Ruchira's Ramblings

Isn't the Mercury Retrograde over yet? Everything seems suspended in a strange sort of stasis. We return to our lives that used to be with the shadow of a fear. I just want us all to be happy again. In the room where I got my vaccine doses, the lights on the ceiling were soft and dreamy, and the rows of cushioned chairs slanted down a steady slope. I looked around and realized we were in a movie theatre, although the screen was covered up by the make-shift cubicles where the nurses met the unvaccinated. The realization hit me like a slow ache, bringing back memories of movie dates and lunches and friends I hadn't seen in ages. When our biggest festival came round, I spent the time in my room, flipping through facebook memories, recollecting a decade's worth of plannings and anticipations and picking out dresses and mad traffic and melancholy evening goodbyes. This is an old bereavment of mine, this traveling home after a happy hour or two, the crowd somehow always flowin...

I don’t know who I am anymore. Who I once thought I was has been dead for years, who I want to be is nowhere to be found, and I seem to falter at every step I take towards that elusive self. Projects fail. Hours of toil amount to nothingness. The last remaining egg fails to hatch. The world breaks your heart. And meanwhile the past you want to leave behind keeps intruding. Photo by Dan Grinwis via Unsplash This blog isn’t going anywhere, is it? I know all the advice. Have read them all a hundred times. I know I don’t offer a service here, nothing that a reader may gain for spending their precious minutes reading through my ramblings. But that’s not why I started. I started because I needed to hear out my thoughts before they imploded inside my head. I write here because I can’t speak my madness and my fury and my melancholy out in person, and I don’t know who to talk to. Oh I have friends. Perhaps you are one of them. And I know you would listen. But what do I tell you? Sho...

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 ...

The Quest of Saint George’ by Frank O. Salisbury The Quest of Saint George’ by Frank O. Salisbury) #1 There’s a kind of relaxation that comes with the experience of travelling, of being transported somewhere without any direct effort on your part- this sense of a flow, of a movement towards somewhere. As the destination draws closer, an anxiety creeps in, because you know that soon, too soon, the bus or the train or the car or the plane or the boat will stop, and you will have to step out of the safe cocoon of passive inaction and be responsible for your own direction again. It’s like the breaking of a spell, or a reverie. But step back and think of the before- the past actions that led you to this journey, and may be finding a new route will become that much easier. Or may be not. Who knows! The ice melts, the oceans part, the forests shift and the maps change all the time. You are on the ride of life anyway, and there is only one destination, eventually. But maybe you can ...

There’s this word, or idea that I like. Journey. Odyssey. We are travelers in time and space, all seeking, knowingly, or unknowingly our purpose in life. Pilgrimage. That’s another word. Draupadi and her five husbands knew this when they embarked on the final journey of their lives (perhaps a lifelong path of wandering homelessness taught them that) – the one we call the ‘Mahaprasthan’- the Great Exit. And that’s true too. We journey to a purpose while also moving onwards towards the final leave-taking. Estragon and Vladimir were travelers too, even if all they did was wait beneath a dead tree. But what if our paths are ellipses, an Ouroboros circling Godot? What if we were all just lonely planets lost in our own orbits of individual, inexplicable sorrows? And the hope of meaning and purpose, like the sun, gives us light and life-sustaining warmth, but we can never really touch it, and getting too close would burn and blind us, and so it’s much, much safer to remain content with...