Her small hand held mine, the head rested on my shoulder and from a moment of tears she went off to sleep. Seeing the trust in her closed eyes and feeling the tug of her other hand on my collar, I gave my heart to her.  She slept the entire way and when we entered our home and tried to let her slide onto the bed, she opened her eyes wide and smiled. Everyone in the room smiled back and my daughter had reached her home.

It took 14 years for our family to be complete. It was a fight of 14 long years through an emotional rollercoaster. But when she came home, it was worth the wait. Our world has changed since then and these days we spend our every waking (and sleeping) hours trying to adjust to her whims and fancies.

These days the small toothless grin and the artful raising of her eyebrows make our day worthwhile and every hint of tear is met with anxious glances. She is all of 9 months now and yet, my daughter knows how to rule already! She has won over the most prosaic men and she has more well wishers than what I could have ever envisioned.

These days as I play with her or just let her cosy upto my amply cushioned stomach, I feel a sense of pleasing warmth creep up my spine. I pray to the almighty to let me have the strength to help her realise her potential and to help her lead a fulfilling life.

Kolkata and KKR

Phew!! The hectic month of IPL is over , finally!!

For the last one month the country had been divided on regional lines depending upon the allegiance to the region based cricket teams. Yesterday night all of Kolkata( at least the most of it) erupted in unadulterated glee after Kolkata Night Riders managed to stage a wonderful win to lay their hands on a lovely cup and about 10 crores INR among all other things. The glee of its famous owner at having won the cup for the first time hogged the television screens and the daily newspapers of today. After all, the much beleaguered backbencher city had some achievement to show!!!

The present local government was overjoyed and promptly the airwaves were ruled by the right comments. Suddenly, local sweets like rossogolla and mishti doi was the toast of everyone and every heart started beating for the city.

But , it was a tough day for me!! Having  been identified as someone whose sympathies were not with the 'local team' but with an individual who did not play for the team, all hell broke loose the moment the winning runs were hit by Manoj Tiwari. In a span of about 5 minutes I was called some beautiful names like parochial, loser, worthless, and some other ones which I would not repeat here as I guess that would lower the dignity of this blog.

However, I was happy that KKR won-- for two reasons. Reason one was that CSK was trying to armtwist the tournament as a personal backyard tournament and reason two was that my Kolkata had some thing to cheer about.

But, the cynic in me has a few more questions to which I seek answers:-

a) How is KKR representing Kolkata? After all, this a profit seeking commercial venture which operates out of Mumbai and do not , I repeat, do not, till date have an office or representation in Kolkata.

b) What happens if tomorrow, the name is changed to just knight riders and it operates out of Bhubaneswar or Dhaka? After all, the owner is free to do it!!

c) Heard that the state government would have a grand reception for the winners! Great idea this! but what about the Bengal cricket team which had won the Vijay Hazare trophy for the first time this year. I know that most of us do not know about this. Just for the information, this tournament is the premier tournament for one dayers in India. This year the champions team list had the following names:- Manoj Tiwary, Laxmi ratan Shukla, Debabrata Das, Anustup Mazumdar, Wriddhiman Saha, Sreevats Goswami, Ashok Dinda, Iresh Saxena, Shami Ahmed, Sourav Ganguly among others. Any plans for felicitating these pioneers? Or will it be the only those guys belonging to the Mumbai based franchise?

I know these questions are uncomfortable but these are to be asked. After all, it is the name of my beloved city that is at stake.

P.S.:- Mr. SRK, if you really mean what you said after the match, one would expect you to invest a sizeable amount of your huge earnings at the expense of the loyal Kolkatans in making the game grow and in nurturing talent from this state. But I guess, that is expecting too much. After all, you are here for business and you would like to encash on ready talent. Nurturing young talent is someone else's forte and I guess you know his name rather well!!! 

And a friendly caution at the end :- this city is infamous for being ruthless against its own icons at the first hint of failure or mis-step . You can ask Sunil Gavaskar, Bhaichung Bhutia, Jose Ramirez Baretto, Sourav Ganguly , old players of East bengal and Mohun Bagan for reference.

God Bless You for the moments!!!

2012- what a start!!

I have aged in the first two months of this year.

It has been a terrifying two months—the extra day of the leap year included.

It started with an early morning phone call in late January; it was a wail informing me that my younger brother had expired in his sleep. How do you react when your brother, the one you grew up with,  is suddenly no more? I could feel the rib - breaking pain as a kaleidoscope of images of our life together unrolled in my mind. I cried, yet I could not cry as I was supposed to act as the strong person who would give the shoulder to the others to cry. I prayed that it was a bad dream and one day I would wake up to find that all is well. I still pray the same. But Life is not an Aamir Khan movie. So the recurring pain continues, throbbing at the back of my mind. I have thought often to put my anguish on paper but I guess it was too painful

Just six days after this, one fine morning while stretching to pick up something I felt some sharp twinge at my back and there I was down with a terrible pain. ‘Back spasm’ said the doctors and advised me complete rest for the rest of the week. The cause has to do with carrying laptops and my excess body weight. Well, here I am much better thank you but hobbling across and watching my diet like a sick old man. Hmmn, for an ex sportsman and a gourmet, it will take some getting used to. When you add to it the inputs that I receive from all and sundry about healthy living, it just adds to the fun.

Well, two months have gone and I have been shaken, stirred and fried. And as I have said before, aged and I am not talking about my chronological age. 

I must have been a Mayan in one of my previous births.

Onto 2012

This year has been a year of hope ---- mostly not – fulfilled and some fulfilled.

We completed the first year of staying in our new house and got acquainted with the neighbours. We now know people by their names and can occasionally exchange a point or two without getting too much into the depths of the contents.

The work front has taken off in our new venture, but at the moment we are experiencing the famed mid-life challenges of any such venture. We are doing barely enough to tide over the present troughs such that the crest next year is meaningful. But this also was the year where new horizons opened up and enriched me with first hand knowledge. I have never travelled so much for work after 1997.

On a personal front I had started going to the gym for the first time after 1993. In fact, I like the experience and lost a couple of kilos of the flab till the festive season hit. The fun, the food and the furious pace put paid to the experiment (at least for the time being) ands I have returned to much rotund self, thank you very much.

Well, this year also showed that age has caught up with my ever-active parents. My father (a young 80 year old) has started having niggles which unfortunately are not really niggles but a reflection of the wear and tear of 80 years of active life, from the later half of the year. My mom, much younger, has started early on the same path. I guess, these ailments are signals for me to take up more responsibilities/chores at home. But it’s still fun when mom dutifully dyes her hair and baba goes in for a haircut in spite of having a near bald head.

Wifey and I completed two cycles of the 7 year itch. The itches were there but none which were non-curable after a couple of bouts of shouting, sulking and shopping. Thankfully, the basic friendship remains the same.

My friends , as usual remained by my side at the times of crisis and we had a great time meeting up and celebrating 25 years of school leaving this year.

There were heartburns, heartbreaks at times, pains both physical and figurative and periods of frustration laced with anger that things did not go to plan.

I normally do not do this sort of an annual review as I prefer a seamless transition of time where all activities are a continuum. However, at the end of this year, I somehow feel that 2012 would be a watershed year of my life. My gut feel tells me that new major responsibilities would be thrust upon me by my choice. New horizons and unknown territories are to be traversed. My abilities and strengths would be put to test and weaknesses attacked. Hence, as I embark on my own voyage in 2012, I wanted the immediate past to be documented.

And all of you who may be reading this, may the New Year be the best year that you have ever had till now. May all your dreams see the light in 2012.

Sign of Times ?

Come September and I would wait eagerly for the special editions of the magazines slated to be published during the festive season. These magazines, puja shonkhya, as they are known as, would take up majority of the time of my pre-pujo days.

It started with the special editions of the children like Anandamela, Sandesh, and Sukhtara with an occasional dose of Kishore Bharati. These were mostly adventure stories and comics aimed at the psyche of the growing child and they had wonderful authors who wove magic through their word imagery.

With age, I have graduated to the more commonly known Puja Shankya for the grown ups like Desh, Anandabazar , Patrika, Bartaman, and Anandalok ,too. Each year the newspaper vendor would deliver these by mid September and then on every free time between meetings or in the back seat of my car or Sundays would be spent in the joys of reading through myriad stories printed there.

I have always found the authors depicting present reality through these stories and events were woven round the ‘in things’ at that time, save a few ‘period pieces’. I have seen class struggle being the base of the majority of such stories in the early eighties. Cricket heroes replaced football heroes as a protagonist of the stories after one Sourav Ganguly proved that even the ‘mach bhat khaoa Bangali’ can play cricket at the very highest levels. A couple of years back many stories had  ‘land acquisition’ as the backdrop.

The moot point is that I have found that these stories are a veiled attempt at contemporary social commentary.

Of late, specially this year , I have found graphic descriptions of sex, lesbianism and seduction in a majority of the stories.

Are we becoming adults or is the social fabric, as we knew it, going for a makeover? Or have the authors realised that sex sells?  What say?

REVELATION

And I saw myself being swept away

In the swirling muddied waters

While I sat in the safety of

A wet high branch of a banyan tree

And I laughed at my sense of false security

While I enjoyed my tea on my third floor balcony

On a wet dreary monsoon evening.

Then I snapped back to reality

And I rolled back into one whole self

I, Me and Myself.

Open Letter

As I sit back and watch the breaking trends of the elections in Bengal unfold, I feel that a time has come when I should write an open letter to the new chief minister about what I as a common citizen and a voter expect from her.

Dear Madam (or Didi as you prefer to be called),

I represent that part of your electorate who have stayed back in Bengal throughout the last 34 years and tried to make a livelihood here whereas a majority of my friends have left for other states and look at the home state in dismay and with disdain.

The left front came to power when I was just 8 years old—too small to realise what had happened. I grew up, studied, worked and started a business in an environment which knew that the government belonged to just one party. The policies (whatever little there were) were the same and as statisticians pointed out, the state was going downhill. I refused to lose faith in my dear Bengal and struggled manfully along. Buddhababu came on to the scene in 2001 but flattered to deceive. Your parties brand of ‘opposition politics’ made life difficult for us. It felt that we were being shoved down a blind lane by both the parties.

My business makes me travel extensively across South Bengal, a majority of which is rural. I kept on meeting people who were excited by your call of change – or ‘Paribartan’. The urban population did not know what to do. The man on the street was faced with a choice where he did not know which way to go. This was all the more so for a majority of the electorate who had not seen a different party in power from their birth.

But, I guess the ‘Paribartan’ has caught on. People have given a huge mandate in your favour. They have agreed to your call for change.

Since, change is the platform on which this historic win has happened for you, I take this opportunity as a voter and a common man to request you to incorporate the following changes in our lives:-

a)      Change the work culture of Bengal. I am tired of hearing that we are lazy and we shirk work. Believe me, we work equally hard as other states, but some laggards pull us down. Unfortunately, a majority of these are government employees and hence, directly your employees too. Please make sure that red tapism and bureaucratic delays do not happen

b)      Create other work centers than Kolkata. Kolkata is chocked and development cannot be seen if it does not reach the corners of the state

c)      Ban bandhs, dharnas or other such stupid things. Protests are a right in a democracy, but not at the cost of inconvenience to others.

d)     Revamp the education and healthcare. These two basic requirements are in a shamble in the state, especially in the rural sectors.

e)      Create job opportunities such that my friends can come back to their home and do not have to stay away for earning their livelihood. We cannot afford to lose our best brains anymore, can we?

f)       Corruption has invaded our blood across the country. But can we just keep a check on that?

g)      Let the law enforcing agencies be neutral such that the man on the street can go to a police station with hope and not with fear of reprisal from a hoodlum supported by a political bigwig.

h)      Agriculture has been our backbone and needs to be supported. Can we still have some manufacturing industries please? There are enough parcels of land for such activities, if infrastructure can be provided.

i)        Above all, can we have clean governance wherein we can get to feel that we matter as an individual – as a citizen

I am sorry if I have crossed limits, but this is an outflow of angst from a person who loves his Bengal, who takes pride in being a Bengali and who dreams of a Sonar Bangla.

No, I do not want a London in Kolkata, neither a Paris in Digha. I just want my Sonar Bangla. Can I please have that?

With Regards.