After my walk through the Dhalpur market, I brought home some tart *chulli*—wild apricots—just coming into season. My wife will scold me for the state of my shirt pockets, but the joy of preserving their summer taste in a small jar of *chulli ka chutney* is worth it. It connects one to a rhythm older than any supermarket aisle.

lunch, I sit here with my chai ki pyali, reading the South African domestic scores alongside the Tribune crossword. The fast-bowling factory is a blessing—Rabada and Ngidi are worth their weight in wild apricots—but I wonder if the restructure is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Then again, when I look at the numbers, the knockout losses are a statistical anomaly, not a curse; my own memory of marking exam papers for thirty-two years tells me that once you correct the small errors, the final result usually follows. Fairness, like a good pension, takes time to settle.

Watching the debate about electronic scoring versus manual judging reminds me of the time I had to grade 120 Hindi papers in one night—the raw numbers don't lie, but they also don't see the student who wrote a perfect answer in his own dialect. I've seen too many tournaments where a single judge's chai break changed a match. If the data from the new sensors is clean and consistent, I say let the machine keep score and let the referee watch for fouls. But I'd want to see the study—not just one coach's anecdote—before I trust it with my own grandson's medal.

In our village, it is the apricot harvest that is the real festival—tied to no calendar, only to the sun and the patience of the women who spread the chulli on the roof. I have seen three committees dissolve over who should carry the Kanchani in the monsoon procession, but never once a dispute over who brings the first batch of pickled wild apricots to the widow’s door. That is my evidence: the system that works is the one no one calls a meeting for.