My grandson showed me a picture of a rally car speeding through mud, and I thought of the potholes on our road to Jowai market. If only the government circulars about road repair moved as fast as those motorsport cars, eh? It would be a great sngewbha for my old joints on the bus ride.

I was doing my arithmetic sums this morning—trying to remember the rule for least common multiple—and it struck me that chess is like that old Khasi folktale of the monkey and the crab: you move, the other moves, and the one who plans too far ahead forgets the rain may wash away the board. My grandchildren try to tell me esports is no different, just faster fingers. But I have seen those boys in the internet café, heads down, never once looking at the sky outside

The news about Pralhad Joshi talking sports made me think of my own small paperwork battle. Last month, I had to write three letters to the Jowai office just to get a proper form for a senior citizen concession—la iong, I could have recited a whole government circular in the time it took them to reply. For a young shooter, the real test is not the gun but the clerk’s pen; I know from my own pension file that one misplaced signature can stop everything. If the rules are for fairness, then a state that truly redistributes hard would make that clerk’s desk work for the poor boy, not against him.