As I contrive to pen this essay, I am emphatically reminded of the myriad instances when I had to retail my midsummer enterprises to my grade teacher, my invariable reply being “biking all day, ogling Scooby-doo, and eating homemade pies” save for when we undertook our sporadic family trips once in three years. Wistfully, I mull over how the essence of what summers meant has changed since then.
​
The summer before the last, I unearthed my love for pencil shading, a mellow surprise for an easel girl like me. In light of that discovery, I embarked on sketching my late grandparents and my brother, only to end up penciling my entire clan. I joined an art camp for 3 months, which culminated in a 6 feet wide mural proudly displayed in my school foyer. My zest for scientific inquiry led me to design a project which sought to overcome the complications linked with prostheses by employing stem cells as an alternative. Although purely conjectural, for I lacked the resources to assay its feasibility, it served as a good mental drill. In between, I played comrade and Samatarian (a grossly misleading sobriquet) to my white-haired neighbor, Aai, imbibing culinary art infused with sapience.
Last summer, I tutored middle schoolers in communion with a charitable society. My long commute hours for the same were expended leafing through Shaw’s (and Gutman’s, but the latter doesn’t scream highbrow as Shaw does) texts in breathless rapture until the words merged into tripe albeit not so grandly since the book was a pdf version and my commute, a seething mass of humanity: chaotic, olid and boisterous. I joined a local running squad, which led me to opine that watching someone run in overalls is wildly comical. Besides, I braved a week of transcendental meditation, made dozens of origami, dabbled in e-commerce by handling the YouTube channel for a child welfare trust and rooted frenziedly for DD in the IPL all while fretting incessantly for my future (and no I am not a type-A personality).