Life......predictable....yet weird.....beautiful....yet ugly....boring yet sensuous. Its full of question marks and exclamatory signs...sometimes comma...but never a full stop in my opinion. What befuddles me about it is....its so very abstract....so very full of duality. Some say the hardest thing about life is the truth of death....some say its the desire.....but I say...its the decision making part that is hardest of all, the choices we have to make are the hardest things about life...and since our choices define us.....the hardest thing in life is to find out who you are....the hardest thing in life is to be satisfied in the definition of ourselves...and not to look forlornly in the direction of the neglected choices.....be it about ur beleifs...about ur career....or about ur love life...

                  I am pretty close to my daduvai....and our favourite pass time is chatting over a cup of coffee......daduvai is a good story teller....and his life is so full of incidents he does even have to use his imagination to keep me hooked to his evening tales. One night over a cup of coffee he was telling me stories of his childhood.....all of them were fascinating but the one I m going to narrate here is a bit different from the rest. This happened when my dadubhai was like 18 or 20.....my great grandfather had just passed away....and daduvai was the only earning member of a family of 15....he had just joined his office and the pay was hardly enough to support the whole big family. So one day he woke up in the morning to hear from my great grandmother....that is his mom....that there s no food in the whole house...and no money either....in a fit of frustation his mother cried out saying...”what is the point of living if you cannot feed your family?”. My daduvai was a brave heart....but that day his poverty....his mothers' tears...and the crying voices of his brothers and sisters pushed him over the edge of depression. In a moment life lost all its beauty to him.....he wanted to get over with life...it felt like a curse to him.....because to him at that point...life meant hunger....life meant fighting....... and he was too tired for both. So he decided to give up the gift of life....he was planning how to commit suicide......when his friend shown up.....Robin Bhattacharya ….who considered dadubhai as family. Dadubhai never told him what he was thinking....neither did he tell him the condition of his family....but his friend sensed it perhaps....or there were some unseen words suspended in the atmosphere......Robin Bhattacharya emptied his savings and handed over 250 bucks to my didima.....250 bucks in those days meant may be say 10000.....dadubhai had not asked for it....neither did he had the means to pay his friend back....but Robin dadu just gave him the money and said....”this feels like the right thing to do”. With that money my daduvai bought food that day.....with the money left he planned to go to kolkata to find a new job....he also cleared some of his debts.....and most important of all....he regained his faith in life.....mentally he was knocking on the doors of death and Robin Bhattacharya brought him back. And you kno what happened to this friend of my dadubhai??? He died the very next day because of the sudden fever that hit him after he had left my dadubhai's house...

                     I am a practical person....i donot believe in fairytales...i do not believe in ghosts....i do not believe in demons....and I do not believe in angels......but here ...in this story.....my romantic heart wants to believe.....Robin Bhattacharya was an angel....or a farrista...or debdut.... He was sent by fate....by universe to give a second chance to my daduvai......that was his purpose...and he went away after completing what he was meant to do.....he was that deity we worship in temples.....that khoda we sing our namaj for.....that God we pray to before going to sleep. I do not do any of these things....but if I had made the choice of being a beleiver...its this soul I would pray to.....

                    And thus I return to what I started with....life is hard because of our decisions.. I have made the decision of being an atheist....and I have done this because the thought of a deity...an external unseen force...makes me feel like I have no control on my tomorrow....and I hate that feeling...my practicality makes me feel less like a puppet..and more like an actual human being.That I am a atheist helps me be focussed.....but I cannot help reconsidering now and then cuz it does not allow the romantic inference i drew earlier...it does now allow the shiver I felt after I heard this story....it does not support my little wish that I get my angel when I am about to give up.....