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Five years of OFN: The origin story

The set up I used to use in 2019 to work on OFN and make videos. Written on February 25, 2024. In a week from now, Online Free Notes, or OFN, will turn five. I would not say that in five years it has reached the place I had imagined it to be, or rather missed the mark by a lightyear, but it is still somewhere, continues to exist, and continues to make miniscule progress. This post is primarily to document how OFN came to be. Teaching and learning I have always been tutoring children—largely to stay alive. I remember teaching children in classes 1–5 when I was in class 11. By the next two years, I was teaching children up to class 10—all subjects. I had had a fair understanding of English as a language by then, and I felt teaching children all subjects up to class 10 should not be difficult if I understood the concepts and ideas. So I taught, and this was going to be a significant factor years later when I would start OFN. For clarification, I studied Commerce but had the desire to choo
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Eating Cosmos

We are all in the quest Of making fools of others And ourselves, When we are writing something, Reading something, Singing something, Staring at the walls, At the mountains, At the dead cat At someone. We will never know why we are here, Among the cosmos, If anything we do ever makes any sense Against the infinities of time And space And the vastness of stories. Not knowing anything About who we are What our souls are made of, If it’s necessary for us to be here, At this time, Should make us crazy, But we are not Or, are we? -Ron'e Dutta
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Life in our 20s: 7 different phases, hopefully

I am living the last days of my 20s, and I am certain of the fact that for the 30s, I am not yet ready- I might never be ready, but I guess that’s the thing with us- more often than not we are not ready for the next thing in our lives till the time the next thing hits us hard on our face and now we know that not being ready is not an option for us anymore. I remember in my very early 20s, when I was in college, I was as optimistic about life as can be despite the fact that I’d write horrendous poems about love and death, and now that I see people in their early 20s writing passionate poems about love and death, I know that this is a phase, and by the time they’d reach 30s, they could still be writing poems about love and death, but the poems would be of a completely different kind. We learn and we grow every day, but learning and growing in our 20s happens so fast that for most of us, the time seems to be gone too fast, too soon. It’s like 20s has got a huge gravity of its own that slo
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12 Types Of Bengalis You Find During Durga Puja In Dimapur

Durga Puja, the biggest festival of Bengali Hindus is here and the wee roads of Dimapur have already been clogged. The Bangalis are taking over the city for four days and Bengalis of all sorts are coming out of their hives to live a little before being dead again. The pretty women have had all their things ready to woo the city, while the men have had their eyes checked (if you know what I mean). Here are 12 types of Bengalis that you are going to find this Puja in Dimapur. 1. The unimpressed. These are the people who keep constantly complaining about how the Puja in Dimapur are not as impressive as other places. They are the people who have either come to Dimapur to spend their Puja holidays or are Dimapurians who in their previous years had been in a different city during the Puja. You need to stay away from them, especially if they had previously seen the Puja in Kolkata. They will make you regret the life you are living. 2. The gazers. They are particularl
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Women by Charles Bukowski: Why You Should Not Read It

"Many a good man has been put under the bridge by a woman.” - Women by Charles Bukowski.  I have just completed Women by Charles Bukowski and I would not recommend you to read it if you are looking for an intriguing story. Of course, there’s sex- too much of it actually, and being someone who read mostly classics like ‘Wuthering Heights’ and ‘Jude the Obscure’, there were times I thought of just abandoning it. But I could not. There is something about the book that held me. Maybe it was the language, maybe it was the hilarious tone of the narrative, or maybe I was just curious to see how many women the protagonist sleeps with till the end of the book. Honestly, I could not keep count. The story (MILD SPOILERS) There isn’t much in the story. Women by Charles Bukowski is just an everlasting inflow of women in the life of alcoholic writer Henry Chinaski, who is in his 50s and is enjoying popularity finally. The book is heavily influenced by his own life. He gets invi
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Death is the only escape

Ever since the day Kiron threw herself out of the window and disappeared among the grasses, leaving a trail of blood on the blades of t he grasses, I have been continuously seeing strange dreams. In these dreams, I am always following the bloodstains, to find her and reach a lake which is almost freezing. The water of the lake is as black as can be, and as I stand there, looking around, I start to hear an unearthly hum of hundreds of people repeating one single sentence over and over: Death is the only escape. As the hum gets louder, I start to notice all over the banks of the lake were corpses- pale and had their eyes open and pupil diluted making the eyes all white. They were murmuring, in no particular synchrony, that death is the only escape. I realize at this point that I am actually dreaming and start to scream to wake myself up to escape the deafening sound, but the noise only grows and becomes clearer: Death is the only escape. Death is the only escape. I remember, a
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TRUE EVENT: Tea and Eternity

DISCLAIMER: THE EVENTS ARE REAL An eternity ago, I had a plan of spending an eternity with someone and she used to make fabulous tea. Till this day, I drink a minimum of five cups of tea each day. So, obviously, I believed that the universe was at work in my favour. But apparently, the universe was writing a bad movie plot. So, an eternity ago, when we were becoming certain that things were falling apart between us, I was one day in a tiny room with her. I sat in a chair, with a cup of tea in my hand prepared by her and she sat six feet away, on the ground, surrounded by many empty bottles and a bucket of water. She was filling the bottles with water when I started laughing hysterically. “What are you laughing at?” she asked, a bit confused. “Is the tea not okay?” “You make the best tea,” I answered, trying to calm myself down and realizing that my association with my sloppy and dark humoured friends over the years had given me the superpower to laugh at sad situat
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