I Am

Just
One
Dot

Unusual Thursday

Unusual Encounter 1: Three men in the park sitting just in a line across each other in consecutive benches. One picking his nose away, the second doing pranayam and the third one sneezing...nose people!

Unusual Encounter 2: While jogging back from the lake, over the flyover, towards the railway station, I see three men walking together, all in white t's and navy blue tracks...one of them has a cap written amazing thailand some year to some year....I forgot the years....and the same person had all the Millennium Development Goals (all eight) printed at the back of his t-shirt....

Unusual Encounter 3: While crossing the railway tracks on foot, saw a woman in sari fallen and rather drowsy, I don't know really...she had her eyes closed and face cribbed...other women helped her get up...and her husband trying to help her...but the man seemed to be a pauper of sorts...she seemed unhappy that he tried touching her to help her out...and he shouted at her, in public, telling all "look what kind of a wife she is"...and she kept insisting on not to touch her....and they glided away to the nearby slums just where the railway crossing ends on the side of the bazaar...

Statement of Purpose, Forsaken and Forlorn...

in scientia veritas, in artes honestas...

It would not be very wrong or outrageous to say that one could treat illness with music, paint a canvas with sulphur and cadmium, write poetry for proving a mathematical theorem and take a photograph with the blink of an eye. Indeed, music IS therapeutic enough to alleviate depression, paint IS made up of chemical substances, poetry comprises of metric rhythms and mathematical progressions, and memories are photographic images of past incidents stored in the brain. Yet, as Einstein quite rightly points out, gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love. Also, imagination is more important than knowledge. New discoveries and inventions would have been impossible without creativity and imagination.

Hence, in my mind, the scales don’t really balance when it comes to science or arts. It’s a never-ending base-superstructure (base being science and superstructure being arts) dialectical leitmotif for me. But however often this recurring imbalance haunts me, I always knew that one reciprocates the other and that there has to be a structure that houses both the disciplines. The boundary seems to get blurred in a post-structural fashion, as if by deconstruction, and the field of Anthropology wins all the votes. But one must look hard for something, sometimes consciously and sometimes even the world conspires and gets it for you when you are temporarily not looking. The moment of arriving at a juncture where a balance is struck is almost like death, which is only the beginning. One gets flashes of the past in a series of linked montages at such arrival points and it makes all the more sense, just like in the Nonsense of Sukumar Ray or in the secret anagrams of Leonardo Da Vinci.

Just like Alice, I would like to keep myself busy in all things human. I would rather indulge myself in social questions and finding scientific answers so that our planet doesn’t get run over by intergalactic bypasses and leave the residual hitchhiking survivors like Douglas Adams’s character Arthur Dent, cursed to forever brood over the planet that was really never meant to be obviously because of the insensible viscous acts of human civilization.

We have done more damage to our planet than the rodents that destroy our crops. If in science lies the truth and the key to technological advances, in art lies the honour in keeping and maintaining such advances. Human beings fight among themselves and in doing so create havoc and leave a long trail of wreckage endangering life on Earth and nature itself. If we don’t act responsible socially and resolve social problems within our communities then the relationship between human and nature will worsen. We get angry at each other and greet each other with atom bombs. But what could we do when the Tsunami washed away several lives, and stripped off the nuclear plants naked? When nature strikes back, we will all be mashed into a coagulation of useless dump that might resemble some 20^th Century Dada art but it needs serious recycling with another Big Bang. It wouldn’t even be funny!

THREE DOGS

The strangest thing happened to me today...I just finished my dinner when I happened to be at my balcony when I saw a dog eagerly staring at me from the street...I motioned it to go away, just like that...but it stared at me with watery eyes...I thought it was hungry and needed food. I went inside to get my leftover rice and went back only to find him sitting and wagging his tail....I quickly poured the rice in a cellophane packet and keeping it open dropped it down. The dog immediately went near it, sniffed and then walked in another direction and stopped as if looking for someone, another dog perhaps...saw left and right and went away without giving me any further glance...I didn't even exist for the dog...then after a while another dog came, this one thinner...went straight to my dropped food, sniffed and then peed on it and left! I was so bewildered! then after a while a third, blackish, limping, oldish dog came over, sniffed and then peed like the second dog and left...HOLY BELGIUM! i mean, really, the food I eat even a dog wouldn't! Is that what it meant? Or was it something very personal amongst the dogs like some underground activity...for UNDERdogs...LOL...See, this is why I never like dogs...or anything that can be made into a pet...they are strange and they pee in the wrong place!

STALKERS BURN IN PLASMA MOCKTAIL!!!

I have lived the most important years of my life in Kolkata...and now I just can't live the life of a criminal anymore...criminal indeed...i need to report to FRO section every time I enter and leave India. And every time I get a new Visa, I need to make a new RP (Residential Permit)...which is not a very happy job. Involves a lot of photocopying, drafting and shit work. Meaningless and in no way of any use...It's for the State of India to feel proud of exercising power. Only the extent of power they exercise varies from place to place.

The Bengal Police had been very generous and kind as to the papers to be submitted for RP...but this Kolkata Police thinks they can find the rabbit hole where I, Alice, came in through...only if they had the imagination...I am in my third year of this course and in my last semester and the officer asks me there is no proof that I am a Bangladeshi student, despite my passport photocopy, and my Bangladesh address in both Sponsorship Certificate AND my college ID card...am sure you don't understand what I am trying to say by all these jargons....neither do I...and let's say I don't want to...I have had enough...

He (Dennis -The Menace as I call), has the whim to ask me whether I know the difference between submission and inquiry...i mean, why should I? why should I have to produce the sponsor's electric bill as address proof when I have the telephone bill to provide? I mean, isn't the telephone bill also considered as a valid governmental proof of address? He wants my sponsor's Voter ID card, AND his PAN card...let's say his whole point is to discourage my sponsor to sponsor me....and how ridiculous, that if a Bangladeshi student doesn't know anyone or can't convince anyone to sponsor him/her, then he/she simply wont be able to stay here for education purpose...is that fair? does that in any way stop infiltration, and illegal migration or even terrorist acts across the border? IT DOESN'T!

But had I not been suffering like this, I really would have pitied all the OC/RP's and DIB officers for having to work in an office that literally reeks of urine excreted in the leaking lavatories by themselves...What you inhale there, is all you can deliver...he inhales urine and delivers more excreta of the State itself...i say he, since most of the officers there are male...

Like Ginsberg, I would love to say to India (the State, I mean)

INDIA, I AM SICK OF YOUR INSANE DEMANDS!!!

When will you sell your eggs to America?

p.s. India, I wish I don't have to be a burden on you anymore...ever...I wish I never miss you...I wish I never have to love you again...or live in nostalgia for you...I am preparing myself to hate you...