How do significant life events or the passage of time influence your perspective on life?
Covid! When things started to go bad, we had just landed in our home town. I was confident that borders would not close and flights would continue to ferry people to and fro. I mean! How can you ‘ground’ an entire nation. It’s our right! The freedom to travel. The freedom to shop, being physically present in a store while making purchases.
And yet, seemingly overnight, things just shut down. Not just that, people got paranoid. I had an instance where I was called aside and asked to furnish proof that we had been the only person in business class to travel back. It went to the extent of them asking me to visit a government registered or sanctioned covid hospital to get a ‘not-infected’ certificate. I am talking March 2020.
The ignorance. The chaos. The belief. The bullying tactics used! I was beyond stunned. This was my home. In my hometown. I paid my taxes regularly. I paid my maintenance regularly. I had absolutely no dues anywhere. And yet, the instance of being made to feel like a pariah was traumatic. Kids were shunned and ignored. They were upset- unable to understand what had happened and why it had happened. And at that time, the government healthcare volunteers would reach late for the inspections. I was ‘requested’ in no uncertain terms by my building residents to ‘stay home or else…’ and thankfully, the local store and shops offered to deliver groceries and vegetables to my doorstep. The quarantine officials took one look and said, ‘Maam if you are ok then there is no problem. Pls stay safe.’ They stamped my hand and left.
This was the end of the world for me. I had no idea how we would ever get out of it. All that progress and we are back in the dark ages, is all I kept thinking.
And two days later, the world closed its gates. Something I had never even thought possible, was happening and I had no idea how I would record this. This was one of those landmark moments in the history of the world, in the development or evolution of civilisations- something that would be discussed a few years later maybe even a 100 years later like we learn about the Spanish Plague!
The world shut down, offices, schools, industries all closed down. Supply chains hit. Vehicles off the street. Curfew imposed in all cities. Daily wage labourers roaming the streets unsure of how to get to their destinations without public transports. Basics, like milk and bread was in short supply. Vegetables were abandoned across the highways spoilt! Wasted. Because of lack of timely transport to local markets. This was the stuff of some major English blockbuster or science fiction movie not everyday life across the world. And definitely had not featured in any one’s nightmares since no one could have imagined something like this at this magnitude.
But that was 2020. And I honestly thought this was the end of the world. Our family was living across international borders and I thought that we would never get to meet anyone. Ever.
Then came the rule of the masks. As difficult as it was to breathe through them, I honestly felt that it gave us a lot more freedom to move and did not mind wearing it at all. I stocked up on them and felt that this would be something that would continue at the very least for the next 5 years. I mean considering the magnitude of the viral spread and the severity and the constantly morphing capabilities of the virus I was convinced we were going to be a race of mask wearing beings.
Yet, here we are today, roughly 4 years after the outbreak and things have changed. We also have time to have wars and there are two of them as we speak. We have so much time from all the worrying and entertaining we had to do earlier, that killing our fellow humans is an acceptable distraction. Tourism and travel is back at almost the same level if not higher than it was before the start of the pandemic and there is no social distancing. No masks. No monitoring. Almost all checks and balances that had been imposed have vanished. We are back in the streets. Singing. It’s a new world. It’s a new day. It’s a new life.
Without a thought to what we had lost for a couple of years there. And this makes me believe that, ‘time is a healer’. The passage of time, gave us the time to identify the vaccine. It gave us the time to develop enough doses to vaccinate everyone around the world twice over and in some instances more than once. Because life has to find a way.
Just a little more 