Anushree

Everybody in the audience was mesmerised by the spectacle of lights. Not Anushree.

As soon as she completed her song, Anushree didn’t know from where she mustered enough courage to look up to her mother’s face. She could surmise what the visage on her mother’s countenance would be. And she wasn’t mistaken. It was what it had to be when you lost your tempo in the middle of the performance plus missing out on a low-pitch note completely, twice in succession. This was the first of two stages of the Elimination Round. Her mother’s face looked drained. Reluctantly, she turned. To face the jury.

“Anushree, do you think you did well?”

It was an expected question. She gave it a thought on what to say. The director of the show had showed her the statistics of the SMS votings she had received. And it didn’t look impressive. The director had suggested an alternative to boost up her “rating” – cry.

Tears were at the brink of her eyes, ready to gush out at her command.

“Anushree is a very talented girl. But we think it was not Anushree’s day today. You could’ve done a better job.You lost the tempo in so-and-so stanza and tone modulation too wasn’t upto the mark in so-and-so section.............”

Anushree couldn’t hear any more. The whole amount of lightings was now blinding her. She longed....for a drop of water, a grotesque statuette in front of a hundred pairs of blazing eyes. Even before those words thrust into her brains like shrapnels, she felt her consciousness deserting her.

The microphone which fell from her hand as she fell, send reverberations across the studio.

The director didn’t “cut” even as Anushree fell. In fact, he was elated at her “outstanding performance.” After all, he had “taught” her just to cry, look melancholic. And here was someone doing a better job than he expected. He was continuously motioning to the cameras panning onto the anxious judges’ face, to take shots of the gaping audience as well. Her fellow contestants came rushing onto the stage, and a significant majority of them succeeded in displaying a glance of their faces onto the ever zooming camera lenses.

Even after Anushree was moved from the stage, the sober mood of the session was sustained by the anchor, who the director reflected, very efficiently sensed the pulse of the show. The adjudicators focussed on Anushree’s flashback performances. And one of them even went on to the extent of saying that she was one of the most talented performers in the whole bunch of contestants.

It took quite some time for Anushree to regain consciousness. She glanced around to the faces of her fellow participants-envy and jealousy were implanted all over their expressions. Instead, her “performance” after a flopped performance, gave new ideas to many of her co-contestants, in case something goes wrong. The director too was overjoyed-he got a few amazing moments, which could be used in the show’s advertisements. And he conveyed that with a gleaming nod, to Anushree’s mother.

But the tension on the face of Anushree’s mother still lingered. She knew that Anushree’s SMS ratings were on the decline. And the revalation that “buying” SMSes with their dwindling bank balance sheets was becoming a bleak possibility, set the direction for her thoughts. Calls continued to pour to and from her mobile phone. And her father, who was running around trying to obtain economically viable solutions to the same problem, never stood by for a moment and thought...about Anushree.

That Anushree needed them the most. Then.

Even after they reached home, Anushree’s mind was still pre-occupied with the whole debacle. She often sobbed when she rehearsed the song, the one she had chosen had a sombre tone. She didn’t know why she was crying. In fact, more and more she went through the song, the more she felt that she was isolated in the world.

She despised an alien world. She did.

No sooner had her mother gone to the club, Anushree closed her room door and fell onto her bed. She reflected, sobbing all the while, that she had lost her childhood in her race behind learning and music; rather books and music competitions. She found it hard to recollect a few faces of her kindergarten classmates, whom she once thought she’ll never forget. She saw a small butterfly trapped in the mesh cover of her French windows. She made herself to rise up and go to the window. The little butterfly was making fruitless efforts to disentangle itself from the trap it was in. Wiping her tears, she freed it and opened the windows. Her gaze followed the butterfly as it happily burst off into distant world....into freedom. Into life....And seeing that, as if in frenzy, Anushree screamed and ran off into her bed. She thought she would find some solace under her blanket, hugging her dear cotton pillow. But it was not to be. The cartoon characters imprinted on her bedsheet seemed to mock her.

She discovered some noise in her screaming. To get away. To get out. She felt as if her small world-something that till recently comprised of her mother and father other than herself, had become a mere Utopian concept. The song for the next performance was filtering its way into Anushree’s ears from the Sony music system at the corner of her room. Armed as if by a divine courage, she caught hold of the nearest book she could grasp and threw it at the music system. And she got all the more infuriated when she saw that the music had not stopped in spite. Getting up from the bed, she charged down her room, lifted the music system and threw it on the wall.

As the music ceased to emanate from the “music system” anymore, Anushree for the first time in days, felt relieved.

Armed with her bedsheet, she wriggled her way onto the final stage-one final elimination. Her ears seemed to throng with reverberations of claps from the audience....her eyes seemed to visualise cameras panning in upon her from all possible range of angles. The sobbing picture of her parents made the close up.... wet towels of her relatives formed the long range shot.....And the background was subdued with a solemn song.

The wings of the ceiling fan proved strong enough.



At the recording studio, the director motioned “Start camera rolling...action!” A dark colour clad adjudicator pronounced the verdict, “Anushree Suresh....age sixteen....eliminated from the show.”

In The Lurch

Across the bantering rains,
mystic obscurity of haze and fog,
standing alone was I.


Me but a solitary me,
scared I was, alone I was
No light to guide, no shade to hide,
a lonely road is all I saw.


An alien world was busy,
who cared if an alien I wasn’t.
Hungry askance of ravaging predators
Oh but I had only myself to pray.
Through the raindrops the rainbow smiled,
only to make me realise it wasn’t beautiful, after all.
The thankings of a thirsty hornbill,
the elation of a novice peacock,
I never knew where they melted away.


In the lurch I stood,
waiting for an angel to lift me up
Crying, was I?
No I don’t know.
But God, I didn’t want you to send me here.


A life is what thou dreamt,
shattered dreams are all what I got.
A dwelling is what thou yearned
didn’t know I was destined a broken glasshouse.


So here I was in the lurch,
unsheltered in the deluge of rains,
when I saw thy angel.
The lonely road I took.
Sure was a tear in my eye,
a tear sent by God it seemed.
All I remember thus, my last second of life.
‘Coz it blocked my vision.
And there I saw thy four wheeled angel,
coming to take my life.


All over in a flash it was,
a new life after life I hope.
No more was I in the lurch.
And at last I realise,
the rainbow never looked so lovely.

ADIEU A POWERFUL DECADE

Often wondered on many previous New Year eves-why is it that we always show a great zeal in welcoming the New Year as we simultaneously neglect the year that goes by. We often talk about New Year resolutions but do we ever look back to see if we fulfilled any of those resolutions which we took the same day a year ago?

This time around, the New Year is a little more special than usual. Because it is the beginning of a new decade. Or rather, I would say, it is the end of a powerful one.

The past decade is something that “revolutionized” the me in myself. I distinctly remember those days of the late 1990s and early 2000s. That was a time when I used to be a regular reader of Tinkle Digest (must admit it’s something I do even now!!!). The “thickest” books I ever read were those of Enid Blyton – Famous Five and Secret Seven series. The few things I knew about a computer was to use MS DOS, Paint, MS PowerPoint and a few games. And for me, life was all home, school and my dad's college. And home, school and dad's college was life.

The past decade also infused in me a lot of thoughts and ideologies, the most important one being communism. I was influenced by communism and I believe this happened because I went through a lot of communist-based literature at an age when I was not very much in a position to take decisions.


Terrorism,Twitter,Google,Transistors,Tsunami-all these were words unknown at the dawn of the millennium. In fact, a lot of these were unknown to me until the latter half of the decade. Also this decade has the speciality that I started my tryst with the world of competitive examinations. Something which I am not entirely in favour of till date.

I don’t know if I am a changed person as compared to what I was ten years ago, but certainly I like myself the way I did then. I started the habit of reading, a very good habit at that. Mainly fiction novels, but I don’t mind the occasional philosophy as well. While in primary sections, I had the habit of writing regularly. But that habit became intermittent as I looked upon people and incidents to make me write. Another change that was brought about was the writing style. I started writing fewer poems and more prose as compared with the opposite trend earlier. And also I started writing in my mother tongue in this decade. And I still find it way more hard to write in Malayalam than in English, something I wish to rectify with time. Reading particularly news magazines and soccer world cup history was something I picked up in the early part of this decade.

This is a decade when I started taking resolutions. And stopped the practice as well. But one resolution which I took somewhere in the middle of the decade, possibly 2004 or 2005 is something I very strictly adhere to, even till date. That I will not miss the chance to sing my national anthem anytime. And I make it a point to go to any function that has the national anthem in its agenda as much as possible.

Another set of memories of the gone-by decade would be the life in college. College life is something that influences everybody, me being no exception. All those (un)successful mass bunks, those sleepy lectures from the last bench, night outs at hostels, delivery (and in unfortunate cases, the recipt as well) of GPLs, night walks through the college campus-every moment had a special charm. Remember someone saying that how he wished he was born on February 29 so that he would’ve had to bear only one GPL in his college life! And it is this decade that gave me all these.

Oops. I nearly missed out. 2000 is the last year I studied Hindi officially!! It was in mid 2000 that I attempted to read Munshi Prem Chand’s Godaan. Remember flipping through around 35-40 pages with persistent hard work. After that the book went back to the school library shelves.

I don’t know what prompted me to write this article. But I regret the fact that I didn’t write anything this day 10 years ago and I might not want to regret the same mistake when India and the world awake to 2020. I never imagined that I would be here 10 years before and I do think that I can repeat the same statement a decade ahead. Maybe a few years down the lane, I might look back on this article. And smile.

Maybe that’s what I write this for.

Maybe.

Adieu a powerful decade.