Leisure

How many seas must a small boat sail, before she sleeps in the sand? Now, I hope Bob Dylan won't mind if I tamper with his lines a little. Let's call it 'personalising Dylan', eh? I found this boat at Taalsaari, a seaside tourist spot near Digha, where the Bengalis go to booze and die in the sea, or to have some quick illicit f**k. My visit was a relief from a hectic schedule. So, I couldn't help identifying with this boat, resting after some hard wrestlings with the sea. Queer, isn't it? She had to come up on land to rest, and I chose to plunge into water! I have named this picture 'Leisure'. Look at it and feel the mood of soothing relaxation creeping up your toes. Only if you have worked really hard to earn it, you would know what leisure means. As this boat seems to know!

Homecoming

Ugliness is but a nightmare.
The tawdry tinsel, paint and mask
vanish bahind the final curtain,
The Closed shutters
Of all shops in this market square.
The lights on the wares flicker no more.

The performer, with his paint off,
Runs up the way he had walked down.
The painted woman returns to her motherly self
From the public light to a private dark

Where embrace drowns the stink of gutters ...
Where kisses are not for sale ...

Sisyphusing My Time

It is really unbearable—this feeling of isolation. Don’t you think that behind our social or familial existence there is an untrodden territory of loneliness? Untrodden, because none but ourselves roam about that desolate place, knowing fully well that neither can we share, in the real sense of the term, the feeling or destiny of others nor can anyone else share that of ours. Does it really matter? What does it matter if we live in our capsules of consciousness? But humans love to socialise. They don’t relish the idea of being locked up in narrow prison-cells the walls of which are too thick to let any noise through.Yet, I cannot help sensing the impossibility of complete self-expression. How do I communicate my today’s melancholy to you?
In Bengali there is a peculiar expression—“Mon kemon korchey”—to portray such an inexpressible feeling of melancholy. Has anybody hurt me? No. Am I in some kind of trouble? No. Have I done something wrong? No. May be, it makes me melancholy to feel that I am wasting my time. Life is very precious in the sense that it is not going to last. So, I must make it really worthwhile. But, at present, I am doing something servile. Sisyphusing my time. I am wasting every precious minute of my life in drudgery. I must shake slavery off. Otherwise who is going to lend me an extra second of life when mine is over?
But, again, humans do not survive on enjoyment alone. I cannot be Maugham’s Wilson, the famous lotus-eater, who relinquished his drudgery for a life of supine sensations (and pathetic death). Even he was calculative, though his calculation was not foolproof. I dream of a life of blessed idleness, spiced with reading, writing (not answers for students this time) and listening to music. I am tolerating my drudgery only because it helps me store up for my arcadia that lies near the horizon. Sorry Mr. Kierkegaard, I will not ‘leap’ up to God.

After Some Fresh N Fruitful Showers on My Sunburnt Brain

It is 8 May 2008, Thursday. I am in Kolkata. Is has rained in the evening. So, the weather has cooled down considerably and I feel like writing something just to celebrate the relief after a day of sticky heat. Why not ‘flirt’ with philosophy? With due respect to the wise reader’s scornful smile and legitimate feeling of irritation at my intellectual pretensions, there is reason to be optimistic, eh? Whenever the heat becomes unbearable, rain follows. So, I feel violently tempted to using clichés like silver linings to every cloud. Or, cloud-lining to every sultry day!
It follows that nature takes care of everything, if we don’t interfere much in the process. If one understands this, one feels relieved of the painful task of making one’s own choices and suffering the consequences thereof, like a devoted Nietzschean. One can leave the entire thing to nature, or to the mysterious power one calls God, for a more skilful management of life’s business. Bad faith? May be. But what relief! And who could handle one’s own business before birth or after death? Can we oversee the decomposition of our own bodies and distribute the elements properly or reassemble them to make another being with a new composition of old elements? Let Him/ Her (lest the feminists should take offence) who looked after my foetus and would supervise my decomposition, take care of the interim, i.e. my life.

The Value of Silence: A Blogger's Dilemma

Whenever I am told to write anything I cannot help remembering a story included in my school syllabus. Thus the story runs. One day a man goes to a forest and finds a human skull lying on the ground. In a perverse mood of humour the man asks the skull what it is doing there, and much to his shock, the skull replies, “Talking brought me here.” The man runs to the king and reports that he has found a talking skull. The king sends two soldiers with him to see if what he says is true. The soldiers are also given the secret order that in case the man proves a liar, he is to be killed on the spot. Now, when he reaches the spot, the skull refuses to answer back in spite of the repeated queries of the man. He is beheaded. When the soldiers have left, the skull asks the man’s severed head what it is doing there. And it replies, “Talking brought me here.”
So, talking has always been a dangerous thing. And my personal experiences have taught me that blessed are those who can keep their mouth shut even in the most provoking circumstances. In this respect I can tell you what I heard from one of the senior teachers of a local college. There was some kind of meeting once on the college premises where distinguished guests were invited, including the formidable political figures. One of such political veterans had the temerity to say, while commenting on the miserable condition of education in our country, that he doubted there were lecturers, even in the English Department in that college, who could speak English. Now, there were people who could challenge him on the spot and prove the reality to be otherwise. But, their prudence prevented them from doing so. Therefore, if the senior teachers choose to use silence as a defence mechanism, it is not advisable for a part-time lecturer to be much outspoken. To blog or not to blog, that is the question!