Up, Away

Up, away from the hopping crowd sit I,
Looking down into the merry world.
A bird of thought in my mind was nigh;
It flew away, its wings unfurled.

Down below, I can see a city
Hop its way from here to there.
Boys, girls wanting to be pretty,
While I sit alone without a care.

A Walk Back

Empty spaces fill me up with holes/ Distant faces with no place left to go….

 

Unknowingly, this Backstreet number comes up on shuffle on my phone’s music player. I’m unaware. I impatiently push the volume tab higher. Alas! 14 is all that stares back at me. Sealdah can be quite a melee at all sorts of odd hours of the day. The blaring horns of the run-down buses above; the colourful, loud shops below – selling anything from a pin to the most outrageous copy of the latest gizmo. People hollering all round – someone running to catch his train, a tired worker returning home, head buried in his chest, a jewellery-laden, not-so-beautiful boudi tripping on a lethargic street dog. Judging by the screams that emanate, it’s hard to decide who the victim is and who the perpetrator. A chivalrous dada kicks the bewildered dog away. The boudi walks away without a look. The dada looks disappointed.

 

All around, a milieu of people engages in a plethora of such incidents. I walk on. I’m unaware. Damn the headset. Wish the volume would blare louder into my drums…

Of Derozio, Rationalism and Contemporary Thoughts

The viewless winds are wandering!

Now o’er the flower-bells fair they creep

Waking sweet odours out of sleep;

Now stealing softly through the grass

That rustles as the breezes pass,

Just breathing such a gentle sigh

As love would live for ever by!”

With these lines have been captivated, nearly two centuries of scholars; lines that poured from the pen of one of modern India’s most endearing symbols of intellectualism, a poet ingenium cui sit, cui mens divinor, a rousing spirit of the Bengal Renaissance – Henry Louis Vivian Derozio.

The mere fact that two centuries after his birth, we come together to celebrate the life of this young poet, bears testimony to the impact that Derozio’s short yet eventful life had on intellectual awakening in 19^th century Bengal. Derozio remains the guiding spirit of Presidency College, the forerunner of which was the Hindu College where Derozio taught, and planted the seeds of rational thought in the minds of his fellow countrymen.