KEBABS, GANDHI & ABDULLAH
Alexandria, Egypt

I can bet that for meat lovers like me there are very few things that are less enchanting than the aroma of freshly grilled kebabs. The aroma of the exotic spices mixed with fresh yogurt used in an unique marination starts radiating its magic once it kisses the fire. As the sun was setting in the crimson horizon beyond the sparkling blue waters of the Mediterranean Sea the floating aroma of Kebabs coming from the alleys of Alexandria continued enticing us just like the back piper of Hamlin had allured the kids with his music. As the busy city was settling into a cosy weekend on a Thursday evening we decided to answer the call of Kebabs in the streets of Alexandria.

British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein had once said “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”. I would have hardly connected this much with him if I had not visited Egypt without knowing Arabic. In India being a small town boy who is decently skilled in English, you earn a superficial super hero vanity as if you are truly the cool dude. For me since I was good in spoken English as well as Hindi I had an extra air of confidence. So whenever Hindi failed to support me I resorted to English and in most places in India I was well through. But Egypt & Arabic was totally a different ball game. I mean in Egypt life without an English speaking guide or google translator is real tough. Even the common video player thread which moves from left to right in our phones indicating the video duration, moves from right to left in Egyptian phones.

This evening in Alexandria our Egyptian tourist guide had left us with the advice of ordering Pizza in our apartment. But the call of the kebabs from the Arabic alleys was too hard to resist. So I took some cash in my pocket and decided to go Kebab hunting in the mystic alleys of Arabia (read Alexandria) along with my wife and her father.
As we walked past the Mediterranean Sea beach on our left we got comforted by pleasant sea breeze. It not only got the temperatures down very briskly but it kind of made the atmosphere quite chilled. There were vividly colourful canopies on the beach sand which were getting used as shacks and restaurants. The streets were usually crowded and it had the familiar clatter and weekend vibes amidst the office returning mob. You could hear the evening prayers echoing from some nearby mosque as the street lights and the neon signs were taking full effect. The road side shops mainly sold books, silk, satin and glass hookahs or chandeliers. There was also a number of restaurant chains such Pizza hut and Dominos, but they were mostly crowded with men wearing loincloths or short kilts and women in stylish hijabs. But we were drawn by the bewitching aroma of the freshly grilled kebabs which had intensified more as we approached the alley.

Just as I entered the alley I realized I had made two mistakes. Firstly my mobile battery died and deprived us of the services of the google translator. Secondly the cash which I carried was just a single 100 Egyptian pound note wrapping an Indian 500 rupee note & five 100 rupee notes. The cash would not have sufficed but luckily my father in law had some extra cash. Though he readily offered me the cash, he also exchanged a nasty sarcastic look along with it.

The alley was heaven for any foodie. The enchanting aroma of freshly baked bread and cakes continued to wrestle with enticing fragrance of the kebabs. To add to it they were brewing strong Turkish coffee in some stores which further continued tickling your taste buds. The alley was well lit and had food joints on both sides of the road with delicious looking billboards all in Arabic. People were relaxing with a cup of coffee or soda in the roadside bars watching some football match. In many ways this scene reminded me of my hometown Kolkata where the football fever is usually this high. The people were engrossed in the game and involved in animated discussions with each other. You might relate the scene with a German or English football pub, only the drinks here were non-alcoholic strictly. Though the drinks were non-alcoholic but the energy and intensity amidst the crowd was at its peak. 

But when you are hungry you and accompanied by your wife and her father, don’t have the luxury to watch all these things.  As if walking in a trance we entered the first shop in the alley which had the most spectacular photos of lip smacking Egyptian meat delicacies. But Hold on. This was the first time I realized that my language skills were totally inadequate here. I could have resorted to sign language but alas the menu was in Arabic too. Even the cashier was in no mood to explain and entertain us with the menu. So heart broken and ditched we had to sadly come out of the restaurant bidding adieu to the thrilling aroma of the kebabs from a stone throw distance.
We had a repeat experience in the next three joints and slowly we were growing impatient and hungry. I could sense the hunger and anger soar up tempers in my wife and her father as they kept exchanging irritated glances with me. It was me who had insisted on the visiting this alley so the onus was clearly on me.

As I was approaching the edge of my desperation we located a shop on the edge of the alley which was selling delicious kebabs and fried meat in an open glass counter. This was my last opportunity to redeem myself. As we approached the shop they seemed interested to serve us unlike the other counters. But the man was clueless in English, so I had to resort to hand signals to complete my ordering. Though he had the most hospitable euphoria and zeal to help me, our communication gap was too wide to be bridged. Somehow by using the calculator and finger pointing I concluded my ordering & he confirmed it would take 10 minutes to prepare. As I witnessed the chef across the glass counter weave magic by frying the crispy chicken pieces and kebabs along with exotic Egyptian herbs and sauces, my wife and father were becoming increasingly impatient. It was then that Abdullah greeted us in English, ”Hey you Indian- Shehrookh kahnn, Carrrinna Kepoor”

The spellings of Shahrukh Khan and Kareena Kapoor though purposefully written wrong will still not be enough to explain to the reader the rustic, rugged accent of Abdullah and this pathetic pronunciations. He was seated in a big armchair in one corner of the alley besides the shop as if he was the Sultan of the alley greeting some weary travellers from India. He was tall and huge like a gummy bear. Must be comfortably more 200 pounds in weight. He was dark in colour and dawned a white turban on his head. The light from the street lamps reflected against his face and shabby moustache, creating a mystic aura around him. He wore the grey coloured traditional robe commonly called “gallebaya” in Egypt. My father in law would mockingly call it a Maxi or nighty referring to similar night robe worn by women in India. Though the comparison is not the best, but still it will suffice to give a correct imagery. In his heavy husky voice Abdullah announced, “I love India! Great country! I love Gandhi”

From the day we came to Egypt we had being frequently greeted as Shahrukh Khan and Kareena Kapoor without having the slightest resemblance in shape, size or appearance with them. It was pretty dumb for me to accept that our entire identity will be summed by these two actors. Amidst all this, the sudden reference of Gandhi from this gummy bear was a pleasant surprise. But my hungry father in law was not at all intrigued by his advances. In fact he exchanged anther disgusted stare with me and hissed through his clenched teeth, “Drunk Case! Non sense”. But I was highly fascinated to know how this man in far off lands knew Gandhi.

Abdullah got up and started explaining animatedly. “Your Gandhi great man! Swear to Allah what a man! Gem of a man”. His showering adjectives kept me interested and I was forced to asked him why he thought Gandhi was great expecting a crisp socio political point of view. But Abdullah again stumped me with his hilarious answer that forced all of us to break into instant laughter.
“Man Gandhi did not sleep with his wife for 30 years!! Man what a man he was!!” Abdullah replied excitedly.

I had heard and read many things about Gandhi but this was certainly not one of them. In fact I doubt even Gandhi himself wouldn’t have imagined that this feat of his would earn him such accolades in Egypt so many years down under. Amidst all his glorious revolutionary feats and ideals, this fact about his conjugal life earning him brownie points wouldn’t have pleased the great man himself. As we were splitting into laughter, my father in law had his signature grin and snarled “I told you drunk case. Bloody Idiot”. I could visualize Gandhiji nod his head in his support and appreciation!

At this juncture Abdullah came close to us to bid goodbye. He hugged me gently and I swear I could not smell anything alcoholic in the man. This kind of made me more intrigued about Abdullah. But my father in law continued with his xenophobic glances and avoided his hug to shake his hands from a distance. Abdullah gently obliged and greeted us saying “mae alsalama” or goodbye before disappearing briskly into the darker part of the alley. Honestly I was thrilled by this encounter with this Egyptian who honoured Gandhi for the weirdest reason I ever heard.

Soon our chef announced that our dinner was ready and packed. Just by the look of the enormous parcels I guessed that my sign language has messed up big time. We ended up paying about 600 Egyptian pounds for the food which served for our breakfast too the next morning. Yet we had to waste one third of the food. As we took the parcels and kept walking back to our hotel, my father in law kept expressing his disgust on my excess ordering.
Right at that moment the crowd in the bars erupted in joy in unison. 
“G-O-A-L“

The local team had scored a goal. People hugged each other, cheered and danced running across the road. Few guys started singing aloud. All of a sudden the alley in Alexandria become a lane in Kolkata where the East Bengal club has scored a goal against arch nemesis Mohan Bagan. Out of sheer joy and love for the game we also started clapping our hands. Truly the love of sports had breached our international barriers.

It was then I realized that the 1000 Indian rupees in my hip pocket were missing. Probably Abdullah had removed them with surgical precision during our goodbye hug. I felt foolish but not really unhappy. Abdullah too will not be very pleased with the Indian currency. Probably he will take out the notes and will be greeted by the same Gandhi grinning at him. I trust he will have face a few tough questions from our Father of the Nation. May be he will sleep with his wife that night with Gandhiji under his pillow. With all these random thoughts, we returned to our hotel with the deja vu of delicious kebabs, Mahatma Gandhi & our new friend Abdullah.

Sweet Butterfly 
Md. Mesfakus Salahin


Sweet sweet colourful butterfly
Have you enjoyed all the sky?
If I had the wings like you
I would keep nothing new
I would be faster than time
Breathing dream and rhyme. 

Von Von the buzzing grasshopper
Visitor of the upper and the lower
You and gypsy  are the twin
Never keep me below your line
I want to fly with your wings
l will be the king of the kings.

Oh dear bumble bee, the spring guest
To you I have an urgent request
You are  swinging with flowers
Don't forget to take me with you, brother
Of course this world will be mine
To everyone l will be very fine.

A Broken Heart
Md. Mesfakus Salahin


A broken road never connects two hearts
A broken egg never births cockerel in Yachts 
A broken wheel never runs a bullocks cart 
A piece of thorned cloth never begets a shirt.

A broken heart never beats well
A rotten flower never gives sweet smell
A dry fountain never spreads hope and light
A dead river never reflects life and sight.

A foggy sun never finds sunny morning
But a broken heart overflows love still evening
True love is never defeated  by anyone 
True love is that two hearts that beat as one.

LIQUID TREASURE

Black air covers the sky

Which come from a small tube hole

A liquid that moves the motors

Controlled by many companies

Pumps are the distributor

People lined up,
With their earnings

To fill the tank,
Which stitched in the motor.

Government earns,

Value increased,

Reliance grownup,

Aramco empower,

A liquid that makes 

billionaires or zero.

Discussing Death

Gaurav Ojha

From the perspective of death, human life is just a passing story; we are here at this moment and in another dimension of time and history all of us are here no more. Recently, I was going through an old picture from my childhood days, which included me as a toddler and as I was going through a picture I realized that three out of four individuals are missing, they are dead and gone. 

I am alive now, but eventually I am also waiting for the same fate. After some time, just like the three of them, I will only remain in some other pictures. Similarly, I was looking at a crowded picture taken in the year 1910 with hundreds of people at a musical concert thoroughly enjoying together and by now I can safely presume that almost all the people in that picture are dead. Life happens only once to each of us, and there comes a point where everything concludes and ends. 

These are my discussions on death and there are so many of them, me and some of my friends we discuss death; however this proclamation seems bizarre to most of us because we are preoccupied with life without acknowledging the dimension of death. After all, everything in life together with all its achievements appears pointless and limited from the perspective of death and dying. Hence, death discussions are either forbidden or else postponed. 

Death salons and cafes are becoming popular throughout the world with hundreds of people discussing death together, however we don’t have such privileges yet to discuss death with beautiful music, talking about the darker sides of life. Paradox is that from the childhood days children are exposed to death, characters die in cartoons, serials and movies. But we are constantly ignoring discussions on death all together. 

Death discussions are important, because how we think about death somehow determines how we live our life. Death creates urgency to act here and now because life can’t be postponed. Finite dimension of life means there is only life at this present moment and everything we do or achieve in life can be interrupted by death. Therefore, unlike many people, I think because of death, everything we do or achieve in life becomes precious. 

Our act of love, kindness and support for parents, children and friends is meaningful because we will not have them around forever or always with us. Everything is going to end, making everything we have precious. As an example, a couple days back as we were discussing death, a friend reflected on his mother’s love for his baby daughter. His mother is already into her eighties and she knows that she will not be around to see his daughter grow much longer. And, in those reflections of life from the perspective of death, we also realize how each and every bit of life is so beautiful, complete and precious.

A Taste of Death

Gaurav Ojha

In his seminal work, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, English author Douglas Adams suggests that the meaning of life is 42, and I used to think of it as gibberish and my response used to be like how about 52, 67 or 103? And, it was only a couple of days back; I was able to grasp the subtleness behind this suggestion.

When I was wandering near the Ghats of Pashupatinath, I stumbled upon a resonance that she was only 32, she died of an incurable disease and all that remains of her now is a handful of ashes slowly dissolving in the river. Maybe the meaning of life is life itself, the matter of living in a certain way and after we die it’s all over.

For Douglas Adams himself it was 49, he died of a heart attack while taking a rest after his regular exercise. Similarly, for the rest of us still alive, our time is set, the clock is constantly ticking and we never know when death strikes us.

After witnessing a burning funeral pyre at the Ghats of Pashupatinath, I sat beside a Shiva temple near the river bank.  With that sinister smoke swirling in the sky, sounds of wailing, that dreadful smell of human flesh and seeing a human body reduced to handful of ashes, I thought to myself how bizarre our human life actually is, after all that human impulses, dreams, worries, joys, suffering and sweet passion for life, why this sorrow of death?

Sitting beside the temple, a sense of fear and anxiety gripped me from within, and I kept on asking myself, if we are living now to be nothing more than a handful of ashes, why do I have to breathe? What is the purpose of my life? Why this trouble of living? With the fragrance of death all over me, all other purposes, meaning, aspirations and expectations of my life appeared dull, empty, trivial and contradictory.

In the midst of death and dying, I reflected on my struggles, sufferings, strivings, plans, relations, anguishes, aspirations and achievements. And, I said to myself, isn’t life a tale told by an idiot that signifies nothing, a bitter sweet symphony, a brief episode of dancing shadows or a meaningless puzzle squeezed in between our birth and death? It’s inevitable that we all are going to die. Death is in life as a necessary ingredient that makes human life vibrant, exciting, erratic and alive.

On my walk back home, I felt a liberating calmness touching me, a kind of feeling that cures the mind. However, beyond the Ghats of Pashupatinath, the greatest surprise remains the same, as Yudhisthira laments in the Mahabharata, death pinches us all the time and still we human being live as though we are immortal, believing that we will be living our human lives forever with all our passions and possessions together, what a self-delusion indeed.

Ripples Of Life

Gaurav Ojha

When our student died in an awful accident, struck by a truck while cycling, he was barely fifteen. The student was a bright star gleaming in his potential. Some of us thought he would one day be a great poet. He used to scratch poems within minutes and had a voice that resounded like a mature orator. However, due to a reckless mistake, all our impressions and expectations were reduced to a handful of dust scattered in the river. After his death, for days I felt a little diminished and couldn’t be at ease with myself. The claws of death had snapped my neck, and I kept pondering what if death was just around the corner waiting to catch me as well. 

Maybe his untimely death was a reminder of my own mortality. My mind got clouded with thoughts of death, and I was really anxious, eclipsed by the shadows of my lingering death. I know I can’t experience my own death with the death of another person. And, I don’t know when my death is going to happen, but I am sure there’s no escaping it. Maybe my life is just a ripple in a vast ocean of eternity, life that keeps on bubbling up, as it pours out and passes away.

Impermanence of life is all around us, and as human beings we are inexorably moving towards our death. Everything we see, touch, taste, love, hope, despise or desire is in the process of dying. There is nothing that remains unchanged. Besides, if there is a bit of meaning in life, as writer Franz Kafka reminds us, it is that it ends. Life reflects itself in the mirror of death. With death life comes to an end, and how easy it is to be forgotten and replaced. Therefore, it is meaningful to contemplate on the tiny ripples of our human existence and to think how meaningless human life actually is.

Meaninglessness of life often infuses some sense of lightness into my being. I feel at ease with all these tiny ripples of my life sparkling around me in their randomness. And, I have embraced the reality that it is not possible to have absolute control over how the plot of our life unfolds or when this chapter is going to end. Hence, whichever way our life shuffles, either substantial or just meaningless, the zest of life is always the same, that it ends.

Persevere

Even if your purpose here on this circular sphere
Called Earth appears uncertain and unclear
I’ve learned one’s worth isn’t a mere
Sum of what they’ve purchased or what they’ve earned in a career
Life’s about how you feel about the person in the mirror
Like whether or not they’re further on nearer 
To who you want to be, a word for the ears
Of those not there yet, ‘Persevere’


A Winning Formula

When there burns a fire within
And you’re spurred on by a desire to win
If you never concede defeat 
You can withstand pressure and keep the lead
Going against the opposition
With the approach, “A win is not a given”
Execute the game plan
And never lose faith, and you may remain the champ
For some time to come
When you find you’re the one
To beat, you’ll know that you can win
And be the one who stands in
The ‘winner’s circle’, when it’s all said and done
And you’ll rank second to none
Realizing there’s no ‘I’ in ‘team’
A group can realize a dream
And win.


Stargazing

Every evening my eyes scan the cosmos
Paying particular attention to a certain section of the solar system
In search of the sights I identify
As the celestial streetlights that litter the night sky



Active Imagination

What if we didn’t have division from capitalism,
A clash of religions and a class system
And we were equals even if polar opposites,
Government put people over politics
And we could make citizens’ arrests 
Of those that abuse the power they’re given to protect
And serve, when wrong is done under the cover of law?
What’s done to one can be done to us all
So we should all spend a few
Minutes each day trying to walk in the shoes
Of others; going forward, what if we bid,
“Farewell” to the ills of the society in which we live?
I wonder…


Matters of the Heart

While I haven't been in love, yet
I have been given tips on the subject
And no, love isn't blind
You'll know it when you see it, just give it time 
And let it take its natural course, if
It's real, then you won't have to force it
We tend to think of love as 'dependency'
And that we're empty and incomplete
When we’re not in the presence of
The one whose affection and love
We seek, but that’s not true
Being alone doesn’t have to stop you
From enjoying your own company, with 
That said, if you and the one you want to be with 
Complement one another 
And share a bond friends and lovers
Can appreciate, you may have found
Love everlasting, I say that now
But really only time will tell
Love’s a matter of the heart, but the mind will help
You recognize true love; love can smooth any wrinkle
And until I find that, I'm cool with being single 


Realize The Dream

Some think, “To dream is a childish thing
And dreams only come true in your wildest dreams” 
But how do you think Martin Luther King Jr. 
Was able to see so far into the future?
Becoming a man on a mission
And it's up to us to expand on the vision
He had and do our best to bridge 
Gaps and make prejudice
And inequality obsolete
So no one’s at the bottom seeking
A better life, no matter how grim the prospects
If we’re in lockstep
There isn’t a goal that’s not within reach
Though I’m cognizant peace
Might seem elusive 
Like a pipedream rooted
In fantasy, there’s nothing we can’t achieve when
Doubt isn’t given a chance to creep in
We can even make Indigenous mascots and team names
And images a thing of the past; Dr. King aimed
To change the world, and the quest
To see his dream manifest
Continues on…