Ruchira's Ramblings

Lately, I have been trying to confuse my Spotify algorithm. Yeah, I know. We usually try not mess up our feeds, as I sternly told my friend who sent me a reel from a film that I absolutely do not want in my algorithm. But well. When I started Spotify, I picked on songs that I liked and played them on loop. Soon enough, they caught on and sent me a playlist. And for two years, I shuffled that same playlist, playing songs that got me into an adventurous head-space, beats, rhythm and voice. I wasn't listening anymore. I was zoning out. This isn't probably so much Spotify's fault as it was mine. I was using music to escape instead of paying attention.  And then I got bored. I shuffled and changed and came back and shuffled and it seemed that there wasn't a song left that I liked without engaging in mental cosplay. Again, not the songs' fault, but mine. And so I have been trying to remember how I used to listen to music before Spotify. Before we had our music on our phon...

  Photo by    Kostiantyn Li  via unsplash.com Yesterday, I was returning home from vacation and the whole dislike for waiting rooms and the existential dread of yet another year ending, with the reminder of all our forever dissatisfactions sent me off on spiral of longing and wishes. Which is fine, I guess. After all, this blog is where I come to think aloud. And two things can be true at the same time. You can love yourself and your life and still feel the pang of all that you haven't found yet. But today, on the first day of the year , I want to remember all the good things that happened. I had three wonderful vacations. True, there were canceled and delayed flights and mad rushes and sleepless nights at the airports but where would the stories come from without these? And there were beauties, and long bus rides broken with song and afternoon soirees after mad days at work. I had a frantic summer at work, but I am glad I could share the load with people I love spen...

 On the last day of the year, we came down from the mountains at the end of our little winter vacation. As the car pulled into the 'Drop & Drive' lane, I felt the stirrings of a vague sense of anxiety. We were about four hours early for our train. The journey from Takdah to NJP station was motion with purpose, the train ride to Sealdah would also be movement towards certain destination. It was the waiting period in-between, with nowhere definite to go that was unsettling.  I'm not much of a standing still person, I tend to pace around instead. Which is ironic considering how I've lived my life through little units of waiting. Waiting for this or that exam to get over so I could have fun afterwards, waiting for some movie to release so I could go and watch it with friends, waiting for vacations,  waiting for birthdays (now increasingly accompanied by a foreboding sense of dread for the inevitable and inexplicable letdown), waiting (now as a teacher) for end-semester ...

“If it has passed from the high and beautiful to darkness and ruin, that was of old the fate of Arda Marred; that was of old the fate of Arda Marred…” J.R.R.Tolkien, The Silmarillion I don’t believe we pass from necessarily from beauty to darkness, but something in that last sentence from The Silmarillion awakes a heartache within me for something I don’t even recall longing for. It is in our nature to long for the past, not simply because things often appear golden in retrospect, but also because innocence has its own charm. The first time you read a new book is magic. You can return later and discover the things you missed of course, but that first magic is something else. When I read the first Harry Potter book for the very first time at fifteen, when I read The Sandman at thirty, I knew as the pages turned that something wondrous and enchanting and beautiful was drawing to a close, and it would never be the same again. Others have their own magic. That first time yo...

Year X, Day 1, New Beginning Resolution Number: Infinity. The morning is bright- cheerful music, blue sky, golden sunlight– but it hardly enters our angled rooms. The sunlight, that is. The music pushes in through wood and brick and cement, making you feel like the accidental guest who has not been invited to the party. What are resolutions worth? For years I’ve been making and failing them, but sometimes I wonder if I fail them on purpose. Say we fulfill all our dreams and resolutions, what after that? ‘A man saw a bird and wanted to paint it. The problem, if there was one, was simply a problem with the question. Why paint a bird? Why do anything at all? Not how, because hows are easy- series or sequence, one foot after the other—but existentially why bother, what does it solve?’ * And yes indeed, why do anything? Why sing, make art, bleed into canvas and paper? Why get out of bed every morning, commit to a daily commute, the crowd of office hours, ten million excel sheet...

I watched the starlings perch on a swaying stalk of long grass as the wind gushed about and thought, perhaps little birds need their share of adventure too. And when flying is one’s natural state of being, perhaps even the sky seems to be nothing more than an overworked old map. For don’t we all come from infinite source, seeking infinite experiences in finite things? And so the clock ticks, and the earth rolls, and another year comes to an end. Things I’ve done for the first time in 2018: Presented papers at two academic conferences. And it wasn’t nearly as scary as I thought that would be, although, let’s be honest, it’s a little disconcerting to be talking to a room full of people while pretending you know exactly what you’re talking about. I think I did okay. Participated in a poetry-reading. I didn’t read it as well as I had hoped to (see point above regarding a room full of people staring at you), but considering I hadn’t thought of myself as a poet for some yea...

On the first day of 2017, I woke up at my friend's house, on the bed that we had turned into a fort with bed-sheets and blankets and fairylights, after what was my first ever New Year's Eve Special Sleepover. It was the first time I had done anything different apart from watching and geting bored with the same people singing and dancing on television to usher in a new year. I woke up beside my bestfriends, teasing each other and hugging each other and making promises to begin every new year the same way- well, one of those idiots is sitting in America right now and the other one is too busy studying for an exam to meet me but that doesn't stop her from baking enticing cakes and posting pictures of them on WhatsApp- I'm sure gonna remember this. And on my own part, I just returned from a trip today after a long overnight train journey so I am definitely not going to any parties tonight. But the point here, I began this year in a manner markedly different from previous y...