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Why @madeleinestjohn says Kolkata has a hunger for creative connection?

Episodes are out now on @hoichoi.tv

Black & White Non-Alcoholic Carbonated Beverages presents #TableForEveryone, an intimate talk-show, hosted by @parambratachattopadhyay, with @chefshaunkenworthy and @ritu.parna_, featuring voices shaping Bengal today!

Madeleine is the force behind @triartandculture, where ideas are shaped with intention and creativity is treated as craft. With a sharp eye for detail and a deep respect for process, she builds spaces where art, design, and culture meet with purpose.

#TableForEveryone Episodes 1, 2 & 3 out now!

Black & White Non-Alcoholic Carbonated Beverages presents Table For Everyone, an intimate talk-show, hosted by @parambratachattopadhyay, with @chefshaunkenworthy and @ritu.parna_, featuring voices shaping Bengal today | Fourth Episode drops on 24th December, only on hoichoi, and our official YouTube channel.

@srabanti.smile @snehasinghi1 @madeleinestjohn @ronbron06 @sagar.daryani.90 #NewOnhoichoi #BlackandWhiteConversations

Promissory 8 — No one could tell me why we call the break Double D, only that the point was working this week. So was my body: paddling, ducking, diving, stretching, lifting, punching, kissing — the earth and the air and the water, all in equilibrium. Some people told me I could really rip. Others said they had watched me shred to the end. I asked, why the language of violence? Why pretend we can and wish to conquer the waters? I said, I was learning a new way to make love. Where else but in the water or with a lover do we willingly go in deep, sure we’ll be bowled while certain we’ll be held? Reef scrapes and doctor’s orders kept me away from Gili and Double D that final morning. Instead, I stayed in with my pen and watched a storm roll in, jotting down something about reintegration. Now, inside the container of a layover, I’m less interested in merging my avatars. Perhaps, I think, my parts can become mates — teammates, passing the baton of my spirit over the thresholds she must cross. More than reintegration, all I really need is to be received; to give the muscle and flow somewhere to go. I’m wondering if what I love most about the water is that I get to be an amateur, a lover. What I love next is the fatigue, the satiety. Embedded in this, an idea I’m flirting with: that bliss, that to be blessed, that living life to the lees, is less as less as less.

Promissory 7 — Suddenly it’s winter; solstice approaches and the city speaks to us in shadow and light. The message of maroon knows how to woo, but my ear still tilts toward that cool colour blue. Open shutters and retired air conditioners ask me again and again where I am from. Again and again, I respond: the Pacific, the Cascadic, the Angelic. And now: Bengal. They ask, how long? Here, six years. Yes, I like it — enough to make a life. If my nervous system could join the conversation, she would address the shadows we’re both certain will shift. She would say something about homesickness. She would confess to pining for the blue, and some green too. So I ask on her behalf: Dear maroon, would you bleed out your blue and draw us a bath? Bright winter light, won’t you massage in some photosynthesis and reverse the anesthetic? Such balmy afternoons inspire me to imagine it could all be a balm; inspire me to imagine the sensational arriving as a salve; ask me to view the hues we don’t choose as the day’s very muse.

Promissory 6 — Rebecca Solnit taught me that blue is the color of distance. And then Maggie Nelson insisted that, no, maybe it is the color of intimacy all up in your face with its smothering beauty. That’s the thing about proximity: its relativity. That’s how space suffocates. So we respirate. Nothing much but heaving lungs resigned to sigh before the fat blue sky. It was a day so perfect I could have died; too sublime to have divined. But, looking back, I notice my fingerprints all over the edges of those hours and their series of summits: a glacier, a graduation, a grapa. But mostly: the people who mean nothing short of everything to my breathing. What if pride is underrated? What if all we are doing in this oblivion is living for what we come from? Isn’t that how we get off and turn on? Isn’t that what turns the peaks into the heavens? Here’s what I can say for certain: the blue turned me iridescent for a pure 24 hours. Thanks be to the distance that envelops. Holy, holy, holy the heights that hold us.

Promissory 5 — Home is the container of time where I am neither ahead nor behind. Not a place, but a state, home happens when I relax into life’s flux and concede to its grace. What is it to uptake the body’s energies and aches? How is it that we all go on arriving into the intimacies and inflammations that make up our days? These queries are what make me the evangelist of immanence and a sucker for the rush of time’s touch. And yet: I would live last week in eternal return if the laws of physics let us. Alas, they do not. And I think this must make timeliness the antidote to homesickness. If so, I’m after the pharmacology for sanity: to be on time as I am in time and to greet each moment as if she is exactly where she is supposed to be — just like you, just like me.

Promissory 4 — The other animals seem to get it: nothing more luxurious than contentment; nothing sweeter than the sufficient. I startled at the darting dogs and hovering monkeys. But they did well to remind me that ease does, irrevocably, please. And so, an incantation while keeping my cadence: Thank goodness sufficiency is not a commodity. Thank goodness there is such a thing as goodness itself. Thank goodness I can call upon the earth (and the internet) to witness the way I must repeat myself; the way I must revolve — around brewing coffee and pumping blood and backlogs of messages — to evolve, at all. This week, thus: May the waking be easy and the living be light. May the revolutions unfasten me from any temptation to believe that any of this is less than bliss.

Promissory 3 — Maybe, it occurred to me: all that glitters is glacial gravel. Maybe I was always meant to bear my grandmother’s clavicle. Maybe it’s less about the carbon and more about the calcium, more about the earth that is flesh. Requesting: more muscle on the skeleton — muscle like a massage-able schedule, a rippling torso, bodies of water too readily available. Let me be at risk of taking these gifts for granted. And then, let me be at rest in their grantedness.

Promissory 2 — It was the summer that smalt and cobalt would seduce me so mercilessly I would paint my nails to match all of Lisbon’s tiles. I didn’t know this in Lomattenstrasse. I just knew the air needed to find its way into my lungs and the words needed to find their way out of my mouth and the paint needed to dry before I could know how to love the image. Praise be the opportunity of an education. Glory, glory, hallelujah to it’s completion.

Promissory 1 — That “prayer” and “precarity” come from the same family tree could have occurred earlier to me. After all, supplicating and stabilizing both best happen on the knees. FOR VALUE RECEIVED: This party yields to blocked exits and misplacements. She minds her business, so that her business may be minded.

4.10.20

I awoke
this morning
in the gold light
turning this way
and that

thinking for
a moment
it was one
day
like any other.

But
the veil had gone
from my
darkened heart
and
I thought

it must have been the quiet
candlelight
that filled my room,

it must have been
the first
easy rhythm
with which I breathed
myself to sleep,

it must have been
the prayer I said
speaking to the otherness
of the night.

And
I thought
this is the good day
you could
meet your love,

this is the black day
someone close
to you could die.

This is the day
you realize
how easily the thread
is broken
between this world
and the next

and I found myself
sitting up
in the quiet pathway
of light,

the tawny
close grained cedar
burning round
me like fire
and all the angels of this housely
heaven ascending
through the first
roof of light
the sun has made.

This is the bright home
in which I live,
this is where
I ask
my friends
to come,
this is where I want
to love all the things
it has taken me so long
to learn to love.

This is the temple
of my adult aloneness
and I belong
to that aloneness
as I belong to my life.

There is no house
like the house of belonging.

The House of Belonging
by David Whyte

#latergram #India #WestBengal #Kolkata #HindustanPark

3.22.20 // the perfection of a Kolkata kitchen

#latergram #India #WestBengal #Kolkata #HindustanPark