Impossible City!

I was caught unawares!

Today is the 11th day of the illuminated lunar fortnight and all immersion celebration of idols should have ended logically on the 10th day. But this time the devotees or more appropriately revelers somehow earned a bonus day and created havoc on the main arterial roads of Mumbai.

As I left office there was uninhibited celebration on the roads--crowds carrying their idols on tempos with loud dancing, louder bands playing non-stop and loudest fireworks right in the middle there. Traffic snarls and mass congregations at the bus stops. City buses started disappearing--maybe the staff need to celebrate too.

I managed to travel half the distance on a bus and afterward decided to walk the 3km home considering pondering wondering.

As usual, the homeless hordes lounged on even the most prominent pavements cooking eating sleeping defecating and suffering there while imported cars zoomed past in fond oblivion. Thousands carried on with their existential dilemma while thousands went on celebration without end and wasting money of immense proportions. And, the city admin machinery looked on. Maybe with election round the corner all voters are allowed to do whatever they want! Eat drink and be merry and 'vote for me'!

Where's this city going? What's going to happen next? How long would it take to burst out of seams? No solutions. I only managed to arrive at the title of my post!

Comments

The VIP Brat: A Study in Contrast!

Here we’re talking about only two compartments inside a particular AC 2-Tier coach in a particular daily train under the Indian Railways that departs a particular originating station at around noontime and reaches the destination city early morning the next day. The train is popular because it is superfast and always on time. That fateful noon too, the train was ready for boarding about one hour before departure. We cut to the inside of that particular coach having those two compartments for our contrasting study. Two elderly couples were in a state of considerable distress. One of them, both technically senior citizens, had been allotted two upper berths and the husband was at his wits end how to proceed, because his wife was being taken for check-up after surgeries in both of her knees—she could hardly walk and her climbing up the berth was a sheer impossibility. The husband was also on the wrong side of the sixties, but he thought he could manage the climbing once he managed a ...

Mitali: The Trauma of Losing a Sibling

Maybe I lied to her when I used to reassure her that she was going to be alright and was going to resume her life in some measure of normalcy in the future years; maybe all my gestures/expressions were false when I used to run my fingers across her forehead or embrace her on occasions when she was able to move around a bit; and maybe all my exhibitions of love care and responsibility were exposed as superficial when I failed to turn up in Delhi where she along with my mother were treated during September-October, 2022 (my mother Urmila Chakravarty was also diagnosed with dental cancer the same month the same year as she was) and when all the members of my parental family and the in-laws converged. Since that fateful day in August, 2022 when she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer to that disastrous day of March 6, 2025—the day my younger blood sister Mitali (Mainu) Chakravarty Sarma (November 2, 1963—March 6, 2025) passed away in the wee hours in a hospital in Guwahati after giving a bra...

Release of Book 'Randomized: A Dozen Short Stories'!

The fourth collection of stories titled 'Randomized: A Dozen Short Stories' by Chinmay Chakravarty has been released on Amazon KDP just now! This collection, short stories in a lighter vein plus with mild satire like the previous collections, has been published in both the E-book and Paperback formats. The links are given below: International: Click Here ! India: Click Here ! Other collections of short stories by the same author: The Cheerless Chauffeur and Other Tales(2021)--Notion Press. Funny and Fishy Tales(2022)--KDP. The Weirdos(2022)--Ukiyoto Publishing. All books of the author are available on Goodreads, apart from Amazon and other outlets! Have a look!