SPORTS - the arena that turns mortals into immortals or drags them down to the abyss of public ridicule.
SPORTS - the birthplace of unforgettable moments that stay with you throughout your life.
I am sure that each and every one of you has your collection of 2 or 3 moments from different sporting events that just refuse to turn old no matter how many times you rewind them in your mind’s video-recorder. It is a part of growing up I guess!
I have a chosen few, too. . . .
All of them are from football world cups. More specifically, all of them are from documentary movies made on the football world cups. . . .
The most cherished one is from the official 1998 FIFA football world cup movie. All of those official movies, starting right from the 1950 or 1954 world cup, were shown in ESPN and Star Sports during the build up to the 2006 football world cup.
This was from the 2nd round knock-out match between Italy and Chile, and it involved Roberto Baggio - the most expensive player in world football at one time. Baggio was the blue-eyed boy of the Italian football squad during the previous world cup in 1994. He was their main striker, play-maker, star attraction. But in the final match against Brazil he made the biggest mistake of his life. He shot the ball over the crossbar of the goalpost during the tiebreaker – a miss that immediately handed Brazil the world cup. And turned Baggio into the biggest villain in Italy.
Now, four years later, Baggio was nearing the end of his international career. This was his last world cup, and in it he was playing the role of a once-great-but-now-in-the-sidelines hero-turned-villain-turned-nobody. This time, Italy was no longer being supported by his shoulders. Alessandro Del Piero was the new ‘Baggio’.
Baggio was playing as a striker in that match against Chile. At one time, as he attempted to pass the ball inside the Chilean penalty-box, it struck the hand of a Chilean player. He appealed for penalty at once, and got it. Now I’ll narrate the scenes as shown in that documentary. . . .
Baggio immediately bends down, hands on his knees, as if for support. He stays that way for some time, as one or two Italian players run to him and say something. Then he stands up, takes the ball, and proceeds towards the area from where the shot is to be taken. Four years after that fateful afternoon in Pasadena, USA, Roberto Baggio is again going to take a penalty kick for Italy.
As he places the ball on the ground and steps back, images from the build up to that infamous shot start flashing in the screen. We see a Chilean player shouting vehemently in the left ear of Baggio, as he is about to start his run. Images start to flash again. But his face is like stone, not a single muscle showing any movement. He runs, takes the shot with his right foot, sees what happens and calmly runs away. The next shot shows the Chilean goalkeeper getting up from the ground, looking dejected. Meanwhile, Italian players run to Baggio, congratulating him. In one last shot, we finally see him from the front as a teammate runs up and embraces him. Even now, Baggio stays eerily calm, his face displaying the least amount of emotion possible. But you can feel it is there this time – like an underwater volcano, ready to burst to the surface at any time. I would not have been surprised one bit, if at that moment Baggio had broken down in tears on the ground. But helped by some Herculean will power, he didn’t - and that suppressed emotional torment is what has gotten stuck to my mind. Later Baggio said that he finally got rid of the ghost of ’94 in that one penalty kick. That beautiful video (augmented by a superb background score) is there at YouTube – go find it out and have a look!
Italy won that match and curiously, my next memorable moment involves Robert Baggio during the tiebreaker between France and Italy in the quarter-final match. The first shot was to be taken by Baggio. Again he coolly took the ball, placed it on the ground, stepped back, waited for the referee’s whistle, then ran up, took the shot and scored. But right after that, as he was running away, Baggio placed his right index finger on his lips and gestured as if to tell someone to shut up. Actually the crowd behind that particular goalpost was mostly made up of French supporters - and they had been constantly booing Baggio during his penalty kick. But he silenced them in one shot and then took time to explicitly make the point! However, Italy lost the tiebreak, and the Italian player who missed the last shot had a name that also ended in ‘Bazzio’, though not as spelled as ‘Baggio’. . . .
My last two memorable sports moments come from the next official FIFA football world cup movie in 2002. They took place during the first round group match between defending champion France and Denmark. The French team was in deep trouble by then – securing only one point from their first two group matches. They needed to beat Denmark at least 2-0 in that last group game, to have a chance of advancing to the next round. But unlike the previous two matches, this time they had their talisman with them – Zinedine Yazid Zidane, though he was carrying an injured left leg and had bandages over his left thigh. Just four years ago he had single-handedly demolished the formidable Brazilian side in the final match and handed France the world cup. Handling Denmark should have been a walk in the park compared to that!
The whole of France was counting on Zidane to pull their side through to the second round. It is in this context – ideally suited for a hero, more so for the two-time FIFA world player of the year – that I remember those two incidences. The first was when a high long ball was played to Zidane as he was running inside the Danish penalty box. He received it right enough with his right foot, but then lost balance as his injured left leg couldn’t handle the speed of his run and gave way. Zidane tumbled onto the ground, rolling as he hit it and came to a stop lying with his face buried in the grass. As he took a deep breath and looked up lying down, the camera showed in a close-up shot the sweat running down his contorted face betraying the pain and frustration. France was probably 1-0 behind by that time.
The second scene was more poignant, although strangely I couldn’t locate it in the official film any more when I searched today at YouTube. I’m sure about having seen it, perhaps not in the official film version but in some other documentary that used the same footage. It showed Zidane from behind as he took a shot from distance at the Danish goalpost. He hit the ball with his good right leg, but in the ensuing motion lost his balance again and started to fall. As the ball climbed higher, curled leftwards and began descending towards the upper left corner of the crossbar, Zidane was still falling in the foreground. Finally as he hit the ground, the ball went past the post, missing it by inches. Zidane’s fall was complete, and that of France as well because instead of winning the game 2-0, they lost it by the same margin. The injured star failed to rise to the occasion, with that collapse onto the ground symbolizing his country’s exit at the very first round of the tournament. France managed just one point and not a single goal. It was and still is the worst performance by a defending champion team in a world cup. . . .
So while in one case Baggio went through agony for four years and finally redeemed himself in the best possible way one could have planned, Zidane went from being the guiding force of a world champion team to being reduced to a fallen hero returning home after a disastrous performance by his side. And you know what – the first shot in the tiebreaker on behalf of the French team in that 1998 quarter-final against Italy was taken by Zizou, after Baggio, and successfully. One can only wonder if the two players had spoken to each other after the match, and what, if anything, Baggio said to Zidane. . . .
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Monday, May 16, 2011
A Ride worth Two Rupees
. . . . I couldn’t help but say what I was feeling: “You know, this is the first time since I left school that I’m buying one of these things!” But he didn’t pay any attention to my heartfelt confession, or at least didn’t show any sign even if he did.
Oh well, it didn’t matter much. I was in seventh heaven already, and there was nothing anybody could do to ruin it.
Can you ever imagine the power a two rupee coin possesses?! As I held that plastic wrap in one hand and gave the coin in exchange, I knew I had just jumped on a ride to the past: to those golden days of my school life. . . .
As he took the coin from my hand in the most carefree attitude and put it calmly in his pocket, I turned my whole attention back to the plastic wrap and how to deal with it. I mean, after six-seven years of absence the sudden appearance of a once familiar face can often put someone in a fix as to what to do next.
The first thing I remembered was that back in those days we would often ask the vendor to cut open the plastic for us. But there were always some “what’s-the-point-in-waiting” type of guys in our midst, who would immediately tear the plastic apart using their teeth and get to the brightly coloured thing kept inside within seconds. Meanwhile we would impatiently wait for the vendor as he looked around for his blade, and keep one jealous eye on that boy who was already beginning to forget the hot sun above his head. . . .
. . . . Well this time it was my turn to give a damn about asking the vendor, so I quickly chewed off the top of the plastic wrap. There, inside, dressed in a perfectly Fruity-type orange colour, waited my gift worth two rupees. I gently put the Mango-flavoured pepsi icicle in my mouth, and it was. . . .
. . . . It was like going back to those late, hot summer afternoons in front of the school. The school bus was taking longer than usual to show up, and the sun was in no mood to be considerate. But even the thermonuclear fusion reactions powering the entire solar system were no match for a white, square, one foot by one foot by one foot box made of thermocol. What lay inside was way more powerful than what the big, bad sun could ever hope of becoming in such a summer afternoon at Kolkata. We called those bright red, orange, green icy things ‘pepsi’. I guess all the kids of our age called them that. Don’t ask me why! It’s one of the biggest mysteries from my childhood days. Maybe one reason was that back then we were still not age wise, fashion sense wise, stylistically evolved enough to just pop open a bottle of real Pepsi whenever we wished and take funky sips from it like Ranbir Kapoor does now-a-days, or Sharukh Khan did during those days! Those six inches long, coloured sticks of flavoured ice were the easiest, cheapest and tastiest way to show off our macho image! So they just had to be ‘pepsi’, you know (I don’t know what was wrong with ‘cocacola’). . . .
. . . . Well, come to think of it, I hadn’t tasted too many of these Fruity-orange coloured types while in school. The most abundant ones then, at least among the white, square boxes that came to our rescue every summer in front of our school, was a more Orange-orange coloured type. And it tasted like orange I think!
But the boy with the white box in front of Muhammad Ali Park this afternoon had just given me a Mango-flavoured one! Yaba-daba-doo and etc.! Some of the plastic was still stuck in my tongue. I carefully tongue-kicked them away and finally took a long sip out of my pepsi. Wow, man! I can’t tell you how sweet it felt! Let’s do it again, and again, and. . . .
. . . . And disappointment. It seemed I had forgotten one important lesson about ‘plasticated pepsi’! See, it’s basically a stick of ice made from water mixed with some coloured, flavouring syrup. Now they use more of plain water than the syrup in the mixture, for economical reasons. So if you suck on the stick too forcefully too early, all the syrup just travels down your throat in one go, leaving you with a more-or-less tasteless stick of ice! And this time, I hadn’t even gone through one inch of it before I was looking back at a Mango-turned-bamboo coloured piece of ice. Ironically, not all the syrup had made it inside my mouth. Some were clinging like nail polish to my toenails, others had befriended my jeans. And a majority had coloured my palm, like they put turmeric paste on a bride before she takes a bath on the day of the marriage!
Damn it, and to hell with it! This is my first pepsicle in seven years, so “saat khoon maaf”! I was going to enjoy this in any way I could. Fortunately, I detected some syrup hanging onto the bottom of the icicle. Yaba-daba and so on! I continued walking towards the MG Road Crossing, mystifying the passing-by people about the meaning of a bespectacled bearded man, with a school-bag in the back, and a stick of bamboo-coloured ice in his hand. Ha-ha, those idiots! What do they know about a two rupee ride back to childhood?
As I sat down on a cement slab in front of the Fire Station just before the Crossing to finish my pepsicle, and put my bottom on fire on the literally ‘hot’ seat under the afternoon sun, a group of school-girls passed me by. I felt somewhat silly, with the plastic wrap sticking from my mouth. I obviously hadn’t intended to rediscover the lost child in me, you know. I had simply obeyed what my heart had ordered: to rediscover a long-forgotten joy. But I didn’t want be embarrassed about it. . . .
. . . . I gulped down the last drops of syrup that had made that plastic wrap their home since only that morning, I hoped! It was time to take an auto from in front of the MG Road Metro station and head home. As I crossed MG Road and hurried up towards the auto stands, I couldn’t help smiling. The men and women sitting in the taxis and buses might have noticed that and wondered what was so funny with the world! I wish I could have asked them: what do you know about a two rupee ride back to childhood?
Oh well, it didn’t matter much. I was in seventh heaven already, and there was nothing anybody could do to ruin it.
Can you ever imagine the power a two rupee coin possesses?! As I held that plastic wrap in one hand and gave the coin in exchange, I knew I had just jumped on a ride to the past: to those golden days of my school life. . . .
As he took the coin from my hand in the most carefree attitude and put it calmly in his pocket, I turned my whole attention back to the plastic wrap and how to deal with it. I mean, after six-seven years of absence the sudden appearance of a once familiar face can often put someone in a fix as to what to do next.
The first thing I remembered was that back in those days we would often ask the vendor to cut open the plastic for us. But there were always some “what’s-the-point-in-waiting” type of guys in our midst, who would immediately tear the plastic apart using their teeth and get to the brightly coloured thing kept inside within seconds. Meanwhile we would impatiently wait for the vendor as he looked around for his blade, and keep one jealous eye on that boy who was already beginning to forget the hot sun above his head. . . .
. . . . Well this time it was my turn to give a damn about asking the vendor, so I quickly chewed off the top of the plastic wrap. There, inside, dressed in a perfectly Fruity-type orange colour, waited my gift worth two rupees. I gently put the Mango-flavoured pepsi icicle in my mouth, and it was. . . .
. . . . It was like going back to those late, hot summer afternoons in front of the school. The school bus was taking longer than usual to show up, and the sun was in no mood to be considerate. But even the thermonuclear fusion reactions powering the entire solar system were no match for a white, square, one foot by one foot by one foot box made of thermocol. What lay inside was way more powerful than what the big, bad sun could ever hope of becoming in such a summer afternoon at Kolkata. We called those bright red, orange, green icy things ‘pepsi’. I guess all the kids of our age called them that. Don’t ask me why! It’s one of the biggest mysteries from my childhood days. Maybe one reason was that back then we were still not age wise, fashion sense wise, stylistically evolved enough to just pop open a bottle of real Pepsi whenever we wished and take funky sips from it like Ranbir Kapoor does now-a-days, or Sharukh Khan did during those days! Those six inches long, coloured sticks of flavoured ice were the easiest, cheapest and tastiest way to show off our macho image! So they just had to be ‘pepsi’, you know (I don’t know what was wrong with ‘cocacola’). . . .
. . . . Well, come to think of it, I hadn’t tasted too many of these Fruity-orange coloured types while in school. The most abundant ones then, at least among the white, square boxes that came to our rescue every summer in front of our school, was a more Orange-orange coloured type. And it tasted like orange I think!
But the boy with the white box in front of Muhammad Ali Park this afternoon had just given me a Mango-flavoured one! Yaba-daba-doo and etc.! Some of the plastic was still stuck in my tongue. I carefully tongue-kicked them away and finally took a long sip out of my pepsi. Wow, man! I can’t tell you how sweet it felt! Let’s do it again, and again, and. . . .
. . . . And disappointment. It seemed I had forgotten one important lesson about ‘plasticated pepsi’! See, it’s basically a stick of ice made from water mixed with some coloured, flavouring syrup. Now they use more of plain water than the syrup in the mixture, for economical reasons. So if you suck on the stick too forcefully too early, all the syrup just travels down your throat in one go, leaving you with a more-or-less tasteless stick of ice! And this time, I hadn’t even gone through one inch of it before I was looking back at a Mango-turned-bamboo coloured piece of ice. Ironically, not all the syrup had made it inside my mouth. Some were clinging like nail polish to my toenails, others had befriended my jeans. And a majority had coloured my palm, like they put turmeric paste on a bride before she takes a bath on the day of the marriage!
Damn it, and to hell with it! This is my first pepsicle in seven years, so “saat khoon maaf”! I was going to enjoy this in any way I could. Fortunately, I detected some syrup hanging onto the bottom of the icicle. Yaba-daba and so on! I continued walking towards the MG Road Crossing, mystifying the passing-by people about the meaning of a bespectacled bearded man, with a school-bag in the back, and a stick of bamboo-coloured ice in his hand. Ha-ha, those idiots! What do they know about a two rupee ride back to childhood?
As I sat down on a cement slab in front of the Fire Station just before the Crossing to finish my pepsicle, and put my bottom on fire on the literally ‘hot’ seat under the afternoon sun, a group of school-girls passed me by. I felt somewhat silly, with the plastic wrap sticking from my mouth. I obviously hadn’t intended to rediscover the lost child in me, you know. I had simply obeyed what my heart had ordered: to rediscover a long-forgotten joy. But I didn’t want be embarrassed about it. . . .
. . . . I gulped down the last drops of syrup that had made that plastic wrap their home since only that morning, I hoped! It was time to take an auto from in front of the MG Road Metro station and head home. As I crossed MG Road and hurried up towards the auto stands, I couldn’t help smiling. The men and women sitting in the taxis and buses might have noticed that and wondered what was so funny with the world! I wish I could have asked them: what do you know about a two rupee ride back to childhood?
Thursday, February 24, 2011
From university to home
We are both looking at each other across the corridor, keenly. One difference is that he is smiling, but I’m not.
Well, to be absolutely honest, there are two other big differences. Number one is that he is a Nobel Laureate, and guess what am I! Number two is that he is dead, and I’m sort of alive. . . So you want to know his name? He’s Richard Feynman - Nobel Prize winner in Physics in 1965.
The picture is quite big, probably three feet by two. It’s the last one in the corridor. But for me, it’s the most interesting of them all. . .
I think it’s due to the smile and that razor-sharp yet mischievous gaze, plus the way he’s resting his chin on the three fingers of his left hand. It’s like the man is seeing right through you! And any moment he’ll give you a wink and laugh aloud saying, “Aha! Caught you red-handed my friend!”
Anyway, he’s keeping me good company as I wait for the pressure of the autoclave to come down, so that Arunda can open it and give me my conical flask containing 50 ml of YPD agar. Right now he’s sitting to my left on the top of this bench, rubbing two rectangular wood pieces together, probably in the hope of re-discovering the original method by which human beings acquired the ability to light a fire! Jokes apart, I think he’s also trying out ways to let these idle minutes pass by without giving them much thought.
But I kind of like it sitting with my back to the wall on this bench. The end of the corridor at the Biochemistry Department is calm and quiet at the moment, half-an hour past nine in the night. Arunda and I are not talking. We’re just sitting and waiting, and I’m looking at Mr. Feynman while he’s playing with his wooden fire-starting equipment. At times it feels nice just to sit silently with someone you know at your side, and do nothing but pass the time. . .
Shounakda-s wife, whose name I don’t know, is coming this way. As she is about to enter AKDG-s lab, Azharda and Siddharthada comes out. Both of them almost go past her, then suddenly turn around and congratulate her for something. In reply she asks them to come inside the lab and have some sweets. Azharda insists that all the sweets are gone, but she won’t let them go. So in the end they follow her inside the lab and the door closes.
The pressure reading has not come down much in the last five minutes, just like the five minutes before that. But somehow it doesn’t bother me. . .
Azharda and Siddharthada come out again. They talk to each other as Azharda kneels down to tie his shoelaces. This is the guy who single-handedly cooked more than eighty luchis for breakfast in the jungles of Orissa four days ago. Right now he’s bent down in front me adjusting his snickers. Nine hours ago I was strolling on the banks of Hooghly with Saurav, Bikram and Sayan at the Strand in Chandan Nagore. And now I’m killing time to get a small 100 ml conical flask in my hands at the sixth floor of Ballygunge Science College. Life is stranger than fiction. . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . Damn it man! In & Out is closed! Now where will I get a packet of biscuits at Ballygunge Phari at twent past ten pm?! Hey, hold on a minute, can it be. . . yes! Rajeshda is stiil there at his phuchka stall! Brilliant! It looks like he’s getting ready to leave. But I know he’ll not say ‘No’ to me even at this hour. . .
. . . For the past ten minutes I’ve been hiding from Arunavoda, Arindamda and Sudiptoda standing on the other side of Phari. Fortunately they didn’t notice me at Rajeshda’s, gorging on twenty-five rupees worth of phuchka, when I was supposed to have left the lab fifteen minutes ago and caught a bus home! Come on now, its past ten-thirty – haven’t those guys chatted enough in the lab for the past ten or so hours? Why don’t they just hop onto a bus, or auto, or taxi, or something and let me be in peace?! Don’t their legs hurt standing for so long after such a long day? Mine do! Well, I don’t mind much. But you know people – they see you somewhere and start asking what you were up to, as if it was the most important thing in the world for them to know, when in reality they don’t give a shit! Why can’t I stand at a bus-stop wherever I want to, whenever I want to, for whatever time I want to – without being afraid of being asked questions?
Mother had called. Now she knows she’ll have to wait for another 40 minutes at the dinner table or so before her genius son returns home after a remarkable day’s work in the lab, inventing newer and smarter ways of doing who-the-hell-knows-what! She must be so proudly tired and hungry after working in the office the entire day. . .
So then, let’s allow her some loneliness for some more time. I will do only as I wish. Since I can’t find any buses to Phoolbagan, I will catch that two-forty to Sealdah, get down at Sealdah station flyover, go to Kalpataru, have a big bhar of Lassi, then take an auto going to Beleghata Building More, get off at Alochhaya cinema hall, and walk for ten minutes before I reach home. Lucky Ali, Strings and 30 Seconds To Mars will be there with me as I walk down the empty street. Unfortunately the in-built memory card of my phone doesn’t have space for more than three mp3 songs! And out of a fanatic determination not to waste my parents’ money, I didn’t spend three hundred and twenty-five rupees only to buy a 2 GB memory card either. Therefore I end up listening to the same three songs over and over again and then I change them after a week. But it’s better than listening to all the bakwas blabbering in FM channels, in return for barely four or five good songs in an hour. . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . Thundering typhoons! Kalpataru was closed! I did see the shop-owner talking to his neighbourhood shop-owner who was still open, but I controlled the urge to take the big dustbin in front of his shop, all full of broken bhars, and break them some more by emptying it on his head! While I was passing through the crowded station on my to the auto-stand, I walked past a homeless man sitting with his rags and clothes on the road. He was sitting exactly like Feynman – chin on the palm of his left hand like Sukanto and the hint of a smile on his face. Although he was not looking at me – in fact he was not looking at anyone or anything in this mortal world at all! I don’t think he could have cared a tiniest bit about what was going on around him. But that smile. . . ah, yes – I doubt whether even Ratan Tata, or Amir Khan, or Sachin Tendulkar can be seen smiling like that too often. . . it was the smile of a man truly at peace with himself and everyone else. Getting to taste lassi or getting to taste the bitterness in your mouth after not getting to taste lassi is all the same to him. . .
. . . Eleven-ten and I’m at Alochhaya cinema hall. The road stretches out in front. . . somewhere in the end I’ll have to take a right turn, walk next to a park, go through the park, and on the other side my mother will be waiting for me in a first-floor sitting room of a two-storied house. As I start walking, I watch my shadow in the pavement walking side-by-side. I ask myself – who do you think you are? A cool guy, because you keep others waiting for you by returning late every night?! A hero, because you can have phuchka at Ballygunge Phari at ten-thirty pm?! Well, all of it is simply a load of crap. So please don’t go home, stand in front of the mirror and ask, “mirror, mirror on the wall/tell me who is the most ‘different’ of them all”! But what one can easily do is enjoy just being himself or herself, and enjoy the little weird things that we do from time to time that define who we are. So enjoy this ten minute walk tonight, not because it proves anything to anyone, but because it means you tried to be as you like to be. . .
. . . And 30 Seconds To Mars bursts to life inside my earphones: “We were the kings and queens of promise/we were the victims of ourselves”. . . and I can see all those cyclists from the music video with my eyes closed – cycling down the empty streets of the big city together, with a sort of dream-like gaze, pushing the peddles with determination, going faster, going stronger, going further. . .
Well, to be absolutely honest, there are two other big differences. Number one is that he is a Nobel Laureate, and guess what am I! Number two is that he is dead, and I’m sort of alive. . . So you want to know his name? He’s Richard Feynman - Nobel Prize winner in Physics in 1965.
The picture is quite big, probably three feet by two. It’s the last one in the corridor. But for me, it’s the most interesting of them all. . .
I think it’s due to the smile and that razor-sharp yet mischievous gaze, plus the way he’s resting his chin on the three fingers of his left hand. It’s like the man is seeing right through you! And any moment he’ll give you a wink and laugh aloud saying, “Aha! Caught you red-handed my friend!”
Anyway, he’s keeping me good company as I wait for the pressure of the autoclave to come down, so that Arunda can open it and give me my conical flask containing 50 ml of YPD agar. Right now he’s sitting to my left on the top of this bench, rubbing two rectangular wood pieces together, probably in the hope of re-discovering the original method by which human beings acquired the ability to light a fire! Jokes apart, I think he’s also trying out ways to let these idle minutes pass by without giving them much thought.
But I kind of like it sitting with my back to the wall on this bench. The end of the corridor at the Biochemistry Department is calm and quiet at the moment, half-an hour past nine in the night. Arunda and I are not talking. We’re just sitting and waiting, and I’m looking at Mr. Feynman while he’s playing with his wooden fire-starting equipment. At times it feels nice just to sit silently with someone you know at your side, and do nothing but pass the time. . .
Shounakda-s wife, whose name I don’t know, is coming this way. As she is about to enter AKDG-s lab, Azharda and Siddharthada comes out. Both of them almost go past her, then suddenly turn around and congratulate her for something. In reply she asks them to come inside the lab and have some sweets. Azharda insists that all the sweets are gone, but she won’t let them go. So in the end they follow her inside the lab and the door closes.
The pressure reading has not come down much in the last five minutes, just like the five minutes before that. But somehow it doesn’t bother me. . .
Azharda and Siddharthada come out again. They talk to each other as Azharda kneels down to tie his shoelaces. This is the guy who single-handedly cooked more than eighty luchis for breakfast in the jungles of Orissa four days ago. Right now he’s bent down in front me adjusting his snickers. Nine hours ago I was strolling on the banks of Hooghly with Saurav, Bikram and Sayan at the Strand in Chandan Nagore. And now I’m killing time to get a small 100 ml conical flask in my hands at the sixth floor of Ballygunge Science College. Life is stranger than fiction. . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . Damn it man! In & Out is closed! Now where will I get a packet of biscuits at Ballygunge Phari at twent past ten pm?! Hey, hold on a minute, can it be. . . yes! Rajeshda is stiil there at his phuchka stall! Brilliant! It looks like he’s getting ready to leave. But I know he’ll not say ‘No’ to me even at this hour. . .
. . . For the past ten minutes I’ve been hiding from Arunavoda, Arindamda and Sudiptoda standing on the other side of Phari. Fortunately they didn’t notice me at Rajeshda’s, gorging on twenty-five rupees worth of phuchka, when I was supposed to have left the lab fifteen minutes ago and caught a bus home! Come on now, its past ten-thirty – haven’t those guys chatted enough in the lab for the past ten or so hours? Why don’t they just hop onto a bus, or auto, or taxi, or something and let me be in peace?! Don’t their legs hurt standing for so long after such a long day? Mine do! Well, I don’t mind much. But you know people – they see you somewhere and start asking what you were up to, as if it was the most important thing in the world for them to know, when in reality they don’t give a shit! Why can’t I stand at a bus-stop wherever I want to, whenever I want to, for whatever time I want to – without being afraid of being asked questions?
Mother had called. Now she knows she’ll have to wait for another 40 minutes at the dinner table or so before her genius son returns home after a remarkable day’s work in the lab, inventing newer and smarter ways of doing who-the-hell-knows-what! She must be so proudly tired and hungry after working in the office the entire day. . .
So then, let’s allow her some loneliness for some more time. I will do only as I wish. Since I can’t find any buses to Phoolbagan, I will catch that two-forty to Sealdah, get down at Sealdah station flyover, go to Kalpataru, have a big bhar of Lassi, then take an auto going to Beleghata Building More, get off at Alochhaya cinema hall, and walk for ten minutes before I reach home. Lucky Ali, Strings and 30 Seconds To Mars will be there with me as I walk down the empty street. Unfortunately the in-built memory card of my phone doesn’t have space for more than three mp3 songs! And out of a fanatic determination not to waste my parents’ money, I didn’t spend three hundred and twenty-five rupees only to buy a 2 GB memory card either. Therefore I end up listening to the same three songs over and over again and then I change them after a week. But it’s better than listening to all the bakwas blabbering in FM channels, in return for barely four or five good songs in an hour. . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . Thundering typhoons! Kalpataru was closed! I did see the shop-owner talking to his neighbourhood shop-owner who was still open, but I controlled the urge to take the big dustbin in front of his shop, all full of broken bhars, and break them some more by emptying it on his head! While I was passing through the crowded station on my to the auto-stand, I walked past a homeless man sitting with his rags and clothes on the road. He was sitting exactly like Feynman – chin on the palm of his left hand like Sukanto and the hint of a smile on his face. Although he was not looking at me – in fact he was not looking at anyone or anything in this mortal world at all! I don’t think he could have cared a tiniest bit about what was going on around him. But that smile. . . ah, yes – I doubt whether even Ratan Tata, or Amir Khan, or Sachin Tendulkar can be seen smiling like that too often. . . it was the smile of a man truly at peace with himself and everyone else. Getting to taste lassi or getting to taste the bitterness in your mouth after not getting to taste lassi is all the same to him. . .
. . . Eleven-ten and I’m at Alochhaya cinema hall. The road stretches out in front. . . somewhere in the end I’ll have to take a right turn, walk next to a park, go through the park, and on the other side my mother will be waiting for me in a first-floor sitting room of a two-storied house. As I start walking, I watch my shadow in the pavement walking side-by-side. I ask myself – who do you think you are? A cool guy, because you keep others waiting for you by returning late every night?! A hero, because you can have phuchka at Ballygunge Phari at ten-thirty pm?! Well, all of it is simply a load of crap. So please don’t go home, stand in front of the mirror and ask, “mirror, mirror on the wall/tell me who is the most ‘different’ of them all”! But what one can easily do is enjoy just being himself or herself, and enjoy the little weird things that we do from time to time that define who we are. So enjoy this ten minute walk tonight, not because it proves anything to anyone, but because it means you tried to be as you like to be. . .
. . . And 30 Seconds To Mars bursts to life inside my earphones: “We were the kings and queens of promise/we were the victims of ourselves”. . . and I can see all those cyclists from the music video with my eyes closed – cycling down the empty streets of the big city together, with a sort of dream-like gaze, pushing the peddles with determination, going faster, going stronger, going further. . .
Sunday, January 23, 2011
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