4 years

It’s been a whooping 4 years since I wrote anything over here. 4 years gone in the blink of an eye. Countless things, memories, setbacks fill these years as I look back on things that I had scribbled right from 2012 days.

Cool to think, and sometimes funny about the viewpoints that I held back then. When I wrote those things, never for a moment did I think that these would be revisited after so long, after so many things/events would happen some day. God willing, life is much more strcutured and (if I may say, touchwood), better than what it was back then. I was changing my stream and college, and today all of that seems so distant. So much was uncertain, so much could have been worse than how life turned out to be.

If anyone would’ve told me back then about this, if any time travel is possible in this mortal world I’d love to go back and talk to my younger self. Barely 20 back then, I had started blogging. Rather call it – inspired to start. I always loved to write about a lot of things, and that had manifested in multiple forms across different domains. I used to write as part of my school magazine, short stories, poems in both Bengali and English back in my pre-teens. This started first when I was in my third standard if my memory doesn’t fail me. I used to devour books back then. Fiction, mostly! Right from Agatha Christie, to Enid Blyton to Robert Loius Stevenson. And who would not remember the legendary Satyajit Ray from Bengal, to the equally-statured Arthur Conan Doyle. And not to forget JK Rowling’s fantasy books. And countless many, not so revered and easily forgotten authors, I had given Sidney Sheldon amongst others a try too. I can vividly remember my tantrums when I’d borrow a book from my school library and would not be able to finish the same in a week, and then pester my parents to read it overnight so that they can tell me the story later. And annual visits to College Streets in the December winters. Such golden long lost days, yet so distant! And as I grew up, Bibhuti Bhuson’s Pather Panchali, Byomkesh Bakshi started to replace the ‘Secret Seven’ and ‘Famous Fives’.

It was a caraze hitherto not felt anymore (sadly). Back when, fiction books were so much loved that parents and teachers alike would pass on remarks like ‘The story books ain’t flying away, pass your boards first!’ I still vividly remember the scare from ‘The Hound of the Baskerviles’ when I started reading it at 1 past midnight, and Sherlock Holmes’ ‘Science of Deduction’! Or the deep feeling one got from a poem like ‘Dui Bigha Jomi’ and ‘Tithonus’, where someone was cursed to immortality by the Gods! Or when Robert Frost’s tired voice spoke in your ears – ‘Miles to go before I sleep’!

High school, entrane exams, college, dropped off, again entrance exams, then college – and that’s when I finally had some leeway to give my writing attempts a try in the digital world. I borrows a hundred rupees from my dad to purchase a domain name for my blog and started writing. I stayed at it for one year, and then let the subscription expire. However one good thing that I did was to take a backup of that and upload on a free cloud service. I occasionally did revisit that, and finally in 2017 when everything was said and done from college and education perspective, I decided to restart this. I remember purchasing a Kindle so that I could read more (almost every book has its soft copy available online these days, more so the classics in Project Gutenberg). I started reading, but this time it wasn’t the same. Back in my childhood, it was a thing to visit the occasional fair (in Bengal we used to call it ‘Rather Mela’), that was held anually during the monsoons with the dark clouds hovering and showering at will only to postpone all the plans and entertainment. I loved these fairs, and the biggest attraction of these would be the book fairs. Much of my stock from ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ to ‘The Invisible Man’ to ‘20000 Leagues under the sea’ came from these annual fair visits. It’d be much later in my 20’s that I’d again visit a bookfair, this time the famous Calcutta Book Fair and purchase fiction. Unfortunately the old child-like thrill was long lost by then!

Fast forward to 2020, during peak covid I was thinking of going back to this old hobby of mine – reading and writing (don’t they go hand in hand?). I still remember penning down my so-called resolutions for New Year about returning back to books, but this time fiction no more appealed to me. The child that used to feed on fiction at one point, was suddenly finding these repulsive. I know of men who have read all their lives, in their early sixties and still admire fiction like they used to in their younger days – God bless their tribe! Now, non-fiction like History, Conspiracy theories appealed more, however all of them were short lived.

Fast forward to 2024, now a happily married man, I want to give one last shot at my blogging ambitions. If not this time, probably never again. The old days of Mela hopping have gone for good, never to come back anynore. Offline shopping in bookstores in crowds have given way to surfing books on Amazon and Flipkart. A lot more soulless than how it should be, but such is life. Nowadays everything from Gutka shopping to Pujo shopping to booking a barber for your monthly haircut is at the tap of a button. I still wonder in my mind, do we still have the book fairs like we used to? Do we still have throngs of school children eagerly waiting for their parents to take them to the book fairs? Do we still have College Street crowds on Winter weekends? Will our next generation ever be privy to the simple joys that we were so lucky to have?

For all the things that one used to do long back but not anymore, there was a last time when we all did it, without realising that this is the final time, that this joy will no longer come back to your life – and that you’ll miss this day maybe 10/20/30 years on. Does it not speak a lot about life in general? You never know if the phone call you took that day would be the last time you’d speak to that person, or the last goodbye that you waived to that person before he left for a new city, or the last time that you played with your friend – remember the joyous afternoons of cricket in hot summers?

Life has its own way of moving on, like that distant breeze carrying the chirping of birds returning back after a days’ work, like the sun setting in the distant west. We never know, when it’s time for our own sunsets!