Sunday Posts

The rational human being exists somewhere inbetween the matrimonial advertisers flaunting their caste and income and property, and the pathetic spectacle of Brock Turner, a swimmer and a student of an elite university, caught raping an unconcious woman. Being human is thus defined by our capacity to love, to fall in love as well as being loved, and to love well: Completely, committedly and unequivocally, transcending both our animal urges and middle class meekness, outside both the socially mandated and instinctively compulsive. Being able to love is not about pleasure, but about creating happiness. It is not about possession, but about giving away. If you deeply love something, give it away - a wise man once said - and touche! being able to love is to able to give, to surrender oneself for the happiness of the other. I remember my first moment of feeling in love. It was indeed a moment, specific and memorable. To be sure, it was a dream, etched in memory, permanently and not...

In Annie Hall (1977), Annie tells Alvy, "You don't know how to enjoy life. You are New York!"  I came back home last Friday, but, as always, I remain really confused where home is. Pico Iyer doubts that home is really any place at all, but rather where you take your guards down. My home in London ticks that box, as I have not lived in Kolkata for more than a decade and feel besieged when I am there.  But, then, I think all too often when I shall be doing practical stuff. I live an emotional, engaged, life, dreaming away most of the time. I carry this change-the-world optimism with me alongside the repulsion for narrowness of people I have to do business with. I feel almost good when people say I have unfulfilled potential. I start all too often - make new beginnings as if past never existed. I feel proud of my dilapidated being because it indicates a tradition, long forsaken, that I want to belong to. I eschew all the company that will have me for company, in a ...

No you may not be tired of life. The streams of other people's lives can be overwhelming: It may make you a retro-phile, full of nostalgia for the secret gossips or unrequited love, or all those things that were staple of the 80's teen-life. Suddenly, what was boring - you may not even remember how you really spent all the time that you now spend on Facebook - may look exciting. The fact that you can't find the girl who fascinated you in college on Facebook may be pathetic - you should have told her then - but then Facebook won't really change all that. Facebook or not, you are still alive. Oh yes, Golden Age is always in the past, just around the time when one was twenty! If only - and there goes another list of moments missed, things unsaid, all those mistakes and missteps. But then, is it not a happy feeling that those are safely buried, gone, hopefully forgotten, rather than protruding out in your timeline? At times like this, should it be called Facebook Fati...

I try again to start. Life moves in circles as usual, and these are moments when I say - stop! These are strange moments when the past comes back to me, and as with a circular life, I see future at the same time.  I am not off the mark if I say I feel like standing in a hall of mirrors, where I feel like being in an endless passage, a passage to the future, built entirely of stories of the past. Once I start believing it, indeed, I feel weightless. All the baggage that I accumulated over the time, all the fears, all the emotions, fall away. I feel like staring firmly, solely, solemnly into possibilities. Just that, and nothing else - I feel creative. I am too restless to be anything. I am too much of a dreamer to make money. Or even stay. Or love or be loved. In this life of mirrors, illusions, dreams and words, my emotions are that of a constant journey, of movement and not of anchoring. And, this may reflexive, as people I loved and those who were my anchors, left. Since...

Once you left home, my friend told me, you can never go back. I said I must, as I only wanted to travel to see the world. To learn, as I believed in Gu Yanwu's dictum - walk 10,000 miles, read 10,000 books. I went only as a student, as an adventurer who wanted to live in different places, speak different languages, learn different customs and make different friends. It was very different from wanting to migrate, escape from my roots: Far from it, I dearly loved my city, my house, everything that wrapped around my childhood. Indeed, my friend had a point, despite the copious amount of beer he would have drunk before he said that. That is the perennial question in a non-resident's life, the question of return. There is a constant weighing of opportunities, the choices being made at every step, the desire of self-renewal up against the desire of being yourself. Besides, home is only an idea frozen in time, not a house just, but the people and the voices and the habits that reside ...

I see time as a brush to paint my life's canvass with. So, nothing is ever lost: All the moments become a brush stroke as they seem destined to be. There will be no regrets either: There will be no claims to finality of a final masterstroke. Seen that way, life, my life or anyone's, becomes a beautiful rainbow of colours and possibilities, its each corner filled with a story of what could have been and its each ending filled with a tinge of beautiful sorrow. The portrait, which must be hung on the wall one day and possibly take the form of my own face - old, lined with little spaces marked by each of these stories - can and should be somewhat anticipated. The little creases build up over time as all the people that loved me step gently in the background, some go sooner than they should have, some linger a little, some leave a mark, some don't. But they must go, as is the rule perhaps, and every brushstroke must reach a conclusion, and the endings be laced with a feeling of ...

I discovered a word : Serendipity. I came across this before, indeed, but never understood it. This was one of the more exotic bits of my adopted language, which I kept neatly tucked away, never needing to use it. It was as beautiful and as unnecessary as the three Persian princes of Serendip , the story that gave us the word. I traveled around, but never liked the expression - if you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there. For all what I am, I am a dreamer, a planner in disguise. It made no sense to arrive somewhere I did not plan for. Or not to want something that I do end up having. The real life experiences are just the opposite - I do not get where I want to go, I scramble for what I want. This is indeed exotic, out of the way, as unreal as those little princes of Persia. All wonderfully miscellaneous for the busier ends of life. The point is, indeed, as it must be said at this Christmas pause, that all the busy ends, all these busyness, all planning, are...