This one's in Bangla and it's about self-love. Or the lack thereof.

shobai bolechhey ami onek roga hoye gechhi. tar maaney nischoi ekta shomoy ami brihot theke brihottoro hoye cholechhilam kintu keu amake boleni. ekhon jodi ami roga hoi, tar maney ami ki agey doityo chhilam?

ami majhey majhey shopno dekhi j brihot hotey hotey gas balloon er moto akashey urey gelam. ami jani eta manoshik oshukh ekta. kintu ei oshukh ta amar bhalo lagey. kichhu neeye toe bhaba proyojon jiboney. ma'r mawt ey "maniagrosto".

Once I yearned for you to come to me like wildflowers when the field needs it. Suddenly.

Come, love, like the sudden rain on on an unbearably sunny day.

Now, I ask the rain, could you not become him and arrive suddenly? We could be one, without warning, like the rain soaking my clothes and hanging from my hair.

Your phone keeps ringing. You don't answer your phone anymore.

. _ . . _. _

"Anything other than yes is no,

anything other than stay is go,

anything less than ' I love you' is lying"

- John Mayer, Battle Studies

Neel: Guess which film I managed to get my hands on. Just guess…

Me: Glass of Rage?

Neel: Yes!

Neel: But no subtitles.

Jonai is typing…

Me: Spot on, huh. Glass of Rage at the film festival in 2001. It was impossible to find! I guess you got it off the Internet, illegally of course.

Neel: Of course.

Me: I know you too well. Too bloody well. J

Neel is typing

Neel: J I don’t know what I should do about that though. There’s such a long trail of heavy destruction behind us. J Putting in way too many smileys but I am not really smiling.

Sent at 12:00 AM on Monday.

Me: ??

Neel is typing

Neel: Just watched this movie called Amu by Jonai productions.:)

Me: Hmmm. It’s a nice movie. How could something called Jonai productions fail ;)

Neel: J

Neel: It’s been three years since we saw each other, ya?

Me: Listen, I have to run. Got work.

Jonai has logged out of chat.

Of all the things that remind me of us everyday — television shows, books, places, names, faces, terrible haircuts, shirts torn at the sleeves — the metro rides are the worst. I still brave the traffic and heat and dust over the metro-compartment time machine.

We’ve spent three years, stuck like an old vinyl LP that has stopped on some random phrase of a song, which suddenly has so much meaning on its own. Hammering the message into your mind with mechanical repetition.

“Darling you got to let me know
Should I stay or should I go?”

an open letter

hello everyone.

it's been a while since i've been part of this blog, and yet this is my first post.

there was stuff going on in life. unpleasant stuff. yes yes. you get the drift. pyar-related, of course.

transition times are hard, yes. they make you nervous and edgy. you end up clinging to whatever bit of familiar ground you can manage.

and so last year, when i was leaving for my studies, to a completely different place, i did it.

i decided to fall in love.

love, rather romance, is - a lot of us would agree - a great buffer. comforter. and the idea of romance, thanks to the world of romance novels, chick flicks - of which i'm a great devourer - is also very familiar territory.

almost eight months on, the person i was supposed to fall in love with, is nowhere on the scene.

and yet, i have found love.

it's not another man. neither is it another woman.

it's a city. it's my life here. it's who i have become here. it's the trajectory i can see my life taking which it will continue to take with or without a man. it's a state of mind, a new space.

of course, pyar-suckers, as some of you are well aware, will always remain so. and so new city has instilled in me the hope for new love. for our kind of pyar. after all, it's the hope that keeps us going, right?

My mummy strongest

My wedding day has always been a bit of a lemon in my mouth. The photos and videos have been locked away and I rarely look at them, lest the sourness rushes in, resulting in the inevitable finger-pointing between my husband and me. It's unfortunate that such a special day be thus ruined for anybody, but it's O.K. Worse things have happened.

At my wedding party, my mother's face looked painted pink. It looked like she was making an effort to look pale skinned while being deeply brown. Many comments were made-- all of them from my in laws and not all of them directly to me -- on my mother's appearance, her apparent eagerness to look "fair" which had caused her to look like a pantomime artist, her perceived lack of good taste and makeup skills. One random lady from my husband's family recently came up to me at an event and almost without context, said "tomar ma k dekhe monay hoyechhilo khub old fashioned, conservative, na? " (Your mother appeared to be rather old fashioned and conservative when I met her at your wedding, no?) I knew there was a translation for this, which read as, "your mother is not polished and sophisticated like us, no?"

I did not answer this woman at the time since it seemed to me that validating her question with any explanation will be an insult to myself and to Ma. I simply smiled and turned my face away. People who know me and my family, my friends for example, who have spent many many nights in my house-- with perfect freedom to think of my parents' house as their own, have been drunk and stoned, have burnt down our living room couch, have borrowed saris from my mother-- know my her as a woman who is anything but old fashioned. Fortunately for me, none of my friends have been people who considered speaking fluent English, or blindly imitating the West as a sign of progressive behavior. To shun all things Bengali in an effort to appear cosmopolitan has been scoffed at by my immediate and extended family and by my large and rather accomplished circle of friends. So, in these circles, Ma has neither been old fashioned nor conservative. She has simply been a middle class, educated, Bengali mother, who also happened to be a banker for 27 years of her life.

My family consists of three people. Ma, Baba and me. It's your atypical Indian nuclear family. When it came to the traditional Bengali wedding of their only daughter, these two people nearing sixty, my Baba and Ma, pulled off a wedding party with a 700plus guest list with amazing aplomb. The venue was perfect, nothing malfunctioned, services were payed for on time, the guests were received with a smile and a nomoshkar, the food was sumptuous and there was enough of it for everybody. No one went away with any complaints, which is generally the mark one aims to hit at any Indian wedding.

On the day of my wedding, right up to the time to leave for my wedding venue, Ma was working. Taking care of big and small details, while continuously supplying people who were getting ready in our house with whatever they needed--safety pins, water, hair clips. You know, the little things.

She wore her sari in the bathroom. Tied her hair without a mirror. She then put on her jewellery and her make up in the car on the way to the wedding hall. Looking her best was the last thing on her mind as she worried about things being even a little less than perfect on the wedding of her only child. And yet, her sari was exquisite, her jewellery tastefully matched, her thick, long, black hair in a simple but tidy plait falling down to her knees. Once at the venue she remained collected, gracious and charming, right up till the moment when her blood pressure shot up and she quietly, without a fuss, removed herself to a small room at the back, where she collapsed and had to be treated immediately. This was done so surreptitiously, that I learned about this much later and most guests still do not know of it. The wedding went on without any diversion.

In her youth, Ma had been a striking woman, tall and slender, with long thick hair, an easy smile and great taste in clothes. She turned heads at a lot of places and had many admirers.

And at 52, I would not hesitate to say that it requires a rare kind of beauty and charm to look as good as she did on that day, even with slightly off make up. Would you?

Much Love

I thought it was over a long time ago, maybe when Schumacher retired or when Govinda & Kader Khan movies started flopping - but I think when I look back, in the years to come, Michael Jackson's passing on will symbolise the beginning of the end of my childhood.

Do you have a jiggly belly?

I do.

Do you hate my jiggly belly?

You probably don't, but I do.

Do you hate me?

You probably do, but I don't.

Stars die in burning skies.

I knew her. And everything about her. Every tacit gesture, every unsaid word and every nervous twitch. I knew all the masks she wore. I knew their maker. I knew every muscle in her body and how they would look in every light. I knew her steely resolve and her fragile heart. I knew the softness of her smile and the twinkle in her eye. I knew her silent sob and the sight of her mascara running down her cheek. I knew how beautiful she was and how much more she will be. She knew.

Someone else knows her now. And I lurk, unknown, in the shadows waiting to be found by someone.

Saurian's Gyan: "I"

Before we begin, I'd just like to clarify a few things: For any
relationship "me", "you", "I" are important, because, well... it's your relationship. When I write further, my reference to I, me, we, us, etc., essentially means you (and occasionally me, the writer), but you can read it from a third-person's perspective and it would work well for entertainment purposes either which ways. There is no argument that you are of course important in any relationship. And with this note I start writing "I", my first couple of series on "stuff" that I want to call Saurian’s Gyan.

For any of my relationships in life, as I am important, it is imperative that I know who I am and what my inert characteristics are. It is important that I know what I like in my life and how I react in circumstances -- how I feel and how I react. As on my quest in life with the hundreds of people I have relationships with -- whether it is with my mom or my dad; my sibling or my girlfriend; my colleague or my fiancé; my mentor or my best friend who I have a crush on; my ex or their mother-in -laws; my friends or my God -- they all generate some emotion in me. Whether I understand or overlook them, they all not only determine how I feel and react, but also how I deal with other relationships. In this quest of building and maintaining these relationships of multi-emotions we must be clear as to who we are and what we want.

Most problems in relationships are our own doing (well we want to blame others too because it’s simpler). But on a serious note, if you fix yourself, your relation heals or has more chances of survival. But do you want it to survive or "am I too insecure to be alone as this world is a lonely place" is again a dilemma. There is no potion for a good relationship, there is no reason for questioning why your best-friend is lucky to have a perfect relationship (as it may appear) and not you, there is no need to blame your rotten unlucky life, there is no need for feeling miserable and lonely without at least giving yourself the chance and time to fix and understand what happened.

Do not base your life on the faults of others or on luck, it's not going to help, it's going to do nothing but let another day pass by in positive tears or negative belief, and you will wake up the next morning ready for challenge and looking for a better tomorrow, I pity you. I pity those who, when sad, remember all the sad times in their life and think that they have always been upset and hence always be, then spend their days in misery. I pity those very same sad people who when are happy, seem like they have never been sad and remember only the happy moments in their life and are all positive that their future is content too. I pity those who think they have understood the dynamic of all relationships and off course their own, when they haven’t yet understood their own head and heart. I pity them because they don’t like getting hurt, but if they don’t get hurt on a regular basis, feel something is missing in life. I pity these smart, social, winners, playboys, mba’s, rich, intelligent, doctors, lawyers, artists, beautiful ignorant people. Their life doesn’t belong to them anymore. The more often you feel you are in control of your life, the more quickly your make up will run out and you will be forced to see who you really are, unless off course you still choose to be blind. I pity the one who is loved by all but cries alone at night, because he/she couldn’t love him/herself. We all have tried it all, we all have tried various ways of changing ourselves in order to be loved, we all have been accepted with and without are masks, we all have been rejected and we change on the basis of others and mostly not for ourselves.

If we just accept who we are without judging ourselves by the eyes of the world, if we just not justify our actions even to ourselves, but follow our gut and conscience, we would never complicate our lives as much as we do. "Charity beings from home", so be good to yourself, be true to yourself, know yourself, fear yourself, bear yourself, control yourself, help yourself, as you will always have to live with yourself. In order to fix relationships, to make this world a better place, we do injustice to ourselves, to our own nature; we forget our true self and the roots of our emotion. So the next time you regret something or are upset, don’t think how you have been wronged, how you did something wrong... just realise where you have done an injustice to yourself, where you have gone against your gut and conscience, where you did not love yourself, then you won't make the mistake again, or at least realise and understand ourselves and our emotions slightly better. The better you are to yourself, the better your relationships will be, and the better you will be able to understand your partner or others in society.

Coming up : Saurian’s Gyan : 2. "You"

Note: Saurian is a friend, (half philosopher/half clown), who requested I publish some of his thoughts on "stuff" anonymously