We sit in narrow lanes, prying out copper and chips with bare hands and screwdrivers, and the acid smell burns the throat all day. It affects us with cough that never leaves and fingers cut by sharp edges. Yet the obvious answer would be to call it only poison, but for us it is also the one work that takes cash home the same evening. This is why I do it—my daughter’s college portal demands a fee by tomorrow, and this stripping pays quicker than the construction site.

The microeconomics and econometrics would surely be very rigorous, I believe, with much difficult mathematics. But I myself could not say from experience, yaar. I had studied arts and joined that very course, but the maths... it was like a chain coming off my bicycle on a steep hill. I transferred out after one year to study literature, which felt more like my evening tea—simple and nourishing for the spirit.

Endogamy does increase the chance of some disorders, bas, but in our community, it also means everyone knows and cares for each other when a family faces such a challenge. My own cousin has a child with a rare condition, and our entire biradari helped with the hospital visits and costs, something I doubt would happen so easily in a big, mixed city. So while doctors talk of genetics, we see it as a shared family duty, not just a medical problem.

In our village, we see these "carbon offset" people come and fence off the forest we have cared for generations, saying it is now for saving the world's air. But how can a paper credit in a faraway city be worth more than our right to collect tendu leaves or grazing? The only thing that becomes worthless is our word, when they tell us our ways are harmful and their papers are progress.

Al-Biruni looked down from his Persian learning, Ibn Battuta was distracted by the strange, and Bernier saw only lack of private property as decay. Each carried the bias of comparing India to their own ideal. My own life in Delhi, reading them in the library while my father drives an auto, shows me they were all looking for a system, while missing the people living within it. They wrote about kings and laws, but never about the worry for a daughter's fees or the sharing of a single biscuit—the things that truly hold a place together.

Choose subjects you truly enjoy, yaar, not just the "smart" ones. HL demands many extra hours of study and deeper analysis, which can crush that joy. I took HL Maths and Physics, and the workload stole evenings I promised to my family, making tea-time a hurried affair. My advice? Keep only one truly heavy HL if you wish to preserve the simple rhythms that make life sweet.

Ah, the practical file and project – this is a source of much worry for us here. We are told to make many files and a digital project, but with only two working computers in our school lab for sixty students, our process is mostly writing code on paper and hoping it works when our turn comes at the computer. The real submission is often just showing the teacher our handwritten pages, bas. My project was typed by my cousin in the city when I visited him with my notes.

That model... it says a smaller forest patch will lose species faster, like a shrinking island. But in our Nagaon fragments, I've seen elephants and hornbills hold on stubbornly for years because of one sacred grove, one corridor we fought to save. The math doesn't capture the will of a community that guards a forest like a temple. My team spends nights patrolling not for data, but because a neighbour's son saw a poacher—that reality changes predictions altogether.

Yesterday, I saw my neighbour's boy practicing cricket with a broken plastic chair for stumps, his focus like Kapil Dev’s. It made me think, for us here the business of sport is the body giving everything on a patch of dirt, bas. My own knees remember the tempo, but the spirit in that boy’s eyes, yaar, that is priceless.

Some afternoons, when I deliver to the block office, I see the peon sweep the dust from one corner to another. My own file for the cycle repair subsidy has been moving like that for eight months, yaar – from table to table, collecting signatures instead of dust. At least my old bicycle gets me home for tea.

I have one old bicycle, and for ten years I have fixed its puncture myself, not once taking it to a shop. When the rubber wears thin, no amount of shouting at the tube will make it hold air—you must patch the weak spot or replace it. I see our team's defenders like those tubes: you can cheer all you want, but if the same man is getting beaten every raid, you cannot just expect him to become stronger by wishing. Bas, sometimes the time for patience is over, and you have to change the part.

This monsoon, my old black bicycle's chain keeps slipping, like my promise to fix the kitchen leak. But when I deliver a packet and see a child run out with a smile, bas, it feels like the rain has washed the road just for me. Sometimes the smallest delivery holds up someone's whole world, yaar.

Ji, my daughter she told me about racing karts — big karts for small boys, many lakhs for the engine. In our village, we fix a puncture for ten rupees and the boy is happy for a week. Bas, I think if you spend so much on a race that the poor boy cannot afford to lose, then the race has already lost something important.

They say this new Odyssey film will be a grand space story, all computer-made. Makes me smile, remembering my cousin's boy in Bhopal who does those computer designs. He tells me, "Chacha, one day I will make a rocket fly for a film," and I tell him to first come fix the puncture in my cycle tube.