quite a happy person and both of them dote on each other. Yet the girl harbours this secret cravings to know what her previous crushes are upto. As far is known through various sources {read gossip-mongers} she never had any serious flings upto now,, she just had been infatuated with them. Now when everybody thought that she n her boyfriend makes a lovely adorable couple , this rather anxiety of hers has made tongues waggling all over her group of friends,
Now is this cheating ? She tries to talk to those guys over the internet, or other social networking sites,, fortunately none of her crushes are in the same city as hers. Well is she being infidel to her present boyfriend?
or will this not be called cheating if her boyfriend is aware that she is still friends with people she had feelings for?
We have seen in Bollywood movies : once the person , generally the hero, has confessed his sins ,he is forgiven -coz our heroines are so tolerable and enduring.
Or does time really heal everything??
when the confession comes years after the one night stands or stranded nights actually took place and the partners in crime are no longer together, is it easier to forgive [considering again that the spouse is again a magnanimous person]
Perhaps its the other way around,, years after the confession ,, feelings mellow down ,,, the rage is no longer scrapping the wound and above all love prevails and hot tears are shed and the cheat is taken back.
so what is infidelity? Is cheating once pardonable but not if you slip again and again? Is it possible to forgive the person who cheated on yhou just because many winters have passed since that took place and your spouse begs for forgiveness? HOw sorry is he or she ? Does that help anything?
To imagine a third person when your sharing most intimate moments .. is it not cheating too? Here the other person never knows what is going on in his/ her partners mind? Is he / she moaning from your lovemaking or is he/ she craving for the phantoms in their mind?
So coming back to our friend : is she cheating on her boyfriend if she desires to talk to people who once set her heart aflutter? N will it not be cheating to have desires to talk to them in the light of her boyfriend knowing about it?
So again back to square one? whats infidelity ? where should one draw the line?
Whats acceptable ? whats intolerable? WHATS UNFORGIVABLE?
Friday, June 4, 2010
Lost in your own Country ?
Gone are the songs of unified India. Also gone are the ethnicity of aregion.Nowdaysif you hail from Gujrat, it need not imply that you are a gujrathi. Further, we identify oursleves better with the place we have been brought up or did our studies rather than our ancestral rootings. So a person who stayed in Delhi most of his life would prefer to be referred to as a Delhiite rather than a Jaipurian from where his forefathers may have migrated in search of greener and healtheir pastures :)
Hailing from a different region as opposed to one's own community may lead to many interesting situations and for me it is the unbiased way of learning what people really think about you n the place you come from , your cultural n religious customs and so on.
Very soon I feel , we may feel the need of a second citizenship though I wish not to enter into such controversial thoughts.I however , sometimes land myself in a quandary when someone enquires of me "where are you from?". Forget that it irritates me to no end for reasons which even I cant fathom, I really wonder what to answer.
I take few seconds to judge why the person is asking me that question. If he is interested in my background I say Jamshedpur which is my hometown. If the person is from my professional acquainatance, he would mostly be interested from the place or university from which I acquired my last degree. So accordingly I intimidate them about my academic profile :))
So I , belonging to Jamshedpur(Jsr) but born in Kolkata , did my schooling in Jsr but did my grads in Mumbai, Masters in Kolkata and now pursuing doctoral studies in Bangalore its quite an identity crisis. people find it difficult to guess that I am a bong except for some faint hint from my name and for some the chubby cheeks and the rosogolla frame helps to categorise myself in the Bong community. Thankfully I dont carry any accent though the last few months in Bangalore has already inculcated in me what I like to refer to as the 'tamarind accent'.
Hailing from a different region as opposed to one's own community may lead to many interesting situations and for me it is the unbiased way of learning what people really think about you n the place you come from , your cultural n religious customs and so on.
Very soon I feel , we may feel the need of a second citizenship though I wish not to enter into such controversial thoughts.I however , sometimes land myself in a quandary when someone enquires of me "where are you from?". Forget that it irritates me to no end for reasons which even I cant fathom, I really wonder what to answer.
I take few seconds to judge why the person is asking me that question. If he is interested in my background I say Jamshedpur which is my hometown. If the person is from my professional acquainatance, he would mostly be interested from the place or university from which I acquired my last degree. So accordingly I intimidate them about my academic profile :))
So I , belonging to Jamshedpur(Jsr) but born in Kolkata , did my schooling in Jsr but did my grads in Mumbai, Masters in Kolkata and now pursuing doctoral studies in Bangalore its quite an identity crisis. people find it difficult to guess that I am a bong except for some faint hint from my name and for some the chubby cheeks and the rosogolla frame helps to categorise myself in the Bong community. Thankfully I dont carry any accent though the last few months in Bangalore has already inculcated in me what I like to refer to as the 'tamarind accent'.
Saturday, May 29, 2010
the route to my home becomes perilous
The Great Britain soared to great heights with Industrial Revolution and since then industries have laid foundations to great cities. Rivers were still important, like all previous civilizations. A similar transformation took place in an obscure village of Sakchi, lying in the south of erstwhile Bihar. In the mid 1800s Jamshedji Tata took pioneering steps to build the sixth largest steel company of the world, and the place chosen was this village Sakchi. After the establishment of the Tata Iron & Steel Company [TISCO] in 1907, with Jamshedji's son , JRD TATA as all in all of TISCO, Sakchi got rechristened as Jamshedpur and the Kalimati railway station as Tatanagar.
The village grew and prospered and today is counted as one of the cleanest city in India with drinking water plants at par with international standards of purification. Jamshedpur became an important city in the east and its prosperity brought people from different parts of the country. I grew up in such a secular society without any discrimination. It was a matter of pride to know many languages and women took great interest to learn the diverse cuisines from their neighbours , friends who may belong to a different community. We would visit each other places during festivals and even at school it was so important to know the different regions of India, our festivals, the traditional attires of the ethnic groups, their cuisines, their music and culture.
It never occur to me in my growing years that i should only know about Bengali culture and infact it was very late in life when I actually spent two years in Kolkata for my studies that I revisited my roots. I , being brought up outside West Bengal , would be called probasi and yes, I did think I would always remain an outsider in Bengal. I thought my lack of impeccable bangla, or ignorance of so many classic novels by the great writers of Bengal or the popular Bangla Band songs would come in the way of me being accepted in Kolkata. My stay in Kolkata proved to be opposite.
Though I hated the rush in the local trains and the perennial fear of being molested or robbed in trains, buses, etc , the ultra humid weather and thoroughly despised the laziness of the employees at the University, banks, I had two years of absolute fun. Those two years meant a lot in my life. I was not only knowing Kolkata , a city I had been visting since childhood, but also I was reconnecting with Bangla and the bengali culture. The years in Kolkata also reconfirmed my belief that you cannot shun a person or the community he belongs to on your prejudice. We had students from all over India and we all became such thick friends that everyone at the University spoke about our friendship and the camaraderie.
It was during these two years that I took several visits to home which I could not do during mt graduation days in Mumbai. Jamshedpur in 250 kms from Howrah and takes about 4- 4.5hrs by train. I had few friends in IIT KGP and hence we would plan to travel together specially during vacations. On the way we would cross several small stations and it was my childhood hobby to try to remember the names of the station in their order of succession. Jhargram follows Kharagpur while travelling from Howrah to Tatanagar. This also happened to be the native village of one of our closest family friends, with whose children mean more to me than my own kith and kin. We would seldom fail to treat our sweet tooths with the misthi from vendors of Jhargram.
Now, Jhargram has become a nodal center of Naxalites and the route to Tatanagar from Howrah is life threatening. Few days back, a Mumbai bound train was derailed near Sardia , near Jhargram at the middle of night. This was not the 1st or the last incident to happen there. Over the years the Naxals have expressed their chagrin by uprooting railway lines along this stretch, plundering banks, abducting police officials and God knows what more. I certainly dont.
I fail to understand why they want to kill innocent people. Perhaps their people have suffered, they have been subjected to atrocities at the hands of public officers. They have been denied basic needs of life and their honour has been trampled under the feet of bureaucracy but WHY KILL THE INNOCENT PEOPLE?
WHAT HAD THOSE PASSENGERS TRAVELLING BY THE FATEFUL TRAIN GOT TO DO WITH THEIR SUFFERINGS???? SOME MAY HAVE BEEN THE SOLE BREAD- WINNER OF THEIR FAMILIES, SOME MAY HAVE BEEN TAKING THE JOURNEY TO REUNITE WITH THEIR FAMILIES, OTHERS WITH THEIR HOPEFUL EYES MAY HAVE LOOKED FOR A BETTER LIVELIHOOD THERE, SOME MAY HAVE BEEN JUST STUDENTS IN PURSUIT OF THEIR CAREERS AND STILL SOME YOUNG BUDS HAD PERHAPS JUST ENTERED THE WORLD.
Why kill them? Why take the ill wishes of survivors of the victims or the victims themselves. If getting attention is the only intention, stop the train , vacate it and then blow it up! The fight is against the government not your fellow human beings.......
I never thought the route to mmy own home would be laced with blood. I didnt know i had to travel a stretch of path strewn with corpses to reach out to my parents. I didnt know my sister has to travel the dangerous route to pursue higher studies.. or that my friends would shun to come over to my place for the fear of their lives. My parents and so many thousands of them spend sleepless nights when their wards are travelling either to reach home or to leave for work from home. WHat have they done to deserve all this.
People have suffered at the hands of tyranny since centuries and they have fought oppression, revolutionized the world and changed history too. there are ways to show your sufferings , there are ways to avenge yourselves but please spare the innocents.
Do not kill more innocent lives in retaliation to the death of your loved ones. One life is as precious as the other. This bloodshed will have ominous effects on everybody. Do not instill feelings of hatred in the minds of people who are not involved in your battle.
Perhaps nobody will read this and yet its my request to anybody who does... Think before you kill an innocent life ... there is someone waiting for them at home. I want to go home too, please do not hinder the path with such gruesome acts against humanity.
Please!
The village grew and prospered and today is counted as one of the cleanest city in India with drinking water plants at par with international standards of purification. Jamshedpur became an important city in the east and its prosperity brought people from different parts of the country. I grew up in such a secular society without any discrimination. It was a matter of pride to know many languages and women took great interest to learn the diverse cuisines from their neighbours , friends who may belong to a different community. We would visit each other places during festivals and even at school it was so important to know the different regions of India, our festivals, the traditional attires of the ethnic groups, their cuisines, their music and culture.
It never occur to me in my growing years that i should only know about Bengali culture and infact it was very late in life when I actually spent two years in Kolkata for my studies that I revisited my roots. I , being brought up outside West Bengal , would be called probasi and yes, I did think I would always remain an outsider in Bengal. I thought my lack of impeccable bangla, or ignorance of so many classic novels by the great writers of Bengal or the popular Bangla Band songs would come in the way of me being accepted in Kolkata. My stay in Kolkata proved to be opposite.
Though I hated the rush in the local trains and the perennial fear of being molested or robbed in trains, buses, etc , the ultra humid weather and thoroughly despised the laziness of the employees at the University, banks, I had two years of absolute fun. Those two years meant a lot in my life. I was not only knowing Kolkata , a city I had been visting since childhood, but also I was reconnecting with Bangla and the bengali culture. The years in Kolkata also reconfirmed my belief that you cannot shun a person or the community he belongs to on your prejudice. We had students from all over India and we all became such thick friends that everyone at the University spoke about our friendship and the camaraderie.
It was during these two years that I took several visits to home which I could not do during mt graduation days in Mumbai. Jamshedpur in 250 kms from Howrah and takes about 4- 4.5hrs by train. I had few friends in IIT KGP and hence we would plan to travel together specially during vacations. On the way we would cross several small stations and it was my childhood hobby to try to remember the names of the station in their order of succession. Jhargram follows Kharagpur while travelling from Howrah to Tatanagar. This also happened to be the native village of one of our closest family friends, with whose children mean more to me than my own kith and kin. We would seldom fail to treat our sweet tooths with the misthi from vendors of Jhargram.
Now, Jhargram has become a nodal center of Naxalites and the route to Tatanagar from Howrah is life threatening. Few days back, a Mumbai bound train was derailed near Sardia , near Jhargram at the middle of night. This was not the 1st or the last incident to happen there. Over the years the Naxals have expressed their chagrin by uprooting railway lines along this stretch, plundering banks, abducting police officials and God knows what more. I certainly dont.
I fail to understand why they want to kill innocent people. Perhaps their people have suffered, they have been subjected to atrocities at the hands of public officers. They have been denied basic needs of life and their honour has been trampled under the feet of bureaucracy but WHY KILL THE INNOCENT PEOPLE?
WHAT HAD THOSE PASSENGERS TRAVELLING BY THE FATEFUL TRAIN GOT TO DO WITH THEIR SUFFERINGS???? SOME MAY HAVE BEEN THE SOLE BREAD- WINNER OF THEIR FAMILIES, SOME MAY HAVE BEEN TAKING THE JOURNEY TO REUNITE WITH THEIR FAMILIES, OTHERS WITH THEIR HOPEFUL EYES MAY HAVE LOOKED FOR A BETTER LIVELIHOOD THERE, SOME MAY HAVE BEEN JUST STUDENTS IN PURSUIT OF THEIR CAREERS AND STILL SOME YOUNG BUDS HAD PERHAPS JUST ENTERED THE WORLD.
Why kill them? Why take the ill wishes of survivors of the victims or the victims themselves. If getting attention is the only intention, stop the train , vacate it and then blow it up! The fight is against the government not your fellow human beings.......
I never thought the route to mmy own home would be laced with blood. I didnt know i had to travel a stretch of path strewn with corpses to reach out to my parents. I didnt know my sister has to travel the dangerous route to pursue higher studies.. or that my friends would shun to come over to my place for the fear of their lives. My parents and so many thousands of them spend sleepless nights when their wards are travelling either to reach home or to leave for work from home. WHat have they done to deserve all this.
People have suffered at the hands of tyranny since centuries and they have fought oppression, revolutionized the world and changed history too. there are ways to show your sufferings , there are ways to avenge yourselves but please spare the innocents.
Do not kill more innocent lives in retaliation to the death of your loved ones. One life is as precious as the other. This bloodshed will have ominous effects on everybody. Do not instill feelings of hatred in the minds of people who are not involved in your battle.
Perhaps nobody will read this and yet its my request to anybody who does... Think before you kill an innocent life ... there is someone waiting for them at home. I want to go home too, please do not hinder the path with such gruesome acts against humanity.
Please!
Saturday, May 1, 2010
I fell in love with Him again
There are at times in a relationship that you reflect back and ponder what made u say yes when you did . More often than not you are absolutely left aghast as you cannot find a single reason that seems logical to you at that time. Past few months have been tiring for both of us... more for me than him. I constantly felt that the spark has died out and that I no longer love him with the same intensity as before. I even felt I am in love with few random men, whom I either happen to know or just caught a glimpse of them across the dinner table. It was so weird, I suffered from compunctions and yet nothing would relieve me of my chagrin.
At these times, he was very patient , always trying to reason out with me, asking me to be calm and assured me that I still love him.
I always wanted to watch him in action at the hockey ground, after all , he was a former state level player. And today, after 2 years,2months and 2 days later I did see him. It was a match between intra instituitional teams but when i saw him, I thought it was an important match. Not wanting to distract him,not that he would have spotted me with spotted me with the gleaming floddlights. My eyes followed him everywhere.. his every move, the way he held his hockey stick, the slight tilt of his head, his long lean legs, I took it all in . Standing between the trees, I saw him frustrate the efforts of the opponents. He delivered few neat sweeps to pass the ball , though I dont know much about hockey, he did seem to put in a lot of effort and often I would hear his name being screamed out from the field below "Kumar". What an exhiliarating experience it was..
GOD!!! I fell in love again with him,, I felt like the shy schoolgirl that i was, surreptiously catching glimpses of the school champion ,.. only now am no longer a school girl and my eyes were absorbing the very Man, who taught me the meaning of love and continues to do so.
There are bitter moments in every relationships but it is these brief moments of unexpected ecstacy that makes you believe that LOVE IS A WONDERFUL THING and its more wonderful to know that out there ..someone is waiting just for you.
We have been through a lot in the past 2 years and there had been innumerable times when I thought that this relayionship cannot last any longer... and yet after today, and it has happened many times in the past too, I feel I can never ever be complete without Him.
thank you Da, for being with me ,,,
At these times, he was very patient , always trying to reason out with me, asking me to be calm and assured me that I still love him.
I always wanted to watch him in action at the hockey ground, after all , he was a former state level player. And today, after 2 years,2months and 2 days later I did see him. It was a match between intra instituitional teams but when i saw him, I thought it was an important match. Not wanting to distract him,not that he would have spotted me with spotted me with the gleaming floddlights. My eyes followed him everywhere.. his every move, the way he held his hockey stick, the slight tilt of his head, his long lean legs, I took it all in . Standing between the trees, I saw him frustrate the efforts of the opponents. He delivered few neat sweeps to pass the ball , though I dont know much about hockey, he did seem to put in a lot of effort and often I would hear his name being screamed out from the field below "Kumar". What an exhiliarating experience it was..
GOD!!! I fell in love again with him,, I felt like the shy schoolgirl that i was, surreptiously catching glimpses of the school champion ,.. only now am no longer a school girl and my eyes were absorbing the very Man, who taught me the meaning of love and continues to do so.
There are bitter moments in every relationships but it is these brief moments of unexpected ecstacy that makes you believe that LOVE IS A WONDERFUL THING and its more wonderful to know that out there ..someone is waiting just for you.
We have been through a lot in the past 2 years and there had been innumerable times when I thought that this relayionship cannot last any longer... and yet after today, and it has happened many times in the past too, I feel I can never ever be complete without Him.
thank you Da, for being with me ,,,
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