He didn't jump.
Instead, just to make a point he took of his shoe and threw it down form the 7th floor of the library. That is where he was dangling his legs from. He drank a lot of water, spoke on his cell, and talked animatedly to the people inside. Only once he addressed the crowd gathered below to say that JNU had no value for his life for the life of others. He got the police and the fire brigade and the tv crews in.
He didn't jump.
He came out looking like a martyr leaning on the shoulders of our student union president, he looked as if he had gone through hell sitting up there dangling one of his legs and his privates placed precariously on the window ledge.
I think he came down cause he had to pee.

Daddy!Daddy! It's just like you said- now the living outnumber the dead.

Going.Going.Gone.

We had our 'Hostel Night' yesterday. It is the last function of the 3 day hostel extravaganza that every hostel in JNU hosts. It is basically a 'gala' dinner followed by a dance party and loads of booze to add to the general confusion.
However the story is not that, or about anything that happened either at the dinner or the dance. But rather well after everyone had stuffed themselves silly and had finished shouting at the DJ to play that 'one last song'.

This particular friend of mine has a room mate who appears to me as a pretty nice and sweet guy. Well, in general, i obviously have to base my reaction depending on the very minimal contact i have with him. The usual B.A boy who has his set of weird friends, good in sports, confused with his German translations and so on. However every time his girl friend comes to his room to stay (those are the times when my friends are unceremoniously kicked out) they have a small World War of sorts. EVERY TIME.
Bottles are crushed beyond recognition, mugs are shattered to pieces, window glass is broken, book shelves twisted out of shape and I don't know what else. It in general is darn nasty.
It seems to me that they 'battle' every time they meet, or rather they meet ever time they need to fight. I should not assume any such thing for I am sure they love each other very much and after all my experience I know for certain that every couple has its own equation and perception. I cannot unearth this one perfect idea of a couple and expect it to work with EVERYONE and for information nor can you.
However, this time i was an auditor to their epic battle.

We were all outside the room, in an open space behind the room where people hang their clothes to dry and keep the coolers and chatting with friends who were having a few drinks, singing, laughing and having a decently good time. within roughly 10 minutes of the lights in the room going off we heard a loud noise of something being thrown, soon followed by another then the door banged hard and the windows flew open and the lights went on. My two friends who stay in the room with the guy quietly closed the windows and went in to check. We discretely left the boy's wing. While we were leaving we realized that we were not the only ones who had heard the racket. Half the hostel was awake and outside their rooms, at least on the ground floor.
What happened next is a different story but the guy had cuts all over his hand and the girl was unharmed albeit greatly embarrassed.

She was not embarrassed by their fight but rather by a million people barging in to find out whether he had hit her or not- especially those retarded feminists. The ones who never hear the full story but run to mutilate the character of the guy involved and run signature campaigns to get support for their propaganda.

I know for sure that the guy did not hit the girl, he never has. If he had ever done so then she would have been gravely injured; for a guy who can twist a steel book case out of shape is not a force i would want a girl to reckon with. Other feminists could and may by all means ostracize me for a comment like this and are welcome to. However I do not believe in their brand of feminism and I never will. I stand by what is right and what they do does not substantiate as 'right' to me.

JNU has this association (if i may call it so) called GSCASH- which is to make people stand up against sexual harassment of any sort. What happens when a boy/girl slaps a GSCASH against the other- the case is taken up by a 'court' who decide the tenets of who is wrong and who has been wronged, and it is a long drawn tedious process that can take forever. The group is supposed to be apolitical but they have party back up which absolutely makes a farce out of the whole system. The case in question becomes a joke and the people involved become characters to be joked about and talked about, the ones you make plays about and laugh. You however do not learn. NO ONE learns.
For these 'feminists' such an association is the best thing ever.
The guy is always wrong and the girl is always the victim.
The only grounds on which I think a guy must not hit a girl is because biologically females and weaker then males and can't physically match up to males. Genetically and otherwise females are built differently. There is nothing to argue on this. You cannot expect a female to be physically strong enough to take on a guy unless under unique circumstances. I believe that the only reason guys are taught to never hit girls is because girls get hurt easier than guys do. This is entirely a physical thing.
I am not even raising an emotional argument so don't bother.
So i remotely abhore these 'feminists' who choose to ignore that a girl may also harass a guy emotionally. They refuse to see the other side of the coin or hear the other side of the story. For them it is ONLY bout the fact that a guy hit a girl. Not do much about one human being hitting another.
So lets get this straight- you put sex before being human? Is that what your 'feminism' is all about?
I for one being a girl know how manipulative and harassing a girl is capable of being. I am not saying that ALL girls who have got harassed are like that but all I am saying is that there is another side to the story. Maybe you should try hearing that before you tighten the noose.
In every relationship there arise times when you could murder the significant other. I have felt it SO many times. Now how I deal with it is the question. As human beings who are cultured and educated (as per the basic government approved norms) should know that every relationship has its marker of respect and privacy and space that should not be violated. Stop the fight before it gets physical. I have seen bruises on people I love and I have cried for that. don't forget that we are human. You cannot and should not hit another human being. Irrespective of the sex.

There even cropped up a fight between the people who had been awoken by the noises about whether the couple should be left alone to sort out their differences or should the guy be pulled out and beaten up for hurting the girl.
They weren't even in the room and they already had taken sides.

I was asked by my friends to stay out of this so I departed. i knew that the girl was not hurt and I was fine with that knowledge. I am no one to say whether a couple should or should not fight and if they should then how, with what levels of decorum or what levels of approved noise.
That is not my concern, it is their private one.

I hate feminists. They are prudes with half baked and selective knowledge and no humanism in them. Maybe they should learn about being humans before they learn about being a girl or a guy.

Feminism is passe and its GONE.

Confessions for this Week

1. I bunked two classes for absolutely no good reason and two more for a decent reason. None of it had anything to do with love, anger, or anything remotely awe-inspiring.

2. I ate 4 egg rolls in 3 days.

3. I picked up a fruit from beneath a tree on the side of the road and ate it. Twice.

4. I lost my temper and cried twice.

5. I learned some terrible things about one friend and don't know what to do with it.

6. I called the American Center Library up at least 15 times to confirm one list of 30 useless people.

7. I was rude to one person today. A junior.

8. I was glad today that I had someone who loved me. I am glad always, but especially today. And the concerned person did nothing GREAT, in fact he did NOTHING.

9. Today i made sure that I looked smarter than the rest 30 odd people going for a seminar. I thought it mattered...to me it did.

10. I swore a breakdown that involved breaking and burning every piece of remotely flammable article of a planned project.

11. I abused the daylights out of people all down the week; not on their face but by typing it in sms and then giggling to myself about it for the words sounded funny when i said them. I didn't send those sms.

12. I didn't study, not one bit.

Maybe I should do this more often.
Maybe.

The Anatomy of Greed

We have sticky fingers. Probably green too. Like the ones that grab anything it tends to remotely like and sometimes even things that it just must have. It is a fancy, a fascination and an obsession to want anything and everything that can be wanted and probably possessed.
I was very small then...tiny in fact. Probably 4 or 5 or at the most 6 years old. Surely not older otherwise my ego would have retaliated back rather terribly at this incident. I had lots of toys. LOTS. Just as all pampered girls do especially if they are the oldest of the siblings. Even more so for the poor parents feel that since they have decided to go ahead and make the error of wanting MORE crying, bawling, defecating, noisy kids to add to the general chaos, the first of the blessed lot must be feeling unloved when the later truck load arrives. The poor child is made to feel miserable by relatives of all shapes and sizes and most hideous proportions that the parents would now love the new creatures and not them. So these disillusioned older children wander around plotting murder and managing to pull the cheeks of the new arrivals and subsequently getting shooed away by the ever watchful, irritating, pan chewing ayah. These juvenile delinquents are made shades worse when those awful relatives heap gifts over gifts on the new creatures and the criminal minds wonder- what exactly will a 6 month old baby do with a tricycle? Or a toy train? Or a Barbie? It baffles them. These were supposed to be THEIRS. And why not?
The parents do not care anymore about their glorious lives and no one gives them anything. Trust me. That is how the relatives and the servants ensure that they think. And if you are a shade darker than your new sibling then God help you and your likes. You will be ostracized to the depths of a dark continent and back. Twice over.
What do the parents do? In turn they together with some well meaning people donate some goods of decent entertainment value to the older child hoping to negotiate peace details. It works mostly. You know...the bright, colourful, shiny, new toys are such a temptation.
Someone had sent a packet full of toys to our house. I do not know who they belonged to and I never will. Being the eldest I managed to sift through them first before my brother and sister could reach it and I hunted out a plastic cat with a blue bow painted on its plastic body. Someone had nibbled on the tail and the right ear. Teething Animals!!! The rest of the things were broken and uninteresting. So I grabbed the cat, with its nibbled ear and tail as it stimulated this vague memory in me. It was probably an old toy of mine for I had the habit of chewing anything and everything. I still do. It also occurred to me that if this was mine then for sure some unholy soul must have taken it away from me when I was sleeping and had put it in the bag with all discretion so as to pass it on to my siblings. THIEVES.
So I grabbed the cat and exclaimed-
“Eta to Amar!!!”
Translated- “This is mine!!!”
The next thing that happened has engraved itself in my memory in such a bitter and raw way that it bleeds even today.
My grandfather snatched it out of my hand and said-
“Shob kichu tomar noye...”
Translated- “Everything does not belong to you...”
Nothing had ever been snatched away from me unless they were shiny sharp objects. Baffled I looked up at his face. There was a look of a strange disgust- a disgust of my childish greed and God knows what else. But disgust.
He took the plastic cat away from me and gave it to my sister.
The plastic cat with the blue painted bow now sits on the top of the refrigerator. And I don’t care who it belongs to.

Confessions of a genuinely f***** up mind... :)

My thoughts are all mangled up in knots. I can’t think. What I can do is cry. Shamelessly standing under the pouring shower water...just cry. And then the water runs out. I have forgotten what claims I may stake on friends I call my closest and how far I am entitled to depend on them for emotional intravenous feed till they turn around and yank the needle out. Ouch.
Find a few caves, sit , meditate...learn life truth, give up everything for life truth, write a 100 poems or more in rhyming couplets in the earliest language known to your race, become immortal so as people study that in another 1500 years and do Phd.s on them. Aaah! Nirvana.
How hard can it be?
Bleh!
I created you, you vain thing. And I can destroy you. Remember that.
It’s just that I love you too much.

been there...done that...

i dreamt that i was late for the exam...
how typical.
i fished out this thick fat book from a shelf to study for it...and didn't even turn a page. but i will get brownie points for at least finding the damn book :)
the whole day prior to the exam i spent clutching my tummy and whining.
why?
because it felt as if someone with really cold hands was clutching my stomach and squeezing the life out of it. does that qualify as food poisoning? i don't know.
come morning when the hands where still squeezing i wanted to remove my tummy forever-how much difference would it make?
mom said-"you really don't have to give the exam..."
whoa!!!did i hear her right? did she just say that i didn't have to give the damn exam?lord! i must be real sick then!!and she had made me sandwiches to take with me for lunch..like a good little girl i would dutifully finish the first half of the exam and then sit outside in the winter sun on some bench, dangle my legs and eat the sandwich and study.
i ate one sandwich, didn't dangle my legs, didn't study. so there!
you may judge me for that.
i sincerely had no clue about the paper and people studying out side totally amused me. they were in their sweaters and mufflers and monkey caps and shawls and cardigans....
and i sauntered in wearing a sweatshirt.
they dutifully studied while their parents kept an eagle eye on them giving filthy looks to other people around who might try to sneak a look into their son's or daughter's precious notes. my mom just stood there advising that i should take a cab back home in case i felt sick.
i love my mom. i do.
there were some fathers there as well. i knew my father would not be caught DEAD there. i found a classmate and we saw another classmate and refused to recognize him. we didn't study and we calculated as to how long they might keep us there and not let us leave the exam hall. the instruction booklet said that they would not let the student use the loo in the last 20 minutes of the exam. that was the only thing that made me nervous. who cares about essay type questions and 20 short notes?
not me!
i am after all one of the intellectuals of the country. woohooo
they asked questions like-
what do you do if a student misbehaves in class?
which were the dates that sunday fell on in April 1994?
wtf!!!
the girl who sat next to me for the exam was giving it in bengali, since i finished my paper AGES back i stared at her paper trying to read what she was writing. they didn't let me leave early so i left my paper and went to the loo instead. and the loo had pigeons nesting there. long live CU!!!
i choose random answers for the MCQs and wrote utter nonsense in the essay types. why was i at all here?
the whole saga carried on from 9 in the morning to 4 in the evening. i was thoroughly entertained.
sorry mom- i am not a good girl and i am not going to clear this exam.(the National Eligibility Test- so now you know!)

Homeward Bound

They don't sell platform tickets anymore...did you know that?
well..now you do!
This always happens...you want to go home and then when you are finally in that God forsaken train heading back you wish you could run off and flee.
i keep saying that i don't know any longer where home is.
the dratted train takes roughly 24 hours to cover a distance that another train takes 17 odd ones. why?
this completely baffles me!
and besides those irritating bed bug infested 24 hours the ever friendly attendants tell us that the train is 2 hours late!
"MAADAAM jaast 2 hours laate...it is raining naa..."
what do you say to that?
the people in the adjacent berth stare.
they stare when i eat.
when i sleep.
when i read.
when i wipe my face.
when i stare outside the window.
and i can't even slap a gscash on them.
the scenery outside is drenched in rain. the windows in our exclusive ac compartment get clouded over as skies grow darker outside.in some odd small station we have reached before the rain has. and then it catches up. a goat runs under the post office for cover.
there are some kids in the compartment too, just opposite my seat. a whole family in fact. they collectively gasp and mumble and giggle every time my friend and i use an explicit four letter word. and that seems to happen every 5 minutes.
what to do?
the journey is so mindblowingly uneventful!
the tea is bad..the coffee worse. and lets not even discuss the food!
a day old and cold kfc chicken seems brilliant in comparison.so we chew on that.
i finish off a whole book.
i finish off the battery in my mp3 player.
i have heard and reheard 52 songs.
did you know that the children in the villages still stand and wave at the passing trains?
obscure pandals and out dated lights. but you know that there is something to celebrate.
the train lurches to the final halt. the great bengali race must instantly gather all their luggage and family members..exactly in that order and jump off the train. i wish they had done that when the train was in full speed...
my bag is so HEAVY...
disgruntled and marginally relieved i walk out of the over crowded station and head home while half my head and heart lies elsewhere...
after all i did not pay for these "jerks"!!!

dratted weather!

must not let the weather get to me....

i want a hug...

Home coming

Blank.
Empty.
Dying.
Touch.
Vision.
Dark.
Blank.
No sleep. Nothing here. I have lived a whole holiday out of a suitcase simply because I am so lazy that I could not bother to unpack. Then...what would it amount to? Unpack and then pack up once again when it is time. There is so much I wanted to do here. So much I wanted to come home to. But this is not me coming home. This is just a holiday. The room is no longer mine. And my clothes and books lie packed up somewhere. Lives put into big brown boxes to make space for new things.

Let me talk to my sister now. I don’t know when I will see her next and when I do she may not have time.
Let me hug ma now. I don’t know when I will see her next and when I do she may not hug me back.
Let me ask amma now, all the questions in the world. I don’t know when I will see her next and when I do she may not have any advice to give me.
Let me irritate the dog now. I don’t know when I will see her next and when I do she may not recognize me anymore, she may treat me like she treats baba.
Let me try and change my brother now. I don’t know when I will see him next and when I do his girl friend might hate me.

I am becoming my father am I not?
In a few years I shall give everyone explanations as to why I choose not to come home, how terrible it is here, and how this holiday would heavily mar my work schedule and how expensive it is to travel these days...
You know...there is never enough that you can take back with you. You cannot take 22 years away with you. 22 million fights, 22 million broken promises, 22 million attempts, 22 million failed attempts. 22 million hugs. My family. My house.

Blank.

This is not the dust of brown and shards of life,
Reduced fragments of existence- letters, bubblegum wrappers;
Tears and bird feathers.
The dust shines- shines down from other worlds into the altheiometer of Pullman’s novels.
Dust that circles our footsteps day in and day out of so many classes and so many hours.
Fragments of existence and sand and coloured stones, sea shells and echoes of temple bells.
This dust is me. And you and us.
It settles on my shoulders on calm quiet nights and speaks of spectres and daemons-
This dust mingles in my blood and spikes my tears to salty droplets.
The red dust; of votes and elections and false ballots;
Of politics and sociology and Korean studies.
This dust is them.
And those there were and are yet to be.
A dust of dreams and passions and empty words.
This dust is everything we want to be.
Then the skies darkened over our little intellectual heads and colourful umbrellas opened up.
But the dust rose from our prayers and term papers and diary pages.
Circled the souls of new little puppies and left over colour from yesterday.
It slipped out through their fingers and through our skins.
The dust settled in thought puddles.
The dust flew with emotions to every lover in every tree shadow.
Who knew our existence was trailing away?
And the lives ran unending races and sweated dust in plenitude that soiled the paper money and fuelled our banks.
The dust rose and fell like a sleeping child’s breath and the echo of church bells.
The storm raved the rocks, raped the trees and took the dust.
The dust and the storm of a thousand hungry years of tearful revolutions and misplaced thoughts.
The storm was them and the dust everything we could be.
Have you ever wondered why you still feel
Empty?