2010. 2010. diabetes. no symptoms. something else?
everything sucks. i am singularly unfortunate. depression.

When all this ends.

I return to the rusty green table whenever I am clueless. It is like the old ignored piece of soon-to-be junk that you are too fond of to throw away. The last week has been absolutely crazy. One birthday, one suicide and one exam. This highly incongruous combination kept me busy.

The birthday was very nice and how much. The suicide was unnecessary and disturbing. The exam was difficult and absurd.

Then sleep deprivation. Five nights straight very little sleep, bad throat and complete mind-fuck was unbearable. And then I got 14 hours of sleep which made things so much better. As I write, I am searching for a snazzy new template for my blog. Something that looks impressive and serious etc. :P

In other news, I think I am finally out of a love. And it must do me good. But life is not so easy. I was thinking about one thing the other day. It seemed kind of crooked and freaked me out, but it made sense. Why do people end their lives when they are miserable? I think it is a better bet to kill yourself when everything is perfect. I, for one, always feel this anxiety about whatever happiness I have. I fear that one day the people who love me will stop caring about me. I fear mortality. Not my own, but of those I love. So I was thinking that it is actually a good idea to end your life when everything is fine. You can die happy, knowing that people love you, that the little illusion of a perfect universe that you have created around your head is still there.

Let us face it, all of us know that happiness is some kind of an illusion. Our romances, our friendships, our witticisms, our fixations, our principles... all these build up a nice happy universe which is so fragile that it can go POOF! with one blow. I fear that Poof more than anything else.

I know that my world is fragile. I don't know about your one, I don't know whether you have these anxieties or not, but I feel a sense of desolation each time I am very happy. I learnt my lesson the hard way when I was a kid. But I don't want my bubble to burst so bad again. So I want to go away when I am still cared for as a child, when my romance hasn't lost its glow, when my friends still find my jokes funny, when I am still important in my puny little world.

But then again, I can't be so selfish. And of course, I need to check out what life has in store. And right now it has a snazzy new template. So there.

Every time you say that you are scared, I feel a terrible, empty sadness and a sense of futility. You make a stranger of me. Would you do the same if I were your own?

ivory bridges.

Hemen died yesterday. And with him died a generation, an institution and a kind of life that I can never relive again. Hemen was important in ways that most of the people today do not even know. In his little shop in Deshapriyo Park, he quietly practiced a craft that was perhaps destined to die.

It was his suggestion that made me include an extra string on my instruments for better resonance. He carried with him the aura of the lost world of sage musicians and winter evenings.

His ear for music was a famous one, yes. The first time I went to his shop was when I threw a fit for a Sarod. I wanted to play the instrument when I was three years old (that was when I started going to my Guruji’s place). I was too young to even hold a Sarod, so Hemen made me a little one. It is probably lying in some corner of a house. Instruments need regular playing to mature. I know it has lost its voice by now. I played that one for five or six years, until it became too small for me. Still, my toy sarod, which did not even have ivory bridges, I remember its characteristic sound. It was what I will now call ‘chapa’. I smile when I remember the mock serious tone of that instrument. Not being a full sized one, it did not have the characteristic ‘gambhirjyo’ of a Sarod. But it was my first instrument. With whose touch I learnt sa re ga ma pa.

And now, old Hemen is no more. And that world is no more.

The only world to which I feel I belong. That old world where people play Sarod for hours. Where music and whiskey flow with the ease of a maestro's meend. Where life is a celebration of sorrow. Where music is instilled within the nerves of people and bricks of houses. Where the sun rises only to the strains of Bhairav. That world where we do not run. Where people understand, from within, the true meaning of ‘thehrav’. Where mindless speed is considered to be as immature as the anxious expenditure of the nouveau riche. My obscene, elitist, decadent world. My delicate, inebriated, exquisite world.

I languish in this unreal space instead. Marveling at my mediocrity. I split into two.

But Hemen is dead. Ali Akbar is dead. That world is dead. My past is dead.

And I have a lute of wood at a corner of my room that sings no more.