Ludo Vs Chess

‘Happily Meleed’: My story

     There came a distant whirl of sound which hit onto my ear groove and travelled the tunnel to enter the message onto my nerves, which rapidly delivered the post into my brain, saying that, “Swati, quickly get ready for your mathematics tuitions” and me (to myself) “Oh! Such a lovely weather! Can I not sit on the grass and paint the huge banyan tree”? As I thought about it, I could see the aerial roots entangled around each other so densely yet sorted and unanimously pierced in to the soil supporting the tree endlessly to spread out hither and thither. That was an entity in itself. The bicycle  bell distracted my attention, I stuffed my books in the sac and headed towards the eighth standard class. That was the first fight of my life, mathematics vs painting. As life moved ahead, while academics kept me busy, somehow, I managed finding my joy in sketching the diagrams in the biology subject. There was this hope which kept me on, the hope of getting on the route of my choice. Every time I was told to read the daily newspapers and add more of layers to the crust of general knowledge. To be honest, I wasn’t a dedicated reader, I read some selective ones and that would be from the core of my heart. To my amusement, I discovered that I was more affiliated to the sound of ‘ghungroo’ where once I managed to attend a demo kathak dance performance and the foot tapping left me totally thrilled. With the restricted expenses at that time, the majority in my family would vote for newspapers and not the dance workshop. Hence there I was left with another fight, Newspapers vs dance. Likewise, a sequel of cut-to-cut fights went on for a longer period until I was not only declared as a doctorate in Microbiology but also a gold medalist for my work by Indian Association of Medical Microbiologists, India. On this occasion, my close one, affirmed me that there is this balance between your left and right side of the brain, where you are artistically maneuvering science. My friends from psychology department would take me as their subject for the quizlet and would look upon me as an experiment depicting equilibrium of analog and digital sides of the grey matter. By the time some new stories got hypothesised around me as an experimental animal, I had accepted science as my social partner and arts, as a personal companion (I wouldn’t call arts as extra-marital because there was nothing fleecy about it). And now, for quite a long period, I had been maintaining a worthy repo with the two and it’s we trio staying harmoniously, ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘self’. In the course of lockdown, I even managed to impartially allot my duties for the scientific and literary writing to presumably avoid arts vs science literature debate. Apparently, we three were about to stay happily ever-after until one fine day, during lockdown, I had to choose between chess and ludo. Chess would implement more of strategic planning with timely execution whereas ludo will recruit the dice to decide the luck with an intuition dependent skill. I am left there again confused enough for a checkmate state and this time it is Ludo vs chess. The external factors are two crews of friends, one would challenge me for chess and other would test me for ludo whereas the internal factors would add to the muddle. There I am left to be sandwiched once again. Then I felt, where is all this leading to? Is this a mere stupidity?! But aren’t the fools convinced of their smartness! So being stupid gives me a possible scope of knowing more, especially myself and then the surroundings. All is going to be well in my world till I manage to fetch tranquility in the left vs right (brain) situation and this story of optimising with oneself is staying there as much as the one will. 

DR. SWATI BHAVSAR Travel buff, painter, poet, writer, Microbiology professor