The Deep Cut

I shamelessly agree that I watch a LOT of movies. And that I cry every time a Danny Archer calls a Maddy Bowen to say 'Wish you were here Maddy..'  before he dies or the moment when Marley is put to a permanent sleep with a shaking John beside him, whispering in his ears 'You're a great dog Marley.. you're a great dog!'  or whenever Mufasa is thrown off the cliff by his brother Scar, after he whispers  'Long. Live. The King.'  on his horrified face or when Forrest Gump meets his son for the first time and asks  'Is he.. Is he smart?'  or when Ellie gets fatally ill as Carl gets ready for their 'dream adventure' to the Paradise Falls in the movie  Up . Sniff.   I've been moved, repeatedly, by movies and movie scenes and by the fictional characters and personalities that govern the directions they usually go. So when Robin Williams died a couple of weeks back, I shut the door for my room upstairs, climbed up the chair and sile

It's that time of the year when I wake up and find the dorm chummy walk into the room with a laddoo in his hand. Before you brace yourself, his geeky face that otherwise has a permanent creepy smile on it, opens up to shout a 'Vande Mataram!' (a senseless 'Inquilab Zindabad!' if he's a communist) on your unsuspecting face. You turn the other way around and try to go back to sleep again. What's the point? You don't get any laddoos now anyway! Happy Independence Day guys. Yes, today's the day you get those 'Mere des ki dharti sona ugle, ugle heere-moti' feels. Are you done posting your patriotic update on Facebook yet? Go on now, don't let me delay you. Do it and come back to read me. Independence Day has only one memory for me. Okay, two. Stew and Silver Linings. ... It had rained the previous night, so the grounds were water-logged. I wondered, as we walked into the mess, of what will happen to the parade if the grounds

Last few weeks have been such a whirlwind that I've been all like Whaaa-?! Okay, so I really dunno and I'm also kind of clueless about what to fill you guys in with.. except.. that suddenly one day I decided to pack up my things back in Kolkata, and shove everything to the back of that giant thing they call an aeroplane (and hop in to like 4 of them - connecting flights) to travel halfway around the globe to this place named Tallahassee, in Florida. Unlike back home in India, where a state-capital city is like a big bustling, marginally chaotic city (usually the biggest in the state), the quiet and slow college-town of Tallahassee is the state capital of Florida. Not Miami, as you'd have  perhaps   thought. Don't worry, same mistake was made there! Nothing could've prepared me for that REALLY LONG journey than perhaps the craziness of American college football (which you get only here, so there goes that plan)! It was something like this: Kolkata to Delhi (2:3