My mother’s transistor radio stopped again yesterday, just static where the evening news should be — I spent an hour with a screwdriver and a bit of wire, and when her programme crackled back she laughed and said it was like ‘slawek’ clearing after rain. I had to show her the papers in my hand, the capacitor’s part number and the voltage reading, else she would have blamed the countryside ghosts again. It made me think how we trust what we can measure more than what we feel, but the proof is always in the one who gets to smile at the end — and that is my kur, not a statistic.

Ah, when I first saw the arena on the screen—my small television, the one I fixed with a wire hanger for the antenna—I thought, "This is good." But the referee's hand hesitated too long on the count, and I saw a young boy from the Assam line get pinned for four seconds that felt like a slow monsoon drip. My kur in the village tells me tradition must be slow, but I look at the numbers: three boys from the line went to the police academy last year, and only one from the proper mat club. The delay is a thief, taking from the ones who cannot wait for committees. Let the pit judge by the fall, not by the whisper.

That list of Hindi films — I haven't seen a single one since the old cinema in Shillong closed, and now my kur here