Living Diagonally In My Parallel World!

The River Takes It's own Course   Shrikant They say the river forgets. But I remember everything.  It started some years ago.  I had taken early retirement to write books. My first two books with stories on human relationships were well received.  It began with her voice. Not the sound — I never heard her sing — but the silence around her. Vaidehi Deshpande. She lived in that old bungalow near Parvati Hill, the one with the sagging balcony and the bougainvillea that bled red onto the compound wall. I saw her first on a Thursday evening, when the sky was the colour of old brass and the air smelled of wet stone. She was feeding crows with turmeric rice, her saree a faded violet, her hair streaked with silver like monsoon lightning. She moved like someone who had once danced and now remembered only the rhythm. My wife, Anjali wouldn't understand, so I told her I was walking to ease my knees. But truthfully, I was walking to find her again. I began timing my ste...

  In the quiet lanes of Prabhat Road , Pune, where G ulmohar trees flamed red in April and the air carried the scent of roasted corn from roadside stalls, lived Rajiv Das Bandopadhyay, 45, a writer whose name was both a blessing and a burden. His father, Sanjeev Das Bandopadhyay aka S D Bandopadhyay , was a literary colossus—winner of the Sahitya Akademi, Jnanpith, and Padma Bhushan. Sanjeev’s novels were etched into the syllabi of Pune, Delhi and Jadavpur University. His prose was like monsoon rain—dense, lyrical, and cleansing. Rajiv, by contrast, wrote with the precision of winter light—clear, sparse, and quietly aching.   Rajiv had inherited not just his father’s Bengali cheekbones and contemplative eyes, but also his gift for language. Yet, in literary circles from Kolkata to Mumbai, he was always “SD’s son.” At readings, people asked him about his father’s metaphors, not his own. At Sahitya Sammelans, he was introduced as “the heir to a great legacy,” never as a write...

  On a cool January evening in Pune, the city exhaled a gentle hush. The air carried the scent of roasted peanuts and eucalyptus, and the sky above Model Colony was a soft indigo, stitched with the first stars. An old bungalow, once belonging to a freedom fighter, now hosted a literary soiree — poets, professors, musicians, and wanderers gathered under fairy lights and faded portraits to celebrate the written word.   Arjun Deshmukh, 38, stood near a bookshelf lined with dusty Marathi anthologies and translated Russian novels. His lean frame was wrapped in a navy Nehru jacket, and his eyes — brown, thoughtful, slightly sunken — moved across the room like a man searching for a sentence he’d once read but couldn’t recall. A literature professor at Ferguson College, Arjun was known for his lectures on Eliot and Ambedkar, but tonight he felt like a footnote in someone else’s poem.  His wife, Abha, 35, moved through the crowd with quiet grace. Her silver saree shimmered like ...

   Abhi Mujh Mein Kahin from the new Agnipath is a song most of us like. The feelings it generates of tenderness, longing and rediscovery are too delicate. Amitabh Bhattacharya and Ajay-Atul along with Sonu Nigam have created magic. I have attempted to write on similar lines. Somewhere within me, still, you breathe, A whisper soft the winds don’t sheath. Though time has tried to dim your light, You bloom in shadows of the night. A touch, a glance, a fleeting sigh, You taught my silent soul to cry. I’d buried dreams beneath the frost, But in your warmth, no hope was lost. I feared the joy—it felt too rare, Like morning dew too shy to dare. Yet in your smile, the world stood still, And love returned against my will. You didn’t ask, you didn’t plead, You simply gave what hearts most need. A moment’s peace, a breath so true, A chance to feel the sky turn blue. Now even pain feels strangely sweet, Where sorrow and my heartbeat meet. For once I lived, if j...