Morning,Computer.

Slowly but surely this has become a part of my daily reading:

http://morning.computer/

I like that there is a famous writer who cannot but help write stuff. All the time. And he has a morning musing page which he just updates for himself.

This makes me want to do things everytime I read it. I could update a blog every day. Draw something. Or write something. But no.

I live in a house where three people exist, where only two at a time talk to each other and the other one is shut in the room. We live like refugees. And the token effort made to remedy the refugee-like situation on my part is buy a book shelf and take a week to assemble it and finally put it up, unloading two cartons of books.

Its wobbly and wonky and I have a deeply unsettling sensation that it might come toppling down in the middle of the night.

Thoughts on the Charlie Hebdo killing

This is one of the rare moments I find myself at a different pole in terms of opinion than the most intelligent of people whom I look up to. It almost looks like we live on two different continents... oh wait.
I really love Stephen Fry. He is brilliant and erudite and logical and well exposed to the world. At least that's how he appears to an audience like me. He is so much of these things that I forget that he is, after everything is said and done, a white man, who conveniently lives in a first world country, where even being gay, isn't as difficult as being gay in any south east asian country. Then he says something like this:

http://www.stephenfry.com/2015/01/10/you-must-mock/

and I am immediately made aware of the differences.

Same goes for Neil Gaiman. He is perhaps one of my most favorite authors of all time. But how he is going on on his twitter feed is seriously making me aware that how much of a first world advantaged person he really is.

I do not doubt for a moment that these two men are not geniuses or for that matter very very kind and thoughtful men. They are all these things, but they are all these things in the first world.

The thing that they don't seem to consider is that it is a privilege of only a few, the fact that one can choose to believe in the existance of a God or a higher being and choose not to be religious. Most of our realities deal with the fact that we, here, are almost born into a religion and are forced to deal with it on a daily basis for the entirety of our lives, weather we want to or not. In fact, the government has made it mandatory. From the time you are born, right through the times you would need anything official done, be it examinations, taxes or for that matter anything that would have you filling a form, you are required to be a person of religion. And this is in India, where we pride ourselves in having a "secular" democratic frame work. Imagine living in a country which is not even trying to play act at being secular in its political framework?

This brings me to what I thought about the nature of religion and religious practice in the east and how it differs so much in the west. The western religion is not a intrinsic part of a mans life in the west. It is a subsidiary. Their culture has never been spun from the cloth of religion and hence religion has never managed to permeate the very fabric of people's lives there.

More often than not, religion in the east is almost less religion and more culture and lifestyle. People's ways and mannerisms are crafted by religion. How they talk, eat, sleep, where clothes, how they live is defined by religion. I think its fundamentally impossible for western people to understand how the other half live and think.
And this is what is behind the root of what these great men mentioned above have said:

#JeSuisCharlie

Hence they fail to understand how Charlie Hebdo's systematic vilification and satire of anything Islamic or some people who are not western and white,
Because we can never be charlie. We cannot think about the right to free speech is in danger and this a bigger catastrophe, than say, the recent Boko Haram massacre. Because we have never known anything other than a tenuous version of free speech. Given to us one day, and the next day you are in jail.

I think both Mr Gaiman and Mr Fry has been expressing opinions. And that is a first world problem.

There are so many things to care about on this planet. I sometimes feel that my head will burst for trying to remember to care about things. Its like I've got a Damocles sword hanging over my head at all times: If you don't care about the children in Africa, you are not human and your human license will be revoked; If you don't care about the disappearing dolphins, your human license will be revoked and you will be the worst excuse for a human that can be; If you can't remember that farmers are dying right at this moment/the Narmada is drying up and villagers are being displaced all the time, you are not a caring and well rounded individual.
The thing is that I'd like to think that I'm a caring and human as anyone can be. But I don't think its humanly possible to be agitated and thinking about things to agitate about all the time. Its just not humanly possible. The brain does not work that way for most people. How is it possible to be so empathetic to things that you are not actually experiencing that you can howl in agony as if its happening to you? You just don't have the requisite life experiences to relate to, most of the time! At least most of us don't. You can be shocked. You can intellectually disgusted and even scared about whats being written about, in case it happens to you, but crying like its your leg's being cut off? I'm sorry I find that hard to believe.
So when I read all my social media feeds, I feel like the right scum for just being bored by everyone agitating all the time. I feel no normal sympathy for the things being agitated about even if I would have cared about it in normal circumstances. It just feels so useless. Its not even logical to rant about important things in social media which does nothing, and affects nothing.
If you wanted to do something worthwhile then do it at the playing field on which the problem is currently happening. Not on the bloody internet. Especially when the people you are agitating about definitely does not have access to the education or the technology you are using to see whats being said.

New Year Revolutions

I promise.

To be More Active.

To actively Seek and Do What I want to do.

To Draw more. To Look better.To Create regularly. To Feel Better.

Ambivalent enough to make me not feel guilty when sluicing my way through those loopholes.

Something which I thought of today, but the thought has been surfacing and drowning in my head for quite some time:

I am that girl, that friend, the colleague, who is good for some amusement, some revelry, some shock at vulgar behavior, some laughs, maybe some witty comments. Or, I'm the friend you cultivate because you think I am broken and helpless and need to be kept together and taken care of, a burden that is friendship. Some times used because I can never say no.
But when you need someone to hang out with, or tell your innermost thoughts to, or consider a romance with, someone you want to exclusively be with, its always the other girl. There is the prettier one, the one who giggles, the one who is more lady-like, more normal, less thinking, willing to talk about completely inconsequential things, who is put together, doesn't have issues, who doesn't look like a monster. The one who depends on you to do things for them, ask you questions to make you feel important, does not have an ego that makes her feel guilty when you do something inconsequential for her because she knows she can do it herself, and dammit she should.

Don't get me wrong. Its not a pain or a heartache anymore, this realization. I'm almost thirty. I realize this is what its always going to be like. Its been accepted in the head. So what it becomes difficult to see into the future knowing this is how it's always going to be. So what then it becomes difficult to create, or imagine, and dream. So what.

Youth Cola Fountain

Something I wrote on my first blog ever:

There’s a corner on Vivekananda Park, right on Southern Avenue. It sort of pushes its butt on the park itself, on the railings. You cross the road, at least to the other side towards Golpark and there is a really inane Police Box whose entire purpose is quite unknown to people who walk by. I happen to think that the box is there so that most of the people there can find occasional entertainment when, say, a motorbike falls of or a car bumps into the bumper of another, or say some street kids start a scuffle. Its entertainment. After all most Bengalis love nothing more than a bawal to watch.

The pavement on the other side of Southern Avenue leads to one of the many entrances to the placid park that the corporation of our city had build to beautify the lake, Rabindra Sarobar. Which remains dark and creepy when the evening darkness sets it.

The corner of the Vivekananda Park , which I’m talking about is the seat of a Chayer Dokan. The man of the shop sells cigarettes to us solely because we’ve drunk way too many liters of his tea.

That VP, as the area is so called, is one of the worst lit and dangerous areas in the civilized pool of south Calcutta is a minor detail that hardly crosses my mind before the clock strikes nine.

There are regular police raids on narcotic contraband and I’ve seen way too many rushing bunches of prostitutes running from the police to count. Most of my male friends, have at some point or the other, been accosted by these ladies of the night and as well as people who aren’t quite ladies, if you know what I mean. I’ve been touched at really weird places that I’ve stopped being an idiot and a kid and always insist on any one of my male friends to escort me down to Golpark at least, these days, now that I’m older.

On any given day, the “morer Cha Dokan” has at least two people whom I know sitting there.

“yawn.”

“You know? I actually have nothing to say anymore”

“So? I don’t either. Kaku/Dada, Ar ekta cigarette daona… ei, anyone for another tea? Ok, Kaku, another tea to go, too”.

That’s the range of conversation that mostly takes place, when we haven’t run into someone who’s somewhat controversial, or ranting about how bad some band is, or more so, how to make that aforesaid upstart band famous.

The setting wasn’t always the same. There was originally another tea shop about a minute’s walk from this one that originally started this… thing. Once, a couple of friends from Ashutosh College had no place to go and smoke or to adda for that matter and they chose to go to this little shack of a tea shop right on the green fields of Vivekanada Park. It had a lot to commend it. For one, it connected them to the lady who was nature; you found people playing cricket there in the morning, football as the sun started going down and “ludo” when the sun went down. It was a miracle of the God’s. A place where you could sleep off horrendously desperate bouts of drinking and order your tea that was delivered and also keep a tab book that was used all by yourself? It was unthinkable. Also it was a highly political move against globalization and franchise trends that Calcutta seemed to succumb to. It mostly had nothing to do with the fact that people at the Lake Road CCD had thrown us out because we had become way too popular for sitting in a large group, guitar en tow, and not ordering anything at all. So the little tea shop on the greens was named CCD2- Champa Di’r Chayer Dokan. It was even labeled on Google Earth.

Come rain or shine, that place had us coming back. It’s seen a number of birthday parties when some of us never celebrated at home, it also acted as advertisement board and planning ground for a number of our very own home-grown ventures, Ex Nihilo, by the way, being one of such.

The number of evenings of lying on the grass and staring at the stars and feeling the strange feelings of contentment as live cows passed us by are things that has possibly melted into the velvet darkness with the two years or so that went by. The romances that started on that math , some still remain and some have withered away along with the seasons that do, to make space for another. The thoughts that were debated, thought of, were so “enclosed” that now, when I think about it, feels like thoughts thought by some one whose got the whole of tomorrow to worry, not like now, when I am in the front lines facing the line of fire and submerged in it. Exams didn’t seem that important enough. There always seemed like there was going to be a Part2 or a Part3.

Then things started unraveling a bit.

I lost a friend. Actually that was quite consciously lost, but lost all the same. That shook up the man-place equation quite a bit, and things didn’t remain the same. Some people started turning up and that in turn didn’t suite some people. So they broke up the gathering into two halves. A bunch hung out at the same place and some went off to the Morer Cha Dokan.

I spent quite a bit of time shuttling in between the two trying to be the diplomatic type and trying to not lose out of any of the people involved.

But then other things happened. Like the proprietress of CCD2 betrayed us by raising the price of tea and fags by quite a bit and the decision was made for me. It was the granite slab-makeshift benches for me.

It was all that mattered for me then. For any of us really. That was the Second year of college, I believe.

I had people who were either fortunate that they studied engineering and were guaranteed to shift seamlessly into the “real life”. They wouldn’t really have to fight too hard. And I also had people who were pretty sure what they wanted to do, or brilliant enough( I mean hardworking enough ) ultimately do something with their lives. But what of me and say someone who’s most likely to think that they should work hard and do really well in exams, dream of studying murderously when opening an article on history in the national geographic magazine, but when it came down to actually studying or writing the paper for that matter, barely scrapping a pass. What would happen to the daydreamers? Who dreamed of traveling to Europe to back pack or to study classical art and then having a really cosmopolitan life who works from home, freelance, or some one who dreams of riding off into the orange sunset of the Indian horizon with a bag of camera equipment and only returning to a city in like six months in a year?

The exams came and went. I didn’t really fare too well. But there was always the Part Three. But the fear had started to set in. People had already started to make their decision to do what they wanted to. Internships and what not. People who I least expected to, were earning pocket money.

But there it still was, that place under the sun/moon/clouds/stars that provided tea, and space to stare into. Lives never really go on when one sat at that place. What happens to the things that you read at home or the little bits of art that inspire you when you’re unaware? Where do they go? I don’t know. But I know that I stopped reading too many books at book shops, I started afraid of being alone. I never ever thought of the future. And I recently discovered that I really don’t have much of a personality any more. Please don’t think I mean to say that most people that were around don’t have personalities, but when you’re there, you stop thinking out side that little corner of southern avenue and that’s about a good four or five hours of twenty four. So imagine what’s left for you then. The recovery time’s killing. So the entire day revolves around that tea shop, from the morning when you mindlessly did what one was supposed to do waiting for the evening, and the evening gave way to night when one recovered.

“aj band practice ache, can’t go to the morer dokan, come to maharani.”

And the scene shifts. Now the tea drinkers have branched out. One more place to go. This was the time of weekly Princeton visits. The aforesaid band have found a small measure of fame in Calcutta by playing at Princeton clubs. The egos have increased, and they think they are something hot. Some what. And life still moves around tea shops but to a lesser degree. This is the final year of college, and people are actually doing what they need to be doing studying. Even me. I pretended to, when I wasn’t running around like a headless chicken trying to find study material. I thought I was being diligent. But in reality I could see the edges of the frontline and I was nearly shitting in my pants. People were still thinking that they were so great because they knew who Godot was. I thought that I was being individualistic by not knowing much and being extremely proud of the little that I did.

Then the finals came and went, some became graduates before some of us. And then we weren’t the same anymore. No one was. There were random hookups, some holidays, and some breaking ups. There were people I could talk to for hours, and I couldn’t anymore. And there were people who just went on doing what I think they were planning to be doing all their lives.

But I don’t drink tea any more. I don’t smoke as much either. I am a graduate now. But I fared (predictably) so poorly that I know with my secret foresight, that I’m in the trenches and I’m being bombarded with heat seeking missiles everywhere, and I know that my chances are slim. I don’t have peaceful moments any longer. Not much anyway. The permanence that I thought were my friends, I’m not too sure of. Not because I don’t want them, but because they’re preparing to fly away. And I’m trying to buy cheap tickets too, so poor am I. Some one pointed out to me that I wasn’t planning to keep in touch with most people I used to hang out with in the first and second year of college. I say they don’t plan to. Because from now on, people will probably less and less to talk about at the tea shop. And people will realize smoking isn’t that good, so they won’t have that many excuses to come to the shop anymore.

But they might all, the same. Some like me are so grounded that they might be the phantoms of the tea shops. But the talk will dry up, as the joy will. And then what would happen to the people who’re stuck in the unending cycle that’s the tea shops? Maybe its time to find a spot under a tree of a math which spins a mean time machine, and has a fountain of youth for cola fountain. 

I think I come here to moan a little, cry a little and then go back and forget this a little.
Maybe its the steroids that I have been taking since april that's the problem. They are supposed to make you depressed. P asked me if I was sad, when I she called me. I just garbled something at her.
I have been garbling a lot lately at people. I've lost the skill for articulate speech. I think I need this time that the brain takes to transfer thought to speech and then the written word to be properly understood.
All these inspirational things that people who are famous on youtube tell me about just taking the risk and just start being famous for something you did, by just doing it. They absorb me when they are talking but soon I have to come back to my one room, and the deep feeling that I can't breathe properly, and I don't have a table to draw on, and I SHOULD move, and the  thought of moving into a new place fills me with a deep sense of foreboding. But I should. I should buy a new computer but that cannot happen because I need to move, and I keep putting it off.