To all my fellow Citizens in India and around the world,
The day of 22nd March will go down the annals of Indian History, where the entire country adhered to a nationwide curfew in response to our prime minister's clarion call , in the wake of the Covid-19 Pandemic, which has jostled us out of our daily ever so hectic mundane activities.
The last time I witnessed such a curfew was during the communal riots in Bombay post the Babri Masjid demolition! But never before in my lifetime , a curfew of this magnitude and proportion!
On 22nd March, after nearly two decades or maybe even more, as i stood in the balcony sipping milk at 10 am, all I could hear was an eclectic chirping of birds, which was so mellifluous to the ears..! The leaves seemed greener.
Infact, being summer, the ghee which was in a liquid form until a couple of days back had strangely solidified today, maybe due to the drop in temperature .
When I started writing this post, I never imagined that this way of life would soon become what is being termed as "The New Normal"
So Like many other countries , grappling with COVID-19, went into a lockdown, so did ours starting from March 25th 2020.
Here is an account of some of my personal observations and experiences during the Lockdown:
1) It is so ironic, that on regular days ( pre- lockdown) we were inhaling all the carbon dioxide and pollutants from the endless traffic, and now when the road is free of vehicles and traffic, and the air cleaner and purer we are having to use masks.
2) What particularly piques my interest, is the over usage of some phrases such as " social distancing" "the new normal " " flattening the curve" which have become an inherent part of our daily vocabulary!
3) Surprisingly, while promoting social distancing, what COVID-19 has also done, has bought people together virtually in more ways than one, while pulling them physically apart ( thanks to collaboration tools like zoom, hangouts, houseparty, teams and webex). Even people, who have not been in touch for ages , are suddenly sending out invites for virtual parties and the likes.. Well did it require a pandemic of this sort.. for people to keep in touch and stay connected ?( I for one, have always been a people's person and have always made a conscious effort to keep in touch with people , be it family or friends , in pre covid times too!!)
4) Instagram and all social media are being flooded with all the exotic dishes that people cooked today and yesterday! Seems like everybody is making something around dalgona coffee ( Well cooking has never been my forte, and I thrive on basic and minimal cooking and salivate looking at these posts, making a note of them, so that when my cook resumes work, she gets a long list of exotic dishes to cook)
5) Also all sorts of word puzzles, mathematical problems, are floating around whatsapp during these times, probably to keep our brains from rusting.. (Well. our family( including the extended ) have always been quite adept and have always taken a keen interest in games, puzzles, brain teasers, which have been a regular feature during our family outings and family vacations , and solving sudoku, crosswords in the newspaper are among our daily rituals along with the morning filter coffee and even now during our fortnightly family virtual calls)
6) Also there were posts on facebook stating that if we did not learn a new skill during lockdown shame on us.. ! Well I would say isn't staying safe and sane and alive good enough??
7) Another observation is: the innumerable conspiracy theories doing the rounds , some of them almost sounding like plots straight out of some espionage thriller movie , about how china has unleashed this deadly virus (aka biological warfare) to gain an upper hand in the global economy , but sadly as newspaper articles cite, China is being dethroned as the preferred hub for manufacturing .
I have been writing this blog in bits and pieces over the last month or so, because never did any of us imagine when this all started out, that this is going to forever change the way we lead our lives ..!
The observations and lessons learnt are one too many, which would warrant a whole novel, but am sure many authors and wannabe writers would already have embarked upon writing such novels on the covid-19 and the massive impact it had on the year 2020, which would probably be best sellers during the next literature festival ( if and ever there is another one!)
Those of us who come out of this alive, (not trying to be pessimistic at all) will have lots of stories to tell our future generations on how we survived this global pandemic.
Interestingly the other day,i saw a news piece which said a brother of one of the twins who had died during the Spanish Flu of 1918, succumbed to Covid -19 aged 100 years. Seems so diabolical that twins were both victims of pandemics exactly a century apart.!!
Which also got me thinking on how the world would have tackled the spanish flu a century back , infecting nearly 500 million people, which lasted over two years. Medical science was not as advanced in those days and also prevalence of technology and means of communication would have been zilch. I shudder to even fathom how it would have been back then!
We should be thankful that at least in these trying times, we are able to stay connected with family friends and coworkers and able to carry on with our slightly deviated than normal lifes!
It can get stressful at times, working long hours, confined within the four walls of our houses, without social interactions of any sought ( since human beings are social animals) All of us may have our highs and lows and peaks of emotions, but the way I look at it, we are more fortunate than all of the following:
1) The frontline workers who are selflessly out there serving, risking their own lives, clad in the super suffocating PPE gears day in and day out (Read about a doctor who sleeps every night in his car to avoid risk of infecting his family members by going home)
2) The Numerous migrant workers, labourers , daily wage earners who are struggling to make ends meet and scampering to head back home or to work
3) The innumerable people who succumbed to COVID and had to die lonely deaths , and given mass funerals!
4) And last but not the least our very valiant armed forces who have to safeguard our country's borders from perpetrators through rain and shine, and continue gracefully doing so in such trying times! ( Remember there is no such thing as work from home for our bravehearts!)
It aches my heart to see my city "that never sleeps" the city that I grew up in,
the city i call home ,and the city that I would go back to in a heartbeat.. Yess..Bombay, has been the most impacted.. in our country.!!(:
The tumultous effect that the COVID has had on all of our lives, across all socio economic borders , will take a really long time to get our lives back on track.
But resilient as we are ,and as our lives slowly limp back to normalcy (with masks donned on our faces), this pandemic, I would say has inculcated discipline of some sort amongst the masses and many of us!
1) We have learnt to stand patiently in a queue outside grocery stores !
2) Hygiene which was on the backburner for most of the country's masses is coming to the fore!
3) We have learnt to live with less, and make do with what we have , instead of hoarding!
As the positive cases keep increasing by the day, sooner or later all of us would most probably contact the virus .. or maybe many of us may already be asymptomatic carriers , or another plausible reason could be that our bodies have developed an immunity to it..!
With fingers crossed, while we all await with bated breath for the scientists world over working relentlessly for a panacea for this virus, that has claimed an epic number of lives all across the globe.. LIFE GOES ON and HOPE LIVES...!
P.S. This blog is a tad too long , but so has been this lockdown !:)
