Right from the baselines on Day 1, it's follicle phase with rising oestrogen till ovulation around Day 14, then luteal phase with progesterone rising to prep the lining. But my luteal phase is always a short ten days, not the textbook twelve, which my didi says is common in our family—means that implantation window slams shut faster. So I track my temperature and cervical mucus like a hawk, because my body’s calendar runs a bit ahead of the city doctor’s charts.

The ports argument misses how policy protects domestic industry first. Chotanagpur had the ore and coal, so we built it there; bringing steel from there to the ports for export is easier than hauling foreign ore inland to make it. Sitting in Delhi, I see files where protecting our own resources always wins over port-side convenience. My family's old irrigation pump is the same—we patch it year after year because buying new, even if more efficient, means money leaving our village. You focus on what you already have in hand.

The science says it's retreating over 20 metres a year. But in my control room, the Ganga is not drying up in summer; it's becoming more violent, with sudden, furious surges from meltwater and cloudbursts that threaten my dam gates. My worry isn't a dry riverbed, but the night we get a glacial lake burst upstream and I have to flood the valley below to save the penstocks. The mountains are losing their ancient ice, but the problem they're sending down to me is too much water, too fast.

Oh, daily—sometimes hourly, if the afternoon nap is missed. They can last from a moment to twenty minutes of truly impressive lung power. "Normal" is when they end with the child asleep on your shoulder or distracted by a crow outside. With so many hands here—Dadi, Chacha, myself—the tantrum often just gets passed along until someone's silly face or a fresh *sevaiyaan* does the trick.

Over an hour, they say? In Chennai, it is longer. My bus from Besant Nagar to Parry's Corner takes one and a half hours most mornings, and I see the young ones starting even earlier, packed in like tin of *biscuit*. My own brother drove a taxi in Mumbai; he said his commute was shorter, but he never sat still. So your average numbers feel small from where I sit, waiting as the bus stops at every single *nukkad*.

Float means you lock your seat, freeze means you wait for better options, and slide means you upgrade within the same institute. I froze my rank, thinking it was clever, and then watched a perfect seat in horticulture engineering open up like a bud I couldn't pick. Sometimes the safe bet just leaves you staring at the snow on someone else’s orchard.

Booking SEM and XRD slots here is like queuing for the village water tap — you submit online, pray the portal works, then chase the lab in-charge with a *chai* packet. NMR and confocal? Forget it, our college doesn't have them, so you pay steep sample charges at a national lab and wait months. A broken instrument doesn't just delay your thesis; it eats into your family's savings meant for our orchard's pump repair. I know, because my data got stuck last monsoon when our spectrometer failed, and I had to choose between a costly external test or my father's worn-out pump.

They say it’s the unclean street air, but I think it’s just the right amount of desperation. At home, you can fiddle with the spices. At the cart, that *anda bhurji* is his rent money. My own failure was trying to make the chai from the cart outside the bus stand. Mine tasted thin. His secret, I realised watching him, was one battered kettle never washed, just brewing layer upon layer of tannins into a small, potent fortune.

Faculty, hostels, and those glossy placement brochures—they’re all just different shades of the same pressure cooker. I saw brilliant friends at top NLUs burn out chasing corporate packages that never filled the emptiness. The real dropout isn't always about failing exams; it's the soul leaving the room while the body stays. I walked away from that entire law library to mend a broken irrigation pump back home, the chill of a Shimla winter on my face feeling more like a future than any courtroom ever did.

In ISC, the correct sequence is: Application, Allotment (with premium due), Calls if any, then Forfeiture. But the textbook forgets that real capital isn’t so neat—our old pump’s motor once gave out right before the monsoon, and I had to re-jigger the payment order to the mechanic just to keep the saplings alive. Sometimes, you secure the premium first when you’re living season to season, allotment or not.

Officially, it’s a mix of standards and rankings. But in my bones, I know it’s the rankings that break you. I hit the qualifying time, clean. Yet, they took only the top 32 in the world, and I was 33rd. One man’s injury, one race’s wind… that’s the margin. Now I watch the snow settle on our orchard, thinking of that single spot.

In India, the school issues it, then you get it stamped by a gazetted officer or notary for it to be 'attested'—verification usually needs a matching stamp from the department it's for. But I learnt that's the *official* answer the hard way. My state-level kabaddi certificate from college sat un-attested for years, and when I finally needed it for a government scheme, they called it a 'useless paper'. The obvious answer is it's a simple process, but in my village, without the right contacts or knowing which office window to approach, that paper might as well be a leaf from my apple trees.

Last winter, I was up late grafting apple rootstock by kerosene lamp, radio playing an old Kishore Kumar number, and the match from Dhaka was on — I kept one ear on the commentary. Bangladesh’s seamers were bending it both ways on that Mirpur track, but when they went overseas, the same ball just sat up and said "hit me." It reminds me of our irrigation pump: works perfectly at home at 1,400 metres, but take it down to the valley and it coughs and seizes. You can’t blame the machine for the altitude; you have to fix the design.

My old radio only catches static up here, but on a clear night I can tune into a station from Rohtak that airs dangal commentary. It's a strange comfort, listening to those grunts and thuds while I'm soldering frayed pump wires by lantern light.

Our orchard's irrigation pump is older than me and

Saw a Circle Kabaddi poster in our market yesterday, prize money in Euros from a London gurdwara. Our own irrigation pump makes that exact frantic, wheezing sound when a raider is surrounded.

All this talk of khadoos batting on green tops reminds me of last monsoon, when our old tractor battery gave out. I spent three days trying to revive it with jumper cables and hope, feeling like a Mumbai tail-ender just trying to survive the session until the rain came. Sometimes, the greatest fight is just staying at the crease.

Just tried explaining Circle Kabaddi to my uncle while we fixed a broken fence motor. He said it sounds like our own village tournaments in Himachal, but with less arguing and more prize money from Canada. Honestly, watching those lads in a field, with just a handkerchief tied to the centre circle... it has the same *dil* as fixing something old until it runs again.

This old irrigation pump of ours groans like a bad tabla player, but after fixing it with pliers and hope for years, I think I understand your first boards. You learn every creak and sigh. The sea must talk like that too, a different kind of maintenance.

The sunrise here finds me with pliers and my old transistor, listening to a crackling update on the game. Six hours ahead, I’m grafting saplings while you debate rest days—my own load management is hoping the pump holds through another irrigation. *Kya karein*, some of us bleed purple and gold through muddy boots and snow on the blossoms.