Randomness of life

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
— The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats

Chinua Achebe rightly echoed this thought in his seminal African novel, Things Fall Apart. Sometimes, our lives achieve its effect as a collage of hallucinatory, random fragments flapping against our ruins. Their contiguity is all their meaning; the meaning takes into account the ‘randomness’ and discontinuity of modern experiences.

Faced with strange mundane circumstances, for instance, three suitors for a single woman, may be just as purposefully chaotic beneath its skin of deliberateness. The woman in question may ponder over the role of destiny in the situation and even resign herself to a hopeless soul. By this time, her sense of dislocation is real; she fails to connect emptiness with emptiness. Her inner war becomes real, as life imitates art and vice versa with disastrous consequences. It is then that she can put on the persona of a seduced photographer and try to capture the entire meaninglessness of existence. To quote Jean Paul Sartre here, “Why do we need to call a cat a cat?” It is then, the gulf widens, and, people with any serious aspiration towards realism take into account the fact that reality bypasses perspective and logic.

When you realise yourself to be a product of ‘randomness’ you develop a miming way of looking at the world where objects become clear for a moment and then blur, adjacent phenomena get compressed into deep homogeneity and clear outline abruptly turns illegible. One can sense a certain fluidity in the movement and occurrence of mundane objects, when suddenly, we feel all-powerful and enabled to make decisions about even simple questions like finding a soulmate for oneself. Suddenly, the crusty gentleman from southern India plays the role of yuppie gadfly in Mumbai, warms up to your inner life and imminent stagnation.

Meghna Maiti

Office Romance

When the little blue clerk, in the middle of his work, starts a tune to the moon up above; it is nature that is all; simply telling us to fall in love.” How better to distract yourself from a weighty workspace than with an unlikely affair between two hapless colleagues. Working together can sometimes become like an aphrodisiac, dealing with people, venting out bitter feelings over a cup of coffee or lunch. Some day, when an ‘Elizabethan’ girl walks into an office, she can be asked to spin a globe, place her finger on a random spot and decide to move there. If she were from real life, people would turn their back towards her. But, she can still be essential to male fantasy and even if a colleague is boring, he may want a woman who will find him fascinating and perk up his dreary life by forcing him to plunge into a stranger’s pool.

Why should people only limit their emotional lives to fend off desires of their spouses? In a mundane office, where ethics precluded romantic liaisons with one’s colleagues, one might feel doomed to celibacy. And then, one needs to think and act. In a series of subtle and intense gestures that follows, two colleagues may unravel companionship, a sense of happiness where realism contends with fantasy and shadow and romance intermingle.

These liaisons excite but alert us; like magic and monsters; whether or not the actions are correct. Monsters act as moral compass. In such situations, people are often left with a mixed feelings, thoughts about cultural expressions and sense of ethics. Yet, people go ahead sometimes for a brief while into a zone of idle fancy, embracing a monster with rare humanity and entering a phase of childhood errancy, timelessness. There is always lingering danger of these exegesis interpreted as too murky and obscure. But, still one can keep these threats at bay, flow upstream on a high tide and probably dream of a different kind of offspring at some time of life.

Meghna Maiti

God's new avatar

Profile:  Newsmaker


“I have seen a medicine, That’s able to breathe life into a stone, quicken a rock, and make you dance canary. With spritely fire and motion,” — All’s Well That Ends Well, William Shakespeare.


In life as in a work of art, Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar is like that potent medicine that breathed life into cricket almost magically and to a greater degree with his Mozart-like passion. His life is to an astonishing extent the product of the Darwinian theory of “channelising aggression to a purposeful end.”


Born into a middle-class Mumbai household, he grew up in Dadar Shivaji Park. A student from Sharadashram Vidyamandir (High School), the young Sachin was quick to lend glory to international cricket. The game, known for its glorious uncertainties, became Sachin’s life. Under the able guidance of his cricketing mentor, Ramakant Achrekar, he rode to mindblowing success. Early this week, he took a totally improbable entry into democracy’s gilded hall when he was sworn in as a Rajya Sabha MP.


It is anybody’s guess whether Sachin can improve the sports world or the state of cricket, and his nomination to Rajya Sabha may have raised a few curious eyebrows. The reticent batsman, who silenced his critics with his willow time and again, has an uphill task this time. In cricket, as much as in life, there is time for entry and exit and one cannot perhaps go on eternally. Sachin’s stint in politics may bring sports into the limelight of parliamentary decision making without playing politics. It may also give him the courage to shed the cricketing gear. But, that’s something only time will tell.


Cricket is all about statistics, and Tendulkar has a series of records to make him the greatest batsman of cricket ever. In November 2011, he became the first batsman to score 15,000 runs in Test cricket. He is also the first player to score 10,000 runs in one-day internationals. On February 24, 2010, Tendulkar became the first man to score a double century (200*) in an ODI against South Africa. Playing for over two decades, he also holds the world record for playing the highest number of Tests and ODIs.


His latest triumph was his 100th century during an ODI against Bangladesh in Dhaka. That is 29 centuries more than the man in the second place on the list, Australia’s Ricky Ponting. Sachin, 38, who started playing at the age of 16, has 100 centuries, 51 scored in Tests, to his credit. Nearly 22 summers after the legend arrived on a caparisoned horse, laden with battle honours, he is now the $2 million man of Indian Premier League (IPL), synonymous with the short format, 20-over match.


The curly-haired, cherubic boy who was determined to avoid the usual traps in life, with its attendant cynicism, worked as an adult workhorse from Lord’s to Lahore and Jamaica to Johannesburg to chase the rainbow. For someone who has been blessed to achieve nearly everything he wanted on the cricket field, the nation is touched to see the calm, collected young man, almost god-like in his ability to remain untouched by applause and adulation.


meghnamaiti@mydigitalfc.com

The gleeful knight

Profile: Newsmaker

The iconic stallion-riding knight exerts a kind of mesmeric control over his warriors. ‘Divinity’ is but a step away as he slowly alights from the horse and finds himself amidst collective identities. The blurring of the boundary line between brand Shah Rukh Khan (SRK) and Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) has almost taken romantic, epic proportions. Such is his charisma that anyone’s life, even yours or mine described in Shah-ruesque’s detail, could seem like a fairy tale.

Shah Rukh, the underdog from Delhi who went on to rule Bollywood, acted in over 70 films and tasted pinnacle of ‘pelf and power’. Yet the man had done less to lift his spirits; had the unbending, straight-armed gait of someone trying to prevent his clothes from rubbing against the sunburned skin. In a recent conversation with media, he excitedly speaks about the KKR win in Kolkata but he is often indignant, in a way that is linked to professional regrets and a period of tabloid notoriety, when an angry voice from the public ranted at him. The IPL victory has filled up the sense of emptiness in him, almost like a personal triumph. With an intense often, moving involvement KKR victory changed the flow of identification to the masses.

Shah Rukh embraced KKR like his misbegotten offspring and added to its stature, psyche with his passion and unrelenting effort. Nourished on SRK’s romance, the underdog KKR team can remain severely disciplined, keep doing what they have been doing, believe in themselves and fight together as a unit, say brand experts. While KKR has already usurped the number one slot, it now has a reputation to live up to, grow up and mature, say experts.

Shah Rukh’s exploits on and off the field can be likened with Roman Abramovich, the owner of the companies that control Chelsea Football Club, who was as passionately involved with Chelsea. Quite like SRK, he is also present at almost every game Chelsea plays and shows visible emotion during matches, a sign taken by supporters to indicate a genuine love for the sport. Interestingly, Abramovich’s success story is also that of an underdog from Komi Republic, then Moscow to his ascent as a multi-billion dollar businessman. Both the men are self-made, ruthless in their approach and passionate about their dreams. 

Shah Rukh had an entire generation at his command, delighted the teenagers with his cherubic smile, dimples and stammer. The first seeds of romance were often sown in the minds of youngsters from his performances in Dilwale Dulhania Le Ja Yenge or Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. His charm is unique, almost childlike all out there to win the world with his innocent mimicry and glee. Let us remember him as a cherub and forget his dark, plebeian twin.

meghnamaiti@mydigitalfc.com

Dalal Street

Let us go then to Dalal Street, you and I. It meanders through the island city Mumbai, screams out its dehumanised songs into the sunlight over and over again like parrots. At around 3 pm, it grows naturally wild; you see horny lobos and the hoarse hawks cry. You could almost see their cramped minds delirious with insomnia; hunter lives measured with stocks and shares. The twisted and breathing money crushes them. Yet they survive; smelling blood, bees and women.

At 6 pm, twilight immerses the wild incantations. The animals buy and sell their dreams. The sane sex hour of their lives arrive like a temptress and devours them. They wander and roam; their impatient souls slowly get consumed by the burning inferno. They are afraid that others will haul them across the abyss; they are scared of being left behind as simple beings with empty, disappointed hands. They are always terrified that home and trees and mountains exist, and, they lift the fear of many things into the darkness of their lives and sink into it. 

Their fortunes are recorded in companies. They are especially happy or unhappy, especially greedy or hateful in their hearts. You cannot be against this very important occupation: The story of Rakesh Jhunjhunwala and Warren Buffett. Every one of these characters, etched a furrow in the great grey brain of the earth, and we all carry a miniature reproduction of this archetypal brain within us. We like to tell these stories because freedom is now for sale.

Death for them may come early across the graveyards of hollow promises. And, time-worn vultures will pick at their denial. A shroud of darkness may cover them soon because the Street is stacked under the walls of a dying order. To this end, they have spent the last few decades ripping apart the heroes of the past and the usable contemporaries and put together new and ever new material possibilities, manufacturing modern capitalist legitimacies that make the old measures seem redundant. Let us go then to Dalal Street you and I, but, let us not applaud it.

Meghna Maiti

Dalal Street 

Three pm, Dalal Street

Horny lobos and the hoarse hawks cry,

Their cramped minds delirious with insomnia,

Hunter lives measured with stocks and shares,

The twisted and breathing money crushes them,

Yet they survive; smelling blood, bee and women.

Six pm, Dalal Street

Twilight immerses the wild incantations,

The animals buy and sell their dreams,

The sane sex hour of their lives,

Arrive like a temptress and devour them.

Cause freedom also has a price.

Meghna Maiti

House of Solitude


I owe my existence to the house of solitude. 
The room of silence swallows my self-trapped soul. 
And I discover my collective significance. 
I outgrow my individuality.

Wasn't this my destiny and my voyage of longing?

Yet I take refuge in flashes of you.        
In you, the entire consciousness accumulates.


Meghna Maiti