The last day of 1414 was surely a memorable one...
It gave me a chance to behold the darkest cavities of this society ,  the  nauseating faces beneath the amiable facets...

No matter how much we boost about our secularity & tolerance, how much crocodile tear we shed after watching bollywood  blockbusters like “veer jara” & “Bombay”; our subconscious mind can never look beyond the narrow racial sentiments…

I belong to a kind of family which had been successfully preserving its bloodline ever since the (in)famous ballal sen coined the “Koulinya Protha”; an errant though effective rule to impede ethnic adulteration.In our family the 1st jolt to this revered ritual decorum came when it was known that my sister was engaged to someone outside her own cast, let alone the safeguard of the 4 holy titles...though excruciating, that was at least  acceptable...all this years of  education had rinsed some of our prejudice. But what my maternal uncle did was just deplorable! He had chosen a girl who is not from his own religion...
I met with that girl..very pretty, very simple, very humble & above all a typical Bengali who adores rabindrasangeet... my family never had any objection about me having friends from other religions...they often come & no, there aint any different plates for them...but when I pointed  all these out their answer was a simple one-“but they were just friends”...

Surely I did a mistake. I’d forgotten that we still think genetic fraternity is of more value than the intellectual ones & so when it comes to intra-religion interactions ; the level of kinship should never cross the safe realm of emotional attachment & enter into the forbidden land of perceptible things like the body...the rule is especially valid for girls. a girl’s hymen still bears the onus of family honors. The actual situation of this metro is not really different from those villages which supports honor killings. Here a soul doesn’t marry a soul, a body doesn’t crave for a body. Even after uttering endless amorous odes, the learned,-admirer-of-literature dad still advises his daughter to restrain her ardour & preserve her family values. In India marriage is just an institute to create a(preferably male) descendant who’ll bear the swollen family values. &  those who arrange it are crude & calculating & so despise any element which might vandalize their calculations.

The scene is changing but not in the pace it should be. We, the youngistan  haven’t yet fully shed off our hypocrisy. We are the kind of adventure lovers who loves to surf in the artificial  whirlpool of their own swimming pool. If we don’t grab the  boat & raft now then the social  rancidness is never gonna perish.