panchadhara

it has all the overwhelming ugliness of a so called upcoming "town" and the idyll and nonchalance of the average eastern village..it saw surprising amount of development twenty years back, but none since...try remembering one of those acquaintances who have looked 40 all their lives..its surrounded by lusty blue hills on all sides, something typical of the ghats and for a few hours of dusk on random days of the year heaven descends for brief holidays in this unknown uncelebrated part of the world...a stretch of the eastern ghats which nestles my village..known as the panchadhara (meaning five streams)...I decided to write about it after my last visit when I saw it at its best, in a particularly wild devillish green October..

for all my regional ties I do not know much of odia litertature..yet this is briefly borrowed from memory..

"chhota mora gaanti, bhugola pothi patare pache nathau taara naanti"..which should mostly translate to "my little village, so what if it's name is not found in geography books and records"...nahh much of the affection in those words is lost in translation, probably in tandem with my disaffection for its people like many others, over years..

there arent too many such stretches left in this country which havent been terrorized and ruled by terrorists and tourists alike..

if you know a thing or two about tropical rains, you would choose october although november wouldnt disappoint you either..if you think the north is too far, too testing, hills too steep and (like me) too cold, this is your place, you ll like this place in passing, well literally..

in those days take a bus at one of those hours when its about to rain (how you re goin to do that, well you just have to get lucky for the best bit)...treat yourself to a journey through the clouds (a bus is good enough, though booking an autorickshaw is fair if there is a bunch of 4-5 people) which rave titillatingly into the mountains that playfully crisscross into each other. The streams subtly accessorize your view while finding their way around the mountains and tracing their path along the girth of that mountain along with you, for all their harmless presence bordering almost on absence, these streams had expanded during the 2001 floods to gorge down the very roads from where you re gazing down at them (be there and you cant even start to wonder, how on earth that happened!)

so let me stop meandering and mooring around panchadhara's landscape and help you with the usuals:

getting there: take a puri - bolangir, bhubaneswar - sambalpur intercity..and get down at boinda..the boinda station itself is quite pretty, one of those small places where the train wouldnt bother to stop more than 3-5 mins (time of journey (from bbsr - 2.5 - 3hrs)..from there take a bus (max 70 bucks) or autorickshaw (250 bucks) to athamallik (yes, thats my village)...you re likely to cross the ghats which is stretch of somehwere between 5-7 kms 30 mins into the journey...

usp : although am yet to see one in all of my twenty five years, if yu re lucky/unlucky (the way yu see it) yu may spot a wild elephant!! causing an occasional traffic snag :D (most locals and my mom have experiences to recount) (passing tip: choose the evening for this)

usp #1: it will never have touristy usp, its not a destination, its for passing, its for people pursuing other mundane destinations, quite unlikely to sound impressive to people who are in the habit of bunching a few tourist spots together for their itinerary.

usp#2: you re not bumping into he usual tourist or maoist (although news has it that maoists are tracing it on their maps as an exit route)

usp#3: walking through and past clouds, yes you can wonder on why I keep emphasizing this bit

p.s.: those were times of innocence, of coolgal85, cute girl19 and sweetiepie....I was 15, and my first email id was with rediff. Whats the connection?! some of you already guessed it right. for others you can mail me at mala_5springs@rediffmail.com :)...and still others, call me obscure :D

by the way..this is the nanowrimo month...so is anybody doing it :)

mirror mirror on the wall

with blogging self obssesseion has a new address, a web address, ...(thought cloud)..there must be something wonderful about what I think, otherwise I should have stopped at talking to myself(big dark italicized thought cloud)

an ego trip being essential..I would go on to talk some more...about self obssession..
Have you ever wondered whether you remain interested in people as long as they are interested in you...

self obssession is the progenitor and propagator, as is already known its also the destroyer...I shall not go into the horror of a Dorian Gray..

We fall in love with someone who loves us for what we are, so in a way affirms that we are so good that we are not wrong in being slef obssessed.

the only thing that does not fit in is why are women where they are, they should have had a superior place, not a so called special place, somehow the historical defeat of the female sex doesnt fit in, it doesnt fit anywhere in the equation of how civilizations have almost uniformly worked out, in that equation where if you remember civilizations almost unmistakeably grew along rivers, went through their stone ages, copper ages ,..,
This self obssession was why tribes increased, they wanted more of themselves, more warriors, more kings, more slaves, this is the reason why tribes can't co-exist, because that would be giving space and acknoweldeging someone who is not like them, that is the reason men fought wars - self obssession.
Narcissus was stranded at the waters, you and I needed the mirror at times, what happened to women, the only mean for man to express his self obssession, to propagate and to look at his reflection........what was so exceptional about property (which is what mostly the historical defeat of the female sex is attributed to)...what was so exceptional about greed, why did it manifest..more than our inherent desire to see more of ourselves..

P.S.: self obssession is the glow on my face when I remeber correctly that triskaidekaphobia has something to do with the fear of the number 13 and that I came accross it in an episode of FRIENDS, when my otherwise bad memory clicked :)

odd rambles

Should I start by saying that I spent half the day trying to retrieve the password to this account....(note : this was yesterday…..and hopefully that was the last time I abandoned the blog midway)...
As kids we wrote about "Visit to the zoo" and "scene at the railway station"...atleast I have never been asked to write about just bout anything...you know, 'anything'...or were we too young to think about 'anything'...or was it we were too young to know 'anything' about 'anything'....

let me give them some credit...ok...probably they wanted to get us started..but I guess if at school all I wrote about was what I was asked about..answered questions, I didnt learn much.
but everything said and done, not done...some of my friends write really well....and these 'you know whos' should abandon any ambitions they have of becoming lawyers..they should just write.

moving on.. let me indulge myself, indulge in some self obssessed talk...but before that I might as well remind myself here that I have to dedicate one blog to posts that were started and nvr posted in the past one year.. I have been asked to blog about recent events...about how I was woken up by an eunuch's voice in the compartment when she started abusing a man who (dared to) snap back at here when she demanded money….and how my bleary eyes at 5.30 in the morning saw her flashing two guys one after another (as in upper berth, then lower berth..yu see)...or probably it was a bad dream.. or should i blog about work and such other things you know..dunno about others...or what they may have to say......is this the best kind of work I could have done, is it not…challenging and the ilk..but that is a subjective issue as they call it....i cannot ignore the disappointment that is so plainly writ on people's faces when I tell them that I am doing fine...so many of them are rustling through employments news for me...the usual think that either am not competitive..or that I am biding time..about the previous I cannot be objective..of the latter I am sure - I am not, I dont even know whether I value that trait in the first place...but yes I am not biding time...I am not waiting for my time to come...I dont care about competitiveness..about the feathers in my cap..I just want to do everything that I have wanted to do,..ok that is vague..but you get the drift I guess,..... ...I know I want more..that has kept me in the fray...I cant want it the way they want it...more of what I cant bother to explain....chastize me….but I am beyond wanting to change your way...
……blabber, burble, blabber,..a lil more of this blabber..
..I just wish I could do something about them not seeing disappointment on my face…neways I could round up a few things over the last few months...one of them not being why I have not been writing, ...
the jamun tree jokes came..and went...
it isnt a struggle out here..but kind of weird...my life has been kind of rewired between few of the same things, few of the same people...deja vu you say....the same Citycentre, manisquare, beleghata..college..for the better or worse..I dont know..I am too young to be worrying...........
..or should I go on and talk about the scheming PG Aunty (her ploys are straight out of K Soaps)...my PG mates..a bunch of striplings barely out of their teens..their bfs, breakups, patchups, teddies, black nail paint, bangles, frills..life is somewhere between all of this...
O or should I tell yu we have our own version of the ugly naked guy.. o ya, there is this pyscho who bathes with his windows wide open…and this window opens into our yard....
.....ramble, ramble, ramble rumble rumble....ramble...
P.S., NO, I am not being pseudo philosophical….if I had had the powers of Dumbledore..this would just have been a piece of my thought put away in a pensive.

When they don’t talk and say it’s the jamun tree

She had lived in the neighbourhood. I don’t remember when she died. I just remember the legend. The legend of Mania(No. that is the name, pronounced Maa-ni-aa) that followed, that lived through blackouts of summer and the usual loadsheddings. We as children were hushed up with ghost stories and Mania featured in them regularly. She would be that frail white face in the nothingness of darkness, the white sari and the anklets that make imaginary sounds as she glided through the blackness of the night (my present idea of ghosts is quite coloured by dementors, ..too much of Harry potter you say) …and all of that (We were also told about this severed leg which (or the ghost of which) would go about taking revenge, no, I will not go into that..quite gory…although looking back..Why were 5 year olds subjected to such horrors?)

There used to be this jamun tree . The canopy mostly wore itself thin on that tree. And if you looked at the moon through its leaves..wooo.It was spooky. There was something about its smoky (or ashy) green leaves which brought about the eerie once the sun set.

The jamun tree among other things, saw quite a spate of unnatural deaths around it. Some just plain accidental but mostly unexplained or unnatural.

Our house is the last one of our block. As much as I loved the garden, the wet greenness of monsoons and thelackadaisical, carefree and bougainvillea laden winters, Mania’s supposed active after life on that tree, the jamun tree, made the thought of crossing over to our neighbours place anytime after dark , one laden with the probability of a woman in white pouncing on me. (As a child am sure we don’t need an overactive imagination to think of ghosts).

A few years back another neigbour who had shifted to another neighbourhood along with his family was found dead under mysterious circumstances. We still don’t know whether it was a suicide or whether he was murdered. A couple of other accidental deaths happened, one of electric shock and another was a freak road accident. You might ask why I wrote all this, I don’t know now..but when I had started writing they did seem pertinent. My own superstitious conclusions surround the fact that these were people who had lived in quite proximity of that tree. But that is besides the point.

In the meanwhile, our immediate neighbours (they have been here for some 7 years but I still refer to them as the new neighbours, the jamun tree actually belongs to their compound) had been unabashedly ‘trimming’ away the tree (they said there wasn’t enough sunlight for their stupid vegetable garden) until you could say “it used to be a tree”. For the past couple of months all that has remained of it is a foot long stump.

I don’t think its been a month since Gopi, their daughter died (name changed for “I don’t know what” reasons). She had had a chequered background. They say in the days before she died, Gopi used to sit for hours on the stump, thinking, probably contemplating suicide.

Thus interestingly, it again came down to the jamun tree. The neighbours talked, we talked. Tongues let loose by what if not sensational in the first place, had to be made into one. Non one will probably know why she died.

Her father was a drunkard, wife beater, she had once eloped, …all of this is quite unimportant. Hush, did you say, did I say, did the neigbours say.

Mania was raped and murdered, this is an useless piece of information. And more importantly, not something I can still confirm. Like with a lot of other things in life, it came down to the jamun tree. Its so much easier to talk about the jamun tree, isn’t it.

weekend update

We finally have a lawnmower.

heard that its taking 24 hrs from Bhubaneswar to Kolkata.

HR Classes were again in the middle of a storm. this time the winds uprooted everything taht came in the way. Dykes, dams ...how is this to be helped?????

I have gotten into the habit of beating up people. Have to do something about that.

After Outsider, for the first time a book has really excited me..Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook has achieved exactly what Coelho failed to do in Eleven Minutes...YES...showing an effortless understanding of women ....(k fine, it was written by a woman)....guess men will never accept that there are territories they can only invade but never really occupy....that kind of humility is unknown to them.

Can't believe ..I read the preface twice!!!!

And I have 1 GB (almost) music on my phone...isnt that cooool!!!!

Why do yu want to do lawww *nose up, disgusted*?????

Today I added Hemant to my Orkut friend’s list. Flashback to circa 1992. Hemant Kumar joined DAV (Section 2E) the same day as I had some 16 years back and its been some 13 years since I have had any communication/interaction with him. He was this angry kid with that frown, like, forever on his face. If I am not mistaken I was Roll no.32 and he was 33.The only thing that was common between us was that we had entered class after every body had, with that same grumpy face. My face must have been grumpier coz I had entered class with a heavy bag and ..well.. a shaven head (that was the last time). I cannot definitely say so, but all the photographs of that period do suggest the same.

That was also when this bright eyed girl, with neatly braided long hair, offered me the seat next to her. If the circumstance sounds familiar, yes, we did become best friends.
That was also the time when my English teacher, who was also my class teacher then, became my favourite teacher. Ma’am could, without turning her head from the blackboard, ask some back bencher to shut up. I always thought it was some sort of magic. How could she know who exactly was talking even without looking at them? I had only begun to acquire the garrulity that is now associated with me. So one fine day, I asked her, “Madam, how do you do that?” She smiled and said, “I just know, …if you ever do take my place, you will also learn.”
For some reason, I remember my English, Hindi and Social Studies teachers more than the Science and Maths ones. Actually, I remember both, but the former have inspired me more. Ironically I learnt to reason in the formers' classes and it naturally transgressed into my having greater interest in human reason than scientific reason. Perhaps over the years that translated into my desire of not becoming a doctor, engineer or scientist. Perhaps that’s why I went on to consider a career in some twenty odd professions (notably I had wanted to become a journalist (a freelancer, preferably a Times of India Sunday columnist), cartoonist, a Nat Geo Photographer, actor (ahem, not exactly), travel guide(yes), movie director, copywriter, advertising professional, architect etc among teh feasible ones)... Perhaps that’s why, like to many others, law happened to me – this fascination for human reason.

It wasn’t just a whim or intuition after all.