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Of course you cannot do that. Remember, if you kill yourself now you’ll never see him again. Never!

But even if I don’t, how long am I going to see him in any case. He’ll be married soon; and have sex with the lucky bitch. Where will I be then in his scheme of things?

May be you’ll never get to have sex with him again (that is if he doesn’t find you irresistible enough to betray his wife). But you can always steal a glance at him now and then. You can chat with him on the internet and perhaps even call him sometime. But if you push that empty syringe into your veins now, it will be all darkness henceforth.

Isn’t that infinitely better than seeing him roaming about with another woman on his shoulders? And all this in spite of the fact that he is in love with me? And I know that even if he is in love with me, once he gets married, he’ll gradually fall in love with that other woman as well.

You know, you are 31 now. Old enough to understand that what cannot be cured must be endured. Do you think that if you flee like a coward he is going to remember you for all you were worth? He will chastise you and will always think that you didn’t have the strength after all to face it.

And what is the big deal about that? He always chastises me. It is one of his ways to show that he cares for me. He only chastises those that he loves. About the rest he doesn’t care.

But if you die he wouldn’t even be able to chastise you. What will become of him then? Where will he vent his anger and frustrations and depression? Imagine, you know him so much better than anybody else. Someday if he is annoyed with his wife over something, you’ll be able to gain an upper hand. You can console him, comfort him, fondle him. The possibilities are infinite. How can you not want to try them out?

That was the biggest mistake of my life. To try to try things out. Why did I at all meet him in his apartment five weeks before my marriage? And after that even went on with my marriage like a fool. And you; it is you who had talked me into getting married to him. And now you are trying to talk me out of death.

Oh come on…it is going to hurt you so bad that syringe of yours.

My life already hurts too bad. It cannot be worse.

That syringe might not even kill you. You can be paralyzed or turn into a vegetable. Now, that will be highly inglorious for someone like you. Why not surf the internet and come up with better and surer ways? Fewer things are as bad as trying to die and failing. Come come let’s sleep. That husband of yours can’t even guess what you are up to. He’s sleeping peacefully.

If you are so worried about him why don’t you go to sleep beside him? He’s your husband too.

I will. Once you promise to join me. Don’t worry I’ll lie right between both of you like I’ve been doing all these years. You sure trust me, don’t you? I know you do. Come my love; let’s sleep.

News and TV stunners

Zoo zoo ads - Honestly, we’ve never before seen anything like them.

MJ’s death - We still can’t believe he’s not with us. Can we?

N D Tiwari’s virility - Wow! That old man….long way to go

Bollywood surprises

Dev D - Ahh…in a long while noone will dare to make a film on Devdas

Gulaal - Surprisingly and disturbingly dark. We couldn’t possibly expect anything like that from our good old Bollywood.

Kaminey - Vishal Bharadwaj did it again

Political disasters

Triumph of Mamata Banerjee Brigade

Parliament entertainers

Shashi Tharoor and his tweets

Kolkata Collage

Metro railway line extended, breaking Bedlam loose in the first few weeks

CCF (film fest) is a biiigg flop

City Centre II opens up for public

A string of commercial Bengali movies manage to draw city crowds to theatres

Cyclone Aila uproots nearly 10,000 trees in the city. We never knew there so many of them still

Come guys add up to this list what you think I have missed.

I am here again to key in a few words on the Metro railway service in Kolkata. The metro service has indeed improved a lot since the bedlam broke loose situation we had to encounter shortly after the extension of the line. The crowd is still very much there, but the service is better.

However, if the metro railway authority wishes to earn some revenue, they must watch their steps. At present, most of the turnstile gates where we punch our tickets are defunct. Which means, on their way out from the metro station, passengers are not being asked to punch in their tickets; at least two of the gates are perpetually kept open - partly to control crowd pressure and partly to save themselves the labor of mending the gates. This situation has trigered a new type of problem. As we all know, the metro fare increase by Rs2/- for every zone. Zone 1 ticket costs Rs4/-, zone 2 costs Rs6/- and so on. Due to this unique situation of gates, the smart alecks who populate the streets of Kolkata in hoardes, are purchasing a Rs4/- ticket instead of a Rs8/- or may be Rs12/- ticket that they are actually supposed to purchase. And they can do this because they don’t have to punch in the ticket at all.

I am not sure if the Mtero railway authorities are even aware of this, but if they are, I believe they have to look into it.

“It is such a secret place the land of tears.” At that line, I stopped reading “The Little Prince”. I was on a train and I was afraid, I might just start crying. The land of tears is a secret place and I could not possibly bring it out to light. At that time however, I had to postpone my tears for a better place and a better time. Tears can be shed in the privacy of bathrooms or under blankets. On certain nights, it also feels good crying, facing the wall. And those are such cherished moments of my life. Between the wall and me stands darkness and a sea of loneliness; and in their shelter, I can cry out my burden.

In the company of tears, I feel ecstatic; the experience of crying can only perhaps be compared to making love. If you watch your tears closely, you will notice they come and go like an orgasm. After some time they just go; they disappear and dry up. And then you just cannot do it again. Not until your mind and your body is again ready for it. Ready for another outburst that is. And here’s to a lovely bunch of tears; I am sharing with you something that always gives me that ecstatic feeling. It makes me feel as if I am on cloud 9.

If you go away

17 years ago on this day, the 6^th of December, my school declared a holiday for the coming three days and I came home earlier than I used to, on normal days. When I asked my dad what this was all about, I was told, certain people had pulled a certain Babri Masjid to the ground and there was a curfew for the next three days. When I asked what a curfew was, I was told, it was a situation when the army took over the law and order of the state and people had to walk with their hand over their heads; if they didn’t do that, they were shot dead by the army. This was far too exciting for me.

Though we had to survive on bread and eggs for the coming 72 hours, I could not wait to go out and walk with my hand over my head. Alas, when I did indeed hit the road, holding on to my father’s forefinger, people were walking about like they always did; only, they were talking excitedly over the Babri masjid issue. But everything else looked as they always did. Nothing was different; nothing was alarming except an army truck that sped past us. As I returned home disappointed at not having been able to walk with my hands on my head, I thought I have to deal with this Babri masjid thing once and for all. And so, I confronted my father, asking him to give me full details of the incident.

He said that Babri masjid was a masjid located in what was once Ayodhya, the birthplace of Lord Rama (I had my Ramayana right by then, thanks to my grandma). A gang of Hindu fundamentalists (of course he didn’t use that word then) wanted to build a temple of Rama and had dismantled the masjid. Now this was all too confusing for me. If it was ayodhya then where from did the masjid get there? Did someone forcefully build it overnight or something? Then I learned that the masjid was built more than 500 years ago, probably pulling down a Hindu temple, like was the practice among Muslim rulers. Now I smelled a plot of revenge and things began to make sense. So I asked my father, these Hindu people, they were taking a revenge on Muslims, and what was so wrong about that? I do not clearly remember anymore what my dad had told me in answer to my tirade of questions that followed…

But folks, what I do clearly remember and want to help you remember, that it has been 17 years and yet, that time hasn’t proved long enough to wash off one of the most shameful incidents of post-independence India. For those who will tell me, that the Hindus have dismantled only one significant mosque while the Khiljis and Aurangzebs have dismantled thousands, let me correct you. Hindus may not have had the chance to destroy too many mosques, but they have built temples on quite a few Buddhists stupas. Even the famous Jagannath temple of Puri is conjectured to have been a stupa. So, as it follows, none of us are tolerant, none of us practice the doctrine of peace we so gleefully preach. We are all hypocrites and waiting for the slightest opportunity to tear each other apart. We live together, only because we are forced to; it is only the political boundaries and physical space that we share; we have never learned and nor ever will learn to live like one single community.

I am not here to pass judgment on something ministers and heads of state have failed to solve. I am writing this only with the hope that we shall at least remember what we have done and learn to be ashamed of our deeds; since that alone can perhaps stop us from doing something as shameful as ravaging someone’s place of worship or setting people and their lives on fire.