Vicious Circles of Weak-ends

Its my Monday greys again... blue is too cheerful to be even considered. I woke up, reluctantly... I never enjoy waking up, and I mean it with all possible puns intended, I never did. But mostly, its an act of compulsion, peer pressure, parental advisory, duty or lose motion. In my case it was extreme disgust... it was MONDAY, and that was all. But the fun fact being, the other day, I took this quiz on Facebook, to see how lazy I was... they said I was a "supermom"!!! Meaning what? I hope it doesn't mean I'm too lazy to use contraceptives!!!!!!!!! Maybe, I ain't getting it right, but I've had a perpetual ego battle with Mondays, especially sice it comes right after my weekend. Life's unfair, okay, message burnt home... but this unfair??? Seriously, I think its time we came up with a revolution or something ... to include Mondays into the weekend...
But, then... what happens to Tuesday? So this is a vicious circle of market mechanism. All this brouhaha about weekends... makes the rest of the week so criminally offensive. Like, no one even has a term for week-starts!!!

Another weekend, just slipped through...

Its sunday today, and its around 2 p.m now. the weekend is almost over, and it seems the last two days have been anything of an excitement, since I moved here. Well, the big thing being, being I now have an internet connection in my hostel room, a luxury that had eluded me before this (in JNU). So my over flowing enthusiasm was understandable, even to me. the first web page I checked out was 'facebook' of course, then 'orkut', then 'hi5' and then 'yahoo'. It was clearly a desperate measure to get back in touch with humanity... as it seems now, it was surely a mistake to be made on the very day an internet connection comes creeping into my arena of melancholy solitude... as expected I was hooked... for almost 26 hours... Then I slept, for hours... and look at me now... my weekend is almost over!!! And I'm still holding on to the shreds of the last few hours of my weekend... saying it was "The Best, and Most Exciting" and things like that... Fact is I'm still alone and pretty lonely, even when all my friends are virtually peeking out of little thumbnail pictures... All so small and insignificant... its almost like the same feeling knowing I'm so far away, they all are starting to look smaller.

Back on Earth

And what a great place to begin with, this December I was actually here in person, close enough to click it... an achievement by itself. It was one of those getaways that matter more than the ones you plan, budget and execute like any other corporate deal. Life here was on slow motion, people smiled without reason, but no one thought they were insane, for the sane amongst us do not laugh without an exchange, in cash or kind, we do both.

A whole day, out of a city I so love, out of a life I so crave... and yet it all seemed so desirous, so out of reach and so so wonderful... and thankfully Shortlived.

Phantom of the OPARA: A true underdog story

The cultural and intellectual variation, which I’m quite sure is imaginarily so, is great between those from the Main Building and those from elsewhere in the college. Every time the editorial committees of magazines, newsletters, as well as the drama club, seminar forums, etcetera are formed: I being not a part of the finer grey matter, find that ‘they’ are the ones who walk the red carpet of Literature clutching elbows of great men and women, and I, like the rest of us non-carpet material, are left to scavenge like the desperate paparazzi…trying to cope with both disciplines, I mean the awe of ‘their’ and the load of our own.

It’s an “A-PARA” & “O-PARA” racism that prevails between the two, and mostly the great divide dwells in paper. We find ourselves in the “WHAT NOT TO BE” columns once in a while…not to mention the ‘butt’ of inter-academic jokes. And sometimes the seniors and professors act like KKK catalysts; we have ‘skinheads’ too: ‘they’ are the ones who never mingle outside their class or act out of their state, and smirk on our lesser mortals’ existence out of their extraordinary circle. And we are left to chew on our hats, shoes and cockneyed intellect.

For the greater part of my two and a half years of college life, I have envied their un-cut beards, un-bathed personas, disheveled hair, and those curiously old and patchy paperbacks, clutched tightly in their smelly (but greatly so) armpits, poking out just enough to make me nervous. Yet, I could neither consciously nor purposefully imitate their profound intellect. ‘They’ are the ones I will hate all my college life, and wish my jeans looked as bug-eaten, or my fatua looked as frayed, or I looked as impossibly aantellectual.

Why is it that people like me, who love to play with the simplicity of the language are always lambasted by the self-proclaimed pundits of English Language…while their ornamented presentations win prime pre-dominance…even if half the country cannot even make a sense out of that Swarovsky article? The Pradas and Guccis of this parallel universe are always the ones who edit and process all linguistic manifestations of the college…
…while I, the Phantom of the O-PARA, hover around hallucinating about my own.

‘They’ are the ones who end up behind desks at the offices of New York Post or London Times, while we are left here to pitch sales quotes for baby food that patronize ‘them’…

Address for grievance retrieval, due to the above post:
Presidency College, Kolkata
College Street

So, I'm finally back to my blog, and this time around I promise to do justice to the web space I'm using up for no great deal. I do, I do...

Delhi si Jahan

So now.... after months of cribbing... Delhi is finally a place, humans can also call home, otherwise i was putting up a 50001:1 chances that I'd settle on Neptune rather than Delhi. But its really better now, I've travelled through the city, walked its manicured roads, stopped at pedestrian traffic lights and crossed with others. I have seen what Jama Masjid looks like in the dark, and how very different it is with daylit domes protruding out of singularly noxious biriyani smokes. I have seen what C.P, as they call it, becomes when no one's looking. I have smelt the perfumed frufru and the pungent gentry, both falling over my shoulders with oblivious grace.

For a fact I know, Delhi never sleeps, even if the bars are shut by 11:30p.m , neither are the roads ever empty... the dogs, the prowlers, the poor, the homeless... and the young ventures to spunge out a little fun from right below the extrea conspicuous crime fighters. Still, there are less of them with a bulge above their belts, or a balding headset, someone told me, "...arre, thats because more of the wear pagris MAN!".... well, that could be true.

But for now, Delhi is another adventure for me... its one more city for me to go FIND OUT. Before the rapists, perverts, voyeurs, thieves, gundas, dakus, etc. and other petty criminals find me out. On that note.... MAN! I end.

O Father...can you hear them come?

O Father,
Here they come again.
They have killed your child,
And now they want you.
They have burnt your home,
And now they'll burn you.

O Father,
Here they come again.
They dine on your backyard,
And now they'll take it from you.
They've slept in your bed,
And that's where they'll gag you to.

O Father,
Here they come again.
In the darkness of the night,
And they say they fear none.
Can you here their guns?
If you cannot hide then run.

O Father,
Here they come again.
To promise you forsaken dreams,
Of wealth in your own hands.
But before, they must shoot you,
With guns of distant lands.

O Father,
Here they come again.
They've raped your daughter,
And buried your boy.
Now they'll build fences on our rotting flesh,
Here they come Father, Ahoy!

Measure of Myth

Too bad you weren't there to see...
They took me there, to that place again,
They hung me by my thoughts,
They stripped me of my voice,
And then let me be.

Too bad, it was morning that never came...
I waited for the sun to hit my eyes,
I waited for them to gather around my pyre,
I waited for you to save my soul's last sail,
I waited in vain, again, for my self to become.

Here I welcome you to the circle of apathy...
Engulfing your threats to sanity,
As you lose your proclaims of destructive vanity,
I say, sing another song my friend,
Too bad, you weren't there to see.

On the Wrong Side of the Locked Door

I wish it was dark.
Then I won’t be afraid of the thin
Bright line, speeding in
Through that little hole in the door.

I wish I was alone.
And all these people won’t crowd
Around me, crying aloud
Their voices streaming in, through that little hole in the door.

I wish I was dead.
Living nameless and faceless
Is not living enough, and I wish
I could disappear, through that little hole in the door.

I wish you were with me.
And I won’t be worrying about all the people
Or the light, happy with the little world outside
As I can see, through that little hole in the door.

I wish I was free.
So that I could run after the butterflies
That are blocking my hopes flowing in
Through that little hole in the door.

I wish I could sing.
And give voice to my thoughts
And give them little wings, to fly out
Through that little hole in the door.

I wish I had a key.
To unlock this giant door
And run away into emptiness,
That calls me, through that little hole in the door.

I wish I had you
Then I could hate that little hole in the door.
I wish I could be…
On the wrong side of the locked door.

AD

It took Presidency College fourteen months to decide on him, but it took only forty minutes for me to realize why. He was nervous, almost naïve, the day when he first took our class after being appointed as a part-time lecturer in the department. And I was as cheeky as I could get. I remember staring fixedly at him, until he taught looking at the entire class except for me. Sweating profusely, he took swigs out of his mineral water bottle every two minutes; it wasn’t that hot though, except if you count him being the only man in a class of nineteen smoky women. That was him on the first day we met him.

Later, he left without even a glance. It didn’t matter though, because it was only a matter of time before he became ‘one of us’. He was christened into the group-of-the-damned, and doubtlessly after a few months of the finest unadulterated friendship, he was somehow banned from the college. Now, I’m not being entirely honest. I knew why. In fact, all of us knew why. But we just didn’t talk about it. We still don’t.

We used to spend half our day in his cabin, the rest being spent in the canteen or around it. Of course that didn’t go too well with the other professors: did we care? NAH!!! He was perhaps the best thing that happened to us, till date, and we weren’t going to let go that easy. Anyway, so I remember one afternoon he was supposed to be teaching us Emile Durkheim’s take on Religion; it was a tough little bit of the syllabus. But as usual, we turned up, not just late but heavily sloshed, and I stoned with a strange hangover of smoking an isspecial Presi-pot. But we ever missed any of his classes, so despite the flying ‘tweeties’ around my head and my all classmates looking like my ex-school principal, I got to his class…and I spoke…they later told me I was trying to tell him to let us off a bit earlier but all I managed to say was: “willapleejletuzgoarlleee” and smile…and he had taken more gulps of his mineral water and had asked why so, and then my reply had been: “You know, thatsa verryverry naughty question!”. He had no choice but to return to the lesson for the next few minutes till he could still teach, that is before we dozed off. The next day, he’d given us a briefing about handling immediate hangovers, especially in class. That was him after we had screwed up in his class.

Then, there was the day I met him to discuss my research paper and ended up in China Bistro sharing lasagna and pasta with him, of course after three rounds of iced tea in the coffee shop. He didn’t have his mineral water bottle that day, and every time we’d talk about things that’d make him want to take a swig, we’d order more iced tea. It was kind of crazy at the start, but we talked and talked and talked…and I talked so much I bet I would have weighed a bit lighter after that. I really ‘felt’ lighter, I felt less crammed up in my head, like I’d just written down a lot in the diary, maybe I felt I had a friend. That was him after a nice and hefty meal of lasagnas and pastas.

There were afternoons when we’d nick classes spending time in the canteen, all our heads glued together, huddled in a corner, talking in hushed excited voices…and he’d come right into it and join. And we’d just take him in, and brief him, and continue. And then there were the actual lessons we’d get from him, sometimes in coffee shops, or in the portico, or even at my place: where we’d all come together for an afternoon of highly serious discussions of Weber, or Durkheim, or Spencer along with rounds of ‘prawn pakora’ and chilled Coke. That was him as the friend who also happened to be a professor.

Then he fell in love. We were all delighted, and declared ‘party’ when he told us, he was leaving us. And then before we could realize the bare brutality of that, he left…and left with us moments, memories and a signature “Handloom Emporium” folio bag for each. And his heart with one of us…or perhaps a bit with each of us. I don’t know how much he is where he is, because he is so much here, with us…in our actions, thoughts, and even ideas. That is him, our AD. Alekhya Das, Ex Part-Time Lecturer, Department of Sociology, Presidency College Kolkata.