Bon Voyage... An Early End For Me ?

My bed at the moment is ‘infested’ by stacks of unread notes. They look way more perilous than sharks in the Tasman Sea. I’m in no mood to confront them tonight.

I’m sad because the Rolling Stones magazine didn’t include Queen OR Pink Floyd in their list of Top 50 Artists of all times. I’m hungry too, but that happens every night, when I’m awake at this hour.

I’m randomly remembering past incidents. Like in De Nobili when Debadrita would rush out of the classroom yelling “Bulldozer, bulldozer!” on catching sight of a mighty yellow bulldozer passing our school by. And the school-rules didn’t allow us to set our feet in the corridor between the classroom and the road-with-the-mighty-bulldozer because apparently, the students could be causing a breach to ‘De Nobili Discipline’ by becoming visible to the passersby on the road. And yet, we would follow Debadrita into the corridor, ripping apart every little iota of the notion of ‘De Nobili Discipline’ our class-teacher expected from us.

Somehow, most of my pleasant memories have a cool-breeze coming in through some window.
With Thammu and Buiya, I would play “Chhush Chhush”(sound of waves against the hull of a boat) in the guest-room. The game would have us embark on wonderful Sinbad-ish adventures, where we would be required to do everything right from fighting for our lives to dancing weirdly in order to please local tribal kings. No wonder ‘The Voyage Of The Dawn-Treader’ remains my favorite book of the Narnia series. No one was allowed to enter the room when the game would be on.
And sometimes, we would also dance to ‘Koi Kahe Kehta Rahe’ or ‘Brown Girl In The Ring’. Yes, Thammu IS my dad’s mom.

Life has been good to me. I’ve always had what I wanted. But, I’ve always expected a catastrophic future for myself. I’m not pessimistic. I’m not an unhappy person. But this is something I see for myself. I will spell my own early end, I keep thinking. However, the notion might just be wrong. All these years, and I haven’t encountered the catastrophe still, right? Let’s see what happens. If I wither off early, at least I’ll not be an Eleanor Rigby later.

I leave you with these four posters that I’ve designed and though they’re just amateurish stuff, I quite like them… :D

This, I guess, is my last post in October 2009.

September and October 2009

I think I’ve fallen in love, yet again. This time it’s an Icelandic band called ‘Sigur Ros’(Victory Rose). The band was formed in 1994 in Reykjavik by singer and guitarist Jón Þór Birgisson, bassist Georg Hólm and drummer Ágúst Ævar Gunnarsson, and I discovered it only days back, following a status update by Mayukh where he’d proclaimed that he loves the band. Now since I generally relate with Mayukh’s taste of music, I downloaded it, and was totally swept off my feet. Mayukh had said, “(Listening to the band gives you the feeling of) being under the blanket on a very rainy day.” Comfort and luxury epitomized. It’s like an Icelandic Simon-and Garfunkel, he’d said. And I can’t agree more.

I’m very happy because Ajju is coming back to Calcutta on the 2nd of November, and hence the CCD/Mamma Mia visits will become the order of the day once again. We’ve a lot of catching up to do, and am really looking forward to his return. Anindita too, will be visiting Calcutta some time in the next week. What terrible excitement! Two of my best friends are coming home at the same time...(Oh, my bad! Calcutta isn’t exactly the place Tiku would call home, but whattheheck?)

I have also been procrastinating the act of sanctifying my Fbook friend list. Last checked, it stood at 405, and I need to clear the mess and bring it down to 200, at the most. One more thing I’ve been putting off is watching new movies. I’ve got several tempting new(ly downloaded) movies lying unwatched… ‘Rear Window’, ‘Pierrot Le Fou’, ‘Antichrist’ etc. And I need to watch them soon. But each time I intend to do the same, I end up watching an old episode of F.R.I.E.N.D.S.

Diwali was fun. We got drunk on Rhea’s Hiland Park chhat(eh, no, not totally sloshed, but just mild boozing) and later, had a crazy, crazy, crazy dance session in her drawing-room. Her antique-piece-loaded drawing room reeks of old Bengali bonediyana(aristocracy), the sort I associate my grandparents and great-grandparents with, the thing that many of those first-generation-rich families totally lack. I loved the old pipes and hookkahs and grandfather clocks, and pianos. There was a very odd faith-ant stuffed toy on one sofa, which despite its undoing effect on the entire ‘bonedi-baari’ feel, was claimed to be a great favorite of hers by Rhea.

The mid-term exam is scheduled for mid-November, and well, as always, my preparation is close to nil. What’s funny(well, not really, it has always been an old habit) is that I’m not even striving towards the completion of any minuscule percentage of the syllabus). Sid won’t wake up, ever, I guess.

September was great. I was the Presidency College ‘rep’ at the Loreto College fest, ‘Samagam’. We also had our Departmental Fresher’s(where I was crowned Mr. Fresher’s :D) and Student Union Fresher’s(which was fun mainly because of the disco we made out of the Derozio-Audi). September also was about a lot of hanging out, here and there, randomly, and the masterpiece was made in Taniya-and-Roli’s birthday party-cum-sleepover. The entire circle was there(barring obviously the outstation-candidates) and with the subtle and not-so-subtle undercurrents that kept flowing, the crackling chemistry between some people, and the damp-squibs some others made out of themselves, it was one helluva night.

Then the Punjab-Delhi-Haryana-Himachal tour I took with my family was refreshening. It re-established my North India connection, and made me fall in love with the North all over again. Also, in the last four months, owing to an ever-increasing requirement of proficiency in Bangla, I’ve forgotten the little nuances of a Delhi-Hindi totally. This tour helped me scratch off the surface-rust to an extent, and rediscover myself.

All in all, life’s okay. The winter’s come in quite early. The weather’s starting to turn chilly though October hasn’t faded away yet. Rudrani thinks I write like females do, and I can’t really disagree. She also insists on calling me ‘Tokai’ despite my claiming that I’m the Kolabou. Also hilarious is how Chitrangada Singh says “Signs of aging, leave them behind, Take Care!” in the new Garnier advertisement. The trailers of ‘Kurbaan’ look very promising, and Vivek Oberoi, finally, looks back in form. It has a very international feel to it, and looks straight out of some Hollywood studio. Kareena- I fall in love with over and over again, and this time’s no exception. The song 'Kurbaan Hua' is remarkable in the way it's both sympathy-evoking and also coarse,rough,and adrenaline-rush-stimulating at the same time. I’ve been making frequent visits to the Joo, but they’ll soon be no-longer possible once classes at Presidency re-commence.

Enough for now… Oh and yes, well, bleh, nevermind…. Someone looks so cute, but so what? I’ll shut up.

Presi-People I Prize 1: Batchmates

Contrary to my ‘online’ image, I am a very happy person. Oh yes, I do enjoy ranting randomly about elements that add that noir-edge to my usually mundane life, but I’m generally a very happy person. No depression has ever been able to bog me down for more than a day, and no, my life is no fairytale, and yes, there are elements of terrible gloom and despair in it, but I generally choose to look at the happier things(except when I’m blogging).

I was contemplating the composition of an article about which out of pen-knives, blades of stainless-steel and edges of new books’ pages are best wrist-slitters(my latest name on FB being Slitwrist Goswami, but just then Puja Rohra came up(through her ever-nocturnal FBchat window) and suggested I write about something more cheerful and not keep brooding about how and why most people dislike me.

Now, this Puja Rohra is a classmate of mine in Economics at Presidency. Initially in college, while I’d go around making my presence felt with those ‘friends’ I’d made then,
this Puja Rohra along with her two girlfriends Nisha Dakalia and Aritri Das would sit quietly, prim-and proper, and look down their noses on us. ‘The snooty Loreto House girls’-that’s what I’d refer to them as, then. Oh yes, they’d also sometimes question my sexuality. Whether or not I am a bisexual always seemed to interest them, especially Aritri. Almost four months have passed since then, tables have turned, and now these snooty LH girls are my closest friends in my class. I spend a lot of time in college with them and my, am I thankful to know them? I admire the positivity with which Nisha looks at life, and the ease with which Puja and Aritri came to gel with the ambience of the college, which is so different from their Loreto(Dharamtala/House) brand of schooling. Now, I generally attend a Maths class out of college with these girls, where we inevitably end up spending more time hanging out at Nisha’s home than we spend trying to hone our Maths skills.

Some facts about them:
1. Puja Rohra hails from a Sindhi household but it’s a shame she doesn’t know a word of Sindhi. Also, according to her ‘kundali’, she ought to have been named Kasicka. However, she must have risen up in rebellion against the name, and have forced her parents to name her ‘Puja’. Her original name has, however, found a lot of favour in college, with most of our beloved 2nd years having warmed up to the usage this name.
2. Puja has two cousins, Rish(i)ta and Sagar, who happen to study in the Heritage School, where my mother is a senior Biology teacher. So I have a lot of insight into a lot of Rohra-family traditions from a variety of sources.
3. Puja and I are linked with each other quite often, but she and I are mature enough to not be ill-at-ease due to these overworking rumour-mills.
4. Aritri and I are two Capricorns and two ‘gawars’ around each other. We randomly start kicking each other while walking on the streets while bewildered onlookers look on(Onlookers WILL look on, DUH! ). We are incorrigible to the extent that after not having been provided with tissues after a lunch at Olypub, we proceeded to rubbing our hands on each other’s jeans. She is the female 'kutti' and I her male countepart.
5. Nisha is an ardent fan of Govinda, having watched all of his movies and mastered his way of laughing. She is also a proficient ‘Ghoomar’ dancer and her dance can put Vidya Balan’s Monjulika act to shame.

Among my closest friends in other departments, of course are Debadrita Modak, my fifteen-year-long acquaintance, and the only person in college, apart from Ankur Lahiri(of Statistics 1st Year,my batchmate from St. James’) who I knew from before joining Presidency. Not much to say about her apart from the fact that I absolutely adore her, and is the only person I can blindly trust.

Then there is Manimanjari Sengupta. I’m obviously not following any order of mentioning this people as Mani(or ‘Moni’-as she prefers being called) is as close to me as Puja, Nisha, Aritri and Debadrita. What I like best about Mani is the fact that she’s still a child at heart, much like me. Her way of greeting people with a “Hiiiiiiii” with her two hands parallel with each other, only one partly folded and the other fully stretched out, has garnered a huge fan-following in the college. Mani and I get along like a house-on-fire. With Mani, obviously, I must mention Sayantika Ghosh . Sayantika is this Beatles-loving-feminine-clothes-hating-‘ushkokhushkochool’ flaunting school friend of Mani’s who I’ve especially come close to. She’s unconventional, like I believe I am, and hence I love her.

Taniya Bhardwaj, the girl who the entire college thought I was dating, is the only person apart from Mani, who I got to know in college, and have been very good friends with, since the first week. A lot of the guys in college dislike me for they believe they’re not getting the opportunity to go coochie-cooing with her only because I’m around her all the time. She sure is one of the most attractive girls in college, and there’s hardly been any topic of conversation we’ve left uncovered between us. But don’t worry Rick, she’s all yours. Taniya and I hail from similar strata of the society, which makes it easy for us to relate with each other.

Roli Roy and Sriparna Dasgupta- I can’t claim that I know them too well, but despite the initial odd vibes [especially with Roli, with her knowing Rajdeep, who I didn’t get along with in school] , I’ve got to know them to an extent now, and I can say I like what I’ve seen. I admire Roli for she is an amazingly fun person who can be the soul of any party, who dresses well and is quite a charmer, and also simultaneously manages to bring home a 94 something score in her ISC, and in PHYSICS. Now that’s an extremely rare feat to achieve there. As for Sriparna, she is one of the most graceful and beautiful girls I personally know, and she is extremely well-behaved. Knowing Shalini, Sarequa, Taniya and Debadrita helped me get to know the two of them better.

Shabba Hakim is one person I passionately hated all the while she was in Presidency, but ever since she joined KPC, my love for her has intensified. Now I love her more than I ever hated her, and would ask everyone not to judge her for what she appears to be. She’s not one person you can figure out easily. She is intriguing and in that lies her charm. She’s also scarily blunt ,and her logic sometimes defies my ability to comprehend, and Taniya may be her ‘wife’ and she might be ga-ga over Rick, but at the end of the day, I also happen to ‘prem-kora’ with her. So here’s how it fits. Our foursome couple- Taniya, Rick(whose dad and mine are employed in the same company), Shabba and I. We all love each other. Orgasmic, eh?

Shahana Yasmin is hardly a Presidencian. She spends all her time in Joo. She hated me initially, and thought I was rude to her(me? Rude?? Bleh…). I seriously still haven’t figured out why exactly she found me rude, but the past is past, and the present, well, is great. We get along well, with me having taught her to master the art of sucking lollipops, and her having taught me the bitch-snap and the art of ‘happens’(Well, Anwe, Arghya, Mani and Sean did contribute too). We also added to each other’s vocabularies by replacing the use of the word ‘bitch’ with the metamorphosed version of the surname of a mutual acquaintance. Ooh, someone sure killed.

Other people from my first-year batch at Presidency that I like are
1. Samreen: Very misunderstood again, she’s always been a great help to me
2. Rudradip: Might appear very rowdy at first glance, but he’s my closest male-friend in my class. A classic example of a tough-exterior-with-a-soft-heart.
3. Souravi : Honest and very genuine. And very nice photographs. She’s a great girl who I don’t know so well yet.
4. Pubali: I know we’ve drifted apart, but I still like her and admire her uprightness. Maybe even I would’ve stuck up for Nilaj if I were her and I hold nothing against her.
5. Patralekha: Again, a lot of misunderstandings I know, hopefully they’ll get sorted soon.
6. Debojit: A much-needed guide in the initial days of college. It wasn’t his fault that I went totally loud, and rash, and hate-me-if-you-want-to.
7. Soumyadeb: I like his simplicity.

As for most of you others, I haven’t yet had the opportunity to get to know you all. Hopefully, soon I will.

This is an extremely honest and open note I’ve written clearly stating who I like and why. Later on ,a lot of this might backfire and affect me badly, but then I needed to be honest and open, since my diplomacy is something I bade goodbye to when I left school.
A few months later, I might be biting my fingers for having written any of this but I have only one request. I know I don’t make a great friend and I don’t stick up for you always. I’m selfish, self-centered, opportunistic and a coward. But please don’t let me down. For I’ve already been let down real bad in college, more than once, by people I’d come to really like. If you let me down, I’ll be very, very hurt. I am no victim of an evil world, neither am I any saint myself. I’ve always been totally capable to fend for my own self. However, I LIKE you all, and I really hope it stays this way till the very end.

Prematurely Gray and Disillusioned. NOT.

Fragments of a broken dream,
Chase a winning star.
A night begins, ten million shades dim,
Darkness arrives, her cardinal power.

Souls blend in with the silence,
Soft visuals from a horizon emerge.
An epiphany that composes a trance,
Into a surreal world, numb shapes surge.

Hallucinations show sympathy, so hollow,
Illuminative seductions-its only true worth.
Vocal bitterness, the lies then swallow,
Celebrations of a new wave take birth.

Clandestine ecstasies ruin a game,
Never more are my faculties meek.
The ambience faceless, demands a name,
To the naked bizarreness I speak.

Turbulent waves and rugged terrains,
Welcome, but never the roughness gauge,
Of mornings that to despair, are veins,
That in me, evoke a burning rage.

Rendered impotent of finding a frame,
Of reference, Of relatability,
I wander lost, I dwell in refrains
Out of vanity, arises a lurching pity.

Horror strikes with wrath terrible and sure,
Frozen identities are preserved.
Life invites with malice and vice so pure,
A painless waning, for me, I reserve.

My Magenta Imagination Lives For A Night

The scary cost
Of all that we lost
Have you tried to measure, ever?
When the mist and fog let us see, then rebuild.
When the rainbows do not, the droplets shield.
When nightingales fail to serenade…

A Charming End
Comes very slow, her hair loosened.
To fetch us to the other side forever.
Green dreams takeover, White noise shrieks
Empty canvass beckons, Filthy beauty speaks
Through the ice-cold fire I wade…

Helixes don’t match
Silver-shiny-melting eggs do hatch.
Names are called out, fear evoked.
In an open outrage, the winds gush in to conquer
A rhythm rebels, cyano-indigo tunes speak of the anger.
Newness defies the plan, the clan and the dead.

Toxic claustrophobia
Gin, sherry, rum, whiskey, beer
Nothing can, the malicious palettes, cloak.
Children take a masterful task, sink in, toil.
Bloodbath celebrations, ancestries do boil.
We brew up an eternity, facades are shed.

Love deconstructs
The passion, Myths are struck
Legends, they say, overwhelm some souls
Ornate philandering,lose focus of the goals
Candid illusions contradict a life simply made.

Consequences of a Conspiracy Theory....

It is 4am in the morning, and I’m still awake. Aimless, Purposeless, I’ve stayed up yet another night. Right now, I’m listening to the song “ Yeh Zindagi Bhi” from Zoya Akhtar’s delightful movie ‘Luck By Chance’. Like its source, the movie, the song,as well as the other songs from this movie, ‘Raahi Re’, ‘Pyaar Ki Dastaan’ and ‘Sapno Se Bhare Naina’), are extremely underplayed. The restraint, the setting limits to its desires to be noticed was the best thing about this Zoya Akhtar endeavor. Also, I remember ushering in the year 2009, in a very lacklustre way, alone in my room, under my blanket, with my Chemistry books, and with this song (or these songs) plugged into my ears. The night was angst-ridden. I was getting nowhere with my Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics, and school-final exams were just two months away. I remember having made myself a bucket-list of things I wanted, and goals I wanted to achieve in the year 2009. I am not an innately lucky person. Things are not necessarily fairy-tale for me. Yet then, and without much hard work from my side, I have been able to(touchwood) achieve and attain everything I’d set out to that evening, even with two more months left for this year to wither away…
“Jo palkon ke tale, hai apne sapne leke chalein, yeh keh do who chale sambhal ke,
Na kar na koi gile, kahin jo thokar aise lage, ke sapnein toote, aasoo chhalke”…
Speaking of ‘Luck By Chance’, I simply adore Konkona Sensharma. Not only is she a brilliant actor, but she is also a very intelligent girl. The decision to not limit herself to neo-realistic, pseudo-intellectual, intellectual, regional-intellectual and renowned-directors’ movies, and to reach out to the mainstream through ‘Luck By Chance’, ‘Wake Up Sid’, ‘Life In A Metro’ is certainly taking her places. Along with the glamorous and undeniably-beautiful Katrina/Priyanka /Bipasha/Kareena , Konkona too is one of the most sought-after actresses of mainstream Bollywood today.
Consequent to a ‘conspiracy theory’, a non co-operation movement launched by my PC, Laptop, BSNL Broadband, iPod and iTunes ever since I returned from my fortnight-long tour of the ‘Land of Gods’-Himachal Pradesh, I’ve been unable to watch any of the movies I’d downloaded and had been intending to watch, like ‘Rear Window’, ‘Pierrot Le Fou’, ‘P.S.I Love You’, ‘Chungking Express’ and ‘New York’. This misfortune has however been amply compensated by the three movies I watched in the theatres(read multiplexes) in the last one week. ‘Wake Up Sid’, ‘Inglourious Basterds’ and ‘What’s Your Rashee?’



‘Wake Up Sid’ evoked a lot of Lakshya-related deja-vu. The movie was a nice watch, however. It never took itself too seriously, and its efforts in conveying a ‘message’ weren’t too ‘in-your-face’. I liked fluid pace, and the lack of majorly convoluted subplots, and build-up of retrogressive and/or clichéd dramatizations of circumstances. Also, for what is probably the first time in a big-budget Hindi movie, the lead actors repeated their costumes. Konkona and Ranbir both were easy and charming, but since it was majorly Siddharth’s world that was being dealt with, Aisha’s character remained half-baked. And Rahul Khanna, once again, saddled once again with a the-guy-who-loses-out-on-the-girl’s-affection role after ‘Love Aaj Kal’ dazzled in his bit role.




‘Inglourious Basterds’ has not replaced ‘Kill Bill’ or ‘Pulp Fiction’ to become my favorite Tarantino movie. Having said that, I loved every moment of the movie for there was no mistaking the quintessential Tarantinoisms throughout the entire running time of the movie. The director retains his himselfness all through. The performances by Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Michael Fassbender, Eli Roth, Diane Kruger, Daniel Brühl, Til Schweiger, Mélanie Laurent, the generous sprinkling of humor elements, the portrayal of women as masterminds of the French and German resistance, the justifiability of the sadism behind the Basterds’ modus operandi- these are a few among the many reasons why the movie could very well become a cult-favorite among the classes and the masses. Out of all the actors, the two lesser-known faces, Christoph Waltz whose diabolical performance as Hans Landa blends monstrous malice and seductive charm, and Melanie Laurent as the intelligent, intriguing and a master-plotter Shoshanna Dreyfus especially stand out. If you do not watch this movie, it would have greater negative repercussions than the inability of scalping a 100 Nazis would have to an I.B.











‘What’s Your Rashee’ was a carelessly made movie. Ashutosh Gowariker’s( the maker of the brilliant ‘Lagaan’, ‘Swades’ and ‘Jodha Akbar’) decision to foray into the rom-com genre was evidently a fatal mistake. For when you’re watching a movie with a flavor of history, or with an aroma of patriotism, a three-and-a-half hour duration can be tolerated. A rom-com of the same duration would however, without fail, fail to engage the audience, especially when the content is no patch on Lagaan, Swades or Jodha Akbar. It wasn’t entirely a bad movie, but the inclusion of inane, illogical, Rohit Shetty, David Dhawan-esque subplots tarnishes the impressive capacity of the entire movie. Harman Baweja is receding into being a greater non-actor with every movie. His voice and accent would get on anyone’s nerves. The music isn’t bad, though. And then there’s Priyanka Chopra, once again turning in an honest, earnest, effortless, dazzling performance(or twelve performances ?). She is the sole saving grace of the movie, the only reason why I would tolerate the entire movie. She single-handedly does to the film what twelve different actresses could have collectively done. Sounds biased? Not my problem.

Enough for now. I have a lot more on my mind, but won’t say much more in this post.