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Diary entry - 28/1/2019

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The canteen window gestured to the winter sky, desperately preparing to pour down. When the heavy clouds were brawling, my lips were soaked in the steam puffing sugarless coffee. Very typical of a semester beginning, thoughts were grazing in the valley of academia until the glaring clock pulled my eyes out of its sockets. I gulped down the coffee with an oily bite of omelet and rushed into the lecture hall on the first floor. Into the cacophony of the room, the professor with strangely fashioned white whiskers entered and verbally involved himself in Mrinal Sen and his art. Though impregnated with wisdom, it went tiresomely long till he paused! The lights disappeared for the projector to beam moving images, Bengali font and English subtitles. Despite many impeding heads of various sizes, planted on necks of various lengths, I read - Chaalchitra Directed by Mrinal Sen After one and half hours of intermittent fits of laughter and journeying into old memories, I
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Until Next Time

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“It wasn’t that I wanted to go home Who knew home? I only knew alone. What I wanted was to be elsewhere, Somewhere, anywhere but there.” I am forever longing for death. When people around me crave to live, I could never derive meaning out of their desire! I always wanted to die… Slowly, painlessly and alone. Over the time, my death instinct has become an inexorable habitual thought. To me, self-harming is a matter of immense solace because I am always incapable of describing those momentary emotions which visit me, intermittently. I am yearning to merge into there, into that infinite nothingness. Until very recently, nothing ever had the power of diluting my urge to die. But this October came and faded, leaving a swelling torment. Now, I am aware of how death can grab away the soul of the living with that of the dead. Eleven nights have withered since she slept, forever, without putting me to sleep.   At benumbed nights, I extract mute frames from the endless
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The Melancholic Bond and an Insufficient Daughter

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“So, I am leaving on this Sunday night.  .  . ” “Alone?” “Yea . . . It’s the Air India flight, so the luggage thing is sorted. Also, Anita aunty will come to pick me up.” (Silence) “It feels like yesterday was your first day in school. You chose to go to school while you were still underage and we never had to convince you about it.  .  .  You know, on your first day you didn’t eat your lunch (laughs) . . .” My incapacity to respond to it muted our conversation. But I was amused by the emotions flickering in her eyes. Still, it was unbearable for me to know her closer and I turned away into thoughts.                          My reality, since the age of one was that of being raised by grandparents and away from parents. To me, parents were a holiday destination or freedom from the rules imposed by grandparents. Being with them on vacations meant waking up late or choosing jalebi over breakfast or to devour chocolates and ice-creams
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BLISS IT IS TO BE ALIVE IN THAT DAWN

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My clan is that of verbal poetry. Everything around inspires me to slip into a world of words, I wrap myself in its warmth and breathe more and more of it. To me, words are a sign of my own existence. Words keep me alive. But very recently, after getting into college, the cinematic experiences began to thrill me. I started to take notice of things closely. That’s how I began to explore a world of visual poetry.  During the second year in college, I had to use my friend’s laptop for an immediate presentation preparation. In hostel, we were not allowed to use laptops in our own rooms or to charge after an allotted time. But one night, after finishing my work I just peeped into the movie collection in his laptop and ended up seeing Kapila   (https://youtu.be/934wrYOHJ-U) . My friend was after Kapila for a very long time and he was literally dying to see it. All I knew about Kapila was that it was a documentary on the life of the eminent Koodiyattom practitioner Kapila Venu (htt
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Your Gender,Not A Perennial Embarrasment.

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              “I am a perennial embarrassment.” -Rudra Chatterjee (Chitrangada:The Crowning Wish) Many moons ago, when I was more of a kid than a girl, I saw an image in an English daily followed at home. I was not more than ten years old at that time. In that big black and white photograph which occupied a considerable quarter of that page, two young women were embracing each other with a delicate and aesthetic intimacy. I stared at that column because, I felt nothing unusual in women who are close together! Mind fluttered with the question- “what has given this picture, such an importance to appear in this page.”  Being a person with incurable ‘curiosity syndrome’, I pushed myself to make sense out of the cluttered sentences upon the faded white page , fabricated with sophisticated words ! It was really so heavy to be afforded by my vocabulary, thoughts and consciousness. The only thing that I deduced from the whole article is the single idea – “girl-girl relationship
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