Durga puja..a distant picture

Bengali’s biggest festival, the Durga puja, is here..once more. Like so many others living in Kolkata, I used to wait the whole year just for these few days. The anticipation of it coming was overwhelming. We used to have our own Puja inside the residential complex we used to live in. From the day when the decorators started building up the frame for pandal till it was packed up and taken away after puja, that pandal used to be our hangout area, even our home during the 5days of puja. If our parents planned any vacation during or even at the end of puja, I can’t describe how heartbroken I used to feel. Everyday was precious till the 'ekadoshi', the day after immersion of idol.

I was a child back then, hanging on to every bit of each day till the last. What I did not realize is that I remained a child well beyond my childhood days, enjoying all the fun as long as I can.

And then we had to shift to our new home 3 years ago, leaving behind all the fun and suddenly my life was changed completely. All of a sudden I found myself in a world completely unfamiliar to me. I went out of my shell and tried to confront the unknown world with terrible consequences. I did things I wasn't prepared to handle and paid the price. As my tumultuous journey continues, I realized that Durga puja is losing its charm more and more every year. Instead of avoiding a vacation trip during puja, I made it compulsory and in the process I tried to avoid the disappointment of not being in my old place during puja, my childhood world.

2 years and two more Durga puja have passed by..and here I am again on the brink of another puja and another vacation trip away from Kolkata. What I found is that the child inside me, the sentimental/emotional person that used to dominate me, has finally started to give up on me. I am not feeling that extreme excitement I used to have during puja or before a vacation. It feels like just a break from work. But deep inside me, I know the child is in slumber. Being with nature will put it back into life, only for a brief period maybe but that is all I want. I love the way I am now, free from self-destructing emotions, but I want the emotions too to engulf me when I need them most. Hope this little trip will be the way I want it to be and I can come back a better person, a more relaxed soul.

 So, off I go! Once more!

Life well shared..

Childhood… most of us enjoyed that little period of time to the fullest. Making friends
with other kids was so easy but breaking friendship was the hardest. So many times we
said ‘aari!’, pointing our pinky finger at someone( in bengali, it simply means we are no
longer friends!) and the next day we were back again as best pals! Being so immature at that time, the only thing that mattered to us is the enjoyment we had together and the little problems we had with each other never really came between those friendships.
Then we grow up and the definition of friendship, the way we share our life start to
change too along the way. By the time we hit adulthood, we all know the kind of friends
we should look for. But whether it’s choosing right friends or the right partner, all we
want is to express ourselves... to share our life to some extent. And the invention of social networking sites like facebook has made such a big progress in helping us share our life… or has it really achieved that?
Making or ‘breaking’ friends has now become as easy as adding or deleting someone
from your friend list in facebook, easier than it was during childhood isn’t it? The fact is
you can hardly judge a person’s personal happiness from his facebook friend list. A guy
may have well over a thousand friends in facebook but his real life can still be empty, no
one ‘real’ to share his world.
The thing that made me think about this is the last realizations Chris McCandless wrote
in his diary in the film ‘into the wild’. The film deserves a separate article on it altogether
but here, only the final words matter most and those were: Happiness only real when
shared.
It explains why we feel so happy sharing our thoughts, our experiences with others, why
we give so much importance to friendship. We feel relaxed sharing our experiences with
others, be it a good experience or a bad one. It gives us a strange feeling of satisfaction knowing there are people who are concerned maybe just a little bit about our life. Often times we are wrong. The persons we trust for these kinds of relationships shouldn’t be just about anyone, surely not someone we hardly know of.
The friendship we develop through sharing our daily life puts a heavy price on it and if it breaks somehow, it causes the most pain. You just can’t strike off a friend like this from
life and forget about it. To me, happiness can never be real when shared with a wrong
person. So cheers to all my facebook friends and I do have a lot of them but I will hardly
count anyone in when thinking about sharing some inner thoughts with someone.
My world will remain confined to a handful of people I know I can trust. So these few lines are dedicated to those friends who have affected me in both positive and negative ways and shaped my thoughts about the whole matter in general. Nothing is more educative than experience and I would like to thank them for enriching me with mixed experiences.

The million dollar question

Saw a brilliant film a few days ago named 'The Million Dollar Baby' from the acclaimed
actor and director Clint Eastwood. It was released in 2004 but I never managed to watch
it until now and I was bowled over by its awesomeness. It was a film with lots of
emotions and sentiments, a story of determination, triumph and tragedy, well constructed
characters with superb acting from some of the best actors around including Morgan
Freeman, Clint Eastwood and Hillary Swank.
But above all, this film ask the most vital question that no one can answer with authority
as the answer of it changes so many times during our lives that we get confused every
time we face it . And the million dollar question was ‘what is the purpose/aim of our
lives?’
In the film, Maggie (Hillary Swank) was a simple middle aged girl (she was 32) working
as a waitress and living on leftover food. She had nothing except a dream and strong
willingness to become a boxer. She knew it was almost impossible considering her age
and no trainer would be interested to invest on her. She found the trainer Frankie (Clint
Eastwood) she believed can help her achieve her dreams and after several refusals she
finally managed to convince Frankie through sheer dedication. One and half years later
she did reach her goal and as she started to live her dream, an accident put an end to all of it at once, a total paralysis that forced her to choose euthanasia to end her misery. She asked Frankie to help her in that. Frankie was in a dilemma, blaming himself for her condition and at that point a friend of Frankie (played by Morgan Freeman) assured him that Maggie had achieved her dream through him.’ People die every day Frankie, mopping floors washing dishes. And you know what their last thought is? "I never got my shot.” Because of you, Maggie got her shot. You know what her last thought will be? "I think I did all right.”

These lines were very significant to me. What will be the milestone/goal that once
achieved; we won’t regret the time we spent in this world before dying? Maggie was
young and she could have found another long term goal for her later life yet she had
given her everything to achieve her immediate goal. She was already living a miserable
life before being a boxer, so, by fulfilling her dream, she ended a life not worth of
mention but a tragic accident ended her second life too.
What was important here to realize was the importance of understanding our purpose, the ‘shot’ of our life and follow it unconditionally no matter what stage of life we are in. rather than regret what we lost in our past, we should focus only on what we still can do in future. There is never too late to kick start our dash towards our goal.
The only problem here is to understand that goal. In our childhood and during our school
life, we used to have so much dreams and goals. Our thought process at that time is so
uncluttered that many of us manage to fulfill our immediate goals with ease. We also set long term goals in that period but as we grow up, many materialistic and biological needs blur our vision and move us away from our main goal. Wealth, love, sex dominate our mind and we gradually forget what really was the purpose of life until we reach the end of our journey.
I know how hard it is to focus only on that elusive dream but if we can
achieve it, it will make everything worthwhile. If we can think with a clarity of a child’s
vision and pursue our goal with total dedication, we will find ourselves in the position
that we dream to be in and unless a sudden accident put an end to our life prematurely,
we will have plenty of time to reap the benefits of our struggle to fulfill our dream and
say ‘I think I did all right’ before the end.

Mirror, mirror…

We all remember the famous quotes from the fairy tale Snow White and The Seven Dwarves, "Mirror, mirror on the wall / Who in the land is fairest of all?" –asked the evil queen. The answer she always got was that she’s the most beautiful of all, until one day when the mirror truthfully said that Snow White is fairer than the queen and that pissed the queen off pretty badly.

How difficult it is for every one of us to accept the truth... isn’t it?

Unfortunately there exist no mirrors that can show us the truth in ourselves. We do have a mirror that resides in our heart and sadly we never use it without being biased towards our own self. We ask our mirror: ‘am I a good person?’ or ‘was it my fault?’ or ‘have I done anything wrong?’ and the answers that will reflect from the mirror are known to everyone and there will never be any shadow of Snow White lurking in the future to intervene our satisfaction.

I think if we look at our hearts neutrally without any ego involved, we can find the correct answers about ourselves. We can differentiate between the person we really are and the person we pretend to be depending on the circumstances. Sometimes we create a personality just to impress someone and sometimes we create it to avoid somebody and sometimes we do it just to protect our true personality. We can find our mistakes which are creating rift between relationships or tormenting our own minds, accept them and work on correcting those mistakes. If having multiple personality is some kind of desease, then we all are suffering from it.

But we should never look at other’s eyes to judge how we are as that mirror, too, is tainted. We will get feedback from that mirror about the personality we shared with that person, not the real one only we can know of.

Some of us pride ourselves for looking deep enough and understanding people we interact with but actually we fail most of the times without knowing it. The best thing to do is learn ourselves first. So next time, take a deep breath at night being relaxed, clear your mind of any contamination, and ask the mirror of your heart...

‘Am I really a good person?’