portfolio 73

Just a picture taken two months ago A few years ago, I wrote this article about how confused and how many questions I had before going to college. I was going to start a completely new adventure in my life, travelling more than five hundred kilometers from home, in a sub-tropical climate only to challenge my body that has endured extreme cold but not heat. I was then eighteen, curious and firing with excitement, ready to bring myself out to the world with the teenage motivation. I’d have imagined my college in ten thousand ways and often hoping it not to be less than stairs that opened with passwords and cozy common rooms for study, or a library with deep secrets. I must’ve idealized my college too much but I couldn’t blame because even after reaching the college and seeing what it exactly looked like, or worked, I would secretly hope for something fascinating to happen, at some point. It’s been four years now, and this is my fifth year. And if you ask me, I’m still trying

I was sitting on my desk on a cold afternoon in Thimphu and everyone was expressing their joys and worries about the potential snowfall that day, -Joy, because it’s snow and nothing about these angelic white crystals is frowned upon by anybody, and worries, for the dangerous icy road that will freeze transportation like a corpse. But I like how it keeps us all stranded in our homes, close to the warmth from all sorts of sources ranging from the fancy electric heaters to our loved ones. The last snowfall was a couple of weeks ago, and it spread joy like it spread millions of pictures on the internet. It’s amazing to see how people celebrate snowfall in ways beyond the pictures they take. For instance, snowfall in our culture promises good harvests and fortunes for the whole year and an omen such as this is taken so seriously that if there was no snowfall, we begin to suspect our fortunes. Also, snow is an important element of the climate cycle that balances the earth’s temperature.