Let me live as I am living now

"Jeta chilona chilona seta na paoai thak, sab pele nasto jibon..." ... awesome line from a song from the latest Bengali movie "Autograph". The song titled "Amake amar mato thakte dao (Let me live as I am living now) is excellent and says a lot about all of us. Similar incidence in all our lives where we are bound to say "Let what is not achieved by me as not achieved as achieving everything spoils the taste of life." There is an old saying - the grapes are sour - that is what you cannot achieve should be considered as sour, yet I would stick to the words of this song as my own guideline, saying "Let me stay at my limit."

Enough of rantings. I can write a thousand words but that will not make much sense, rather listen to the song yourself.

Vuvuzela and my daughter

The last day today. I am feeling a real sorrow a deep grief for the ending hours of my favorite tournament till childhood, the FIFA World Cup. This time, like all other times, it was a time to spend for myself. To stay late at nights, working hard at the day time. Full concentration of mine was to finish my assignments for the day and reach for the TV as soon as I could, during these whole month. The evenings were so colorful after nearly four five months since we all stopped watching TV totally. That is for the good of our 4 years old daughter's education and upbringing. She was having a very extraordinary hyper activity syndrome which is just for prolonged TV watching and our ignorance about that.

But, this time, after the world cup started, I loosened the restriction of her watching TV at least during the match. Not for her but for myself, my very own self. The only viewer being me, sometimes I enjoyed her company during these TV sessions (only the evening matches for her of course). I tried to let her know what is a goal, and the simple rules of playing this game. I soon felt proud as she quickly learned a bit of the terminologies with her little grown brain of 4 years and was so happy to see people run with the ball. Only thing she liked or disliked about the game was a continuous sound of Vuvuzela, mostly in the early games when may be the "Notch Filter" was not being used to reduce the raucous sound Vuvuzela produced.

The plastic made horn which produces 113 dB(A) at 2 metres (6.6 ft) from the horn opening, which can create short time Noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) as it is blown. A similar instrument, known as the corneta, is used in Brazil and other Latin American countries. So, there were a great deal of discussions and controversy about the usage of Vuvuzela during the world cup matches where thousands of Vuvuzelas created an extreme disturbance to the players as well, kept aside the viewers. Finally Vuvuzela has become a fearful buzzword during the world cup.

Interestingly enough, my little daughter also started fearing from the Vuvuzela.
"Vuvuzela ke voi pacchi baba." (I am fearing from Vuvuzela dad.)
Wondering for a prolonged time, I understood, Vuvuzela is a collection of two words, Vuvu + Zela, where "Vu" stands for the initials of "Vut" the ghost in Bengali and Zela sounds like "Jail" in Bengali. So, she was fearing from a Ghost in Jail. Interesting indeed.

Finally she understood from my continuous convincing that there is no such thing like Ghost in this world and Jail is only for the criminals and most of all, Vuvuzela has nothing to do with neither ghost, nor jail, she thrown away the conviction she developed, and we enjoyed the matches happily together.

Dreaming a story

I was still awake at night. I got up from bed and entered into the drawing room. In the half lit drawing room my mobile phone was lying on the refrigerator. I took it and it's screen shown me the current time. It was 15 minutes past 3 AM. Pretty late for me, as I generally sleep at 11 PM at night. Something is striking in my mind time and again, making my throat dry. I took out a bottle of cold water, pour some in a glass and gulped the whole water at a time, to relive the unwanted dryness in my throat. It still remained dry. In my left eye, I started feeling a burning sensation. May be because of the restlessness tonight after a very hard day at my workplace.

I became restless the day I received the mail from BlogAdda, informing me about the "My First Crush story writing contest". I decided not to write, not for a competition about my very personal life. Sweet memories of the first crush was the subject line, a very personal feeling to be toyed with. I just ignored the mail.

The fifth day of the competition is the day I am speaking about. It was pretty late at night and I had office the next day, yet, astonishingly I cannot think of anything precisely but some odd dreams were haunting me, the dreams cannot be called as nightmares, yet they were very fuzzy and dusky. I understood that the competition, the excellent entries already written by my fellow bloggers are compelling me to think. Compelling me to travel in the past, and that mental state of dilemma is the reason for the peculiar dreams of mine.

Finally, I decided to write at my story telling blog, as an entry to the competition, just to honor the organizers, just to thank them, for once again they have put a bait in front of me, which actually compelling me to write a new story.

It's an innovative way to push your mind to the wall of thorns to fight back with your pen (keyboard) as sword and try to win over the demon that actually eats up all your time mercilessly. I couldn't sleep that night, worked hard in my workplace all the day, then came back home with a rock hard determination to fight back the time killer demon and fought back.

Why can I not write?

Writer's block are very common to the writers. There are known remedies, mainly thinking and jotting down what you think brings back the writer in you to business. Now, knowing the remedy and knowing that it is such an easy thing to do, you plan to think. Thinking and thinking and thinking all the time. That's become the writer's new state. So, thinking becomes the new habit. Jotting them down, again remains far from reality. At least that is what happens to me regularly. I am the kind of man, who loves to think, imagine things, sometimes methodically deduce something but writing becomes and remains a very hard laborious task for me as it was.

Actually, writing is the real good habit that any aspiring writer should love to adopt. Again, for writing something one should read a lot. Mainly for writing stories you need to read a lot of stories yourself. Mostly works of writers who proved their excellence in story writing in the course of time, and the works, which are indeed became timeless classics. To name a few, for writing short stories, one may read the works of Guy De Maupassant, O.Henry, Anton Checkov,Nikolai Gogol, Leo Tolstoy, Ernest Hamingway, Edgar Allan Poe, Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, as I have read and still reading. I was going to leave the list of best seller authors of all times behind, here is the list .

Again, I have left the names of Bengali authors, like Kabiguru (Preceptor) Rabindranath Tagore, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, Tarasankar Bandopadhyay, Bibhuti Bhushan Bandopadhyay, Saradindu Bandopadhyay, Bimal Mitra, Premendra Mitra to latest writers like Sanjeeb Chattopadhyay, Samaresh Basu, Samaresh Majumdar, Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay, Ramapada Chowdhury, Syed Mustafa Siraj, Budhadeb Guha, Narayan Sanyal, Sunil Gangopadhyay, Satyajit Ray, Joy Goswami, Suchitra Bhattacharya, Bani Basu, and many more.

I get totally carried away while reading their works and get so preoccupied enjoying the style, the picturesque, dramatic narration that, ultimately I end up reading and not writing.

Actually a good time management is always the driving skill in all your ventures. True, in the case of creative writing. Thinking, writing and reading should go together hands in hands and that's where I always fail. And that's why there are so less amount of short stories irregularly posted in my blog GolporKhata.

Who did it

"There were five of us who were suspects – and each one of us had a motive.

Three of us were ex-husbands. Lila was democratic that way; she liked to spread her love around. M. was her first husband, someone she had married when she was only twenty three. M. was a loud, brash young kid at the time. He liked bikes, bikes and bikes, in that order. Lila settled for riding pillion for a while but she wasn’t the sort to do that indefinitely. Their marriage lasted six months. "

A nice story telling competition is going on at BlogAdda which forced me to submit my entry to it as well. Though, the story teller has hinted to the murderer time and again and I think I have totally carried away to some other dimension of the story, good thing is, I was really motivated to write something on my own.

Please read the actual story Reunion at BlogAdda and then, read mine too. And the "prize" should go to those who have got it right. You can click on different links to get the ending of the story, it's really an experience.

Controversy - Let's avoid it!

The word controversy is a very scaring word for me. Though I pretend that I am least bothered about a controversy, I generally keep away from such discussions which lead to controversy. A discussion, which may become a total fruitless one, can reveal a lot about you in a point when you, like most, will also try to establish your own point of view.

Now, let's take up any latest topic or news for our discussion, be it IPL, Dada's (Saurav Ganguly) performance, the Maoist movement, the new political steps of Ms. Mamata Banerjee, a new movie like Pathsala / Houseful, the man / woman who is your boss, the concern you work for, literally everything you can have in your mind. Start a discussion, face the controversy and you have made yourself clear to others. You are rigid, hypocrite, selfish, moron, and whatever else the other party think you are, at that moment. And the result will be a "mental separation" between friends / colleagues / partners. So, these ultimately fruitless discussion in controversial topics will lead to nothing but pain.

In my opinion, let's first be in a place where there is no "we" or "they". Let's talk about some thing that will not lead to any controversy. The belief and disbelief of people will not confront each other in such topics, where both are ready to discuss without taking in a particular side. Let's talk about the golden era of something or about some people all of us respect. Say, "Kabiguru" (Preceptor) Rabindranath Tagore or Late. Mr. Satyajit Ray. We all respect them not only for their works alone but also their lives as human beings. Let's avoid controversial topics like Maoist movement or political matters, rather, the performance of an actor like Rudranil Ghosh, where he acted as a chimpanzee, in a movie "Love Circus" may be discussed.

I can still recall an incidence of my childhood, rather adolescence when Diego Maradona's controversial goal with his hand became a hot topic to discuss. I had a discussion with the father of one of my friends and I was against this goal because for a player it is unethical to score a goal which he knew was a handball. My friend's father argued that winning matters, how do you win doesn't. My friend has won the battle of life, much more than that I have, please don't ask me how, but I have lost the respect for his father for ever.

Enough of my demented rants, at last, I would like to mention that, this is a particular fortnight when two of the Bengal's pride came on earth. On 7 th May, "Kabiguru" (Preceptor) Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel laureate, who left no stone unturned in the field of arts (his scientific articles were as good though!) but one, cinema. On 2nd May, Late Mr. Satyajit Ray was born, the Oscar winner film director, who mainly wrote for children and worked on the celluloid to turn the last stone, left unturned.

Felu Mittir - Jatayu - Tintoretto-r Jishu

I am a great fan of Late Mr. Satyajit Roy, for his films, mostly the ones created by him on his own writings like the "Joy Baba Felunath", "Sonar Kella" and "Hirak Rajar Deshe". All of them being movies for the young people, the most beloved one for me is of course "Joy Baba Felunath" for the dream appearance of Late Mr. Utpal Dutta and Late Mr. Santosh Dutta together, as I have already mentioned in my previous post.

Now, being a fan of Mr. Ray and his works, I am never satisfied with the new "Felu Mittir" (Prodosh Mitra) his detective character that has become a legend now for we Bengali people. I don't want to say that I don't like the works of Mr. Sandip Ray, he is too good and the biggest follower of his father Late. Mr. Satyajit Ray on earth, in film making.

Still, frankly speaking I haven't liked his earlier works on Felu Mittir. Now, apart from everything I would like to mention my difficulty in viewing Mr. Bibhu Bhattacharya, in place of late Mr. Santosh Dutta, as the renowned thriller writer "Jatayu". This particular character was created, keeping Mr. Santosh Dutta, in mind. So, it's not for the acting style of Bivhu Bhattacharya, but for the eyes of us, viewers, this character has become the biggest mismatch to the Feluda works on the silver screen.

Jatayu, the character was played by Late Mr. Anup Kumar and Late. Mr. Rabi Ghosh, two more famous comedians of Bengali silver screen. Still, Mr. Bivhu Bhattacharya is doing justice to Jatayu much more than they did.

Finally, in the latest thriller of Felu Mittir, "Tintoretto-r Jishu", he has done his best till now. May be my eyes are now all set to accept him, in place of Late Mr. Santosh Dutta now, but I would say, he is also getting better slowly in portraying my beloved Jatayu. Thanks a lot Mr. Sandip Ray, please make as many Felu Mittir as you can with our beloved actor Mr. Sabyasachi Chakraborty as the main character Felu Mittir is really looking great in this movie.


I have watched this movie this Sunday (25th April 2010) only. If, by any chance you have missed this movie, go for it. It may be considered the best work of Mr. Sandip Ray, till date.

Jana Aranya - Satayjit Roy

I am such a novice in writing film reviews that this may not be treated as a review. If you are searching for a really good review of this film, you can visit, Jana-Aranya, a Forgotten classic . Being a blind fan of Mr. Ray, I should not mention his excellent, perfect, clinical precision, in terms of cinematography, photography and direction, for I am such a little known person to say a word on such technical matters.

I have watched this movie this Saturday and loved it. Not only for the story written by "Shankar" (Manishankar Mukherjee in disguise), for the direction, camera, cinematography, screenplay, technical precision, etc. but for a very rare and my beloved combination of Late Mr. Utpal Dutta and Late Mr. Santosh Dutta.

The dream combination can be found in my most beloved movies like "Hirak Rajar Deshe" and "Joi Baba Felunath", both from Late Mr. Satyajit Ray. So, my dear readers, find and enjoy them together in this movie too. Though purely an adult movie and the rest I mentioned are for children, their chemistry remained the same. Nothing more from me, enjoy it yourselves!

Hate Khari ( The beginning of writing)

"In the Vedic system Saraswati ; Chinese: Biàncáitia-n, Thai: Sarasawatee; Japanese: Benzaiten) is the goddess of knowledge, music and the arts. Saraswati- has been identified with the Vedic Saraswati River. She is considered as consort of Brahma. She is the daughter of Durga and is seen alongside her during Durga Puja celebrations along with her sister Lakshmi and her brothers Ganesh and Karthikeya. Saraswati's children are the Vedas, which are the oldest sacred texts of Hinduism."

This is what I have found in the wikipedia, my favorite encylopedia a, searching about our beloved goddess "Devi Saraswati". Bengali people are grown up with goddess saraswati from their childhood days as they are mostly interested in "learning" knowledge for their "earning". If you study well, you will get a good job, a better living. Even the illiterate "Kalidas" became "Mahakabi Kalidas" (The great poet Kalidas) by the grace of goddess Saraswati, so will be you. That is a childhood story, almost all Bengali hear at least once from their parents or elderly relatives, who are brought up in a very "Bengali" culture in true sense.

Saraswati Puja (worship) is a part of Bengali culture and at almost all educational institutions and every Bengali family organize this Puja. If you are a Bengali, you must have been through and may have been part of the "Hate Khari" (first lessions) of children during Saraswati Puja. At the age of three to four, you are supposed to ritually start writing the first letter of Bengali alphabet (same with Sanskrit and Hindi), on this very day. If you want to have a better idea what the ritual is, here is a link of a video, where a little lady starts her writing.

Bristi's Hate Khari

I am writing this post about the "Hate Khari", though keeping in mind the literary meaning of this phrase, I would like to mention some other forms of "Hate Khari" here.

• The eve before Saraswati Puja have a big significance to many Bengali School College students (me as well) for the "Hate Khari" (first lessons) of communicating to the opposite sex. Both boys and girls get a nice chance to mix with themselves in the school and college they read in and staying late there with proper permissions from their parents for the arrangements of the "Puja".
  
• Most of the cases, students of colleges stay the whole night at their institution and therefore get the chance of "Hate Khari" (first lessons) of smoking, drinking liquor or worse.
• The day of Saraswati Puja is an auspicious day again for another kind of "Hate Khari" (first lessons), wearing the traditional dresses of Bengali. "Dhoti - Panjabi (Kurta)" for boys and "Saree" for the girls. Dear reader if you never experienced this, you have missed the most of Saraswati Puja and the Bengali culture as a whole.
• Attires being that of the adults, the school children and college goers look lovely. There are several awards now a days from different Bengali media channels for best looking people on this day. My best wishes to the organizers of such an innovative effort, this certainly add a lot more enthusiasm to the young people for their "Hate Khari" (first lessons) in these attires.
  
• Seeing the future look of their "liked" ones in these attires, getting a great chance to freely talk to them in public, the young people stays in great mood on the day of Saraswati Puja. And this is why it is the known date for the parents to know that Saraswati Puja is also a main occasion for Hate Khari" (first lessons) of love. Yes, most of the school-college level love stories start from this day, and the "liked" ones turn into "loved" ones.
  
• I would also like to mention that, many of us who in our school or college level had organized or had been part of the arranging team, have got their "Hate Khari" (first lessons) in organizing. Later on this experience help them to organize events in future. A beginning lesson in event management.
  

I have mentioned (or tried to mention) about the different "Hate Khari" (first lessons) on this auspicious occasion. Please let me know about your views and experiences in Saraswati Puja, which will enrich me and all the readers. Have a great Saraswati Puja! Wish you all the best.

Social Networking hazards! Flirting?

Have you ever used hi5 as your social networking application? If yes, you must be knowing that there is a new unique feature in hi5 (not so unique though), flirting. You can flirt with the man / woman you like. Send him/her a gift, make friendship, start chatting, and more, and more.

Out of inquisitiveness, I started to use the application. Being a man, I viewed a lot of different ladies from all around the world, starting from India, United States of America, United Kingdom, to Japan, Korea, Philippines, and of course, less but not the least Bangladesh. Let me show you what you may find out in the application and searching a lady from Bangladesh to flirt with.


Doe's he look like a lady in your eyes? OK, it may be a fault from the user's side. Then you may click on "No" as the answer to "Interested", and view an image as follows.


Another mistake from another user? May be, but you may be shown in the next attempt a photo (this one will be your "final" try) like below.

You try, try and try. Most of the time you will find photos and profiles like this. Amazing. Nice application for Bangladesh indeed! Question is, is it the "mistake" of the users, or the application itself?

Please try the search yourself to know if I am wrong, and my opinion is, please don't try this application all together. This is a hazard.

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I am sorry if I have done anything wrong in publishing the photos of people "unknown" to me and will remove this post, if you complain in your comment! Feel free to comment. Thanks.
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