First Snow

I am a subscriber to this online poetry forum called Minstrels, where I receive a poem by mail almost everyday. The poem I received on 12th November goes like this :

People

No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.

Nothing in them is not particular,
and planet is dissimilar from planet.

And if a man lived in obscurity
making his friends in that obscurity
obscurity is not uninteresting.

To each his world is private,
and in that world one excellent minute.

And in that world one tragic minute.
These are private.

In any man who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight.
It goes with him.

There are left books and bridges
and painted canvas and machinery.
Whose fate is to survive.

But what has gone is also not nothing:
by the rule of the game something has gone.
Not people die but worlds die in them.
-- Yevgeny Yevtushenko

The poem itself if very beautiful and it concurs with my philosophy, but what makes it all the more special is that it mentions "his first snow" . By a strange coincidence, I DID experience my first snow-fall on the same day I got this poem in my mailbox!! There is something magical about "the first snow". Its biting cold, yet you want to venture out and play with the snow flakes. Others around you will have their umbrellas open, but you won't be able to get yourself to open yours. There's an inexplicabe elation. The poet could not have been more correct. I'm now waiting for my first kiss ;-)

wow...its 3 degrees POSITIVE today

Just a week of cold, and I find myself undergoing a paradigm shift. My defintions of cold and pleasant have changed. I really surprised myself when I looked at weather.com,before leaving my office for home , and when I saw that its 3 degrees, I said to myself, "Wow ! Its pleasant outside today" . Soon I was wondering if it actually went down to 3 in Calcutta, what would the reaction of the city be. The baboo would be convinced that doomsday is here !

The last 2-3 days have been cold. The maimum has been 3-4 degrees and the minimum -4 or -5. And I have been working late at nights, so I invariably end up walking back home at around 3-4 am , when the cold is at its worst. Somehow, I actually enjoy it. Its a new experience. I am just waiting to see snow, and I realise that the wait isn't going to be too long. The past week though cold has been very clear, but by law of averages, it rains at least once a week, so maybe the next time when it gets overcast, it wont rain, but snow!

I also realise that this is Diwali time, but strangely I dont feel the need to be a part of the festivities. I think its good...otherwise I would end up feeling like shit. Whoever is reading this - wish you a happy Diwali.

Pather Panchali

Its quite a shame that I end up watching a Bengali masterpiece like Pather Panchali, in the US, surrounded by people who barely understand the society and struggle that this movie portrays, let alone the language. Ironically, I think I enjoyed the movie more here than I would watching it at home.

Well, the movie IS a masterpiece. Some critics might say that it is too slow. Yes, it is slow, but I feel it has deliberately been kept slow. Also, some people are restless. Others, like me, relish it when time moves slowly. So it definitely wasn't too slow for me.

What made the movie special ? The simplicity and ubiquitousness of the theme. It is an ordinary story of ordinary people, just narrated in an extra-ordinary way. This in my opinion is the hallmark of a good story-teller. It is the story of family in a village facing the vicissitudes of fortune. Plenty of movies have been made on this general theme, but what makes this special is (a) the picturization and (b) the ability to to make one empathize without resorting to melodrama.

The picturization is just brilliant. The scenes that will be etched in my mind for some time are the candy-man, durga, apu, and dog scene and the scene where Durga and Apu play hide and sike around a dilapidated wall. See it and you'll know what I'm talking about.

The reason this movie was all the more special to me was because of a feeling of association. Sitting here in the US, there is hardly anything with which you feel an immediate connection. For once, I truly understood the characters, the colloquilisms and the setting. There's something about rural Bengal which is really magical. Rural Andhra or rural Orissa isn't the same. I speak out of my experience on the Howrah-Madras route. I always knew it by the scenery when we entered Bengal.

Finally, the scene of the water bugs darting about in the pond : it made me nostalgic about my IIT days. Actually, I get nostalgic about IIT at the drop of a hat , but this was different. I remeber one fine winter morning in Chennai when Shivaram and I decided to go explore the IIT lake area in order to prepare for the "Nature Lovers' trek" that we were organizing during Saarang. We ended up accidently noticing these same water-bugs on the IIT lake, and were awe-struck by nature's beauty that manifested itself as these timy bugs moving absolutely randomly on the water surface. I dont know what was the purpose of that scene in the movie, but it was definitely a statement about Satyajit Ray's idea of beauty . I wonder how many urbanites have seen these water-bugs ?