Blogging from A-Z Challenge: H is for Home sweet Home

H for Home Sweet Home

Image via: http://paulasponderings.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/home-sweet-home.jpg

Home is my own dreamscape

where buds of comfort

effloriate and bring to life

frequently my own unsung musings,

with a splash of happiness 

that wraps me throughout the day.

Two summers and two winters have

passed by, but my present home,

my abode of happiness

still remains new.

It is as sweet as ripe mangoes,

as pretty as a bunch of peonies,

and as delicate as the petals of a white rose.

White is my theme here, white linen,

white chalk on a tiny chalkboard

with scribbled messages indicating

a wish to freeze fleeting moments

or cherish subtle warm memories.

The bell-peppers are ripening this season,

ample little Catharanthuses load the plants

in my little balcony-garden and flush

my life with red, pink and white hues.

My clean little space, decked in

comforting beauty is a sight

that brings abundant pleasure

on tired days when I come back

from a disquieted world waiting

for a touch of order.

Then with a sepia-tinted gaze

my home assures me that you can have

your own little world of calm and beauty

away from the ranting and fretful house outside.

Blogging from A-Z Challenge: G for Gracing the 'Good' Night!

G for Gracing the ‘Good’Night!

Night descends with tip-toeing severity in my city. The sounds of the day, the hush and the murmur, the zinzulation of drilling machines perforating solid concrete, the hammering, the noise of water pumps working assiduously, the noise of vehicles, are conspicuous by their absence. One wonders where the activity has gone to, perhaps after having enough of the day, it too has decided to hum a rhythm and retreat to its nest. For a few short hours it will all be still. Even if you strain your ears you cannot hear even an iota of the deafening noises of the day.

The seasons of the day never fail to intrigue me even if I have spent enough ruminating hours over them. Sometimes I think of them as a metaphor to our life: once a season expires, you cannot bring it back until its natural cyclical life brings forth its presence. The past is fast retreating; the present is an awesome mingling of the bygone day and a future dawn.  Think of night as a cumulative of all your yester years and you standing under one dark dome wondering if there remains a speck of the day in night’s awesome quiet. There usually isn’t, the scenery undergoes a metamorphosis just like we all do as we hop from one age-box to another.

Right now in the calm complacency of night, the binary of the day strikes me as somebody who has been greatly wronged. Since a time out of mind we’ve considered night as a child of necromancy and evil; its darkness has forever signified wickedness. But come to think of it, such a stereotype is erroneous and aims to detract from the essential beauty of night all its grace. Society loves to typify and dwell on stereotypes, but as a scripturient bent on understanding the world anew through my writing, I propose to take the beauteous night not as an otherized subaltern, but as a graceful beauty, one who is beautiful and complete and not un-good or evil as we would like to believe it. Devoid of light doesn’t mean presence of evil; can evil or ungoodness not lurk in daytime, I wonder. Of course, it can, amidst the smile of charming people there dwells the smirk of evil. 

So, on this beautiful night, amid the absenting noise and under the star studded sky, I aim to embrace the goodness of night and hope to be a person in my life who doesn’t discriminate a person/ a season/ a weak opponent based on her apparently negative physical attributes. 

Blogging from A-Z: F for Feluda

F for Feluda

A Sketch of Feluda, Topshe and Jatayu by me

This evening when I scanned the horizon to discover ideas about today’s blog post, several prompts beginning with the sixth letter of the English alphabetical series came to my mind: F for Friendship, F for Fantasy, F for Frustration, F for Family, F for Future, etc. All seemed quite judicious at the moment, I told myself I could very well pick one among the several magic-props and start scripting my ideas; and just when I was wavering between F for Family and F for Future, a door to my past opened with unusual vim and there, under the hallowed portals of days bygone, I found the very topic of the day: F for Feluda. Among the olla podrida of yesteryears’ images, among the grime and slime, among good and bad memories, were my Feluda, the hero if my youth, my first love.


As I sat in my chair on the pile of unacknowledged ideas, which looked at me goggle-eyed like those leftover congregation of Thanksgiving turkeys after one in the group had been selected to be pardoned, I saw my meta-voice upon hearing Feluda’s name performed a terpsichorean feat. I smiled and headed for my laptop.

Feluda, the astute private detective from Kolkata is an immortal fictional creation of the flamboyant genius Satyajit Ray. Ray, known to the world as an auteur who directed such gems of Indian cinema as the Apu Triology and Pather Panchali, was a brilliant writer as well, who concentrated mostly on literature for children and young adults, and Feluda was his unequivocal master-creation. Prodosh Mitra of 21 Rajani Sen Road, Kolkata -700029, is best known to the world by his informal sobriquet, Feluda. He along with his cousin, his “satellite” or his assistant, Topshe (Topesh Ranjan Mitra), and his friend, mystery-thriller writer, Jatayu (Lal Mohan Ganguly), partook of innumerable baffling criminal cases. Feluda emulated the great detective Sherlock Holmes and applied a method of detection and deduction for his own cases similar to Holmes’. An astute observer, Feluda was armed with a “magajastro” –his impeccable weapon of a brain capable of plunging into the convoluted sinews of a criminal’s mind and extracts his secrets, and a Colt revolver. Feluda’s first adventure was “Feluda-r Gyoendagiri” (English title “Danger in Dargeeling”) which was followed by such gripping escapades as Badshahi Ankti (The Emperor’s Ring), Sonar Kella (The Golden Fortress), Joy Baba Felunath (The Mystery of the Elephant God), etc. Each of the innumerable stories that I read as a child struck me as masterpieces, but the best among them was “Sonar Kella” or “The Golden Fortress”. It was a novel chronicling the adventures of Feluda in deciphering a labyrinthine mystery that involved a child who was able to recall his past and became a target of two dangerous crooks after mentioning the presence in his previous life of precious jewels in a golden fortress.


What was most intriguing about the Feluda mysteries was their setting. In his professional capacity Feluda had travelled far and wide, and his stories, which also read like fabulous travelogues, inspired many young readers in Bengal to become travel enthusiasts. I remember how after reading “Sonar Kella” I threw a fit until my dad agreed to take me to Jaisalmer, Rajasthan which houses the eponymous fortress. The Golden Fort in Jaisalmer is probably the only fortress in India made famous by a novel and a subsequent cinematic production (“Sonar Kella” was made into a movie by Satyajit Ray). The aureate aura of this flavicomous structure made of yellow sandstone draws innumerable Feluda enthusiasts every year, who come here to see the various places inside the fortress where Ray did his shooting for the cinematic adaptation of his famous novel. Those sights are a ticket to the gilded dream land of fictional-upliftment and imagination for many of Feluda’s young and old fans. When I revisited the place last year it proved to be equally exhilarating for me like it had been back in 2001 when I saw the fort for the first time.


As a kid my sister and I took it upon ourselves, ardent fans that we were of Feluda, to travel all the places Feluda visited. I am happy to say that we both have overtime managed to cover ninety percent of those travel-locations: London and Hong Kong and a few places in India are left. It was Feluda who made us love travelling, and even now, whenever I travel to a location haunted by Feluda in one of his fictional journeys, I cannot help but be elated.


 My love for Feluda has kept the adventure-loving child alive in me. It is to Feluda and his gripping-adventures that I turn to when on certain sleepless nights I feel the grown-up world’s weight tiring me.

 I know it is difficult to keep the child alive in you among the din and cry the world, but by not decathecting from my favorite childhood reads, I have been able to do it; and I say this without an iota of abashment that come what may, I am never going to do otherwise. Feluda and I are united, and even if age with all its majesty and intuitiveness demands a jettisoning of the leftover streak of youth, I propose to curl back in my youthful corner and enjoy an escapade with Feluda and display a stuck out tongue at the grimacing face of the demanding world eternally wanting me to grow-up.

Feluda on WikiPedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feluda

The Feluda Song : 

Bogging from A-Z Challenge: E for Evening Dawning!

E for Evening Dawning!

Evening descends slowly in my city like drowsy eyes closing from the weight of sleep. The warm early-summer days with the sun’s rays dropping on earth approximating drum sticks beating on the musical instrument will often lead you to wonder if the day would at all pave its way for the evening hour. I wonder if we can do without evenings. Come to think of it, how do we define evening : a binary opposite of morning, a stereotype.May be we can do without them, but the unflinching law of the world as particular about its duties as a well-bred butler, will always follow the universal code as to the dark and light hours specified for a place. And so evening is born today as usual from the crepuscular venter of the day causing the inmates of the city to utter a sigh of peaceful relief. In my garden I imbibe the sweet smell of wet plants their leaves dripping with water along with the marvelous colors unleashed in the sky by some invisible necromancer. I stand and watch the evening-walkers in the park outside my apartment with cellular phone stuck to their ears seldom stopping to see the marvelous pre-evening sky above. The children playing downstairs count the scores in some game and exchange data about the regulations of a sport. They raise their voice to remonstrate with some rule-breaker and I hear their shrill teenage boy-voice along with the chirping of the birds en route their nests, the frequent honks of cars, the tinkling of cycle-bells, the occasional rumble of airplanes sundering the dome above, and bursts of laughter emanating from a group of women. I stand and listen to them and wait for another familiar sound of evening: my door bell. On days when I am home, I get to greet my husband and eagerly wait for the moment when I am to hear the oft-repeated sound of the bell, generally ignored but sounding special to my ears on certain pedestrian days. All the above sights and sounds are part of the quotidian evening ritual. They occur, these sights and the sounds—the ianthine sky giving way to inky black, the retreating chirrups from birds— with marvelous accuracy every day, and only on certain vacant days do I enjoy them. Indeed I do not remember the last time I enjoyed the dawning of evening; we are way too busy with our life to savor the fleeting joys of the day. Nevertheless, the occasional treat is good too. It’s amusing to think that the pulpy evening vision I inject in me will subsequently find its place in a machine-typed post to be published in a virtual space. Contrary to my previous estimation of the internet, I now feel it’s more indispensable than anything else, for one it never forgets and so the blog wherein I will disgorge my thoughts on this beautiful evening hour will perhaps be there in my virtual diary for me to scrutinize on some later date. Also, I think the idea that nature or the physical world as crafted by some supramundane agency cannot co-exist with a mechanical universe riddled with the boons of science is erroneous. I look at the evening vision around me: tall buildings happily illuminated by electric light embedded in their torso, cars parked under leafy greens, manicured lawn looking pretty, a bright red birdhouse accommodating a sparrow, and airplane lights twinkling at a distance in close communion with starts blinking in the sky.

Enchanting evening has set in and it’s time to savor the rest of it over a cup of steaming tea flavored with cardamom.  Ah, the pleasures of life, what are we without them!

I wish all my blogging friends a very good evening! 

A-Z Challenge: D for Dear Delhi

D for Dear Delhi

You have been the jorum of dreams; you have been the heart of our country. You have been home to many drifters in the dawdling, dark hours of the night. You've been the flimmer of hope, the station of action, the place where vision meets reality. Since the antiquated centuries, you have been the maiden holding in her bosom monuments from which wayfarers still draw aesthetic nourishment. You have been home to art and culture, to music and drama; you have been the capital star of the country, its central conurbation, its cardiac organ throbbing with life. Dear Delhi, you have housed in your bosom princes and paupers, criminals and saints, men in white and individuals with shady reputation. Silhouetted against your painted red sky are skyscrapers, tall candle like structures often with tapering tops and pointed peaks finger-tipping the drifting lumps of cumulus. I see you as a pantomime, one with a painted face and communicating with gestures. I see you as an old matron tired with age, your back crooked from holding the weight of civilization. You stare at the city you gave birth to with eyes welled-up. You cannot hold your child by its arm anymore. It has matured before you knew it.

Dear Delhi, you have given opportunities, you have unleashed discrimination, you have pushed people to succeed, and you have forced them down hill too. You have been propitiated like god by your lovers with poems and prayers; you have been called a horrible monster by those who derived not a drop of milk from your buxom bosom. Dear Delhi, you have endured tempestuous disruptions, but what deracinated the essential human spirit in you was a blow hurled by a bunch of men. They hurled arrows on your chest; they robbed your bosom of their nourishing elements. They violated a woman, they violated you. A veil of assault was thrown at you and you were forced to display it. You now stand abashed, you dry maiden. The drought in your womb may never cease. Dear Delhi, you may never be the same again: the spirited central organ of the country breathing life and sporting equality for all. You have a scar on your face, an ugly defect that might never heal. You may still house wayfarers, breed dreams, but a piece of your ample heart that died on a foreign shore on a cold day last December , that broken piece might never re-unite with you; you may never be full and complete again,  my dear Delhi.