NAMES, FACES AND FLASHES

‘ a man’ sits alone on a park bench in the middle of an uptown colony, in the middle of the city, in the middle of the country, in the middle of the globe.

‘A boy” rotates the globe that he carries from the staff room to the geography room,

remembering the furious tides of the ocean and a raft from outside his conscious experience.

‘a mystic’ tells four disciples on a rainy day in a tropical rainforest,

how the unit of life is an experience of four dimensions and how much is the meditation fee for the esoteric course for non nationals.

“ a political leader” tells an upcoming model at a socialite party how the strings of his pyjamas hold her future in a sideways glance as he chews on his paan.

“ a prostitute” sheds her first tear since she was twelve , when a gentle virgin boy caresses her face. In an instant she explodes like an injured horse, and accuses him of not being a man.

‘a coward” floats serenely in the sky as he descends from the 40^th floor, thinking about the beautiful movie his life has been.

“an ex heroin addict “ thinks of integrating music, meditation and visuals that he stumbled upon inside himself with a sport hes created called VIBGYOR , to fight the agents of power conditioning.

‘the black sheep of the family’ remembers how complete he felt as a sick child, rocked to sleep in his mothers lap all through the night,’

“the responsible son” sits at a business school in Boston acquiring the guile to usurp the monopoly rights of his uncles business in Bombay.

“the bright , ambitious , likeable girl” thinks of a way to break her idealist boyfriend as he

kisses her shoes in the ruins at night.

‘the fat girl” licks a pillow as she tries to sleep thinking of the love she has to give, listening to “everybody hurts” playing distant on her neighbors radio.

‘ a wildlife photographer” frames all of the above characters in a long shot and instead decides to go to a bird sanctuary.

‘ an aspiring documentary film maker’ fights with his father a bureaucrat to go and live in the refugee slums of yamuna pushta for a year instead of a film school in California.

“ a schizophrenic ” looks at his shadow moving on the walls of an asylum, which reminds him of an old bengali folk song and a kite he sees all the time swimming in an ocean or a galaxy of purple now and crimson then.''

‘ a slacker” sits hunched in his filth studded room with spit oozing out from the sides of his mouth and suddenly his nails bite into his three stringed guitar with a premonition of notes and raging rhythm , discovering a riff which means everything to him.