Ah, look at all the lonely people
Ah, look at all the lonely people

Eleanor rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been
Lives in a dream
Waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door
Who is it for?

Eleanor rigby died in the church and was buried along with her name
Nobody came

All the lonely people
Where do they all come from ?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong ?

who is eleanor rigby? i have made up a couple of versions of eleanor rigby...

version 1: she walks with the help of walking stick extending her wiry hands as if expecting some help. her thin body is shrouded in a flowy cotton dress and her hair tied in a bun with strands of hair escaping the severity of the bun. her face is criss-crossed with wrinkles with each wrinkle telling a story...

version 2: eleanor rigby is a crabby old fat lady. she beats up her husband every night and she lost her front teeth in the process. she chases all the children that enter her patchy garden. she is mean and spits on people who irritates her. she once threatened to kill a delivery boy with a shovel. sometimes she is seen haunting the cemetery in the middle of the night with a shovel in her hand. eleanor rigby always insists on leading the church choir and she once confessed having sexual fantasies about the new young pastor.

version 3: eleanor rigby is thinly built with a crown of flowy hair. she lives in a hut wears tattered cotton clothes though the village gossips say she is a rich man's daughter. her eyes are sad and says a lot more than her 24 years of life. she is often seen cradling her baby in the porch while singing 'when this cruel war is over praying then to meet again.'

version 4: eleanor rigby is witchy and saucy. when she walks by all the men stares at her in awe and women stare stare at her with jealousy. her pouffed hair and red lips and her colt like gait has all the men tantalized. her sells chocolates and no one has ever refused to buy chocolates from her. the women say she killed her previous two husbands but the men swear by her innocence. even the history professor is entangled in what the women term as her 'magical spells.'

i am sure there are many more versions of eleanor rigby just like there are many more versions of us, as much as the mind can conjure up.

i don't suffer from Monday morning blues anymore, in fact i don't even notice the approaching Mondays. no i have not discovered a new mantra to ignore the horrifying Mondays staring at you. it is mostly because my weekdays are not same anymore. Monday i have a health presentation, Tuesday is reporting, Wednesday is international issues exam etc etc. i still don't look forward to mornings or no i do plan my days. my days rumble by with me stumbling and bumbling along with it. these days i do a lot of self introspection and discover the most obvious things and still get surprised.

my recent discovery is that dreams should never be full filled. not because it is difficult to chase it but it is pointless. we dream and spend all our energy to make it true. and then we suddenly realise that it is not as fascinating as we dreamt it. it has flaws in it and then we abandon it to chase another. dreams are never meant to be real, they cant represent truth. then why not keep them in our imagination and take the pleasure of enhancing and nourishing it. i would rather dream about being about adding value to my life than make a mad chase at full filling it. how pointless that would be?

my next discovery which is again but obvious is me being dorky with early signs of dementia. i have my suspicions of being schizophrenic and am almost convinced i will end up some kind of mental disease. no i am not morbid by nature, its just that i feel that all of us suffer from some kind of mental disorder. life becomes so easy that when u know that u suffer from a mental disorder. u advertise the disorder and make perfect excuses for your quirkiness. u scream at someone for no particular reason and make the perfect excuse of saying that i suffer from bpd. i am not under playing the enormity of the disorder and people suffering from it. i think they laugh at the so called normal folks saying they are worse than us.

i don't stand by these thoughts and nor do i deny them, as always it is incoherent and i prefer it to be. incoherence adds the meaning that order fails.

everybody goes thru a phase bitten by the poetry considering oneself a Keats in the making...even i had written poetry years back...but the my own composition disgusted me so much that i never made a second attempt...alas the resolution was not very strong...yesterday in a weird mood i wrote another poem....

here is my lame attempt at poetry....

i know your little secret 

in those furtive eyes and hesitant smile

and your cheeks going all claret 

hiding it has now become futile

it is a candlestine love story 

a love lost of untold pain

it is the morning glory

a tale of unpleasant gain

you smile and cry

you celebrate and grieve

you are inert and wry

you quetion and believe

a clash of self and alter ego 

a continous battle of you and me 

a process of holding back and letting go 

a mirror of tragedy and parody

 

i am in the mood of rambling and none of it is going to be coherent. the last month has turned my life topsy turvy. 2 years of redundant work heightened my frustration. at one point i remember only cribbing. be it my work, the people, my height, lack of intellectual stimulation - my day wasn't over without cribbing. i cribbed in groups, i cribbed alone, i cribbed over coffee and i cribbed in my dreams. i wud have given anything to get rid of the situation. desperation led me to apply to colleges in australia, india, uk and scotland. and when i thought i had sunk into the deepest mire, i saw sunshine which almost blinded me. i got offer letters from all the colleges, my family life was perfect, i got rid of my job, the daily frustration, i was surrounded my smart and intelligent people. now i have no reason to crib absolutely not. i have started doing things that i have never done. i finish my homework on time, i dont bunk college, i have turned into a complete family person, i dont bitch about people and in fact i am not even condescendingly nice. i have gotten so used to bitching about anything and everything, that life without sarcasm, the instinct to kill people, cheesy songs, brain dead but feel good movies have almost become surreal. 2 years of seriously avoiding people have generated a phobia of socialisation. after a 5 min conversation i quickly rush back home and put as much distance as possible with the person. 2 years of wanting things badly, when i am finally getting it, its hard to believe that its my life. i have become a casual observer of my own life. my self obsession is also gone. i no longer notice if the person is eating jalebi with a spoon, i just notice them like a detachment as if it does not involve me anymore. i even get confused when people ask me where i come from. do i come from kolkata, hyderabad or chennai? i end up looking stupidly at the person and mentally doing a tic tac toe to finally arrive at a destination. life without worries/problems has become transient. i am not complaing. nothing wud make me go back to that situation. secrectly i am enjoying this phase where i am not expected to do anything.
i just want to quote robert frost:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,And sorry I could not travel bothAnd be one traveler, long I stoodAnd looked down one as far as I couldTo where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the tother, as just as fair,And having perhaps the better claim,Because it was grassy ans wanted wear;Though as for that the passing thereHad worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally layIn leaves no step had trodden black.Oh, I kept the first for another day!Yet knowing how way leads on to way,I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sighSomewhere ages and ages hence:Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one less traveled byAnd that has made all the difference.

it almost takes one and half hr for me to reach home from office. this is the time i utilise in retrospecting about the nagging yet neglected questions of my life - george clooney in ER or eric bana in troy or which is more preferable butter chicken /fried prawns. the shops, people, hoardings also grab my attention for sometime. once i noticed this ad by one of the insurance companies. it had the picture of a child and the caption was something like this 'for your child to have the perfect education, which is IIT then IIM get an insurance.' in india your dreams are almost fixed the minute you are born. if you are a girl at least u r given the choice of not having any career, but every second male aspires to join the coveted and much revered IIT. why is it so important to follow these stereotypes? why is your success measured in terms of which B school you graduated from? somehow fulfilling the simple pleasures like learning to float on your first swimming class is far more important to me than learning socially respected pretentious golf. i gave a real hard thought and have finally made the top 10 must do-list (the list is bound to change in 3 months time). here they are (arranged in no particular order):

1. marry anthony bourdain. if thats not possible then host a travel show in the manner of anthony bourdain.
2. trekking pindari glacier and reaching top of the peak and recording video saying i love my mom.
3. color my hair blonde.
4. have an affair with a french guy after i am forty.
5. retire in the himalayas. own a wooden house and behave like Mr. Heckles. of course die by 65.
6. act in an ekta kapoor serial with full make up and heavily sequined sarees and roll my eyes in front of the camera.
7. write a book. bit of ayn rand, virginia woolf and j k rowling.
8. join interpol and be an undercover spy with a cool background music.
9. convert to kabbalah.
10. dress like 18 th century jane austen heroines.

i have many more on my list and i am sure there will be more to add in the future. i agree many of these are unrealistic. but i choose to not to make my dreams a toothpaste like mass product.

my ancestors were from Bangladesh. my great grand father was an accountant for a muslim jamindar. his son and my grand father were playmates and grand father was like a son to the jamindar. during the partition, my family shifted to kolkata. as a parting gift the jamindar gifted grand father a watch. that was my grandfather's last gift to me. my identity, family history and the memories of grand father are attached to the watch....
history, love, family ties, separation...the story above has got everything except the truth. yes my ancestors were from Bangladesh, but the rest is all fictitious. but it doesn't mean i haven't shared this story with anyone. this story is a reality to me as much as my getting up in the morning and brushing my teeth. in fact, there are many more fascinating stories related to my bangladeshi ties. this whole fictitious world is probably created because my grand parents or my parents never provided me any accurate details about our past in bangladesh or life then was so mundane that it would even be embarrassing bringing it all up. i took it upon me to glamorise my family history a bit. at least my grand kids will have interesting stories to boast about. who knows, my creativity might lead me find a mughal or genghis khan connection (as most of us in the family look like the mongolians) to add the cherry on the cake.
right from enid blyton's faraway tree and currently ekta kapoor's serials this fantasy world amuses me. let me just support ekta kapoor and say that her serials are the adult versions the faraway tree, famous five, st clare's combined. one of the top things in my to-do list is to be a script writer of ekta kapoor or write a complete masala bollywood movie something like om shanti om or any rajnikant movies. the so called non commercial movies with the critics award are very easy to make. i mean u can get inspiration from the normal day to day life. but to create the song dance where 50 different people dancing in the same graceful synchronisation, returning of the dead, reincarnation, the dialogues for eg. "pata hi nahi chalta kab betian jagat jananiyan ban jati hai" etc is pure genius. it is very easy to ridicule such things but to achieve that state of ridiculousness is a form of art. and the fact that those movies/serials are promoted with absolute sincerity is amazing. have u ever seen a sooraj bharjatiya or ekta kapoor smirk when they are promoting the tulsis of their world. 'dariya kinare kanhaiya,' 'saajan bina adhuri sajni' wud probably the name of few of my movies. i am confident that i will bag at least 5 filmfare awards.
whenever i worry about the lack of zing in life, i just think about my split personalities 1. zulekha from afghanistan protecting herself under the wings of terrorism, 2. sophie a jewish descendant who is also an interpol agent 3. sohini who approves ads. like they say its all in the mind.