Dilemma

Sharp edges of broken dreams
lacerate my sleepy eyes.

I dare not open them wide.

Brutal naked light of stark real life
May shatter my fragile vision.

Magic lives on.

Several times today I realized with a pang that it was all over. The spell has broken and the tale has ended. Around 2:30 this morning I finished reading the seventh Harry Potter book titled ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’. And the feeling that shadows one’s mind after one has finished reading something that one felt attached to is gripping my mind now and it is an intense feeling and multiplied by the fact that this is the last book of the series. It is a loneliness mixed with an inexplicable sense of melancholy that I often feel gazing at the inky-blue sky at dawn and a dusty red sky at twilight.
‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire’ happened to me in my 9th standard…the first book featuring Harry Potter that I read. Perhaps because I had never read anything like it before and it was my stepping stone to the world of magic, witchcraft and wizardry ,I prefer this book to any other in the series, whereas many of my friends swear by the third book ‘Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban’. By the time I finished the book I was so in love with Harry, Hermione and Dumbledore and so sorry about Cedric and so drawn into that black and white world Rowling conjured so perfectly with a flick of her ‘wand’, that it did not take me long to finish the first three and wait eagerly for the next three.
I liked to believe that I resembled Hermione…that illusion is long since broken. The characters were all so identifiable, so human yet magical, some so good and some so frighteningly bad which back then I believed was a realistic representation! I told mother I wanted to be a ‘witch’. She was scandalized …which was a pretty natural reaction considering she hadn’t read the books.
The writing standard, I felt, fell in the subsequent three massive volumes. I didn’t much like ‘Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix’ though I thought that the teenager Harry had been portrayed fairly realistically. ‘Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince’ failed to match my expectations and caused me a little despair. The compactness was somehow missing. Nevertheless I waited eagerly for the 7th book to release, believing all the while that Dumbledore wasn’t dead.
I wished with all my heart that none of Harry Hermione and Ron would die at the end of the 7th book, like his millions of fans throughout the world did. Finally when I laid my hands on the 7th book in an electronic format, already having discarded two fake versions, I wasn’t so sure it was Rowling’s writing. It indeed was Rowling’s. Slowly I got engrossed in the book and though at places it seemed rather contrived and made-to-fit-in
I liked the book. I liked the fact that finally there were shades of grey in some of the characters, most of whom were previously ‘innately good’ or ‘incurably bad’. I loved the hitherto misjudged Snape. I quite disliked the epilogue, which seemed rather ‘bollywood ishtyle’. At the risk of getting ‘Avada kedavada’ed by my sister, who belongs to the ‘Crazy about Harry, it’s him I’ll marry’ club and contrary to what I myself had wished for earlier, I would have liked Harry to have died, of course killing Lord Voldemort as well rather than have him pay that little trip to heaven/King’s Cross.
All said and done, I’d really miss waiting in eager anticipation for the huge volumes, scampering through the alleys and secret passages of Hogwarts,sipping the Butterbeer at Hogsmeade, the creepy ambience at the Forbidden forest, the defence against dark arts classes under Lupin and fake Mad-Eye Moody. Lord Voldemort too.And millions of other little things. But I’ll dream. And the magic will live on.

My strange moods and a stranger mindscape [need I say pun intended?] often witness my conscious hours being spent in and my conscious-ness being subjected to a plethora of self-assessment tests and self-analyses. By self-assessment tests I do not only mean those MCQ tests that people take online...mine are of a more critical bent and definitely extensively analytical. My action or inaction as the case most often is in a particular situation impels my over-active conscience to critically analyse my basic nature and allow me no remission whatsoever.
Today was one such day. I was the co-passenger of a forgetful,grumpy old woman en route to garia. She sat beside me in her soiled old white saree, obviously one of her very few, carrying a thole, grumping all along and rebuking the poor auto-driver. When it was time for her to pay the fare she searched frantically in the folds of a yet-more soiled saree which she took out from her thole, while me and a fellow passenger waited for her to get down,patiently. Finally with the driver's help she was able to recollect where she had hidden her money for safety, and took it out of a knot in her aanchal. It was a tenner and the only money she seemed to possess. She paid her own fare.Now she only had Rs 5 on her. Poor helpless woman! And there was I, witnessing her distress silently. I could have paid her fare. What would I have lost? It's not that the thought didn't cross my mind at that moment but I was unable to transform it into action. I have not yet been able to acquit myself of this charge.
And then, once again the cynicism that had gripped me when I wrote the post before last, came back in it's fullest flow and flooded me. Yet this time I knew, I still know it wasn't a fancy cynicism of sorts that one falls back on when one has nothing better to do. A never-felt-before emotion inundated me as I looked at the world in a never-seen-before way.
The over-crowded roads,incomplete creatures on the run,hurrying past each other...do they know where they are going? Or why? To survive is their motto of life, I was one of them untill that moment, till I questioned 'why'! Why should man live? Just because he was born? For his parents, his love, his dreams, his children? But all is falsehood.That old woman...what was she living for? What is she still living for? A hope? A dream? But nothing is real. Nothing will stay. We Human beings...soulless survivors,our eyes steeped in the colours of illusion, spin tales about life, create webs and get entangled, wander aimlessly till one day so-called 'death' happens. fame, success, money, love...fallacies. And I detested being a part of that world of soulless incomplete braggarts.

A few minutes later, I had tears in my eyes when a father dangling his baby boy in his arms,the centre of his attention, the cause of the light in his eyes, peeped at me from within a photograph in a book of photographs titled 'Family'.

Thank you Family.

I am sorry about my incoherent ramblings.These days they keep me company though do not make much sense to me either.

Tomaro asheeme pranmon loye jotoduure ami dhaii.
Kothao dukkho, kothao mrityu, kotha bichchedo naai.
Mrityu shey dhore mrityur roop dukkho hoy he dukkher koop
Toma hote jobe hoiye bimukh aponar pane chaii.
He purno, tobo choronero kachhe jaha kichhu shob achhe achhe achhe
Naai naai bhoy shey sudhu amari nishidino knadi tai.
Antarglani sansarobhar poloko felite kotha ekakar
Jeebanero majhhe swaroop tomar rakhibaare jodi paai.

He taught us everything, including how to accept death.

There are days when nothing helps. Almost like those ‘A day when everything went wrong’ essays that one used to write for literature assessments in junior classes. Unlike in those essays, nothing happens and whatever happens doesn’t help. Waking up to see a dear face inches above your face doesn’t help. Her display of affection towards you doesn’t help. Nor does the steaming cup of morning tea. A cynicism grips your heart and mind and nothing seems real. The scorching sun, the stray clouds, the articles on the newspaper, the glint in your dad’s eyes and his ecstasy at hearing a melodious number, your mom’s iciness, the melodious number itself, an email reminding you that human beings are not as superior as they think themselves to be; so don’t be complacent, prospects of watching a good movie with people you like and people who like you back, promises of friendship, a book that makes you think, Romanticism, learning a foreign language…all seem as Holden Caulfield so rightly used to say and say again ’phony’. The superficiality of everything surrounding you strikes you hard on the face. And suddenly you just don’t give a damn! Yet you want to close your eyes and shut the world out. You try that. Sounds and smells and touches assault your senses, infiltrate your thoughts and encroach on your privacy, disrupt your rare moment of being able to stare back at the truth that usually stares sardonically at you full on face making you cower and avert your gaze. You thank the ostentatious celebrations of life, the splendour, the pomp that have helped you delude the truth once more! The truth that you are an insignificant nobody, destined to die from the moment you were born, like everybody, that you can do nothing to improve any man’s life, that you have known very little about life and beyond life in these 20 odd years that you have spent on earth, that there are more books than you can ever read in one life, that you have been cursed with mediocrity. You retire to your cocoon defeated.

He was a lovely kid. Looked like a cherub and talked like a totapakhi,repeating every word that he heard.I loved his sky-blue eyes wide open in unceasing wonder and the untainted innocent light in them.
Now five years down the line, he's only six and it wrenches my heart to see that his child-like innocence is fast-depleting, or shall I say it's being snatched away from him forcefully.And poor him! He doesn't even understand the value of what he is losing! His eyebrows now remain raised not in wonder but in cynicism.

The horror shows that still manage to haunt me[I should, however, admit that I am a scaredy-cat] leave him non-plussed and nonchalant. He gallantly declares them to be ostentatious gimmicks constructed by computers. He dismisses the super-human power the protagonist inherits from Ma Durga to defeat the macabre bhoot in one such serial in a very grown-up manner.He refuses to fold his hands in prayer before an idol mouthing words like-the true worshipper of God is one who does his work sincerely or something to that effect. For goodness's sake those are his mentor's words that have been imposed on his naive lips. Does he understand the significance? Five years down the line he's still a totapakhi and in danger of forever being so.

His words affect me much more seriously and in a worse manner than those mind-less horror shows do. His matter-of-factness, his 'Realness' scares me. He's only six ,for God's sake. He is being made to act as an insufferable know-it all!!! He has been taught not to believe in magic, in God ,in fairies, ghosts and anything his mentor considers unreal. He has been taught not to imagine. The key to the fantasyland has been jerked away from his grip. He has been instructed to do away with faith, and very sadly, very wrongly he has not been taught to have faith in himself. His mentor has forgotten to tell him that to not have faith in anything else one needs to have faith in himself. And I shudder to think of the rootless heartless soulless ideal machine that he might grow into, ostracised from under the tender influence of magic and faith.

Alarming as it may sound, he isn't the only kid in this century to lose his innocence. Many of his little friends are on the same precariously balanced boat as him. These logical little ones will grow up one day to be logical grown-ups who shall be driven only by the force of neccessity. For them flowers shall bloom to be dissected, clouds shall dissolve into rain for watering the crops that satiate their hunger. For them the moon shall provide another home away from the over-crowded earth. Literature will in all probability be an obsolete word. Love affection and humanity shall be vague memories of unintelligible words that they heard in their short-lived childhood days. Irrational imaginations or fantasisings shall not cloud their 'survival of the fittest' days.

And then perhaps one day magic will happen once again!!!And faith shall hold it's reins.

p.s.- This is not a diatribe against his ill-informed misguided mentor, who i hold solely responsible for and guilty of depriving him of his childhood.

yay!! I have been tagged. Feels nice, in a way, proves people care. :)
hmm...8 things about me?
1) I think, therefore I am. I love to think. :)

2) At the present moment,my life is directionless [ except that I know I'd be hitting my bed in half-an hour.that way it has a direction.] and I have no idea what I want from my life.

3)When my friends and family say that I live in a different world, a dreamworld, and that I am a complete misfit in today's world, believe them.

4)I dont get angry, I get hurt.

5)Death has occupied a huge portion of my thoughts since childhood and it's image to me is that of a lover's.marana re tuhu mama shyam saman.

6)I am extremely sensitive.A rude word, a little indifference towards me,a careless remark are enough to cause me great distress.

7)I have a lousy taste for movies and even the stupidest melodrama can make me cry.

8)More often than not the I in my poems and me are completely different entities with some co-incidentally similar traits.

Thats about it.summed up all that I know about myself that others dont in 11 sentences. So there!!
I tag Girl in the dark, Arnabda and Sreetama.