learning and growing

I have often mentioned Kolkata in my blog, and some posts are in fact dedicated to Kolkata. I hated this city despite the fact that I was born here, stayed here in the initial years of my life and despite it being my 'mamarbari'. I hated it in my college years when I could judge situations and places and the quiet that my hometown had offered me, all throughout, was and is still unbeatable. But as years passed by, I started feeling for Kolkata in a different way. True it always had things to annoy me, but then no place is perfect. I think I know when exactly I fell in love with Kolkata. It was since the day I started staying in my single room during my post graduation, took my regular lonely walks in and around my college, and that also included my often spending time in the Ramkrishna Mission in Bidhan Sarani, listening to ' 'Kirtans'. I felt independent in my own way. Somehow the narrow lanes, the sweet shops and ' tele bhajar Dokan 'of North Kolkata touch...

Festival in India means traffic, crowd, pollution of all kinds, and dirty, dirty people smiling at you, staring at you with coloured faces when you don't know why the heck are they so colourful when it is not even holi. Being a person of short stature make things worse. You can't get your way out because you are sandwiched all the time. Nobody even knows that you exist somewhere down there near their chest or maybe lower. I ponder what ants feel like? And then, when you carry baggages bigger than your size , you end up being a ...well I don't know what. Pardon me, for my imagination is surely not working now and I am not sure where and how I should use a metaphor or simile to describe my look/ condition.

Someone asked me if I feel sad. If i retrospect the past few months, the answer will be yes. But more than being sad I find this situation challenging. Everybody has to encounter this reality. I did it earlier in my life and I believe God knew that I will be able to take it and so now. Conditions are as worse as it can be, but when I think deeply I find consolation in my thoughts. For example, many people my age have a father, but still they are sad. Because they don't share a firm bonding with their father. I was never in such a place. In that way I was blessed and I can die with all those happy memories I have with my father. Situation wise, I am sad now but in the long run I will be okay because my father is always in my mind boasting about my achievements. What more? I will never get over this incident but that will just make me more human. I am more a family oriented woman and why to be so ashamed of that? That is my choice. Is not it? My career means nothing without them beca...

So the paperman knocks on our door and tell us how he is proud of his elder son because he got a good job in a reputed company. I felt happy and peaceful after a really long time on hearing this. You see there are people who grow up with privileges and then there are people who don't. And when the second category win for themselves something good, the feeling is good. Ask me, I know it. Now my second feeling- I am 22 and if you want to know if I am seeing someone, ask me directly. You don't need to tell me in a roundabout way that I am reading in a girl's college and there is no romance in such a place. I mean , I do have a life outside my college too, is not it? And we have funnier things to witness inside a girl's college, if not romance. And coming back to romance- we have that too. New generation, you see. And this is it. O wait! I am reading a Bengali book , the name I won't say and increasingly I have got this feeling that Bengali is such a beautiful, beautifu...

Here I am at a crucial juncture of my life thinking what will happen next and then there are people who are paid for analysing words of celebrities. Like, can you imagine? That is their job and they are PAID for it. I would literally die for such a job. The other day I was watching an interview which was about Aaron Paul. To be precise it was about how he treats his wife in public and the topic of discussion were his comments on his wife. So when Aaron Paul told his wife ' is it weird to be perfect and fun to be fun, all the time?', he did not know the headlines it was going to make. Let's face it, democracy does not work anywhere and one is criticised to love his spouse openly and loudly as much as one is criticised for cheating on their partners. And here I am, thinking why on earth should that become a topic of discussion. Some said Paul's wife was probably not mentally fit and needed this open pampering from her husband. While some remarked that Paul was a show-off,...

Seems like the 'Surviving' phase got the better of me.  All the mental havoc that was suppressed for the past one month , unleashed and that resulted in me getting admitted in a nursing home for three nights straight and some eight bottles of saline to freak me out. All this time while I was vomiting and was unstable, my mind was still working reasonably enough to calculate the bill that might arrive anytime, to calculate the number of times I had already puked, the curious faces who came to see my mother and me, the capsule and pill like smell engulfing my bed ( this was my first time in a nursing home as a patient), the number of other patients coming and going, the injections, the dizziness after that and the continuous pain that was beyond any human or medical help. It was the absence of my father. The man I know I will never see again, the man who had always been too proud and loud about my achievements. I was after all a sincere, reasonable , understanding daughter. I hav...