Editorial

Flute and fuss on a Sunday morning

Different time zones, different ideas, entities and identity formation when the flute goes on. It is the flute and fuss that goes on in the Sun-kissed Darjeeling morning.
Just few uninhibited lines with a smile to love and fall in Christmas carouse:
I stood still among the rhododendrons…
Bursting with vivid red, yellow, orange and loosely-hung monochromatic tones,
Bound not for the distant traveller,
but for that little child sitting amidst the dense foliage of the tea-plantation…
Thurbo, Gopaldhara and Tindharia all serrated with fancies,
whims and Durga-puja wishes that disappear across the dust,
the tea leaves and their childhood wither away to ‘nothingness’.
Breathing through the veins of eternity has been exotic,
the charisma of the Buddhist saint drools,
and dribbles with the dreams dodging the rear-view of the hills…
The permanence of human form elongated into an understanding of the nothing and ‘the everything’…
Shapes, mirages, forms and art without sophistication
blending beautifully across the lullabies of church-bells and monasteries…
The vermillioned walls of the monastery assimilating into the whitewashed cloisters of the church on top…
Darjeeling beckons…as the bedazzled serpentine roads lead to a looped Batasia,
as the cobbled footpaths of Chowk Bazaar await the footfall of the next pedestrian….
as the Teesta keeps flowing on into the vestiges of eternity…
I breathe through the veins of eternity…Darjeeling!

Sreetanwi Chakraborty