of growing roots and being an outsider...

As a kid I was often given this very wise piece of advice…”never ever forget ur roots beta…” and believe me I have no intentions of doing so… but juss lemme figure out where exactly should my roots be… should it be the place where my great grandparents lived (Dhaka Bangladesh), or where my grandparents lived (Mumbai, Chennai, Madras as it was called then, and for a considerably long time Banaras or Varanasi, courtesy grandpa’s railways’ job), in case you are wondering, my maternal side of the family is equally colourful in terms of putting down their roots as we often keep hearing. Funny thing this concept of putting down roots gives me a visual image of my toes growing long slowly and digging deep into the earth beneath me and slowly immobilizing me. Moving on to the advice of not forgetting my roots, well this piece of advice got more and more redundant as the third question everyone in this country asks you is where are you from…and frankly I am at a loss whenever confronted on this front…with tym I have managed to give a well rehearsed answer though…I am a Bengali, born and brought up in Rohtak, Haryana, higher education in Chennai and Delhi, worked in Tamil Nadu, Faridabad, Mumbai and New Delhi…phew!




There is one thing though that I fail to understand…why am I ever asked that question… what does it tell? One thing that I have seen is that it snatches away whatever little sense of belonging I ever develop with any place. I visited Kolkata a lot as a child and a lil less frequently as I grew up… I was always an outsider there, a visitor…looked at as a foreign object...interesting but unimportant and temporary… back in Rohtak, my so called home town, the oft repeated comment is…”achha ji aap bangaali ho?” followed by a whole questionnaire of how come I landed here, no no no you can’t really call it home… you are after all an outsider… Delhi, Chennai, Ranipet, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Gandhinagar, Jaipur, Udaipur, Lucknow, Kanpur, Agra, Bangalore, Smaller towns of Haryana, Villages or towns of West Bengal…metropolitans and so called cosmopolitan cities... no matter what place what demographics…I have always been an outsider…why cant people from my own country with the most in common wid me accept me for being the person that I am and not ask me my full name for once in my life!!! And you know what is ironic?? We blame the Westerners for discriminating against us… they are doing to us what we do to each other…

a girl i knew

When she was born…she was loved and pampered and given all that she deserved and then some more and some more. Growing up, she was made to believe the world was hers to love, cherish, possess and own. “My li’l princess, O ma darling, you can do whatever you want!”, and she believed it. Mama told her, she is the brightest and the loveliest of all, Papa said you are the best. And she believed it.




Growing up was fun. She always seemed to get what she wanted, and so she believed. Anything can happen if u wanna make it happen and so life moved on smooth and nice. Studies, music, food and frenz… all of that and some more…so she had it all and so she believed.



But we know its not all rosy all the tym…it so happened that she started dreaming… dreaming of a knight…a knight in shining armour…an armour forbidden. Forbidden to touch and unthinkable to own. Lost in the dazed dreams and seeing the rosy picture she so thought her own….she glided by and dreamt and dreamt of stories woven with fur and silk of her and the forbidden knight. She turned to her own for love and trust…it was different this time. The faces that adoringly had looked at her and in whose glory she had basked were glowering this time not glowing. Somehow they had hardened the loving smoothness had given way to hard formidable lines of worry and disapproval… But I believed in you all…t’was you all who said I could do anything at all…



They remained unmoved…they could understand her no more. The light that she emitted grew weaker each day as her belief shook coz of this dream…



But slowly she moved on and then on….distracting herself with things that made her happy she looked ahead to travel to worlds other than her own…the new and yet again the forbidden, beckoned her… it called out to her and she glowed again with hopes of going and discovering a new world and then perhaps to make it her own…



Bubbling with excitement and her dreams of this adventure that beckoned her...she went back to look at her own and it broke her heart yet again as she faced yet another stony glowering all over again….but…but t’was you all who said I could do anything at all and I then believed you…met by a silence as disapproving as a groan and a growl…she pulled back to her own…slashing yet again her dreams and her vision was strangled and shattered…



The sound of a heartbreak is not loud or dramatic or visible…it simply crushes you slowly as a millstone grinds a seed…the glow around her further weakened….and so every time she found a new dream to get over the first…she would just lose some more until one day the light within her extinguished… and all that surrounded her were clouds of darkness, ignorance and disappointment…



She had heard of guardian angels and fairy godmothers, but had stopped believing in them long, long ago. But today, as she lay smothered and suffocated by these clouds she hoped against hopes to see someone … anyone to hold on to and to ask why? Why me?



And then out of nowhere came a stranger…but was it a stranger? No it was her knight, and then an oracle, then a spirit and then her dreams one morphing into the other….to remind her of what was all that she had wanted… she looked around desperately to find that one hidden angel who was putting her through all this pain of looking at things she had desired through her life and never got them….but realized there was none…these visions were all she could see and but had to endure…



Slowly a voice in her head spoke to her in a voice so familiar that it soothed the blinding pain of the past… she asked the voice why is it that she could not do what ever she wanted…everyone told her she could do whatever she wanted…the voice said my dear angel…you did not believe….to this the li’l girl replied promptly…but I did.. I did believe them all….the voice said to her…yes angel that is what went wrong…you believed them all…but in yourself you had no belief, none at all…



And then the girl realized…the guiding voice she heard is her own…she was her own guardian angel or the fairy godmother or the guiding light as she was seeking one for long…the belief she lost was not in her own, it was in others…she never believed in herself…all she did was believe in others while putting no trust in her own…and slowly so, the clouds that smothered her lifted and slowly she saw her light return and slowly she lifted her feet to bring back what she had lost and what lay before her… slowly and yet so slowly but she set out anyway…