Shades of Life: reflections of an ordinary Indian

ISBN-13: 9781507851647 / Angielski / Miękka / 2015 / 86 str.

MR Biswajit Das

Opis

Once I was travelling from Darjeeling to Gangtok by road. From a vantage point, where we have stopped to have a sip of tea, my colleague Navneet showed me the sight which I used my Nokia E75 camera to capture. I reproduce the picture as the cover picture of this volume. Have a look at it... The picture shows Rangeet river(the dark coloured one), a tributary of Teesta, getting submerged into Teesta...losing its identity...see the river maintaining its colour, and thereby its separate identity for some time before losing out...it reflects many hues that we go through in life. How long can you maintain your individual identity while working in an organization before it gets engulfed? Same in the family and the broader social life. Rangeet's desperate bid to fight a losing battle is symbolic of our life in many ways...it is indeed very difficult to maintain a distinct identity for long. So what you get is different shades of life each with a separate identity, separate outlook and even a separate attitude in accordance with the imbibed value system. The social you, the professional you, the parent in you, the son in you. All seem to be a different shade. So what is your actual shade? Or do actually have a "distinct" shade. These are the questions which go through my mind. Are we really an amalgamation of colours, just like the ray of light which carries an apparent "wholeness" till a spectral intervention brings out its different shades? The way you are constituted, somehow, comes through your expressions in its various avatars. As the digital revolution ushered in, I also took to blogging. I blogged intermittently, posting whatever my thoughts at that point of time. I see blogging, similar to the way people used to record events and their thoughts in a diary previously .The added advantage being it can now be edited, designed and even protected more easily and in a much better way. Going through the posts, I thought it makes sense to categorise and consolidate them into the various shades that they reflect. This volume is an outcome of the same. This is the beginning of a journey. The idea is to capture the various shades of the self, family, professions, society etc. that constituted the various hues of my constitution. This is journey of self-discovery through the various eyes by which I look inside and outside, the various factors which shapes my shades. And finally, it is an attempt to keep each shade's identity intact like the river Rangeet . P.S: There have been a fair number of words/sentences from the Indian languages like Hindi and Bengali in the book. Most of the places an English narration is given. In some places where the essence will be lost(like words of the song integrated into narration), the translation part has been ignored.