A month of normal classes

It is the last day of July today, and I am happy to report that the god of Covid has let me take a full month of classes offline. Meanwhile infections and fatalities countrywide have sharply declined to reach a sort of plateau (and curiously, just two states, Kerala and Maharashtra, account for more than half of all new recorded infections now, while, if the official data are anywhere near the truth, UP and Delhi have reached herd immunity – nothing else explains the vanishingly low figures over the last month), and in West Bengal, the rate of new daily infections has fallen from around 20,000 to the 600-850 range, while deaths are now being counted in single digits.

So now we are waiting for the much-feared third wave. Experts are sharply divided over a) whether it will happen at all, b) when it will start rising (earliest likely end-August, but could strike as late as October, they say), and c) whether or not it will be as damaging as the second wave, or a little less or much less so.

As for myself, I am actually praying that it may strike and go away soon – because I am almost sure that once the third wave is gone, especially if it is mild, neither the authorities nor the general public will be held back from doing everything normally again for fear of likely fourth, fifth, sixth… nineteenth waves. As I have endlessly reiterated since March 2020, Covid will never ‘go away’, it can only become as insignificant an issue as influenza – the greatest mass killer a hundred years ago – has become now. Whether that will finally lead to reopening of our schools and colleges, I won’t lay a wager, because I am now deeply suspicious about whether we Indians, students, teachers, parents, government and all businessmen making money hand over fist from ‘online education’ at all want things to go back to normal or not. I cannot begin to say how grateful I am to Providence that my daughter’s essential formal education ended just before the pandemic struck.

I have told all my own students and their parents that I shall continue to keep a sharp watch on official numbers as well as local events, and go online again for a while if the situation so demands, but unless I make a public announcement to that effect, they should all know that offline classes are going on as usual, with infection-related safety protocols in place. I am waiting for the second dose of the vaccine in mid-September, and I hope that once it is done, I can travel freely around the country again.