Straight from the Heart

Last week was a sad day for me! The kitchen window in our flat opens out to a square plot of land, which housed the corporation’s water pumping station. The pump was on one side of the plot and the rest of the plot usually remained empty, to be used by the corporation sweepers to park their “koora” removal vans. It also served as a dumping ground for all sorts of wastes like broken water closets, door frames, iron gates, etc which may have been generated in the course of the municipal corporation repairing some public offices somewhere. It may have even been kept by some scrap dealer who probably used the government space as his own. I agree with you certainly on the fact that if one’s kitchen window, or any other window for that matter, opened to a view like the one I described just now, it would not be a pleasant thing for the residents of the flat. Who wants to have a junkyard right in front of their house, worse still having to see it every time the window was opened? However, t...

One is hardly used to the Calcutta that one sees at the crack of dawn. For the newspaper-wallah who has to wake up early morning so that he ( here’s one profession where I haven’t seen a female working) can manage the entire logistics and ensure that the paper is made available at each home with the cup of hot morning tea, its no big deal. Neither is it a big deal for the lady who comes to work at our home from some far off village. She gets up at 3.30 in the morning and then takes the 1st train into the city for starting her work. For such people, the dawn breaking in the city, holds no special surprises. However, 5 am is a little too early for people like us, who are blessed and do not have to worry about physical exertion for the sake of eking out a living. Therefore when someone suggested to me that I have to wake up and leave home latest by 5.30-5.45 am, my initial reaction was one of dismay! There’s no way, I would get up so early and that too on a Sunday morning! However, when ...