जीवन, जीवनी और जीविका

[somsesh]

Persepolis, a landmark work that will always stay with me. Thank you, Marjane Satrapi. Your passing deeply saddens so many of us.

[somsesh]

Railsong and The Fraud

I couldn't finish The Fraud by Zadie Smith. Found it hard to find a flow in it for myself. But I found two striking excerpts in it.

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The truth was he dreaded conflict: he only really knew how to be wounded.

__

what was Eliza Touchet’s role, now, in life? She understood that she was the bereaved. That she had suffered. But didn’t everybody suffer? Perhaps she was the one to whom suffering had come relatively early, bestowing upon her special insight. She was that poor young widow who had known ‘intimate difficulty’. She was the mother whose child had died of scarlet fever, far from home, in a strange city, in an Irish nursemaid’s arms. She was one to whom the worst has occurred. And what did this mean to people? That she could help? Why did they think that?

____

Rahul Bhattacharya's Railsong was majestic, and I wish I had it more seamlessly but the constant travel and work kept it a very a passenger train like journey. In The Sly Company of People Who Care is still my favourite of Rahul's three books, but I really appreciated the kind of difficult domestic discussions Rahul focussed on in this novel.

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‘The thing is,’ P was saying, sipping his choffee contemplatively, ‘when one hides something, one is being honest. With oneself. Yet dishonest with the world. That is the clash. That is the turmoil.’

__

In the end what becomes our truth is a negotiation.

__

[somsesh]

Time to draw the Blue curtain?

After being an ardent supporter of Chelsea over the last 17 years, I feel that I am not able to sustain the heartbreak anymore with the late-night wake-up calls. It was Ballack who led me into this relationship of being a Chelsea fan. Players left, many Managers left for sure, there were decisions taken at the Club that I wasn't proud of, but somehow I kept finding mysellf in front of the screen for every Chelsea game. I regretted having booked an itinerary that clashed with the weekend match, I woke up sleep deprived on European game schedules in mid-week, I swore not to read comments after Chelsea lost a game, I never indulged in banter, but got annoyed by it anyway. But I can't do this anymore, I am in a different mind space and the Club has changed a lot too. Maybe I will still linger around if I catch a Chelsea game going on, but with Maresca leaving the club, I need a departure too. I hope I watch the league games again just as a football lover.

This Ramires goal will forever be in my memory.

Thank you, Chelsea, for the good times and so many heartbreaks.

[somsesh]

At The Jamun Residency, Bangalore.

At home, Bangalore.

At home, Patna.

These were my work setups at different locations in 2025. I had high hopes of wrapping up work on my novel in 2025, but it slithered away from me. I worked on 120 pages, and I need to finish roughly the same amount in the first three months of 2026. I pray that things stay put well, so that I can keep ticking off these pages off my list. I wonder how I will feel the day I draw the last page. It's difficult to imagine the emotional response I will have, but it's an exciting thought to look forward to at the end of this marathon.

[somsesh]

“Things don’t have to last forever for it to matter.”

—

Glen Carroll: You lost your son recently.

Detective Mare Sheehan: Yeah.

Glen Carroll: Does it get any easier?

Detective Mare Sheehan: No… But after a while… you learn to live with the unacceptable. And you realize that you still need to put food in the pantry, pay the electric bill, and wash the bedsheets. So you sort of just find a way to live with it.

- Mare of Easttown

—

So glad that I took some time out to watch this show. The idea of loss looming for you in the future can catch you when things seem to be going okay. Just okay is more than good enough for me, but I keep thinking when is your luck going to run out. It does for all of us, sooner or later. The leash is long for some, and quite painfully short for some. I have often wondered what keeps people going on in their bleakest time. All I need to know is that you can never prepare yourself for it, when you go through it, you go through it.

[somsesh]

The Day I became a Runner by Sohini Chattopadhyay

I had picked up this book last Bangalore Lit Fest. After it sat there on the shelf for close to a year, I picked it up and instantly fell in love with Sohini’s writing and her articulation of grief and running.

Out of the distinguished profiles of women track and field athletes, the one that really struck to me was Lalita Babar’s. The way she endured pain without letting self-pity seep in, and how she accepted the injuries and chose what she wanted out of life in a pragmatic way makes you feel for her even more. To compete and live a life of an athelete is not easy. You put so much on the line, and then an injury can take it all away from you. You try your best, and then to take this misery into your stride is perhaps one of the toughest battle to endure.

I will let Sohini’s words do the justice.

—

For several years, you live in a dizzying metropolis on Rs 2,000 a month, surviving on junk food and fruit juice, after sending most of your salary home. Then you pull yourself up like an underdog in a mythological story and begin running marathons, competing with the unbeatable Kenyans and making your own mark— the finest woman marathoner in India. You then shift to something new again-the steeplechase—and do whatever your coach says. You wake up at 3 a.m., sleep at 6.30 p.m., eat nothing you love-and win a major medal for India at the Asian Games in 2014. You crash your calf into a hurdle in your terrific heat at the Olympics and decide not to tell people because it sounds like an excuse. You negotiate with a lacerating, white-hot pain every time you jump and, yet, you run till the finishing line. You end the race tenth out of fifteen participants.

You take a break afterwards, waiting for your injury to heal, and get married. But when you return to serious competition, you realize your injury hasn't healed. And that it may never do.

All these years you train for six to eight hours a day in all weather. Sustain injuries in your joints and ligaments and bones, wait anxiously in recovery, work doubly hard to make up for the lost time. You listen to your coach, don't take calls from your family, live a hostel lifestyle with strict rules, lose touch with your friends.

As if you are living in suspension from the real world. All because vou have to achieve something in sport.

Then one day you realize it is over. The body you spent so many hours training and looking after has betrayed you, although the mind is still keen, the heart still hopes. Tenth at an Olympic final is the best you may ever be. It cannot be an easy realization. Do you answer that your place in history was to be tenth in the world?

—

From Sohini’s self reflection on what made her start running.

—

Ritual helps you cope. The bother of abiding by it is also a form of suffering—it can ease the guilt. Running became my mourning ritual.

I remember grief being heavy: I was carrying a dull, dead weight. It was enervating. I ran to shake it off. I ran persistently, seriously, which is to say that I turned up at the ground every day.

The pain was penance: I was paying off my guilt. The pain was also a marker of my bereavement—I was here because of my loss, I was charging madly about a small patch of dusty green because I had to remember and grieve. It was my dawn cold-water bath, it was my white-flower puja with incomprehensible mantras.

This is what kept me running— the sense that I was mourning, that I was accounting for my loss.

[somsesh]

खालीपन से डर लगता है,

खाली ख़यालों से डर लगता है।

लत सी लग गई जमानें की

ख़ुद को जानने से जी भर जाता है।

दूसरा, पराया हर कोई आ जाता

पर अपना साया कहाँ घर आता है।

—

ख़ुफ़िया क़ातिल

[somsesh]

The Bee Sting, Climate Change, Artificial Intelligence

This summer I was stung by two honey bees. I was in Patna, and had gone for my morning run at the Botanical Garden/Zoo, my favourite place to run, till I got stung. I felt something touch the back of my head, just above the neck. I thought some twig from the low tree on the side must have brushed past. I casually swept over the head to feel if there is anything still stuck. I felt a sharp sting, and then one more. In less than a few seconds, I had bees buzzing around me. I have had no prior experience with bee sting, so naturally, survival instinct kicked in that told me to run waving my arms frantically. Unfortunately, in the process of shaking the bees off, my headphones had gotten stuck in the nearby bushes. But at that moment, I had to run away. I tried to sweep them away by taking off my t-shirt because they were clinging onto it. I had to stomp my feet, make weird noises to hush them away. I was flailing my limbs and running away, then ran back to take my headphones, and then run away again. When I thought I had put some distance from them, I stopped at a water filter to quench at my panic induced thirst, but I saw a bee fly close to me, and I ran again. Ran out of the Zoo, almost a kilometre away. When I took my t-shirt off, there were seven stingers lodged in it. I couldn’t imagine what it would have been like if all those stings had gone in my skin, but the two I had at the back of my head gave a piercing pain when I pulled them out. A bad move, I know! I checked Google later.

Since then my immunity has been super alert, giving me days full of sneezing and even a throat pain, but it has slowly come back to normal. I must have spoken and searched plenty about Bee stings because my Kindle suggested this novel called The Bee Sting by Paul Murray. I guess this has been the most favourable outcome of the summer sting because this book turned out to be a fantastic read. I love stories cooked on a slow burn, and Paul Murray has done that to perfection in this novel. There are layers to the stories that speak of larger crisis and the personal ones ongoing at home. The last time I felt this much for the characters in a novel was when I read Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. A story told well needs patience and time to season the characters and show their turbulence.

What the book did additionally well was to throw light on how to look at the daunting fact of climate change. Surprisingly, the penultimate episode of Season 2 of Twin Peaks has a compelling speech from Annie Blackburn on Climate Change too, and I came across it the same time I was reading The Bee Sting. The larger issue of Climate Change can perhaps be tackled first as how we look at ourselves. What self-image do we hold for us? Is it covered under pretences that masks what we truly are? That raises the other question, who are we? Are we born selfish or selfless? I don’t have the answers, but once you begin to come to terms with yourself is when you can perhaps come to terms with the uncertainty that lies ahead in the future. I am writing this after a day at a Design Conference where the buzzing hot topic of Artificial Intelligence and what lies ahead is the burning question. Lauren Celenza, one of the speakers at the conference, threw light on it by questioning if the intent behind using AI is to get there faster and quicker. If that’s the idea then that model will only be our downfall in the long run. She recommended care, depth and meaning as the new benchmarks for using AI. I did wonder that if we ever question as to what values do we seek in the way we live. Is faster growth a critical requirement for us or is it only there because it suits the corporate structure? How do we feel about using AI in our work as individual practitioners? Do you see yourself as a problem solver and derive joy out of it, or your craft is only limited to do the template task. If it’s the latter then the templatised work will be swept away by AI, but if we you pride yourself to come up with iterations that chip away at finding the right solutions, then AI is not a threat. You have to ask yourself what do you get out of your work. What does it do for you? I had seen a quote on the Internet saying, ‘Why should I be bothered to read something that you are not even bothered to write it yourself’. It was about novels being written by AI. I agree with it. Unless you don’t see value in what you create, it’s difficult to make others see the value in it. I love spending time on coming up with abstractions when working on a logo, why would I outsource it to AI to generate a generic looking slop. Maybe this is my privilege, but I choose a slow, quiet life than a rushed one. I am not denying efficiency. A doctor needs an efficient solution in critical situations, but even then, a careful diagnosis has its place and it can be supported by AI, but it cannot be AI first, at least not yet. You can’t rush things. A quiet life is worth living if that’s what you want. Choose for yourself.

Excerpt from The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

You couldn’t protect the people you loved–that was the lesson of history, and it struck him therefore that to love someone meant to be opened up to a radically heightened level of suffering.

——

I’m going to propose tonight that one path towards a solution lies in a radical rethinking of what we mean by ‘us’. By really looking hard at these things we think make us ourselves. Those two words, in fact, give you the gist of the argument. ‘Things’ and ‘selves’. What do ‘things’ have to do with ‘selves’? How can a thing make you a self? Before people had things, were they not selves? When you were born, when you first came into the world, with no iPhone, no car, no Nikes or Adidas or in fact running shoes of any sort – did your parents think you were incomplete? We have a faulty baby here? No. They thought you were perfect. You were stark naked without even the power of speech, and they thought you were the acme of beauty and perfection. But that’s not how we think of ourselves, is it? That’s not how we’re encouraged to see ourselves. Instead, we’re taught to think of ourselves as flawed, inadequate, incomplete. Different in some way that is repugnant, that is unacceptable. We’re taught that if we don’t hide that difference away, we’re going to be alone. Unloved. And so we learn to cover ourselves up, with products, labels, masks of one kind or another. Clothes, goods, sports teams, belief systems, politics, nationalism – things from outside that we use to represent who we are. I’m the guy who’s a Marxist, I’m the guy with the fancy watch, I’m the guy from this place not that. When you look at me, that’s what I want you to see. Still different to you, but in an understandable, categorizable way.

[somsesh]

गुज़र

गुज़र रही है ज़िंदगी

लपलपाती हुई बेंत पर

अपनी हस्ती को क्या लिखोगे

जब लिखना है रेत पर

यूँ ना दर्शा

कि तू चल रहा कोयले की सेक पर

चनक ना जाए तेरा आईना

एक रूए की फेंक पर

अगर हर पल बन जाए नुमाइश

तो कुछ पल कर मुआयना

बाज़ार में ही ना बिक जाये

तेरे ज़िंदगी का दायरा

—

ख़ुफ़िया क़ातिल

[somsesh]

Sufi turns 7

This little one turned 7 turning the pages of Astro Boy through out the last few months. In the last year, her usual way to spend time is to grab a corner and a book, mostly comic book, and sit reading without turning on the light of course!

While she is seven year old now, she still wakes up by climbing like a monkey in my arms, and the average number of times she has to be told something for it to be done is three times. Rice with dal is still a no-no, bread with jam still wins the day, and she still needs to be cuddled for her to fall asleep. We have spoiled her a little, and she has spoiled us too in return. Her warmth is the blanket of our life.

While I haven’t been a shutterbug I was anymore because films have become expensive, and my midlife crisis is making me buzz around other things like a bee high on nectar, but there are a few shots that I took on film while she turned 7.

Love and at times tough love,

Papu

[somsesh]

Nights at the Studio

[somsesh]

Ganesha shopping

Wasn’t carrying my camera, so phone camera had to be used.

[somsesh]

She lifts her hand to her face and inhales the scent of sandalwood deposited onto the fingers by the mirror's frame.

The soles of his shoes are worn the way the edges of erasers become rounded with use. As though he walks around correcting his mistakes.

—

While Marcus was digging in the garden one afternoon last month, the sunlight falling deeper into the small pit inch by inch, his implement struck something hard. He pulled out the cassette player wrapped in canvas, interred there during the time of the Taliban. He tried to remember where he had buried the cassettes. Sound fossils! There is hunger that declares itself only while it is being satisfied, and so for the next dozen hours he listened to music without pause, cassettes on every surface around him.

—

Have they infected him permanently? When yesterday he said he didn't know what to do with the sounds issuing from the radio, Marcus had told him, 'You listen to music with your memories, Casa, not your ears.' Perhaps it is the same with other senses also. You smell, see, touch, and taste with your memory. There have been occasions when he has eaten something sweet and been reminded for the briefest of moments of dynamite, from the time in the al-Qaeda camps when he had been made to recognize various explosives through taste, placing a small amount on the tongue.

—

This is among the few things that can be said about love with any confidence. It is small enough to be contained within the heart but, pulled thin, it would drape the entire world.

—

The Wasted Vigil

by Nadeem Aslam

[somsesh]

Wipro Tech Park

Shot with Canon Sure Shot on CPB 400 respooled film.

[somsesh]

Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.

Jamie Anderson

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Shared by my friend, Girish. Love the last line.

[somsesh]

She lifts her hand to her face and inhales the scent of sandalwood deposited onto the fingers by the mirror's frame. The wood of a living sandal tree has no fragrance, Marcus said the other day, the perfume materializing only after the cutting down. Like the soul vacating the body after death, she thinks.

The Wasted Vigil

Nadeem Aslam

[somsesh]

"That nothing is real and that all of us are alone in this world," Manabu said promptly, the words tripping off his tongue. "That was a phrase I liked at the time. A pretentious and immature one-liner."

Invisible Helix

Keigo Higashino