What an Incorrigible Non-Cuber Like Me Did at Rubik’s 2025 WCA World Championship in Seattle

Goddess Saraswati’s greatest gift to us is perhaps the ability to know that you don’t know. In an age when social media and algorithmic silos have made us feel smugly certain about everything without stopping to think if we are being actively misinformed, it is a humbling feeling to see one’s limitations.

My limitation, in the context of this essay, is that I cannot “cube” (verb; “solving a Rubik’s cube”).

Back in the early 1980s when the cube first became an overnight sensation, I used to manage solving a side or maybe even two. But of late, I don’t seem to manage even that, let alone figuring out how the whole thing actually works. And despite being a cubing-parent for the last several years and hanging around dozens of competitions where children, teens, and adults are solving all sorts of Rubik’s-inspired puzzles in just a few seconds, and despite watching dozens of YouTube videos that make up the thriving speed-cuber subculture, I have still not learned. 

Is it impossible? Perhaps not. Is it something worth committing to and learning? It probably is. But for now, my interest is in writing, mostly, and writing about popular culture in particular.

For four days in July, I had the fascinating experience of sitting amidst thousands of speedcubers who gathered for the world speedcubing championships in Seattle. While some parents manage to participate or volunteer as judges, I have never felt confident to handle this responsibility either.

I decided though that rather than read some other books, which is what I often do at these competitions, I would read a book that seemed appropriate to the occasion — Erno Rubik’s Cubed: The Puzzle of Us All.

Cubed is Hungarian architecture-professor Erno Rubik’s story. He talks about his interest in puzzles, his world-famous invention, fame, purpose, art, science, and more broadly about life, living, and the world. It is an autobiography, a cultural ethnography, a business memoir, and a philosophical musing all entwined into each other. Quite conveniently for a reader like me, the only thing Rubik seems diffident about in his book is the fact of his writing it – he insists that he is not a writer, and his reluctance about the form, or at least his humility about it, comes across repeatedly.

So, there we were, a reluctant writer, and an eager reader immersed in the mind-and-finger storm that a reluctant writer created 40 years ago. Each day of the competition, between watching events and spotting speedcubing celebrities, I read a little more of Rubik’s book. Sometimes, his musings on design, architecture and beauty seemed to give special meaning to the many beautiful details and quirky expressions of the Seattle Convention Center. Sometimes, his memories of his aeronautical engineer father made me wonder about how we negotiate the past and the future in our lives, and how our childhood memories of watching what our parents did (like building a house on an island in Erno Rubik’s case), can have a bearing on how we do things much later. Intergenerational continuity and change, family, social history, pop culture trends, manufacturing, marketing, the joy of teaching, the sudden pressures and challenges of fame; for a self-described reluctant writer, Erno Rubik certainly makes his readers feel deeply immersed in the world in which the cube came to be, and indeed the, world that the cube spun into existence ever since.

Reading Cubed at the World Speedcubing Competitions was perhaps my way of being in a happy state of zen, or dhyana, while the competitors pursued theirs in somewhat more dynamic forms than mine.

Reading Cubed at the World Speedcubing Competitions was perhaps my way of being in a happy state of zen, or dhyana, while the competitors pursued theirs in somewhat more dynamic forms than mine. It was exciting to think that a toy or pastime that hit the toy-stores of America when I was a child (and on my first visit to the United States with my mother in 1981 at that), somehow has not only lasted in popularity, but has grown into a thriving global community which I got to see now as a parent. Even many of the toy-stores in which children of the 1980s got their wonders, big box spectacles like Lionel’s Playworld, are gone now. Highly specialized cubing stores like The Cubicle and the Speedcube Shop now advertise online and ship what you need to your doorstep.

But even in our world, which has spun out of the way it once was, appearing insurmountably unsolvable and out of order now, the reminder that in theory, it all makes sense, that it can be solved, is somehow hopeful and reassuring. For me, an incorrigible non-cuber, the joy of losing myself in the sun-filled glass-ceilinged halls of the convention center as the sounds of hundreds of cubes turning filled the air brought me the realization that I started this essay with.

Sometimes, learning that you still have something to learn is a good place to be. I do not know what places, events, memories, or times I could offer by way of comparison with this feeling. Some memory of my first days at school? Maybe not, those were less pleasant (Rubik has a lot to say in his book about schools, teaching, and learning). A memory of other competitions, of euphoric wins and bitter losses? Not quite so. This generation of cubers seem admirably calm and non-aggressive about how they see their journeys through competitions.

What I realized most precisely, between reading Cubed and listening to the ambient sounds of hundreds of turning cubes around me, is that what every one of those children and adults doing their solves knows is something I do not know. They have seen the inner core, the mystery, the secret, if you will, of how the pieces and colors all relate to each other. I do not know if it can be compared to the first time you balance on a bicycle or learn to float in the swimming pool, but perhaps the moment you see how the cube works feels just like that.

What I thought the first morning though was something more ancient, more primordial, and at the same time more peaceful. I remembered a scene from an Asterix comic in which Asterix and Obelix sit outside the edge of a forest where Getafix and all the other druids have gathered for a “Druids Conference.” Each of the minds in the competition there carried a signature, a mark of learning, a moment of seeing, a discovery of a relationship in being. I thought of druids, or the rishis of ancient India, with their pupils, repeating sacred sounds and syllables in varying combinations and meters and rhythms (the Vedic ghana patha). “What is the purpose of it?” Our modern minds sometimes make us ask. “Just for fun,” a kind of play, an exercise in not futility, but sustainable fruition, is what such activities feel like. A painter plays with colors, a poet plays with words, as Rubik notes in his book. The cuber plays with geometries I couldn’t figure out; but being around people who are happy with their play, made me happy with mine, I suppose. “There is an epidemic of space blindness,” as Rubik puts it, and perhaps I am not alone in failing to “get” the logic or magic of the cube. But the fact that so many people, mostly children, have learnt, and taught each other via YouTube and competition tutorials, a form of play that is really a reward for its own sake, made me enormously happy as a teacher, a parent, and a reluctant but sometimes renewable student.

“A good teacher is beloved, sometimes feared, sometimes respected by their students,” writes Rubik, “(and) that emotional relationship in itself is already learning.” In an age when technology and new forms of communication have opened up incredible possibilities, good and bad, for the future of our emotional, social, and spiritual lives, the world of the cube is a good way to remember that before the smartphone which tempted us to pick it up again and again, there was the Rubik’s Cube. And it’s still there, in all sorts of new forms as well. Read the book, solve a cube, or at least present one to someone you know. Joy, beauty, friendship, truth, all there in our fingertips. Teach your children well, as the song goes. But learn from them even more.

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Vamsee Juluri is Professor of Media Studies, University of San Francisco. He is the author of “Becoming a Global Audience: Longing and Belonging in Indian Music Television” (Peter Lang, 2003), “The Mythologist: A Novel” (Penguin India, 2010), and “Bollywood Nation: India through its Cinema (Penguin India,” 2013), “Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia and the Return of Indian Intelligence “ (BluOne Ink, 2024) and “The Guru Within” (in progress).