Remusings

There is a song by a Bengali folk singer Dwij Bhushan, in which he revels about being alive and the great fortune he had of being born in a human form. In the song, called " Hridmajhare Rakhibo ",  Dwij Bhushan is grateful to life and feels blessed to have the chance to enjoy the beauty and brilliance of this world. Some of the words (roughly translated by yours truly) are as follows: If we let go of the divine touch  Of life that is within us, We will never get it back again. So, I will keep this life close to my heart, I will never let it go. The sentiments are indeed heartwarming. Every time I sing this song, I can feel the beauty that he speaks of, often leading me to verge of tears. However, in the face of endless war, poverty, disease and ecological crises in this world, I can imagine how this sentiment can feel quite hollow. Not to mention, given the fact that humanity is the source of so much malaise on this planet, one is naturally led to wonder whethe...

This is a story set in my city, Dhaka, when one autumn day in the early '90s, hundreds of people gathered outside Dhaka Central Jail in protest. They were seeking to stop the hanging of a man who was apparently on death row, within the premises. However, the problem was, the man was not in the jail at all. In fact, he never existed. When I was 8 years old, Bangladesh was a country of 120 million. Dhaka was a city of 7 million. And we all had 1 television channel we could watch - Bangladesh Television. Back then, a TV was a matter of novelty. And coloured TV sets were only the luxury of a select few in Dhaka. It was a time when people across the country were crowding around the one television set in their villages. Congregations formed inside lone huts juiced up by a stolen power line, where scores of people would gather to watch the entertainment. The magic box would bring us a select range of programming - from the state-scripted nightly news, to heavily censored 80's Ame...

We are beautiful. Together we shine. We are loud, we are music. We are dance, dance, all night. We are permanence, like love, like hope, like time. We are ephemeral, like wisps of hash smoke, Exuding like visual poetry from your lips to mine. We rise and we fall, to the moods of the skies, To the drone of the planet, to the hum of the cosmos that never dies. We live, to live hard We choose it - living hard, over hardly living. To live, is to keep moving, We understand this truth. And we pay homage to it in our dance moves. We seek moments. Moments of laughter, boisterous and great. We take our laughter with a side of stomach ache. We seek moments of ecstasy, piercing and soulful. We feed off the lifeforce of numinous truths. We seek moments of caring, compassion and tenderness. We bask in the warmth, the buzz, the fuzziness. And we seek moments of meaning. Meaning so overwhelming, that words collapse before it. Meaning so profound, that silence is its true la...