A Bowl of Elusive

Not all relationships are meant to be great love stories, some are just destined to be flings. While love stories make it to the printed page, flings are often forgotten and flushed down the memory lane. This story would have had a similar fate, had this happened to anyone else. But if you meet a writer who's hit a block, and pour your heart out about that girl who just wouldn't call you back, be sure he'll write about it. That's exactly what Poorab (name changed) did. I will surely take some liberties with the story while narrating it for you but will try to capture the essence of what happened as well as possible. Poorab & Ruchi were set up by over-zealous common friends. They started texting each other first, something Poorab excelled at. Especially since he had just recently broken up with his high school sweetheart. Ruchi was the morose, self-deprecating and depressed kind of girl who often finds betrayal in love. Or that was what she made him believe. Poo...

Measuring the degree of how much I want something has always been a challenge for me. I do understand the difference between yearning and obsession but I'm afraid my definitions may vary a little from the societal norms. You see I tend to be a little intense with my feelings. It usually plays out well for me because there's not a lot I want in life. But sometimes it becomes painful, especially when I have no control over the causality of things. That happens when its SOMEONE I'm yearning for. Because the way of the heart can be treacherous and all consuming. If I like you, I like you. There's not much in my control after that. I don't just get infatuated easily, only to be disillusioned later. I often know what I want and when I come across it, I'd pursue it through heavens and hell, through good and bad, through suffering and joy, because it's worth all that. But there's another side to it. An ugly one. I have never had things easy. And ...

Teri har khoobsurat jhooth ko sach maan loon, aisi maasomiyat dhoondhta hoon, Bas tera chehra dekhta hoon aur usmein aage ka rasta dhoondta hoon. Toot ke bikharna to sikha hi diya zindagi ne, ab zara simatke jeene ka hausla dhoondta hoon. Tere baahon mein aisi bhi raatein guzri ki bas sab bhula diya, main ab unmein agli subah ka sooraj bhi dhoondta hoon. Tum nibhaa na paaye rishta uska ghum nahi kiya maine, tere diye huye har jawaabon ke ab main sawaal dhoondta hoon. Thodi der ka jo saath raha tumhara, usimein khudko kho diya hai maine...ab bas tumhari ghair maujoodgi mein apni aks-e-rooh dhoondta hoon. Ye khoj, ye talaash kab khatm hogi meri, jis jheel ke saamne khada hoon, uski paani ke liye main zubaan pe apni pyaas dhoondta hoon. Jo mil jaaye aaj manzil bhi, to shaayad rukna manzoor na hoga mujhe, ab kisi aur sheher mein, koi aur hi thikana dhoondta hoon. Note - I don't usually write in Hindi but this one just wrote itself. I would have preferred...

As you grow up, fewer things surprise you. Eventually, you've seen it all, you've lived it all. There are very few new experiences to be had, very few things that excite you. Eventually, you lose the wonder you once had, the excitement you once felt and I think you just wither away and stop living. But don't underestimate the power of new things. Things that can surprise you, things that can knock your socks off, things that can take your breath away. Like meeting someone new, someone who fascinates you, someone who gets your heart racing, someone who invokes feelings you'd forgotten you had inside. All of a sudden, you're ten years younger, wondrous and hopeful. You can't stop thinking about it. About how good it made you feel. You're inside your own head again, reliving meeting that breath of fresh air, wanting it more. So much so, that it scares you. You wonder if you had that same effect on them. For some silly reason, you look for validation,...

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. ...