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A Suicide Note

Please don’t get perturbed by the title of this article, more than a “suicide note”, it is a note on suicide. I, along with many others, have been deeply moved by the sudden suicide of a famous Bollywood star, in the peak of his career. Questions started cropping in my mind. What and why? News says that he has been undergoing treatment for depression for last few months. Was this suicide an affect of that? No one can answer all these questions. But we can ponder over a single connecting thread over many suicides, “depression”. In our society, depression is a negative term. Once you are in depression, people look at you with the corner of their eyes and general belief is that depression is a symptom of mentally weak people. We are so scared about the societal issues related to depression, that we even hesitate to take professional help. Because our society believes that once depressed, you are either “mental” or “to be mad”. We forget that as my physical health goes throu
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Power of Silence

I always wondered in my life whether situations, where someone is apparently trying to hammer you, can be taken in its stride! When you are hit hard, how do you keep your head straight, without feeling fragmented and belittled. These situations happen all around us, not specifically by someone who is superior in power or position to us. The overtaking Uber driver giving a nasty look, the ‘super-power’ boss showing his red eyes, the fellow elevator passenger showing his implicit frustration when it stops at a lower level for you or your life partner showing a subtle sign of disagreement – all these can generate a feeling of tightening the lid on you, thereby giving you a feeling of suffocation and anxiety. And anxiety in any form or the desperate need of venting out is always counterproductive. Situations like these, inevitably prompt the ‘me’ in myself to react, in either explicit or implicit manner. But, does that really help? Yes it helps, only to be in the negative connotati
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Papa, I Can’t - the Story of a Burdened Child

We have grown up believing that the student life is the most beautiful phase of life. It is the time when we got introduced to the world and learnt the nuances of practical life. It is the phase when we got best of our buddies, with whom we played, fought and reconciled and then, through the rest of the life, have carried that nostalgia of childhood friendship. I remember, we used to have only two sets of examinations in a year, the mid-term and final-term (half-yearly and annual, in some schools) and rest of the year used to be a fun going to school and colleges. We perhaps, used to look forward to next day, to hit the school. I was so obsessed of going to school that I continued to go even when it was only fifteen days for the board exam to begin and one of my senior teachers had to counsel me, “ beta, there is no class happening now a days and you should study back home. Don’t worry, after fifteen days, you will be back to school for writing exam”. The advice was so comforti
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Protagonist in the Making

They say that when you dream of something, there are 3Vs which may make you closer to your dream – Visualize, Verbalize and Vitalize. Visualization is important for the bigger picture, while by Verbalizing, you close the ways to go backward. Both of these make you bound to Vitalize or enliven your dream. This piece of writing is all about the second ‘V’ – Verbalize. While I had a long-cherished dream of penning down a fiction one day, by verbalizing it today, I want to close all doors behind me so that I cannot escape in anyway. I want you all to point your fingers towards me, if I cannot make within the dreamt timeline. I also want you all, as good friends of mine, to chase me, to question me on the progress, to push me towards the wall so that I complete the fiction in time and go for publishing it. My bouts of writing spells are very irregular and I suffer from ‘Irritable Creative Syndrome’ (ICS), where, I tend to fall prey of creative constipation repeatedly and tend to g
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Is Your Everyday A New Day?

I was having a soul-searching discussion with one of my childhood friends who is associated with one of the premier organizations whose tag line says “Imagination at Work”. This friend of mine has joined them as a Management Trainee around 20 years back and is still continuing with flying colours. In an era, when continuing in any organization for long seems to be cliched, our discussion eventually centred around that point, “what made you stick to a single employer for so long?” He proudly proclaimed, “my everyday at this organization, is a new day”. Are all professionals equally lucky to enjoy a ‘new day’ everyday or get entangled in unavoidable mundane routine stuff? While strategies and putting the thinking-cap happens sometimes, most of the professionals find themselves in spending around 70% of their time in routine staff. Gone are the days when people used to have assistants, secretaries, short hand experts under their command, more of self-help is the trend today. So,
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TRUST or NO-TRUST

TRUST is always seen as an integral part of any relationship. A relationship, whatever it may be, gets maturity with the factor of trust getting built into that. Sometimes trust is seen as a paranoid factor, why should I show that I trust someone? Or for that matter, if I trust someone, my exhibited behaviour will automatically demonstrate that, I need not consciously show that I trust. These are some confusions which creep a thinking mind. Does trusting someone also indicates that we are a bit obsessed or possessive about the person? Or in other words, does possessiveness sometime questions the trust factor? So what is more desirable, trusting someone blindly or feeling a bit possessive about that person? Sometimes it feels like a balancing act, a perfect balance between the exhibited trust and little bit of possessiveness may usher in sweetness in any relationship. The key factor, is always an open communication. Whenever there is a question with the trust factor, let us qu
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The First Day in SteelCorp

The long beeping sound of the fax machine is monotonous. Though the machine has become a rare sight in any office now a days, but during the late 90s, any office used to be incomplete without a fax machine. (That reminds me, my present day business card also talks of a fax number; I need to check whether the machine actually exists in the office!!) So, I was quite used to the beeps after I spent around two hours in the Central Office of Steelcorp Limited, a steel trading company having its corporate office in a busy business street of Kolkata. The office was in a two storied building, on the second floor. Narrow corridors leading to the ‘Central Office’. That was my first interview, a call received with the help of my then would-be brother in law, who forwarded my profile to the Head of Human Resources. The head, Mr. Biswas, instructed me to write an essay on “one hour in an office”, extended some pieces of A4 papers and vanished. I was all alone, in an open cubicle, with varie
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