Sudipta's Life

- "It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really matter, full of darkness & danger they were. Sometimes you didn't want to know the end because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was, when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines, it'll shine out the clearer. Those are the stories that stayed with you. They meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I now know, folks in those stories had lots of chances to turn back, but they didn't. They kept going because they were holding onto something." - "What are we holding onto, Sam?" - "There's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it's worth fighting for." -- The Lord of the Rings

Mihir was asleep, finally. Usually, it took him less than five minutes to be snoring from the time his head had hit the pillow. But these days it was different... ever since Mihir's mother had died, it was almost impossible to put nine-month-old Mihir to sleep. He would cry, scream and flail his little limbs about, while everyone looked around helplessly. Poor old Baidehi: she struggled and wept a lot in her last days. "Please take care of him", she had muttered from her deathbed to everyone who stood around it. No-one in particular had nodded to accept the responsibility from the withered frame, though. After all, who wanted to take custody of the cursed child. People referred to him as " Bhutey " or the ghostly one. Mihir's father had died the day he was born. The village lore held that his father had run all the way from his paddy field to the Sadar Hospital 10 km away upon hearing the news of his birth. Actually, he had limped: the snake that bit him in ...

Okay, so you've been on the blogging track for quite a while. You began by looking at a few blogs with high readership (at least going by the comment count). Then you thought... what the eff, I can definitely do better! So you began by publishing a blog of your own. Some of your friends were forced to read the first few posts, but then nobody really cared if your cat had cereals or fish bones for dinner last night. Which, admit it, was all you could think about after a month. After some time, even tempting emails such as "Hey dude I just moved my blog from blogspot to wordpress, take a look!" didn't seem to work. And the fact that everybody knew the one digg on that post of yours was your own doesn't really help matters. So worry not -- here are the top 10 surefire ways of increasing blog traffic (or at least these are guaranteed to spike your traffic for a day): 10. Pataofy blog aggregators You see, we are all human. So find the blog aggregator websites like blog...

JK Rowling got this one thing right. You need to feel it, really mean it. When you curse, it can't be revenge. It cannot be something to give the person a taste of the same medicine. You cannot be trying to appeal to his conscience, you cannot have the glimmer of hope that the enemy will realize that this is futile... that there is no point in the battle. You have to mean it, and really really want to hurt. They cry, they weep, they scream in agony... you must go on. Wound, maim, kill and destroy. Thats how you can be evil. You see, good things happen only to those who can fight for it. When the time comes, you must be prepared to fight. Bury those weird feelings of guilt, mute that voice of conscience screaming within that this isn't right. Because it is right: that is how the fittest survive. The conscience is just what people programmed you to believe in when you were a kid; but hey, they aren't foolish enough to believe that bullshit anyway. If it takes drawing blood, c...