Ruchira's Ramblings

Disclaimer: I have never been and never will be an art critic. These are just some thoughts I had. Also, this post has stewed in my head for about a month because procrastination. Some time ago, around the end of Durga Pujo, someone in my timeline shared this 1882 painting by George Gidley Palmer depicting the immersion of a Durga Idol in the river: And seeing it made me think of another famous 'Bisarjan' painting by Gaganendranath Tagore: And then I found another one by Tagore too, on the same subject: And while I lack the terminology or study to properly express this, had I not known anything about these paintings and had to pick which of these had been made by a Western artist and which ones by an Indian, especially by a Bengalee artist, I would have picked correctly.  Palmer's painting has sharper lines, I think, but the overall impression for me is that of Marlow staring into the heart of darkness, at something essentially alien. It's a lovely painting, but to me,...

From the archives...Rejected Pile, August 2016. You go to the end of the world. Meet people. Have adventures. The waves bring you back. You try to keep in touch, your heart still echoing to the beat of far-off seas. Nothing is ever going to be the same again. Waves. Rolling in. Crashing. Ebbing. Flowing again. Each wave is new, with a different rainbow at its crest. Gradually, the colours fade, the edges of memories are blurred- they could have happened to someone else. The conversations on social media wane, and you sink back to your old life, the familiar rhythms- the beat of your daily chores, the rotation within your axis. The sea sometimes haunt your dreams, but they slip away as you wake. And after all, you are all very different people, with nothing in common but the shared adventure. But sometimes, a gust of wind brings in a half-forgotten fragrance, and you remember long walks along unnamed beaches, and cheap motels with bad plumbing come back to you. Deep inside, you know ...

February In the parking lot, the fallen leaves flew around in that strangely sad afternoon light with it's detached indifference. I felt tired. Tired of thinking, tired of being myself, tired of the slight heaviness that weighed upon my heart in a constant throbbing ache, tired of how the ache rose up to my throat, tired of how I had absolutely no reason to cry and how I couldn't cry and how I wish I could. The leaves flew around me, with a freedom and abundance I didn't possess. The crows cawed at the dimming of the light as they returned home. I thought of how it was a lovely spring afternoon, or would be,  if a cuckoo would sing in that moment. It  was  spring after all. Here and there in the city the palash and the krishnachuras flamed their defiant reds against the greys. I wanted to participate. I wanted to feel the fire in my heart, not this weary heaviness. I didn't want to be sad. There are things I want to do but I keep freezing, distracting myself, going to b...

  Photo by    Kostiantyn Li  via unsplash.com Yesterday, I was returning home from vacation and the whole dislike for waiting rooms and the existential dread of yet another year ending, with the reminder of all our forever dissatisfactions sent me off on spiral of longing and wishes. Which is fine, I guess. After all, this blog is where I come to think aloud. And two things can be true at the same time. You can love yourself and your life and still feel the pang of all that you haven't found yet. But today, on the first day of the year , I want to remember all the good things that happened. I had three wonderful vacations. True, there were canceled and delayed flights and mad rushes and sleepless nights at the airports but where would the stories come from without these? And there were beauties, and long bus rides broken with song and afternoon soirees after mad days at work. I had a frantic summer at work, but I am glad I could share the load with people I love spen...

 On the last day of the year, we came down from the mountains at the end of our little winter vacation. As the car pulled into the 'Drop & Drive' lane, I felt the stirrings of a vague sense of anxiety. We were about four hours early for our train. The journey from Takdah to NJP station was motion with purpose, the train ride to Sealdah would also be movement towards certain destination. It was the waiting period in-between, with nowhere definite to go that was unsettling.  I'm not much of a standing still person, I tend to pace around instead. Which is ironic considering how I've lived my life through little units of waiting. Waiting for this or that exam to get over so I could have fun afterwards, waiting for some movie to release so I could go and watch it with friends, waiting for vacations,  waiting for birthdays (now increasingly accompanied by a foreboding sense of dread for the inevitable and inexplicable letdown), waiting (now as a teacher) for end-semester ...

    Image by Nathan Dumlao via unsplash.com   When I was fifteen, a friend lent me a book. I hadn’t asked her for it, I didn’t even know she had it, but she lent it to me anyway because she had asked me if I had read it and I told her no, but I wanted to. The book was called Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone . To be honest, I didn’t really know how big a deal this book was in late 2002. I had only passingly seen it mentioned once in the weekly children’s page of the English newspaper I used to read as one of those children’s books dismissed and criticized by adults as not real literature. Some months later, there was a review of the film in the Bengali newspaper which said the magic didn’t work because the lead character couldn’t act. (Hey don’t throw stuff at me, okay? I mean, this isn’t even the worst thing they had said about these films in subsequent reviews. I remember when they reviewed the fifth film they actually made up their own plot for it).   ...