A Bowl of Elusive

Disclaimer - This is a work of fiction and can get pretty graphic and explicit at times. Read it with an open mind.  It was a humid evening in Kolkata. I could see the puddles created by the rain from this morning. Somehow I had managed to get off early from work. I was visiting the city for a meeting with the team. I wasn’t very fond of Kolkata as a city. It was crowded and loud and unorganized but it had Rashmita. I knew her from my brief stint at the Oberoi Hotel, Mumbai. She had been an Industrial Trainee then and I was a manager-on-training. Being an employee, we considered all interns “kids”. She was still in college after all. It didn’t matter that she was actually older than I was, by a year or so on account of having started the vocation a few years later than I had. So, I was a little stand-offish when she’d asked me if I was single. It had seemed unethical to get involved with a “junior”. But her internship ended after a few months and she left. I did notice her...

Farhana had always been difficult. Mirza and Farhana had met through common friends, and since life isn't a fairy tale, they'd not instantly fallen in love. In fact, they'd been dating different people at that point. Months passed before they reconnected. Both of them were on "breaks", so they made the best of it. You'd be amazed at how many courtships start with a pretense of innocent friendship and flirting. Soon they were asking each other if they'd eaten or not. But since life isn't a fairy tale (reiterating here), both of them had a whole lot of baggage and life was gonna be difficult. Firstly, they'd started with the "I like you but not like that" routine. For some reason, people are too scared to give romance a chance to blossom. But romance is but natural, so it sneaks up on you. And before you know it, you're missing a person's voice, a person you barely know. Now, steering through life's garbage had never ...

While I sat there working on that 87 mb excel sheet, I couldn't for the life of me, figure out how to represent the data I had to. I had put in some tags and now I didn't remember why I'd put them. Even a simple copy paste function was taking several minutes. This problem was just not getting resolved. So I just closed the file, without saving it. I took a leak, drank some water and came back. Then I started fresh on the file. I put in new tags, named them so that I won't forget their purpose, jotted down my thought process and I was done with the file an hour later. This got me thinking about starting fresh. So many times in our lives we keep on persevering on things that aren't going well. We keep trying to find solutions while repeating the same mistakes. It's like if I kept on creating more pivot tables in the 87 mb file, bumping it by another 20-30 mb so that it would hang more and waste more of my time, instead of closing it and starting fresh. ...

Most people go about their lives with a certain clarity which I have noticed that mine doesn't have. I tend to find myself facing one problem after another, many of them resulting from my own actions in some way or the other. So I often find myself wondering if there's something wrong with my nature. A certain school of psychology dictates that a person's nature can be directly attributed to their childhood and upbringing. Personally, I think that's just blame-assignment. I mean, yeah, I had a difficult childhood, yeah, I faced abuse in various forms between the ages of 6 to 10, but can I blame that for the problems I am going through now? No, not directly at least. However, all those things did make me who I am today. And in a way, whatever new soup I find myself in today is due to the person I am. So I kinda went ahead and crossed my own point there. See what I did? Self-sabotage. Some of the biggest decisions of my life have been starkly contradictory to ...

Mirza joined college in the summer of '08. As is usual for freshers, he soon found friends, other misfits and rebels like him. Praveer was one of those friends. Tall, lanky and sometimes awkward, Praveer was a talkative and charismatic young man. And he got along well with Mirza. Praveer and Mirza later ended up as roommates at Indira Niwas, but this story was from a time before that. Male bonding can be interesting to encounter, especially because guys are usually so uniquely messed up in the heads and mingle in such funny patterns. The first year of college was all about finding their footing for Praveer & Mirza. It was a time for their individual personalities to clash and gel with those of their classmates and their seniors, who by the way were no less interesting than our protagonists. Meet Himanshu, Vivek Pratap, Arshad & Deepak, the seniors inhabiting 4 adjacent rooms in the boy's hostel. They were sassy and intimidating, and eventually became role mo...

In one of my earlier posts, I had revealed that I suffer from a condition called Generalized Anxiety Disorder. It’s a very common mental disorder where the patient experiences severe, ongoing anxiety that interferes with daily activities. Now I have spoken about it to many of my friends and acquaintances and the usual reactions are on the line of “try-to-calm-down” or “relax-its-all-in-your-mind”. What people fail to understand is the extreme nature of stress that I experience. EVERYTHING STRESSES ME OUT. WebMD says “Generalized Anxiety Disorder (or GAD) is characterized by excessive, exaggerated anxiety and worry about everyday life events with no obvious reasons for worry. People with GAD tend to always expect disaster and can’t stop worrying about health, money, family and work. The worry is often unrealistic or out of proportion for the situation. Daily life becomes a constant state of worry, fear and dread. Eventually the anxiety so dominates the person’s thinking that it ...

Preface: Mirza is a fictionalized and combined version of the several fascinating people I've met in my 28 odd years on this strange planet. I will be recounting various stories like this one, some weirder than others and I'm gonna call it the Mirza chronicles. Mirza was, for the lack of a better expression, “a regular Joe”. The only distinguishing feature about him was his height and build. But he kind of cancelled those features out with his meek demeanor, if you know what I mean. At that time, Mirza was staying with his friends at Indira Niwas, which was at a walking distance from Vista Do Rio, the hotel where he was carrying out his summer internship. Indira Niwas is a legendary house and this is one of the many stories associated with the place. Mirza was a teetotaler, striking a stark contrast to his housemates who were habitual drinkers and dopers. But they got along well and that’s all that mattered. In the winter of ’09, Mirza was working night shift at...