Urbi's stories

Different people are coping with the lockdown in different ways. My daughter is reading out stories on Instagram. Look her up there: her handle is urbichatterjee.

This is the link to today's story.

P.S., April 30: Want something to smile over? Look up the last two posts on my other blog.  

Endless lockdown: a bewildered lament

I don’t know whether mankind has taken leave of its senses. Read this essay, and this one. At least some people are still thinking like me, here and abroad.

I don’t know whether everyone has forgotten the warning that ‘the only thing we have to fear is fear itself’, whether you picked it up from Gandhiji, or Franklin Roosevelt, or Harry Potter.

I don’t know why panic has been spread like this. Didn’t people die in vast numbers routinely before this, of accidents, pollution, bad genes, other epidemics and just extreme poverty? Has everybody forgotten that panic itself can be a deadly and indiscriminate killer? Recall what they did to anybody suspected of having leprosy in Europe of the middle ages…

I don’t know whether the only people who are all for an indefinite lockdown (at least those who chatter on social media) are those who are both a) bone lazy and basically hate to work, b) assured that even if they don’t work for months at a stretch, their pockets won’t hurt, and c) don’t give a damn about all who are not so lucky, and so do not feel horribly guilty like me. Have we asked the many hundred million who don’t write their opinions on social media?

All non-essential services will remain closed. So everyone from us teachers to actors and sportspersons, everyone in the transport and hospitality and beverage trades, to name just a few, we are all ‘non-essential’, eh? We should remember that forever: this is what society really thinks about us!

Since when did governments start caring about saving every human life, ignoring all other priorities? Why do riots and wars keep happening then, killing truly vast numbers, if governments really care? (I know everybody has forgotten, but there was the Delhi riot as recently as February!)

Is saving lives that important? Since when did it become absolutely essential to stay alive at all costs, regardless of whether such a life is meaningful or not, liveable or not? I for one wouldn’t want to live the life of a helpless cripple in pain, or a starving, freezing, regularly beaten prisoner in a concentration camp, or someone who has been permanently cut off from all work and all loved ones – aren’t there many people who would agree with me, who are privately beginning to lament that living life in an interminable lockdown is not much better than a quick death? In any case, how have we convinced ourselves that if this virus doesn’t kill us, we shall all live happily ever after?

At least our own Chief Minister has said that it is a suffocating situation (dom bondho kora poristhiti), and therein lies some little hope for the likes of me. I fervently pray that next time such a weird thing happens, I will not be around to see it.

Ah yes, many good things have happened too. Crime is down, pollution is down, death by accidents on the roads is down. A lot of people, especially in countries like ours, are re-learning the worth and importance of manual labour, since domestic helps have gone on an undeclared strike. Pity that we could never find more sensible, less drastic ways to solve the same problems.

One last, very sobering thought. I hope all those idiots who used to imagine and boast that science and technology have made us masters of the world will fall silent for a long, long time. Earthquakes, tsunamis and viral epidemics are all Nature’s diverse ways of reminding us, not too gently, that when She wants to strike, mankind must behave just in the same helpless and panic-stricken mode as we used to do hundreds, even thousands of years ago! We need to live with that humbling knowledge instead of hubris…  

Why is CoViD-19 killing at such different rates?

Since the whole world is indulging in every kind of speculation, from very sane to completely lunatic, why shouldn't I join in?

Still, I shall start with hard facts which nobody has denied. China claims to have controlled the epidemic very quickly, even if the death toll might have been several times what they have reported. Most of the rest of Asia has followed suit. Meanwhile, the same toll has been merely creeping up in India: in the month or so since the alarm went out, it has gone up to only about 77 (even the best newspapers cannot wholly agree on the exact figure, leave alone the social media), whereas it is literally galloping in the USA - New York City alone has seen 3,500-odd deaths already, and the numbers show no signs of flattening out yet. One great myth, I hope, has been busted for ever and ever: the Americans are NOT far more advanced than us in all respects. Indeed, though it sounds cruel, it is good to hear that the US president is begging India to send a drug not easily available there (hydroxychloroquine, commonly prescribed for malaria, which, in combination with Azithromycin, seems to be working well on many patients) and accepting a large donation of ventilators from - surprise, surprise - China! (see this news item).

What explains the tremendous difference in numbers? It can't be because we are more God-fearing: there's more than enough of religious loonies in America too. It certainly can't be because we have a far better medicare system (Germany has one that is better than America's, yet there have been a lot of deaths there, too). Surely not very many Indians will claim that it is because our prime minister has superhuman powers to protect us. To my mind, it has to boil down to one of two possibilities, or maybe both: perhaps a hot dry climate does prevent the virus from doing too much harm (look at most of Africa), or maybe simply because we live in far tougher conditions, we have much higher natural immunity. In happier times, I used to joke in class that we have the best bio-weapons in the world: welcome an invading American army with open arms and feed them all on roadside paani-puri: 90% of them will be dead or dying of diarrhoea within three days...

Care to join issue with me, readers? 

Model essay for pupils

[The following essay is supposed to serve only as a guide: do not copy out bits and pieces from it blindly while writing your own]

How I spent the days under lockdown

March 22, the day of the ‘janata curfew’, was incredible: never in my life, not even during the Bangladesh war or the Emergency had the whole town been emptied out as it happened that day. Two days later the countrywide lockdown began.

The night before there had been a scramble as panic-stricken people went out to shop for essentials. But from Wednesday the 24^th, there descended an eerie silence. All day the streets were deserted, save for the occasional bike or car cruising by, and the odd pedestrian or bicyclist. People were seized by a strange, quiet panic. You had to look hard to find someone not wearing a mask of some kind. Whole families were stuck from morning to night within four walls, and TV- and internet usage zoomed. People were binge-watching movies, or obsessively following the latest updates on the spreading infection.

A lot of us found out how hard it is to stay locked up for days on end, and to do all household chores, from cooking to washing to sweeping the floors and doing the dishes all by ourselves. Tempers flared, and unnecessary quarrels erupted. Many of us sought refuge in sleeping for far longer hours than usual, until insomnia took hold, and we tossed and turned in bed for hours. Boredom quickly became so acute that many of us started yearning to get back to work, and swore over and over that we were never going to ask for holidays again. People stayed glued to their phones for hours together, that being the only way to keep in touch with friends and relatives.

I tried all sorts of hobbies that I had forgotten to while away the time, from drawing to playing the harmonica to trying to write stories. I read books in a frenzy. I got used to people looking askance at me every time I went out for a walk, and wished I had been living in one of those countries where doctors were actually asking people to do it, in order to stay fit. I welcomed with open arms any visitor who dropped in, hoping for a hearty chat that could while away an hour or two. But still time hung heavy on my hands, and I kept praying for April 15 to come quickly. May God grant that we may never have to go through another such experience in this lifetime.

(400 words)