Ruchira's Ramblings

Last week, someone I knew on Facebook posted a Calvin & Hobbes cartoon.   It was one I had seen before- did I mention I was a big Calvin & Hobbes fan?- and shared with my academic friends, sort of as a light-hearted in-joke- a nostalgic reminder of our experiences as clueless students trying to hand in assignments within looming deadlines. As one classmate very memorably said on encountering a discomfiting question- “What’s the point of studying literature for all these years if you can’t use the language to fib and improvise?” Strangely enough, I had never seen this joke as a specifically literary one, but found its humour revolving around the fact that Calvin didn’t actually know anything substantial to say about the subject. As a teacher one knows that the less a student has studied, the more likely she is to “inflate weak ideas, obscure pure reasoning” and write longer and more convoluted sentences. However, my Facebook friend graced this little strip with a...

Before  the beginning was the  night . And the night was without boundaries and the night was without  end . In the beginning was  time . The relentless beat in which things could happen, in which everything could  become , dust could coalesce, matter could  exist . In that coming together, the  universe  was possible,  all  versions of it.  In  it, people could dream and die. In it, stars  burned  and  flared  and  went out. -       Neil Gaiman, Overture-04, A Madness of Stars Where did we come from? I remember once watching a documentary about circles. It began somewhere in Venice, with children skipping with circles they use in the circus. Taking that circle as a starting point, film proceeded to increase the diameter of the circle tenfolds. And so with each increase, the circle held Venice, and Europe, and Earth. Within a few leaps, it had reached the boundaries of the kno...