Because he's the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now. So we'll hunt him. Because he can take it. Because he's not our hero.. He's a silent guardian, a watchful protector. A dark knight..

BRUCE WAYNE - Where am I?

BANE - Home..

Wayne’s eyes dart about: filthy stone walls, distant sunlight from above, iron bars: an underground prison.

BANE - .. where I learned the truth about despair. As will you. (Rises.) There is a reason that this prison is the worst hell on earth... (Bane steps to the bars - looks up at a bright opening five hundred feet above. Like being at the bottom of a gigantic well...) Hope. Every man who has rotted here over the centuries has looked up to the light and imagined climbing to freedom. So simple. So easy. And, like shipwrecked men turning to sea water from uncontrollable thirst, many have died trying. I learned that there can be no true despair without hope. (Turns to Wayne.) So as I terrorize Gotham, I will feed its people hope to poison their souls. I will let them believe they can survive so that you can watch them clamber over each other to stay in the sun... (Bane points to an old TV, just outside the bars.) You will watch as I torture an entire city to cause you pain you thought you could never feel again. Then, when you have truly understood the depths of your failure, we will fulfill R¯a’s al Gh¯ul’s destiny. We will destroy Gotham. And when it is done...when Gotham is ashes...then you have my permission to die.

One of my most favourite poems..

Every time I read the last two lines - "Shob paakhi ghore aashe - shob nodi.. phuroy a jeebon-er shob lyendyen; / Thaake shudhu ondhokaar, mukhomukhi boshibaar.. Bonolota Sen.."('When all the birds return home, all rivers too.. when this life and all its give-and-take comes to a stop.. / It's only darkness that remains.. and in that darkness, we sit facing each other, Bonolota Sen..", I can feel the goosebumps on my arms.. How can two mere sentences be so haunting, so beautifully tragic? Interpret it as you may - the lover's promise to stand by his lady for all his mortal life and beyond, or the philosopher's eulogy on the inevitability of Death and the romanticism arising thereof - these eighteen lines are otherworldly..

They say there are always people you care about; you just don’t realize how much until they’re gone. Actually, I think you start realizing it the moment it becomes inevitable that they’ll go away, sooner rather than later. However much your stubbornness wants you to believe that it won’t really matter that much, that noone’s indispensable, that the person’s going away was always meant to be, there is a voice at the back of your mind, deep in the realms of your heart, that will know..that will always know exactly how passionately you care, that will always remind you exactly how acutely you’re going to miss the person…

"You know what I think?" she says. "That people's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn't matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned. They're all just fuel. Advertising fillers in the newspaper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills: when you feed 'em to the fire, they're all just paper. The fire isn't thinking, 'Oh, this is Kant,' or 'Oh, this is the Yomiuri evening edition,' or 'Nice tits,' while it burns. To the fire, they're nothing but scraps of paper. It's the exact same thing. Important memories, not-so-important memories, totally useless memories: there's no distinction—they're all just fuel."

~ Haruki Murakami, "After Dark"

Live.. and let live...

Because the world is just as much theirs as it is ours..
 
                        

"I had absolutely no idea about the country America; I had never been there. I was certainly not of a later generation of my cousins, such as Sameer, who at the age of sixteen stepped into JFK Airport fresh off the plane from Bombay wearing a Mets baseball cap and with half an American accent already in place. I traveled, in twenty-four hours, between childhood and adulthood, between innocence and knowledge, between predestination and chaos. Everything that has happened since, every minute and monstrous act—the way I use a fork, the way I make love, my choice of a profession and a wife—has been shaped by that central event, that fulcrum of time."

Beginning to feel I might like this book.. A lot.

Book Review: "Mockingjay", by Suzanne Collins

"I no longer feel any allegiance to these monsters called human beings, despise being one myself. I think that Peeta was onto something about us destroying one another and lettng some decent species take over. Because something is significantly wrong with a creature that sacrifices its children’s lives to settle its differences. You can spin it any way you like. Snow thought the Hunger Games were an efficient means of control. Coin thought the parachutes would expedite the war. But in the end, who does it benefit? No one. The truth is, it benefits no one to live in a world where these things happen."

This paragraph sums up 'The Hunger Games' (and its fallout) so beautifully, that it almost takes your breath away. Essentially, it's not anything new that Collins tells us - this thing that the world is like a venomous snake that has bitten into its own tail and refuses to let go - but the way she goes about in her narration.. Mostly lucid, and almost always sticking to a central theme.

"We learn to keep busy again. Peeta bakes. I hunt. Haymitch drinks until the liquor runs out, and then raises geese until the next train arrives. Fortunately, the geese can take pretty good care of themselves. We’re not alone. A few hundred others return because, whatever has happened, this is our home. With the mines closed, they plow the ashes into the earth and plant food. Machines from the Capitol break ground for a new factory where we will make medicines. Although no one seeds it, the Meadow turns green again." - the peace, or whatever it amounted too, was needed. Really needed. Like air. The way Collins brings it to the characters is well-planned. Perhaps a little obvious, yes, but still well portrayed.


"My children, who don’t know they play on a graveyard." - the war may be over, but the repercussions will always be there and thereabouts.. This line was particularly brilliant, I thought.. Respect.

A fitting end to a masterfully scripted trilogy. Yes, the pace appears to be a little forced at places, but then the first two were so good that Collins was facing very tough competition from herself.. That she did such a commendable job is what really carries the day.

p.s. And it had to be Peeta. "Always.."

And this time a book takes me to another of those places.. you know, to where someone in the enthralling, gripping text does something that is not only so touchingly selfless, so human in such a forgotten way, but also so similar to what you could’ve done, to what you SHOULD have willingly done when a similar event came to pass.. and you so want to be like the character in the book, that person who has nothing but ink running in his veins, and yet pulls off something that not even being the possessor of the thickest blood could ever make you consider.. Ink reminds me.. ‘Blue blood’ is often used to refer to nobility.. could it be, then, that those characters we celebrate in books, whose blood is nothing but the ink - mostly blue – used to pen their lives and loves, are the noblest among us all?

"Abhi nahin aana, sajna..
Mohe thoda marne de..
Intezaar karne de..

Abhi nahin aana, sajna.."



The lyrics take me back to a rainy afternoon at 86/1, College Street.. I remember Dibyadyuti da (Department of English), my immediate senior both in C.B.S. and Presidency, singing the song ever so beautifully.. The poignant undercurrent of the song, the deep-seated pain in the lyrics struck me at once, and I have sung the above stanza to myself countless no. of times..

These songwriters must be gods..

THAT, it appears, is the only problem with books. That one innocent little paragraph, so quaintly tucked away in an otherwise ordinary part of a random book.. that’s all it takes.. and the paragraph takes you away so, so far beyond the scope of the book, so deep into the forgotten recesses of your own heart, that you hardly remember your way back.. You begin to wonder how it is that the writer, probably living richly off his/her royalties in a picturesque part of the world, managed to delve so deep into your very soul, managed to knock your breath out with such finesse.. Well, music can sometimes be guilty too, in this respect.

              Somewhere in the world a man has abducted a little girl. Soon he will rape, torture, and kill her. If an atrocity of this kind is not occurring at precisely this moment, it will happen in a few hours, or days at most. Such is the confidence we can draw from the statistical laws that govern the lives of six billion human beings. The same statistics also suggest that this girl's parents believe—as

you believe—that an all-powerful and all-loving God is watching over them and their family. Are they right to believe this? Is it good that they believe this?

No.

                The entirety of atheism is contained in this response. Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. In fact, "atheism" is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a "non-astrologer" or a "non-alchemist." We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens have traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and their cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs. An atheist is simply a person who believes that the 260 million Americans (87 percent of the population) claiming to "never doubt the existence of God" should be obliged to present evidence for his existence—and, indeed, for his benevolence, given the relentless destruction of innocent human beings we witness in the world each day. An atheist is a person who believes that the murder of a single little girl— even once in a million years—casts doubt upon the idea of a benevolent God.

Kyamon baashi bajaay shono, maathe te rakhaal..

Delhi 7: Reporting LIVE!

30^th June, 2011

New Delhi is sweltering hot during the summer (roughly from early March to end of August, with a little bit of rain thrown in once in a while, which then piles up the humidity) with temperatures dancing on the wrong side of 40 degrees Celsius with unfailing regularity & biting cold during the winter (mid-December to mid-February) with the mercury stoutly refusing to climb above 5 degrees Celsius. What’s more, last year the capital recorded the highest ever rainfall in the last 30 years, coupled with the otherwise withered up and innocuous Yamuna threatening to unleash her swollen waters! Credit some really bad drainage facilities (that resulted the flooding of roads here, there, everywhere) and you’ll have conjured for yourself a rather lively image of my inebriated tango with this city so far. I have few non-familial acquaintances here (ergo, fewer friends), but if there is one thing that this city has given me then that is experience. (Well, to be entirely true, it had also given me splitting headaches and the subsequently diagnosed sinusitis last year, but I’m trying rather hard to keep the detractors at bay here!)

Trust. What does the word mean? Does it mean anything at all anymore? What’s that? “Yes”, you say? I find disinclined to agree.. “I don’t think I can trust anyone anymore..” How many times have I heard that by now? I think I’d have a better chance at counting stars! The most recent repetition of this over-used, bordering-on-cliché phrase came to pass on Thursday, June 30, 2011, at 01:12 hours IST. (Or, as we are more comfortable with it, at twelve minutes past one at night.) It was one of my MIB classmates, oh yes. A girl. As a matter of fact, a girl who has recently had a bitter breakup, no less. Now, when I first came to know this girl halfway through my second semester here (I was blissfully ignorant of most of my classmates’ names –male and female - for most of the first semester and unawareness about the females carried on till the aforementioned halfway stage), I found her to be quite chatty & a fun person to hang around with. So hang around I did and, wonder of wonders, we became something more than acquaintances - she suggested we had become ‘friends’! (What’s the exclamation mark for, you ask? Well, you see, I used to be quite shy when around girls right from my school days, and since the very first day of attending a co-educational college, I’ve found it nothing short of a miracle every time a girl has actually become ‘friends’ with me. But, I see that I’ve digressed..) Right, so back to this girl.. Well, after she & I became ‘friends’ (once again, according to her, for I have the odd habit of taking a while to become ‘friends’ and I hadn’t yet begun to consider her as one), she told me that she had a boyfriend who was studying something somewhere (I only have selective retention capacity and I didn’t find this fellow interesting enough) and that they were going through their roughest patch yet in the four years’ commitment. Having nursed only one monumentally one-sided (albeit prolonged) ardour, I wasn’t much of an expert on the matter, but rough patches seemed to me quite commonplace in relationships. As I understood, things almost always got better sooner rather than later. Quite to the contrary, however, about a month later the girl told me – over the phone and in a fit of tears - that she and her boyfriend had broken up, (to be perfectly honest to her, she did say “He dumped me..”; quite frankly, I don’t see how who dumps who really matters either way if the relationship is discarded after all, but apparently such things are very important to people) as far as I remember due to the fact that he had told his parents and they hadn’t accepted it (or something as weak-willed and banal as that). I tried my best to console her and sympathize with her, but who was I kidding? I’ve always been a rabbit in headlights when it came to being around crying women, and this was not much different, I admit. Anyway, I did what ‘friends’ are expected to do, I guess – told her to keep a stiff upper lip and all that, told her that she didn’t deserve a spineless wimp like him (which I did think he was), told her that she’d find someone much better (which is always probable) and soon (which, truth be told, I had no way of knowing; but such things need to be told at times likes those, I gathered, and proceeded to do the needful). “I don’t think I can trust anyone anymore..” came her tear-stained self-realization.

               

Surprise, surprise! Within a fortnight of having suffered what she identified as a “shattering, life-altering” heartbreak, came this one day when we were out having pizza (courtesy good old Dominos) when she started flirting with me! (Yes, you read it right.. ME, of all the people in the whole, wide world!) Not buying it, you say? Good joke, you think? Not to worry. I couldn’t believe it myself! I mean, why on earth would any girl flirt with me?! I’m positively a woman-repellent! But, tell me, what else can “I didn’t think I could ever trust anyone anymore when _______ broke up with me, but I now know I can trust you with anything.. I think I can more than trust you.. In fact, you know who I think is the right guy for me in class? I’d tell you, but I’d only embarrass you.. I only wish you’d feel the same way about me, you know.. It’s hard for a girl to ask a guy out..” with her hand on mine (which had been lying innocently on the pizza table) possibly mean, right?! (If it wasn’t flirting, however, I plead guilty; having never attempted to ‘flirt’, so to speak, it’s one more of those entries on that ever-burgeoning list of things that I remain largely distanced from.) Thankfully, humour is my one (although sadly, only) forte, and I was able to laugh it off before it indeed became embarrassing for me.

Days later, this adventurous daughter of man went on a ‘long-drive’ with three boys and one girl from our class (none of whom have the best of reputations), got high on beer, and got kissed and groped by two of the said lads (while the third was making out with the other girl present). When this plan had originally been drafted (of the five of them going on the drive, i.e.), she had called me to ask if I thought it was safe for her and whether I wanted her to go or not. I remember telling her quite clearly that it was not in my place to want, not want, allow and/or deny her from doing anything, but that I felt that she would be invariably better off if she opted out of their company. It goes without saying that she turned a deaf ear. Eventually, she called me later that fateful day of their little escapade, crying and feeling disgusted with herself, and said - (Yes, no points for guessing..) “I don’t think I can trust anyone anymore..”

Within a week of that episode, she called me up to tell me that she and one of my male classmates had started dating, mentioning quite clearly that she had suggested the idea and that he had accepted. She further told me, in no uncertain terms, that it was a convenience thing – the two of them travelled to college by the same Metro rail, lived in more or less the same locality – and that neither of them had any plans whatsoever for considering it as a serious commitment. “We are in it just for fun..” she had said. And, now, three and a half months after the commencing of their “fun” , she called me, once again, in a fit of tears, mumbling things like “He trapped me..”, “We were physically involved, you know.. Now I realize that he used me..”, “It was all a well-laid plan.. Girls are very delicate, and guys like him swindle us like this..” And, of course, the omnipresent “I don’t think I can trust anyone anymore..”

And they say ‘Dilli.. dil waalon ki!” As Obelix the Gaul would no doubt have said had he the fortune of visiting our respected capital city, “These Delhites are crazy!” Touché.