Sunday Posts

We are the stories we tell about ourselves. I am one of those writers in search of a story. That story has not appeared, yet. But I am always crafting one. In this, it is not the start that confounds me. It has already begun - I am in it! The reason I have never written because I can not end it.  Because I lack courage. Around me, so many stories begin and end everyday. In fact, I also see beginnings are endings too. But I still can't write about it. Happily-ever-after is cliché, death or departure is beyond contemplation, something dramatic is too unreal! In that sense, I live in the precipice of the story, that kind of safe bourgeois existence where nothing really should happen. Therefore, I am just going from chapter to chapter. But the script is becoming quite predictable now. Characters seem to be desperate for something to happen now. The narrative is becoming one of those overextended TV series whose writers have run out of ideas. Something got to happen - and I am waiting. ...

  The two weeks of Covid, it seems, wiped my memory clean - but given me new ones. One of those is a dream - of the most feverish nights - in which I was in a room where all doors out led back into the same room again. Its mosaic floor was of the room I grew up in, back home in Kolkata; its door a white one like the one in Croydon; its windows showed nothing but an endless array of houses nearby, somewhat reminding me of a flat in Hyderabad where I spent some time. In the dream, I was forever trying to go out of the room and turning back up in it, again and again, even when I was not sleeping anymore. It was one of those that extend from sleeping to waking to sleeping back again, making me more desperate to escape in every turn. If I ever write a story about it, would I call it 'No Exit'? I thought about it later on, as I continue to limp back to normal life. The jarring point is the existence of the door though, a wide white-framed one, which was there for a reason. It was per...

1 How would it sound, if many years hence, a novelist starts his novel with It was a time of uncertainty, it was a time of prediction, it was the age of realisation, it was the age of illusions, it was an epoch of science, it was an epoch of leaping in the dark, it was the season of end of the world, it was the season of new beginnings, it was a spring of staying home, it was a summer of giving up, we had everything behind us, we had nothing before us, we were all together in saving the civilisation, while we were tearing each other apart to save ourselves - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. Would we recognise the time - or, is it indeed like any other time? 2 Would we miss the lock-down once it's over? Once the busy life starts again, if it does. Do we miss the packed trains, hurried lunches, noisy evenings, attachment-fr...

If this blog needed a purpose, I have one now. I started writing just for the sake of writing, and later, used this space for reflecting on my experience as well as exploring ideas and connecting with people. It was a serendipitous journey, with twists and turns of my wandering mind suitably exposed, and I assiduously avoided being boxed, or turning this blog into a commercial promotion of myself. And, this is not a holier-than-thou stance - I indulged in usual narcissism on Facebook and tried to do desperate social climbing on Linkedin - it is just plain love, of words and of ideas and of conversations, and I wanted to keep this one space uncorrupted of the other 'social me', in order to welcome them as they came.  But then there is something I love. And, all my wandering is really a quest for that one thing, in a way. My otherwise pauseless life may not allow me the space to love anything except for the socially mandated, all the middle class stuff about careers, mortga...