Ruchira's Ramblings

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...

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...