I was walking along the streets of Kolkata one day, when I saw about fifty people crowding around a street vendor.
“What’s going on?” I asked a kid who had just made his way out of the crowd.
“The Puchkawala uncle is giving free coupons. One plate each.”
The kid showed me a paper-plate that he had folded into his shirt pocket. On the paper-plate were two lines, written in Bangla:
(more…)I was in Mumbai teaching one of my classes at a footpath school. There were nine street kids around me, restless and distracted, because one of them was wearing a brand new T-shirt.
It was a pale yellow cotton tee with a minimalist rendition of John Lennon’s Imagine.
(more…)“Did you know that, in India, way more people have access to cell phones than to toilets?”
I was in the elevator of my building, standing next to two high school students holding a stack of A5 sheets. The boy with the curly hair asked me this question just as the elevator started going down.
“I did know that, actually,” I replied, quite truthfully.
Curly looked at the other boy, who was wearing a Batman T-shirt. Batboy pointed to something on the top sheet of paper and nodded his head.
(more…)“What do you do with the books that don’t sell?”
I was in an independent bookstore, talking to the owner about the challenges of running a brick and mortar outlet in the times of Amazon and Flipkart.
“I usually have a sale-or-return policy,” she replied. “If the books don’t sell, I simply return them to the publishers.”
“Oh, but all of them don’t take back the books, no? I know a couple of publishers who simply ask the retailers to pulp the books.”
“Yeah, there are those people too. They find the cost of taking the book back higher than the loss of sales.”
“So what do you do with those books?”
(more…)sometimes…
i simply want to do
the silliest things with you
like stacking up the books
to see how it all looks
like clicking a thousand snaps
to make our memory maps
like dusting down the drapes
to fly with them as capes
like kneading up the flour
to shape it into a tower
like picking nonsense names
to play the childhood FLAMES
like writing little rhymes
to seal our feels in time.
When they asked me to join Special Ops
I didn’t really know what cops did in the guerrilla fights.
I spent countless nights running recon
And watched my six for a sneak-on attack that I knew was coming.
“We take so many sweets for Lord Jagannatha, but he doesn’t eat anything. Why?”
I was sitting today with Aai, my mother’s mother, and talking about her longstanding relationship with her God. She was telling me of times she had to walk a day and a half to Puri to see her Jagannatha. And she was telling me about all the miracles that had happened when she was younger.
“Who said Jagannatha doesn’t eat our prasad?” she questioned back. “I know he does.”
(more…)I won an argument I had with my girlfriend about how she forgot something important to me. She said I was right, but I was a jerk too for forgetting about how the harshness of my words eroded her self-esteem.
I won an argument I had with my mother about how she should tell people they are wrong without humiliating them. She said I was right, but I was a jerk too for making her feel stupid and unappreciated.
(more…)Prof. Subash C. Mishra taught me one of my most important lessons at IIT Guwahati. And he did it outside the classroom.
I had written a dramatized story in a student magazine about the Battle of Saraighat. Prof. Mishra sent me an email saying he really liked the story and wanted to talk to me about it.
(more…)“You can hear her too, can’t you?”
The woman under the tree pulled herself closer to the trunk and frowned at me. She was scared, of course, because I was a complete stranger to her.
I took a step forward, tapped the trunk of the tree and said again, “She talks to you too, doesn’t she?”
The woman didn’t say anything, but she kept looking at me with the same suspicion she usually reserved for stray dogs.
(more…)
Minakhi Misra