My love for you....

It’s almost been 12 years since I fell in love with you...

When I first met you all I could think was ‘what a cute guy’...

The second time I saw you I was head over heels for you...

Soon after you broke my heart...

But we both held on to each other by a thread called ‘friendship’...

Once strangers we became best friends...

We parted ways after three years, embarking on another journey of life...

But I could not truly move on...

I saw you in every face...

I imagined being with you wherever I went...

I always thought what would you think?

What if you don’t like the new me?

What if you thought I was not good enough anymore?

My mind would subconsciously compare others with you...

Try to find reason to not like someone... 

To push someone away...

I succeeded because you are that important to me...

I still dream of you sometimes...

I want to talk to you sometimes...

There’s so many things I want to tell you, share with you...

I pull up your number in my phone...

But my fingers turns numb...

The emotional trauma is too much to bear...

I promise myself no more pain..

But come next day and I am back to where it all began...

I wish love wasn’t this hard...

I wish you could love me the way I do...

I wish I could love someone else the way I love you...

Not because I want to move on, but because I want to end the suffering...

I hope you stay happy always...

I hope I find my happy place...

-Rashee Khemka

What life truly means to me

What is life?

At Wall Street, NY

It’s easy to say that life is a mystery...
It’s a road that reveals its true beauty if one decides to embrace it the way it is...

But has anyone of us actually embraced life in all its raw, true form?
Have we given life a chance to unveil its natural beauty?

Have we given life a chance to take on its natural course?
The answer is no...

We have always been so insecured about everything and everyone around us...
We have inbuilt a fear amongst us.. a fear of letting go, a fear of holding on...

We are all a selfish creature who demands attention all the time...
We do not truly want to work to achieve our goal...

But, we are constantly trying to demean others to rise above all...
How do we do that?

We lie...
We lie to people around us, but most importantly we lie to ourselves...
We paint a complete different picture of ourselves in other’s mind...
We play dual personalities until the day it becomes our nature..

Why is it so hard to stay true to ourselves?
Why is it so hard to work to achieve our dreams?
Why do we have to demean someone else?
Why do we have to lie?
Why betray someone’s trust assuming that they will never find out?
Why do we need to control someone?
Why do we say ‘Speak Up’ when all we want is for the other person to ‘Stay Mute’?

Life is a precious gift of God...
Every single one of us has the right to live...
To love it, enjoy it the way we want...
But don’t live it at the expense of others...
And don’t be blinded by faith, by trust...
Try to see the truth behind someone’s lies, behind the sweet talks...

Try to see the pain behind someone’s smile...
We might get rich and powerful today by demeaning others...
But remember true happiness can only be achieved if you stay true to yourself...

-Rashee Khemka
26th July, 2020

2-MINUTE TALE: TIMEMACHINE

From behind a tree, I saw a sickly
old man, aimimg a gun at a youth.

The youth was staggering and
was helpless.

It was me- my younger self, as I was
20 years ago.

I must save myself.  Loading my rifle,
I took aim. A bullet flew out.

The sickly old man at my feet! Dead!

I peered in closely. It was me,
my old self, as I'd be 20 yrs hence.

A True Fighter

                Different people from different walks of life in different parts of the world bound to be different meanings of term ‘fighter’. I myself had varying meanings of the word until the day I turned 14 years 1 month 18 days old i.e the 8^th day of November, 2017.

                Her snores stopped, yellowish liquid started oozing out incessantly out of her mouth. It was as if she was empting everything left off her. Her eyes were half shut in an eerie way and arms were flailing around wildly. I had my heart in my mouth. I could not bear to see her suffer like that, it was intolerable. My whole family was beside themselves looking at her pitiable state. Then ……suddenly……blank…… Her arms dropped cold, her eyes reflected the light she could no longer see…….her face etched a smile, she could no longer feel , she was breathing lightly….she still had a pulse….Feeling a little ray of hope light inside all of us, my dad ringed the family doctor to come immediately.

                Although her pulses were fainting away now, and cold death was creeping deeper inside into her, I was only praying to God not to take her apart from me so early. Not yet, I was pleading to him to perform some miracle, some trick….but to no avail. The doctor arrived, checked her pulse, breath and heart beat.  After that, he hung his head low and declared in a soft whisper that she was no more……….

I felt all empty inside, I did not know what I was doing, whether I was standing, sitting, sleeping, crying, nothing. The only thing I knew was that she left me and went forever. I was hoping that when I touch her, she will awake from her slumber, embrace me in her arms and comfort me that she will never leave my side. On the contrary, when I touched her, I felt as if I was touching marble, she was so cold and stiff and still, I could not believe that she died. She was so very lively, she, whose voice filled our entire house. She who was gone……

                I wanted to cry, to die crying. I did not want to live anymore. After all, there was nobody except her who had ever really loved me. She was my life and I was hers. I wanted to show the world how much she meant to me but no sound escaped my throat. I wept a lot inside, myself, but the only thing the world heard was some hoarse sobs, nothing else. All that I wished now was for her and only for her.

                I myself don’t know how I have scraped through thirteen long and lonely days now. I don’t even know how I will live my life without her. Her last wish was that I study hard and achieve fame in my life, and you bet I will fulfill it. I cannot even dream of letting her down.

                For me now, the term ‘fighter’ has only one meaning and that is my ‘fighter grandmother’. Losing her mother at a mere age of nine, her dearest brother the day her board results were to be announced, and her father shortly after her marriage, she suffered a lot. But she fought bravely; she never shed a single tear all her life. She had both her knees replaced when I was very young and she never let me feel that she was going through pain. After being diagnosed with 3^rd stage ovary cancer, she was broken, but as always she fought for two hard years. In the end, she was a living miracle, what with having a cancer relapse, diabetes, severe cough, ulcers, thrombosis, slip disc and many more insidious problems. She fought through it all like a lion.

She was the bravest.

She was the noblest.

She lived double the time the doctors had presumed.

She was ‘a true fighter’.

She was my grandmom.

-          Khushi

(In a tribute to my fighter grandma who fought against every disease like a pro.) 

Harry Potter throwback: Old moments and deeds

With Potter series, you find moments- small moments in life-

Like that immensely satisfying moment when I made a lengthy board game (on a giant chart paper) over several days and played it at length with my friends and cousins, earning myself the pleasure of watching them ogle at me with awe-struck eyes

- Like that serendipitous moment when I realized that my very first Potter reading was on a bus while returning from college, gratifyingly similar to Rowling's first seeding of the HP idea during a train journey

- Like that moment of duty-related pride when I succeeded in turning my very reluctant sisters into HP manias

-Like that moment of familial joy when I gifted a COS book to one of them and a handmade HP album to the other on their respective birthdays

-Like that moment of creative fulfillment when I inked down my own version of the final book weeks before the release of Deathly Hallows 

-Like that moment of insomniac fanaticism when I left my house a little after 4 am in order to pick my copy of Deathly Hallows

-Like that moment of extreme involvement when I set up a Facebook page (Harry Potter flows in my blood) and took it past 4,50,000 fans

-Like that moment of mindless dreaminess when I dreamt that I was sitting inside a cab with Voldemort sitting on the front seat, wearing a bunch of keys on his ears (as those keys were keys to his Horcruxes)

-Like that moment of extremism when I went to Goa with a bunch of people I had met on Facebook pages and knew them mostly through their nicknames (like I was 'Chocolate Rats', named on the lines of 'Chocolate Frog')

-Like that moment of irrepressible literary urge when I penned down HP fan-fics and even promoted shampoo products like Garnier by making Snape as its mouthpiece 

And sigh, like this moment of reminiscence when I look back fondly at those -bygone years and bygone deeds and write this long post to t2

Regards

Ritesh Agarwal

Ginny's Rainy Evening

It was raining outside. Ginny Weasley Potter peered out of the window and saw how the clouds seemed to have bulged up. The sun had been pushed to the corner and would surely sink into the horizon in a clandestine manner, with nobody witnessing its decline today. It was nearly time, her husband should return from office any moment now.

She pictured his bedraggled form, water dripping from his hat and he shaking off the drops from his hair. Ginny blushed at the thought. It has been close to a year since she had married the Boy Who Lived, but she still felt nervous at his presence. She suddenly recalled with a chill how she'd run away at his sight in her first year at Hogwarts.

A few drops of rain flew in with the wind and she trembled at their touch. The pinkish glow on her face made a brilliant contrast with the grey background outside.

The rain gradually picked up speed and the wind started to wail. She shut the window but the rain kept knocking at the glass pane accompanied by the rattling of the wind. Ginny walked across the room and sat beside the grate. The flame shivered, as if chilled by the weather. She folded her knees and inched in closer. The warmth of the place was addictive. She noticed the black currents of ashes that ran along the sides of the walls. She had spent many an evening at this place drinking Butterbeer with Harry. Perhaps today it would be another of such evenings. She blushed again, overcome by the joy of the thought. Her checkered blue frock looked pretty on her. She tugged at it as the temperature of the air dropped further.

There was a crackle suddenly and the fire changed colour. She stepped back partially surprised but recovered soon as the revolving figure of her husband began to take shape.

A face, grinning from end to end, rotated before her in circles till it slowed down and her husband winked at her, seemingly in a joyous mood. He clambered out of the grate, brushing off the soot and let out a couple of coughs to clear his throat. Then turning around, he held his wife in a gaze and gave her that long, knowing smile.

She returned the smile but her eyes crinkled and she covered her face in shyness. Today, she was blushing unusually and Harry noticed the change at length.

"Ginny, what's the matter?" he said with a grin. "Anything the matter with you?" He surveyed her with the admiration of a man in love. She failed to suppress a giggle.

"Oh Harry, don't look at me like that." There was entreaty in her voice and seeing this Harry broke into a chuckle.

"Hey Ginny, anything the matter," he shook off more soot off his hair and said with a giggle of sorts. Taking a step towards her, he made an attempt to seize her beautiful arm but she retreated babyishly and scurried out of the room.

"Ginny, why are you behaving oddly today," he called back after her.

"Am I?" she answered back in between fits of giggles. "Okay listen to this then. You need to start taking diaper lessons, Harry. I am pregnant."

Harry swam out of the room and seized her in his arms from behind, planting a soft kiss on the back of her head. His eyes danced around and the muscles of his face worked furiously. But the words he spoke got drowned by the roar of the cloud outside. The long dark night had just begun for them.  

-Written by Ritesh Agarwal

3rd July, 2016

Dumbledore’s final evening by the window (Harry Potter fan fiction)

The breeze smelt of salt as it blew in through the windows of the Hogwarts castle. A withered-looking Dumbledore stood facing the forests at his office, gazing with wearied eyes into the vastness that lay before him. His eyes, bordered by white and frail eyelashes, appeared dreary. They longed to sleep after having borne the world for so long. Something was gnawing inside him. He lifted his burnt fingers to caress the wooden edge of the window. This corner had been his refuge all these years, allowing him the solitude he needed during troubled times. Now, he stood there once again, one final time, gaping into the huge void that sprawled ahead.

'Harry would be ready in an hour,' he mused. The journey to the cavern wouldn't be free from perils. Was he right in putting the teenager into such a situation, he reflected dolefully. A pang of guilt seared across his heart that was already heavy with the pain of saying goodbye to this place. It was going to be his final day at the office, he knew it. His heart still ached, though, for Severus. He would have to lay his life for the love he never got.

At that moment, a bird darted across the room and perched upon his shoulder. It nipped him on the ear angrily with its beak, sensing a premonition of things to come.

'It's okay, Fawkes. I have to move on, now', Dumbledore said in a grave voice, stroking its spine in a tender, fatherly manner.

 It was getting windy. Not the best weather to fly towards the sea, he reflected. Dumbledore struggled with his beard which flew across to hit Fawkes on its face. It snapped at it, then softened a bit and dropped tears of lamentation.

Dumbledore heaved a sigh, inspected his watch and rose with steely determination. 'Time to set to work, Fawkes. And I hope you'd be a little more polite with the next Headmaster.' He beamed at it one final time before draping his cloak and striding out of the room. The large oak door swung shut behind him and the bird sunk back behind the shadows of the lonely walls.   

-Ritesh Agarwal

22^nd June, 2016

ritzy182000@gmail.com

55 word story: The cycle of life

Image source: google images

Merry Christmas 2071 . Ring in the New Year at Hotel Heritage Garden for a royal treatment and historic experience. Our brick-and-cement rooms, wooden windows (no glass wall, no sliding window) and internet-free lounges give you a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Small attached garden (with two trees minimum). Rs 80,000/room/night. Book now! LIVE LIKE A MAN. 

The Distinct Desire to be A Salesforce Literate

Learning a new skill is bliss. If the skill means a latest technology, it gives immense satisfaction and pride. Being it a simple individual, an Entrepreneur or well established business personnel, getting updated with the latest technology becomes essential. For every business, being it of whatever size and structure, the main factor is customer. Handling a customer is very sensitive. The most modern trends showered the magic indeed on customer relationship management.

The notable application which was invented as a result of such advancement is Salesforce. It takes and transfers every customer relationship management data in to the cloud, keeping them private and secure. Salesforce CRM comes up with numerous innovative ideas indulged within. It is not quite easy to master it on one’s own. A proper training must be undertaken to make it easy to handle Salesforce CRM.

Allotting a training package for the internal Salesforce CRM handling team, becomes essential to achieve the fullest utilization of the application. Many organizations possibly feel to do it themselves with the instruction manual. But the change in era has changed the lengthy instruction manuals to simple product details. The training to Salesforce CRM is unique and more complex. But the benefits that are residing within it are quite amazing. The most important benefits are brought together and listed below.

Return on Investment (R.O.I)

Return on Investment is one of the popular phrases in the business community. This is because of its incredible importance. Salesforce is not an easy investment. It should transform real business worth to offset costs. Motorola study is usually cited to understand this. The research put forth a result showing that for $1 spent on training yielded $33 as return. How great, isn't it?

As per HR Magazine, certain companies earned 24 percent profit margin which is higher than their $1,500 annual investment. Higher user adoption is one among the key advantages of Salesforce training. There must be a specific reason why Salesforce Application is purchased. To meet such objective, it should be used in a better way. Salesforce training promotes to use the system appropriately and facilitates more people to use it.

Homogeneity in Business Process

The technology must be used in a uniform way across the organization to meet the challenge of successful reporting and elevated user acceptance and adoption. Usually a business is constructed on certain standard business processes. Every organization has a unique objective which frames its vision and mission.  Such business process engineering is the most important factor for a accomplished Salesforce implementation.

It ensures that the platform laid is moving towards the achievement of the set goals. As technology develops, the business process gets evolved, which in turn changes Salesforce and its pattern of training. Thus it is important to assure that the official process is documented and the training moves accordingly.

Uniformity in Data

To take better decisions and to lay a perfect report map complete set of accurate and quality data is essential. Same data may be handled by many employees. It is necessary to reassure that all of them enter the same data with a same course of action. No data must be left considering that it is not important. It will be of use to another team.  So, proper care should be taken to log the available data in its relevant data field. This is a crucial component in the Salesforce training process.

Holding up a Long-standing Road Map

Organizations concentrate on increasing their customer base and fail to provide a proper and continued support.  Concentration must be put forward to grow the rate of internal sources and staff to match the growth of user base. Salesforce development must be directly proportional to the Salesforce road map and the user base. This can be made possible by building a team of qualified designers, developers and administrators to assist the internal employees, business process and technology during the initial phase and evolution phase to ease the new implementations and applications.

Salesforce Training Resources

The finest weapon in achieving a successful Salesforce training is utilizing the available resources to the fullest. The commonly available resources are,

1.      Local User Groups

2.      Salesforce Training Institutes

3.      Salesforce Administrator

4.      Salesforce Blogs       

5.      Online Training

6.      Salesforce Success Community

Exchanging tips and tricks are easier in the Local User Groups when compared to other resources. They meet at a fixed interval of time. The meeting focuses on a particular topic based on the type of users. SalesforceTraining Institutes offer customized Salesforce training with well-trained and experienced trainers. Salesforce Administrators have deep knowledge about the intricate details of Salesforce environment. They can be utilized to meet the requirements and challenges.

Salesforce blogs focus on the current trends. This helps the users to stay updated and extend their skill towards the latest best practices. Concepts of the Salesforce can be made accustomed to the team through online training. It is the easiest and simplest way. Customized curriculum can be created depending on the organization's business process and the level of Salesforce implementation. All the above mentioned resources incur some cost. But if it is needed to be free, one can opt for Salesforce success community to avail free training resources for Salesforce and master the best sales practices. Knowledge database exists in such community where one chooses articles of his choice.

The rainbow that was there (a very very short story)

Why are you so scornful of rainbow, they ask me. I tell them that I too had a rainbow sheltering me from heat and storm of the day, a beautiful face, some handsome men, some good men- two good men to be precise- no, one good man actually, and then he left, my father died along the road, my mother went away, and  I was with wine whole day. But it was an opportunist like you. It consumed me more than I consumed it. And now at the end of the road, I sit here before a mirror and talk to you about myself, about yourself. I wish I had talked to you at the other end. My rainbow would have still been there I guess.

-Ritesh Agarwal

email: ritzy182000@gmail.com

Children don't climb trees anymore

These last few days I have been slowly soaking the quiet pages of Ruskin Bond. He is one of those few people who have remained unperturbed by the growing domination of internet. His stories therefore are very rooted to the past. Much like Tagore, in Bond too, nature is almost a living character; one character constant in almost all the stories. So it is no surprise to find greying trees and their old remembered branches feature in several of Bond's stories.

The ease with which these trees spring up in so many of his stories is alarming for a modern-day reader like me. The familiarity that Ruskin seems to share with his long-remembered trees has a disturbing quality about it. Disturbing because the same trees seem to bluntly remind us of our own unfamiliarity with them.

In some of his stories, a greying and mellowed Ruskin revisits his leafy childhood pals, lamenting with a stab of sweet pain that he cannot climb them anymore, now that he is old and frail. But Ruskin, after all, can take heart from the fact that he hasn't fallen out of the race. He isn't lagging behind the new-age children. They don't climb trees any more than he does. The only worrying question is that will he really take heart from this fact?



-Ritesh. A

Lady Chatterley’s Lover vs. Chokher Bali: A thematic comparison

Image Source: Flipkart 

It is enthralling to see how themes in different novels can often converge despite staying concealed from the eye of a casual observer. At times, the true theme of a tale is so deeply embedded that one has to dig out the superficial veneer to get to it.

'Lady Chatterley's Lover', a classic by DH Lawrence, perfectly exemplifies this view. Prima facie, it is a story about adultery though close reading of the text can throw up surprising epiphanies.

Penned and published in 1928, the highly controversial novel has had to endure the murderous gaze of prudish critics who lambasted the book severely at the time of its release. It was strongly condemned for its unapologetic sexual tone and graphic imagery which bordered on the taboo. But was there more to it than what met the eye of the immediate society?

The novel, sprawled over 300 pages, chronicles the story of Lady Constance Chatterley who is matrimonially chained to a man half-paralyzed. The lady's youthfulness is waning away behind the mundaneness of the usual chores of a life that is prosaic at its best. She is deprived and her body discovers redemption in the company of their keeper Oliver Mellors. What follows is social blasphemy, a torrid affair of adultery between a woman of higher stature and a man from the lower rung.

But though the woman's need for physical pleasure at the prime of her youth cannot be refuted, it is significant to discern the strong undertone of loneliness which is constant throughout the story. Lady Chatterley is not merely physically unsatisfied with her crippled husband but is also living in mental isolation. The disparate mindsets of the two people, with the man as a snooty high-nosed gentleman and the egalitarian woman bearing irrevocable sympathy towards the menial class, further distance her from Mr. Chatterley and intensify her loneliness. Her silent disapproval turns her away from him (even without her realizing so), makes her apathetic to his industrial ambitions and eventually makes her fully aloof, thus aggravating her solitariness.

So, should 'adultery' be labelled as the theme of the story, as has been done by generations of readers and critics? Or is 'loneliness' the underlying and the truer theme of the book?

Despite the above arguments which advocate for the permanence of loneliness, the question is debatable and cannot be put to rest easily. Theme is supposedly more concrete than motif and while the former is a constant, the latter is recurrent. There is a very thin line there as far as this novel is concerned, but probably it would be just to declare a woman's mental solitariness as the veritable theme, with the her recurrent sexual affairs as the motif.

“Lawrence was preaching sex as a kind of sacrament, and more than that, one that would save us all from the results of war and the nastinesses of our civilisation. …. ‘it is the crime of our times, because what we need is tenderness towards the body, towards sex, we need tender-hearted fucking.’”    [Doris Lessing's introduction to the new Penguin Classic edition]

On similar lines, one can put another classic on the table. Tagore's 'Chokher Bali' is similar in its theme even though here it is the man who goes out of his way to surrender to an extramarital fling. Mahendra, on finding no mental connection with his beautiful wife Ashalata, gets drawn towards Binodini, a widow who has come to stay at their home and with whom he is able to strike fascinating intellectual conversations.

 While Mahendra's attraction towards Binodini may be attributed to his need for a woman of his type, the imposing question that raises its fangs and demands to be answered is 'whether his felonious actions are governed by carnal desire or by the need for quenching a personal loneliness.' And once again, we find ourselves at a crossroad since the puzzling question can have multiple answers just the way this literary work can be interpreted in multiple ways.

It would appear that perhaps both are alone in their own rights (physically, mentally and figuratively) and they seek not merely sexual gratification but intellectual accompaniment. So, it wouldn't be wrong to call it a book dealing with loneliness rather than with adultery. Here too, we see aloneness as the theme and sex as the motif. But opinions will always be divided and many will see it the other way round (i.e. sex as the theme and aloneness as the motif).

Interestingly, both the pieces have been penned around the same time (1928 an 1903) and both project the woman in a negative light, without spraying much stain on the man's character. If Lady Chatterley and Binodini were wrong to tread on this path, then Oliver Mellors and Mahendra were equally wrong, if not more. But it is unfortunate that these stories are set in a patriarchal society which also hints at the underlying theme of male chauvinism; something which Lawrence and Tagore have masterfully expounded.

(Ritesh Agarwal,

CL-  Jadavpur University

55 word story: Chat room

Image source: Google images

“ASL,” I typed.

“22 f Kolkata,” she replied.

Yesss, she’s from my city! Emboldened, I typed back, “You have a boyfriend?”

“No. You have gf?”

“Na,” I lied. “Can I see you sweety,” I pushed.

“Sure, let me turn on my cam”

As a nude girl appeared live, I shrank back. It was my girlfriend.  

Hegemonic theme of To Kill a Mockingbird

Image source: Google images

‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ (by Harper Lee) has been tormenting the readers’ conscience for the past fifty years, drawing them into a world of racial bigotry and questioning our social and cultural values.

Narrated from the point of view of a girl-child, the novel explores the hegemonic white-black relationship in America, how a black is wrongly accused of molesting a white woman, and how a white lawyer fights for the accused and how the jury, despite its contrary personal beliefs, declares the accused guilty of felony.

Their action, quite in congruity to the existing American society’s bigoted mindset, confirms how racism is a hegemonic social state (it works in the human mind’s psyche).

Ritesh Agarwal

email: ritzy182000@gmail.com

Jadavpur University campus survival tips

t2 issue of 19th sep, 2015

Following are some survival tips for freshers (or veterans) at JU (Jadavpur University, Kolkata) campus:  

*Don't let AC canteen fool you by its name. It doesn't have AC. As the old bard said, "What's in a name"

*For cheap printouts @50p per page, head to the xerox centre situated shyly behind the capacious AC canteen

*Jheel is just a romantic red herring. For real mush-fest, go to Worldview's terrace.

*Cheapest and the most walk-worthy canteen is a remotely located jungle-wala canteen. Opens after 1.40 pm. On your way, you will pass through quarantined dogs.

*The corridor to Comparative Literature Departmental library will always have water over the floor. A Harry Potter connect, minus the Chamber of Secrets (but who knows). Dare not peep into the girl's bathroom, though ;)

[

The Arithmetic of Breasts Review: An intelligently philosophical erotica

Image source: Amazon

Book: The Arithmetic of Breasts and other stories

Author: Rochelle Potkar

Genre: Fiction, anthology

Publisher: Notebook Press

No. of pages: 115

Cover price: Rs 115

[Shortlisted for The Digital Book of the Year 2014]

It is a book that is brutal, realistic and an ironic amalgamation of anatomy and arithmetic. The book can be critiqued using feminist perspective too, though the element of storytelling, entertainment for mass readers and clever use of language make it impossible to club it as a purely feminist book.

Here is a story-by-story review of the entire anthology-

The Arithmetic of Breasts

3.5/5

An engaging story that matures as the protagonists mature and age. From lust to love, the transformation is life-like, seamless, riveting. That’s the arithmetic of human relationships. The use of mathematical terms to describe human anatomy is clever, and at certain places, metaphorical. The story, overall, stirs you up in bits but falls short of being a memorably great one.

The Room with a Sea-View

4/5

A very difficult read but an enlightening one. It tends to philosophize love. It has multiple layers to it, even a strong layer of originality. Some lines are quote-worthy and need to be penciled. Sample this:

His voice was soundless again today.

Sky Park

5/5

Use of geometry in this book is fascinating. Eg. The ‘springing buildings’ in this story described as an act by the Geometry God.

The story begins on a queer note, with a girl falling in love with a boy when he’s making out with another girl. There is powerful narration involving polyphony. Description of a suicide scene is so vivid that it is scary. The story is deeply psychological. Author takes you inside the mind of the character. To put it simply in the words of a character- “It is her mind talking to me.”

Dr. Love

4/5

A fresh story with a fresh plot. It highlights the importance of a face and how a surgical change in it is akin to a change of identity.

The Scent of a Conscience

4/5

It is an erotica; not a bland erotica but one that leaves you psychologically shaken. The story questions extramarital affairs but not in its puritan didactic form, rather in its visceral, hedonistic form.

A Place They Call Scary

3.5/5

A hard-hitting story that exposes the hypocrisy and sexual cravings of religious forces in the country, through the eyes of a young girl. The climax rattles you, leaving little difference between a young human girl and a Goddess.

Our Lovers

4.5/5

Crisp story. A two-page quick read that ends with a thundering jolt, not waking you out of your leisurely torpor with a shock but rattling your soul with an epiphanic hammer.

The Troll on Page 16

3/5

The story gives a peek into the psyche of a lecher. How he fakes complaints to a doctor and thus lives all his fantasies. An absorbing read that sets you up for a revelatory climax that unfortunately never comes.

What Men Want

2.5/5

A very engrossing story if one is wanting to get high. Conversations between old inebriated friends always give a voyeuristic pleasure to readers. But the story comes with no after-effect and, hence, pales in comparison to the other wonderful stories in the book.

As a bonus, the book ends with excerpts (full chapter 1) of Potkar’s debut novel Dreams of Déjà vu.

Should you buy this book? Yes, it is pretty hooking apart from being a highly intelligent book.

[The review was done on request by the author who was kind enough to send me a hard copy after listening patiently to my rants of anti-ebook theories.]

-Ritesh Agarwal

email: ritzy182000@gmail.com

Black is the colour of the rain

Black is the colour

Of the rain that falls today

Black is the farm

And the crop that grows on it

Black is the sown

Black is thy plough

Oh bygone William, black is now your reaper

Black is the bone and black is the eye

So which is the daisy, which one the dew?

On that land of ice

White melts in fear

Sun burns away

Moon no more there

The whole world burns

Even the flame’s colour is black

So why play Holi

Coal will always smile

Yet there’s a heart

That smears a crumb of hope

The moon may be whitewashed

The rainbow painted anew

-Ritesh

06/03/2015

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Sailing the sea

Poetry is the yacht on which I sail the sea

I fear the storm no more

I carry a storm within

Ritesh Agarwal

05-03-2015

Colour me not today

Colour me not today
I was black for a day
On the land
Where red and green bickered
Let the white now prevail

03/03/2015

-Ritesh Agarwal

‪#‎JadavpurUniversity ‪#‎Holi

Pray wake me not, desire

Pray wake me not, desire

The lightning that knocks is asking for me

-Ritesh Agarwal

01/03/2015

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