Obituary - A Goddess merged into another

Fig: "Ailing Lungs, Drooping Heart" - I made this piece when my mother was bedridden because of the disease of the lungs

We live in a cyclic world with the cycles of birth and death around us all the time. It always seems like the process of life is moving towards infinity, only to end up in a zero. Funny but realistic, this is how life is. It is a number line which starts at one point and ends in another, only to be a starting point for another number line. Quite an analogy to the “Jeevan Maran” chakra of Hindu philosophy.

My mother had a life full of enormous struggle and hardships. She had a life where she had to prove belongingness to society every day. She had to prove her identity and her existence in her social circle by being available all the time. But even after this, she was largely the architect of her number line of life.

Born in Rangoon in a Marwadi novelty, her family had to forgo all their wealth and immigrate to India during the 1962 Myanmar coup. The family having their roots in Rajasthan had a lot of connections all over India and they moved to different parts of India. With a gradual decline in financial status, her family moved from Kolkata to Ranchi for business where she spent most of her life.

She was an ardent movie fan and made it a point to watch as many during her teenage years and later until she was bedridden. Probably, I got that movie “keeda” from her which still runs deep. Oh! I remember one of her episodes of Delirium, when she was not able to recognize anyone at home and had a temporary memory loss. I showed her clips from a few old Hindi movies which she was able to recognize immediately. Her love for movies was fascinating. She could recognize any old movie just by their clips.

She was an immaculate cook, a soulful Bhajan singer and a hardworking woman. She always taught me that a man should learn everything which a woman can do. I learnt those too during the course of my life with her. A social personality with a lot of connections, she spread happiness with her smile.

Like all beings, she also made choices which defined the course of her life which made large troughs in her number line of life. That being said, it was her life and she took the responsibility for it. The good part is that before leaving this realm, she did closure on all her qualms and made peace with her past.

She left us after more than a year of suffering because of prolonged lung disease leaving a subtle void in our lives which will always be etched in my mind as long as we see the shape of Rabbit on the moon. She was my Goddess, I could sacrifice my life for her. But I guess she bargained better with the Gods.

Now her suffering has ended and she is at peace. She is with “Ma Kali” and I hope her number line doesn’t have another starting point. Thank you Ma for teaching me throughout my life, taking care of me and being what you were. I will always celebrate your life and have learnt from it in ways which made me a better person.

Anand Bora

Surrender

This poem is written on the context that Lord Shiva gets impressed by the incessant focus and hard work of a very knowledgeable and scientific man and gives him Darshan in his dream.

Fig: Meditating Shiva created by Bing AI (Prompt: create a meditating image of Hindu god Shiva on mount kailash. His disciples are saints, monsters, bulls and common people. They are in a worshipping pose towards him. Shiva is in a meditating state.)

My curiosity and the will to know,
Made me question, reason and question the flow.
Driven by logic, I debate with the divine;
He answers patiently just before 03:59.

Oh! I find him calm, serene and yogic,

His aura is beyond human logic,

I have my doubts and knowledge clouts my mind;

I ask him, where do you live and how do I find?

Giving me a look of aplomb;

While his devotees prop out of a catacomb,

He tells me gently, "I will answer your questions."

Suddenly, my heart is filled with mixed emotions.

He returns to a meditating state -

I don't know, why it feels he has no date.

He opened his eyes and spoke, "OM" -

My mind got inundated with pathway to freedom.

The voice trickled down my spine;

Healing my nerves, blood vessels and the dynastic line.

The answers have come, I don't need to ask;

I surrender, Sensei - unto you, I bask and task.

Anand Bora

5 easy ways to shed weight | Bi(e)tter Health tip

The big con about working in software is that this is a ‘s(h)itting’ job and we attract fats very quickly into our bodies. I fell to the gluttony trap and sedentary lifestyle and started feeling very heavy and dull. I was consuming lots of sugar which made me more inactive and lazy. Once I was not able to get down and touch my feet which triggered that I needed to do something about my body. Following is my before / after photo in which I had lost 16 kgs in 6 months. I talk about my process and tips I followed to be where I was in 5 steps.

Me Before / After

QUIT SUGAR

I quit Sugar for more than a year completely. I didn’t take an iota of sugar in my body in any way. No chocolate, no sweets, no cakes and not even home-made sweets. If I really got a craving, I would eat organic jaggery in my tea or anything else.

WORKOUT

I started to workout daily for at least 20 minutes. This automatically increased and I started doing more and more exercises on my own. Probably this is a mental thing and the body becomes accustomed to it as the time goes by. By the 5th month, I was doing 150 crunches a day which was uncalled for at my age of 38. We need to do reasonable exercises daily to feel good in some way. You can follow this app which is great in terms of giving balanced exercise experience.

DAILY CONSUMPTION OF HEALTH DRINK

Drinking a homemade health drink in the morning in an empty stomach eases out the metabolism. I didn’t believe this much before I started. I prepared this drink based on this Youtube tutorial and was consuming it everyday without fail. It really did wonders and I started to see the effect as time went by.

Preparation - Grind some fennel seeds, carom seeds, cumin seeds, flax seeds and some cinnamon and create a rough textured powder.

Consumption - Mix one teaspoon of powder in hot water and a little bit of lemon juice. Drink on an empty stomach to see the difference in a few days.

INTERMITTENT FASTING & DIET

I completely stopped eating at night. My schedule was to eat between 10am - 7pm. I stopped munching unnecessarily and resorted to eating less. Although my diet didn’t change much, I had completely stopped eating RICE. I was eating a lot of pulses, millets and fruits to compensate.

IMPROVED SLEEP SCHEDULE

For us software folks, it is very difficult to manage sleep. We work with people in different time zones and it becomes really difficult to avoid work at night. But when you have to lose weight, you need to tune your body for enough sleep. My sleep schedule changed to 11pm - 5am. I had never done this ever during my working career and it was a drastic change but I started feeling so much better. Although the change was disruptive, it helped me a lot.

So, those were the tips I used to shed my fat. I hope this helps people who are trying to do so and achieve results in due course.

Review of "Hereditary"

Hereditary comes across a movie which should be on your list if you are a Horror movie lover. I am writing this piece so you know already that I love horror movies a lot. To put into perspective, I have already watched 55 from Top 100 horror movies list from IMDB which would be close to 5500 hours of my life. 😀

Getting back to the movie, I watched this 2018 movie on Prime Video recently and it was really good in terms of concealing the antagonist or the demon in this case. Just after finishing the movie, I felt that I had watched an amalgamation of the “Wicker Man”, The Holy Mountain and a tincture of “The Shining”. If you read about those movies or watch them, you will realise what I am talking about.

I want to talk about the BEST parts in the movie which are really good and worth mentioning.

The SOUND DESIGN - Oh! I love the Sound Design in this movie. Very few horror movies bring out the right music to compliment the scenes of the movies. Lewis Goldstein and Tom Ryan have done a splendid job on this project. The sound design is eerie, contemporary, tribal and creepy, all at the same time. I really enjoyed it on the IEMs I used to watch the movie.

The SCRIPT - A very novel approach to horror movie making by mixing a lot of ingredients like paganism, slasher effects, brute force and dreams/nightmares. The unpredictability of people being killed is an icing on the cake and adds a modern and novel approach. There are occasions where the script brings out the emotional part of the characters within a family in a brutal way which is justified by the actors with all its merit. Bonus points on the miniature art concept and connecting it to real life. A scene which shows how the mother laments the death of her child by re-creating the miniature version of her accident, must be a brain child of a genius and vastly experienced writer. The suspense of hiding the main antagonist is also brilliant and the scriptwriter has done a tremendous job here.

The ACTING - All the Actors are Fantabulous. I think this is the first movie of Toni Collette which I have seen and I am already a Fan. She delivers emotions on the screen like a rainbow formed with mercury, transitioning effortlessly from one emotion to the other. Gabriel Brianne and Alex Wolf have been tremendous. This movie must have re-defined Alex’s career and he is on his way to do much larger projects. But one actor whose name I don’t know creates an impact in just one scene with his gaze (pictured below). Although, he comes for another single scene later in the movie too.

The EDITING, COLOR GRADING, SFX and all major aspects of filmmaking are top notch. They keep the audience hooked with the streamlined storytelling.

Needless to say, there are blips which they should have looked at. The VFX at places seems very outdated. For example, the scene when Annie’s jacket catches fire, the fire seems fake to normal eyes. Some decapitation scenes and bodies look glaringly artificial. Color grading at some places during the climax is too dark. They show a lot of symbols in the movie but there is almost no explanation of them. They seem purely referential which in a way shows that the director wants people to make assumptions. They don’t mention how the actual possession happened, only the means are shown. Probably, that can be an inspiration for another movie 😀

Overall, I really enjoyed the movie and it is definitely part of my all time horror movies to watch out for. After the movie, I tried to recall which movie might have been the creepiest I saw and the immediate answer was “Rosemary’s Baby”. Again, that is purely a personal choice and it won’t be fair to limit my answer to just one movie.

Zindagi

Random creation while evening walk..

ज़िन्दगी कैसी है, तेरे मेरे जैसी है

बारिश की बूंदों की तरह नाज़ुक,

एक अल्फ़ाज़ में पूरे आयत के जैसी है;

मेरे सांस में तेरी हवा के जैसी है,

ये कुछ नहीं पर एक छोटी पहेली जैसी है।

ज़िन्दगी कैसी है, तेरे मेरे जैसी है

ग़म और खुशी के अश्क,

इसके वजूद में इंटो के जैसी है;

इनका बंधन एक नवरंग है,

ये तुम्हारे काले और सफेद जुड़े जैसी है।

ज़िन्दगी कैसी है, तेरे मेरे जैसी है

हर मौसम के हम है आशिक,

मेरा हुनर, मेरी रचना के जैसी है;

ये इन्कलाब मेरा मेरी ज़िन्दगी से चलता रहेगा,

कैसी भी हो, ये सच्चाई के जैसी है।

Re-start!

It's been a while since I wrote anything and I have started to feel a void inside me as writing gradually eroded from my life. This year I have promised myself to do more art, write more stuff and get healthier and wealthier at the same time.

I had a fabulous start to the year as I made my first Artwork in quite sometime. Thanks to an inspirational pic posted by a friend on Instagram. Quite surprising that I can still do art is relatively lesser time which means I need to practise and do more.