India, a country with a growing population of 1.3 billion people witnessed its first case of the Novel Coronavirus sometime in the month of March and the first thing to have happened was our colleges shutting for a period of two weeks. A break finally after 3 months of college, all the time to galavant, eat out and plans of playing cricket with friends over these days; little did we know what was in store for us. When I saw all the socialising places getting shut, I decided that I will go visit my mother in Mumbai for a week. Worst decision.
Our Prime Minister told us that there would be curfew, a Janta Curfew for a day, and in the evening every citizen of India was to bang Utensils. During his address all I could think was how is this going to help, is it necessary but then I realised that this move was just like any other strategy of his, useless. Anyway, one fine evening a fourteen day lockdown was imposed with very little time to go and buy necessities. I lost it thinking how I could spend the next two weeks without meeting my friends, and it angered me from within. How is this going to work? I thought, experiencing a combined pang of frustration and dread. Surviving with my mother, whom I haven’t lived with over two weeks for the last ten years, navigating her schedule, personality and relationships is hard enough at the best of times. Living with my mom in the middle of a pandemic threatens to be excruciating: What am I going to be asked now – avoid others, keep things extremely clean, isolate if sick – is a serious challenge when you live in a house with your mother for a long period of time. It is like living in a hostel full of people without any familial bonds to make the household feel like a united front.
Someplace between 3 months and a million years ago, when it first became evident that this coronavirus pandemic required a significant lifestyle change, my mother, our domestic help convened a meeting. We would try to wash our hands more, we agreed, and make ample use of our nice smelling disinfectant spray.
The thought which kept me up at night was when this lockdown would end as two weeks after two weeks, it just kept increasing. So one morning, I decided that there was no point of dwelling on the negatives. I saw this as an opportunity of contemplation, and from what I hear that’s what everyone seems to be doing, knowingly or unknowingly. This state of contemplation comes after the late night binge watching sessions end, when our eyes are tired of scrolling Instagram, when our brain tells us that there’s enough nicotine in the system for an entire year, and this is when I realised, true, to live in quarantine for such a long time, to stop shaking hands, be forced to cancel our plans for vacation, be unable to drink coffee in cafe, visit the cinemas, and be thrown into a nearly impossible situation of dealing with our constant emotions and negativity while being unable to go out, if far far away from even a joke. The other side of the coin is something very special, which no one possible ever imagined? Suddenly I found myself on a new mental planet. I forced myself to rethink my life, develop a new mentality, and live a radically different life that I, even in my wildest imagination, never envisioned. This asked me to break with the monotony that most of are used to. Almost all of us jump into routine every morning – whether it’s a job, going to class, or the need to sleep, eat, or entertain ourselves. And now, one little virus suddenly forces us to rethink everything, making us wonder what this life of ours is really all about. Is it a dream that will end when we think we die?
The questions that many of us fail to address due to this pandemic is whether we are willing to do this? Is this pandemic an opportunity to see how truly interdependent we humans are? Are we ready to live in a world that is different and better than that all live in now? We have missed the train to test every asymptomatic person, but we have not missed our train to change our mindsets, how we see people around us, our neighbours, and this could lead to the groundwork for the collective action we as humans will need to deal with other global crises. The time to see how connected we all are is now.