Weekend management

ingBefore 2004, I spent three years in Kolkata. I used to travel back home to Burdwan during weekends. I used to sit with my friends and tour across the city with my cycle. The charm of the weekend was to chat with friends or to play cards with them. From end-2003, I used to attend classes and then used to meet my girlfriend.

After coming to Hyderabad in mid-2004, I was repeatedly troubled by how to spend the weekend. The biggest dilemma was to decide whether to go out or stay back at home to conserve some energy for next weekend. Initially, my energy and eagerness to tour across a new city got priority over the latter. Later the issue became so complicated that I had to spend a few moments to think about what really can be done over the weekends. Of late I have modeled a plan for ideal weekend so that my decision making becomes easier.

Let me see the forces those ask me to stay home -
A1) The English Premier League Live telecast on ESPN (Thanks to the Cable operator, it didn't add my worries in some time periods)
A2) Cook, cook and eat (Somehow I like to cook new items at home and eat)
A3) Enormous lethargy. (Common to all techies)

And the forces to move out of walls -
B1) Seeing new places.
B2) Eating in a restaurant (my favourite are Paradise and Tabla, although it's too costly)
B3) Shopping and reading books in Himalaya book stores.

There are four basic time slots available to me - Saturday morning and evening, Sunday morning and evening. So if I reserve Saturday evening for A1(most of the matches are in that slot), and the morning for cooking, then I can go out on Sunday. So an ideal weekend goes like this :
Wake up late in Saturday morning -> Go to nearby market -> come back and cook -> a siesta till EPL live starts -> have foods at night -> talk over phone -> (optional) Read books/write blogs ->sleep -> Wake up late in Sunday morning -> get ready and reach the bus stand -> Eat in a restaurant -> shop in a AC shop (books or anything else) -> have dinner in a nearby shop -> talk over phone -> Good Night!!

Well, reading this, if you think I'm a machine, then I would ask you to think again. I always have plans but I seldom execute those. That's the charm of the life. After all, to lead a predictable life is equivalent to living in hell. So, I hardly care about these plans when weekend really comes. I plan because I love to plan and I am happy that I have chalked out a plan at last. But who can compromise over the uncertainty hidden in the weekend? Let me decide on the next weekend what to do, whatever I would like to do after getting out of the bed. A new weekend should always be there to enjoy it in a new way. That's how life goes ...

A short story of Dustbin

What is a dustbin? Rather I should ask how a dustbin looks like. If you think dustbin is the place where you dump all the wastes - then you are taking a bookish meaning of a word. A dustbin, in today's world, is a place, which is known for it's lack of cleanliness and appears to be clumsy and dirty from all aspects. In Bengali, what is an 'Astak(n)ur'? It should be a close to 'dustbin' in meaning. Well, if you think I am referreing to a place where I never want to go ... you're absolutely wrong.

The 'object' that I am referring to right now, is nothing but the No 203 apartment of Sai Somnath Manor, where I live with my three unfortunate friends. There might be a debate on who's really the most unfortunate of us all to be a part of the Dustbin, there's no doubt at all that everybody contributes everyday to some extent to maintain our the reputation of our house as a pure dustbin.

So why it's a dustbin after all? Anybody who visits our house from a non-dustbin background can take a glance at our house and understand it. The way newsapapers are scattered, the way the tv is placed, the way the beds are laid on the floor and also the dirty appearance of the walls and the woodworks (!!) are maintained really talks about the taste of the people of the house. I have contributions to all these and I know how difficult it is to restructure all these once they are scattered. But, there can be a 'backward compatibility' issue if there is an effort to bring all these in shape - nobody will get their belongings in 'proper' place, where they are habituated to get them. So, isn't it better to leave them as they are and concentrate on the other aspects of the life? After all, who's in the world has become rich only by taking care of households? So, we are as we are, and our house is also as we are ...

There's a strange relationship between good food and dustbins. The good food is always excess (because it's prepared in occassions only) and seldom ends up at dustbin. It's very difficult to visualize a dustbin as a source of some delicious foods. As an exception to the hypothesis, our dustbin is known for a clean and well-organized kitchen. Every weekend we prepare exceptional foods to re-establish that exception. And the very person who coined the term Astaku(n)r to describe out apartment, acknowledges the taste of our foods. Again, I have some handsome contribution to all these efforts to continue our experiments in the kitchen-turned-lab. After all the first boon to the goopy-bagha was that they can have unlimited delicious foods anytime. It highlights a basic dream of any human being.

So, what's about the future? After all the inhabitants of these dustbin are scheduled to enter a new married life next year, they'll no doubt find it difficult to forget the habits developed in their dustbin-life. But, I am sure, this life also added some value to our life - the self-dependency, the skillset oriented cooking culture, the courage to experiment and the instinctive initiatives are to name a few. The life will go on ... from dustbin to family and to family to .... old age home.