I don't know how I'm feeling. It sounds terribly vague, and vague it is.

Flesh and blood have turned into a pale shadow of the contour. I don't know for sure, if I've ever felt like this. We do go round and round the prickly pears, at five-O-clock in the morning.

Amazing, we still exist.

Pinkish haze. All over the dark sky, as if the stars are celebrating an early christmas.

Across the Universe

One or two pieces of a lost universe. Smatterings of what could have been. Paper cups. Hazy outlines of a John Lenon poster. Smiles, yellow, rusty, and decaying.

From nowhere, the baritone of Suman Chatterjee, my Suman Chatterjee, streams in through the shutters. 

Nothing's gonna change my world...nothing's gonna change my world......

There’s a wrapper, where the chocolate was.

There’s a railroad somewhere beyond the skyline of this city. And tunnels. There are tunnels within the tunnels. Smoky and hazy and blurred. Like the corner of her ladyship’s mouth. The trains, do they explore the wonderland of your magic-acres?

What is love but a whiff of death in the land of lotus-eating voyeurs! People change streets only to find hidden streets, changes cancel out to make room for prodigal morality. Metal towers, grim and dark and foreboding. They cast the coldest stares to the hint of light beneath their presence. Does the sound of distant thunders resemble your whispering in my ears?

Much has been said and done. Over and over again. Each fragment of our incomplete thoughts, they belong to the charade of half-remembered faces and names. Just when the hue of the evening sky touches the tip of our collective iceberg, we notice, with a start, that summer leaves have just turned to the colour of your hair……

There’s a feather, where the pebble was.

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.