Camouflaged in a Black Glass

14:00 hrs IST: 21 killed as cyclonic storm hits Kolkata..(I get a call from my friend telling me to stay put!)
15:30 hrs IST: Worst storm in 20 years hits Kolkata..(Cellular Network lost)
15:50 hrs IST: Two people including me try to brave the storm. We find a lone taxi standing. We hire it. But alas! it cannot reach my place. Tree trunks lie everywhere preempting any movement of vehicles.

16:30..31.... I get out of the cab and start walking.
Somewhere in midst of a storm outside, I felt the futility of a mere black umbrella against a behemoth of a kind. A similar kind of feeling delved into my thoughts and that was for myself, I suppose. Ah Boy! Leave that euphemism aside.


The sky was already looking ominous, perhaps with a streak of prophetic entanglement. The trees started swaying with the wind, but it was in anguish rather. I could not hear them cry, but I could rather see it through the wind. The view through nakedness looked like one through a pair of black sunglasses, with the lenses having an exceptional defect of optical aberration. At that point, I happened to realize that my fate could be no more optimistic than that of the trees and then even a bigger fact that I did not seem to care about it any longer. I was still walking, unaware and unconcerned of the distance left to cover. Trees had crashed into their own species, stray inanimate cars, man-made obelisks in a theme park and then, I saw some survivors scampering ahead of me in godspeed hurry. A little while later, I witnessed an unusual sight: A girl picking up flowers from a fallen tree and a boy holding up an umbrella above her head with a precious meticulousness. Although, the rain was falling at a near horizontal angle. A tinge of a faint smile came to my lips, with a silent wish, "Careful! Dolts."

I could see a gigantic tree trunk lying ahead of me and it stuck my mind like some paralyzing force with a trace of wistful longing. I did not want to go ahead nor I wanted to admit the unverified veracity to myself. I took a few steps that exhibited my reluctance to continue yet my steps goaded me to carry on. I could get under the log with an aching screech coming from my backpack which had rubbed against the wood.

Sometimes in life, a devastating force is all that what serves to make equilibrium with a forsaken will. The living force needs to serve its own verve to make it worth living. I could get the portentous message: "Be the change you want." Thinking of my dreams and fleets, I started running among hushing inhabitants. I needed this life as badly as the storm and perhaps as exuberantly as its intensity. I reached the house marked "11" and barged into it through the front door. I felt the gloom gradually clinging to evanescence as I fell asleep in the couch..

A rendezvous with Destiny: Enter Rainman

What could you possibly do when all circumstances sketch an incontrovertible visage?

What if there is neither an inception nor an end?

What if all the possible alternatives have preempted one another?

And finally who wins the duel of the fate?

You or is it your fate!

Call it divine intervention or be it serendipity..... or what ever else your mind can make you delve into..

There is one road to be taken, there is one destiny to be reached. There enters 'The Rainman'.

A dimly lit hall with few broken pieces of furniture, an ancient couch and a table with a visibly allergic layer of dust, incapable of attracting attention of even something remotely humane, was occupied by its only tenant : Ray. He always felt a deep abhorrence for the place, like he did for stinking canals with floating waste. But these days were special, though not in that specific sense. Somehow all the difficulties had taken an insurmountable stance before him and he was finding it impossible to deal them all, at once with impartiality. His usual confidence was swaying in a bottomless chasm and yet he was fighting for poise. With a fleeting smile and insane humor, he managed to make people laugh at times, yet he failed to make himself do the same.

Nobody occupied the couch either at late night or during the early part of dawn, when no palatable television soaps or sports were aired. That served as a prime advantage, as a quantum of solace. A glistening drop of rain glowing with the street light, caught his eyes when it was struggling along the window glass trying to make a mark, perhaps it was too a question mark. Ray had seen disgrace but could not feel it because it seemed just unbelievable. He had gone numb.

He had lost faith in God a couple of times before, but this time it was like a thunderbolt, as they always are: they arrive unexpected and are bang on target. He smiled at himself in the brazen mirror, as if at all there was a road to be taken which he did not take. If at all there was a mistake to be committed which he could not, so that he can justify it to himself by putting the blame upon.

He gradually delved into his intermittent heart-beat and yet he could not feel himself. His body seemed to be non-existent, his mind seemed to have transposed the balance. He realized it was a heart he had, it was blood he lost to the leech sucking his blood in his left foot. He remembered one word from his mother..'salt'. He ran across and then decimated the leech with salt. It melted down into a pathetic skeleton of itself. Just like something else.

It was around 5'o clock in the morning that made him realize that there was a thing called a bed and there was workplace to be visited at sharp 10'o clock. And now he seemed to be everything it was :"Destiny's Child" rather a step-child.

He thought of the solitary Rainman:"He walks unperturbed, unfettered with the same vision unchanged with non-linear time."

Propitiation

Unquenched cravings, eternal thoughts and an irrefutable present, these are aces of my day break, when I wake up from my ever transient dreams. For a moment, it becomes too grueling to accept the present in lieu of the feasible future. Thoughts and dreams alike remain symbolic to the 'mirror of the erised'. They cast a reflection of the way I want to see things at a distant time which signifies neither possibility nor improbability. It vents out my imminent quest, the journey I have been longing for and the journey which I should embark.

Often in my life, I ascribe this realization as to being ineffable but it is not really so. It consists of amorphous aspirations with foundation in an incipient state. An Utopian world where fleeting thoughts are not so fleeting, fancy is actuality and insatiability propitiates the very cause for which a human being is born. In fact desire satiates both deed and dream. As I write these lines I feel an intense desire to transcend the verbose and express myself in a few short lucid lines, as do the great philosophers and thinkers. But I feel I am incapable of doing it so. After all, it is not easy to easily express every bit of thought or every ounce of emotion. Neither do I stand remotely even in the verge of doing so. Yet my verve to convey myself remains unfettered, unaltered in seemingly immortal verities.

The most difficult thing to achieve in one's lifetime is an inconspicuous object called integrity. The thing which cannot be bundled with comparative or superlative degrees. A thing which can exist only in an absolute sense. It simply exists or is non-existent. This is one thing which I yearn for in this life. I do not want to look upto anyone else but myself. This is the only thing that preserves the pristine sanctity of life devoid of either joy or sorrow. Idealism is a variable whereas integrity is an absolute unpossessed by any kind of relative sense, idealism may or may not be its verisimilitude.

Time follows a linear theme forever having neither digression nor pre-meditation. It is supposedly we who caper with it and land up in prevalently inopportune quantums of time. However insurmountable, incapable of defeat the situation appears to be, we should be standing tall in front of it. The only unparalleled weapon to fight their kind is integrity of a human.

I look upto the life which is beyond so that I live to conquer the apparently fleeting bliss of it. It is an expedition which is both introspective and prospective in nature. It is neither an illusion nor an allusion to idealism. My only pondering is, why I want to do so. An imperfect life with a perfect probability still prevails with its endearment to one desirous journey.

A Sweden Trip

Sweden (n): is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Its capital city is Stockholm. It is surrounded by Norway (west), Finland (northeast)........It never took part in any of the world wars. ..peace-loving...highly developed...

These were the scant pieces of information I had, before I began my journey ahead. Any way this issue seemed minor in front of the other issues which had just surfaced in my mind, which was itself in a perennial self-distracting trance. I had been assigned to the project as a subject-matter-expert(SME), the subject of which I knew almost nothing. Then boarding the flight(it had been more than ten years since I had boarded any flight and the previous ones were obviously as a minor) and all those issues mingled along with the official clearance issues. They were concomitantly staring at me like a draconian monster spewing forth fire.

The way I got into Sweden concludes in a single word called 'WoW', which forms a mottled imagery in my reminiscences. I got here all in one piece!yuppie!

The itinerary in a rough sketch looks somewhat like this:

28/03/2008-----1600 hrs

CCU--> DEL

Quite surprisingly my mom and dad had come to drop me off at the airport, perhaps they knew of my nausea well before. It really bolstered my self-confidence. I was no where prepared with the luggage. And so we went to the nearest mall and bought a samsonite cabin baggage with a laptop case for my laptop bag does a real favor to hold the laptop only.[It sucked in 11k :(, International flights allow only one cabin baggage]. The universal truth is, mom always excels in packing. No matter how hard you try, mom will beat you.....And I was ready. I checked in at Kolkata domestic airport at 4:25pm along with my parents, who had to board the flight back home. The flight from Kolkata to New Delhi was in Jet Airways(Boeing 747-400). Food was delicious and the air hostesses pretty : Ah! food for thought. It was a pleasant trip all over, though a slight headache had germinated in my head. The boeing landed in the domestic terminal at 8.00pm. I had to take the bus to international terminal (around 15 kms ) from the domestic terminal. Then, I had to check with my passport and the only good thing I did was that I filled in the immigration form beforehand, special thanks to Pajji in the KLM Royal Dutch Airlines helpdesk.

28.03.2008-----2000 hrs

DEL--> AMS(Sounds Dutch)

Pajji told me KLM Royal dutch airliner(Boeing 747-400) was delayed by 6hrs. It would have the departure time at around 7.25 am(Mar 29) instead of 01:30 am on the same day. Then one of the charlatans associated with Airports Authority of India duped me for 200 bucks for the service which was never required. Then, I had to collect the boarding pass for Amsterdam(Holland) , do the immigration check. I made a through check in of my luggage to CPH(Copenhagen, Denmark).This business finished at 12:00 am. At 2:30 we were given snacks from KLM for the delay which was pretty hopeless in both taste and amount. We waited in the so-called lounge with hundreds of Indian Airforce Personnel waiting for their flight on an UN mission en-route to Congo. Then the Delhi KLM agents, they just mismanage so well that you would prefer domestic flights instead. After lots of hue and cry, I was finally on board. Flight was good, food better, and the air hostesses best. We were served with food and beverages(alcoholic/non-alcoholic) at regular intervals. The Boeing went above Kabul, Berlin, Warshaw then finally arrived at Amsterdam. I had a view of the mighty Himalayas running through Indo-Pak-Afgan borders, which were all covered with snow caps like some one had covered the peaks with marble lining, from 21 000 ft they appeared as majestic as I had read only in the geography text books. And finally, it reached Amsterdam after 7 hrs(11:30 Local time). I managed to get off the flight at 11:50 AM. The connecting flight to was at 12:35am. I didn't have a boarding pass. I had to collect it from KLM counter. So it was rush-hour for me.

29.03.2008------1130 hrs

AMS--> CPH

Oh God! the Schipol Airport at AMS is so well-organised but too big for I had very little exposure to follow organized travel. I rushed to the terminal after checking in at AMS security cordon and they threw away the water with me(500ml -Aquafina) with my kind permission of course, the sole reason being its volume was more than 100 ml! Then I came to T2 the KLM terminal. I stood at a counter of eternal enquiry there, which propelled me to collect another ticket for counter(like in icici banks). I faced racism for the first time in my life. After a while, I got my boarding pass for CPH. It was already 12:10 am then. Within 10 minutes, I had to board the (Focker-40 passenger ) and fortunately after an hour I reached CPH.

CPH--> Malmo Central (SWEDEN)--> Nassjoe--> Vetlanda

This is the perhaps sweetest part of my entire journey. The trains are the the very best(unlike Hwh-Mas mail). And the people are so co-operative in Sweden unlike Amsterdam(Some are real racists). The first frontier at CPH airport for me was that I had to to collect my luggage from downstairs at Arrivals(as shown in the ever spawning sign-boards). There was a guy from Hyderabad and another from Toronto who helped me collect my own luggage! I exchanged 100 Euros for 830 SEK (Swedish Kroner) at the exchange counter there. Then, I got to the train terminal which was located at the airport exit. I purchased the tickets with amex card which would take me inside Swedish frontiers i.e Malmo C. A Swedish family helped me out. They were perhaps the best people I had met outside India until now. Now some where inside the train caught fire all of a sudden. It stopped abruptly after the announcement was made in local dialect, which was all greek to me. The alternate one came after 10 min. So I went to Malmo Central thanks to the Swedish family as they helped me with the local announcements. And missed the connecting one to Nassjoe. So I had to wait for two hrs. The tickets cost me around 460 SEK. (1 SEK=Rs 6.6). Its quite costly even here. I took an apple and a cup of coffee during the wait. (16 + 5 SEK). Meanwhile, I purchased a calling card, called up Chandra and apprised him of the situation. Then finally at 1714 hrs, I fortunately took the train which was going all the way to Stockholm. After half an hour of passing the snow lining on either side the train caught up a speed around 250 km/hr as per the screen-information. The journey was most comfortable of the whole trip. A Swedish girl helped me reach the taxi stand. She braved the cold and snow just to show me the way and went back. Nice gal! Then I took a cab(Saab make, Gps navigation screen, amazing, he only fed the information Vittalagatan 15 C for street and house number) for 40 kms and it costed me 465 SEK(way too much). Finally I arrived at the apartment at around 2000 hrs and for me, and it ended with a 'WoW! Finally I reached'.