Musings On What COULD Have Been...and What Has NOT Been

 I was reading Daytripper by Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba just now and remembered how special it was to me and how I read it in less than an hour and a half with my good friend Gayathri (admin and Sorceress Supreme of the Paperbacks and Backpacks book club) and suddenly my very organically random mind wanted to write so here I am at the keys again.

What teenager has not wanted to be a guitarist? I'm sure everyone has a story about how they got introduced to the sound of a six stringed instrument as was I. My story involves my friend Soumya Basu aka Choru Da who made me listen to Slash and Knopfler when I was in sixth grade and set me on a path that nearly made me a sound engineer, nearly made me a guitar player and gave me a place to hide when I was low. Choru Da, you will read this, I know and you will smile and text me from Down Under and say it means a lot to you. I think what you should know is that you mean a lot to me. Thank you for showing me the beauty of a part of the world that makes me want to seek beauty even in the darkest of times. 

But then again, my random mind, forever a slave to Brownian Motion now wants to talk about Robert Frost's poem The Road Not Taken, specifically the lines 

"Oh, I kept the first for another day

Yet knowing how way leads on to way

I doubted if I should ever come back"

What has this got to do with me not becoming a guitarist? Well, after pestering my parents for ages and ages, I did not get a guitar. Come on, this is me! If the story were to write itself the way all stories have so far then it would not be my blog would it? So yes there is a twist in this tale. I scored highly on the analysis question set for the poem The Road Not Taken and I've written about the significance of the poem when I wrote a farewell post for my seniors in college when I was in 3rd year. I felt the poem's message was most appropriate and I think I will have to link that post at the end  of this one so that you can revisit it!

Anyway, I did not become a guitarist. But I did become something else. I picked up a camera that my father got from his maiden trip to the USA back when Obama was the POTUS and I decided to go Dexter's Laboratory on it. What were the functions on the camera? What did the wheel do? Why these logos? I took that camera with me on walks and I clicked so many photos. I was enthralled. And then, I got a phone (a Sony Xperia E3, my second Android device) and that camera was stellar. I clicked away to glory. In between, I'd used a CyberShot DSCHX100V and the kind of creative and expressive power that camera gave me was out of this world. And so, a romance began. I became The Guy Who Has a Camera and my college batchmates used to ask me to photograph them and I learnt and learnt and learnt and expressed and expressed and expressed. 

I am still enthralled by the sound a guitar can make, I am still in awe of music and still use audio to unwind. But the road to being a guitarist is the road I did not take. I became a camera user. I will not say I am a photographer. That is a road I have not walked down yet. 

Ah, the point of this post? Nothing. Follow me on Instagram! (@shoshamitra)

The Bilge Master

Why I Read...

  “It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo, the ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. . . . Those were the stories that stayed with you, that meant something, even if you were too small to understand why."

~Samwise Gamgee in The Lord of the Rings 

Those of you who know me even slightly will know that I adore stories. I spend fifteen minutes or more on Instagram checking the stories and comics that the creators I follow have concocted up and most of my feed is filled with their talent. 

But the title of this is "Why I Read..." and to be honest I do not know the answer. I just know that if stories were to be taken away from me I would be devastated. Stories have gotten me through so much. I was five years old when my mother gave me a book to read and in the womb when my mother told me of the things we would do together. She taught me that the world is both beautiful and dark, and also that life is not about the Lamborghini in the drive way but the child begging for alms at a street corner, who hasn't eaten for a while and maybe a small packet of biscuits means more to him than any money his family will steal from him and use up in drinking themselves silly.

Stories are all around us. That's why I've been keeping a diary for a while now. From the moment you open your eyes, a story starts. How you spent your day is a story, the security guard in your complex whose WhatsApp you configured is a story. 

Grandparents told the best stories if you ask me. Their world was so different from ours. They didn't have access to books as freely as we did. They were a living, breathing treasure trove of experiences from the past; our first history teachers in a sense. I wonder why we are taught so sparingly about history. In reading William Dalrymple's City of Djinns I fell in love with Delhi all over again. My endeavour to learn Bengali is to read stories in my mother tongue, a practice I feel I should have started a long time ago.

Storytellers such as Neil Gaiman wax eloquent on the importance of libraries and the experience gathered from children's literature while storytellers like Charles Dickens (although in my opinion his characters are unrelatable) tell us long stories about good vs evil and how good prevails. John LeCarre will take us into the world of espionage. Alistair MacLean will enthrall us with thrillers. 

Edmond Dantes and his quest for revenge, Dustfinger and his desire to return home, Markus Zusak showing us a war torn landscape and Exupery telling us how important our child self is. All stories, all about the world we live in and all capable of teaching and giving us armor to use.

A story teaches you how to be good and also how to be evil. It gets under your skin (if you let it) and it shows you the world of words and their power from the perspective of someone else, someone who like me was perhaps born in the arms of imaginary friends.

I still cannot resist walking up to a person reading a book and asking, "Hey, what are you reading?"

Stories have been there for me longer than people have. My teachers told me I read to survive and my parents gave me the responsibility of taking care of our library. My friends say it is a bibliophile's paradise. I just think of it as a house full of stories.

And yet, some stories haunt me. Some stories break me and leave me a bleeding mess on the floor. Some stories give me the power to get out of a sticky situation.

I read because I do not know what or who I'd be if I did not.

The Bilge Master

So Long, Easy Rider

 He liked long drives a lot. Out on the road, with the top rolled back and cruise control keeping the car smooth. He was what Baez called Dylan in Diamonds and Rust- the original vagabond. Most at ease on highways- places he called home.

 But a few months back he had called a different place home. His home had a body, it had a voice He had wanted that home. Maybe it was the loneliness that made him seek out that home again and again. He felt like the un named boxer in Simon and Garfunkel’s song when he was at that home, lonesome and the New York city winters cutting into him, wishing he could go to the home of his youth. He had tried to find that home wherever he went and sometimes he succeeded. But it was always temporary and before long he was travelling on. I do not mean to imply that he did not have friends. He did and they cared for him. He felt at home with most of them, but the home he sought eluded him, always on his cusp and never his.

 He took to many hobbies- writing, reading like a man possessed, ordering and buying books like anything. His family thought he had a bad attitude so he kept away from them. However, his other family, the people he had met on his travels, they told him it was a pleasure being in his company and they introduced him to other people like himself.

 But still, home eluded him. Until he made his peace and realised that he liked being on his own. He liked the freedom of choosing his company, of having nobody tell him what to wear, what to eat and how to work out. And this was one freedom he hesitated to give up. Such freedom was magical and allowed him to sate his wanderlust. He started to look for photos and updated his camera with two new photos each day. He found a coven of readers and he chatted with them. He made friends who fuelled his creative side and gave him the courage to experiment and to express himself.

 And tonight, is like the other nights. He is on the highway, his favourite Uriah Heep song is playing and he’s on his way. He does not know where, but he’s on his way. I do not know if he will find home, but I do know he will not stop looking.

 “So long easy rider

I know I’ll miss you for a while

But sooner or later

I know that I’ll forget you”

The Bilge Master