The Storm (14th September 2025)

 It is not easy being a pop culture enthusiast or a nerd. In general, people will not get your references, you will be bullied for your passion and misunderstood for the largest part of your life by so many people who are close to you. You may or may not have the maturity to chalk this up life being what it is, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury which at the end of the day actually signifies nothing.

But then, aren’t all lives stories? Isn’t freedom the right of all sentient beings and do we not have a poet who reminded us to dream of a heaven of freedom, endlessly?

14^th September 2025. 7:41AM. I am having a panic attack. Where is the bus? I’m dressed in a polo t shirt and a pair of my father’s black jeans with an unbuttoned green shirt shrugged on over the ensemble. I am 31 years old and I am going to watch a cartoon with 350 people. Where is the bus?

You’re thinking, “How can he be 31 and behaving like a schoolboy? Also, wasn’t 14^th September a Sunday?” You are right, it was. It was also kind of historic, but we’ll get to that in a bit.

14^th September 2025. 8:00AM. I see a figure walking towards me carrying a katana made of wood. We embrace. In his eyes is a light I have seen before. He’s home and he’s here to rock and roll. A white cab pulls up and a man in a red wig and haori steps out, smiles at me and says,”Hey. You’re here. Take these bags. Let’s go.”

14^th September 2025. 9:00AM. I’m walking up and down the lobby of a theater testing the acoustics. Some extreme panic seizes me.  I look up and I see my friends working on a large poster of the cartoon we’ve come to watch. I see college students standing on wheelchairs and I know, we’re going to be okay. I see an image in my mind of a crowd of thousands at a metal concert holding up a crippled man’s wheelchair so he can see the band. In that moment, my panic leaves me. I am calm. I am bringing a storm.

14^th September 2025. 10:11AM. I have put on makeup, which feels like war paint. I am no longer 31 years old.  I am a Demon Slayer in Japan, the Stone Hashira and my friend in the adjacent chair is no longer 25 and 6 feet tall. He’s Muzan, Omega Level threat and ruler of the Infinity Castle.

14^th September 2025. I’ve lost track of time. In front of me are two extremely senior people. Ma’am is 57+ and sir is 61+. I shake their hands and the entire crowd roars in welcome. I told you it was going to be historic earlier, did I not? We’re still here to watch a cartoon. On my right, I see my friend. I wave and I head over to see her nails, specially made to order to sync with today’s cartoon.

14^th September 2025. The unity of a dark theater. 350 people, seated. I make my way to my seat. I enter a different world than the one of calculators and mathematics and tall buildings. In this world, is a home which I have resided in since I was a youngling. In this world is a curious peace. As the first demon is decapitated, someone yells a cheer. That cheer becomes a roar. That roar becomes an echo. That echo is a chant.

I am home.

How did we come to this you ask? Let me tell you about one boy’s dream which he hung on to and created a space he shared with two of his friends. Let me tell you of the ridicule, the bullying and the jealousy when others saw that they could not be these three people.

And let me tell you of those who believed in them.

It took us all five years to get to 14^th September 2025. It took so much to stand there in front of those people. The body pain I felt on the 15^th was peanuts compared to what I was a part of.

We hope that next time, this dream of ours makes you want to dream again, to be a child, to remember summer vacations on your grandmother’s lap, away from the sound and fury, hearing of the same demons that we saw slain in front of us. We hope that for the sake of the child in you, you come home.

Behold, the power of a cartoon! By the way, we call it anime in this home.

The Bilge Master

 

Kingdoms (Break Me, Shake Me, Devastate Me)

 I was reading Annabel Lee and got to wondering about that kingdom by the sea. We got to know only one story about that kingdom and that story broke our hearts, but what if there were other maidens or youths and they too had high born kinsmen?

I live alone now and some say I love fiercely, but still others say I am abrasive. I personally spend a lot of time blushing fiercely and joking about diabetes. But what of my kingdom in the forested glade where there are dogs and that one neighbor who sends me eggs and guava juice for succor? What of the paintings in my dwelling that I recently put up again? What of the books and the milestone I got of making a vegetarian dish from the very first principles today? If everything Midas touches turns to gold and if Hemingway wanted to be ruined by the one he loved as a token of that love, then what am I trying to achieve? Maybe I’m waiting for someone to “break me, shake me, devastate me” or I’m just a guy wanting to be held, thrilled, kissed and killed.

In a Pratchett-esque twist of events I’m also marveling at things like the Justice League taking on a literal angel and a rookie Green Arrow prowling the Watchtower wondering who it is he’s up against. Certainly Stephen Amell and his pushps or gravity defying chin ups didn’t prepare his kid for an antagonist of this magnitude.

Thus life goes on in my kingdom. Maybe one day an Annabel Lee will come along, or someone will give me a cask of wine or maybe appeal to me to rescue him from a ramshackle house where someone’s beating heart is driving him slowly insane.

Or maybe, I’ll stop feeling disgusted long enough to pick up that gentleman racist who wrote of Pinkman and his model which was brought to life by Del Toro recently.

Or maybe I’ll hunt down my creator and ask him to take accountability for my existence only to watch him die and leave me to face this world all alone.

Thankfully, I don’t know any mad scientists with God complexes so that last one will remain in a book.

The Bilge Master

A Lunch With Kolkata Bookworms

 “Let your silence make a sound

All that’s lost can still be found

You’re too good for giving up”

~Liam Gallagher, Too Good for Giving Up

There are a lot of things I believe. I believe in a thing called love, I believe in beauty. But sometimes, I need make believe to make me believe things. I guess that’s why I cannot stop myself from buying books like a maniac. There’s just something about a book, there’s just something about people who decided to put a pen to a piece of paper and sometimes those people, living or dead, can actually bring others together.

This is the story of a bookstore and a young bunch of people who like books. At least that’s where it begins. Where it goes from there is a lot of talking, a few connections and a queer little push that seemed to come from somewhere inside me- Give these guys a chance. I’m glad I did.

This book club came into my life when I least expected it to. As I was feeling my way around, there were many people who spoke to me about a few things. Their admins, Khushi and Shreemanti asked me to drop by an online meeting and see what happens, and that’s how my journey started.

Over the course of the last month, (and I’m realizing this now), as I mourned the loss of my father, Khushi’s club called Kolkata Bookworms suddenly stepped in to fill a part of a very large void. If nothing else, it was a place where I could pop in and talk books. A few people reached out and asked me about things like Amazon Customer Care numbers or a suggestion for an entry into science fiction. I kept sharing books I got in April (and I got a LOT of books in April).

I feel like the biggest bonding exercise we did as a club was when we did the NaPoWriMo together and that was when I found there are writers here as well. Some of those poems were fun to engage with, to ponder on and I’m pretty sure one or two of them will at a later date be dug up and read again.

And then, we met! Our (at the time member, currently Pooh Bear and for me personally someone I can legit want to be like when I grow old) very own Pooji came down from Jaipur and there was a lunch!

The café we chose was one that I had walked past for years, but never bothered to go in to. It was a bright café called Grezia, done up in blue and white. It being Star Wars Day, I was obviously dressed in a Star Wars shirt and I was a little nervous if the truth be told. For all my bravado and excellent communication skills, I am now learning a little about the importance of boundaries, not just my own, but of the ones others set. But it was a sunny day, a cheerful café, John Mayer (serendipitously) had just finished singing and well, I thought “Let’s do this”.

People started to trickle in bit by bit. This is where it starts to free fall. From this point on, please do not ask me to explain time. Ask me about the conversations, I can back you up, but there were a lot of those. But as is critical in a conversation, some stayed silent, some spoke. I made mistakes, I laughed because the others laughed them off with me, and I spoke to someone about the Bible and actually understood a lot about the difference between Miltonian and Biblical Lucifer. I even feel a pull to visit a church I’ve walked past many a time. I got called out for bad mouthing Durjoy Dutta and since there have been a lot of endings in my life; I managed to pass on Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending to someone yesterday.

I don’t know at what point pizza arrived. I do remember telling someone to put chili flakes and oregano in coke and getting a weird look, but weird as it sounds, it rocks. At some point we ended up discussing what food we would like to eat until we die and the common factor may have been biriyani, but dal bati churma, dal makhni, kadhi chawal and a little healthy dose of the good old truth fit the bill as well.

While I do not remember every conversation at that table, I remember Cuddles on the Beach, randomly swapping my mixed fresh lime soda with something called Chilli Gondhoraj, a pun about how a fly determines if you are sweet or not, and wondering at the end of the day exactly when one guy happened to take 49 photos.

I have been to that locality so many times, but these people have made me realize that I will never look at that locality with the same eyes. Was it the Joey vs Chandler with a side of French Vanilla, or was it when I glanced at my watch, saw that it was 6:30PM and wondered out loud “Where has the time gone?”

I suppose life is going to go on whether I like it or not, and I suppose Brandon Sanderson (splendid little bugger) has a point when he wrote in The Stormlight Archive

“This is life, and I will not lie by saying every day will be sunshine. But there will be sunshine again, and that is a very different thing to say. I promise you Kaladin: You will be warm again”.

It’s really good to be here, Kolkata Bookworms. Thank you for having me! If this is what an unofficial meet is like, I cannot wait to find out what official ones are like.

 

Ashesh Mitra

A Weird Guy Who Reads a Lot

"Oh, patron saint of lonely souls, tell this boy which way to go"

 Its happening again, like it always does. My writing process is being a thorn in my side. I know I want to write about highways and cars and Bon Jovi's Lost Highway, but for the life of me I cannot put two and two together and I'm frowning at the screen, sipping some tea and hoping for the powers that be to guide me. 

I always liked the lyric "Oh Patron Saint of lonely souls, tell this boy which way to go" though. It reminded me of the saying, "Red sky at morning, sailor's warning" or maybe I've been reading too much Moby Dick. That novel grows on you, let me tell you. Ishmael is initially hard to crack but after a few chapters, his story becomes compelling. I wonder how much a pirate or a buccaneer prayed honestly. Well, maybe I'll be cancelled for calling someone a pirate in this day and age but the other option would be privateer isn't it? 

But yes, the idea of asking a Patron Saint, that too of lonely souls was something that struck me back when I heard this song for the first time. As it is, a Bon Jovi song never fails to get me excited, (have you heard Always?) and this was no exception. The video was also a charming one to be honest, (linked below). But now that I've spent some time rambling like Radagast the Brown, amidst the brambles and thickets of the woods, I find that I still don't know what I want to say. Is the song a prayer, an acknowledgement of the powers that be, or something about moving on, 'coz like it or not, roads do go on and on; and "Man may come and man may go, but I go on forever". 

So much imagery in this, isn't it? I like situations like this where I go on and on talking with the person reading this and it seems to me like somewhere, something clicks in them. Now I am aware that sometimes I am an editor's nightmare and that essentially most of this, if put into a book would first be deleted or furiously scratched out with a red pencil, wielded with the sorrow of ages, but yeah, thankfully this is not a book. 

The concept of a lost highway though. Is it an acknowledgement of trying to chart a course back? Is it a plea to get away from something or somewhere? Is it an embrace of loneliness or is it just the "I cannot take this anymore, I need to drive" that happens to us from time to time? Or is it pointing out the necessity of being lost, of the two roads that diverge in a yellow wood and since you cannot be one traveler...

I never thought about Bon Jovi's Lost Highway this way, not once. Yet, after putting the song as my ringtone, some of the strains have started to come and hit me and it's prompted this piece from me on a Thursday morning and my initial intention was to just have this be a small read that you could finish on the way to work or over that first coffee but well, we're beyond that now. I will however talk about the instruments in this. There's quite a solid guitar base here, but the sound is different from the usual hard hitting that Bon Jovi does. I've found it to be a case of a more subtle way of giving hope as opposed to earlier works like Keep the Faith where he was earnestly telling the listener that it gets better and that living is possible. 

My father used to say that a car is a means of getting to point B from Point A. Over the course of time, I learnt to imbibe that philosophy for the brief time that I drove a car, but then I realised it was more about being in the passenger seat as a navigator and going along for a ride.

And, sometimes...just sometimes, you need a car to get away to point B from point A and I think that Bon Jovi is actually saying that in this song. It's a hopeful song which asks you to move ahead, stay strong and trust in the powers that be in a very interesting way.

"Hey hey! I finally found my way,

Say goodbye to yesterday

Hit the gas, there ain't no brakes on this lost highway"

And the rest...is silence 

The Bilge Master

Debts

 A few years back, I reconnected with my English teacher from sixth grade and we’ve been getting along like a house on fire since then. If you haven’t been reading enough of the tripe I put out there and am tyrannical enough to call writing then you won’t know the fact that my brain immediately wanted to make an F451 reference after the first sentence, because I deeply admire Mr. Ray Bradbury and feel that his book Something Wicked This Way Comes opened my eyes to a better understanding of Shakespeare or (as I like to call him, Shakey Baby). I’m not trying to say that you should call him that, most certainly not, but calling a writer something ridiculous oftentimes makes studying that bugger’s work a little easier on the eyes and mind. But, I digress. One of the things my teacher chastised me for as a child in sixth grade was my compulsion to bite my nails and some 25 years after the fact, she chastises me for giving up on what she feels are excellent ideas for articles and stories. Well, in the light of the fact that my father passed away recently, I find that one of the story ideas I had pitched to my teacher will now (possibly, and in a way that justifies the signature at the end of this post; that alter ego of mine from 2010 looking on with bated breath as I drum a note on the Backspace key) come to see the light of day.

I want to talk about libraries and librarians today. I want to talk about books and stories and safety and how that safety is taken away by someone who had the gall to tell us books were safer than people and lived up to that quote effortlessly. Yes, Neil I am looking at you with bitterness and disgust right now as I take all the books I had of you and consign them to new homes, while my heart breaks for Sir Terry whose amazing essay about you in A Slip of the Keyboard I read this afternoon. Oh, Neil you poor excuse of a man and poster boy for the neighbourhood compost heap. But yes, moving on from that digression, the importance of libraries and books in my life is what I want to write about today and I want to talk about my family too, with or without the other animals we’ve adopted and we’ve cared for and had care for us.

The fact of my privilege is that I happen to be born in a family of bookworms and you cannot chuck a slipper in my house without hitting a book or a bookshelf or a bookmark. My flat is basically two bedrooms, with books on the beds ,three chairs, a quilt that my mother used as her personal arson practice area, (by this I mean that she would inevitably drop lit cigarettes on the poor thing), repurposed to make a small sitting room and a rocking chair and armchair belonging to my great grandfather. The rest of my flat is books and aside from the books telling their own stories, these books end up telling a second and sometimes even a third or a fourth story. There’s the book my father bought from Golpark and read in two nights before a date with my mother when they were courting, there’s the book I salvaged from the books I gave my grandmother, which has her name written on it in my handwriting, there’s a book belonging to the grandfather I never knew, which I discovered was being held together by electrical tape and I read from cover to cover, getting chills when a certain man in it asks his brother in law to “answer for Santino”. And of course, (because life isn’t all smiles and sunshine), there are the books that languish in the house,  which I do not have the heart to discard and yet know that I will never read again, unless my mental health improves a little more and it doesn’t hurt to think of the woman who they belonged to.

In the bookcases littering libraries galore, I found a different world to the one in my house. I found a world of faeries and goblins and assassins and teenagers who didn’t do maths homework but found ways to catch a murderer. I suppose my love for the whodunit stems from the discovery of the short story collections edited by Alfred Hitchcock where I was shown a whole new world of mystery and fear or the ones written by Franklin W Dixon, the quintessential Frank and Joe Hardy who were cool enough to know how to utilize karate chops while I had trouble eating with chopsticks. The happiest hours of my schooldays were the ones spent in the library in the arms of Orpheus and Eurydice and Alexander Dumas and the rebel Mowgli. I learnt that animals have voices, I heard the clarion call of gods and had a crisis of faith when I realized Batman is a psychopath. I found hope in Frodo’s loyal Sam, wishing to roam the lands of Middle Earth forever, Balrog forsooth!

Then there was the library mouse that showed up one day out of the blue and we talked for six years, daily. We shared so much of our lives and libraries with each other. We cried at the same bits in books we had discovered- me in garage sales or secondhand bookshops here and there and my friend in multiple bookstores across the sea. I suppose I owe so much to people who don’t even exist (and to those that do), for it was in books that I found a way to talk to girls at parties and became confident about language and unapologetically shout from the rooftops that I am a weird guy who reads a lot.

My debt to English teachers who saw this need in me, principals who helped me build it into a way of life and friends who came into my life because I read books knows no bounds. If you are what you eat, it follows that your mind is what you read.

And one day, fed up of being told that I would not amount to much as a writer, I found the cojones to found this blog. I should say the blog found me, not too early, not too late, but precisely when I meant it to find me. Like Prince Dastan from Prince of Persia, I found that no matter what I do, I cannot change my fate. I like to comfort myself on the long and lonely nights by reminding myself of the words I am surrounded by, the words that voices sing to me from my speakers, the words I have read and forgotten about and the words I am yet to discover and imbibe.

And when I look up at the sky at night, I see a million different stars and I see a billion things I can write about those millions.

This is a declaration of dedication. I solemnly swear fealty to words, and allow them to morph me and transport me to other realms and minds. I know that when I miss my parents a little too much, I can turn to the words they left behind for me, and I won’t be so sad.

To close, I am reminded of my uncle who owns a bookstore and has only this to say:

“I wish I had more time to read them all, more space to keep them all and more money to buy them all”

The Bilge Master

Session Attended On "Curses and Boons" Hosted by The School of You & My Impressions

 I have just been a part of The School of You’s session on Curses and Boons, which was a freewheeling discussion about mythology and how many figures in mythology came up with a curse on some people, such as the story of Cassandra and Apollo in the Greek myths or closer to home, the story of Karna in the Mahabharata.

We went on to explore the nuances of injunctions such as “don’t exist”, “don’t be you”, “don’t belong” and how these affect our day to day activities and put unwarranted pressure on us to be something we are not, (or never wanted to be). As a further means to illustrate this, I spoke up and said that my mother would force feed me books by people like Thomas Hardy or Fyodor Dostoevsky and while I accept that some of these books are among the greatest written in the history of mankind, (which immediately set off a train of thought in me about how great that history is anyway, when you consider the Crusades, the actions of the Knights Templar, Charlemagne or closer to home the riots and the Indian freedom struggle from the oppression of the British), I found another world in the writing of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and in the films of Guillermo Del Toro than in those books and I think the fact that I could not bring my mother into those worlds, that she expected me to inhabit her worlds without question and yet would never bother with my worlds; well it was that which led me to grow apart from her.

It is funny how the session had more to offer though than what was for me such an immense personal introspection, because we were split into groups and told to re write the story of Karna from the Mahabharata and this was by far one of the best activities I’ve ever done. Our group dived into it, with the clock ticking and eight minutes speeding by and we discussed how, if Karna, who was given a raw deal from the very beginning with his mother Kunti rejecting him (being of course a textbook example of how “don’t exist” is an injunction) instead hadn’t or how his lie to his teacher wouldn’t have been necessary and if Dronacharya had been his guru. We concluded that had this been the case, perhaps (with 25 seconds on the clock) there would have been no Kurukshetra and even no Bhagavad Gita. I must say this story makes a bit more sense than seeing Karna suffer such injustice. I feel, (like others felt in the session too) that his choice to not play the victim card and to be generous and selfless makes Karna a more rounded character ,and a more believable one than Arjuna.

At this point, there was a discussion on how Hindu mythos as a whole is very  unforgiving of mistakes and sends the message that mistakes are what bring about huge penalties and therefore should never be made and some of the mothers in the session went on to say that they don’t read or discuss the Hindu mythological canon with their children.

This reminded me of every single teacher I’ve had who has taught me anything and how they would always encourage me to make mistakes and how they would guide me so that I wouldn’t be making that mistake so effortlessly in the future. Being a freelance teacher myself, I was reminded of a student of mine who was never motivated and all I told him was to just go and give his exam and not worry about any consequences. He thrived and he said to me at our final class that I was the only teacher he had had who had believed in him and not written him off as a lost cause.

I digress, but this got me around to thinking that even a boon is not without its conditions. Stand on one foot for a ridiculous amount of time and you will be granted this boon. Lord Shiva and Ravana, Ravana wanting some recognition of his faith and instead being humiliated because he went too far in lifting the Kailash parvat; or the Prince Dastan from the Prince of Persia video game series who is given power over time itself and is motivated to protect his home of Babylon and yet the underlying theme of “You cannot change your fate”, which we are made to see as he loses Kaileena, the true love of his life and returns home from his battle with the Dahaka to find that indeed, Babylon does lie in flames before him.

Someone had written in the chat of the meeting something along the lines of “When the student is ready, the teacher appears. However, when the student is really ready then the teacher disappears.” A jest indeed, but is it/was it?

Is there truly something that is unconditional in this world and is there truly a need to be perfect? I think what this session reinforced in me are the following points:

One- it is okay to not be okay

Two- perfectionism is a sure fire way to total disaster

Three- celebrate and rejoice the fact that you are flawed. Even God made a mistake in creating humans (since Biblically speaking, humans are flawed creatures) and ignoring Lucifer’s warning that we as a species are flawed

Four- embrace every mistake you make as with each mistake you grow a little

Five- forgive. Forgive those that hurt you, forgive those who make mistakes, and of course forgive and be  kind to your own self.

 

I thank the School of You from the bottom of my heart for this session which has given me so much food for thought and happiness and would love to attend more such sessions as and when I can.

Ashesh Mitra

For more information about The School of You and what it is they do, follow the link below

The School of You 

Goodbyes

 “Bury all your secrets in my skin

Come away with innocence

And leave me with my sins

The air around me still feels like a cage

Love is just a camoflague

For what resembles rage, again…”

~Snuff by Slipknot

 Sometimes you don’t get to say goodbye. Sometimes, she’s just gone and you’re suddenly at the cremation. The relatives come over, the ever oversmart friends say they’re sorry, as if an apology will bring her back. You try to cry, but nothing comes. Are you even human anymore, you ask yourself as you pull on that shirt and spray on the cologne for the Zoom call interview.

Your not so oversmart friends come over. Some of them hold you and watch as you tremble with the heaviness of the hammer blow that’s shattered you. You childhood memories with her play a dance of death in your dreams. What is a dream? Is it supposed to make you happy, or sad, or just fuck you up?

You feel yourself reaching for another bottle while you see your surviving parent cry. So, you put aside your pain, like you always have. After all, you’re the child who grew up too fast, ate too much and was an academic disgrace.

Yet somehow, somewhere in the cosmos, you realize that there are still bits of her in you. The heaviness settles in your heart again as you pack a duffel bag full of books to sell. Her books. You seek solace from the knowledge that you never made her proud of you. You seek to run away from the memories of her beatings and how fast your heart used to beat when you thought that maybe, just maybe 73 in English would be the currency that saved you from a thrashing (It did not).

This is an oft repeated story.

But yesterday, something changed. After 8 years, you sat down to watch cricket. You commented in your WhatsApp group that since the pitch was favoring spin, it would be an even match. You shouted when Rohit Sharma hit a four and a 20m, 96m in the crowd six. You felt your heart break when Kohli left for a duck owing to one of the most amazing leg before wicket decisions.

And India won.

India won. Out of nowhere, a memory started to play in your head. It was the summer hols of 2003. You had woken up and the telly was on. She was standing ramrod straight as a flurry of unknown faces flashed on screen to the accompaniment of the national anthem.

India vs Pakistan. The Master Blaster vs The Rawalpindi Express. It was a strange kind of feeling, as you sat next to her and you experienced something new.

It was the summer of 2025 and you were on holiday for your health.

Rohit Sharma vs Rachin Ravindra. That same strange feeling.

India won.

But that was not all. After such a long time, you remembered something about her that did not make you sad, or angry, or upset, or send you reaching for pills.

Sometimes you don’t get to say goodbye, because the person never leaves.

 
The Bilge Master