The Marrow of Existence

I woke up this morning with the distinct and not entirely unwelcome sensation that my left eyeball had been gently, almost lovingly, marinated overnight in a solution of lukewarm gutter water and the distilled essence of every unfulfilled promise I have ever made to myself, which is to say that the humidity of Calcutta—this city that sweats like a guilty man before a magistrate—had once again conspired with my own internal chemistry, that treacherous alchemy of serotonin and spite, to produce a morning that felt less like a beginning and more like a continuation of some interminable, poorly written play where the protagonist, yours truly, is simultaneously the audience, the critic, and the janitor sweeping up the peanut shells of other people’s happiness after the show has long since ended and the lights have been dimmed not for drama but for the municipal corporation’s inability to pay the electricity bill, a bill that is, I am certain, padded with the same casual fraudulence that pads our milk, our spices, our very souls, because food adulteration in India is not merely a matter of economics, oh no, it is the symptom, the external suppurating wound, of a deeper and more terminal condition: the adulteration of the Indian conscience, a conscience that has been so thoroughly cut with chalk powder, with sawdust, with the ground bones of scruples long since discarded, that one can no longer tell where the original substance ends and the filler begins, and I lie there, this fifty-one-year-old carcass of a man, this Bengali specimen of educated futility, staring at the ceiling which is stained in patterns that resemble, if one squints and is sufficiently medicated, the map of a country that no longer exists except in the fevered nostalgia of men like me who remember a time when the air did not taste like burnt rubber and the water did not carry the faint, sweet undertone of industrial effluent, and I think, with the manic clarity that sometimes visits me like a drunken uncle at a wedding, that my blogs are like this because I have given up on life as I live it now, as you can probably tell, I just exist now, and existence, let me tell you, is the most insulting of all verbs, a grammatical middle finger from the universe, because to exist is not to live, it is merely to occupy space and consume oxygen that could be better used by a street dog or a potted plant, both of which, incidentally, contribute more to the ecosystem than I do on my best days.

It’s a meaningless existence but what can you do, you can’t automatically rush your death just because life is awful, a sentiment that sounds, even to my own ears, like the motto of a particularly unsuccessful insurance company, or perhaps the tagline for the Indian democratic experiment itself, which, according to the 2026 V-Dem Democracy Report, has been backsliding with the enthusiasm of a toddler on a polished marble floor, backsliding into what, one might ask, and the answer, my dear nonexistent reader, is into a morass of cheery religiosity and holy obfuscations, into a landscape where politicians are about as biological as the plastic flowers that adorn our municipal parks, where loud jingoism is the national lullaby and the subversion of democracy is conducted with such bureaucratic thoroughness, such meticulous attention to the forms of legality, that one almost has to admire the craftsmanship, the way one admires the craftsmanship of a well-made coffin even as one is being lowered into it, and I think about the elections, the endless, grinding, soul-flattening elections, the BJP’s historic win in West Bengal with 206 seats, a number that means nothing to me except as a measure of how thoroughly the electorate has been marinated in the same toxic brine of fear and aspiration that marinates me every morning, and I wonder, in my more depressive moments, which is to say most moments, whether the act of voting is not itself a form of adulteration, a dilution of the self with the chalk powder of hope, the sawdust of civic duty, the ground bones of the belief that anything will change, because nothing changes, the naphtha pipeline still burns at Haldia, the cybercrime epidemic still rages, the Durga Squad still patrols the digital streets with the same futile righteousness as the British constables who once patrolled the physical ones, and the rain still lashes Kolkata with a petulant indifference that mirrors my own emotional weather, which swings between the manic conviction that I am the only sane man in a city of lunatics and the depressive certainty that I am the lunatic and the city is merely indifferent, a city that does not care whether I live or die, exist or persist, write or rot, because Calcutta, that great whore of a city, that aging courtesan with tuberculosis and a PhD in literature, has seen too many of my kind come and go, too many men who thought their suffering was unique, their insights profound, their blogs anything other than the digital equivalent of shouting into a septic tank.

Depression also unfortunately makes you extremely raw and candid which is why I know for a fact that people don’t like me, a knowledge that arrives with the same uninvited certainty as the monsoon, and there could also be the reason, I sometimes speculate in my more paranoid and therefore more accurate moments, that there’s a nutrient deficiency in the population just because they are living in India, for instance, because most of what we eat are making us dull if not dead right away, the poisons from the smorgasbord of adulteration that are leaching into our system daily, and I imagine, with the vivid, almost pornographic detail that my manic phases afford me, the interior of the average Indian intestine, a landscape as compromised as our democracy, lined with the same chalk powder that lines our milk, the same sawdust that bulks our spices, the same ground bones of scruples that bulk our national character, and I think about the etymology of the word “adulterate,” from the Latin adulterare, to corrupt, to falsify, to commit adultery against the original substance, and how apt it is that this word should apply equally to our food and our morals, our bodies and our politics, because what is a nonbiological politician if not an adulterated human, a being cut with so much ambition, so much venality, so much theatrical piety, that the original substance, whatever it might once have been, is no longer detectable except by the most sensitive and therefore most despairing of instruments, instruments like me, this human gas chromatograph of societal decay, this fifty-one-year-old spectrometer of bullshit, sitting in my rented room in Calcutta, surrounded by books I no longer read and ambitions I no longer harbor, existing, merely existing, while the city outside grinds on with its own adulterated rhythm, the rhythm of construction and destruction, of hope and its immediate betrayal, of the 173-year-old Howrah railway station getting a new platform even as the trains that arrive on it carry the same cargo of disappointed dreams and adulterated milk powder.

And I think about the Annapurna Yojana, that grand scheme to feed the hungry, and how the first tranche of funds has been credited to 1.1 crore beneficiaries, a number that sounds impressive until you realize that it is merely the latest iteration of the same adulterated compassion, the same cutting of the original substance with the filler of political expedience, because to feed a man is not to nourish him, not if the food itself is compromised, not if the grain is cut with sand and the lentils with stones, not if the act of charity is itself a form of control, a way of keeping the recipient docile, grateful, complicit in his own slow poisoning, and I wonder whether my own existence is not similarly subsidized, whether the small pension, the occasional freelance check, the meager returns of my intellectual labor, are not merely the government’s way of keeping me quiet, of ensuring that my rants remain confined to the digital septic tank of my blog rather than spilling out into the streets, where they might inconvenience the traffic or frighten the tourists who have been ordered to leave Digha and Mandarmani by the Election Commission, as if the presence of outsiders might somehow contaminate the pure, unadulterated stupidity of our democratic process, a process that now includes the appointment of college professors as presiding officers, as if the academy could somehow disinfect the polling booth, as if the same men who have spent their careers adulterating knowledge with ideology could now be trusted to oversee the unadulterated expression of the people’s will, which is itself, of course, thoroughly adulterated, cut with the chalk powder of caste, the sawdust of religion, the ground bones of historical grievance.

It will come when it will come, death I mean, soon perhaps but I don’t know when, and until then people will have to adjust to my existing, a statement that sounds like a threat and is, in fact, merely a confession of helplessness, because what else can I do but exist, what else can any of us do but continue to metabolize the adulterated air, to circulate the adulterated blood, to think the adulterated thoughts that pass for consciousness in this age of algorithmic manipulation and democratic backsliding, and I think about the etymology of “exist,” from the Latin existere, to stand out, to emerge, and how ironic it is that my existence should feel like the opposite, like a standing-in, a filling of space that might otherwise be occupied by something more useful, a tree perhaps, or a parking meter, and I remember, with the involuntary clarity that depression sometimes grants like a cruel gift, the taste of my grandmother’s cooking, the unadulterated flavor of a time when food was food and conscience was conscience and politicians were merely corrupt rather than nonbiological, and I wonder whether that memory itself is not adulterated, whether the nostalgia I feel is not cut with the chalk powder of loss, the sawdust of regret, the ground bones of a self that no longer exists except in the sepia-toned fraudulence of recollection, because memory, too, is adulterated, it is the original experience cut with the filler of subsequent interpretation, the pure substance of the past corrupted by the present’s desperate need for meaning, for coherence, for a narrative that makes sense of this senseless, swollen, grotesquely cynical existence that I lead, this bipolar oscillation between the manic conviction that my words matter and the depressive certainty that they are merely more noise, more pollution, more adulteration in a world that is already so thoroughly compromised that one more rant, one more blog post, one more fifty-one-year-old Bengali man shouting into the void makes no difference whatsoever.

And yet.

And yet I continue, because the alternative is silence, and silence is the ultimate adulteration, the cutting of the self with the filler of nothingness, and I would rather be noisy, would rather be raw, would rather be candid in my unlikability, than be silent, than be complicit, than be one of the cheery religious obfuscators, one of the loud jingoists, one of the nonbiological politicians in their subverted democracy, because at least my adulteration is honest, at least I admit that I am cut with despair, that my hope is bulked with cynicism, that my love for this wretched, beautiful, sweating, dying city of Calcutta is itself a compromised substance, a feeling that exists only in the space between the manic and the depressive, the elevated and the grotesque, the sacred and the profane, and I think, with the sudden, startling clarity that sometimes pierces the fog of my medication, that perhaps this is the only honesty available to us, the honesty of the adulterated, the confession that we are all cut with something, that the pure substance was always a myth, a marketing slogan, a lie told by those who profit from our belief in purity, and that the best we can do, the only thing we can do, is to be aware of our own contamination, to know the chalk powder from the milk, the sawdust from the spice, the ground bones from the living flesh, and to write about it, to rant about it, to exist in the full, foul, frank knowledge of our own meaninglessness, until the day comes, soon perhaps, when existence itself is recalled, when the final audit is conducted, when the universe, in its cold and methodical way, tests the sample and finds it, finds us, finds me, wanting, adulterated, unfit for human consumption, and disposes of us accordingly, not with malice, not with mercy, but with the same bureaucratic indifference that characterizes all great systems, all great democracies, all great and grotesque and swollen and cynical and manic and depressive and utterly, irredeemably human enterprises.

So here I am.

Here I remain.

A fifty-one-year-old bag of mostly water and partially digested adulterants, typing these words into a machine that will outlast me, into a medium that will forget me, into a world that does not need me and will not miss me, and yet, and yet, there is something in the act itself, something in the sheer, stubborn, stupid persistence of putting one word after another, one sentence after another, one long, serpentine, self-interrupting, muttering, messy paragraph after another, that feels, in the moment of its creation, like a small, private victory against the silence, against the adulteration, against the slow, inevitable, and probably well-deserved rush toward that death which will come when it will come, soon perhaps, but not, please, not quite yet, because I have not finished complaining, I have not finished existing, I have not finished adjusting the world to my presence, one blog post at a time, one grotesque metaphor at a time, one manic-depressive, bipolar, swollen, cynical, Calcutta-soaked, Bengali-inflected, artsy-fartsy, determined-mouthed, smart-aleck, smartass, irritatingly acerbic word at a time.

P.S. The etymology of “blog” is, appropriately enough, from “weblog,” a log of the web, a record of entanglement, and I am entangled, oh how I am entangled, in the sticky, sweet, rotting web of this existence that I did not choose and cannot escape and will not, despite all evidence to the contrary, stop describing, because to describe is to resist, and to resist is, however futilely, however absurdly, however grotesquely, to live.