While we are at it, let's practise.

One wise man once told me : don't write, talk. Being quite inept at conversations, with a history of stage fright and blunders while reading poetry or even opening my mouth in front of large gatherings of people, this was indeed a challenge. It continues to be so. When I write here, I don't pretend to talk to anyone. I don 't have a target audience, I don't have a brief. I just vomit. I do so because for me, this is coping mechanism. Or a journal of sorts, you can say. This is an album or a scrapbook, where I store certain memories, thoughts, people & lines. Sometimes, I craft. I craft after the vomit is over. Mostly, I don't. Does that make me a bad writer?

You might say I am not confident enough, you might say brevity fails me every time, you might say I can't tell a story, you might say I can't sell a product because I can't talk. 
 
Death of a salesman, or death of yet another writer, I wonder.

.........

Monday Mind Munch

I was thinking about a fleeting moment, the kind you witness when you are speeding past roads, shops & an endless throng of humanity. Just the tiniest snippet of dirty toenails, the flutter of a dupatta, maybe a giggle, or a discarded Mirinda label - the orange popping against the grey of the asphalt. It all happens so fast, and you catch a glimpse of these utterly everyday things and maybe give it some coherence in your head. 

That reminds me of Calcutta buses. Huffing and puffing, I would aim for the window seat. If I got lucky that morning, the road & its people would be mine. I would shut out the angry tussle, the sleazy stares, the endless chant of "ticket ticket ticket", the very high-pitched mashimas and meshomoshais and weave the lazy patterns only a daydreamer can. After 40 minutes, I would be at the Minto Park crossing, or on Park Street, and would run to college, with my backpack swinging to and fro.

I wonder sometimes why Calcutta is such a recurrent pattern in my life. Why do I keep revisiting every detail of my beloved city so relentlessly. I know how nostalgic I am, and how home is home, after all. But can I not move on? Can I not find that feeling of wholeness anywhere else?
Then I realise that I am trying. Trying very hard to keep the image of the city alive & throbbing in my heart. I might be anywhere else, in close contact with another city, but I never really got over home. Maybe I never will get over the lazy beautiful sleepy city. It's a poetic & platonic relationship. It's the kind of love which won't be affected by everyday nuisance and the dirty palm of routine. It's the kind of love that uplifts, inspires & comforts. 

It's a Amit - Labanya kind of love. 
 

A well-established pause & some eye-contact. There's a big voice in my head, which feeds me more often than I want, and I feel it's all rehearsed. It's a part that's being played, just a chapter cherished, for reasons unfathomable - much like everything else. For those who wander, how would you hold on - with an iron fist & starry eyes? I would have no right. 
I just try to convince that big mean voice inside my head that things happen for a reason, hold on to the best thing that has happened to you - I tell her, hey! you won't fall face-first, bum-second, into a disaster.
It's maybe, just maybe time enough, in this quarter of my life, to sit and stand and ponder and laugh belly loud, the laughter which came back to me after what seemed like an entire era. Uproot & levitate two inches from the ground. 
Who would understand? - you keep asking yourself, persuading, pleading over and over again, now running, now waiting for the monsoons, now falling into potholes of predictable plunders. 
Honestly would you embrace the idea of me now? 

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existence

this morning was slightly de-saturated, and there was a bug on the wall. A common bug, the one which comes with a home, a soft, shell type object and you can see its head poking out slowly, a rather narrow head. I stared at it for two minutes, not with love, but with a slanted sort of curiousity, and the clock ticked its way to 10:45 and I stubbed out my cigarette out, moaned at the mirror and with no particular fondness or inclination, moved on.