Nivedita Das Narayan

Life… catches us by surprise, too often for comfort! June 13: N messaged me from Bangalore that he’s raising a toast to Manu… and praying for his soul to rest in peace. I messaged ‘Amen’. Manu passed away peacefully, on June 8. Shock to many, grief to many more, yet perhaps nothing more irreconcilable for his wife. N got to know on June 9, practically woken up by the news, crying inconsolably, miserable, (silently) shocked. Manu is N’s friend, one amongst the delicately few you make during your work years, and stay so, even after jumping several jobs, exchanging cities, getting married and living years not seeing each other. I know N for almost 4 years now, and I’m trying to remember my touch-points with Manu through the years… Like my first invitation to visit Manish Sea Croft to watch a DVD together and my encounter with the incorrigible ‘Peecha Karo’, that apparently was Manu’s heirloom left behind for N. {N, let me tell you it was a precarious choice of a movie on a 3rd or a 4th Da...

I wrote this on the 5th of June, just didn’t manage to give it much shape… still half baked but what the hell… Why give it a name… it’s life It’s been a day full of nuances; germinated somewhere in the chats I’ve had since last evening and this morning. Somehow HAD to source out the two-pin to plug in the Bose and blast the Metro soundtrack. Several thoughts running criss-cross, parallel, contradicting, confirming, affirming; all at the same time. Life, all of a sudden, has offered a unique scale to grade whether I’ve lived a life; fully yet; with its doses of purity, love, hope, hopelessness, despair, optimism, hypocrisy, forgiveness, anger & Déjà vu’s and I’m raring to see how I’ve fared across life’s parameters…Momentary lapses that most of us will find traces of ‘been there’, ‘felt that way’, ‘ah, that feeling’ and resonance The sequence of the ‘lapses’ follows the sequence of the tracks in the album and not necessarily that of life… In dino dil mera, Mujhse hai keh raha Tu khw...