The Path of Paradox

“Carry on, my wayward son
There’ll be peace when you are done
Lay your weary head to rest
Don’t you cry no more” (Livgren & Kansas)


In the crowd with a mouthful of stories, have you ever felt lonely?
With a charade of emotions have you ever felt, nothing is True?
In a momentary exchange of words, have you ever found that familiarity?
In a room with machinery heat, have you felt that cold silence?
In those age-old pages, have you ever had the warmest embrace?
Have you felt that sanity in isolation? Aloof, away, unshackled and emancipated,
Have you ever wanted to live with your head held high, and having answers to all those finger wielding questions, yet to remain silent with pride,
Because you don’t owe them a single word? To live with honesty and clean satisfaction.
The familiar faces can hardly get you with your clearest response…
But you are understood, here and Everywhere.
Have you ever followed those signs? Seen the playful irony and smiled on your own?
They will say, the path is too perilous to walk, they may say, it’s too linear. But it’s your path, only you are to assess. You may hit the impasse, you will break through. The struggle is the ultimate meaning, that’s how it goes.
We, who feel our disjointed belongings, are understood by our prime elements. You have to see. You are seen. You will see. That’s the meaning of it.


Photo: ©Moulina Bhattacharya


So who wins?

The one who is angry, despair of life, she writes,

‘Life is a mistake, it is filled with mistakes and errors, you are haunted by your past mistakes, leads you to make a bunch of new mistakes! It is horrible! All I do is wrong, I take wrong decisions, chase wrong paths, and say wrong words! I am done. I hate everything. Please cut me a slack!’

Heat cools down, attention passes on to other things, for a while, she thinks again, she sees again, she starts writing again,

‘It is like writing, you make mistakes, you write again, you learn from past mistakes, you do not repeat it in the new, because you know now, but there comes another mistake, you learn another one. It’s a process, it’s a flux, and hence it’s not a straight line. You make mistake, you learn, you may repeat it again, because it’s a long run. Who keeps the score? If anyone, it’s you. What is your existence beyond life? If you are discussed, when you are gone, if you are remembered, when you are dead, it is by life, by another lived ones. A world devoid of life, might remember you with your elements and matters: carbons and oxygens, to its atomic level, but that’s not you, that’s all, all lives possess some or the same elements, every other life possesses those atoms as in you. Life celebrates life, life of the lived, life of the dead. You do not exist beyond life. Life does not exist beyond life.’

So really, who wins?


Header-image source: IMDB, Room, 2015 movie


©Moulina Bhattacharya

A Tale of Two Years

It was the time of pestilence, it was the time of vaccination, it was an era of digital awareness, it was an era of practical negligence, it was the age of scientific advancement, it was the age of global retrogression, it was a test of patience, there were unrest and impatience. It was the season of cooperation, it was the season of distancing, it was a phase of exposition, it was a phase of masking. It was the period of lockdown, it was the period of migration. It was a moment of mobility, it was a moment of immobility. It was a state of self-quarantine, arousal of sub-sunken realizations. It was a matter of time, persistence and observations amid the farrago of pandemic. It was a tale of two years, only they were not just tales.

The Event Horizon

Society expects conformity. And too much conformity engulfs one’s individuality. Being too good or too bad gives you identity or else you are ‘lost in space’, I mean into the abys of existence, perhaps.

‘You showed individuality’ said she to Princess Margaret, ‘and that made people panic. They don’t want individuality. The last person who showed “character” took almost the ship down.’(The Crown)

Hence it appears that conformity and individualism do not go hand in hand, but can’t they be allied? Where individuality and identity share their light, conformity is a gigantic shadow. Their coexistence could be a haze, a chaos but that’s what runs in the universe. Each planet, per se, is followed by its given trajectory, implies its conformity to its governing star having perfectly balanced individuality or rather say identity. So do the other unnumbered celestial entities, one goes supernova and slurped by a black hole. There comes the subtlest dots of existence, the humanity has its questionable outlook for the preservation of traditions, meaningless deference, rigid practices and crores of self-made labels to follow and unfollow.
The matter of fact is that the extremities collide where cohabitation sustains harmony.  But is it that easy? You may say collision is the one that creates, equilibria stands still. That’s why it’s a mosaic, an admixture of each a thing altogether.

The Wordly Legos…

‘Far from the madding crowd,’

‘And dream away a sunny week’

‘Among its drowsy lanes—’

‘Some half-forgotten nook, hidden by the fairies’

‘Out of reach of the noisy world—some quaint-perched eyrie on the cliff of Time, from whence the surging waves of the nineteenth century would sound far-off and faint’

Citation: Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat

Photographs: ©Moulina Bhattacharya