Walk a Mile in My Shoes

Walk a mile in my shoes

See the places I’ve been and the places I could go

Feel the earth beneath your feet

And inhale the fresh air that I’ve breathed

Let the yellow lane marker

Guide you to places you haven’t seen

Walk on into the dawn

Wearing my shoes

Maybe one day

My shoes will bring you back

To me my love

For now, follow the path of your feet

Listen to the patter of raindrops and

Feel the sunshine on your feet

Walk a mile in my shoes, stranger

And see the world as I do

And when you have seen what

I have also seen

Walk back to me

With a new pair of shoes

And let the wanderers that dwell within us

Tell us where to go 

Photo Credits- Kestrel Van Der Mark (@kestrel_LAOD)

The Bilge Master

The Things That I Want by Ashesh Mitra

Traffic lights change from red to yellow to green. When it’s green, the cars are clear to go. Until that time though, everything stalls. It has been like this for years now- an open-loop control system giving us direction when we drive

.

It got me wondering-are there traffic lights in our heads as well? Do we have a PLC in there? What tells the body to get up in response to the alarm? What tells the body that it’s raining and also time to dance?

What makes a human being happy? Straight A’s in college? His/her/their favourite band live in concert? A chat with a newfound friend, with whom emails are exchanged? Looking up at the sky yodelling “Wish You Were Here” or “Knocking on Heaven’s Door”?

I wish I knew. I look into the mirror and I see my face looking back. It is a face stamped with tiredness, with fear lines around the eyes; which I also find are lack luster. I go grab some tea and reboot my brain, which still makes me feel like a zombie. Although a functioning one; not one who spends his nights having nightmares about the people he loves or seeing himself dying.

They tell me this is nothing but a bump in the road. I agree. Itis nothing more than a bump in the road, but I am getting fed up now. So I asked myself-what are the things that I want?

The Things That I Want by Ashesh Mitra

A good book, some comforting music, to be able to meet my friends. I want to forget the bad and bring the good back, I want a nice stiff whiskey and some sirloin for dinner. More than all of these things, right now- I want Me.

The old me. The one who was not affected in any way by afflictions like this. The one who always knew what to say. The one who smiled from his soul and not just moved his mouth muscles.

Where is he? Where am I?

The Bilge Master

Ruskin Bond Has Never Ceased to Win Children's Hearts- A Guest Post

The following is a guest post, written by a friend who was a junior back in school. Please welcome Asmita Bhattacharya to the blog!  

The Bilge Master

Every person has an idol to look up to. Some idolize great scientists, some idolize movie stars and many idolize their parents. We admire people who are greater than us and who have achieved greater deeds.

My idol is one of the most prolific Indian writers, Ruskin Bond. Though born as a British, he is an Indian at heart. His works deal with the simplicity of Indian life and has received the John Llewellyn’s Rhys Memorial Prize in 1957 at the age of seventeen, for his first novel, The Room on the Roof. He also received the Sahitya Akademi award for English writing in India in 1992. His works also earned him one of the most prestigious the Padma Shree in 1999 and brought laurels to our nation.

Ruskin Bond is my inspiration as I aspire to become a writer one day. His works have inspired me and instilled a burning desire within me to read more and write about the simplicity and the beauty of nature around. This burning desire of mine brought forth one of the luckiest day in my life, The Day I met Ruskin Bond, My Hero.

It was a great day. I was on a vacation trip to Mussoorie, one of the most fascinating and beautiful hilly regions in India. I was jumping with joy as my parents had planned that we were going to meet Ruskin Bond that day. We had a long walk after our lunch to the Cambridge Book Depot, where Ruskin Bond came down every Saturday, to interact with people. Just as we reached the Bookstore, I blurted out, all I wanted to know about Ruskin Bond's residence. They gave me his contact number and his residential address. We bought one of Bond's books, The Season of Ghosts, so that I could get it autographed. As soon as we walked out of the store, I called up his contact number. After a long impatient wait of six seconds, a lady picked up the receiver. I asked her, if I could speak to Mr. Bond. She informed me that, Sir, was not keeping well and so he was taking an afternoon nap and that I should call back after half an hour. My father decided that we should directly go to his house and call up from there.

Ruskin Bond's house is on a hill top, near the highest spot in Mussoorie. It was no huge building or a sprawling palatial bungalow, it was a cottage and it was as simple as it could be. The house seemed to be camouflaged with the surrounding of wild grass, leaves, trees, vines and creepers. It couldn't be any better. This reminded me of a quotation by Ruskin Bond's late grandmother," Blessed is the house upon whose walls, the shade of an old tree softly falls". As planned I called up again and this time a child of about seven took the call and conversed with me for a long time. After a long conversation, the child asked us to come up and meet, Mr. Bond. We went to the door and knocked. My heart thumped so loud that I was afraid if my parents could hear it. I debated with myself in those couple of seconds, how to start the conversation and how should I answer to his queries.

Ruskin Bond himself opened the door and welcomed us. I glanced around the room briefly, which I assumed was his drawing cum study room. It was old, dusty, sunny, bright and beautiful. It just suited him perfectly. I smiled so hard that my face hurt. I introduced myself and my parents and touched his feet to seek his blessings. I stammered and stuttered as I answered all his queries. I presented him a notebook titled which contained all my poems that I had written till date. He took the notebook, went through it for a moment and then asked, "Do you have another copy?" I nodded, unable to find the proper tone to answer him a YES. He read one of the poems in the notebook. He smiled at the lines, making my heart beat grow faster each moment. After he completed reading, he placed his hand on my head as if to bless me and the little piece within me screamed and danced with joy in the grounds of my endless fantasized world.

I told him everything. How I liked his first novel, how I related to his stories with everyday life, how I loved literature and how I aspired to become a writer one day. He autographed the book I had brought along; he even autographed my diary so that I could share them with my friends. It was time for us to leave and I just couldn't stop smiling for who wouldn’t want to meet someone they really look up to and realise that their imagination of how that person is, isn’t much different from the reality.

Time changes, life changes, people change. Recollecting the happy past brings back those cherished dreams and those lost words and help us move on in life again.

ASMITA BHATTACHARYA

(PERSONAL ACCOUNT OF VISIT TO RUSKIN BOND’S PLACE)

Rusty Cage

I have a dark side

Locked up in a rusty old cage

With corroded bars

And

When I close my eyes

A little bit of my dark side

Trickles out, and wreaks havoc

Morning finds me weary

As if I had run fifty miles

And

My dark side retreats

Into its rusty old cage

My dark side is manipulative

Like an itch you cannot scratch

It is scheming like Gollum from that book

And

So I try, to lock the door

And

Throw away the keys

But somewhere in my head

Is a monstrous creature

Trapped in a rusty old cage

But

Tonight the creature will take the shape

Of a wolf

And

It will hunt its prey

By using black thoughts

Which are exothermic and radiate negativity

Like anions in an electrolyte

Whose conductive nature

Is slowly taking over

And

I will also hunt

For a new cage, with better locks

Because it takes two to tango

And

I want to come out

Of the darkness

And waltz with you in the light

The Bilge Master

Of Depression and Survivial

 Imagine you wake up with this feeling that there is an elephant sitting on your chest. But, you can’t see this elephant because it is in your mind. So what do you do?

You get out of bed.

You get out of bed, grab a cup of tea, say good morning to your best friend, your cousin brother from another mother and this is the way your day starts.

It is another one of those days where you watch funny sitcoms such as Brooklyn Nine-Nine or Community or you boot up a game and play it. Sometimes you get in the mood and write, like you are right now.

See, the thing about Life is it goes on. Day turns to night, night turns to morning and in between these cycles, and you find you’re stuck in a rut for a year.

How to get out of this rut?

You wish you could go out of the house, and today you did. You cooked and you baked and somehow the elephant was gone. It’s like it was never there in the first place.

However it returns in your dreams or should I say your disturbing nightmares. Sometimes, your aggression gets the better of you and you chuck a glass at the wall and take 15 drops of liquid haloperidol to calm yourself.

But you must not forget one thing. It is your mind not some asshat’s who happens to have hacked your firewalls and infected your RAM. But as they say, if you hit rock bottom the only way to go is up.

You keep this thought alive in your mind. When you feel sick, go to sleep. Sleep in spite of the various fearful abominations that plague your dreams. Again your dream not theirs

And then one day you find that you are free from this glass cage that you were in. But it will take time, just as Arthas Menethil took time to become the Lich King in Warcraft 3 or the Battle of Falkirk took some getting used to in Age of Empires II

You hang on, kid. One day it will go. Do not forget that. Keep the thought alive

The Bilge Master

The Rasgulla Seller

This is a true story. It is set about 12 odd years ago, when I was a boy in school. We lived in Salt Lake at the time, near Punjab National Bank in a block called BB. Our house was BB-212. It is where we got a dog; a Labrador named Chuni, with whom some of you are acquainted. This is a story involving Chuni and his love for rasgullas.

A seller of sweetmeats used to pass through BB block in the afternoons. He used to shout roshogolla chai roshogolla (Come and get rasgullas) We used to buy sweets from him. They were apparently home made, and they were fabulous. He used to carry sweets in two metal containers- one for those dipped in syrup and one for dry sweets. He was an aging Bengali man, who looked to me to be about forty. He had a medium height, a slight amount of stubble and a very kind face, with two glinting eyes.

This is where Chuni comes in. As I said, my dog came into our lives in BB. He was a puppy aged about six months when we got him. I should add here that I was slightly jealous of Chuni at the time, because of the attention he got. Within some time however, I started to love Chuni.

Another person who loved Chuni was this rasgulla seller. He would pass through the block on his bicycle, ring our bell without fail and present me and Chuni with two rasgullas. It so happened that his visits became frequent, and Chuni and I would both bolt to the door when we heard his cry. He came in to our house, wiped his sweaty face and drank a little water, before cycling off again. He never accepted payment for the rasgullas he gave to Chuni and me. He called me babu shona (little one) and when Chuni arrived and first met this man, his face lit up and he said that here was another babu shona.

Then, it so came to pass that we had to move out of BB-212. We moved to an area called Sreebhumi, which was close to Lake Town. 

Obviously, the rasgulla seller could not come that far and he bid us goodbye and good luck at our new house.

I was thinking about him today in the morning. I wonder how he is, where he is. I wonder if he is okay, or if some disease has struck him. He was a very kind and gentle man, who loved me and Chuni and the house. He wished me well. Sometimes, he would not come and on those days we would be crestfallen.

Isn’t it strange how a complete stranger, who earned his living selling sweets, had so much kindness to show me? It goes to show you what humanity is capable of.

Wherever he is, I wish him well.

The Bilge Master

PS- A rasgulla  is a type of Indian sweet, which is meant to be had dipped in sugar syrup

Icarus' Ballad

In a land of mythical creatures

There lived a man

Whose inventions were unmatched

He was the creator of a maze

It imprisoned the two legged bull

And heroes quested to and fro

Entering alive, and not succeeding

In ridding the world of this menace

So it came to pass that

The inventor decided to step in

He did not know the price

He would have to pay

For treachery of this nature

For although he made wings

Capable ones, which granted flight

His son, a fair youth

Flew a little too well

And a little too high

His wings turned to ashes

And flailing, this youth

Fell from grace into the cold sea

Where his corpse is still buried

Thus is the tale

Of the inventor and his son

One called Daedalus, another Ikaros

That is why, when this tale is told

People realise the power a parent holds

And should you ever text

While crossing the road

Or talk on your device

While driving a car

You would do well to recall

The legend of Ikaros

For it might save you

From an early grave

The Bilge Master

Footnote- Read about the legend of Icarus here