Whispers To The Oblivion ...

I am always stuck in a limbo. Yearning for a far fetched world while my feet are tangled into the veneers of reality. As a child, yearning to grow up and be an adult; as an adult, yearning to achieve one shiny object after the other. I wonder why the human mind is designed to traverse from one achievement to another, one place to another, one little possession to another bigger and better. Who indoctrinated us to be materialistic mongers? I have yearned for so many things in life and achieved them or negotiated peace and moved on. What I have yearned the most in life is love. I have never settled with the love I already had for a moment, satiated, content and fulfilled.  I remember, as a child looking at my friends' fathers warmly snuggling, holding and even kissing their children at the bus stop to school, while I felt empty. My mother never had the time to smother me with kisses, or hug me for nothing at all. In fact, as much as I remember the chastising, surprisingly I don't...

'Reclaim the night'- As I sit in my cluttered desk in a chilly lab eight thousand miles away from the city, the people and the culture I call my own, thousands of Bengali women are out on the streets of Kolkata protesting for the rape and murder of a resident doctor at RG Kar hospital.  How do I feel? Claustrophobic. My eyes are welling up, with every bite sized news that I see my friends posting on the social media. A good advice would be to just shut off that source of stimulation and regain the calm. But you know what the problem is? I have always felt terrible like this whenever there is a crime against women, even in the movies. So much so that, it has become like a version of me that surfaces at adverse circumstances like these. It is so emotionally daunting, that I cannot even explain in words. But why are we so fragile and exploitable as women? Why is the world unfair to us? Do we deserve to be just secondary to the world whereas, if you really think about it, we are th...

Most people that I have met in life have found my name intriguing, enigmatic or colloquially what you call a 'jaw-breaker'. Therefore, much to my dissent, my name got conveniently shortened to 'Shreya' or 'Shrey'. It irked me majorly because 'Shreya' is also a different name within the Bengali culture. It felt like an imposition of a person or personality that I were not. Over a period of time overstimulation forced me to accept the fait accompli until, a friend started using the word 'Shree' to address me affectionately. Intuitively, effortlessly and organically I felt like my personality fell in perfect symphony with being called 'Shree', so much so that, subconsciously, I also had started to address myself as 'Shree' soon afterwards. Needless to say, the shift in cultural paradigm as I immigrated from India to USA was vast and diverse. Surprisingly however, it made me cling on desperately to the vestiges of my roots and identi...

পর্ব ৩  শ্রীচরণেষু মা, শীত , বসন্ত, গ্রীস্ম পেরিয়ে তোমার পাঠানো জিনিস হাতে পাই কাল সন্ধ্যেবেলায়; সাথে এক খানা কাগজ।  ভাবলাম হয়তো চিঠি লিখেছো আমাকে, তারপর দেখলাম যে ওষুধ পাঠিয়েছিলে সেই ডাক্তার এর প্রেস্কিপশন মাত্র। অতঃপর মন খারাপ এই হোক বা তোমার আঙ্গুল যে চাল এর ঠোঙা ছুঁয়েছে, সেই ঠোঙা বহু হাজার মাইল অতিক্রম করে আমার কাছে এসে পৌঁছেছে, এই অনুভূতির কাছে অবদমিত হয়েই হোক, চোখে জল এল। এক-দুই ফোঁটায় তাকে থামানো গেলো না ।  সহস্র ধারায় বয়ে চললো সে।  বিকেল তখন পরে আসছে।  বাইরে সূর্য মধ্যগগন থেকে নেমে এসে উঁকি দিচ্ছে আমার পশ্চিম এর জানলা দিয়ে: তার অগাধ কৌতূহল আমার মা এর বিদেশ থেকে পাঠানো দ্রব্যাদির ওপর। সারাদিনের ক্লান্তি বুকে নিয়েও অনেক্ষন, প্রায় ঘন্টা দেড়েক তোমার পাঠানো পাঁচফোড়ন এর প্যাকেট , চালের ঠোঙা, চানাচুর, আমার ফেলে আশা জামা গুলো নাড়াচাড়া করলাম, বুকে জড়িয়ে ধরে কাঁদলাম।  এ কি মায়া , ঈশ্বর এ জানেন। এ কি যে একটা মানসিক দ্বন্ধ আমি আগে কখনো অনুভব করিনি। বিদেশের এক ঘরের বাড়িতে, শুধু ভালো পদোন্নতি আর টাকার জন্যে এই প্রতিনিয়ত নির্যাতন।  দুঃখ হ...

The claws are all at me: sinister and ominous, luring me into the dark alleys of my head, where all my courage  and will power lay, stabbed brutally. Their carcasses prophetic  of an imminent catastrophe. And yet, I want to thrive in this hell. And yet, what demon in me thinks  I can defeat the horror? To burn in humane, but to rise again from the burnt is not. The body I carry with me tells me I am human. The soul within, agrees not.

Compliments  in the middle of the office corridor, In between the walk to the grocery shop, At lunch, during work  socials feel nothing short of a long lingering hug- affirmatory and validatory to the peaks of hope landsliding with each little missed deadline and each tiny failure. As apprehension grips me  day after day- Will I make it? Or will I eventually fail? It is surprising how the lack of belief in yourself can make so much space for how others feel about you - your appearance,  your cerebral capabilities,  your creative stint and almost everything under the sun. Compliments to some might simply mean  a few warm words; While to some others it means a whole story- The story that they could never write in their own words.