Rosetta

I went to Egypt prior to the social media explosion and I remember it far better than most places I have been to recently and photographed abundantly. Our photos from Egypt are few and amateurish- reeking of a lack of training in both viewing and capturing sites of historical importance. My memories suffer from similar...

An average day with the big C

The last few days have been stranger than I would like them to be. I sleep and wake up on an infinite loop that neither knows nor respects any frame of time. My body feels more fatigued than it ever was, with new pain emerging in old places. I have been yearning for a sense...

A Guilty Bar of Lament

Dear J, The lockdown has ushered in all sorts of doom that our species could never imagine. Some are dying of hunger and others are succumbing to disease. But my dear J, that isn't the only reason reason I sit sleepless in Calcutta, complete with dark circles and darker sorrow, writing to you. Of all...

Periwinkle

Periwinkle came into my life when I was beginning to open up my windows to the wider world and welcoming in tidbits of half-baked information that I'd save in hope of using later. Somebody somewhere wore a perwinkle to an event and Pantone was quick enough to break it down in ways that would make...

Letter to the future past

Dear future past, I wish my letter finds you in the pink of health and I hope that good metaphor is still in use. You know me, perhaps as a leftover social media account that I'd most likely be embarrassed of today. A few words. A lot many photos. Some of those things there are...

Kolkata: Shades of Grey

"What colour comes to mind when you think of your city?" "Grey," I responded with some thought.I really tried hard to settle for brighter colours, but every time I thought of a pink or blue or yellow, I felt an odd grief for abandoning the grey. It isn't a grey of melancholia, gloom or mundane....

Shoe

Shoes confuse me. The word is unsettling when it appears in singular, almost arresting the reader in a moment of unrecognition I don't know most of the words that separate one kind of footwear from another. It took me quite long to learn footwear itself as a sophisticated synonym to just 'shoes'. I don't know...

Dear Pedagogue

Dear pedagogue, There are things a student isn't supposed to say to their teacher, and this is one of them. But there is no similar negative sanction on writing such things, hence I proceed. Good things take time, and like most things that we believe in for no apparent good reason, I believe the paper...

Deep Conditioning

There was a time I would be excited about such small things that might today seem like an embarrassment. I remember this one time my father came back from Patna, where he was posted, and handed my mother a bottle of Sunsilk and said he'd got a new shampoo for me. It was still those...

Diwali of Prohibitions

As the planet warms up more and more to an emerging consciousness about itself as a faulty failing hell hole for the most self-proclaimed superior species, there are some meek voices growing louder that announce ways to save the Titanic. Diwali, for good reasons, has been at the receiving end of much of these extremely...