My Inescapable Thought Abyss

I wish I could wonder how we got here. But I seem to know exactly how, by one step after the other, on and on and on….. And there’s no whirr of excitement this year, no new books or classmates or teachers for real. Not when they’re talking icons on the screen. I don’t mean to complain, just acknowledge the myriad ways in which we’ve tackled the situation in such an unprecedented time. Last year, just when the academic year had begun, I’d written a blog post called ‘On the Annual Whirr of Excitement.’ But nobody could’ve predicted that this year, there would be no whirr, no after-exam celebrations, no farewells, no new-school first days on campus. Not when we all barely managed to lock ourselves in our houses in the nick of time. And that out electronic devices will be our saviors. But! I just felt the slightest whirr and on came the need to acknowledge it. As I was giving away my 10 th grade books and making space on my shelves which are to be filled with the books for t

Ahhh I feel poetic. It's 12.52 am and I know I've got a class at 6 am but sleep is miles away.  In fact, unexpectedly so, I just felt infinite.  Have you ever wondered why poets find, in nature, poetry? Why they model their works around nature and it's ways? I just felt why. And so I can say I (probably) know.  Of course it's a teenager's opinion but in my view, equally valid.  Well, as it happens, I just looked at the sky only to be fazed by the sight of two tiny specs of light beside the mighty moon itself, supposedly Jupiter and Saturn.  And, here's the answer to that question about poets: It probably is because they're constant, and to some extent, calming to the human mind.  Here's what it means to me: A sheer sense of conscious insignificance against the inevitable consistency of the flow of time.  The presently mundane incapability to reach out to the starts and being limited to only be able to gaze at them and wonder.  That is, how I'd expres

                                Okay, so we're here already! Last post for the Student Blogging Challenge March - May 2020. It's been a new experience. Yeah, probably because I've never participated in a blogging challenge ever before much less one specifically for students.  And, reading other's works has been quite interesting too. Getting more than one point of view on a subject does broaden one's horizon. Admittedly, I couldn't commit 100% to the challenge. I even missed a week or two in the middle. But it wasn't for nothing.  Besides, to quote Hank Green from one of his videos, I know more stuff now!  So, throughout the course of the challenge, I wrote a total of 6 blog posts (including this one, the number sounds awfully small now, whoops!) Should've definitely written more.  Here's some questions about the challenge as a task to answer in this post: 1. How many weeks of the challenge did you participate in?     6 weeks 2. How many posts did yo

The topic of the Student Blogging challenge’s week 6 is Schools around the world. Now, the world is a huge place. So I don’t think it’s possible to make the post interesting if I go ahead and list all the different types of them. Neither would it be any help. So, I’d rather share with you something about the educational boards in my country, two to be precise: CBSE and IB. And maybe even impart some of my knowledge about them because I just changed by educational board for grade 11 and 12. P.S. There are other educational boards available too including ICSE and IGCSE and other State boards. But in this post I’m going to focus primarily on IB and CBSE. Okay, so, here’s the thing: When you pass 10 th grade in India from the mainstream board (Central Board of Secondary Education – CBSE), you’re expected to make a choice. And if I were to be honest, I don’t like either of the three options. The choice is to decide which stream of study you’d like to go ahead and study for th

There’s this one poem I wrote last year: I wrote it during a chemistry class. Don’t blame me, inspiration can be found anywhere, especially when you’re on the verge of falling asleep during an extremely boring chemistry class. Since the class topic was putting me to sleep, I began thinking of that year’s summer I spent in Switzerland and it came to me in the form of poetry. However, this poem is not written the way most poems are, or by following a specific poem structure. I’ve written it like an account of a few days in the country of Switzerland: what I saw, what I thought, which incidences I remembered and why. And I happened to have found a picture from which I can directly associate this poem. Here goes: Sitting in a classroom, Doing as I’m told, My mind drifts off to, The day I walked the bricked streets, Of Zürich . The day saw no sun, Clouds hung low above in the sky. I walked out of a store, And I walked the length of the bridge.

Commenting on other blogs. This task was one of the tasks of the Student Blogging Challenge, week 2 by Edublogs. So, I visited a few blogs of the other participants of the challenge and dropped them some comments, following the commenting guidelines as one should. And I realised, in case one, I ended up writing a comment in order to inform the blogger that I shared a similar interest and also telling her about a resource I’d recently found which caters to that kind of interest. I tried to keep it relevant and ended with a question I had on my mind relating to it. Comment, Case 1: Blog post: Click here Hey Enija! This is Mahikaa from India. I really love Rome too. Its culture, history and architecture fascinate me. I have little knowledge about its mythology but I hope to know more. In case you're looking for something engaging concerning Rome, I recently found a free course on Future Learn about it. I signed up for it to finally learn more about it