With the Warm Sun on My Back

 

Life, why do you wander?

Life, why do you sigh?

Come rest-a-while,

For the only thing you do is try!

 

The warm sun on my back,

How I wish you were here!

The pain of not being with you,

Life, it’s just not fair!

 

The gingerbread man is broken,

Life, you never gave him a chance.

With a broken leg and a cuppa,

Look at him dance, look at him dance!

 

Where are you my love?

Where did you go away?

Stay with me for while,

Stay till the words have their sway.

 

I wander around, quiet and calm,

There’s a storm brewing inside.

Life why do you smile?

I took everything in my stride.

 

Where do the sparrows go?

Where do the songbirds lie?

They never had a chance I feel,

Once concrete hearts willed them to die.

 

Songs and birds and mahogany stools,

The steel breathes fire every day.

Help me my love, my life.

I can no longer find my way.

 

The song and laughter is all I have,

Will you steal them from me?

All I want from life it seems,

A chance to love free.

 

It fades, it fades, it fades.

Memories come and go at will.

I wait and look at the setting sun,

My chin resting on the windowsill.

Wars vs. Trek and the Man that Settled It for me in 2022

 

There had to be a day when I had to throw my ring into the hat and give my opinion. The truth is no one asked for it but the First Episode of Star trek- Picard reminded me I needed to do it. The reality is that the debate between Star Wars vs. Star Trek is a manufactured one by the legions of fans who will always have their reasons.

 

Let us start with the obvious. Star Wars is a classic fantasy and adventure. Imagine a Western in a completely new world. It creates a world never seen before in a galaxy far far away. But take it away and set it in Ancient Mesopotamia and Mesopotamia Wars would not be out of character. It is probably one of the greatest stories ever written encompassing every story arc ever known. In fact, the story arcs became so powerful even George Lucas had to become a revisionist and give rise to the debate of whether Han Solo shot first! He did by the way.

 

And with Disney taking over, the Star Wars universe just becomes grander and bigger than ever. It is as close to a modern Epic that we will ever get.

 

Star Trek on the other hand was science fiction at its purest and at its best. Look at the progression of their storylines. Look at the details of the technology being discussed. What’s shown in Star Trek today might as well be technology of the future. But there’s more to that. It’s a story of humanity’s never-ending search for meaning till one day it will lead to our self-destruction.

 

Star Trek also differs from Star Wars on one critical aspect. Star Wars is about a battle between Good and Evil. It is about empires battling each other for what they believe is right. Imagine Star Wars is The Iliad. And that makes Star Trek The Odyssey. It is about exploring; it is about the journey. It is about finding home at the end.

 

And therefore, when held at a gunpoint facing the Wrath of Khan I would always choose Star Trek. Unless of course Yoda appears and gives me the Force. Who wouldn’t want to feel the Source? Unless of course you are a Man in the Wheel of Time World and touching the source will only drive you to madness. (I deliberately threw it in to show how cool I am)

 

But now let us get back to Star Trek – Picard. There probably is no other series equaling it today on streaming that can match it in terms of storytelling and complexity. I was always a bit put off by the reboot of the movie franchisee from 2009 onwards but Picard takes Star Trek back to what it always stood for. Science Fiction at its purest form. And I know there had to be a season 2 and that’s why Picard lives at the end. And probably that is the only place where Luke beats Picard. His bowing out of his world was spectacular. And will always remain so.

 

But Watch Star Trek Picard. The world of streaming will see a cash crunch soon (That’s my business acumen speaking) So enjoy perhaps the greatest moment in the history of content creation. One day into the future, this will be considered the Golden Age of Content.

 

The Hope Eternal

 Our species is a strange one. It likes to believe that all will be well in the long run. As the sun flies through the universe with its tiny little blue planet, the even tinier us like to believe that we are invincible, that we are not a happenstance but part of a larger design and a larger plan.

 

Even our most outrageous stories which dare to explore the concept of chaos, end up bringing the world to an order. Look at our popular culture icons over the last couple of decades. For every Joker, we find our batman, every time an Evil-Lyn embraces chaos and wants to let it loose, a Teela rises up to being order. Even our games call chaos Magic and asks mages and witchers to control them.

 

In our worldview order is good. Order gets things done. Ordre is the natural form of life and hence when cataclysmic events completely turn our worlds upside down, we get afraid of Armageddon. The Hindu pantheon calls upon Vishnu to preserve after Shiva’s Tandava destroys everything.

 

If you have managed to read through some of the older posts, you might see that the questions that troubled Siddhartha troubles me as well. He however became The Buddha and I just read about his journey and his teachings. The three biggest sources of suffering illness, old age, death starts taking new meaning in a world that we live in today. With everything up in the air, mortality has come closer to home. Age crept up while we masked up and illnesses became many with treatments becoming more and more expensive.

 

2020 was the year of survival. 2021 was the year of reassessment. How 2022 will turn out is anyone’s guess but as we have seen over and over again throughout our history, hope is eternal.

 

And as Bollywood puts it beautifully, “If the ending is not happy, it just means the film is not over yet.”

 

So there it is – another year goes by and when we look back fondly many years from now, we will remember how we survived on hope and prayers.

 

Because all will be well in the end.

The New Stages of Grief

 

This is the year of strangeness. A year back no one would have imagined the position they find themselves in. But beyond everything else, there is hope that lingers on. Because hope is what makes us human. That and worrying about a future we know nothing about. Amongst our closest ancestors and relatives, we probably are the only species that worry so much about what the future holds for us. The big primates seldom do. And that is an evolutionary marvel that probably allowed the homo sapiens to race through and become masters of the world around. All that we do is with an eye on the future. Even “Carpe Diem” that tells us to seize the day loses its sheen after a few glorious years. Because if something is an absolute in this world, it’s regret.

 

There are events in world history that change a lot of our daily lives. Let’s take margarine for example – first thought of as a butter substitute for the French Army and the poorer sections of the society it became the saviour as World War II ravaged the world. And then it fell from grace again as the world attained prosperity. Often, it’s all about being at the right place and the right time but more often than not, it is about missed chances.

 

The strangest things however were playing out in our minds and the phases of grief were playing out in a completely different order. In the beginning of the year there was disorganization and despair all around. Information was scarce, the hubris of the human race was at full display and we were winging it in the true sense of the word. Then came the shock and numbness when we couldn’t meet family, things went from bad to worse and there would be a glimmer of hope which would then die down. But we picked ourselves up and moved on to yearn and search for meaning between never ending calls, the need to head back to work even though things were not quite the same. Some of us were luckier than the rest and this was the year I felt we finally began the see the invisible hands that moved every economy. There were people out there braving the virus while we kept safe at our homes. We are now in the reorganization and recovery phase with the hope of a vaccine helping us go through the process to get back to normalcy.

 

At your workplace too, you truly realize who you are. This was a year when the usual stressors at work were mostly at bay because something gigantic had usurped their places as our key irritant. This was a year when you needed to find our who you are – at home and at work.

 

But the truth also is that if you didn’t bother to find that out, it’s all good. By the time the year was halfway through, Linkedin posts almost made you feel that everyone on the world had gotten a minimum of two PhDs with all the time they had in the world. Thankfully for me, I had mentors who told me it’s ok.

 

So here we are, having survived 2020 with a story we can tell our grandchildren. And probably given the strangeness of it all, instead of ringing in 2021 at the stroke of midnight hour, maybe we should pause and observe a moment of silence for all those who we had to leave behind.

 

See you in 2021.

 

PS: Stages of Grief is an amazing concept. If you want to read further, I recommend starting with the book On Death and Dying by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. It was written in the late sixties so modern scientific understanding has really taken this forward.

 

My Favourite Girl

Didima’s no more. Today morning at around 7:30 am while the world was wondering what to have for breakfast or where to find their next sanitizers, Didima said her au revoir and off she went. And it’s an au revoir and never a goodbye.


vasamsi jirnani yatha vihaya
navani grhnati naro 'parani
tatha sarirani vihaya jirnany
anyani samyati navani dehi

Almost every child growing up in an Indian household would have heard these lines somewhere irrespective of his or her religious affiliations. It’s a verse from the Bhagavad Gita Chapter 2 Verse 22 and one of the most famous.


It says as a person puts on new clothes, discarding the old, the soul too gives up the old and useless body and accepts a new.


The soul in Hindu scripture is indestructible and I would want to believe that the purest soul that I have ever met would come back to this world. For suddenly today the world seems a little more barren and a little more colourless. Little Girls are made of sugar and spice and all things nice, so goes the nursery rhyme. Didima was made of Pure Love. I have never found anyone so full of love for everyone. I have never found anyone so forgiving, so selfless and so full of life. I have never seen anyone with such curiosity about everything in life with a true desire to learn. I have never seen anyone so diplomatic and yet stern and I know it was because her love was unconditional. Everyone she met, she made them feel special. She made them feel that they were the most important person in the room and they loved her back. My friends from childhood remember her, my mom’s friends came down to meet her for one last time. The world stopped for her.


Didima was my most favourite person in the whole world and I probably was her fifth (after the 3 children she brought into this world and her amazing husband). And as my Filipino friends had taught me, being in the Top 5 is always a great thing.


She gave me some of my earliest books. She gave me some of my most treasured gifts. But most important of all, she gave me the gift of writing. Anything I have ever written is because of her. My parents believe that I got my writing genes from her. People called her up asking her to write something for their children’s birthdays, weddings and sometimes even funerals and she could break into verse anytime.


During my teenage rebellious years, I had said I perhaps put Sukanta Bhattacharya as a poet higher than Tagore because of his realism. And I, a veteran of many school debates had been brought to my knees, my arguments demolished, without making me feel bad about it.


So here’s Tagore for you – “ami Mrityu cheye boro, ei kotha bole jabo ami chole.”

 “I am larger than death, saying this I will leave”. (From Mrityunjoy – The conqueror of death) 

There are few people in this world who find God. I think she did it. She had such faith in Jesus that she believed in earnest that all that she would ask for will be given. And in her I found the true embodiment of secularism in India – a practising Hindu finding her personal God in Christ. Since childhood I have seen her straddle the boats of Krishna and Christ. My grandfather’s family came from Navadweep, the heart of the Vaishnavite movement in Bengal and her own family Deity as a child was Raghunath – an incarnation of Vishnu while her children went to Catholic Missionary Schools.


Often I have been asked at work why do I rarely say a no to a challenge? I think the answer lies with Didima. I have never seen her say a no to anything that life threw at her. She faced it, found a way to solve it and moved on. With a smile.


Exactly a year back, dadu had passed away. And I always knew that this day would come and she chose a Sunday. The entire world she had touched landed at her house. She caused no disturbance to anybody and off she went on the ides of March. Julius Caesar was her and my Dadu’s favourite Shakespeare.



Can an exit be more poetic?



And can memories be more beautiful?

Nalin Sarkar Street

This year has been the year of losses and they seem to keep piling up with heart wrenching regularity. Around a month back Choddidima, my grandmom’s younger sister passed away. I was in office when the news came and it just did not make sense. Slowly ties to my past were weakening and growing up was seeming a lot tougher than I had assumed it would be.

Choddidima was an outstanding lady. I still remember I was in college and I had called up. After enquiring after my health, her first question was had I heard of this young writer called Chetan Bhagat. I hadn’t. She had. And within a few years all of India had heard about him. She lived to learn. There was not a single news item in our daily newspaper that missed her hawk eyes. And she loved to get to the bottom of things. Like most people in my grandma’s generation, she could quote Tagore at will and there would be always the right song that she would burst out singing and it was difficult to keep up with her.

She was one of those who supported wholeheartedly my decision to head out of Calcutta for college. She was way ahead of her times and yet when it came down to checking the right ways to conduct a religious function at anyone’s house, she was the ultimate authority. I have heard so many of my uncles and aunts just pick up the phone and call choddidima before they performed any form of worship, lest they offend the Gods. It was always safer to call her and be sure.

My favourite memories of her however were through the movies. We discussed movies over the phone and when I used to come home for vacations, we would go together and watch movies of Shah Rukh Khan, her favourite young actor. I remember watching Swades with her, skipping a college reunion. It just seemed the more fun thing to do.

As I grew up and started working outside Calcutta, our meetings became infrequent. Telephone calls would have to do. However, I did try to meet her every time I landed in Calcutta at her house in Nalin Sarkar Street because of her stories. Her stories were a connection to our family’s past. India has a long tradition of oral history. She was my historian.

Like all good Bengali boys, I have numerous nicknames given to me at various stages of life by the large joint family I come from. She called me Ganguram. And after today, no one will. I guess that’s how life is. One less person to pamper you when you head home.

Will miss you loads

Yours Ganguram

Finding your song

There are few areas in life where raw talent can burst forth suddenly and mesmerize everyone around. Intellect is not one of them. Rarely do you dazzle someone with your brilliance. Impressing the world through your capability in Sports is possible but then you need a stage. But Music…. Music is something that can break out from the crowd, a voice rises above the din of the millions and transcends you to a world beyond the ordinary. You don’t require a stage, you don’t require an audience, all you need is your voice.

Perhaps that explains the never-ending popularity of American Idol or its Indian counterpart – the Indian Idol. And while every reality show has its share of dreamy eyed contestants perhaps none is more universal than a Singing Reality Show. Today was the Mumbai audition of Indian Idol at a school near my apartment. And since morning the hopefuls had gathered around, waiting for their chance at glory. At the end of the day, there would be only one idol. But today everyone believed in the dream, believed that they could be the idol.

The lines were long and serpentine. It drizzled a bit, long enough to make the umbrellas come out, the sun kept playing hide and seek. But every now and then, there would be a group that would suddenly burst into a song. The world suddenly felt a bit more bearable.

In every field in this world, there comes a point of time when you hit the outer limits of your talent. You suddenly realize that there are others far more talented than you, others who are not as talented but way more hardworking than you and finally others who are just luckier than you. In showbiz this happens in far scarier proportions than any other. Even the best fade away after winning the show. Bands become one hit wonders. A Music Director never manages to get the accolades of her debut album.

But when you stand in the line for a chance at becoming an idol, you know that your grades don’t matter, your status, your background does not matter, you still believe in your own talent and you wait for your moment of glory.

As I saw the young aspirants line up outside the gates, full of hope and trepidation, I knew that in their love for life, music would play on.