musings.

The football world cup comes around every 4 years and I get attached to the underdog teams scoring against giants and old favorites who are on the verge of retiring from the magic they created half a decade ago.

Japan's performance this season ended in a playoff against the skill of Brazilian players whose prowess at the game is inherent. The equalizing goal came in the last minute of the game, if not the last second, leaving almost no space for an equalizer. The match between Argentina and Cape Verde had a similar heartbreak. People were already feeling sorry for the debutante nation against a crowd favorite. Cape Verde lost the game but only after being unafraid and matching the Argentine challenge on field.

There is no conclusion to the heart-break that follows after losing a match, more so for the one that decides your fate in the tournament.

When I had started writing this, I was back from the fresh heartbreak of watching the teams I support being consecutively kicked out of the tournament. By the time the final was played, my attention was onto the protest happening in India. That is being hailed by an unusual yet inevitable demographic - the Gen Z, the forerunners of the current world. Fresh out of watching fifa and creating fomo for missing out on laathi charges.

A football game might give you the grace of trying again for another tournament at another time. A protest like this, with the momentum it has accumulated does not come around easily. It has taken a lot, despite the jokes and memes, to get this conversation going and amass such grit from such a large population. I hope with all my might that the outcome favors and gives justice to the many students who have had much at stake. It is surreal to see the people (we, the people), the youth come together like this and deliver on the seriousness on the issue while keeping up on the humor without fail.

I don't know what comes out of this, how the protest even reaches till the end goal it has declared for itself, whether the govt takes the accountability it has run away from for so long. But I do know that this has mattered. As the quote goes, not all battles are fought to be won, some are fought just to tell the world that someone was on the battlefield and resisted.

What impresses me is also the refusal to be satiated with the bare-minimum. After trying to counter the peaceful protest with brute force backfired in gaining sympathy (surprise, surprise) the protesters also called out the incoming messages of fake-sympathy, scripted from the the vocabulary of saying much to resolve absolutely nothing and the people are refusing to take the bait and be silenced.

The past years have felt like playing a losing match, where things were changing only for the worse and all efforts to change were met with a resigned disbelief for hope. But hope is a funny thing. It can come from the most unexpected of places, and awaken the youth of an entire nation. Going beyond the fun and games and memes, we have a responsibility to remember this.

So much has changed since then. The people are gone, the rest have moved away, even though the house still remains. The house had been abandoned long before the people left, but that house is what I remember of the old days, not the much larger houses that we visited later. It is a different house that my mum remembers, her memories very different from mine and of a different age.

We all have different memories from that place, if anyone of us does recall the past. It is not even as nostalgic and poetic as I am making it out to be, but is is also nostalgia that is making me take a second look at those memories. Of long drawn-out afternoons and the greenery outside.

The trees in our neighborhood were cut down last year. I remember our hearts ached at the sight as we saw the people hacking away at the branches that had grown to touch the fifth or sixth floor of a tall building easily. The dense foliage, grown a deep green, served as a gorgeous backdrop for the rain to see from the window.

I remember thinking what purpose would it serve to cut down the tree? after seeing the video about the broccoli tree by john green. Apparently people can’t let nature be, just thriving and vibing on its own (literally not coming in your way, in any way) and they will cut down trees still.

A year later, the branches are reaching for the sky again, the leaves make a beautiful light green and the trees flowered this year. While I was peering at the newer branches the other day, I realized it was easier to make them out by their lighter brown colour as compared to the darker shade of the tree trunk.

Green is often the colour of spring, new leaves and new life. Brown can be the colour of growing. Slowly, consistently, persistently.

you know that seemingly random moment of deep human connection people talk about experiencing with strangers in a supermarket, maybe over a shared moment of joy on behalf of someone’s toddler being adorable or stupidly funny, or perhaps acknowledging the mutual struggle of surviving in this economy, in these times; I experienced that on a train with this girl sitting next to me, trying to watch Detective Conan.

the girl had forgotten her earphones, it seemed, and she was trying to increase the volume of her phone in order to listen to the audio without having to hold up her phone to her ears and miss seeing the video. the seats were full, as they always are, and we were initially standing up, and I recognized the anime. i used to watch the show when it was aired on tv some over ten years ago.

i think I mentioned it to her, I don’t remember exactly what, but maybe I referred to the name of the show and girl immediate offered to watch the movie (it was a movie, i recall) together. neither of us knew at which stop the other person was getting down, but for the time being, we could watch this thing together.

we tried to watch the movie with the low sound, by cupping our hands over the speaker, but honestly, it didn’t really work with two people trying to hear the low volume and see the small screen of the phone at the same time. I had to get down as my stop approached, but that train ride is a memorable one.

First lines become memorable when you want to read past it, all the way to the end of the book. It is easy to agree with this as a reader, on some level. If you happen to be on the other side though, writing that first line and belonging to the self-destructive species known as perfectionists, well. Good luck getting started on that first line and moving past it to the second, and all the way to the end of the paragraph.

This particular piece of writing has been an exercise in the same, just moving past the hesitancy of is this enough or do I need to make it better? It can be very frustrating when there is much to write but the first line just doesn’t get down on the paper. So here I am, pausing only slightly and putting down the words as they form in my mind. No backspacing, that one is to be avoided for now.

You don’t make a home out of it.

 I remember someone wrote this as a reply to the question, and it has stuck with me since.

This particular the train of thought might be a result of the lingering after-effects of binge-reading the demon slayer manga last weekend, but here: even when you think you have lost all and there is nothing in your hands anymore, nothing you can do; while you are hurt and that is the truth, you can control how you respond to it.

We can’t always run away from sadness, can’t put a band-aid over all wounds. But. We can choose to not wallow in the sadness. Pain demands to be felt, but you can choose to not clamp your hand over the pressure when it fleets, if only for a moment.

Sounds easy, right? Hurts a heck lot, actually. And that is where you have to choose to get up.

Wounds heal with time. The scars… may or may not fade away. I think a lot of students can say this from the first-hand experience of academia during the time of a world-wide pandemic that closure isn’t always an inevitability. You just gotta make peace with things, sometimes. Some scars, they stay. No amount of fancy word-building is going to make them go away, no matter how poetically, tragically beautiful anyone might make it sound. But then, how does one cope? By treating it like life. You fell down and you scarped your knee. There’s an ugly gash now and you don’t know when it will fade away, if at all. So then you take care of it. Disinfect it and treat it and then you brush off the dirt and you don’t stop wearing your favourite ripped-at-the-knees jeans just to cover it up.

The last episode of season 2 of the anime aired a couple of weeks ago and what I noticed most prominently, like Tanjirou’s empathy in season 1, was his resolute in getting back up and going ahead. No matter how harsh the blow, he managed to take deep breaths and get back up again. I tried to think if I could be as brave in face of being knocked down so hard, so many times; I guess I could only wish I might be as strong.

The places of transition; when you are neither here nor there, but rather in between two spaces. I suppose that is not entirely true because we are somewhere, at any given time no matter how weightless (or weighed down) we may feel.

An example: the space between an artblock and creation when you are trying to write down the words or maybe paint the first stroke(s) across the paper.