Making Proposals Part II - Nearing 30

Rings of light, originally uploaded by suprio.

Approaching 30 is like a lifetime achievement and I am not liking it... not at all... seems I have had spent almost the half of my life in "fruit"-less, unimaginative pursuits.

When you are young, you often have the vision of greatness, of doing something purposeful and noble, achieving success... where has all that gone now? I realise with growing disappointment that this situation is not going to change very dramatically and that most of the things I have achieved till date seems pointless in the long run. Perhaps I am doing a Kafka and all his famous existentialism stuff have overwhelmed me. Then again I realise that this feeling is not original and I have had this since my early days... only then, this ideal seemed too absurd to be true. Every time I had this feeling, it has thankfully passed, leaving me in a state of indecisiveness; but every time it had come back again I have been rocked more intensely and the recovery from it seems to be taking longer and longer...

Several of my close friends and confidants, who somehow understand me attributes this growing despair to the fact that I have been too casual about any serious relations that tend to be tying-down. According to them I needed a cool headed companion who could bring some sort of rule into my life, but I disagree. I disagree in spite of the fact that since my article on Proposal Making, the very basis for a good steady affair, I have not had much success. That does not mean that my article was not a masterpiece... just that I have had a rough patch since then... it happens to most people you see... and to be in an affair you need the right person. Until very recently, I had been searching...

Just when it seemed that I might be making some headway, into the ever illusive affair, I am now not sure whether it would be such a good idea to take a plunge again and come out only wet with disappointment. I mean to say, that even if I think that the affair is just gathering momentum, all my previous brushes with this phenomenon hardly is any help in providing any ideas about where I am headed. I could be absolutely wrong in assuming that I have cleverly have conveyed my linking for the individual to this individual, but then again the thick or subtle gestures might have conveyed a completely benign message. I guess i will have to know somehow..but how?

This is the third try and I already like it

This is the third try and I already like it, originally uploaded by suprio.

My tryst with 3d photography:
tutorial:
http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/3D/view3d.htm

Memory drops

droplet4, originally uploaded by jun_madayag2002.

As the day of my return approach, I feel I have been here for ever. The people back home who await my return fill me with a sense of joy and longing. Oh, it has been quite some time now that I have been oblivious of the daily hassles of life in Kolkata missing the touch of the near and dear ones. Arriving here sometime 2 years back on a bright sunny and colder-than-it-looked day and finding myself in a sea of unknown people with nothing more than a telephone number and a partial address I was horrified at the prospect of making my own way through this unknown country to Bristol. Everything looked impossible. But as someone I know well so aptly put it:

When you have come to the edge
Of all the light you know
And are about to step off
Into the darkness of the unknown,
Faith is knowing that
One of two things will happen:
There will be something solid to stand on
Or you will be taught how to fly.

I set about on the faith that I would be taught to fly. I was not mistaken.

Looking back now, I realise with a sense of nostalgia, I was so keen to have come to this country to see a new way of life that I almost did not take my eyes off the streets I passed in a cab, trying to engage in a social conversation with the Iraqi cab driver. Everything was so different. Streets were so quiet. Nobody seemed to honk. Houses looked so different. I was instantly in admiration for the country I was in, United Kingdom. Life is so easy here it looked.

I was fortunate enough to have worked with a group of people who were very different from each other and had provided me with so many opportunities for learning. It was only the other day that I had met them for the first time and it seems it is strange to be planning a return back without the hope of seeing some of them ever again. Some I will miss, some I will not but the whole idea of going back is now an uncharted territory. This whole mindset made me discover a very disturbing fact about me: I tend to hesitate to make a choice when they are equally balanced, somewhat like my favourite poem 'The road not taken'.

Doomsday?Or a Crimson tide?

Doomsday?Or a Crimson tide?, originally uploaded by suprio.

I amaze myself in some ways... Never very tactful and yet very much so... never very thoughtful but that is not entirely true... never serious but always talking from my heart in a friendly careless way... always disconnected from everything around me (no I am no hermit)...I must have been having this thought for some time now, trying to gauge what someone else would think of me... A strange person, seemingly well intentioned but you can never be sure? I have no answers.
It is all too cloudy to think, too complicated to be resolved in an instant... give it some time and surely something could be untangled.
needs revisiting :-)

Be careful of what you say

R is a very impatient person and knowing him personally, this habit of his, has enlightened me with the limits of a person's inability to cope with long waits and the degree of it. Having to wait for nearly an hour at the Desntist finally R manged to see the doctor. Natuarally he was very dissatisfied and fired off straight at the doctor:

"I want you to clean my teeth"

A visibly shocked doctor - ".. you mean brush them for you?!"

"Err... " Stammered R taken aback by the unexpectedness of this reply... "... No I mean... Clean them... like "

"Now wait a minute.... That is what I asked isn't it?"

"Noooo... " screamed R desperately trying to find out what he wanted to say ...

Silence.

"I want my teeth lo look very clean without the stains... like the people who do to the dentists and get their teeth cleaned" ... blurted out R, relieved to have made all the effort.

The Doctor looked all the more confused, having offered what he knew to be the best solution. He sat there behind the desk doing nothing.

It was then as if like a divine awekening it dawned upon R that he was not using the clinical term for the request...

"I want my teeth to be scaled..."

"Ah! you could have said so, earlier..."

Saggis have always been oppressed?

Saggis have always been opressed?, originally uploaded by suprio.

Nearby is Giambologna's less celebrated marble sculpture Hercules beating the Centaur Nessus (1599) and placed here in 1841 from the Canto de' Carnesecchi. It was sculpted from one solid block of white marble with the help of Pietro Francavilla
Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loggia_dei_Lanzi

Spams...

"hi,
kemon aacho?asha kori bhalo.tumi aamake kemon
bhalobasho bujhte perechi.u re not at all serious abt
me,nahole aamar ekta khobor na niye etodin thakte
parte na."

I stopped on this mail for a moment while clearing out the junk folder today. The sender was none other than the person who once doubted my integrity and severed all ties. Funny that she could mail again and try and rekindle a flame which does not even have a wick to burn on. But it was a moment of triumph... or was it triumph no, but a bit more subtle... a feeling of a spent hope with some splash of nostalgia and bit of feel-good. It was like being acquitted of being blamed of something horrible... Like the feeling that comes to someone who reads the daily newspapers and gets a feeling of "I am not that bad after all....with events like these happening all round I am pretty well off."

I felt a sudden urge to call up that person and plead for this to be over... for good or for bad... but, then again I pause, let her hang in an uncertainty... There is a satisfaction of not replying at all...."Boobar shotru nei..."

Addendum:
---------
Mailing has now picked up some regularity and things dont seem all that messed up now... But I guess it all boils down to the same old poem 'The road not taken' where it says:

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

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

And both that morning equally lay
In 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 sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

I did really take the road less travelled by and have initiated a friendly banter which I have not regretted till date... I am not looking to renew the trust that was broken but I am merely giving a space for the other person to breathe. It is not affecting me or taking my time but it is for the greater good and for making one less discontent person... so why not?