time of my life

dedicated to a friend who lost his partner a year ago:

with every loss, i defied my sense of defeat.

denied that what i had lost was anything to grieve over.

dodged myself with assurances of rising from the ashes.

after all,

i was supposed to be a phoenix.

well, the phoenix stopped fighting the ground.

after all, with time, the spirit gets soar and ready to rest.

with years, even Tithonus wanted to cease.

losses don’t anymore scare our hearts away.

with scars, we have learned to celebrate even what we have lost.

the black and white memories overlook the rusty edges off the frames.

after all, the flavor of vintage must bear sufficient traces of wear and tear.

so, with life and losses,what goes by gets precious by the second.

celebrate memory.

rise above oblivion.

invest on memories and tragedies

they make and unmake you.

A friend of mine, a Brahmin in the truest sense, shared a story with me.
His son, a sixteen year old was applying for his driver’s license. The kid wouldn’t lie about his year of birth. His father would be appalled. So, when he came to the ‘age’ part, he wrote 16 and then conveniently dropped some ink on the ‘6’ to make it look like ‘8’. He took the driving test and he qualified. He mocked the system, bluffed his dad and moved on.
His father discovered the misdeed and decided to share the defeat with me.
And I, in turn decided to blog aout Youth and Truth.

Blogs, bluff and boredom almost ride the same rivers. You write when you don’t trust your memory cells anymore. They rust, rot and rape your faith when not in perfect use. With stress, one tends to erase. Wiping moments of pain, compressing the hard disc space and saving it in another external hard drive certainly helps. Only ones that provide you euphoria manage to be zipped in your messy desk top.
Question is, do we have space for truth in there? Or are we simply busy stashing hedonism and plotting emergency exits every time there’s a theft, rape, betrayal, murder, coups, departures? Does hurt always side with bitterness and oblivion? Perhaps not. That is exactly why some scars take longer time to heal and some even leave a permanent mark behind. Some may even go unnoticed if the subject is way past youth. After all, the teens are the ones most concerned with break-outs and pimples. We who are wading in the seas of our mid life monotonies may even decide to ignore and expunge dents and dots from the proceedings of our lives. That is how we thrive and sustain. And that is exactly what youth refuses to do. Gonotontro Mukti Pak could not have stemmed from a senior citizen. Only a young Noor Hossain was able to run through the streets and  could sing that song. Young boys holding flags and running across yellow fields promise freedom and truth. Mid age men or women hoisting a flag simulate bland bureaucracy.
This is how age makes a difference. This is how years gradually pack in mistrust, inertia and the “no-no” syndrome. History hardens the soul. Boundaries restrain. Time disallows competition. By the time youth reaches the battle ground, chaos, limits and speed have already taken over as major players and there’s huge queue ahead of youth. By the time it’s time for youth to register, the grays have already begun to show, the complexion has patches from the over exposure to the blazing lights of the waiting area.
The front liners who had made it earlier have had the opportunity to inspect the ground, erect a house there and announce ideologies and game plan.
Their strategies have no room for alternative or avant garde streams.
Meantime the youth stand there drenched with perspiration, slapped by the threats of experience. When will the youth work? When will this land make space for new lives?
Will we ever see youth tempting our dreams, dismissing our nightmares and leading Bangladesh? If anyone reading this piece is below 40, please run past every single one of us standing ahead of you, blocking your way, pretending and professing more sanity than are good for you. We are a dead generation, seeped in mistrust, lost opportunities and transitional insecurities. Don’t listen to us. Trust the text of your times. Swanatan does not exist. You do.