Blogging .... Winter night Musings ::: Nov 2019 ..... "As I sat with the laptop, I thought my mom had asked me to carry on with my writings"

Shashi Tharoor once said --  “I think George Bernard Shaw put it best: I write for the same reason a cow gives milk. It’s inside me, it’s got to come out".  

Writing as a hobby is also linked to 'zero responsibility' vis-a-vis free thinking. The thinking of a vagabond....Udbaastu !! the great spirit and search for wonderlust. The Bengali song ...

"amaye prashna korey nil dhruba tara...aar koto kal robo ami dishe hara" ...is a powerful line.  

It means -- Questions me the Polar star - the constant one in the northern sky -- how long will I continue like this???

Mom -- A Polar star.. Neel Dhruva Tara

The real fun in agreeing to every sense of the line is -- still I do not have a proper answer to this query ! And that's the root of my 'happiness' and here too begins all my troubles in the marital life ! The lady gets angry !! 

   

Blogging is really fun; and it's all the more when you read a post written 10 years back -- and when you re-read it, you realise -- "hmmm....i wrote this too".

"A blogpost can be half-baked and barely proved...But it’s nearer the truth to say that some posts are outcomes of rambles across the archives of the internet, byproducts of the odd information trawled up and the lateral connections created." -- wrote 

Simon Reynolds for London-based 'The Guardian'.  

Long back I took to writing out of 'frustration' as I thought the career getting off track is the most dangerous thing to happen to any youth. Writing world saved me. Journalism started giving some money.... and so the love affairs continues. 

Soul is ever free, it is deathless because it's also birth less....but it cannot be regimented by stars. The writing world is linked to these. But how can you explain the rhythm of the vagabond journey?

It is like moving on unmindful of a tool called Google roadmap. Importantly, it is only when a traveler has reached his/her goal that he/she can try to JUSTIFY the decision one took in discarding the road maps !!

But where's the goal?  

I lost mother on Nov 11, 2019. Those were difficult days. The historic verdict of the five-member bench of the Supreme Court on Ram temple came on November 9, 2019. Little more 36 hours after, my mother Minati Deb breathed her last at around 2.30 am on November 11. We were shattered.

At Siliguri, where my mom breathed her last, for a week I had no connection between pen and paper or between laptop and my fingers. Writing was far off...After a week, one post-midnight hour I woke up and decided to sit for a while with the laptop. Fiddling with mouse and tapping a few fingers, all of a sudden I walked into the room where we had kept a large garlanded photograph of my mom. Those were extremely emotional moment.

My father was sleeping in that room.

In dim light, I stood folded hands in front of my mom’s photo. I stood silently with moist eyes and stared blankly for a while as I stared at her lips. I watched on as if her lips moved and she was speaking. ‘Why you are awake so late?’ --- as if she quizzed her ‘boro chheley (eldest son)’.

I stood in silence and for sometime my mind was trying to make sense of what my mother would be telling me. My flirtation with ‘writing’ and journalism never excited both my parents at initial years. 

But that night – I felt her voice was not familiar. This sparked an excitement punctuated with curiosity in me. The curiosity made me step little ahead closer to her snap. An ardent admirer of Bengali fiction; decades back she had told me that stories are ‘best’ when writers pen them with ‘tears’ in their eyes so that the stings of these works would be felt.

I was still standing silently in the room. I also felt an irrational hatred for myself. Could we save her had we done something different?

I slowly walked out of the room. My room appeared darker. As I sat with the laptop yet again, I thought my mom had asked me to carry on with my writings despite challenges.

‘God is everywhere’ – my mother often used to say. Even otherwise I presumed ‘Ayodhya verdict’ has its religious elements. 

The politics around Ayodhya, the disturbance and incidents of violence, blatant communalism and riots associated with the 'Ayodhya movement' would leave me disturbed. I walked into the veranda and in a clear sky above; I watched the clouds drift by. Ma could be staring at me.

I came back to the room....Of course half an hour later, I would fall asleep with laptop not shut yet and sad musical number on the mobile still playing.

After all these years, another thing about writing would haunt me somewhat unknowingly. One will always have challenges, hardships, moments of frustration and undoubtedly some 'weak points' but the SINCERITY to the cause of freethinking to pen some words should be always beyond doubt.

In this context, I like the oneliner from Simon Reynolds -- "Even if nobody reads them, I’ll always be drawn to the freedom blogs offer.

I can ramble about any subject I choose".

In the words of  Cyril Connolly ('Enemies of Promise'); a writer must be “a lie‑detector who exposes the fallacies in words". 

Of course, life has many shades.

Nevertheless, Life's biggest thing/teaching lies in ― Ernest Hemingway's
"The Old Man and the Sea" ....
“....man is not made for defeat...A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”