Avik's Story

Dr. Jerome Motto, a psychologist wrote about a guy in his thirties, who jumped to death in 1970 from the infamous Golden Gate Bridge, which often termed as a marvel of technology, but a social failure. The reason was haunting. Deeply haunting. The guy wrote his suicide note, or rather ‘life note’ as below: But no one smiled at him. No one. Even witnesses told their accounts later about how the guy waited on the railing of bridge for hours till sunset and kept smiling at random people. I remembered late writer Sunil Ganguly too wrote about the incident in his famous travelogue on Paris “Chobir Deshe, Kobitar Deshe” (In country of Paintings, In the country of Poems), while pointing towards the relative heartlessness of crowd. I know, in this world of unreasonable earthly madness, this surreal act of lunacy sounds silly and immature. Maybe empty to many. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the pain and hopelessness of that poor guy standing on the verge of death, putti...

‘Okay. But I don’t know Chinese. How can I know Chinese? I know Hindi. Can Hindi work?’ I fumbled to explain. And then she laughed. I was in this line in Airport in Mauritius preparing for check-in. My time with my two awesome pagliz had ended surreally. At very last moments, while Vedantika cheered with us with her adorable water bottle, we like two good-old friends opened Tequila and had three shots with lemon and salt. My taxi was waiting outside. And it was raining. I didn’t want to come back, but sometimes we are out of options like the wasted rain drops over the glass of speeding car. Sometimes we can just held hands and pretended to be grown-ups. And we did that, in taxi, in waiting hall, and even when we stood in the line for collecting boarding pass. She carried my trolley. Her eyes as usual were mysterious but poignant. God! I already started to miss her. We miss more when we get more. And then it happened. We were in front of this check-in counter. A young pre...

I remember Ojha Sir of Vajiram used to say in class, ‘Do you know how to recognize common men? Just ask them the solutions of the most impending problems of India. They will have the same answer. How to solve Kashmir? Send Army and kill all. How to tackle Maoists? Send Army and kill all. How to check growing militancy in North-East? Send Army and kill all. How to deal with Pakistan? Send Army and kill all.’ And then he used to pause, and announce little dramatically, ‘And when you find them, just do not debate. Because you cannot win. Just nod and leave.’ Whole class laughed. They liked it, because they knew it was true. Or, as it was an IAS preparation class, power-dreamy students pretended to understand with their temporary open-minds. Whatever. Surfing Facebook is fun, because only here people can’t pretend for long. You open a person’s profile, don’t go for the ‘About’ section, rather look into his/her sharing patterns, you definitely get a hold of that pers...