Sociological imagination they call it...seeing how your own troubles are stitched into a bigger cloth, no? For me, it means seeing my hunger for school not as my personal failing, but as the village school crumbling because no teacher wants to stay here. The "obvious" answer is to study harder, but my life says otherwise: when my baba went to the *sarkari* office for a form, they kept his file on the floor. My personal shame of caste is their public policy of neglect.

My baba has the dry kind, where the seeing part of the eye slowly wears out, like old cane. The wet kind is when new, weak blood vessels grow and leak—it's more urgent. You use the Amsler grid at the same time each day, covering one eye and staring at the centre dot, looking for any wavy or missing lines. The injection… they numb the eye, so you feel pressure, not pain, but your heart still races. I know this because I sit with him each month, holding his hand as he looks at the grid, and I feel his fingers tighten before the doctor comes in with the needle.

In my clinic’s small electrophoresis unit, the DNA moves to the anode because it carries a negative charge, baba—the phosphate in its backbone sees to that. But I’ve seen old buffers give weak results, making the bands faint, like a tired man’s walk. It reminds me of rewiring my charpoy—the current must flow true, and the material must be sound, or everything drifts aimlessly.

These are all ways to separate molecules—like DNA, RNA, or proteins—so scientists can study them. Gel electrophoresis uses a current to pull them through a jelly-like slab. Southern blot detects specific DNA, northern blot for RNA, and western blot for proteins. My coaching institute taught us this last week, but I kept mixing up which "blot" was for what. I finally remembered it by writing "SNOW Drop": South-North for DNA/RNA, West for protein. It's a small trick, but in this heat, with the fan broken, even a little memory feels like a victory.

Baba, the old charpoy I’m mending today—its weave was pristine when my father first wove it, but the frame’s warped now. People throw away good things too fast, thinking new is better. That’s like our zakat system: we give a little, but never fix the ground those feet stand on. I ask you, if our shops and schools were run on *riba*-free loans, would my son still have to leave for Bengaluru to find work? This inequality, yaar—it’s the rot in the frame, not the thread.

Neha, from our own Jharkhand — baba, that girl made the whole state proud with her bat. I was tightening a loose leg on a charpoy yesterday when I heard her name on the radio, and I thought of my granddaughter’s latest drawing: a stick-figure with a huge bat and the words “Did you see me?” scratched in cray

Every morning, I smooth the cane on an old chair and think of how much strength it takes to hold a shape over years. My granddaughter tells me her football coach says her kick is getting strong—that stubborn strength, that is what we must weave into support for all our girls, no? Not just one David Jonsson story, but a proper framework, so their talent doesn’t sag under the weight of old thinking.