মৃত্যু চেতনা ? May be... it has been there in my thoughts lately...
I feel an agonizing void at the death of Rituparno Ghosh. It is like a silent moan which burns your insides, yet you somehow can't bring it out. I feel it is a personal loss. I can't quite explain. I am not a normal girl, because I don't have a normal life. The little joy I have in my life is credited to my pseudo world...my world of revelations, in the movies I watch, in the stories and articles I read, in the music I listen to, in the faces I observe in a packed bus, in my thinking, in my realizations. And people who are talented enough to be able to nurture that pseudo life and as a result keep me alive (because my entertainments won't come cheap), are going away from me. I am scared of this fact.
I am seeing too many deaths, just too many deaths lately. As I was returning home today, I was almost silently praying to God, let nothing happen to Suman - even if he doesn't write another line of song in his life, if he is just alive, I will continue to feel secured, with the feeling that there is some sane mind in some corner of my beloved city, who taught me to be brave and vulnerable at the same time, lonely and unified with the world in the same breath (these are by the way, Rituparno's own words, describing the essence of his film making), even though it does not reflect in his work anymore. I was desperately telling my mother, at least Suman and Shirshendu, let nothing happen to them, they are like the last two pillars of my typical Bengali upbringing.
I have felt so so blessed that in my generation, I happened to find someone who is so well read, who knows and assimilates Tagore and serves his work on a palate to us lesser beings, I felt almost scared for the next generation who would not have a guiding star like Rituparno. As I have always mentioned, I don't know what fascinates me more, his film sense or his music sense. That he was born as a man and had a girl's heart perhaps contributed to this immense understanding of human nature, which in itself is (was) his unique talent.
Yes he is a past tense now. I don't understand, here I am confused about sustenance, here sustenance is such an ever elusive thing? Tonight you go to sleep and tomorrow you don't wake up? All your mettle and dreams vanish in a wink? I don't quite perceive it. Last year this time, my Pishi was there, last to last year, my Mashi was there, and now they are simply not present? Some months back, Yash Chopra was making Jab Tak Hai Jaan, and then he simply dies? That interview, which they showed on TV after Sunil passed away, between him and Rituparno, a pure Bengali intellectual adda, now both the participants are no more? Their age difference of nearly 30 years doesn't matter, why, people die at all ages, from 1 day to 100 years. And here I am, doing nothing worthwhile in life, yet I have to live so long I can, and to live, I have to adapt? And then one night, when I go to sleep, with happy thoughts, that I have probably adapted well, I have accustomed myself to the society's preferred ways, then God decides to break the utopia and end my life? Just like that?
I read somewhere about signs God shows, when your end is nearing. Signs are almost always in the form of suffering. So, every time I suffer, and finally don't succumb, but emerge victorious, does that mean I have kicked away death? No it doesn't, death is always there, lingering, enshrouded in mystery. And it means that it all ends in a supernatural whim? I don't understand death. Suicide I understand, it takes a lot of bravery to end your dreams and finally decide to quit. It is like giving up or retiring from a fight. But imagine a fight whose end point you don't know. No rules, no time bound parameters, imagine, the end comes and you just have to obey that end and you have to keep fighting all the while that it chooses not to come up? Think of a human being, who indulges in all kinds of circus (what else do I call this ensemble of goodness and crookedness, mockery and jealousy, stabbing and forgiving that we do everyday, sometimes willingly, sometimes unwillingly, just in order to survive), why? To live...and "living" is not in his hands. A freaking car accident, to a sudden cardiac arrest to a long and painful cancer (all of which the hopeful species that we are, we believe of either not happening to us, "it only happens to others" or sing the ever encouraging "we shall overcome" in the rare times when the truth hits in an unavoidable way) - is awaiting us and is driven totally by an inexplicable term called "probability" - which has a definition in mathematics but none in real life. And in the mean time we research on stem cells to sustain life, and if we'd go by Robin Cook's novel, the researcher trying to give human beings longevity dies in a laboratory accident. It is as unpredictable and ironical as that. Lucky are those who get to live a complete life and say, oh, I have had it all, now I can die in peace. Wish death had that kind of glory - to be embraced without jolting the natural motion of life. We are so oblivious in our self centered inertia of life, aren't we? And would it be the same world if we were otherwise? What kind of a world would it be with us fearing death all the time? Not fearing death is something I can understand and obviously, gleefully accept and support, but do we even perceive death properly? That is what worries me...
I feel an agonizing void at the death of Rituparno Ghosh. It is like a silent moan which burns your insides, yet you somehow can't bring it out. I feel it is a personal loss. I can't quite explain. I am not a normal girl, because I don't have a normal life. The little joy I have in my life is credited to my pseudo world...my world of revelations, in the movies I watch, in the stories and articles I read, in the music I listen to, in the faces I observe in a packed bus, in my thinking, in my realizations. And people who are talented enough to be able to nurture that pseudo life and as a result keep me alive (because my entertainments won't come cheap), are going away from me. I am scared of this fact.
I am seeing too many deaths, just too many deaths lately. As I was returning home today, I was almost silently praying to God, let nothing happen to Suman - even if he doesn't write another line of song in his life, if he is just alive, I will continue to feel secured, with the feeling that there is some sane mind in some corner of my beloved city, who taught me to be brave and vulnerable at the same time, lonely and unified with the world in the same breath (these are by the way, Rituparno's own words, describing the essence of his film making), even though it does not reflect in his work anymore. I was desperately telling my mother, at least Suman and Shirshendu, let nothing happen to them, they are like the last two pillars of my typical Bengali upbringing.
I have felt so so blessed that in my generation, I happened to find someone who is so well read, who knows and assimilates Tagore and serves his work on a palate to us lesser beings, I felt almost scared for the next generation who would not have a guiding star like Rituparno. As I have always mentioned, I don't know what fascinates me more, his film sense or his music sense. That he was born as a man and had a girl's heart perhaps contributed to this immense understanding of human nature, which in itself is (was) his unique talent.
Yes he is a past tense now. I don't understand, here I am confused about sustenance, here sustenance is such an ever elusive thing? Tonight you go to sleep and tomorrow you don't wake up? All your mettle and dreams vanish in a wink? I don't quite perceive it. Last year this time, my Pishi was there, last to last year, my Mashi was there, and now they are simply not present? Some months back, Yash Chopra was making Jab Tak Hai Jaan, and then he simply dies? That interview, which they showed on TV after Sunil passed away, between him and Rituparno, a pure Bengali intellectual adda, now both the participants are no more? Their age difference of nearly 30 years doesn't matter, why, people die at all ages, from 1 day to 100 years. And here I am, doing nothing worthwhile in life, yet I have to live so long I can, and to live, I have to adapt? And then one night, when I go to sleep, with happy thoughts, that I have probably adapted well, I have accustomed myself to the society's preferred ways, then God decides to break the utopia and end my life? Just like that?
I read somewhere about signs God shows, when your end is nearing. Signs are almost always in the form of suffering. So, every time I suffer, and finally don't succumb, but emerge victorious, does that mean I have kicked away death? No it doesn't, death is always there, lingering, enshrouded in mystery. And it means that it all ends in a supernatural whim? I don't understand death. Suicide I understand, it takes a lot of bravery to end your dreams and finally decide to quit. It is like giving up or retiring from a fight. But imagine a fight whose end point you don't know. No rules, no time bound parameters, imagine, the end comes and you just have to obey that end and you have to keep fighting all the while that it chooses not to come up? Think of a human being, who indulges in all kinds of circus (what else do I call this ensemble of goodness and crookedness, mockery and jealousy, stabbing and forgiving that we do everyday, sometimes willingly, sometimes unwillingly, just in order to survive), why? To live...and "living" is not in his hands. A freaking car accident, to a sudden cardiac arrest to a long and painful cancer (all of which the hopeful species that we are, we believe of either not happening to us, "it only happens to others" or sing the ever encouraging "we shall overcome" in the rare times when the truth hits in an unavoidable way) - is awaiting us and is driven totally by an inexplicable term called "probability" - which has a definition in mathematics but none in real life. And in the mean time we research on stem cells to sustain life, and if we'd go by Robin Cook's novel, the researcher trying to give human beings longevity dies in a laboratory accident. It is as unpredictable and ironical as that. Lucky are those who get to live a complete life and say, oh, I have had it all, now I can die in peace. Wish death had that kind of glory - to be embraced without jolting the natural motion of life. We are so oblivious in our self centered inertia of life, aren't we? And would it be the same world if we were otherwise? What kind of a world would it be with us fearing death all the time? Not fearing death is something I can understand and obviously, gleefully accept and support, but do we even perceive death properly? That is what worries me...
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