thebengali.com

at the very edge of your conscience
is a line
a line that separates you
from the beast within you
a line that once crossed
leads you back to the jungle
from where you once came
a line that signifies the threshold
of all that society needs you to do
for it to maintain its collective sanity
at the cost of your identity
That, is the price you pay
to want to belong to society.

I have lived most of my life so far in a city. And I have lived most of my life so far among city people. And both – the city and the city-dweller – are dangerous. They are both full of themselves and do not have a vision of the world beyond the city and its life.

City life breeds homogeneity. It also cultivates social blindness. Cities give birth to intellectual illiterates, a kind of people who are educated to perform tasks that are necessary to survive in a city and to follow the template of behavior in all spheres of life as a city dweller.

If you are not a part of this phenomenon: mourn. Mourn because you will spend your life feeling frustrated with the lack of sensibility in those around you and angry because you have to conform to such behavior to get anywhere or get anything done.

If you are part of the city-life phenomenon: rejoice. Rejoice because you will hopefully die before you realize that your destiny was to be one of the marching ants that made up the vastness of the urban human mass and nothing else. If you do realize it before you die, fret not. Fret not because that is a noble cause with a difficult path. It is often difficult to tread a trodden path because the animal within us wants to break free.

… and just in case you’re wondering what new content beyond a blog I have included into the site (apart from taking the blog 2 clicks away from the home page), it’s coming … in the pipeline … almost there …

And here’s one for Yahoo!

Recently, I decided to change the design of the website to include content beyond a blog. I use a Yahoo! site building solution and published the new design and before I knew it, my blog was gone, and I couldn’t access it. 

I wrote to Yahoo! Customer Support, trying to get help to get the site back online and the blog back on track. And after a couple of initial emails that did not get results, I rewrote my query/problem statement to them and by next morning, my site was up and I was back to updating my blog as before. I guess that’s the reason why I have persevered with Yahoo! all these years, if you state what you need accurately and without confusion, the support system is super fast and efficient.

Wooooohoooooo Yahooooo! Thanks for the awesome response time.

About a month ago, my wife got this cheese spread from her weekly trip to the supermarket. A few days later, I found it looking sunny and cheerful on a sandwich for breakfast and a bite later, I knew it wasn’t for me: it was an Jalapeno-flavoured spread, the ‘Mexican Mirchi’ tag should have tipped us off. To keep up my recently found good health I have to abstain from such burning temptations and I have been doing a good job of keeping away from them.

Then, a month later, today to be precise, my wife informed me cheerfully: “I have got you a new plain cheese spread.”

“I will have bread and butter, I don’t really like cheese  spread … ” I said, watching as her sweet expression curdled, crustalised her exasperation and settled into a calm, silent and stormy look , the kind of look my friend Rohantonio would term as a “killer look”.
 
That’s pressure, my friend. That one look. And we face such pressure every day of our lives, taking paths that we don’t really intend to go down.

I love cheese. And I hate cheese spread. As simple a piece of communication as that eight years ago would have saved my wife endless trips to the super market trying to get that perfect cheese spread. (I’m not really sure if she herself likes cheese spread, hmm.)

And really, 14 out of 15 days, cheese spread doesn’t make my breakfast interesting, because 14 out of 15 days I don’t have bread for breakfast. And no, no matter how much money the dairy-product company spends on the advertising, cheese spread just doesn’t taste good on parathas, rotis and sundry other India breakfast foods.  

But my likes and dislikes do not encourage or discourage dairy product companies from employing more people in research and spending more time, money and effort (which they will recover from you and me), trying to raise revenues by creating more variations, varieties and options in flavours that excite a momentary taste and create entirely new lines of product space on the over-crowded shelf. That’s what they do and they should continue to do so.

The real question is: am I going to continuing eat cheese spread when I don’t really like it? And if yes, what does it say about my decison making process and can I really avoid looking for someone else to blame if I can’t say no when I mean no?

It’s a long, hard road to being who you are without making a conflict out of it, but the road must be travelled.

Days without incident: 0.

The evening sky as seen from Wakad, Pune, India; Photo: Sanjay Mukherjee

An angel swooped down,
Or was it a demon?
But in the clear blue sky
I could not tell.

A bit of sky, a whole of mountain, a deep blue sea and a boat: what else would one need for an adventure but an unstill mind?

If you ever get to Hong Kong, pay a visit to Mui Wo on Lantau Island .. and not just the touristy beach but really take a walk around.

so where do all the voices come from? and what do they want from me? the only thing I seek is silence and I know the silence must come from within me, but the voices they just keep coming. maybe it isn’t time yet…