Ruchira's Ramblings

Imagine an empty room. Imagine a house. Or a world. Imagine an entire star-spangled universe with its make-believe show of beginnings and ends. A show that engulfs us, consumes us and drives us towards each other. Or away from. Even from ourselves. Now imagine us. Forget the noise. It's just you and I. All that I say won't matter in time. All that I say will echo across the stars forever, forming new words somewhere else, for someone else. But right now, in this moment, all that I say is for you. You know that. So listen. I love you. I've been looking for you. I hope we find each other, because what else is left when the sun is cold and we are all long gone? All we have is this moment, to be true and to live and to not burn ourselves out in this great cosmic pantomime that consumes us and drives us away from ourselves.  📸 John Fowler via unsplash.com I found a Tumblr screenshot on Instagram the other day. I don't recall the exact language but it said something to this ...

  16 th June, 2021 . Bloom’s Day. I mark the date because it’s my blog-anniversary. This is my space to think aloud without judgment and prudent advice, to ramble my heart out, to find my way as all who wander lost may someday find theirs. It’s been a strange world, a strange time. Where would you wander when paths were closed? And the people died, without help, without love, without dignity. And the world carried on, in light that was always eight minutes late, as moments turned into memories, as memories faded into dull, half-forgotten heartaches, as all aches blurred into the fog of the blank spaces. And the light was always eight minutes late. We woke, opened our eyes, saw the world in delayed light, tried to make sense of it all, and no wonder we got it all wrong. When the darkness came, we looked up and said our prayers, pinning all our hopes on God. “Move him into the sun”, we said. And God was eight minutes late. I wonder, if tomorrow, in some moment of inexplicable co...

Pre-Script: If you came over from my Instagram , my YouTube channel is here . ... By Kaique Rocha via Pexels Another Bloomsday gone. It has been three years since I announced the intention to revive my blog on Facebook. The aching sense of lack that drove me to that decision back then still exists. Of course a lot has happened since then. A lot has changed, a lot has been done. But sometimes, in the middle of the doings and keeping busy and ticking boxes, you ask yourself, what has really changed? Why are you here, anyway? Leopold Bloom walked the streets on a meandering search for purpose. Sounds like a fairytale in the middle of this lockdown. Still, we’re all making our ways through our daily schedules through the meandering signposts that keep us reassured that we’re doing it right, that we’re doing something, at any rate. Online, offline, or inside our heads. Perhaps it’s selfish to talk about personal ennui at a time like this. So let me ask instead, where do ...

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...

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!

It has been a while since I’ve blogged. Apologies to you, and to myself as well for not writing. I have been planning this piece for a while, and it has been so long that I have probably forgotten what I was going to say. But then, this is a ramble, really, so it doesn’t matter in the end. A few weeks ago, I came across an article about the first phase of a major radio sky survey using Low Frequency Array telescope, revealing “hundreds and thousands of previously undetected galaxies.” Without going into technical details, seeing as I am not a sciencebro , here’s a figure: “their radio signals have traveled billions of light years before reaching earth,” (one light year is 5.8 trillion miles)- which just blows the mind, really. The actual article shared on Twitter had a highly entertaining comment thread, with people talking about mass, infinity and multiverses. All of it reminded me of Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy. For all its subversions, politics, imagina...

First of all, apologies for the long absence. Also, I know I promised a surprise, and I was supposed to host a writer-friend who was going to talk about his new novel, but I went on vacation, and then he went on vacation and somehow it didn’t sort of work out. To make up for it, here are not one but two whole disjointed rambles. Do let me know what you think in the comments and share if you like them. 1 Last night I dreamt I was in school, going to class to learn calculus and having a generally miserable time of it. I keep having some variation of this dream at long intervals, usually at times when I am stressed or worried or sad- dreams where I go to class and the teacher has covered so many chapters of the math book that I have never studied and have no clue how to answer in the exam and then it takes me a while on waking up to remember that I didn’t in fact need to sit for that exam again. And so it was last night, except in the dream I made a very definite decision of quit...

You know how kids think sometimes that movies are real? When I was a kid, I didn't think so. I even knew actors' names (learned from my mother) and understood that they played different roles in different stories. But I didn't know how movies were made, and thought that they ran in real time. And so I thought, I thought... that perhaps the life I knew- with parents, friends and school and vacations was a movie that somebody else was watching the same way we watched those black and white classics on the family television set on Sunday afternoons, and that someday the movie would end and I would discover that I wasn't who I thought I was, but somebody else. And how strange and exciting would it be to discover that it was all make-believe, that I was someone else, from somewhere else.  Sometimes I think that I'm still waiting to discover who I really am. I recall no dream but broken images of imagined conversations melting away into a void of disquiet- ...