Mystery never abandons its name and lovers...and its mysteriousness!

Amar saathe cholcho o megh
Amar saathei bolcho
Amar motoi chaicho o megh
Amar motoi jhorcho.

Kothaye harai
Kothaye palai
Kothaye je jai bol
Meghbalika amar saathe arektu dur chol.

Boddo gorom boddo bheja 'boddo' sob'er majhe
Ojana sob bhalolaaga notun kore baje.

Toiri ami? Ta jani na
Hoyeto ba bhan kori
Tai to hothath nil akashe
Tomar khoj'ei pori.

First you turn a page and then the page turns you.That tipping point may appear on 43rd page or somewhere around 17th...or just anytime!

Every book I cast my eyes on tries my preparedness for surprises [or the lack of it] and often smiles back with cunning antipathy. Some unflinching trust in not choosing and being chosen by a book keeps me moving...and eventually find the defining page or word to justify my effort...I move on smiling! 

Suddenly flipping pages becomes 'reading the Book'...

There are mornings...and then comes 'The Morning'...beginning way before the night ends with unmitigated anticipations unfurling wings to soar to unexampled heights...the morning yields to day though the mood stays on...indefinitely!

As I revisit classic works of fantasy, new meanings surface revealing the far deeper metaphors they carefully carry...

let the mind travel too when you travel...as most end up having a traveled body with an untraveled mind!...do the undone, see the unseen, feel the unfelt, smell the unsmelt and forget the forgettable...

Meditation is a journey within. Wonder how does it help when performed in a crowd. Can there ever be a meditation fair where all can put up stalls? Or is it all about saying that 'hey, I can do it alone and with some thousand others too'? What a funny feat! 'Cos when you are within, you become your sole company and that's what meditation essentially aims at - aligning 'you' with yourself.

Can we think of a world without excesses...emotional, material or physical? Is Beauty not a creation of physical excess, is Art not a fallout of creative excess, is love not the prettiest manifestation of emotional excess? People desire a taut frame and magazines abound with tricks on shedding that flab. Centres are erected to prune curves. What a pity! Doesn't it render the world flat, flabless, unvarying, dull? Conceive of a world where people only execute and don't dream - as dreaming is a luxury, excessive, prohibitive pattern.

I repeat...love the riddle, not the answer.

...we all are farmers. How well do we do in ploughing the land decides the quality of harvest. A soul aware of the finality puts his best in leaving the best crop behind...to be cherished by the posterity.

Believe me...every demand that I make carries a slice of my 'self'. I've vainly tried sometimes to sober some of them, hide them, rephrase them, fake them...and have always ended up owning them, loving them.

An apparently disorienting demand carries thoughts way beyond the obvious...something deeper, deep-seated, undying, raw, uncivilized, rude, crude, deranging...yet real, pure! And I will never cease to have them.

Particularly the friendships that we cultivate in the later part of life largely rest on a deepseated sense of inequality - stems from a thirst for emotional, recreational, creative, sexual or spiritual consummation. Friendships happen between unequals...

anyone hailing from kolkata would know how well does a Bus double as doting rocking cradle to numberless office-goers...even today when my car moves next to any packed bus, I make an effort to stick my head out to see the stooped heads swaying in rhyme with the moving bus on a bumpy road. The engine's sonorous rumble adds the lullaby touch and the seats rock them to a short-lived yet consummate sleep.

Some just age and some grow. Lately my discourses with foes and friends have chiefly hovered around the not-so-subtle differences between the 2 phenomena...and funnily some agreed with me just to disprove their eminent aging...and some just smiled - a smile that only comes with beautiful growing!

Saying it at the risk of sounding utterly presumptuous - it's not easy as the very thought that 'deep down we know everything' is kinda self-placating. We have all the pieces scattered and just need to put them in an order-less order to get the picture out. 

The very delusion of adequacy takes us farther from the 'thing'. Are we looking for gratification or answer. 

Gratification will be there till a distance, answer will be there forever. Don't get into the gratification seeking cycle...you deserve the immutable. 

Wish you 'the answer'...enjoy the ride!

I'm decidedly not one of those who would seek salvation in obscurity or disparage limpidity as humdrum. But a chance parley with Dr Anil Abraham raked some points I should have heeded while posting on social sites...and they all pertain to my style of writing. I deliberately kept from defending myself...what pleased me was his interest in knowing the unknowable!

Thoughts split me within. Thoughts wage wars routinely. Thoughts make me bad. Thoughts make me lusty. Thoughts keep me from divinity. Thoughts baffle me. Thoughts contaminate me...and offer cure thereafter. 

The other one watches and laughs aloud!

There is only one unrelenting poem and 'they' all keep on adding their bits to it. A poem is treated just when left untitled letting the reader find his peace or war and love in it...a poem is ought to be seriously indulgent, unabashedly loving and most importantly uncompromisingly empathetic.

A certain degree of association with books and language allows the liberty to dispense words to one's inner rhythm and not mere advantage. 'Readerhood' is a word that perhaps lexicons don't ratify yet, to me, connotes something far beyond the defined scope of 'Readership'. Readerhood is an empowerment earned over ages through an imprecise process...quite unlike Priesthood.

He first showed me the sparkling droplet on lotus leaf... 

He as much filled me with the reasons to be liked as disliked. He pampered me with Mont Blanc yet taught me to adore the wooden pencil. He taught me to draw faces with it. He took me to the world without letting me loose sight of what lay next. He taught me to speak on Nandalal and Dali in the same breath...to adore creativity. He showered me with books, brush and colour. He taught me to confront…and to stoop to conquer too. He made me fall in love with Vilayat Khan and Beethoven…and Swiss watches. He prepared me to wonder. And acquainted me with both Plato and the Platypus. He offered me the key to the exalting world of literature – where I later found many of my immortal friends. 

He bequeathed me an infinitely interesting life. Thanks Baba…

Thoughts pick its language and civility cannot tamper with it. Sophisticating it would amount to robbing it of its innocence and vigour..

The altitude dictates the attitude...As you rise and slowly zoom out of all trifles letting the eyes savor a humbling vastness rimmed by the vanishing horizon, the restlessness leaves giving way to an overwhelming bliss...you feel like staying there even after your body retires to ground...

Wish all a blue sky, exciting take-offs and safe landings!

I always love the book that I'm not reading. I often end up loving summer during winter. I fancy Bach's playfulness when I am in the company of Beethoven. It is not the archetypal yearning for the distant. It is just extending the present to the possible...

It all began with a storm and I was catapulted right into it. The storm was beautiful, loving and impeccably particular in inflicting the optimal pain onto me. Did I then realise how it imperceptibly embraced me eventually becoming a part of my being? 

Did I agree to continue to be known with reference to that storm or as one who could tame it with poise and characteristic blitheness?

mind please...

Often the mortals read words emanating from mind as ones from the heart. Mind assumes the colour of its surround whereas heart illumines whatever it shines one. Heart can never step into dark. Mind can. Mind does. Mind plays.

But mind yields when this awareness steps in - asking to let heart subdue mind.

Mistrusting the very faculty of trust...

reflection...

The city is as varying as Proteus.

It is not my nativity that is talking but an honest and well-preserved passivity critically needed to touch the core of Kolkata...a city perennially steeped in her snobbish urbanity yet unbendingly reluctant to let go of her past. She harbours an undying dichotomy - debased and celebrated alike over the years on countless forums, that has somehow been reassuring, validating and reaffirming as much her intellectual relevance as longevity in years yet to unfold. I do not, in all sincerity, intend to add to the ever-swelling body of literature raised to her. I intend to repeat that I love her!

Glorifying some aspect of Kolkata would decidedly shut one out of the overwhelming diversity she offers. It is a city that magically turns the humdrum into sublime and vice versa...often deluding the nonplussed spectator to the point of turning irreversibly apathetic to her resilient beauty. Kolkata is more discriminating than otherwise. Only the sluggish can see her...happily letting her unfold to allow the rare glimpse of an ageless endearing heart. So go slow...and enjoy the ride!