About stones and yellow lamp posts

"....then you better start swimmin', or you'll sink like a stone........for the times they are a-changin' ...."


It is 2.05 a.m. now. Rather it was that time a couple of minutes back. Then I was lying on the bed outside my mosquito-net with the lights turned off. The mosquitoes were yet to locate me in the dark, as they are very active in my room in the ground floor. But they or avoiding them was not of my interest at that time. Recently the road in front of our house got some new lamp posts with yellow bulbs. The street and part of my room is filled with halogen like light, crisscrossed by shadows. The lamp posts, embraced by countless wires going in all directions, were busy with the bugs humming around the light.

The rooms are getting painted. They smell of fresh paint. Oddly its in the night that the smell becomes strong. Its worse when you go to sleep. The smell makes you feel like choking! Some kid probably has his birthday in the flat opposite to our house. Because little lights from wires are hanging from the roof top to the bottom. The lamp posts could use that extra help. Its winter time. So fog/smog tend to challenge the yellow lights from the lamp posts.

The road in front of our house is a small one. Nowadays nearly each lamp post have a car parked for their company as garages are hard to find or maybe people are too lazy to put the cars inside the garage. Like a sight-screen we have the huge South City residential towers. I saw the moon struggling to get higher than the towers many a times. When you look at the towers from the beginning of the road, you will feel maybe the moon is only 36 stories higher nowadays.

In the evening when I was walking back to my house I realized again how huge the construction is! Its bigger than a child can ever outstretch both of his hands side wise and tell I want a ice cream this big. I suddenly had a sinking feeling. It was one of those like taking first swimming lessons. You throw your limbs desperately but still find yourself off balance. Your head bubbles up and down and you choke on waters entering your mouth. Or maybe it was like the space around you is contracting. It wont squeeze you but gives you an eerie feeling. Like suddenly having cobwebs in your face.

Bob Dylan must have written those lines about swimming for the old fashioned people. Advising them not to stop the young ones. The problem is I am quite young and those lines came to my mind easily. Maybe nowadays the old fashioned people are changing things and fresh minds are struggling to float around.

The joke

When we define something as "strange" don't we kill it then and there? If we can define an incident as strange then were is the pleasure of having those times when we cannot just explain what we are feeling? We give things a name to represent it, make it adoptable for the society. But to do that pleasure we destroy the feeling.

If jokers were so happy and laughable then why use all those make ups? Don't they some times make us feel that some how "the joke was on me"? We watch a guy getting kicked or being made a fool of and feel good, happy. Maybe to the jokers we are the real jokes. Paying others to see what we have already got. To relieve us from different forms of pain we impose those on others! People watch serials trying to forget there problems by seeing others in trouble!

So where's the bloody greatness? Where is the joke? Is it that we are afraid to think or are we to ashamed to laugh on our own? Is that why we pay others to create the emotions for us?

There are things which should be left to individuals to understand them in their ways and only when the situations arise. Its like knowing something for ages but suddenly realizing them. Others can just tell us what they came to know after so many year of hard work, but we should realize that we only have known them by hearing. Realizing something is different. Its like the question why there are no more great ones when there preachings are available? Its like knowing that your dear one will leave soon and preparing yourself hard but suddenly realizing the void after there departure. Its like loving a girl knowingly that she was going to leave and preparing yourself for that but getting caught off guard in front of every emotions after she has finally left. Like seeing her face in every crowd.

Posters for all

I am new in the office. So I do more or less whatever is told to me. The latest is going to office at 1 o'clock in the afternoon and coming back around 11 o'clock in the night. I always thought that the night in Kolkata would be a nice thing to see, but never got much chance to do so. Although I nevertheless expected a surprise such as this.

My narrow lane from the main road to home has shot to fame nowadays. It begins with lines of make shift food stalls in the left side and rickshaw stand on the right. The wall on which the rickshaw pullers support themselves while having a biri is covered with posters. And the posters are covered in layers of other posters. So even if someone wants to read them he have to work very hard. Here also lives a lunatic, probably on the street, in the food stalls, in the shadows from lighted buildings or in a way in nowhere. He is just there. The other day when I was beginning my walk to home from the road to perdition, I saw this lunatic standing and watching the posters. Then I realized that he was writing something. The poster was written in Hindi. He was writing (probably copying) those literals in the vacant part of the poster in exact way. The pen he was using must have been different. The pen was giving an effect like those with which black and white graphics novels are drawn. Where the pictures were like as if they were created from long lines.

I always liked that kind of painting but never tried it. As I was not good in drawing, like everything. Maximum I did was to eat a friend's head requesting to teach me to use those kind of calligraphic pens. What I failed, even to try and most "education for all" type of programs all over the country failed to do, a poster , a lunatic, a pen was doing with ease and peacefully in that chaotic place.