News of Covid reached me pretty early. In early Jan, through a friend I heard that a new disease was spreading in South Asia. Soon enough by mid Feb, by the time i travelled to a friends wedding in Delhi, it was beginning to be covered by the news. It seemed dangerous at the time but little did we know that the world would be staring at a global pandemic at a scale only seen a 100 years ago.
Today marks a 105 days since I’ve been stuck inside my house. Other than the customary grocery shopping or to get medicines, I’ve largely stayed in. Some days have rushed by caught in the frenzy of work while others have weighed heavy on my mind.
Albert Camus captured the experience of living in a plague quite aptly in his novel — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Plague If you haven’t read it yet, i’ll recommend you to read it.
Hostile to the past, impatient of the present, and cheated of the future, we were much like those whom men’s justice, or hatred, forced to live behind prison bars
This quote from the novel perfectly captures how we all feel about our predicament. Just that we didn’t know the duration of our sentence. As i look back it’s been a roller coaster of emotions.
March started on a slightly cheerful note with low cases, the possibility of the heat killing the virus, banging of pots and watching Ramayan. However it was also the time I was most panicked. With so many unknowns the first few weeks were stressful. Fear of catching the disease through the air, fear of broken supply chains and food running out, fear of where it would all go. It was a mess.
April was about making the most of lockdown. I played golf with a tennis racquet, stoked up a ton of fish, learnt to cook a bunch of Goan dishes(Cafreal 😍😍), watched money heist(it sucked) and baked a cake for the first time in my life(thanks to all who helped me with the recipe :p )
A lot of May was sent prepping for a new release at work. And what do you do when you’re super bored? Do something new. So i bought a few seeds and pots and planted a few plants. Also i grew a beard and exercised for 15 days! I also wrote a pretty interesting story on AR games
Thus, in a middle course between these heights and depths, they drifted through life rather than lived, the prey of aimless days and sterile memories, like wandering shadows that could have acquired substance only by consenting to root themselves in the solid earth of their distress.
While some of us drift aimlessly at times, if there’s one big realisation — it’s the number of things we take for granted in life. The ability to go out and breathe fresh air, to meet our friends and dance in the rain.
As June comes to an end, the pandemic shows no signs of subsiding. While we speculated on the way it would all end, most of us have now resigned ourselves to our fate inside the house. Hospitals and medical staff are growing fatigued and grim stories are everywhere. This story by ScoopWhoop from Delhi is particularly scary.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lrPggGiGaw&feature=youtu.be
The govt by some reports is looking at minimising damage to their reputation, reducing the number of tests and under-reporting deaths.
No one knows where we’ll go from here. For now i’m grateful for the internet, smiling at the flowers blooming on the Mogra plant and hoping it’ll all be alright. Soon.
