I'm telling you.

Auto Rickshaws in Calcutta often throw up masterpieces on their backsides. From "my name is Khan", to "Road Romeo", to poetic urdu couplets to "buri *insert drawing of an eye* wale tera *insert drawing of a pair of luscious lips* kala".

But today i encountered a rather earnest piece of advice from the auto message board. It simply said, "Avoid girl.bright future.have safe life"

Over and above everything, it just felt so Sincere. I have a feeling he Must have had a heartbreak.

Today's a bandh and i'm writing a bloody blogpost.

The older we get, the more our priorities shift from important things in life. Today's a bandh. And i just caught myself lamenting on how i was supposed to get to place a from place b. Rewind five years, actually even three, and i would have found myself having the best morning i would have had had in a long long time ( notice the oh-so-cool use of two two hads and two two longs and damn i just overdid it, i know).

Bandhs were the Shit in school. Like rainy days, when school gave off and that too at the last moment, so you couldn't possibly prepare for it. But rainy days were still okay, because you had to sit at home and eat garam garam alu paratha, which is perfectly fantastic but just that the worth for those moments is less when you're a kid. Bandhs, on the other hand, meant you could get onto the streets and have a day-long tournament of para-cricket, and Everybody from the uncles who were champion cricketers in their good ol' days, to the Serious cricketers who played Serious cricket and didn't like playing with tennis balls in paras, to the maaru kids with their servants ( i Hate using that word, i really do) and their expensive bats and caps (who were shown their Real place on this day, haah, fucken brats), to the guy you never knew Existed in your para, they all came. And the mummies and aunties looked at the kid/husband/whoever abusing the hell out of one another on the streets from their windows and smiled and giggled.

I could never understand the hoo-haa about bandhs in life, everyone just seemed so perfectly happy that day. And ya, i know how nothing will ever happen to Calcutta if it keeps happening, and the amount of money the world loses, and how daily wagers have to survive another day with nothing, and i completely understand. I actually do.

Also how also it's all a big joke, really.

But this city's a little Like that, i say.

RIP

Every person in the world who clicks photographs has a photo like this.

But, this be first photograph taken with the camera which is no more. Tried focussing on the focussing ring inside the mirror but didn't quite work out. Also, i'm a pretty self-obsessed guy, i know, it shows.

Either way, here's to rudolph.

My father is a most interesting human being. He is one guy i've never been able to figure out. I can't say he's particularly smart, or dumb, or hard working, or principled, or anything. All i know is that he's a pretty terrible storyteller and a couple of people out there would definitely vouch for the fact that so am i ( you shall understand the significance of this statement a little later).

Haan, so I was just having a conversation with him, and he was trying to elucidate me on the significance of ramzan etc, and then the conversation somehow shifted to his beliefs, and His father's beliefs, to our ancestry, and then somehow to the significance of the little Syed before my name that i've always managed to shy away from. Now my father's faith in the concept of Genes is unshakable. It ranges from his defence of smoking (Apparently, how strong your lungs are has a lot to do with genes. Churchill lived till whenever, he cites, how do you explain that? Of course there's a little glint in my eye which he conveniently manages to not catch ), to the fact that he's an honest man (and he's convinced so am i ), to ( now wait for this one ) the inability of any of us to be decent at Math. I come from a family of doctors, my dad and two of his three brothers are doctors, and the only reason for that is because they supposedly all sucked at Math. Also, most of them are short-tempered, and so is my brother, here i guess i deviate a little bit.

Anyway, that's not the point.

The point is, i'm supposed to stand tall in the face of adversaries. Because Syeds are like that only. My forefathers fought against Akbar and told him to chooso his own because they thought Din-i-Ilahi was all shit. He wanted to prosecute them, so they ran off to Bareili, present-day Baro, which is apparently where i Originally hail from. So my puppa told me that i will make it big in life and rise and shine because i'm a Syed. At This moment, i failed to manage to put two and two together ( nobody in my door door ke rishtedaar has really managed to make it Big in life) and smiled and said No daddy, that's not because i am Syed, that's because i am Stud.

But then again, who was i talking to. My baap is the baap of bad jokes. His eternal favourite ( he's cracked it once a month for the last 15 years of my existence, i Clearly remember ), is that once the Indian contingent was sitting at the pool during the Barcelona Olympics when one of the officials came and asked one of our most esteemed athletes if he was relaxing. The athlete turned around and said, "No, i'm Milkha Singh."

Indeed, my father is a most interesting human being.

Ripley's believe it or not.

Rituparna Sengupta's page on Wikipedia says that she got an award in 1997 for a film called "aamar gooder kuttar baada"

I'm not kidding.

Vagera, vagera, vagera sounds like Viagra, Viagra, Viagra.

Yesterday was shabbebaraat, which is an Islamic version of All Souls Day (ya, the pretty-much-only thing which separates this religion from that is the sword, and obviously, you can't say anything more than that because if you've seen cows slaughtered, you know better) and every festival, regardless of what it's supposed to mean, gets the entire Park Circus onto the roads. Which also means that you can't possibly figure out the road from the pavement from the naali which separates them except for when you feel your feet getting wet or feeling moist (depending on whether you've stepped on piss or shit). The funny part is, that they(we?) burst crackers on this day, and don't ask me why. They(we?) make and eat halua on shabbebaraat because the prophet had apparently broken a tooth and couldn't eat anything else on the day so he ate halua (oh man, how i would love to be the prophet just to see this from the clouds), so one can never know.

But anyway, poor old Neil wanted to have cha, so we met in the middle of this cacophony, which he obviously did not expect, and in all his innocence remarked, "Era jekhaane paaye, bomb phataaye kyano?"

All i can say is, well, who knows these things?

And if you're waiting for how the title of the post will eventually fit in here, of course it won't. After all, i'm your friendly neighbourhood attention-whore.

Because life is a Sacred Game.

Sometimes when i read a book, i end up thinking of characters who just pass by and wonder what it would be like if the book was about them. And it happens most when you are in a train compartment because you see characters all around you.

I met an old sarcastic couple. I mean, i've never met an Old Sarcastic Couple before, and these guys were the most fictional real characters i've seen around. And i met the most photogenic little kid i've ever seen, who patiently sat and saw all the photos on my camera, and a hijda who was a Man (i'm sorry, but again, i've never seen a Beard on a hijda, come on) And in the middle of this tedious journey, i was thinking of all the crazy things i did, and how Kerala was like a Wow which stretched on for a week, and about the paddy field i rode the scooty into, and about rocks which looked like sculptures, and mind you, this was when i was taking a break and looking out of the window from the book i was reading, and in the middle of vast green crop land, i saw a bunch of deer hop around.

And suddenly my world stopped. And i tried to savour in the moment. That somewhere, at the end of my month-long cacophonous existence, i saw a sight most spectacular in its simplicity. And its weirdness.

But that's the thing, the book will never be about the deer.

And well, thank god for that.