Mangoes from trees, The pleasure of a sought after goal, Sold in grocery stores rotten With conditioned air, Handcrafted plates dipped in turquoise blue Ma's little fetishes, dad's blissful ignorance Weighed down by the weight of dust The price of a polluted city Distant grass reminding me of Big trees swaying behind my room's window, Neatly cut and a mere decoration Stands oblivious to wilderness They say savour the moments, the good The bad. They fleet and dance, temporary tick toks, Savour them, hold them and tuck them in Your heart Stop, don't rush them, hug them and sleep But how do i savour moments, that scream into my ears Songs of pain, memories of march, Tears of home? I fight those who tell stories, Of living in the moment For in the moment live those Who have pretty moments to live in I complain, I grudge I crib, I crawl Yet I touch the gut wrenching pain, With aloe vera gel and ice. With words and sentences. With hope and love, In poetry I savour the unsavory.

Dream of a dream, the best one, To put you to sleep, Perhaps the ocean or the night sky? Perhaps the melted chocolate Of a one rupee eclair Perhaps the chicken masala maggi That comes once a month To your nearest shop Perhaps the three wheeled cycle? With no expectation of experience Dream on the dream that makes you sleep, In the nights cluttered by the day's torment Dream of your favourite barbie, Of clothes you want her to wear for yourself Dream of the prince and princess Their love intertwined with ours Dream on. You dream, as I write them In small words and easy sentences To wrap them in a cloth and put under the pillow Ma says it keeps the ghosts away You dream, I dream of you Like an old school romance #NaPoWriMo

Human existence is made up of extremities. We carry within ourselves our heaven and hell. Both of these are often thrown together, when we allow ourselves to love and be loved. A passionate love is a love that is pure but also one that demands breaking the rules of society and thereby, reality. But what happens when one wants but can’t commit to that passion? ‘In the Mood for Love’, directed by Wong Kar-Wai is probably one of the best romantic films ever made. It narrates the story of two neighbours- Mrs Chan and Mr. Chow, who find out that their respective spouses are cheating on them with each other. This discovery brings them closer, as they embark on a journey of their own- guided by desire, insecurities and the greatest of all- love. The film has a slow-moving pace when required, and quick time lapses- creating an illusionary state of being. We know from the beginning that the two protagonists’ romance is destined to be doomed, but the director’s subtle tricks sparks hope amongst the viewers. There is seduction using colours that are dark but romantic. The maroon-red curtains flying in the air when Mrs Chan tries to visit Mr. Chow in the hotel sets the ‘mood for love’ that is visibly resisted by the characters. Another key element of seduction is the amazing sound-track of the movie by Michael Galasso and Shigeru Umebayashi. This soundtrack is best illuminated in the market-corridor scenes where the couple cross their paths often. That scene is my personal favourite. It shows the loneliness and subtle desperation for hope of the actors and hence the obviousness with which they could be in the arms of each other. An element of the movie that interests me is its use of frame within frame technique. A frame within a frame is when the photographer uses something within the scene in front of them to frame the main subject. The director exaggerates on the fact that we are the third person in the story. One can literally feel that the characters are being watched. This indicates a larger concept- the threat of being seen and judged. The so-called affair for the two characters is unconventional and they are constantly under the eyes of scrutiny. They know this and so do we. Hence we see them through mirrors, windows and doors. A specifically interesting scene is when Mrs Chan is in Mr Chow’s room and the neighbours unexpectedly come in his apartment. We see only their feet - suggesting that one is watching them from under the bed or table- as if we are hiding just as Mrs Chan is. Another significant use of the technique is seen in perhaps the only scene where the two couples are together. Mrs Chan sits near her husband in the table. Just then Mrs Chow approaches. Mrs Chan then gets up, almost isolating herself from the group as Mrs Chow finds her way in. Mr Chow gets up and leaves the room. This is one of the initial scenes of the film that predicts the flow of the rest of the film. As the story unfolds, Mrs Chan does isolate herself from her husband as Mrs Chow becomes the mistress. On learning this, Mr Chow is able to let go of his wife- something Mrs Chan never could. And all of that is aestheically watched through the eyes of the door. The most important element of the film, as regarded by many critics, is the role play between the protagonists. When Mrs Chan and Mr Chow confirm that their spouses have been cheating, rather than letting the thought absorb- they build a bubble of denial. They enact the role of each other’s spouses to understand how their partners might have cheated on them. Throughout the film, they repeatedly vow to not let their relationship become an affair, all the while enacting the affair of their partners. This reflects an overt expression of their psyche. By enacting the role of Mrs’ Chan’s husband, Mr. Chow is trying to be the husband his wife fell in love with and vice versa. Mrs Chan and Mr Chow’s relationship lies in the desire to be enough and not in quest of companionship. If it was the latter, the film would have a happy ending. The concept of falling in love outside marriage, which is depicted in the movie, is unconventional but not so bold for 2000s. Especially in Bengali cinema, that has produced films like Charulata, Mr and Mrs Iyer and many more- we have seen marriages as social intuitions that often demand an escape. What is unique about ‘In the Mood for Love’ is its ability to show the desperate resistance of the idea of ex-marital affairs by being in one. Perhaps the reason why the spouses of the protagonists are never shown in the movie is so that our opinions regarding them is not coloured. As the movie builds up, one can understand that the spouses were probably right in seeking intimacy from each other just as Mr. Chow and Mrs Chan were. ‘ In the Mood for Love’ narrates love, envy, desire, seduction, hope and tragedy. It is a story told through touches, glances, reflections and camera movements. It is rhythmic and smooth but also defragmented. It is a story of fantasies, of a ‘what-if’ world. Not surprisingly a poem by Amrita Pritam comes to mind so often while watching this film. एक मुलाकात / अमृता प्रीतम मैं चुप शान्त और अडोल खड़ी थी सिर्फ पास बहते समुन्द्र में तूफान था……फिर समुन्द्र को खुदा जाने क्या ख्याल आया उसने तूफान की एक पोटली सी बांधी मेरे हाथों में थमाई और हंस कर कुछ दूर हो गया हैरान थी…. पर उसका चमत्कार ले लिया पता था कि इस प्रकार की घटना कभी सदियों में होती है….. लाखों ख्याल आये माथे में झिलमिलाये पर खड़ी रह गयी कि उसको उठा कर अब अपने शहर में कैसे जाऊंगी? मेरे शहर की हर गली संकरी मेरे शहर की हर छत नीची मेरे शहर की हर दीवार चुगली सोचा कि अगर तू कहीं मिले तो समुन्द्र की तरह इसे छाती पर रख कर हम दो किनारों की तरह हंस सकते थे और नीची छतों और संकरी गलियों के शहर में बस सकते थे…. पर सारी दोपहर तुझे ढूंढते बीती और अपनी आग का मैंने आप ही घूंट पिया मैं अकेला किनारा किनारे को गिरा दिया और जब दिन ढलने को था समुन्द्र का तूफान समुन्द्र को लौटा दिया…. अब रात घिरने लगी तो तूं मिला है तूं भी उदास, चुप, शान्त और अडोल मैं भी उदास, चुप, शान्त और अडोल सिर्फ- दूर बहते समुन्द्र में तूफान है…..

Love you smile like you’ve always smiled Milk smooth skin, hills in your eyes Why sit in a room? Your dreams ironed without creases Fresh as dew-air in a misty morning Washed in burning detergent Why keep in a wooden almirah? Love you walk on beats of drums Sound like thunder after lightning Why listen to the feeble heart’s beat? Oh, you sing so free tearing the cloth off the sky Bizzare your voice, knows no direction Why recite Plath? Love, you smile Why tears? ( Diporbil, yet again)

(Shillong years and years back) We can travel only in one direction in time. The concept of multi-directional travel in time has inspired legends from HG Wells to Albert Einstein to Christopher Nolan. All of them have remoulded time in literature, science and cinema. But we are still bound by the ticks of the clock. Einstein said, “ Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions by which we live.” Yet if we erase the concept of time from our heads, will we become Benjamin Buttons, reliving our lives in reverse or will time still pass by- not in terms of seconds and minutes but days and nights? The tight structure of time has wrapped us in cocoons. The alarm, the deadlines and the date sheets: they mark out the movement of the human mind, erasing the role that nature plays in deciding time’s path. I have worked out my days in terms of the next exam, the next college admission and the next goal. I’ve been chasing mirages thinking I’m moving forward but remaining in the same place essentially. Learning to watch rain drop one by one and then in a burst of tears- has become unknown. My brain has marked that ‘unproductive’, a ‘waste of time.’ A waste of ‘time’. The time that I constructed in my head and not the time that nature goes by. If I followed nature’s ‘time’ it would indeed make more sense to watch the rain descend on earth, feel and know the change in the season and thereby the change in the year. It was simple for me, for you-wasn’t it? We just had to travel straight ahead in time, with time’s pace. But we rushed time in our minds to travel multi-directional. We travelled to our yesterday and to our tomorrow, challenging physics and laws of nature. In return, time has lost us and we have lost time. The world around us promotes working through sweat and blood. We are given images of people who didn’t sleep at nights. And unknowingly we have glorified wrong concepts. We forget that when Freddie Mercury worked for days and nights at a stretch for composing music and when Ruth Bader Gindsburg forgot what sleep was- they were following passion not goals. They were following love and not success. And even they paid a price for it, didn’t they? They found themselves battling aids and cancer. While we promoted that image of people who made it big, we forgot that they truly achieved big things when they made peace with life and let things be. We try working too hard for success, for achievement. We battle time against all odds. Time brings us down. Even as just a concept, just an ‘illusion’ as Einstein would call it, time proves mightier. So let’s learn to flow with it. Let us provide ourselves some space, some break to move with the flow of time. It doesn’t mean not working hard. It means not working at the cost of time’s pace for us. It is knowing that time is not rushing us but we rushing it.

Unpicked flowers bloom in a wild garden One sky overlaps another Yet why is it that your eyes darken Under the shade of bright sunshine We wait for life to happen While life is happening All around this garden of ashen Expectations and lively dreams Give me your hand, will you? We shall walk beyond ourselves In wild forests wrapped in dew Let’s walk beyond the casualties of the mind To you and me, this all seems fair Fire ranging from somewhere Hearts aching to despair You walk ahead, I walk behind We run away like cowards Fleeing towns and cities It is a dream tailored To fit our dreams We go beyond and ahead Into the wild garden With insects with many heads With flowers that smell poison Let’s loose ourselves to become lost Oh let it be just unkempt danger Guiding our path henceforth Let time waste itself, to all I care Tangled leaves, bright flowers Roots of trees rising To the height of towers Smoke and dew, growing and dying Love, the smell of your hair The touch of your eyes Don’t kiss me goodbye We have a garden to visit

( A scene of DiporBil clicked exactly a year back) Dear Earth, I have been sitting and wondering for a while. When did I loose you? My feet have long awaited to be held by you. The white ceramic tiles of my apartment don't hold me but simply let me walk on them. I have long forgotten the taste of rain. My Kent purifier promised cleaner water. I have stopped looking up at the sky, to see clouds pass by in all shapes and colours. You see, Netflix has come to be more entertaining. I am now scared from animals, all animals- forgetting that I am them. As a virus restricts my movement, I wait to eat in busy malls, stroll in crowded streets and dance in disco bars. I have forgotten the urge to sleep under your sky and wake up to Sun's first rays. I have learnt the wrong things from wrong sources and have been left with little joy. I have drowned myself in politics of power. I am a prisoner of a fast moving life running at the tick of a clock and not the shades of the day. I am entangled in carefully laid illusions of success. I am burried under the screams of hate. Screams of hate run in Televisions, Instagram and Youtube. Earth, I have stopped noticing that you revolve and change everyday, just like me. Earth I have lost you because I have lost myself. I've given up on my needs, happiness and bliss. If I had really loved myself, I would have loved you. Every cell of my body, that lives and dies, is part of you. I'm made from, by and for you. I'm an animate being run by inanimate sources. I'm the Earth and the Earth is me. If I loved myself I wouldn't strain to keep up with a bullet train. I wouldn't build a house on a house. I would stay closer to you. I would not drown in the noise of malls, screams of TV and rush of streets. I would bathe in your silence. I would wake up to see green and blue. I would witness birds flying in colours. I would not close windows but run out on streets and drink the rain to quench a longing thirst. If I loved myself, I would love you. And isn't it love that you really need? How foolish I have been to think that you need policies, politics and activism, when what you needed was love. True love. If I loved you Earth, I wouldn't hurt you. I would care for you with compassion, with thought and feeling. So I'll love myself and in turn love you. I realize my connection with you. You have existed before and will exist after me. I'm passing by only to return again in another form. And in each form, I will remain a part of you and you a part of me, inseparable and whole. Yours Lovingly

"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do." - To Kill a Mockingbird “Courage is not the absence of fear. It is rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear.” - Princess Diaries It seems like Mocking Bird and Princess Diaries have different things to say about courage. The concept of courage has been reverberated by many thinkers, philosophers and readers- all relating it to fear as a boundary to overcome or deal with. If I’m asked what courage is, I would say it is abstract. But that is no way to define courage, or anything. All feelings, emotions and actions are abstract yet there has to be some way of characterising them. So how do we define courage? Let us consider Atticus Finch. The greatest father figure in American literature, Atticus raised his daughter not like a ‘girl’ but like a child. He championed the cause of equality in the backdrop of racial violence and segregation. He looked beyond a person’s social labelling and tried to use empathy, a trait still unheard of. You see, Finch was a great guy. He gave the wisdom with which all inequalities are to be fought- the ability to not judge a person but to understand his/her world through his/her eyes. Atticus was so courageous that even America’s first Black President couldn’t help but quote him in his farewell speech- echoing the wisdom that humanity needs. Finch displayed courage by breaking the norms that society that had set. However it is much forgotten that Finch was a white educated lawyer who could afford to be outwardly courageous. And while there is nothing wrong with that courage, it is not worthless to explore other kinds of courage. The kind of courage Calpurnia showed, the black maid who worked at Finch’s, when she decided to take Finch’s daughter to a black church. Her courage is silent. It is buried under the heaps of social prejudices. Yet it is alive. Calpurnia takes a white young girl, a girl of a superior race, to a black church that she has to visit every Sunday for the rest of her life- because she wants to. Her courage is in the fact that she knows where to assert herself. She knows when to be a dominant lady and a submissive housemaid, to choose her battles wisely. She comments on a young girl’s dress but also inspires her to do greater than what’s expected. Calpurnia had the greater courage to accept inequalities and fight them. She didn’t raise her voice against society but took away society’s voice. So perhaps courage is an act of survival, a tool to build a life that is worth living. We see that in Princess Diaries. Teenage dramas like that are barely considered a case for courage. But tell that to Princess Mia- a self-acclaimed introvert pushed to take the spotlight. She is scared to lose a life that she has had, she is scared to be a princess in a foreign country when she can live an invisible life in America. She is tossed between expectations, and wants to defy her grandmother whom she never liked, her mother who lied to her and a father she never had. She wants to rebel through her lessons and escape the well planned royalty trap. And isn’t that what most teenagers want? We want an escape from people who have unloaded their burdens on us and failed to understand us when we needed them to. We don’t want to open up and face them, we want to run away. So did Mia. Her running away would have been an act of rebellion. But she didn’t. Because courage to her wasn’t defying people, it was looking beyond them. As a sixteen year old, she had immense courage. She looked beyond herself- her loosely held boundaries of insecurity broke when she realised that being a Princess wasn’t a royal duty but a chance to reach to people and make a change. Mia’s courage looks beyond fear. And beyond fear, lies strength. Courage here is a judgement. Courage, as I have seen it in my short lifespan of 18 years, remains abstract. But all kinds of courage share some things in common. They share the want for survival, the belief for greater things and the wisdom to not undermine fear but to work with it. The most daring forms of courage don’t necessarily require marching slogans on streets, giving fiery speeches or slamming the door on your parent’s face. Courage can be often seen in a woman who mops for a living but is not ashamed of it. It can be seen in teachers who have the balls to teach a course that is deleted, because they have every right to impart knowledge. It is seen in a child who doesn’t hesitate to ask for a chair in a house that his mother works as a maid in. Finch was right and so were Calpurnia, Plato, Martin Luther King and Mia. Courage is many things but the opposite of fear.

To him, Who has the freedom to live under a house Who has the Luxury of a phone to read this on Who has the choice to marry, outside his boundaries Who has the freedom to love outside his sex To her, Who can wear what she wants, because there’ll be none to question Who can go where she wants, because she’s protected Who can wear any lipstick on an official meeting, because no one will care Who can marry outside her boundaries, love outside her sex, have a child when she wants- because it is her choice To us, Who have been privileged to live in a country, Where adivasis have been ignored and exploited in the name of development Where women are raped Where freedom is curbed Where Minorities are persecuted Where climate change is only an EVS topic To us, Who live in a country where lakhs cry for independence To us, Who still celebrate independence but not fight for it. As an insta post goes.. “ Jo azad hain, unhein azadi mubarak ho.” Happy independence day

Imagine wearing short skirts and make-up to school, dating and even kissing openly, being a girl and walking around the town at 9, living in a neighbourhood with absolutely clean streets. Amazing, huh? I had grown up watching all kinds of American Teen shows- ‘Gossip girl,’ ‘One Tree Hill,’ ‘OC,’ etc. To me, the American dream was the ultimate Utopia. And I wasn’t so wrong in that. It must be beautiful. But its beauty and luxury was all that I was exposed to. I wasn’t exposed to TV shows that talked about racism in America; I didn’t know if sexism could even exist in a country like that, I didn’t know that it has the largest per capita carbon emissions in the world. I didn’t know all of that and that was because, most of us are plagued by a single perspective. There are certain chosen lenses that we are exposed to as children and as we grow up we tend to stick to a particular lens as it becomes an integral part of our ego and we would do anything to defend it. Now to cite another example, say your parents lost everything they had in a riot. They are Muslims and those who caused them harm were Hindus. Now, your parents will always blame the cause of their poverty as an act of ‘Hindus’ and not ‘humans.’ So you grow up in a miserly poor family and more you struggle, the more you hate Hindus. This is how communal hatred, gender biasness, racism and most forms of oppression are carried on. We stick to certain perspectives even if they’re old school. One of the reasons, why this is so prevalent, because in our country (not to mention that the same doesn’t happen in other countries), is that we are not allowed to even think of other perspectives. Our country, our textbooks, our schools have regarded Gandhi as an ‘ideal’ being. While, Gandhi was a visionary and he did pave the path for India’s independence, he did have his own flaws just like most humans. But that part of him is never discussed, shutting us up to stick to only one ‘version’ of a multi-dynamic human. In Delhi University, an important essay, ‘300 Ramayana’ by AK Ramanujan was deleted off the syllabus as it was considered ‘inappropriate.’ The essay contained 300 different tellings of Ramayana across the subcontinent, many of which contradicted the Valmiki version. My point here is that limiting perspectives has become an integral part of both education and media in our country. Our openness to perspectives breaks the general limits set by stereotypes. But to do so, we all have to be daring and experimental in our ways. The more we accept the given formulated age-old perspective, the less we create space for innovation. And truth be told, we all have some space in our lives where that change can be made. It can be our jobs, meetings, colleges, schools and most importantly homes. So let’s all browse the internet, looking for myth-breaking articles videos or books, nourish ourselves, challenge ourselves, and when we are done with that- we challenge others to do the same. The idea isn't not to give up your beliefs and ideas but to challenge them. It is to add more colours rather than just your favourite colour. Much like all plagues, the plague of single perspective will continue to stay unless we realise the deadly effects of it. In our country, the deadly effects have been communal riots, caste and class discrimination and even rapes.