Captain

You dog-eared the pages of my life,

Coloured them happy with splashes of black, white and brown

Your furry wags made my day, everyday,

Brushing off my face anything that resembled a frown

Your jaunty walk made the mornings 10x sunnier,

Pats, wuffs, wags, rubs and hugs – size large

Its a wonder how my stress always eased off,

While giving you an endless head massage 

You were the one who always greeted me the same,

Irrespective of my highest highs or my lowest lows

You showered me with the purest form of love that exists,

Only shy of your love for bananas, potatoes and mangoes 🙂

You made children and grownups alike lose their fear of dogs,

And were the talking point for the introverted-me who didn’t know how to small-talk

Your sage-like “thatha” eyes gave me answers to questions I didn’t know I had,

Credit to your large ears, you were the best listener for every moody monologue

If someone ever asks me, you are my inspiration,

Just want to be as joyful, loving and happy as you were

It was an absolute treat to have had you Captain,

You made 10 years pass by in the most beautiful blur ❤

Care

Image by Larisa Koshkina from Pixabay

I care about doing something I find meaningful with my life,

I care about discovering those little things that bring a sparkle in our eyes

I care about trying to resist the urge to take everything too seriously,

I care about learning to let go even when I feel about something too deeply

I care about the meaning of my existence in this big blue sphere,

I care about whether I’m being a good enough friend to those I hold dear

I care about the rights and the wrongs and the vast grey area in between,

I care about rekindling hope and believing again in a deserted dream

I care about making peace, whether with a disappointment or heartbreak,

I care about whether I’m learning from them or yet again naively raising the stake

I care about bothering others with my rant when I’m in a loop of endless thoughts,

I care about speaking my heart, even when my stomach is in knots

I care about being “myself” and letting my vulnerabilities be seen,

Yet I care about the imposter syndrome and how often I’m hiding behind a screen

Sometimes I wonder what it must be like to live with a little less worry, a little less stress,

And yet, if I had a choice, I’d always rather care a little too much than a little too less

Here’s to wiping away the mist and appreciating each other at our core,

Here’s to being kind to ourselves when we can’t help but feel, just a little more…

On Validation

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Here is an anecdote from a few years back. I was having a casual conversation with a friend and we soon scuba-dived from the surface-level small talk into the depths of the sea where personal stories lie buried in the sand, only to be uncovered in the most random of conversations. As we strolled, my friend shared a highly distressing experience she had been through. I was at a loss for words and just listened to her as she narrated the story. It was one of those surreal moments when you badly want to comfort someone but don’t know how to. I realized that though she had been through something far more serious than I ever had, I could still empathize and relate to some parts of her story.

After she had poured her heart out and we had spoken about it for a while, at this juncture, it seemed natural for me to open up as well. Yet, something held me back. The conscious realisation that the experience I wanted to talk about, albeit important to me, seemed trivial in contrast to what she had gone through. However, my gut feeling drove me to open up anyway, something I didn’t do very often. I started with the disclaimer, “So I too had a small setback a while ago… but that’s nothing in comparison to what you’ve been through.” She immediately waved it off saying, “You don’t have to compare! That’s totally okay.” I instantly felt relieved of judgement and was able to talk freely.

We are quick to judge and compare others’ sufferings, not realizing that we do that to our narratives as well. At times, blowing it up to the point that we start believing the hyperbole, and at other times, belittling our experience with a flippant “it’s nothing.” It is the latter that ironically raises more concern. Pain demands to be felt. And it is when we turn a blind eye towards it, avoidantly dressing it in frills of “c’est la vie”, letting the wound fester in an atmosphere of negligence, when things start to take a serious turn. There’s a delicate balance here between playing the victim card versus objectively realizing that what one has been through has been rough and needs to be healed, perhaps with the help mental health professionals.

It was when I was reading a personal account of a girl who was molested but was repeatedly told by others “to get over it”, that I realized how damaging this could be. She talks of how her experience, despite being intensely traumatic for her, seemed small in the face of other sufferings in the world such as rape, poverty, death and so on, convincing her that it wasn’t worth speaking up about.

But just because there are bigger problems on earth doesn’t mean someone’s challenges are insignificant. We find it extremely difficult to weigh our agonies against the appropriate amount of importance it deserves. What might just be a casual “break-up” for one, not worth giving a second thought, could mean a traumatic “heartbreak” for someone else, taking months or years to get over. What might be thought of as a mere “failure” in an exam, could take an aspirant who had left no stone unturned in its preparation, ages to accept the reality. What might be considered as “harmless” eve-teasing and an “inadvertent” brush of the hand, could take another person countless baths and sleepless nights to come to terms with.

All in all, each one of us has our fair share of poignant stories and experiences. And how we present them, not only to others but also to ourselves, says a lot. But the most important take away, is that our suffering is ours and ours alone, not for anyone else to judge or put into boxes. Something that might seem insignificant to others might have affected us to an appreciable extent. The important thing here is to feel it out, let the vulnerability strengthen us and come out of the kiln stronger.

Ultimately, the only validation we need and crave for is the one from ourselves. To be able to unabashedly be ourselves, to face all of our feelings – however difficult they might be, to not judge ourselves for the things we might do or not do, be or not be, and for once, love ourselves just the way we are. That’s the kind of validation we won’t get in the form of double-tapped hearts and likes, and yet, I bet, that’s the kind of validation our heart likes the most. 

Lights, Camera, Action!

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Here’s a thought. Imagine each of our lives recorded like a real-time show on some platform, say Netflix. However, it is meant specifically for just one’s own eyes (you probably don’t want everyone to see how you mindlessly stubbed your toe and screamed out in pain for five minutes straight this morning). Give the show a name, preferably with a positive spin; Always Have I Ever? Life Education? Breaking Good? How To Get Away With Life? Light? And this being real life, the show is not punctuated with back-to-back punch lines or overly dramatic scenes every two minutes, but is more like an endless documentary and captures every teeny thing; the mundane day to day activities, the smiles and the frowns, the ordinary conversations, the smallest of small moments.

If this reminds you of The Truman Show, it is indeed along those lines, except in this analogy, you knowingly direct your own show, just as everyone does theirs. You get to choose the genre. You get to change it too. Some episodes are romance, some comedy, some drama, and some even adventure. But there are no cuts, no retakes, no edits, no deletion of scenes allowed. Only one chance at everything.

Every few months, you wait in anticipation as a new season of your show gets released; representing a new version of you. Some seasons are spellbinding, you’re hooked to it. And some seasons are unpleasant and you just want to get them over with. Sometimes, there’s the arrival of an interesting character you fall in love with. And sometimes an evil character you wish would die at the end of the season (perhaps that went a little too far, but you get the drift). Every new person adds nuance to the show and develops the character arc of the main protagonist, you.

Within each season, are the small episodes as a window peek into the everyday life. Not each episode is the best. Some episodes are deplorable and you can’t help but cringe at it, or yourself. And yet, episode by episode, season by season, you understand and connect with yourself deeper. You root for yourself in the hardships and chuckle over the embarrassing moments. You shed a tear over the heartbreaks and empathize with the efforts. And when you re-watch your old episodes, you understand where you came from and are hopefully more forgiving in retrospect.

The OTT shows that speak to me the most are those that have a deep character arc. Where you are amazed by the change in the protagonist’s personality from season 1 to season 10. Going from disliking them at the start, to understanding their quirks and loving how much they’ve grown, much like how we would like to in real life (perhaps Louis from Suits or Rachel from Friends rings a bell?).

That’s how I would like my “show” to be. With bountiful change in the character season after season, hopefully for the better. A few laughs here, a few tears there. Good friends and family you wish to see constantly, while accepting that some people will flick in and out as guests for just 2 episodes. But the best parts are when you encounter someone out of the blue and they unexpectedly stick through the seasons, making it all the better.

And with these special people in your life, you choose to share the password for your show. Maybe unlock a few episodes first apprehensively, and then some more, and then all of it; right from the awkward first episodes, to the embarrassing ones you want to fast-forward through, to the ones you’re proud of and replay with joy.

You’re the director, producer, actor and critic of your show; all-in-one. As you live scene after scene, you realize that the most that can be done with the past story, is use it to gain acceptance and cherish as memories. Likewise, you have a fair idea of the direction you want your show to take next season. But if you squander all your time critiquing the past seasons, or meticulously directing episodes way into the future, then how do take out time to act fabulously “now”?

To quote from the book, The Courage To Be Disliked, “Life is not made up of lines, but a series of dots, a series of moments called “now”. If you’re under a bright spotlight, you won’t be able to see even the front row. If you are shining a bright spotlight on here and now, you cannot see the past or the future anymore.” At the end, I guess the best we can do is dab some make-up (or not), bask in the spotlight, and dance the dance this very moment, with whatever funky moves we’ve got.

Dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s

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I remember eagerly typing away at my computer for hours as a child; attempting to write my own fiction novel or poems with adorable rhyming schemes. I also remember my parents encouragingly asking me to share what I’d come up with so far, but I would hurriedly cover the monitor with my tiny fingers and say, “Don’t see just as yet! It’s not finished!” But it never was finished; it kept being a work in progress which I protected with all my heart. While my passion for writing even all those years back makes me smile, this particular flashback of safeguarding my work strikes to me as a trait not lost in the folds of time.

Now, I can identify it bobbing up in different forms. Sometimes, the emails I’m hesitant to send until I have attached every piece of supporting data to drive my point home. Sometimes, the reluctance to go and meet an acquaintance if I’m not looking my best. Sometimes, the interesting thoughts in my head that I jot down in my notes, but leave as drafts, unshared and forgotten, to be veiled from the world until I’m satisfied with it through and through.

You guessed it, it’s the perilous perfection at work here. But don’t get me wrong, it’s not entirely evil. It’s helped me better myself at multiple skills and build expertise. But at times, the unrealistic expectations I set for myself is a lot of unnecessary baggage to carry. It’s like going beyond that point in a bell curve after which the extra energy spent doesn’t translate into drastically improved results.

So now, I’ve started to get a little comfortable. Comfortable being an unfinished story. Okay with things not always being hunky-dory. Comfortable being a simple piece of art. Okay with needing to mentally log-off and restart. Comfortable being an unadorned picture because, why not. Okay with not having everything in life figured out. Comfortable being a poem with or without rhyme. Okay with not always being in my prime.

And while I will still shoot for the stars and push myself to go the extra mile, I’m learning to embrace and enjoy the little imperfections along this journey. I don’t need to dot every i and cross every t. Sooner or later, I will find that’s unnecessary. The freedom that this realization brings with it is surreal. Because that just means, I can live a life that’s real.

How are you?

Recently, a friend casually asked me how I am, and I spontaneously replied, “I’m fine! How are you?” before I even took a second to process the question. Catching myself, I said, “Haha, that came out like an automated reply. Actually, things have been… a little hectic lately.” We laughed at the irony of my first answer and carried on with the conversation. But my robotic response to that one question posed multiple times a day, made me pause and ask myself, how am I really?

Life since the last year has been – to put it in one word – eventful. A mixed bag of happiness, adventure, fun, anxiety, stress. While there are exciting experiences to recount and much more to experiment, there is often this lingering sense of feeling lost. Lost within the heartbeats of a city that throbs with life. Lost within a maze with millions of routes but only your instinct to trust. Lost within the delicate folds of the question ‘Am I doing enough?’

Maybe it’s that age. The newness of things. The acceptance of adulthood in its rawest sense. Being blindfolded, rotated and nudged into a world of possibilities. Like a blind date with life; it could go either way… but the consequences are to stay. Every experience experienced, every person met – a mere roll of the dice. And sometimes, I feel like I’m not the one rolling my dice. 

But in the big picture, that is just a grey lining to the silver cloud. The people make it worthwhile. Greeting acquaintances with an anticipatory ‘hi’, while snuggling into the comfort of old ties. The friends turned to family, the jokes and the raillery. The unplanned trips, and the embarrassing video clips. The small bursts of confidence from putting in effort, seeing myself grow and become a little better than the day before.

There is so much to learn, but perhaps even more to unlearn. The outdated beliefs to be replaced with a clean slate of the mind; ready to be painted with colors, showered with flowers, sometimes running rogue with graffiti that empowers.  

So, I’ll seek solace in the anticipation of the firsts yet to come, the things to look forward to. Discover myself and find my footing, sometimes down the well-trodden road, sometimes down the road not taken. 🙂

PS: How are you? 

Lemons from lemonade

When my thoughts get muddled and cob-webbed inside the head, I often like to read some quotes and witty liners to reflect upon or cheer myself up with. Here are some that caught my eye over the last year –

Matt Haig –
Sometimes the only way to learn, is to live.

WS Merwin –
Your absence has gone through me like thread through a needle.  Everything I do is stitched with its colour.

Sylvia Plath –
I’m glad the rain is coming down hard. It’s the way I feel inside. 

Howard Thurman –
Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

Richard P. Feynman –
The first principle is to not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

Nassem Taleb –
If you want to become a philosopher king, first become a king, then a philosopher.

Naval Ravikant –

• Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.
• Would I still be interested in learning about this thing if I knew I couldn’t tell anyone about it?
• We are not looking for peace of mind, but peace from mind.
• Peace is happiness at rest, happiness is peace in motion.
• The closer you get to the truth, the more silent you are inside.
• Self-esteem is a reputation you have with yourself. You always know.
• Lead, follow or get out of the way.
• If there’s something you do that seems like play for you but work for others, that’s what you want to focus on.

Confucius –

• Every man has two lives and the second one begins when he realizes he has just one.
• A happy person wants ten thousand things, a sick person wants just one thing.

Thoreau –

• How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
• There is no remedy for love but to love more.
• Never look back unless you are planning to go that way.
• Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.
• The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
• The rarest quality in an epitaph is the truth.
• Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good be good for something.
• None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.
• Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.
• Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?
• Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.
• What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.
• The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.
• How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them.

Rumi –

• You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens.
• Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.
• Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?
• Words are a pretext. It is the inner bond that draws one person to another, not words.
• Set your life on fire. Seek those who fan your flames.
• The wound is the place where the light enters you.
• Wherever you are, and whatever you do, be in love.
• Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. Cleverness is mere opinion. Bewilderment brings intuitive knowledge.
• As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.
• The only lasting beauty is the beauty of the heart.
• Close your eyes, fall in love, stay there.
• Let yourself become living poetry.
• You were born with wings, why prefer to crawl through life.
• When I am silent, I fall into the place where everything is music.
• Love sometimes wants to do us a great favour: hold us upside down and shake all the nonsense out.
• The world is a mountain, in which your words are echoed back to you.
• All your anxiety is because of your desire for harmony. Seek disharmony, then you will gain peace.
• Poetry can be dangerous, especially beautiful poetry because it gives the illusion of having had the experience without actually going through it.
• Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
• If you are irritated by every rub, how will your mirror be polished?
• Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

Mark Twain –

• Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that crushed it.
• It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.   
• Age is a case of mind over matter; if you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter!
• The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up.
• When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain. 
• It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.

My thoughts –

• It’s easy to be a Because, aspire to be a Despite.
• Life is a continuous process of trade-off. We are constantly giving up one thing for another.
• Adulting is like finding yourself in the eye of a cyclone. The only catch is, it is up to you to remain calm.
• When the mind is full of heavy, dark clouds, let it rain, let it rain through the eyes.

Phil’s-osophy (if you know, you know) –

• Success is 1% inspiration, 98% perspiration and 2% attention to detail.
• Take a lesson from Parakeets. If you’re ever feeling lonely, just eat in front of a mirror.
• Never be afraid to reach for the stars because even if you fall, you’ll always be wearing a parent-chute.
• When life gives you lemonade, make lemons. Life will be all like “what?!”

Finding peace in the pandemic

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For many of us, the last two years have been turbulent, often interspersed with murky eddies forming in some bumpy corners of our lives. Being bombarded with unprecedented challenges one after the other, doubled with constant uncertainty fogging up the mind, can be quite anxiety inducing and take a toll on mental and physical health.

In order to calm my nerves, I would try to keep myself active; at times nudging myself to experiment and dabble in new interests, and at other times, snuggling into the comfort of ageless hobbies which – quite literally, thanks to the pandemic – felt like home.

One of the upsides for me has been the time spent reading. Books have always been shelved in a special place in my heart and getting to go back to them after a long hiatus was a peaceful experience. It is freeing to know that even when you can’t step out of your room or house, you can still travel the world with the characters, live their lives and feel their feelings, with just a book in your hand. It gave my otherwise restless mind some interesting ideas to chew on and discuss with my friends.

Despite there being a multitude of online options to stay in touch with our friends and family, the lack of real human contact was another challenge dropped in our laps. I, for one, count myself lucky to be able to spend time with my family. Talking to friends, albeit on call, helped me ward off the sense of being isolated and cut-off from the world. These conversations allowed us a safe space to voice our concerns instead of bottling them up, and uplift each other’s spirits.

While news since the pandemic has been largely alarming and upsetting, mentions of random acts of kindness would perk up our ears. Articles of these touching, humane actions floated upwards through the sea of despair like resolute bubbles of hope. Stories like these keep us going, a reminder to keep our eyes on the silver lining of even the darkest clouds, and maybe try to make it a tad bit brighter in our smallest of ways. What we may brush off as an insignificant attempt to make any difference in this gigantic world, could perhaps be something that adds that small bit of sparkle to someone’s day, I’d like to imagine.

Now that we are slowly crawling out of our shells and returning to a sense of normalcy, it’s worth introspecting how the last two years have been trying for many, yet given us a lot to think about and learn from. Here’s looking forward to a time when our patience pays off and the pandemic becomes a distant memory of the past. 

Out of the blue

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A childhood memory recently came to my mind. As a kid, I used to be scared of jumping into the big swimming pool. Even at the shallow end. Granted, I was small, but I could easily stand in the shallow side. What’s more, even the pool tiles were clearly visible from the top! Yet the idea of leaping in was something I refused to embrace for the longest time.

My friends would coerce me, plunging repeatedly into the water for my benefit, apparently assuming that what was holding me back was the absence of daily live demonstrations on ‘how to jump’. But the most I dared to do was tip-toe to the very edge, stare at the water blankly and swat away the mosquitoes, until I shivered from the cold and gingerly climbed back into the pool using the built-in stairs. It’s a wonder how much I could overthink even at that age.

And then one summer evening, I simply jumped. Taken aback, I did it again. And then some. I still remember being incredulous that I’d been so wary of this absurdly simple action. With time, I found myself jumping from the high diving board at the deep end of the pool.

Saying I enjoyed it would be a grave understatement. It commenced with me impatiently filling the lungs with air and running the length of the board for no other reason but to amp up the excitement. Then springing off it and having the rejuvenating, chlorine-scented wind wash over my face. Finally, plummeting into the welcoming, dark-blue water, touching the tiles with the toes for a weird sense of satisfaction, pushing upwards and bobbing up again, ready for another go. I was so delighted by it that I spent most of my swimming time simply jumping into the pool for pleasure.

All this is not to say that I went on to become a swimming athlete. Far from it. I can swim in freestyle, gracefulness drifting away from me with every uncoordinated stroke of the limbs, but that’s about it. This is about the incident itself, which on it’s own is trivial, but I think a valuable lesson can be filtered out of it. It made me realize how I’d held myself back from a thoroughly enjoyable experience because of irrational fear. Now an adult, I wonder how often I still do this, immersing in self-doubt and denying myself the opportunity to try something new.

Sometimes, it’s worth swallowing the fear and diving into the unknown. If only to find an answer to pop those bubbles of ‘what-ifs’ floating inside the head aimlessly and taking up space. It is scary, but as William Faulkner put it, “You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore”. I can take all the precautions I want; wear a cap to cover the head, and goggles to see clearly, but I’ll never know what it’s really like until I finally take that trust-fall into the vast expanse of possibilities.

If I happen to stay underwater for long, facing pressure from every direction in the depths of uncertainty, I can take it as an opportunity to learn to hold the breath, and likewise, faith in myself. And if I hit rock bottom, that could just give me the required thrust to propel upwards through the cold, dark layers until I reach the sunlit surface.

Isn’t being willing to jump in a fair ask, if we expect to get something out of the blue? Perhaps the best thing to come from this exercise, whether a good experience or not, would be building the muscle of self-confidence, which encourages one to experiment over and over.

Here’s hoping we muster the courage to do what we know we should, even if it terrifies us. It doesn’t have to happen overnight; I like to imagine courage as seeping into our soul and leaking into the heart, one drop at a time. And the next time we’re feeling blue, it might help to remember that we are all in the same boat, individually facing our share of fears and insecurities, while helping each other sail through the sea of life.

Life in “shares”

Of late, learning about the stock market had piqued my interest. One rainy evening, sipping hot chai while breathing in the fresh, petrichor-rich air, I found myself looking at the stock market chart of a company, as one often does when trying to determine its progress over the years. I first checked the graph for that day, then for that week, month, and year, until I zoomed out to the five-year graph. As someone merely dabbling in the arena, no amount of squinting at the laptop screen, head cupped in hands, miraculously gave me “the answers” to the relevant questions. Nevertheless, I did go on a tangent and make an interesting observation.

As I gazed at the rugged lines on the chart, ravenously rushing up and then dejectedly dipping down, fluctuating at a phenomenal pace, it occurred to me that if we were to have our lives analyzed and depicted in a similar manner, it wouldn’t be dramatically different from what was in front of me. Curious to explore the analogy, I drew some parallels; imagining a person’s life being split into numerous little shares, the price of each, quantified in terms of happiness and meaning.

Some days we’re better off, and the prices shoot through the roof. Then there are days when the prices – or happiness levels – stoop and fall, and we feel low, literally and figuratively. And then there are times when the societal market itself crashes. We all find ourselves in the same boat, feeling blue, surrounded by the morbid sea of death and sickness, looking for the smallest branch of hope to hang on to.

But if we’re willing to pardon the untimely fall in the price of a company’s share for a week, month, or even a year, trusting that the company is a good one and has the potential to sky-rocket – I asked myself – why don’t we give ourselves a similar benefit of the doubt? Why do we beat ourselves up for every small slip, every little thing that doesn’t go according to plan, and overthink our way into an abyss of unpleasant thoughts?

True, in that moment, on that day, things could have left a bitter taste in the mouth, which no amount of forced positivity can rinse off. But one good or bad day does not decide whether we choose to invest in a company, and analogously would not determine the quality of our entire life. As Matt Haig writes in his book, The Midnight Library, “Sometimes the only way to learn, is to live.” And what is life, if not stewed in a pot of mixed experiences, generously garnished with mistakes, peppered with a pinch of regret here, a dash of embarrassment there, and topped with wholesome love?

It is the five and ten-year graphs that speak volumes about us. If they are on a decline, maybe it’s time to take a step back and rethink our lifestyle. But if the curve is steadily trudging upwards – albeit at snail’s pace – then that’s an assurance that we are headed in the right direction. Life seems a lot like an uneven road riddled with puddles and potholes, and we need not read too much into every pitfall we find ourselves in. (Of course, we could pay a wee bit more attention to the intuitive signposts at every corner that we often conveniently turn a blind eye to!)

Zooming out and looking at the big picture would work wonders for most of us. We make so much progress over the years, only to sweep it under a rug of self-doubt, when we most need to hold it close to the heart. Perhaps if we had as much faith in ourselves and our potential, as we have in stocks and shares, we would be much, much happier. If we could only take a bird’s-eye view of the present the way we look at our past, as a part of the whole, we would treat it quite differently, wouldn’t we? And the next time we face a set-back, even if that means multiple points in a year of being caged in our own houses, perhaps the picture of an imaginary graph will come to our mind, with a tiny dent at its right end. And here’s hoping it soon arches upward in full blossom, like a bent rose curving up to smile at the sun anew.