It was in 2003 that I landed in Kolkata for the first time. This was as part of work. I had very few contacts there and they were in Old Kolkata. They were my very distant relatives. The work place location was pretty far from Old Kolkata and there I met a young man Vimal. He was my first point of contact there and with the passage of time we became friends. It was through him that I got connected to many other friends in Kolkata.
After my dabbling with writing right through my school and college days, I had ventured into writing again with pretty serious objectives. sometime towards the end of 2000. And in 2003, I had just a small bunch of poems in my hand. My method of sharing these poems then was through e-mails. In 2009, I started blogging and thereafter , these poems got shared through Orkut. Later, with the advent of Facebook, the blog links got routed in there. And now we have WhatsApp, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Google+ in addition through which these links are getting routed.
Vimal was one of those very few who got to read those first poems that I kept distributing through my e-mails.
Vimal, according to me has been gifted with lots of self belief and I could see that right then in 2003. He is a much younger man but he has truck loads more of self belief than I have. There is a reason why I am saying this. After reading a few of my poems in 2003, he introduced me as a poet to everyone we met. I think it took a decade for me to believe that there was a poet in me. So many people had to repeatedly tell me "You have it in you", for me to believe it. Vimal had more belief in me that I had in myself and he was quick to spot it too. I remember presenting him with a book and a poem "Friendship's True Friend", specially written for him, when he left Kolkata for his stint in the USA.
Today I happy to see my first book in his hands in Denver, USA.
