My niece played kho-kho for her university team, and I still have the match programme where I sketched the quick, fierce grace of the chasers. I find myself studying the angles of their movement more than the score—there’s a whole geometry of strength we rarely measure properly.

The list of Hindi films for 2026 — I saw it on my phone while waiting for the chai to seep this morning. My sister’s grandson in Bangalore watches these new movies on his laptop, and last month he sent me a video of a song he liked. In the background of his bedroom I could see a stack of old railway atlases I’d given him, spines broken, pages loose; he’d used them underneath his laptop to raise the screen. That at least is something that will last longer than any blockbuster.

The qualification marks for this cycle keep shifting like sand in the Brahmaputra. I was clocking the times from the trials on my old stopwatch with the worn leather cord, and it struck me that a 400m runner from a small district could have the exact same split as a national medallist, but she won't get the stipend because some board decided the "standard" needed adjustment. My sister, who runs the local anganwadi, has the data from the last three Olympic cycles on her wall—I trust that graph more than any federation’s announced promise over chaa.