There's a meme which goes around that, "Life is a tornado and I am just the cow being spun around for cinematic value." Well, life has felt like that since late last year. But like the day follows night, night follows day, tornados too settle at some point. I feel like the cow that survived a small tornado though the after-effects are still there... the point is that I survived. Perhaps I also learnt a few things. Maybe that's the point of tornados...?

I was telling someone the other day that I like my life to be very routinised in general. However, because you learn things from experience or conflict rather than routine, I do need to have some manageable bits of that too in my life. I guess for the instrumental purpose of connecting my thinking to actual experience. How can I write about an experience or say anything meaningful about it—which is what I wish to do in my routine day as an academic—if I don't experience it myself? I mean, one can get some sense of an experience second-hand too but it's not the same thing. <Deleted short snippet from here to reuse in an article. Will reference it when published>

--------

This is where that snippet got used finally!