Ruchira's Ramblings

When I see your comments on online threads, when I read and hear about the atrocities you commit in the name of your faith, in the name of the God you say you love, when I see the images of the aftermath, my mouth fills with bile and my heart with disgust. I feel anger. I feel outrage. But increasingly nowadays, I also feel weariness. Where does this end? And above all, I feel an utter incomprehensibility. How do you kill a little boy? How do you rape little girls? How do you destroy millions of lives without thinking that they are people, just like you? If you cannot love the human beings that you claim your God created, how can you possibly love God? People are real, they are born, they suffer, smile, love, feel anger, pain and joy- just like you. God, if S/He exists, is intangible. If your heart can’t comprehend the tangible, how can it hold love for the One who is Limitless and beyond definitions? And I wonder how utterly empty inside you need to be to have so much hatred inside ...

The other evening as I was returning home from work, the twilight sky was awash with a strange neon blue. The street lamps held their own- bright and fluorescent. The sound of evening news and movie songs mingled with the tinkling bells of bicycles, the revving engines of auto-rickshaws, the honking of horns, the friction of rubber wheels against the uneven pitch of the road and disjointed conversations. The wind was cool against my tired face as it rushed past the auto back into time. And all of it crystallized in this one undefinable moment, and I was suddenly aware that Pujo was coming. It was an ordinary road, broken, shabby, lined by ordinary shops, filled with tired, ordinary people going home. There was no symmetry in the crooked street lamps, no beauty in the dust, but somewhere far from that busy road was a field full of kashphool where children ran in the golden light of sunset; and at that moment, the soul of the road and the soul of the field was one, touched by the same...

Original Song Lyric ©Ruchira Mandal Tomorrow night if the dreams come along I shall catch them all and spin up a song. And there’ll be no more pain and no more brine. No scars, nor taste of sour wine. Sweet Lady Death, give me tomorrow night, I swear to you I’ll make things all right. The sands are slipping, give me a little while The stars are dipping and I don’t wanna die. Give me a month, a week, a day, I’m yet to build my castle of clay. Let the clock stop ticking, let the flame be bright, A few more tries and I'll make things right. Tomorrow night I’ll catch the train, Retrace my steps or begin again. I’ll pay my debts give me another chance- I had never flown or learnt to dance. A year, a month or just one more night Give me tomorrow night to make things all right. Tomorrow night I’ll call them back- The unsaid words that have gone off-track And broken hearts shall waste no more When love returns from Lethe’s shore. ...

The other day I came across a photograph on my Facebook newsfeed. It was a photograph of a river. It should have been a perfectly ordinary experience, after all, people post scenic photographs all the time on social media. But it wasn't one of those photos. This one was special. It was a photo of the Ganga as seen from  Baghbazar,  Kolkata, the same city I name whenever I need to mention my postal code. Here's why it was so stirring- I had forgotten that there was a river in my city. And that unexpected recollection filled me with wonder. A few nights later I had a dream in which I was going back to college as a student again, riding the metro- except that in my dream it was a cross between a metro and a tram and it used the streets as its path. But dreams are always a little meddled, aren't they? And so, during my journey, my streetcar crossed  Baghbazar and I saw the river again, a little muddy, but calm, serene and yet flowing in a definite direction. I had forg...