Ruchira's Ramblings

  Published: 04/05/2021 on Out of the Blox: Sanglap Journal ‘Why am I doing this? What am I changing? Am I doing any good at all?’ In my professional teaching career in Higher Education of over six years, I have often found myself confronted with these questions.  As I sit here almost regretting my hasty promise to Arunima to write this piece, I am drowning in a virtual whirlpool of overlapping exam schedules, batch-wise email addresses, and timings and uploading to portals, and the only thing that I can say with any certainty about my experience as a college teacher under WBES during the pandemic academic year is that we are woefully understaffed. Not simply for the online mode of examination, but also for the new (running on its third year now)  CBCS system , with its ambitiously wide syllabus and its multiple-component examination scoring system. This becomes increasingly apparent as we advance further into the system, with higher semesters unfolding and new batches coming in, leadi

 For a variety of reasons, it has been difficult to get back into the groove of blogging. I will try to come back but meanwhile, here are a couple of travelogues from the past. The first one about the Midnight Sun was published first on Yahoo Travel India in 2012, and the 2nd one on Antarctica was published around 2019 on travelandy.com. Since we can't travel now, let's revisit some old trips. I In the land of the Midnight Sun First published on Yahoo! India Travel  It was summer in the land of the Midnight Sun. Summer drawing to a close, admittedly, seeing that it was almost August, but the sun was still holding out pretty strong against the impending darkness. It was bizarre, getting used to the never-ending daylight of Tromso. We pulled down the window shutters of our hotel rooms before going to sleep, trying to pretend it was really night outside, but the shutters couldn't keep out the cries of the seagulls, that like the sun, were on duty 24 hours a day. On the date we