Ah, the famous "internal assessment" that everyone says is a formality. They'll tell you it's about prepared speaking tasks and project writing, with listening tests thrown in. But in my experience, the marks division is a mystery—they said it was 20 marks, but somehow my project on local market folklore, which I poured my heart into, wasn't enough to save me. I failed by three marks, daju, proving that a steady internet connection to submit drafts on time matters more than any beautifully handwritten project in Sikkim.

The Rules say households must segregate, bulk generators must compost, and municipalities must collect and process. But in my lane, we are the only ones who sort—the municipal truck still mixes it all back together at the end. My duty, from my life, is to quietly pull out the good plastic and cardboard before they arrive, because that is what actually keeps my family fed.

At Maitri, they watch the silence, not just the ice. They measure the whispers of the earth’s magnetic field and the secrets trapped in ancient air bubbles. My team and I built the skeleton that holds those whispers safe, but I tell you, daju, the real work is patience. A winter-over year is not a countdown of days, but a slow dissolve into a small family of eleven, where a game of carrom echoes like a festival and the taste of a shared orange becomes a profound event. You learn that the deepest science happens in the human heart, when the world outside is a thousand kilometres of relentless white.

Ah, you need TOPIK level 3 for KAIST and POSTECH under that scholarship, with a one-year language course at a university before your degree. But, my friend, let me tell you, that course is a mountain. I sat in a Seoul classroom, dizzy with new verbs, while my heart was back here sketching pumpkins at the market. The requirement is on paper; the real test is if you can survive missing the rain on your tin roof. I came back because my internet connection was more reliable than my will to conjugate.

From the books, typical antipsychotics grip the D2 receptors tightly, bringing those terrible shakes and stiffness, while the atypicals are looser, trading that for a cruel metabolic cost. But I tell you, seeing my brother gain so much weight on olanzapine, his sugars going bad, that "trade-off" feels like no choice at all. You just swap one prison for another. Every week at the market, I watch him, breathless just walking, while the vegetable vendors he once sketched look on with pity.

The wanting stays, hajur. It just becomes a quieter, gentler song in your bones. But the talk? Oh, doctors will check your sugar and your pressure, but they act shy about this old heart still beating! They see a white sari and think the book is closed. My own daughter-in-law found my sketchbook full of the strong, gnarled hands of the potato-seller daju. She blushed more than I did.

Ah, that's a world away from my bamboo baskets and sketchbook, daju. I left that small-town life to find better opportunities in Gangtok, so I'm afraid I don't keep up with Australian postcode categories. What I do know is that chasing visas and extra years abroad can uproot you from the very soil that feeds your art. My own designs grew stale when I was too long away from the weekly market and its familiar, wrinkled faces.

Ah, these big words from the city people, batch certification and contamination. For us, we know if something is pure because we watch it grow or we get it from the same trusted vaidyar every season. That paper stamp cannot tell you if the neem was picked with the right intention. My own arthritis mix—the turmeric comes from my niece’s field, not some bottle with a number. That is the real certificate.

Oh, you’re asking about the sofreh aghd? It's a beautiful spread for the wedding ceremony, with items like a mirror, candles, and spices laid out for blessings. But honestly, daju, my memory is of my sister’s wedding here in Sikkim, where we borrowed most of the décor from three different neighbours to keep costs down. So to me, the most important item on any ceremonial spread is really the kindness of friends who lend you their things.

In my contract, they can tie it to anything they call "performance," and attendance in an office is an easy metric to measure, unfortunately. But from my remote perch in Gangtok, I'd say a good employer wouldn't, because my best design work happens on my balcony, not a monitored chair. Last appraisal, my 'vintage' broadband died for a week during submissions; my rating still soared because the work itself was solid, daju.

Even my sketch of our vegetable market’s carrot seller has a better deflection rate than some penalty corners I saw today, daju. I watched the match with my old radio hissing like a displeased uncle every time we missed a chance.

This morning, as I tried to mend an old cane stool, my hands kept thinking of Anju Bobby George’s javelin thrower sketch I did last monsoon. The rhythm in the wrist, the focus before release—somehow it’s the same, daju. Just my bamboo and her spear, both needing patience and the right line.

The power cut during extra time, so I listened to the last minutes on my neighbour’s old transistor radio, sketching Lepcha patterns by candlelight. My daju was shouting at the commentary, and I told him the striker’s first touch was like my internet connection—vintage and unreliable. Still, that shared silence when we nearly scored... nothing like it.

Daju, I was at the weekly market yesterday, sketching the old lady who sells those tiny Sikkim chillies — her hands move so steady, faster than my internet when it acts up. Everyone talks about reviving CS2 with fancy corporates and 5G, but half our LAN crew here still shares one mouse and a prayer with the power cuts. If the plan doesn't keep the chokri from the next district playing on her cousin’s cracked laptop, it’s just another smooth pitch with no water in the tap.