Ritika Ruminates

Image source - India Map With the Wrestling Federation of India's (WFI) President BJP MP Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh being accused of sexual harassment and how protesting wrestlers were treated, it raises the question of how politicians being the Presidents and higher authority can lead to sporting disasters in our country. Not only was it heartbreaking, but it was an international humiliation of how our wrestlers were treated. The same goes for many other sports governing bodies. Either players and staff are not treated properly or there is corruption and no growth in the sport at any level. Though Presidents and higher administrative of a few other governing bodies like the All India Football Federation (AIFF), BCCI, and Hockey India are former national level players, WFI's President had no sporting history.  With pure political background, with as many as 38 criminal cases filed against him, it's questioning why he was even put in the head administrative position? Though p...

Devi and Nalini from Never Have I Ever Image source- Vulture To start with, Happy Mother's Day! My mom asked me to write a blog on mother or father for as long as I remember. So here it goes. Mother-daughters share a peculiar love-hate relationship. This is especially true once girls touch their late teenage years when opinions are quite contrasting. Nowadays, this can be even earlier with youngsters getting access to media with all the different opinions and perspectives to choose from. If there is no acceptance of one from either side, accepting of the opinions or person they are, which happens more often than not, it leads to fights. Repeated cycles of being close and happy and arguing and not speaking to each other. Me and my mom are like North and south poles on a lot of topics like marriage, kids, weddings, religion, etc. While I'm the one who supports low-key weddings, my mom would like to invite the whole and nearby districts if I ever get married and spend truckloads o...

  Image source- India Weekly This picture is all over the internet, as a cartoon depicting India's population overtaking China's. Receiving a severe backlash from Indian citizens and politicians, it has been termed 'racist'. Compared to China, it may be racist but it depicts the reality too. India is still a developing country, and many of its population fail to get access to basic resources for survival. Many still struggle for shelter, food, clothing and a hygienic environment (washrooms and menstrual products for women). Resources in India fall short to satisfy the basic needs of the country's population.  Of course, a part of the Chinese population also lives in poverty and cannot access basic resources for survival. But being developed, and what is feared, a soon-to-be superpower, the majority of its population gets access to the basic resources. Even though they cannot speak anything against their government. Their earlier one-child policy had reduced the youn...

Kerala trip for my family was like the ever-cancelled friends' goa trip. After having to be cancelled 4 times, it finally took life.  Our Kerala trip covered 4 places- Poovar, Ashtamudi, Thekkady and Munnar. Being a member, all our stays were (had to be) in Club Mahindra Resorts in the aforementioned places. Best was we got to cover 3 terrains in a single trip- beach, backwaters and mountains. We de-boarded at Thiruvananthapuram Railway Station and went to Padmanabhaswamy Temple. The architecture & design of the temple was surely alluring to me. Temple has a dress code- women have to wear sarees and men have to wear mundu or dhoti, bare-chested. Salwar sets or other modern dresses are not allowed; so women may have to change into a saree or wear mundu (1 round of it). As someone allergic to temples and religious places, and rules on top of it, I wished to just pray from outside, but ummm. After sweating profusely in the line, I was just happy to get the darshan and leave th...

Clicked by - Aarti Yadav My former friend introduced me to the habit of reading. When I was around 9 years old, she would bring encyclopedias for us to read. We read the encyclopedias at either our homes or the society terrace. Encyclopedias on various subjects brought us together- we would read and discuss various facts and information. In some ways, reading encyclopedias gave us a sense of acceptance in each other, which we both kind of desired, from society (I would be ridiculed for stammering and she was socially excluded due to her half-Chinese heritage). Seeing my interest, even my parents agreed to buy me encyclopedias to read, all of which I have kept safely even after 12-13 years. Encyclopedias somewhere even gave me my first friend of life, even though the friendship didn't last long. My habit of reading encyclopedias got broken a little bit after she had to leave the city without any notice (got to know later that it was probably due to her parents' divorce). I still...

Image Source - ispr Solutions Ltd “The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education”. Martin Luther King Jr. Education is one of the basic rights of an individual. It helps an individual gain information, which they can use to critically think about, form their opinions and apply what they are taught. But the Indian education system has been relentlessly criticized for failing to do so.  In the present professional world where skills sell, the Indian education system had failed to equip its students with the skills required in a professional field. So when students pass out from their college with degrees in their hands, they still find themselves unemployable. This has led to individuals trying to gain as many skills as possible from additional courses and workshops provided by various credible sources, both in real life and online. All this led to the introduction of the Nation...

Image source- Hotcourses Abroad Book piracy is one of the most important issues in the literary world now, along with plagiarism. Royalty from book sales isn't enough to pay the bills, even for the bestseller authors, and book piracy steals away their income even more. I have written about the issue of piracy in 2 of my earlier blog posts. To read those-  Free books apps and book PDFs: Disrespecting author's works How can we help the publishing industry Book borrowing etiquettes  (One additional blog, not related to piracy) By the way, I feel that book PDFs are at least honest about stealing the work, rather than physical pirated copies available in the market for purchase. If it is about piracy (which I do not support), it doesn't make sense to pay for a book to someone who pirates for a little less than the original. Why waste your money on a first or second copy then, if you will consume pirated copies of a book anyway?  Coming back to the point: Like any crime, t...

Image source: Popsugar This blogpost is going to be my interpretation of the character Tyler from Wednesday series, seeing it from his perspective. Even if you are team Xavier, do give it a read anyway (promise to try to not trick you to change your team). Picture of Hunter Doohan (Tyler) for this blogpost can quite be like a candy, attracting many girls (or even boys) to this blog post🤭. As most have already seen the series or have come across spoilers on Instagram anyway, I'm free to post spoilers here too. Or if you do not want spoilers, watch the series Wednesday on Netflix (not freeload it on Telegram!) and come back here soon after finishing the first season (ofcourse I would like the additional view😂😜).  I think Tyler, at some extent, represents all of us. We all have a negative or even monstrous side to our personality which could lay dormant for years or decades. But when something major happens (or compounding of small things until it reaches the boiling p...

Image source- The Fluent Life Being a daily Mumbai local train commuter, I see small kids travelling long distances in the early hours of the morning (5-6am) to go to school. This makes me wonder- Education and academics are very much needed, but at the cost of their childhood? Most of these kids board from central line stations like Kopar, Diva, Mumbra and Kalwa, areas that are not so developed in aspects of finance and infrastructure, and mostly lack quality and affordable schools. Government schools may not be as efficient either, which forces them to travel long distances from their homes to get their basic right fulfilled. Travelling to main Mumbai areas like Ghatkopar, Vidyavihar, Dadar, Masjid and even CSMT for schools, takes a lot of their daily time.  Once I saw a group of small kids, boarding from Diva station, planning to de-board at Majid for their school (their school bag had a logo of a school situated in Masjid). It almost takes around an hour in the local itself. Al...

Image Source- ArtStation We all want our lives to be immortal. The idea of forever interests us. Though human life itself is not immortal, the memories and legacy we live behind have the potential to be  immortal and remembered by upcoming generations. The elixir of life, as per the dictionary, means a preparation  supposedly able to prolong life indefinitely. Though I would like  to describe the elixir of life in the ways we can live a fulfilled  life, or one’s dream life, and leave a bundle of happy memories  behind for the people to remember us by. Basic life needs, like food, water, shelter and clothing are necessary to sustain life. Though human lives are mortal,  we are bound to die. But our work and how we treat people  have the potential to be immortal.  Staying healthy is important so that your daily life activities are  not affected by any health concerns. To do anything great in  life, you first need to be healthy,...