Ruchira's Ramblings

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...

Some people live in the past. Some people live in the future. I fall into the second category. For as long as I can remember, I have survived the present by weaving stories about the future in my head, without knowing anything concrete about the path to those stories. And the futures became present and the stories never materialized and I moved on to newer stories, newer futures. But this future that engrossed me was always of the airy variety- not the practical future of- if I practice X sums a day for Y number of days I will finish a chapter in my math book, or if I write points a, b, c in this order I will have a coherent paragraph. When I was in school, my mother would complain about my habit of always crossing out the first sentences of any essay I wrote. “Why can’t you plan first and then begin writing?” But I could not begin to think till I was in the middle of the business, neck-deep into a sea of scratched out words and by then, the thoughts had begun to take a life of...

I’m not much of a new year’s resolution person, you know, so I really don’t know what to say here. It’s not like I can’t think of anything to say- there are in fact a thousand promises I could make to myself, like I’ll try to be a little more organized, I’ll try to follow a routine, I’ll try to do this 2nd Tuesday blog every month (because I did such a splendid job last year) and of course, the usual suspect, I’ll try and exercise regularly and get fitter. But I’d rather not because my new year’s resolutions tend to fizzle out as the year gets older. That is not to say that I’m not going to try all those things I mentioned above, I shall of course try to update my blog and write and study and do all those things or rather I am already trying to do all those things but I would rather not call them resolutions- they are changes I have been attempting to make for several months now and I would rather not use January 1 as a marker of any kind. It kind of feels like I jinx, you know. In...