Chandana Hore

It takes time to creep out of the shadows cast by giants... and if they happen to be your parents, it's a longer crawl... i'm talking of Chandana Hore, the daughter of Somenath Hore and Reba Hore(see, i mentioned her lineage before i started speaking of her)

Chandana is a 42-year-old artist, who holds a master's degree in Fine Arts from Visva Bharati... her solo exhibition of water colours, mixed media and the occasional oil on canvas recently left 'art critics' of Kolkata in a dizzy, because no one knew what they were writing about...

Some say to work in water colours in harder than working in oil paints, you have to know the colours really well, and then the individual drops of water you choose... thick paint, bright colours, and the magic of colour mixing with the drops...

"Then the petals open. They are the image of joy and pain. Life and death. Blue and red. Drop by drop. I loved the sea'' — goes Chandana's hand-written message in one. "Rodon bhara e basanta"(this spring deluged by tears), goes another, with no connection with the image which shows a figure, lacking not just emotions, but even the absence of silence....

Yet no one called her immature. Faces, of mostly women, drawn up without expression, yet without ambiguity or interest for the viewer. And there is not a hint of "irony" or "immeasurable sadness" her appreciators mention... i think, going by the sheer number and style of what i saw as untitled pieces, the artist is unsure of herself. She plays with paint like a kite who tangles herself in the submerged fishing nets of a pond where she dives to catch a fish.

An empty dream

An empty dream is an impossibility...

If you dream it has to have some strong content.
You have to expect a reader who will flip across the pages that are filled up with empty news, or news that are so dry and false that crumple at the touch of your imagination, gaze across the moralistic sermons preached in the edit pages, the vague traces of literary reviews and art reviews no one cares to read, jump over sports news that are lifted straightaway from foreign newspapers, crumple the city supplements filled with trash about a magician's daughter procuring a strange fish, and the page3 tabloid where journalists forced to work with some chicken-brained pour out mournful sermons about these painful times, in the narrow print space allowed by bulging western actresses, who will help college students masturbate in the midnight privacy allowed by smelly common bathrooms where there are long queues in the morning...

An empty dream is at the same time, real. It's a wish where you think your reader will skip all these, and read the words, the pain and the guilt that you have to compress inside the newspaper, yet without... where you think you can have the time to speak your heart out...

am i feeling sleepy? or is it fatigue?

Assigners of recorded deaths

Who records all deaths, if we care to exclude the religious allusions and mythologies?
It's the newspapers...

the words of the radio and the TV fade away, it's the printed words that remain... to be forgotten over the morning tea...

Almost every city has its newspapers, and all of these have their own pull-outs which they call city supplements... there's one compulsory space where they have to spell out little incidents, so matter-of-fact that they can't go into the pages, the editors feel, as stories...

— a five-year-old (who went to fetch his marble or ran after a kite you seldom get to watch in a concrete jungle, but this is not printed for lack of space) run over by a speeding taxi

— a ninety-year-old committing suicide by jumping into the river( she killed herself after 12 years of begging and after she remembered that she had some dignity left in her: to make the choice not to beg— this is not printed, unless the reporter is running short of cooked up ideas and advertorials and decides to do a tearjerker, a human-interest story)

—the rotting corpse of a 75-year-old man recovered from a flat( he lived alone after his wife died two years back, no one knew he had died because of his love for his wife....the neighbours got concerned only because of the smell)

—a severed decomposed leg fished out of a canal ( no one knows about the owner, who is dead as well, though his body is yet to be fished out— he was a famous football player in his village, or a musician who played on a stringed instrument yet to have a name, he was a petty criminal or the man on the street who goes to office every day, returns home contended and prays to his gods for a long life until someone decides because of no apparent reasons to hack off his limbs and dump him down the canal— no one cares if the rest of his body is still down there, feeding fishes, breeding larva, and speaking of unrequited love)

— train mows down two( farmers who had come to work as masons in the city's skyscrapping districts, and had to catch the last train back or they would have no boats to reach them to their villages )

This column is filled up late in the night, usually with inputs from the crime reporter, heavy on booze, who talks it over the telephone with police officials who have learnt it over the telephone from their colleagues and juniors who have learnt it over the telephone from petty policemen and who had learnt it over the telephone and could have or couldn't have gone to have a glimpse of the sights they mention... it's a complex process, but in effect, really simple... the person who has the assigning to do on the page, the filling of the fixed slots, solves it all... the space is short... and so is time...

the presses are waiting to devour print and advertisements...

in every city there is a person who does it in the midnight like a machine whirring in endless circles, without thought, reason or emotion... and lacking gallows humour for these people are dead and are meant to be forgotten... grammatical mistakes are avoided here, for the assigner knows no one bothers to read this, except elderly people who have a long afternoon to spend with the newspaper, and do not bother in the newspaper schema of things...

all these are recorded deaths... and there are still unrecorded ones...
who bells the cat? who sets the types? who composes? and who is doing the reading?

the boy who grows up on a cup of tea

As i climb down the stairs every evening to have puffs of smoke, i wish it were the last... by now, i've almost learnt the simple law of doing nothing...

i have a glass of tea from a short cheery man with a defective leg who perches himself throughout the day above a smouldering stove, his eight-year-old son doing the rounds of shops and customers on a busy street, forwarding earthen cups and stained yellow to people calling themselves journalists...

i pass him a 2-rupee coin and forget him and the son who tries hard to learn riding a bicycle after 8 pm, when the roadside stall closes and the pressvans roll in and choke the road. His father rubs himself hard with a gamcha, perhaps to wipe off the day and its pangs, someone else uses the stove to cook food for customers...

i finish my drag... try to slow it as far as possible, for i have to climb up and stare at a blank screen and pretend being involved with work i know that is not there...

as i climb up the stairs, the lift moves, packed with journalists who never tired of climbing...

i see the boy through the tainted glass that always appears dark from outside...
visibility is a privilege... there's the boy wandering round in circles and round again his father's shop... a wonderful scene on a wet street that had soaked off huge quantities of rain...

what's his name? i've to ask one day... today it had rained and his father had a tough time attending the stove and his customers... the pre-monsoon storms that started on from yesterday evening have killed nine people in the city, some stuck by lightning, some electrocuted while wading through water, and two fell down down open manholes that couldn't be seen through knee-deep water... names that would be forgotten by tomorrow afternoon as the papers are bundled off and carelessly flung away...

the reports say the unimportant bit, how the chief minister had a tough time as his car broke down, they had to arrange benches on which he stepped to walk into his party headquarters....

but the eight-year-old had a smile on his face today... his father had handed him a cup filled with the magical brew that keeps them living, our eyes met as i saw him proudly holding the cup... it was his own, he savoured every sip... and his eyes glistened in pride....

somewhere in this wretched city, close to the gigantic presses where "news" is made and dies are re-cast each day, a child is growing up on the streets of life...

leaving for office

43 minutes to go, and i will be leaving for The Office...
these are times when i want to do many things simultaneously, read the books that have been gathering dust, listen to songs that i had listened to in my childhood, watch the sky melting under the summer heat, cook the dishes i had wanted to cook for the last two weeks, scribble figures and faces and paint them in the awful colours i lost on my way to school, and finally, embark on the project that i couldn't get time to complete in two years, a graphic novel ...

time is short, and i have settled for a blog post... i know no one reads my blog, and i know i've beenfooling myself for the last few months that someone is reading...

"Why do trees conceal
the splendor of their roots?" the poet asks...

remind me, unknown reader, to deal in detail of the people who study English literature in our sub-continent... sometimes later!

calvin and hobbes

I want to.. I really want to try this out in my office!
who wants to grow up? and who can ask questions about life like Calvin?
I know there are innumerous sites and blogs hosting the Calvinic philosophy, as on Bill Watterson, but I can't help myself posting these favourites once again...
here goes the best of the creation myths...




and that's the best explanation of parental behaviour I've come across so far!



is there a better way to explain solitude?
in my imagination, Calvin is lonely...
his loneliness takes flight in imagination...
for he will look at life as we stare at a blank computer screen...




and this one's without a comment!