Somehow I have saved one or two of my ribbons. Don't you laugh at it, it has taken years for me to do it. And here at last......

Lately, I've been going through a period of suffocating emptiness. That kind of explains my regular absence in the big bad world of blogging. Fortunately, only a small set of people suffer to go through this insignificant blog. And anyway, this is not intended to make a difference to anything they do, or intend to do, or pretend to do.Smiles decay, so do frowns. The hint of a distant past remains, though. Inside the freezing indifference lies the deserts of vast eternity. Its blazing chariot almost breathes down your back; you could feel the sparks of contempt flying out. Yet, there lingers a maddening urge to taste the raindrops, blue and grey and cold.

'Marvell'-ous, won't you say?

Gaanola, my nemesis

[This is a direct copy-paste from the Kabir Suman community in ORKUT. Thus the reference of a "community" in its first line]

Much like the aura of Kabir Suman, and dare I say, of this community, “Gaanola” remains an album of little ease and strange delight.

A keen-eyed troubadour, Suman absorbed and refined the poisons of urban alienation by reaching out for the next person. At the same time, he inculcated, from himself, the anti-bodies of his impending destiny. Like no other song-maker of Bengali songdom in the nineties, he was at the center of the centre of his time.

The fact, these songs are something like a set of convergent mappings for the past master’s volumes, as well as new ethos, proving beyond point the historical importance of the album. The open-ended sequence of “Ey chawaar rong naao, tumi/ naa pawaar rong naao, tumi/ aagamir rong naao, tumi” describes the frantic wonder of an adolescent soul, caught in the webs of myriad desire, as well as of the world-weary creases of a middle-aged mind.

The music evokes a world of our very own. Raindrops, bleary and bright traffic lights, fireflies in the nooks of deserted vision, clouds hovering over a city that resembles the cactus land, the pang of being severed from the whole, and quite in contrast, the defiance of being free from the workings of our mechanised surroundings.

The opening track almost toils the lyrics into your head with burning drumbeats. “Tomaar aamar jawto chetonaa melaatei hobey ei sheemantey” speaks of an animal conviction, with such force, that all our past and present get branded by a searing future….”aaguney purey gechhey mohaakaash”! It seems a journey endowed with tanks-machine guns-fighter planes and wonder of wonders, with violin-flute and raucous harmonicas as well. A timeless song out of a very very good poem, Suman touches the tip of sublime artistry and craftsmanship, with the high note in “behaala- guitar-bnaashi-harmonica niye, shudhu tomaari, tomaari dorgoraay priyotawmaa”. That precise moment, even the war-trenches of our bloody existence blooms into spotless hyacinths.

The journey continues, however. Beautiful moments run themselves out, they remain in the realm of half light and half shadows. But there is not just heartbreak here, there is also a tenacious clinging to love’s promises, and the strangest and most seductive surprises baffle us in the form of uncertain teardrops...”Dekhbey feraari kono smriti-i knaadabey”. There is a strange melancholy that runs through the core of intense longing. Even nature seems to compliment this apprehension, there is no escape from it unless the personal view of world becomes a charade of lonely characters in unison:

“Brishti Jekhaaney tomaar chokher jawley
Onnyo karur du:khher kawtha bawley
Shei khaaney hobey dyakha
Tomaar shongey eka!”


Not only dark and grim, the journey is also full of humorous anecdotes. In “Dhoraa jaak aaj robibar”, the meaning and dimension of freedom are discussed with deadpan delivery, the dark note of stark reality returns at the end, though. “Brigade ey Meeting” is another song of this kind which again uses images to construct a satirical picture of our politicised reality. Blues-tinged “Tomaar kawthaar rong ki laal” is another master-piece of a totally different genre, it celebrates the ubiquitous identities of self and love, and ends where the rendezvous of longing and rebellion melts into a sudden realisation of our rainbow race.

“Shara raat jwolechhey nibir”….I can’t write anything about. There are things I treasure like an over-jealous child. It belongs to that category. Period.

Fourteen years later, Worlds have gone wrong, empires have changed hands. This album still remains the storm's eye, as well as the shelter from it, for many of us. There lies the mystique of “Gaanola”, holding together the threadbare present and acute asymmetry, its natural offshoot.

My Coffee, mine alone.

This is something different. A cup of coffee, I mean. It reminds me of some funny things. Funny, did I say?

Take that trump for instance. Smiling at me from the wall. I can’t escape the sadness of his eyes. They are almost like the stretch of a lonely ocean, beneath the contempt of regular sunshine. Shades within our little box, part of our everyday grass and concrete. That’s my coffee, thank you.

See that dirty lane, just between the two roads? That’s desolation row for many of us. It’s somewhere in the middle of deliberate choice-domains, a zone of counter-culture that defies the two-faced basilisk of everyday routine. At times, I try to steal a glance of a lonely violin-player, and his shadow, to attune myself to the orchestra of light and darkness. That’s coffee for me, you know.

A little girl on her granny’s lap. Pearldrops. Trains and their glaring lights piercing the vision of innocence. She is nowhere to be found among the garbage and the flowers, even after all these years of randomness. Still, how I wish to travel blind! The sun pours down like honey, and I wish I could stir it into my cup of coffee. It’s been my longing for aeons.

"There's no success like failure"

Utopia is something out of our reality, yet not very far from the boundaries of possible interaction. It is actually the dream that either co-exists with everyday reality, or perceived as the signifier of our future, in terms of probability. It is the plane within our realisation of the conditions of life, as well as social aspiration. Even at its most complex and varied form, all is not one, as Elizabethans would have said.

Talking of utopia, it is interesting to note the class character and history of the same in Bengali culture. From being one of the many cultural identities in Middle Ages, gradual influence of colonisation and its after-effect, the nature of utopia has, indeed, passed through a pattern of striking designs. It would be of great interest to note the changes it has made to the utopian concept. Unfortunately, I have not come across any major work of this kind, and being a non-scholar does not help. It would be best if I try my best from the view-point of a failed journalist. Of course, with my due reverence to the holiest of scholars.

As I am writing this, my famed indolence is catching up with my typing speed, this is going to be another failure in the handbook of the failed journalist.

Some things do not change, just like the predictable anti-climax of my zigzag existence!

See you later.

It lured me into dreams
I couldn’t tell it from the shadows
On your painted wall-paper.

I followed my fear
Into the den of magic neons
Burning bright beside the bed.

There’s a princess
And six apples inside the casket,
Tired looking and pale.

Even without my senses
I could have sworn on
Lifelessness of aeons before my time.

There I closed my eyes
With you sharpening against my vigil
And a weary princess staring hard
At the casket, before the sun is out.

..............

Jonmechhi aageo aami, jawkhon tumi Padmabati
kawbekaar pnuthir sholok tomaar mawtoi osrumoti.

Osrur ekti phnotaay jonmo aamar, aamar mawron
nirobey jaatishmor er golpo bawlaa tomaar dhoron;
jhorechho aageo awnek, brishti hoye aabar jhawro,
ey kemon kaanna tumi aamay jokhon aador kawro!

-Kabir Suman

It will be all for today.

Remember?

Freedom is a word I rarely utter without thinking of her…..

It’s almost one of those clichéd little stories you come across every now and then. A story about me and my loss of liberty, a story about me and your loss of liberty, a story about you and my loss of liberty, a story about us and our loss of liberty.

The piper at the gate of dawn shrieks like a banshee, out of some infamous folklore. You took away my flute, just as someone had taken away yours. We both now live inside the rusty cage of golden inhibitions. Amiable, ain’t it? Only if we could play our flutes like we did before….

All in all, it’s just another brick in the wall.

A methodological take on the Slumdog movie

Any form of art is an expression of subterranean human effort. You may not feel the rigour while observing it and yet it is there, almost like a tribute to the tremendous power of the human mind. However one might try to conceal the effort, it shows. Art and its aesthetic appeal always suffer from the danger of foppery. This is precisely why the tale of a slumdog fails to reach the benchmark of mediocrity, even when it promises to tie a knot between surreal drama and an otherwise biting reality.

Mediocre cinema we grew up with. It is not of that realm. Strangely enough, it is not from the top drawer either. It tried to take the middle road, one of the most interesting vistas of India explored by stalwarts like Tapan Sinha, Basu Bhattacharya, Gulzar and others. In taking that path, it fails to keep up the rhythm of storytelling and confuses between the genre of real fantasy and fantastic reality. While it uses up the glitz of Bollywood to tone up the movie, in trying to adjust the shades it forgets to make a salutary notation to the touch of entertainment. Moreover, it never tries to humanise poverty to get rid of its grotesque Bollywoodness. No matter how unique the selling point has become, because of this dichotomy, or because how this dichotomy provokes the unique selling point of the movie, the poverty-porn tag is going to haunt it for quite sometime.

Let's talk about the last kiss [of course, it’s the first one too] with an ear-splitting background score. Even within the probable boundaries of magic reality, the kiss looks mawkish. The genre of magic reality transcends the boundary of its own probabilistic domain because of this mawkish outcry of directorial emotion, and the last kiss turned into the act of last rite for the movie itself. It became a hotchpotch of so many stylistic attempts at one go. Apart from some non-profit-organisation-boardroom-humour and cheap imitations of shanty-town-dialect [In Hindi of course; they usually speak idiomatic English, with ridiculous accents, bless magic reality!!!], this movie fails to touch the tip of real possibility.

It is only a concoction of confused genres.

Being or Nothingness?

We have another new year. Another set of days and nights, straight and flat. We have enough sunshine to bask ourselves in cozily. We are supposed to be free. Freedom is said to be our birth-right. It’s fine to be alive, as Tolstoy had said in one of his less pious efforts.

Assuming, we are free to do anything and everything, or that we live under the aegis of absolute freedom, a sudden glitch cracks under the surface. True to the concept of absolute freedom, a unit of mankind clashes with the whole of it. Other people, even your most loved ones use their sense of freedom, to make you captive of it. Of course, some of them want to limit you with open adversity, and the order of oppression takes the form of a primeval war.

The trouble begins amicably. Humane emotions, and their apparent expressions, may deceive you into the abyss of captivity. Remember, Roger Waters whining out his soul to one of Pink Floyd’s rare acoustic ballads? Yes, love and affection can make you feel giddy one moment, and at the very next it’s possible to find yourself into the intrigue yet again with frayed sense of liberty. The beautiful vision of a flaming horizon may actually be the glossiest cover for a blue void. Freedom, the ever-unbalanced coin of human existence, has its other side painted in bleak uncertainty. It may well have been a philosophical stunt!

There’s something in the logic, we all know and simultaneously deny. So it seems that the beautiful world that lies before us like a land of dreams is actually the cactus land of biblical prophecy. What is there to embrace then, what is the meaning of the absurd? I wonder. And I wonder.

Perhaps the absurd is just the part and parcel of our being. There is no escaping from it. There never was. We try to bamboozle ourselves with lovely illusions. Matthew Arnold, that stiff-collared poet, pleaded his love to remain true. That was his idea of salvation, his way of hankering after a diversion from the absurd. And, yet, even after taking the probable pitfalls of this ancient approach within the reach of our wisdom, we just cannot rule out sincerity, its resident ghost. True, there might not be any objective meaning of life, and that truth twists between war and peace like some reeling hallucination. Still there is something that may help us to familiarise the absurd as a part of ourselves. If love becomes one man’s idea of fighting the abstraction of his existence, it might not turn into a feasible notion, but it certainly can be a personal creed for the ultimate celebration of the trivial!

And it might become one’s incentive to live on, and counter the flummoxed reality. Soft now, here comes fair Ophelia, and objectivity be damned. The solution lies within the choice-basket of a set of alternative vectors. We are what we choose to be most of the time.

Ask Mrs Rowling for the rest of it.