Sipra's Diary 2018

Date:17^th Jan,2018

 New York

                                    Really time flies so quickly.  We celebrated the 31^st grand  night party in Kolkata,( India )just before leaving for New york next morning. And within blink of  an eye, 2018 is  grown up to17 days old!

We went to India like every other year.; spent almost 3 weeks splitting  our time between Mumbai, Puri, Bangalore and finally in Kolkata, my birthplace….But  I lost the charm of spending vacation here. I don’t feel the warmth of heart now  like before from the near and dear relatives who are quite significant   enough to acquire my mind a lot of time when I am in the far away land. Everybody is busy to their own plan to spend the vacation of the best season of India with their own micro-family.

We feel as outsiders. They grab the gifts we give  them without expressing excitement or ‘thanks, and then vanish in their own world. . 

I ‘try’ to “feel good’,  to shake off old sentiments and accept the change coolly.

But this change of attitude reminds me those nostalgic past days of our time when we prepared all plans centered around vacationing NRI relatives…

To make their stay cheerful we used to plan for them the short tours we would make, the new movies we would watch together in the theaters and the great menu which included their favorite dishes( not in restaurants but  prepared at home) throughout their stay. It was as exciting as enjoying any festival or a kind of wedding-ceremony…. . 

Does country means only a mass of land? Certainly not. It is the people, the community and  above all, the family members, the warmth of relationship that turns the mass of land to “my land, my  country.”   

 Anyway, we reached New York on the1st January with minus degree temperature, leaving behind far away the land of unwanted colder  feeling of ‘feelinglessness’. Through the window-glass of the warm cab which was passing between snow-white road, I noticed the thinly frozen Hudson dazzling like silver sheet in the morning sun.  When I reached my destination, in spite of the bite of chilled weather I felt warmth of a kind of attachment . The cool experiences of the vacation sprayed water to shroud my memory in the mist in such a short  period of time!

  I whispered to myself “I am now in love with this land, New York!”
Long Live New York!

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