Sky gazing On E M Bye Pass

“Whom shall we pray to for rice and for care?

Who can bring bread to this shit flood foul'd lair?
Millions of children alone in the rain!
Millions of children weeping in pain!”     September on Jessore Road



I love looking at the sky and I could sit staring at the sky for hours. My apartment fortunately overlooks a huge stretch of open reserved land beyond which runs the Baghajatin flyover with the high-rises across the rail tracks standing majestically beyond the flyover. This gives me ample scope to laze around doing my favourite inactivity that is looking at the sky.

I have been travelling through E M Bypass for the last 18 years or so. The lush green paddy fields on both sides of the road which soothed your eyes in the initial years of highway construction activity have now been replaced by concrete jungles. EMB was a favourite spot for my parents to go for their ritualistic morning walks when we moved here from the centre of the city . There are still few stretches of open land and luckily some greenery left on both sides of the road right up to Science City. You can still get a feeling of the vast expanse of the sky over and around you like a huge canopy while you travel on EMB.

My love affair with the sky deepened during my solitary journeys through EMB to my workplace and back through the years. I have slowly discovered the meaning of Kalidasa’s Meghdoot while looking at the floating clouds and envied their existence in a non spatial zone.( http://litgloss.buffalo.edu/kalidas/text.shtml  )

During intense moments of sadness just looking at the sky and sharing your thoughts can have a great cathartic effect. I would recommend this to anyone trying to cope with bouts of loneliness, depression and self-doubt.

EMB is fast changing character. Plagued by traffic jams , real estate boom , unauthorized occupation of sidewalks by hawkers, strong arm tactics of local dons who control taxi ,auto and rickshaw stands in the areas ,EMB is becoming an extension of the common malaise that has gripped Indian metros in general. EMB is now the hospital corridor of the city with all kinds of super specialty hospitals coming up one after the other in the span of the last ten years and more are waiting in the pipeline. It is also the link to Sector V the IT destination of Bengal. As a result, as I travel daily I see ambulances whizzing past every now and then, I see lot of cars with plus symbols flying by, I see young executives driving to work and so on. What used to be a deserted lane eighteen years back is now one of the busiest thoroughfares of the extended city.

I do not know how long I will be able to indulge in the simple pleasures of my life such as sky-gazing. Till then…..