Ruchira's Ramblings

Defiance. Such a loaded word. It looks angry. Do you think words have visual personality? I do. It’s why I never enjoyed text-speak, even back in the day when we all had those sturdy Nokia phones with the 1/abc keypads and pre-WhatsApp sms charges to contend with. I still occasionally get grief on this (thanks, Twitter), but I digress. When I look at the word ‘defiance’ I see a little word with an upturned face, lower lip curled in angry rejection of the status quo. See where the ‘f’ meets the ‘i’- like a pair of discontent angry eyes? I imagine rallies and placards and balled fists and raised voices, and perhaps defiance is all that, but sometimes defiance is something quieter, deeply personal and almost invisible. The world pegs you into a certain hole- you tick off certain boxes in the right order, do the expected stuff and that’s that. And on the whole, you conform. You aren’t the rebellious type. Not yet. There are possibilities that make you go cold inside, like the...

I The water pours itself against the sand. Pour? All that energy, all that ephemeral, inexhaustible passion, all that momentary beauty- how do you find quite the right word for it? The water crashes against the sand in an endless exuberant dance, exuding something of the essence of life, stirring something like a vague residual memory in you. Look at the shapes as the froth breaks in and disappears into darkness. Look how it returns in a tremendous triumph. There is no endgame, because the sea knows it doesn’t need to win. It just is. The energy that moves the world. II I was part of the sea once, born of it as a single cell. Everything that I am now, every cell, whatever impulse that quickens life came from the sea, the original womb. And having evolved, I am so far from it. Does a protozoa have a soul? What is true? The evolving form or the eternal soul? When, in the long epochs of mutation and adaptation did consciousness enter the scenario? Why us? Why here?...

I don’t know if I’ve ever talked about this before, but it’s something I’ve often thought about. You know how we talk about going back to being a kid again with a sort of nostalgic yearning like it was some sort of golden era of perfection? When I look back on my childhood, I find a lot of joys, but also petty quarrels and feeling excluded, of never quite fitting in, of trying and failing to be cool enough.  This morning, someone I follow on Twitter (Adrian Tchaikovsky, the author of Children of Time which is a great piece of science fiction that I cannot recommend enough) posted a photograph of the ‘Back to School’ section of a retail store, & there, amongst other school uniforms was a set of the standard Hogwarts black robes, complete with a Gryffindor scarf and a magic wand. As a good fangirl ought to, I shared the tweet, along with the comment- “Can I go back to school, please?” But as I typed those words, I asked myself if I really meant them, and I knew the ans...

(I have been having a difficult time this last week, and I needed to vent. I’m only trying to sort out my head. If you came here from one of Instagram videos, the YouTube link is at the end of this post. Just scroll down.) The monster never sleeps, never lets you out of your sight, lusting after your moments of quiet joy.  There is no hour of day that is safe from him, no place far enough. If I were to run to the farthest galaxy, the monster would still find a way to pounce upon my peace. There’s a choice I’ve been sitting on for two years, hoping for someone or something else to act for me. In my dreams, packed bags gather dust at thresholds where the door no longer fits, and I am always too late or too early for trains, never quite going anywhere. No one, I suppose, will make my choice for me. No one has been inside my head. No one has heard me stifle my screams in empty rooms. No one at all has seen me punch at invisible walls. I try my best. I really do. I get up in...

In case anyone came over here from any of my Instagram videos, my YouTube channel is here . Once again, apologies for the side trip. And so here we are again. Doing another review, the second on a row. I did one last month, which was more of a rambling love letter to all things Good Omens , that absolutely brilliant, brilliant show which you can read here . Today’s ramble is on the new Lion King live action movie, and it’s in response to casual request from my friend, Alexander Lehtinen. I mean, he said “detailed review” but I don’t know how much details I can offer seeing that I can offer no comparison with the original, but here goes. In 1994 when The Lion King came out, my favourite Bengali children’s magazine ran a cover-story on it. I don’t remember what the article said, only that I was moved enough to tell my mother that I wanted to watch the movie. Compared to a lot of kids my age, I didn’t watch a lot of movies back then, and then usually those that my parents to...

Hi. If you’re here from the link in my Instagram bio following any of my videos, you can find my YouTube channel here . Sorry about the side-trip. You know how IG works. Only 1 link allowed at a time. My revived blog completed 2 years of staying active on the 16th of last month and I was unable to put up a post because, well, it has been a chaotic few weeks. Happy Belated Blog-Anniversary to me and to everybody reading this, because without you I would just be talking to myself which I do quite a lot anyway, but it’s more fun with you. So Thank You. I’ve lately been in love with Good Omens the show. And I’ve been giving some thought to why that is, and have come with the two primary reason why I love the show (and the book) so much. One is the philosophy it embodies, and second, the absolute joy with which the story is told, the love that is the soul of this screen story. Which is why, two thousand memes and fan videos later, it still resonates. Because honestly, all one ne...

NaPoWriMo may be over, but poetry never is. On the last day of the month long challenge, the prompt from napowrimo.net was to write a minimalist poem. I looked at some short forms and wrote two other poems that I eventually didn't share. This is the first of those two other ones. I was experimenting with a form called Magic9, which uses the rhyming scheme abacadaba (Basically,  spell Abracadabra and take out the R) but I was also trying to revisit the prompt from Day 28 to write a metapoem. So here you go,  a somewhat minimalist metapoem written in the Magic9 form. And here's the second poem, written in the form of a Korean sijo poem, a 3-line poem of 44-46 syllables. I meant to share those poems ages ago but then I was writing my neverending PhD thesis and the blog kinda got put on a back burner, but then a couple of days ago my mind veered off into an existential ramble during morning papers and so I thought I would share that. Ahem. So here goes nothing. You ...

NaPoWriMo Day 30. And we're here at last. 2nd NaPoWriMo successfully completed. Prompt from napowrimo.net for the day was to write a minimalist poem. Thank you NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo 2019 for the interesting mix of prompts. And thanks to Airplane Poetry Movement for teaching me I could do it. We all miss you guys.

NaPoWriMo Day 29. Prompt from napowrimo.net: "Today, I’d like to challenge you to produce a poem that meditates, from a position of tranquility, on an emotion you have felt powerfully. You might try including a dramatic, declarative statement or you might try addressing your feeling directly, as if it were a person you could talk to." 1 more to go. Yeah, we did it. Almost!

NaPoWriMo Day 28. Prompt from napowrimo.net: Write a metapoem or a poem about poetry.

NaPoWriMo Day 27. Prompt from napowrimo.net: "I’d like to challenge you to remix a Shakespearean sonnet. You can pick a line you like & use it as the genesis for a new poem. Or make a “word bank” out of a sonnet, and tlry to build a new poem using the same words (or mostly the same words) as are in the poem. Or you could try to write a new poem that expresses the same idea as one of Shakespeare’s sonnets..." I don't know if I got that remix vibe right but I did enjoy writing this one. Thank you for reading. 

The prompt from napowrimo.net for Day 26 was to write a poem using repetitions. 

NaPoWriMo Day 25. Prompt from napowrimo.net: "...I’d like to challenge you to write a poem that: Is specific to a season, uses imagery that relates to all five senses (sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell), includes a rhetorical question, (like Keats’ “where are the songs of spring?”)". I love writing about the rain, but I generally don't engage the senses so this was an interesting prompt.  Favourite subject but different approach. How do you think I did? Do let me know. Love,

NaPoWriMo Day 24. Prompt from napowrimo.net: "Today’s prompt is to write a poem that is inspired by a reference book. Locate a dictionary, thesaurus, or encyclopedia, open it at random, and consider the two pages in front of you to be your inspirational playground for the day.". The book I opened was the  'Oxford Dictionary of Synonyms and Antonyms'. And I thought I would give the villanelle form another shot. 

NaPoWriMo Day 23. Prompt from napowrimo.net for today was to write a poem about an animal. But then I came across @the.riya.roy (Check her out on Instagram) who had shared a poem she wrote for last year's poetry challenge, in response  to a prompt from Airplane Poetry Movement who had asked us to write a pantoum. So I thought, why not put the two things together and see what happens? N.B: My attempt is a rather loose interpretation of the pantoum structure where the 2nd & 4th lines of a preceding stanza are not necessarily exactly repeated in the 1st and 3rd lines of the succeeding one. But this was fun to write.  And now for some other stuff. First, my poem  'Scent ' is now up on Issue 7 of the Minute Magazine . You can also check out the podcast version of it on Soundcloud , iTunes or Spotify . Finally, last plug of the day, if you've not already read it, please check out my Antarctica travelogue . Pretty please? I love you. Thanks for ...