By Savyata Mishra
The global COVID-19 outbreak is many things; but “just another bad flu season” is not one of them. While it gave some a much-needed break from work, for others, nothing changed except their workplace, which had now shifted to their homes. For some, it meant walking miles and crossing borders to reach home to their hungry parents. Yet, for others, it meant reuniting with family and spending the entire lockdown surrounded by loved ones.
My experience during this pandemic has been a bit of all the things mentioned above, except for the walking home part. I had the luxury to board a ridiculously overpriced flight home and escape Bangalore just before they grounded all domestic flights.
The lockdown was quite a welcome change initially even though I was grumbling about this tiny virus’s bad timing. However, the novelty of this seemingly rewarding isolation wore off faster than I had imagined. Almost nine months of grueling coursework and working my fingers to the bone, the lethargy that settled in my routine almost instantly was a thing of the past that I didn’t enjoy reliving.
Armed with a new zeal for life, when I set myself to finish reading the books from my long to-read list, I struggle to focus. Ruminations of the good times and bad are my constant companion throughout the day. The obsessive preoccupation with coronavirus has only caused a great deal of misinformation and anxiety in every household.
The virus has chosen its victims from my surrounding localities, fortunately leaving the area where I reside, unscathed. The streets have never been lonelier, even nature seems forlorn without the din and bustle of mankind. It is both good times for nature to heal itself and bad times for people surviving living a neglected life in the fringes of society.
The ruckus created by this virus gives much food for thought to thinkers, philosophers and commoners alike. This period will go down history as strange times when people were wary of greeting each other with a touch, or of being huddled up together. It will be a tale of mighty nations being brought to their knees in the face of a pandemic, of people dying like flies and of scores of lives being saved by practicing basic hygiene.
