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

(Continued from How to be a Workout Nazi ...) "I also remember a guy during those initial days of gym. He used to go Ryan Gosling from  Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011)  on us in the locker room. Although not fully nude, he would strip down to his bare minimum and do some free-hand exercises that would require lots of bending and twisting. Things, you don't want to see on your first day at gym. So, trust me when I say I braved it out there in those initial period. Trying to gel in, I stripped down myself to those shorts showing some skinny legs, lest they think I was homophobic!" The biweekly weight check and diet counselling was carried out by a professional who sits in an office at the ladies' gym. Not so surprisingly, everyone at the men's gym wants to get their weights checked all the time. After 4 weeks of working out (and two discarded, outgrown t-shirts later), I was asked to get my weight checked at the office. Little did I know, that th

Apart from the fact that I almost fainted on the very first day of it, working out at the gym has rather been a unique experience. I've met some peculiar people there, have encountered some eccentric work-out routines and have come across some distinctive personalities not directly associated with the particular form of 'healthcare'. Sometimes, your whole life boils down to that one insane experience to write a blogpost about. In two parts, in this case. After being cajoled into obtaining a membership at the local gym, I remember to have regretted it immediately afterwards. I mean what was I thinking? Were my 'club-sandwich-for-breakfast' and 'chicken-wings-for-snacks' days over? Was I really going to commit to such self-inflicted atrocity? It certainly seemed like that at the moment. And quite unfortunately, now I had an entire family in support of my decision! Now although you'd think my physique always needed a facelift, I assure you it

This will be an extremely personal post, so don't go reading into it too much if you don't particularly like the sorts. Remember I warned you! __________________________________________________________________________________________________________ There are times when you feel utterly hopeless. Like whatever you have done, or are doing, would ultimately amount to nothing. That in the whole seventy plus years you've lived or would perhaps live, and all the work that you've done or would do, they would simply not matter in the end. That you would not matter. Your life wouldn't matter, like so many everyday. Your name wouldn't be remembered. You wouldn't be remembered. That however much you've tried doing things against that, you've ended up achieving nothing. How can anyone live knowing that? Yesterday I went to the market to get some eggs, 'Dada, I'll buy the entire tray. We'll be having guests tonight!' I added, w

Everytime I go to the northern parts of the city of Calcutta, I feel like I have gone back in time on a time machine. Not that I go much. Had I known that I just had to wait for the budding art enthusiastic friend to come back home from her grad studies in New Jersey in order to be rediscovering some forgotten history of my own city, I would have had something to look forward to in the summer! The northern part of Kolkata, oops.. sorry.. of Calcutta, is that old part of the city where people from south seldom visit. Many among the youngsters today, do not know that this city was once called the 'City of Palaces' (now used, rather in reference to Mexico city) - you can see for yourself the dilapidated palaces and their decaying columns from Victorian times on your way to the Howrah station. But you've got to visit North Kolkata in order to truly establish this expression. Just a few steps north from the M.G. Road metro station, further away from the Calcutta Me