Missing in Spades

 Terry Pratchett said that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken and I’ve been thinking a lot about this quote for a few days now. Names have old magic to them – they tell you who you are and they tell you who you could have become maybe, because sometimes the name people bestow upon you is the one your blood family answers to and sometimes there’s a name that you’re called out of love or because you like to eat something all the time or because you happen to stink a lot, or fib a lot.

My name is Ashesh Mitra from the first poem in Rabindranath Thakur’s collection Gitanjali and sometimes this name feels like a blessing because I stylize myself as an endless friend, (and that happens to be my Instagram handle – friendoftheendless) while at other times, the name Ashesh, meaning endless in Bengali fills me with sorrow – I have lost so many people – people whose time has come to an end, while I keep going and going, on and on and on –with just the memories of those people ratting around in my head to keep me company. It’s a bit of a chaotic place in my head sometimes as you can imagine with so many dead people, quotes from dead, tattooed trees and images of good food and fun times rattling around in it.

The other day, my friend asked me how I happen to remember, almost verbatim, something that I had happened to read ages ago and we got into an interesting little discussion about how, for me it is the words themselves that herald the magic and for him it’s the details in what he has read and chosen to retain. That got me thinking, literally just now as I got a WhatsApp about something a brother of mine shared a few days back on his Instagram which was all about how we remember the places we’ve been to because of the people that we meet there – the shopkeeper who served us good coffee and sold us biscuits, the homestay owner who decided to give us an extra blanket and celebrated her birthday with us in the room or the curio shop owner whose son pressed a fridge magnet in our hands and told us it was on the house. This got me thinking about how, sitting to lunch with a dear friend of mine, I’d stated that if she was not available on the dates I happened to be travelling, I would have changed my flight plans.

The thing is, I find that a lot of me is sculpted out of the people who made me and make me who I am. Living or dead, sympathetic or intolerant, loving or hating or just calling me when they need to talk (or I do), I am an atlas of all I see and all the people I’ve found ways to connect with and have lost.

And it’s okay to miss the people who harmed me. Its okay to feel overwhelmed when I hear a song that I last heard while dancing with a person who is no longer of this plane. As my friend happened to text me just now – people often miss people, even their toxic exes, but that has nothing to do with love or hate.

And that reminds me of another little poet, Leonard Cohen who happened to write

“I’m good at love I’m good at hate

It’s in between that I freeze

Been working out, but its too late

It’s been too late for years

But you look fine, you really do

The Pride of Boogie Street

Someone must have died for you

A thousand kisses deep”

Thank you for patiently reading something my ADHD mind just cooked up to silence the chaos in my head.

The Bilge Master

The Forgotten

Why is it that pencils are what we use when we learn to write? Is it a mark of conforming? Is it a sign to us that we may be easily erased or lose our individuality if we don't adhere to writing the P or the Q or the I with the ideally placed dot? 

How many people have become like pencils? The artist who was forced to study engineering. The painter who studied law. The beatboxing champion who is now a doctor. What happened to the pencils they used to write their first words, draw their first cartoon or sketch their first landscape? When I was a child, I remember picking up a pencil and doodling instead of tracing the letters. I remember never having an eye for art. I remember blunt pencils which were never sharpened and exam papers with untidy handwriting which bore the impression of an eraser viciously obliterating a diagram or leaving a word in an incomplete state. 

Then the pen arrived and suddenly my life was all blue stains and blotting paper and knocked over inkpots. It was not so easy to erase a mistake then and as chastisement for my mistakes, there would be an angry red mark over the blue - broadcasting my stupidity to the world. The gel pens were equal in torture. I traded ink stains for the ability to chip nibs when I dropped a pen, I traded blotting paper for the last page of a notebook where doodles and scratches dominated the whiteness for the pens had a mind of their own and could randomly stop working. 

Pens may be mighty and proof of that is the fact that I've been brainwashed into using pens for everything now. The pencils I'd sworn allegiance to as a child stumbling around the world of words and drawing my first misshapen lines to form a tree don't even rot in a forgotten drawer - it's as if they never existed. If I had stuck to my pencils, maybe I could have been a better sketch artist, maybe I could have done better in geometry and engineering drawing classes. 

I now find that I'm starting to leave pens behind too. The addiction of the pre rendered font and the gliding of my thumbs over the QWERTY that's taken over the world seems to be ensuring this. It seems foolish of me to think this means that one day we won't be felling trees for paper because should that day come we will have found other ways to obliterate the fragile ecological balance of the earth. 

I wish I could go back and wield a pencil again, to say to it that I am sorry for abandoning it. I wish that I could go back to my gel pens and tell them I'll use them exclusively from now on. 

But we all know that what I'm REALLY going to do is use a clipboard program on my device to send this to you over the internet and then lean back and feel entitled that I wrote something original, while the pencils I've forgotten in some drawer in my house weep for the days they were held in my hands and made me confident enough to write the alphabet from #1 to #26 without hesitation

The Bilge Master

Bangalore and Its Questionable Adults

 Some of you may have read my buildup post about my Bangalore visit last week but this one is the one where I speak about the place in detail, or as many as I can squeeze in without making you feel like this is a monotonous affair.

Bangalore greeted me with incredible weather that stayed with me throughout the trip. There was very little sweat to be encountered because of the arid heat of the city. This meant that my throat would dry up quite frequently and that at any given time I would be carrying at least one and a half liters of water in my backpack as I traipsed around the city. And what a city.

There were a lot of plants and shady nooks in Bangalore. There were bustling streets where the traffic had no meaning or no way of being considered safe. Between dodging a Scooty that wanted my blood and jumping out of the way of an oncoming, raging and crazed Jeep Thar, I found myself sticking to the footpath and observing the people walking to the gym, or entering the metro station or just rushing about. Bangalore is not tranquil like Kolkata. Bangalore is busy, it is lively, it is disco and rock. And just as Kolkata takes its tea and samosa seriously, Bangalore takes its filter kappi and dosa seriously (that is when it isn't snacking on some thatte idli). 

I suppose Bangalore was also its people. I am a member of Chuck and Berty's Song a Day and had the good fortune to meet some of the group's members when I was in Bangalore. It was nice grabbing coffee with all of you and if you ever find yourself in Kolkata then do be sure to look me up. Thank you Shikhin and Bongo for the company at Nerlu's Cafe and of course had it not been for Bongo I would not have experienced orangeade so take some brownie points there. Shikhin, a massive shoutout to you for the good guidance regarding Rapido bikes and your dry humor about Bangalore traffic. 

Thanks go out to Maxxedro as well. Your enthusiasm and insistence about the time that I caught the metro and the grace with which you and your family hosted me at your place and the incredible cup of coffee your mother made me will be cherished. I look forward to meeting you again somewhere down the Path.

Finally, I have to talk about the people who made the 2nd of June, 2026 one for the record books. From Puro picking me up in the car, to that mind boggling magazine that Rico gave all of us, to goofy pictures, Megs and the apple pie and that long drawn out conversation at Puro's place in the august company of his cats, every element of the day was perfect - even the traffic jam on the way to Blossoms in the psychedelic cab. I do also want to say that next time we meet Prathi, I hope its for a longer time! 

Appreciation goes to Rajashri as well. You are a lovely person to drink with and your niche Hot Wheels hobby was indeed a revelation for me. Lets hope that the creativity keeps flowing my dude.And yes, good plans do indeed happen after beer. The morning after belongs to coffee! 

Perhaps this little article should now move to one final person whose presence made this trip precious. It was incredible finally meeting you Merryl. From 2021 to now, we've seen a lot happen and yet we remained goofy and sincere friends. It did not seem at all like I didn't know you when we sat opposite each other, pulverising mutton and discussing recipes and cats and books. I'm fairly sure you'll like some of the fish recipes I plan to feed you when we meet next, wherever that may be.

And with that, I bid adieu to a weird, warm and lovely city whose dosa is fluffy, whose traffic is randomness itself, whose streets go on forever and ever and whose people made me feel like I was a part of their homes. 

Thank you for making this trip one for the record books. I will come back soon to a city that feels like home now.

The Bilge Master 

...Shut up, Ashy. Just get in the car

 I decided to talk a bit about the trip I'm taking next week. I will be travelling for pleasure after ten years and I'll be going to Bangalore (Bengaluru?). I'm sitting in a boiling hot room, listening to the fan struggle to keep it cool and sweating as I write this post about how I feel about all this. This is a trip of many firsts.

This is the first trip without my father for example as he passed away. I should say this is the first trip without my parents for more accuracy. This is also an impulse trip. I planned it over a WhatsApp conversation in exactly five hours. I want to give a huge shoutout to my friend Megs for the discount coupon she shared that allowed me to slash the flight fare by 15%. This is also the first trip where I'm not going to Bangalore for work or for a doctor's consult or for a stopover. This is going to be a trip about hanging out, food and books. The trip will also see me take buses as opposed to cabs in Bangalore because this time the company is not footing my travel bill.

I pause here to take a sip of litchi juice and check the text that just came in. The packet of glassware I had sent down for my friends who live there has reached and that's a really good thing. I crane my neck back and remind myself for the umpteenth time that I need to get the CDs that I dug up packed up as Rico wants them. I cannot speak more of them as they're a surprise for her. As for Puro, I'm looking forward to where he takes me for breakfast.

I'm told that Bangalore apparently has great coffee places and I have not been able to see those ever so when I meet with the members of Chuck and Berty's Song a Day, the coffee place will see itself nicely photographed. I will also be on the lookout for a bag of coffee in Malleshwaram which is close to where I am staying anyway. This of course gets me thinking about the giant book list I have made and how a conversation with my younger brother Rahul last night led us both to conclude the clear and present danger of me loose in a book store. Rahul also pointed out that there would be a high possibility that I tell the list to go fuck itself and actually pick whatever strikes my fancy when I am exploring the mile high shelves and narrow gullies of Blossoms or wandering around Bookworm.

The last first I can think of is the meetup with all these wonderful people whom I've only known in WhatsApp groups and over discussions on Google Meet and I want to give a huge shout out to my dear friend, Gayathri without whom none of this would have happened to begin with. Gayathri blew into my life in 2021 and in exactly a few months she became a very important part of my life. I'm now going to meet the others she calls friends, my friends by induction and I am very overwhelmed.

I am not someone who is used to kindness being shown to him. When Megs heard that I would be coming, the sheer happiness of her texts and calls, her taking the initiative to create a WhatsApp group for better coordination and her sheer bubbly enthusiasm or Puro's silent presence and his whole entire - "Macha, what about grabbing some dosa?" and of course Rico quietly lurking in the group chats and saying, "Come on down. I met you in a book club so naturally I know that you're gonna lose it in a bookstore". It is these little gestures that tell me that this trip will be one for the books indeed.

And bang on cue, here comes a text from someone in Bangalore. I guess I'll shut up and get in the car now! 

The Bilge Master

Art Needs to Make Me Feel

 What is it about corny lines? “The girl looked so good she gave eyesight to the blind”? I chuckled. Then I looked it up. The song is playing now and it’s not too bad. Geometrically, a line is something that is infinite, stretching in both directions. That’s what I like about lines. There are some iconic ones like “It was a bright, cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen” or something along the lines of “You may have gone to Cambridge, but I am an honorary graduate of Starfleet Academy.” Another one that happens to have popped in my head is “Hello Jim. Who died and made you Batman?”

There’s so many different ways to combine words to express what we want to say. People do it all the time, even when words were not a thing. I have found that human beings love to talk, to express. They are ambitious that way and they have voices. Even when in the prehistoric age, humanity made cave paintings did they not?

So what happens when Artificial Intelligence is used to put words together and make up a story? What happens when that story becomes acknowledged with an award? Is it scary? Is Skynet more real now? It’s always said that “Truth is stranger than fiction” after all.

I was participating in a group discussion about this award winning AI written story and actual writers who have written books were all calling it slop. I read the story myself. I found it so ridiculous. None of the sentences made sense, but even then I learnt something. I learnt a different meaning for the word kink and how to use it to imply that meaning when used in the context of hair. Naturally, a human being and not a Google search led me there, sat me down and explained it to me.

In season one of the medical drama The Pitt, there is a scene where a child who is very sick with measles is being denied access to a lumbar puncture by a helicopter parent who puts more faith in a Google Search than the actual resident doctor who puts their medical experience to work and tells both the parents that unless they act, their son could die. The helicopter parent refuses to relent and I don’t want to talk further about this as it will take away from a good moment in the episode.

The world today is a small place, because of the technology that humans have at their disposal. I can log on to anything at any given time and have my fun or spend a good few hours. Video has truly killed the radio star and some of these things are here to stay. Despite many warning about the effects they have on the attention span, children find themselves addicted to reels on social media platforms and grown  men with years of experience try to replace humans work and talent with the good old artificial.

But I was glad that quite a few of us in that group decided to have a good laugh about the story and I managed to learn something about a word, a human created word by reading that story

It taught me that the danger is not the technology itself, but the use of the technology. Funnily enough, I find myself reminded of a line from Terry Pratchett’s beautiful story Men at Arms. “Gonnes don’t kill people, people kill people”. So, while I acknowledge that it is easy now to just type a couple of things into a program and create, there will always be someone else who sits down with a piece of paper and a pen, far away from the reach of artificial and actually writes what he feels.

After all, art needs to make you feel. This AI story failed to do that. But all these corny lines have made me feel so much.

And with that, I take your leave, because I have a comic to read!

The Bilge Master

 

I Dream In Phosphorescence

 Here's a little something nobody tells you about dreams. Dreams come true. The funny thing is that sometimes the dream takes a little time to come true and that's why I beleive that patience is called a virtue. 

As a child, I had a lot of dreams. Some of those dreams saw me astride a dragon, soaring off into the sunset. Others saw me walking on a brightly lit stage - strobe lights and roaring crowds hanging on to my every word while camera flash bulbs went off and dazzled me, forcing me to blink. Other dreams saw me driving down miles of open road, the wind a roar outside the car and Bon Jovi crooning Bed of Roses on the car stereo.

I am no longer a child. My eyes have become a bit grave. My face shows stubble. There are bags under my eyes sometimes and my dreams are now like acid trips and make me wake up screaming. I cannot sleep in a dark room any more, however miniscule; a light source has to be there. I have a therapist now and a martial arts teacher. I cook my own food and drink a lot of coffee, sometimes laced with alcohol.

That popular song starts playing in my head sometimes 

"Her dreams went out the door, when she turned 24". As did mine. I dream in phosphorescence now. I dream of fantasy worlds and of meeting an orangutan in a library. I dream of endless alleys littered with books that are available for cheap. I dream of tender stewed chicken which is to be relished with a nice piece of naan. I dream of being who I am with people I care about - joking with them, reading the books they give me, playing the games they make me a part of. I dream of going on walks with them and their dogs and of sharing what makes me sad with them.

The thing is, I've changed. I'm not a child anymore. My dreams have changed as well. It's almost a disease with me - I can never stop dreaming. A house littered with books and the smell of good food. A room of my own which has art made by my friend on the wall. I dreamt of all this and I dreamt of more things too. I never noticed some of those dreams coming true. I never realised when a dream became something I was living, when it became a truth. 

So, continue dreaming and stay a while. Let that dream become a truth Let me remind you of the horseman in Robert Frost's poem who stood by the woods, watched the snow fall in them and then acknowledged their beauty but also the fact that he had miles to go before he could sleep. Why do you think we dream the most when we sleep? Could the horseman have a desire to dream? Robert Frost seems to think that his horseman had a dream that he wanted to turn into a truth.

"Dream on, dream on, dream on

Dream until your dream comes true" 

I must admit that my life is kind and in many ways driven by the dreams I dared to dream as a child. My life may not be much, but it is mine. It is fuelled by many dreams and many truths.

The Bilge Master 

How I Cooked Myself Out of It

My flat is being renovated and the place is a god awful mess with a metric ton of dust on everything. The dust has caused me to develop a mild cough and sore throat and the only passing that Pippa would be doing would be passing away. Even killing time has lost its charm and I find myself ready to bolt out of doors, screaming for my (dead) parents every now and then. I'm told that this is my body reacting to the noise, supplemented by the heat and the chaos of yells, slams on marble, the kind of cuss words that make me feel like sailors are golden tongued and of course dirt everywhere. I also want to have a chat with the sun because what the fuck is this temperature of 38 degrees which feels like 42 degrees? 

Now, let me be clear. I should have expected some of this. I am neurodivergent, I am now learning, one typo at a time, that what that means is that this is a sort of natural state from which my nervous system craves respite almost on a constant need basis and since I am now a part of the body that hosts this nervous system, of course it means I need to be the one to calm it down. So, since running out of the house screaming for my dead parents is not on the table, I needed a solution. 

My solution was to cook. Just cook.

Over the course of the past four days, there has been some action in the Mobius Kitchen and now at the end of April, I find that the provisions have proven most useful. I've cooked fish and eggs and more eggs and some chicken as well. I've combined stuff like soya sauce with honey and pizza issue oregano to make a blend for chicken which a friend called Sammit told me would go really well with a pizza as well. I've obeyed the recipe for a cooler shared by a friend over Instagram. This friend by the way is also an Earth Genasi like Mobius Worblehat! There has been the lesson of the fact that turmeric is the game changer in fish curries and the equally important lesson that eggs if left too long in hot oil tend to explode and then you have yolk everywhere.

Don't get me wrong, I still want to run away screaming for my dead parents but at least I can do it on a full stomach now. I suppose that now that I am the only one keeping score of how I'm staying and what my body is asking of me, sometimes I need to bend the rules and sometimes I need to heat oil, add masala and temper temper away the blues.

Shout out to all my friends who are a part of this journey with me and my trusty cooking pot who has seen me concoct many things.

The Bilge Master