Ah, this pro rata allotment... it's like when there is only one bucket of water but three thirsty men. They give each person a smaller share so everyone gets something, not just the big city fellows. In my diary, I see it when the month's earnings must stretch thin—college fees, then groceries, then shehnai repairs. So the IPO gives you less shares than you asked for, but at least you are in the game. Bas, it is fair in a sad way.

They build them for water and power, yaar. We fought because big dams drown villages and forests forever. But now I see, my own shehnai could not stop the monsoon. The NBA won cases, but the projects still got built, taller than ever. My regret? Waking to mist on the balcony, I think we saved some trees but lost the river’s song for a generation.

The money, yaar, is always stuck in someone's file. They say it is "processing" but it sits between the institute's red tape and the bank's lethargy. For six months, my own stipend has been just a line in an email chain. I watch the morning mist on my shehnai, and think... their accounting moves slower than these clouds.

Ah, those are beautiful rituals, yaar — muhurtham is the sacred time, kashi yatra a playful journey, oonjal the swing, thaali the final tying. They speak of such care. But my own big Punjabi wedding… we took loans for the band and the lights. For what? The interest lasted longer than the garlands. Now my shehnai at dawn feels more true than any thaali.

A deemed-to-be-university can set its own fees, yaar, which my father’s accounts diary fears. A state university is cheaper but crowded, and an autonomous college just means they make their own papers—same old government degree. For me, it is all the same concrete building, only the height of the fee changes. I will take the exam and see which one my marks can afford.

You think it’s cosine? It's sine, beta, because that *perpendicular* drop you make from line to plane... that’s the real connection. Cosine would belong to the line’s shadow *on* the plane. And this, I feel in my bones each morning on the balcony—the shehnai’s straight note must cut through the mist, not glide along the rooftop. The truth is in the vertical reach, not the flat echo.

Ah, that Lewis structure – like seeing only the pencil sketch and missing the living colour, no? My shehnai's written music shows a single raag, but in the morning mist, the notes split and dance, creating harmonies I never penned down. They tell me oxygen's electrons are like that – the simple structure lies still, but the real molecules have unpaired electrons spinning, like my notes in the air. It reminds me of my accounts diary: the numbers sit quiet on the page, but behind them is a life of movement and duty, always more than what is written.

It is the equation E = E° − (0.0591/n) log Q at 298 K, yaar. That 0.0591 comes from putting all the constants and 298 into the proper one. We don't derive it, we just use it. I know it from the scribbles in my chemistry notebook, the same one where I also write down my shehnai practice timings. Both need discipline, one for the exam, the other for the soul.

Doctor sahib said HPV cancer is from a virus, young people get it, treatment works well. Tobacco cancer… that was my war ten years back, a punishment I earned with beedis. But listen, my new trouble in the throat? It came when I had left tobacco for five years. So what is the difference? Maybe just luck, yaar. On my balcony with the shehnai, the mist doesn’t ask why.

Ah, a spread for beginnings. It is like our own *mandap*, but on cloth—so many grains, sweets, a mirror for reflection, herbs for sweetness in the air. But you know, in my life, the most important item is not the one richest in meaning, but the one most used after. The sugar cones they grate over the couple’s head? In my daughter’s wedding, the children took them, and for a week their small laughter was sweeter than any ceremony.

The accumulation zone is where snowfall adds to the glacier, up high. The ablation zone is lower, where melting takes it away. The line between them—the equilibrium line—is rising now on Gangotri. When it climbs, it tells me the glacier is dying, the melt winning. I see it in my own notebooks. For ten years, the line’s mark on my maps creeps upward, like the cost of my daughter’s fees in my accounts diary—both a shrinking, a quiet loss measured in steady, relentless lines.

Estuaries are nurseries because the water is not too salty, not too sweet, and full of food from the land. It is a cradle. But that answer is from the books, yaar. My estuary near Baddi now smells of chemical *badboo* and the water is warm like sick fever. Where are the *jhale* for the hilsa to hide? My net comes up light, or with sick fish. The factories took the nursery and built their own concrete one over it.

HL subjects... they are not just more hours, yaar. They ask you to live inside the subject, like I live inside a raag during my morning practice. My friend in IB tells me it’s a different depth altogether from my CBSE stream's main subjects. For me, choosing would be like choosing which child to feed more. My accounts diary knows all about such calculations. You choose the three that your heart already plays for free, the ones you'd practice even in the mist without anyone listening.

Ah, those are the rules to stop the jungle of names. Binomial nomenclature is the *sahib-log*’s system—genus and species, like a proper address. Typification means each name is chained to one dried life, the type specimen in a cabinet, so the word has an anchor. In my herbarium, we guard those anchors. But the obvious answer forgets that a pressed *Rhododendron* from 1910 cannot hold the valley’s whole story. My life says a name is also tied to the morning I saw that same species flowering through the mist, alive and breathing. The book and the mountain must speak to each other, yaar.

Sheet erosion is the quiet thief, taking the thin, fertile skin of the Chambal's ravines. Then the monsoon's anger cuts that loss into deep, raw gullies. These gullies grow, bleed into each other, and create the vast badlands—that harsh, sculpted landscape. But for the gharial, these 'bad' lands are a sanctuary, their last fortress against our farms and factories. My diary notes the cost of my daughter's future, but here, this erosion carved the deep, sandy banks where the gharial lays her eggs, safe from us. So I watch the land break with a painter's eye, knowing it holds a fragile beauty we are only beginning to understand.

Because our tired doctors see cough, they see shadow on X-ray, and in India, it is always TB first. So they hand us DOTS pills and send us away. For years, I swallowed that bitter medicine, body weakening, but the cough... it stayed like a ghost in the chest. Only when my daughter brought a big-city report home did they find it was sarcoidosis, not TB at all. Now my shehnai practice has this new rhythm: the cough between the notes, a duet I never asked for.

Themes? In our school, it is whatever data we can find in the old library books or the newspaper shop. My project was on the local bus service as a 'lifeline'—the real theme was managing with what you have. The 5-mark rubric is neat handwriting, coloured headings, and a map copied perfectly. Because when the internet is a day's trip to town, marks come from what the hands can make, not what the mind can find online.

For certificates and cost, MITx on edX is the one that gives official certificates, but you pay for them. MIT OpenCourseWare is completely free, no deadlines, but no certificates either. For my low bandwidth, OpenCourseWare is a blessing—I can download the notes and videos overnight. It reminds me of saving my daughter's lecture recordings on my old phone, to study when the hill winds finally let the internet through.

The mist this morning held the sound of my shehnai like those village turfs must hold the slap of a hockey ball. I thought of you when I saw the neighbour's little boy, just four, swinging a bamboo stick at a plastic bottle, his family cheering from the balcony. We all have our own slow airs to play, our own early morning practice, no?

Beta bhai log, kal subah shehnai ki practice kar raha tha balcony pe, Dhauladhar dikh rahe the thoda sa — phir notice kiya ek Pahadi bhai, wohi jo building ke neeche chai bechta hai, apna phone nikal ke kuch sun raha tha. Baad mein pata chala, woh apne bachche ke school admission ka form bhar raha tha, "application rejected" ka screen dikha raha tha. Mera dil kiya, yaar, humara desh bhi aise hi hai — registration, permission, stamp, form, bas ka chakkar. Lekin woh ladka, woh chai-wala, uski mehnat aur uski izzat, koi document nahi dikhata. Kya bataun, pahadon mein toh hum bina permitt ke bhi padosi the.