The pretence of it all ...

Why are there no jobs in Kolkata? 

You argue there are. Well okay, there are. But not ones that I want. 

I can't work as an intern for months on end with a four figure salary fucking my brains out.

I can't work as some kind of professor or whatever fancy terminology is attached to my name when my salary is less than the cost of my handbag and I know that after I leave my students will rush out to buy a copy of the latest Ramji Lal. And I can't pretend to be an intellectual when I know I am not.

I can't work as a teacher in a school because I am not as good as my mother is. I can't handle children and I do not want to teach them. To be a teacher you should be a good person. I am not.

I am not an engineer/full-time content writer/technical writer so sector 5 is all about restaurants and not about jobs.

I am not a journalist (even their life pretty much sucks in Kol).

So my job is in Delhi. I am quite happy with it. But the question is why is it in Delhi? Why NOT in Kolkata?

Kolkata has all the nuisance of Leftist politics and bandhs.

Please my dear, don't give me that shit. Even here people walk in late into office. For every bandh we have in Kolkata, you have your Ram Navamis and god knows what. Also the people in your offices are mostly from the Eastern and Southern parts of the country--I wonder why! I am not generalising, just an observation. So what happens? Kolkata is where they drift off to sleep and suddenly here the very same people wake up and start working? 

About punctuality.

Oh we reach late, we do not work, we are lazy. Okay. You reach early. Then you go on FB or buy bags at online portals and just show off. New car, new lover, new house--give me a break. 

Infrastructure.

Please do not make me laugh. Yes you have better roads and a nice metro system and that's about it. Your public transport system minus the metro is non-existent. And the people on the road--the less said the better. You just need to hear them speak. 

So forgive me, I really can't understand WHAT the goddamn pretence of professionalism is all about.  And I still can't understand why these offices can't work from my city. Nope. Don't answer that. I may attack you.

You see I am not angry. This wasn't a rant. Just trying to understand things. Because on a hot afternoon when you want to be home, with your parents and your friends and you can't--life just gets a little drab.

Having said that I do not hate this city. I am earning a living here. My city too has it's share of ills and pretentious jerks--just like Delhi does. But my city could do with more jobs. MANY MORE JOBS.

My take on the few places that I have been to in Delhi:

1. Dilli Haat: dragged there by my over-enthu aunt on a sunny winter morning. Nice place to be on a winter morning if you like shopping for new-market-pavement-type stuff or ethnic fabrics. I was not shopping, so was quite bored. Then I noticed few puppies and started clicking photos. People love the food out there. Food was great but the place was dirty--sorry I am not a fan. Many people lurrrrve this place. I did not. It's okay.

2. Select City Mall:  huge mall, huge shops ... yes that's about it.

3. Hauz Khas Village: erm ... no clear verdict on this place, it's where you find filth alongside the most expensive boutiques. I actually enjoyed taking a leisurely walk down the place. Narrow lanes, shops selling overpriced food and clothes. I went to the Yodakin store, which I liked. You can shop for books published by independent publishers which you are not very likely to find at your local Crossword.

4. Lajpat Nagar: uhh ... love-hate relationship with this one, hate the crowd, hate the congestion, (New Market is also crowded but I'll never hate it!). Anyway it's quite near to my pg in south Delhi so I do frequent this place mostly out of necessity.

5. Green Park market: It has two places which offer South Indian food (Jyoti Vihar--Malgudi Junction--type) where one can have good filter coffee and south Indian food at a very reasonable price.

6. C.R. Park markets (1 and 2) : Any other person from Kolkata would instantly feel at home with the huge fish markets, Kali mondir and Dadur dokan (I hope I am getting the name right!) selling chop, cutlet, dimer devil etc. But what spelt home for me was the sight of a packet of Mukharochak chanachur in one of the shops. That old bespectacled man cheered my heart. So many nights I have lain awake under a mosquito net in my bed in Kolkata either reading a book or observing lizards, with a kouto of chanachur beside me. Only to wake up with an upset stomach. Sweet memories.

7. Fact and Fiction: A tiny bookstore opposite the Priya cinemas. Amazing collection. Must visit.

Have also been to the Book Fair and Comic Con but too lazy to write about all that.

Wish to visit the old forts and CP and Janpath and Sarojini ... as and when I get the time.

Bye.

The first day my rommate mentioned the word 'bellies' she left me slightly confused. Something like 'I have a rack for my bellies' ... bellies? stomachs on racks? how violent! Of course it took me a while to understand that these are shoes. Pretty, dainty, shoes.

Shoes are very important. Ask Cinderella.

Sleeping Beauty woke up from her deep sleep after the prince kissed her. She did not kiss him back. She had not brushed.

Also 6 pm in Dilli is like 4 pm in Calcutta. How very amusing! It's still bikel byala when you leave office. The amusement ends when right after shondhyebyala it's dinner time. Very strange.
 

Okay bye.

Stuff that spills out when tubelights stop working.

Okay I was supposed to have finished some pending work by now. But the tubelight in my room just stopped working. I won't be able to read. I won't be able to sleep.  So well ...

On a bright sunny autumn day, when the soft clouds floated in the clear blue sky like small cotton tufts, Bhuto was born. It was that month of the year when Debi Durga visited her earthly abode, four children in tow. Bhuto was the youngest of nine children. His eldest sister's son was born a month before him. It happened like that in the 1950s.

Bhuto's family lived in a village. They weren't poor, in fact, they were quite rich. With several orchards of the choicest fruits--mangoes, jackfruits, litchies, a pond, and many cows--poverty was something they knew nothing about. Bhuto's childhood was a colourful kaleidoscope of memories--learning how to swim with an upturned kolshi (a metal utensil with a narrow neck used for storing water) that would float on water, climbing trees, attending the local school, eating a basketful of mangoes perched upon a tree and in the evenings whispering sweet nothings in the ears of his best friend--Budh,who was the gentlest cow they owned.

Bhuto's father was a doctor. A fact that explained why he had such luck when it came to marriage. His wife Nonibala Devi was the most beautiful woman in that village. Had Bhuto's father been a regular village bumpkin, he would never have won such a beauty as his bride. She served him well. Nine healthy children; six of them boys. No one could complain.

But the female in the house who enjoyed undisputed authority was not Bhuto's mother it was Bhuto's paternal grandmother, Shoshthi Devi. She was a woman of voracious appetite (one large jackfruit would be her breakfast), sharp intellect and an enormous memory that had soaked up all the verses of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata (the compulsory daily ritual of reading aloud the two epics that her daughter-in-law was made to follow had something to do with it perhaps!). When she passed away in her late 90s her grandchildren were running about joking and laughing as her white-haired son assembled her funeral pyre. She was too old to evoke tears. Can anyone grow so old? Should anyone grow so old?

Years later when Bhuto's mother Nonibala would die, in a different house, in a different country, all her six grown-up sons would gather around her, as she would lie peacefully dressed in white, sandalwood smeared on her forehead, surrounded by tuberose flowers--her sons would gather around her and pose for a photograph. Photographs are for creating memories, capturing beauty--but this one captured death and robbed it of its dignity.

Of phones and vegetables.

Looking at the numerous shops in wide-eyed wonder, I was was ambling through the roads of Mussoorie, one winter, long time ago. I was in class 5 and was fascinated by the shops and wanted to buy everything--spoons, combs, shawls--everything. Baba's voice shattered all such grand plans- 'Egulo shob Kolkata tei pawa jay'. 'All these things are easily available in Kolkata.'  He bought a red cutlery set and a woollen cap both of which I guess he thought would not be available in our beloved city. (Parents!)

This dialogue was repeated on every holiday. In Puri my mother wanted to buy a hnari , (a vessel we use to cook rice etc.), now don't ask me why, (this was a woman who brought home a honuman-kola-khachche soft toy from Fonria Pukur). She did get the hnari but not before Baba could grumble - "Ki dorkar chilo? Egulo Kolkata tei pawa jay".

Anyway so basically going somewhere with Baba, and buying something without him grumbling was a rare experience. If you needed the thing then no problem but if it was a thing you want to buy just on a whim then God save you! Buying around 10 kilos of fruits and then washing them and displaying them on a huge dining table in a not-so-huge room is perfectly normal but buying some clothes just like that is what demented people do!

He is lucky enough to find friends who are equally abnormal. One of his friends has a farm somewhere in Baharampur and whenever he comes to Kolkata, we don't shop for a week. He brings a supply of vegetables and fruits that we have trouble storing in the kitchen. Once this friend of his brought this huge bunch of litchies and after displaying them on the dining table, my father expressed his wish to have his photo clicked with the litchies. FINE. I indulged, brought the camera as my mother looked from the kitchen where she was busy admiring brinjals. The woman loves her begun
and if there is an abundant supply at home, rest assured that the goddamned vegetable will be on the menu, sneaking its way into every dish like James Bond, shukto with begun or better still neem-begun, mach with begun, two slices of begun bhaja and some aloo-begun er torkari--till we are ready to scream . . . and then gauging the situation, she camly says "ponka chilo , na banale kharap hoye jeto" (it had pests, so would have rotted had I not cooked it all).

 -- I digress... where were we ? yes, Baba and litchies. So I got the camera and was ready to click and through the lens I saw a grown-up man smiling like a silly kid pointing at the litchies. I asked "Is it necessary to point?' 'Yes! My friend has brought litchies, this is what friendship is...you all won't understand ...now click.' (Of course I won't ... we are a screwed up lot who buy cups of coffee for 100 bucks and don't send kilos of fruits to each other's house--how would we know!)

Something about buying useless things like clothes irks my father which now that I think of it, is good--great in fact. Because he is convinced that he looks good in two colours--red and yellow. After various shocking episodes of him bringing home shirts of both these hues, now only my mother and I shop for him.


So on one birthday, I decided that I need a new phone. I wanted a particularly expensive model and that was supposed to be my birthday gift. I don't know what sort of a miracle happened and he agreed. In reality I never expected him to. But he insisted that we walk to the store (which is at walking distance but I take an auto... actually once I took an auto and realised that the distance is embarrassingly short so I got off a little further than the intended stop.) So we walked to the store and I got my expensive phone (earlier I owned a black and white Nokia so EVERYTHING was more expensive than that!) and we waked back. He was not grumbling but his face was swollen... like Akbar's flaring nostrils in Mughal-e-Azam. I knew what he was thinking-his first salary was perhaps half the phone's value, some families survive on that amount, he was perhaps spoiling his daughter rotten, how did he EVER agree to it... and so on. So on that day I told myself that until the day comes when the phone just falls apart and fails to come together again--I will continue to use it. (I loved it ...but that was secondary.) My resolve was strengthened further when during a family gathering someone spotted this phone and asked me the price, I innocently revealed it and the concerned relative pinched her sister in a not-so-subtle way... (look-how-kaku-is-spoiling-her was the subtext of that pinch I guess!)... And that's why my darling I am not changing my phone, I am not buying those 'smart' phones, those touch-screen phones. I am happy with my dinosaur-age relic.

The last bit was all that I wanted to say when I started writing but you see my first class-teacher was damn right when she had said -- "she is very talkative".


Bye

Sugar and spice and all things nice

At times when I take the metro to work I cross this bakery, located right across the Iskcon mandir. I look at the bakery with its shining door amidst the squalid surroundings and my mind conjures up images of a delightful chocolate cake, cheese sticks and other goodies ... for a few seconds the music of the earphones die. Then I cross the shop and the spell is broken.


My room has one window with a long blue curtain, it is never opened, because ... I really don't know why. Once I tried and was hit by a dust storm and I never tried again. A part of the window is blocked out by a piece of wood, that's where the rented AC will fit in another month or so. The point is that throughout the whole day little or no sunshine enters my room. So this particular Saturday, having spent a good amount of the day in bed, I decided to take a walk to that bakery.


Dodging autos and cycles, which were being driven by people who had sworn to bump me off the road, I reached the bakery--Golden Fiesta. Bikes and vans blocked the entry, squeezing through them was not an option so somehow managed to find a gap. Inside there was everything that I could possible ask for... cakes, pastries, bread, chocolate sticks, low-fat milk coffee (shoot me if I ever drink that!), eclairs and what-not. Having ordered two savoury puffs and one pastry to be packed, I took a walk around the store, trying my best to ignore the two aunties who were ordering dozens of cakes.


It's not the best cake-shop in town, it's definitely not the best cake-shop I have been to but all the same it's a shop full of bread and cake that brought back memories of days when I happily walked inside Kookie Jar, bought a loaf of bread and returned home happy,  the day my heart did a dance seeing the bright pink box with a golden "flury's" scribbled on it, the day when I bunked a disastrous French exam and went to the French Loaf instead and gleefully shared coffee and cake with my partner in crime and of the day when a crazy friend dragged me to a cake shop called Rouge, in a god-forsaken part of the city where I had the most amazing red velvet cupcake packed in a beautiful box.


At times it's bags, at times it's a book but today... today I am happy with my cake.

FB ALBUMS

I spend a good amount of my very precious weekend browsing through people's albums on FB, looking, gaping, laughing and then kicking myself for being such an ass. Here are my favourite ones!

I me mahself: One album. One face. One particular angle. 300 something photos. Need I say more?

Mah new job: Congratulations. We are happy for you. You have joined the bandwagon of individuals who earn their own living. But (Surprise! Surprise!) you're NOT the first one in the world to do so. Your parents have done it... and they did not have the time to click pics of--mah desk,mah computer, mah coffee mug and mah god-knows-what-else!

Mah wedding: Some albums are nice, sweet. Some overdo the "sweet" bit. Seriously if it's been a while ... and you've been married for quite sometime but your DP is still that of you and your partner's cheek-to-cheek photo then the cover pic should be that of Digene.. we'll need it!


Also sick of moshari hata salwars, anarkalis, red/orange pants, babies, ugly wedding makeup.

Okay bye.