Sunday, October 30, 2022

Bleak Futures!

I have not written about Nature Futures in a while because most of the stories have been all right. A weekly good read, but not thought-provoking enough to provoke me to write a post here. But last week has been different. Way different because I had somehow missed stories from the previous week and read all the four unread ones together last week. And one of the previous week’s story stood out. I am talking about the story titled “The Family Tree” by Russel Nichols.

Autumn Red Tree

The setup was quite mundane, in all respects: characters, geography, interactions and emotions. Slowly, things started moving towards nothing in particular. So far so dull. Then I reached the last paragraph… and the last long sentence. My reading quickened. My gut felt punched so hard. My heart sank so deep. My jaws dropped so low. My eyes welled up so fast. My brain just couldn’t comprehend what hit it was so incomprehensible… for quite a few minutes! My whole being came to a halt screeching and skidding over very, very cold ice. It started wondering why my body was reacting so weirdly both physically and emotionally while my brain refused to re-read the sentence so that the fog of incomprehensibility could lift.

It was the same sort of reaction that washes over me whenever I even remotely consider of re-watching “Grave of the Fireflies”. I just don’t have enough emotional guts to re-watch that movie ever again. Once was enough. Even thinking about the ending feels like my guts are being knotted, stretched, straightened, and then reassembled but not how they were originally. Something definitely changed after watching that movie.

Similar reactions have occurred after reading Ernest Hemingway’s well-known shortest story: For sale: Baby shoes, never worn. Anyway, enough with my reactions to well-known movie and literature. I am not operating one of those dumb reactionary YouTube channels. Back to the Futures and it’s time to see you react to

That Story

Tuesday, October 25, 2022

Happy Diwali…

to those who know what it stands for.

Happy Diwali

We celebrated it the usual way. Cleaning, dusting, cooking, decorating, eating, lighting, praying, bursting, and being happy in general. I just list the verbs because the nouns that go along with them should be obvious! If not, how else do you celebrate Diwali?

Anyway, some other news from other areas of my life. The British comedy-satirical panel show “Mock the Week” has ended after 17 years! Why did BBC choose to cancel it this year of all the time? I mean did the weekly news to mock somehow disappear this year? The ongoings in the world this year could be mocked for decades to come and “Mock of the Week” did mock it well week over week for the past few years. So what gives?

The last episode was something I was looking forward to. It has more than just news, of course. People ‘went emotional’, reminisced, and hoped they appeared on other panel shows equally frequently. The hope that I share as well. Alasdair Beckett-King got inducted in MTW just last season and has done great. He, rightfully, earned his seat in the last episode. Though, that doesn’t mean I didn’t miss Milton Jones in this episode. Angela Barnes and Rhys James were the main people chatting along the whole show. Zoe Lyons and Ahir Shah were quite quiet in this episode but then balance is the key to a show like this unlike the British parliament. Dara and Hugh as always were also there. Wish them all the best for their future endeavours. Hope to see them in expected (see the next para) as well as unexpected places (like in James Bond movies) sooner rather than later, and definitely in 2023.

Well, there’s HIGNFY for the time being. And when will WILTY and QI start this year? How can this year go from worse to worse and still feel like worst is yet to come? What the hell…

Finally, I leave you with some twist in the thread of this story.

Happy Diwali 2022

Enjoy!