I hate the uncertainty that is life now…
But I love the feeling of not knowing what tomorrow holds too, for every decision I make now will shape something as concrete as a career …and a job will not be some intangible myth that everyone talks about but never experiences…and phrases like “settling down”, “future prospects”, “bank balance” and “provident fund” will colour my hitherto bohemian vocabulary…
And these overwhelming realities do unsettle me for I have chosen to ignore the adult responsible being in me for much too long …am 24 and haven’t ever held a position of responsibility (professional or not so professional) in my life, which makes me, in polite terms a “carefree guy”, and in not so polite terms a “loser”…
And now that I have something/someone wonderful in my life, I would like to live life as it should be, with responsibility and independence…
Tomorrow, after all is all about what you couldn’t do today…

All through my growing up years, there would be nights when I would wake up with my heart beating violently, and I would lie in terror, unable to fathom the cause of my dark despicable fear…
Little did I know that they were the ghosts of my unresolved present haunting me…
Now that I have exorcised those ghosts, I dream of a bittersweet life without unfathomable fears…
Am happy and am in love…

My labour of love was flung on my face (well almost)...

Five hours of pure meditation produced something which , am if not proud of , quite happy with...i rush to my course instructor only to be told that he doesnt want me in his course (well cant blame him, i slept through his course, bunked classes and did not submit assignments)...but that doesnt take anything away from those five hours of "intense academic concentration"....

Tarkovsky's Sacrifice...

Anyone could characterize Tarkovsky's work as meditative plodding, which is both right and wrong: the meditation is often rewarding and always more intellectually appealing than the work of most other filmmakers, but it can also venture into the realm of the ponderously ponderous. Who is doing more philosophizing, Tarkovsky or his characters? Sometimes I cannot tell, and those instances lack the immediacy of an artist (in the guise of the character) poignantly reaching his philosophical limit and an emotional climax at which he can only gaze helplessly into the unknown. At such times, Tarkovsky momentarily loses control of his themes, and that some of his films more or less lack clear resolutions (and I don't mean simple or reassuring in the Spielbergian sense, but simply that we are able to discern without mistake what remains) seems to emphasize this. But that doesn’t take away anything from the spiritual world he creates through the journey of his characters…
In Tarkovsky's last film, The Sacrifice, we see the hero, in a black-and-white sequence, running from a house in which we have just seen a nude young woman in a bedroom. We then see him wandering in a large garden, where he picks up some small coins from the mud and rotting leaves, before freezing into immobility amidst the falling snow and the old trees, which thanks to his brilliant camera work seems to be a part of his being. The eerie calmness of this sequence is akin to the feeling of waking up after a horrible nightmare, but it is neither one nor the other, its something in between nightmare and reality. It seems to be a feeling captured in celluloid. Something which is as personal as inner breathing. The tangibility of which, seeps in only after you meditate on it.
This particular scene is quintessential Tarkovsky, not because it is characterized by his trademark craftsmanship, but because it carries within its fold, Tarkovsky’s understanding of the human nature.
The Sacrifice is a story of lack of spirituality in mankind; it’s about Alexander, a journalist and former actor and philosopher, who tells his little son how worried he is about the lack of spirituality of modern mankind. In the night of his birthday, the third world war breaks out. In his despair Alexander turns himself in a prayer to God, offering him everything to have the war not happened at all.In his attempt to charter the spiritual journey of his protagonist, Tarkovsky, meticulously depicts, through visual metaphors, the spiritual journey of the mankind.
In the opening scene of The Sacrifice the hero's son and a postman appear on the shore of a bay, where the hero - before a motionless camera, no a very slowly moving camera - is transplanting a withered sapling. They approach as if they were dragging along the vastness of the whole world outside from over the horizon. Their garrulousness (the postman) and their silence (the mute son) seem to form a complete, "synthesized" chord with the hero's soliloquy, in which they gradually join. The use of sound in Tarkovsky's films is legendary, however. His unique "music" which almost always manages to unsettle me, is intrusive, discreet by turns, at odds with, and in harmony with the images, is an inseparable element of the director's vision. Even if we take only The Sacrifice, we find images on the screen accompanied by the sound of an unseen coin tapping (as the tired hero falls asleep on the couch), a loose sheet of corrugated iron clattering in the breeze (as the introduction to a scene showing the Alexander's son asleep), and distant music and ancient chants in Swedish or Japanese (hence remote in space and time). The sounds themselves transport the visual to a distant setting, to other lands and other times, which provide the indispensable counterpoint to its present reality.
The spiritualization is not limited to human beings; his brilliant use of light manages to breath life to the most inanimate objects, giving them spirituality, and through them an understanding of his spiritual world begins to develop. A gleaming porcelain jug, which carries within its fullness the satisfaction of human thirst, is given its due screen time…
The cupboard, whose door twice opens beside one of the characters without anyone touching it, has a life of its own…
It is not that everything in it is inseparably tangible, sensual, and "spiritual", that the outward form of things cannot be divorced from their emotive significance, from the investigation of their inner meaning - his films are unmistakable evidence of the functioning of one person's subjective vision. Tarkovsky’s vision is self generating , it constantly needs to be subjectified, in fact at times one feels that these are images that the director did not invent but allowed to happen…
In brief, this film seems to have been created almost in the biblical sense, as something with an independent existence. And through the movie one experiences the world with redoubled intensity.Tarkovsky's images are not merely the product of his inner vision; they also have the ability independently to increase and multiply infinitely… during the fire scene in a nearby meadow we find a replica of the hero's house reduced to the size of a child's toy. As it was evidently placed here by the hero's son, as a birthday present for his father, it suggests an image of the future taking shape in the present, the reduplication of the present in the future...
In Tarkovsky's work, childhood is a treasure lost before it has begun. The creak of the sheet-iron, which, with the flickering light, accompanies the hero's son as he falls asleep in The Sacrifice, announces the destruction of the house in which he is growing up, and lays the foundations for his future on this loss.
The idea of fertility and regeneration seems to be a recurrent albeit disillusioned one in The Sacrifice (even though the mute child through his act of nurturing, seems to give us some respite from the feeling of desperation that overwhelms by the end of this film).
All Tarkovsky's female characters, incidentally, appear at once calm and troubled, aristocratic and primitive. They give the impression of being like "God's creatures", dedicated to higher things, but also possessed by the devil. They seem to hold the key to good and evil, love and hate. When the hero's wife is seized by convulsions on hearing of the approach of war, she writhes on the floor, with her skirt riding up her thighs, as if shaken at once by insatiability and an organic need to destroy.
The heroine of The Sacrifice is symmetrically complemented by the countrywoman Maria, who evokes at once Christian sainthood (by her name) and a pagan priestess, b the act of love with the hero she enables him to save the world from destruction.

"Once upon a time, long ago an old monk lived in an orthodox monastery. …." Alexander narrates a story to the "little man". "Once he planted a withered tree on a mountain side. Then he told his pupil, a monk named Kolov, to water the tree each day until it came to life. Every morning he filled a water carrier and went out. He climbed the mountain and watered the withered tree and at night fall he returned to the monastery. He did this for three years and one fine day, when he climbed the mountain, he saw the tree covered in blossom".
The story that a father narrates to his son seems to be the essence of Andrei Tarkovsky’s
The Sacrifice….


Premankur Biswas.

All my life I have tried to be different from her. There have been so many decisions in my life which I have consciously taken, not to end up like her.
I hate it when she looks at me expecting to see a bit of her in me…I hate it when I look at my reflection and see her…

Because deep down, I know I will never be like her… I will never be able take the cruel blows of life so determinedly as she has… I will never be able to love life as passionately as she has… I will never be able to make the mistakes that she has made… I will never be able to learn from those mistakes as she has…

Because she has given me so much that I grudge her her generosity…

Today in reterospect I can safely say that I want to be my mother…my identity lies firmly and happily on the fact that I am my mothers son…

This is for u mom, the grande dame of my life….

She turns 52 today…

I love artist’s impression of court proceedings…they are so very quaint and so wonderfully pointless…like the script girl Bergman never forgets to mention in his credits…the script girl of course is a 30 something, once sharply pretty now fluffy on the sides, spinster…she wears crisp white shirt and asymmetrical brown/black/grey/ knee length skirts…has shoulder length hair always tied up in a bun…and is of course bespectacled…

End of an affair....

My tumultuous Google affair comes to a bittersweet end...

Dear Premankur,

Thank you for taking the time to speak with our campus interview team.While we carefully reviewed your background and experience, unfortunately wedidn't find there to be a close enough match for a positionto move forward at this time.Thanks again for considering Google. We wish you well in your future endeavors and hope you might consider us again sometime down the road.

Sincerely,

Google Staffing

My Reply

Dear Google Team,


It has been quite an experience interacting with your very capable and efficient campus interview team. It's unfortunate that our association has to end here; but I will definitely say that I walk away enriched from this experience.
However, I wonder how you managed to review my background when I hadn't submitted any documents or reference numbers. But then, you are Google and everything is just a "lucky search" away for you guys.
Warmest regards to Sachi, Shiraz and Nicolette for guiding me through what could have been a series of disastrous interviews (not that they weren't).
And as years of diligent Googling has taught me, a perfect alignment is just a click away.

Thank you for bringing me a step closer to it.

Premankur Biswas

1051200 minutes
Is two years of my life…
How should I measure it?
In daybreaks, sunsets, midnights???
Or
In heartbreaks, surprises and lies???

This is again a very tentative effort to translate a Punjabi folk song (I have been told that I suck at this and yet I obstinately carry on)…

She who kneads the dough
She who spins the yarn
She who weaves a quilt of dreams for her children
Has wisdom of her own…
Why then, should she shower her son
With all that she has
And gift her daughter
A legacy of misfortune???

Male
24
Single
Hyderabad
India

That’s what my being boils down to…

As if my gender is my identity…
As if I was born 24…
As if there is no pain in being single…
As if there is no story behind my being in Hyderabad…
As if being Indian means anything

I will let you sing to me
A sad sad song
I will let you release me
From my happy happy reality
For my big secret
Lies heavy on my heart
So will you sing to me
A sad sad song???

Goodbye Center of Decadence

As the afternoon sun sets over the green CIEFL campus I am suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of surprising nostalgia. Surprising, because in my two years in this campus I have nothing but hated each and every aspect of it, from its hastily put together jam sessions (though I am always the last person to leave the dance floor) to its pretentious Festival of Ideas (thank god we didn’t indulge in that intellectual hedonism this year), from its futile, high voltage GB meetings (I stopped talking to two very good friends for a week after we had a minor clash of opinions) to its loser infested chai crawls (thankfully it died its natural death). And more passionately than everything else, I chose to dislike (am consciously not using the word hate here because hatred would entail some kind of emotional investment) the people here…
And yet today, at the fag end of my stay here, I feel something so indiscernibly weird…
Which raises a lot of questions…was I pretending not to have a good time here?? (sometimes maybe)…was this 2 years stay really that unfruitful?? (maybe not…)
And horror of horrors, will I miss this place?? (I will definitely miss some life long friends that I have made here)…
And most importantly – what do I like about this place??
Apart from the lush greenery of the campus and a few friends , nothing much really, well wait there are other things …yes I do like being part of the Film Club and I do like being a part of something as concrete as a play (whenever we stage one)…
But that doesn’t make up for the bad everything I am subjected to everyday…
And don’t get me wrong I am not talking about the bad mess food (which I kinda like) and the stinky toilets (which I am kinda immune to nowadays)…
Goodbye CIEFL I will all but miss you…

P.S. I hate the grotesque entrance plaza too, God will anyone ever do something about that weird Jantar Mantar meets Great Wall of China thingy!!!

Pom is angry with me…
Pom is angry with me because I think one of her childhood snaps is ugly…
Pom is a friend’s sister…
Pom is a smart pretty young girl who has everything going for her…
Why then is Pom so bothered with what I think of a moment of her life captured in celluloid…?

Because Pom is as vain as I and u are, of course…

Prithibita naki choto hote hote...

This is a very tentative effort to translate the first few lines of a brilliant Bengali song by a band called Mohiner Ghoraguli ( The horses of Mohin)…am sure Myriad Mind who introduced the shamefully uninitiated me, to this song , will do a much better job of it…but here is it nonetheless…

Have heard that globalization
Has held the world captive in a drawing room idiot box
But do you realize
Now
We are more than light years away from each other?

Desire de la Coeur …
Or
What the heart wants…

On a hot April afternoon
The reason of the heart takes over
And I wake up calling out “maa…”
Obstinately waiting her to come and make things better
Knowing fully well that she can’t, she won’t….

Desire de la peau
or
What the skin desires...

On a hot April afternoon
The needs of the body takes over
The heat that leaves me breathless
Urges me to do something desperate
But shall I, will I, can I???
Maybe not
Am afraid of being seen for what I want
After all am “worth a lil more than just what my skin desires”…
Or am I?

Me as only i can be......

A day in the life of my scrapbook..

Arunima: r u back?
Arunima: ok, sir. i will be waitin
Bodhisatwa: Sei chele ta sei je gelo...gelo to gelo... ar elo na
Bodhisatwa: that sounds really trippy...masochistic for me in a way...however i believe i'll still go for it...as good as it gets
Arunima: hi, so had lunch? took bath? wok up from siesta? then, thou came?
Bodhisatwa: Are baba na.Subhadra is planning a trip to Goa,so i was generally suggesting her as to where she could ideally be to have a blast within a stipulated budget
Arunima: oh, i see. so wat did u hav for lunch?( does my Q. sounds silly?actually, cant think in the afternoons)
runa: such a bitch you are ...huh
Bodhisatwa: You mean the cult director from Hong Kong?
Dhruv: that may take a while to answer as i'm trying to think of something that sounds more profound than 'msc chemical biology'. something along the lines of 'discovering myself...'
Bodhisatwa: Just seen one...Days of being wild...kono ekta festival-e dekhechilam...very unique in treatment...loved the way he falls back to memory and related it to current time and space
Bodhisatwa: Yeah as usual.Friday's we are always there.Love the Band.They actually are very good friends and i do get a preferential treatment with all my favourites being played.Saturday-ta mainly ghumiye-i kete jaye then sandhyebela i try and catch up on some films before going to Some Place.Again.This time for a Blues Band.And Sunday barir sathe lunch.Na hole my folks get pissed big time...ar sandhye bela theke abar the blues..this time the emotional one...office-r katha bhebe.
Bodhisatwa: Hey my gang's honking outside.Got to rush.Have a lovely weekend
skydiving: what was that humming for??
Anirban: hey! how are u?
arunlekha: we are all wondering where you are, you know?
arunlekha: where are you brother?
skydiving: hmm
Arunima: ok, enjoy. r u the director? or the playwright? i wish i could go there to see it myself :( tk cr and gud luck.aar bhalo kore koro tomar back-stage work
arunlekha: HEY!ARE YOU THERE?HOW IS/WAS PLAY?
pallavi: GUYS I WAS DOWN WITH MEASLES. BACK NOW
Dhruv: kinda fond of the family jewels
Bipasha: 342 scraps!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! wow ur fast!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Bipasha: hmmmmmmmmm you never told me what happened that day wereyou "fast" then too?
Bipasha: ok ok i take your word for it, but i hope u had fun wats up, loved ur new blog entry, am thinking of doing a similar one. would i be infringing copyrights or do i have exclusive permission?

Wonderfully random isn’t it…but if u follow Ug and solan’s blogs regularly u will detect a narrative in this maze of scraps….

This Time Yesterday...

This is a prequel (well at least has a pretension of being one) to a post made about 6 months ago, called, “This Time tomorrow…”

This time Yesterday: was blogging and orkutting (I distinctly remember ridiculing Solan on her low scrap count)…

This Time an hour ago: was thinking about this very post…

This time last month: wondering if I should at all submit my mid semester assignments, my decision is anybody’s guess…oh, was of course blogging too…

This time last year: was wondering why hadn’t I still managed to get myself a single room and was cursing my pleasant and harmless roommate for being alive (Hyderabad heat does get to me)…

This time ten years ago: was discovering the joys of verbal self expression through my sisters diary…decided to get myself one immediately …lost my sisters trust forever in the process…she still hasn’t forgiven me for discovering the deepest darkest secrets of her adolescent soul…she refuses to believe that these secrets were immaterial (I cant even remember the name of the guys she had a crush on) and unimportant, they were just a trigger to get my creative juices flowing…

This time twenty years ago: expressed myself independently for the first time…in the form of a doodle in my father’s bank pass book (they didn’t even have the good sense of preserving it hmmmph!!!)….

This time twenty-five years ago: A determined sperm with one y chromosome of Prabal Chandra Biswas made a dash for the egg in Malabika Biswas, and the rest as they say is history…