MAd aβ¤uŦ MaR©h

March is here and it comes accompanies by the familiar hoopla. When I was younger, March was the month before Bihu (spring festival of Assam) and I used to look forward to the Bihu holidays. Now March has become the financial year-end, heralding the time for individuals setting investments in order, filing I-T returns, organisations compiling their statements and planning for the year ahead. So chances are that whether you are a part of a family or a salaried employee in some organisation or self-employed, you are feeling the March blues cos this month necessities you taking decisions with far-reaching consequences, planning ahead and getting your life in order.

All in all, depressing stuff for most – avoided till the last minute.

The breathless insurance companies beseeching you to ‘secure’ your life and the FMCG and auto companies conspiring to offload their excess inventory and project an inflated profit by extending ‘discounts’. Repeated calls to your banker and accountant who resort to incomprehensible jargon. Yes, March is upon us.

Spare a thought for Niaz da who has a PCO-cum-photostat-cum medical shop near us. I enquired after his business and he cursed March saying that his trade always comes down in this month. The reason he came up for such slow trade is that people tend to hold onto their money and spend less - a theory entirely at cross-purposes with all these companies promoting their products/ services with limited period only offers. Niaz da is pissed too that he has only till the end of this month to return the expired drugs in his stock to the pharma companies.

An auto-wallah told me that his business suffers in March everytime cos people do not want to travel too much in this month. Huh?! I presumed that with all those people buying ‘discounted’ stuff, ‘securing’ their life, filing returns and everything else, a lot of rubber must be getting burned.

We have let the calendar take control of our life, March madness being just one symptom.

“Those whom the Gods love”

It is quite commonplace that the news of a person dying in infancy/ adolescence/ youth is usually accompanied by comments like, “Tsk tsk, but he/she was so young”, “its not fair”. Yet when it happens to someone with whom you shared some moments of life, fairness, age or any other consideration to “decide” who should die and when, are gone. You just feel….numb. I felt the same on 27th February, 2010 when I heard that Sayak was no more.

Sayak Sarkar was my MBA batch mate with whom I shared a room wall for 1 year (he lived in the hostel room next to mine in the 1st year and we lived in different hostel blocks in the 2nd year). He was strictly not a friend but just a batch mate

who shared the same curriculum, same professors, same assignments and the same bland canteen food as me. I was always mindful of what I considered was his overbearing and opinionated nature. But Sayak being the person that he is, I could not help being drawn into his plans for monthly incursions into CR Park for fish and debates about what is best for our batch’s placements.

You see, Sayak was one of those people you meet who had an enduring interest in social good (in this case, our batch), lengthy discussions and ……..food. Yes, he was a true food aficionado – the sort who cultivates an extensive interest in cuisines, especially all fish preparations and also not averse to trying out new dishes. He also possessed an indeterminate interest in advising people about how they should plan their life. Being unknowledgeable of how these bits of advice worked out, I was surprised that some other batch mates did actually consult him for help. It is a measure of how meticulous he was regarding his own life too; he still is the only person I have met who plans his vacation in Microsoft Excel with columns for “Day”, “Activities to undertake”, “Time Allotted”, etc. I was dismissive of these traits and of the person too, at that time.

Yet when I heard that he died on a highway inside the gnarled remains of a car, I felt sadness in the most profound sense. Although we lived and worked in the same city for one odd year, I had met him only twice. Alongwith his family, other batch mates, his colleagues, I too went to a police station in a town in Maharashtra whose name I cannot remember now, retrieved Sayak’s body from the local morgue and went to Pune to cremate his mortal remains.

Afterwards, I found myself thinking of him and googling his name many times and visiting the links that came out. Being indifferent to him when he was alive, I was now reduced to trawling through the net to acquaint myself with the digital vestiges of all that is Sayak’s. And I found unexpected stuff; my MBA batchmates are not the only people who benefited from Sayak’s advice, his Orkut account has loads of scraps from old friends to this effect. He had been quite active in platforms which discussed European club football and online games; I saw so many snaps which he had uploaded in social sites, snaps of his friends, of the places that he had visited, of his good memories. Before February happened, it seems he had real plans to go to South Africa for the FIFA World Cup 2010, being the avid fan that he was of the game.

I can only be sorry now that I had closed my mind towards Sayak in an effort to safeguard myself. So, I pray now for his peace.

(Sayak died in a road accident on 26th February 2010 around 9 am. He was driving with some friends on a trip to Goa. They had hardly started out when it happened just an hour’s drive away from Sayak’s place in Navi Mumbai. There were 2 casualties; Sayak who was driving and his friend who was in the co-driver’s seat.)