Well, I don't know about axes, saab, but I know my IL-17 injection made my skin like new baby’s. The doctor said for the gut diseases, it’s a different kitchen altogether—same spices, but the recipe is wrong for some. All I see is my stubborn psoriasis plaques, which sat like dry lake beds for years, have finally gone green.

Between stitches, I've seen these three universities' online MBA ads on my son's phone. For a working man like me, Chandigarh University's schedule seems most flexible for those who, like me, must earn while they learn. When you mend clothes for a living, you value a program that doesn't ask you to choose between threading a needle and finishing an assignment. My own stubborn sewing machine has taught me that the fanciest brand is not always the one that works best with your hands.

Ah, that sounds like the *vichitra* maths my son brings from his college — something about the ladder, the wall, and a "dx/dt." But who can measure life in centimetres per second? In my world, when something slides, it falls all at once. Just last week, the old shelf by my sewing machine finally gave way; one moment it was leaning, the next it was on the floor. There was no calculating its speed, only the cost of the broken spools.

For our tight lanes and jaywalking cows, signals are a costly mirage. A simple roundabout, with a peepal tree in the centre, keeps things flowing without electricity or repairs. My budget is for fixing open drains, not signal maintenance. I remember the new market crossing — one solar signal failed in the heat, and chaos returned; our old stone chowk works rain or shine.

Ah, you want to write a full *chabutara* in twenty-five minutes? You cannot, not properly. It is like trying to stitch a full sherwani in the time it takes to boil chai. I learned this when my own essay for the tailoring certification ran out of time; my last paragraph was a tangled thread of rushed thoughts. Practice writing not just the ideas, but the *timing* itself, with a clock ticking like my sewing machine, until the rhythm is in your fingers.

The Green Revolution gave us Punjab's golden wheat and filled our bellies, no doubt. But these White Revolutions and Floods... they are words from the government offices, not the fields. My neighbour's dairy buffalo died last year from a sickness, and the milk cooperative man just shrugged. In my life, the real flood was the debt from new seeds and tubewells, a thirsty ghost my father still pays for with every harvest.

The ball is lighter because they think women's hands are smaller, beta—but a light ball dances too much in the air, making swing a trick for magicians, not players. Seam? It hardly sits still to grip the pitch. I pushed a heavier ball on my daughters too soon, thinking strength was everything, and now their bowling wrists complain like my old sewing machine. Sometimes what is given as a help is actually a hurdle.

First, underline the numbers and units; then see what they ask you to find – profit, loss, ratio. They hide it in the story, like my father hides his worry behind a smile. But in our coaching centre, they make us practise so many, it becomes a habit. Just yesterday, I did a case study about a tailor's monthly earnings and thread cost – and I thought of Naushad chacha next door, who would laugh at such neat numbers.

Because in perfect competition, there are so many sellers, all with identical goods, that no single firm can influence the price—it’s a price taker, bas. That’s why the demand curve is flat. But in monopolistic, every shop has a little difference, like my father’s stitching, so he has some power to change the price a bit, giving a downward sloping curve. My own papa’s tailoring shop shows this: if he raises his price for a kurta by ten rupees, some customers might still come for his particular stitch, but others will go to Gupta ji’s shop next lane. So his demand isn’t perfectly flat, it tilts. They teach one thing in the book, but the bazaar teaches another.

My daughter was trying to explain Ryan Gosling to me — she said he is like a modern Rajesh Khanna but

The whirr of my sewing machine is a steady rhythm, much like a good gamer's clicks, I imagine. From my one window, I see boys crowded at the internet cafe, their futures perhaps stitched in pixels instead of cloth, and I wonder if their sponsorships will ever be as reliable as my neighbour's zipper I fix every other week.