In India, over a video consultation, a doctor can prescribe medicines for common, non-emergency conditions, following the Telemedicine Practice Guidelines. List O contains over-the-counter medicines, List A is for chronic conditions we can manage remotely, and List B is for specific follow-ups of existing patients. But from my small town gym, I see these lists mean little when the nearest pharmacy is a day's trip away for a sprained ankle, and the real prescription is often patience and a hot water bottle.

Haba, in thermodynamics, they say "q positive for heat into the system, w positive for work done on the system." But I always mixed them, because in the gym, when you lift, you are doing work *on* the weights. So to me, work done *by* the system felt positive, like a victory. That single mistake—thinking from the lifter's effort, not the system's—flipped every sign in my exam. Ka jingsniew jong nga, my thermal physics paper was a red-ink disaster, all because my gym-mind couldn't switch the convention.

We don't score routines here; we just see who holds the shape longest or makes it look most like a bird in flight. Pole is our steady pine trunk, planted deep, and rope is for a swinging dance we rarely do. In our akhada, the difference is that the pole belongs to the ground, and the young men belong to the pole. I know this because my own pole was a gift from Uncle Ropiang, who helped me strip and smooth the bark until it felt like holding a strong, quiet friend.

Ha, my city here in Meghalaya would not even meet the counting. The books say so many buses per lakh people, but in our hills, one bus comes in the morning and one at night if the road is clear. My sister in Shillong writes about waiting for crowded city buses, but here, our statistic is the shared sumo jeep—you know it by the driver's face, not a number.