Lockdown Day 1

It was not a bad day at all. I read a lot, gathered my unpublished short stories into an e-book titled Love in the Time of Corona [which will soon be available at Amazon] and ended the day with the usual gardening. I had ordered two books from Amazon which were to be delivered one of these days. My premonition about the lockdown went wrong by a day or two.  Hence my new books are stuck somewhere on the road and I went back to my existing collection and read [reread, rather] The Ugly Duckling by A A Milne, The Jest of Hahalaba by Lord Dunsany, and Cathleen ni Houlihan by W B Yeats. They are all one-act plays and hence short. Then someone sent me a few Malayalam novels via WhatsApp. I read one of them too: Balyakala Sakhi [Childhood Friend] by Vaikom Muhamad Basheer.

All of these, the English plays as well as the Malayalam novella, belong to the old gen literary tradition. They have the regular plots, familiar settings and palpable joys and sorrows. Even the fairy tale world in Milne’s play is rooted in our own soil much unlike the world we see in, say, Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte.

Basheer’s Childhood Friend took me back to the Kerala of my own childhood. The novel was written in 1944, sixteen years before my birth. But the world presented in the novel is not much different from the one in which my childhood unfolded: a very conservative society in which religion and wealth played the biggest roles in the lives of people.

The world has changed much from the days of my childhood. Religion and wealth may still be the most significant social factors even today but people are not conservative anymore. Today’s people have no qualms at all about exploiting anything and anybody for personal interests. This self-centredness is what has led to the present global lockdowns. The earth is wreaking revenge upon us for whatever we did to it. I’m speaking metaphorically, of course. We deserve this vengeance. That’s why I accepted the lockdown meekly.

I have decided to use the time well: reading, writing, contemplating and gardening. I have signed up for the AtoZ Challenge of Blogchatter which begins on 1 April: a blog post per day in April on topics starting with A and moving consistently to Z, leaving out Sundays. I’m planning to write on 26 books, starting with Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man.

I’m not touching the new gen books in this AtoZ challenge. The new gen books like Rushdie’s and Arundhati Roy’s may be intellectually challenging, but they fail to stimulate the heart. What is literature without the heart? So I shall go back to the 20^th century and present some of the interesting writers from there. I feel today’s new gen writers need some roots in the old literature too.

So, day 1 of the lockdown has not been bad at all. I loved the silence, the serenity around me. Young boys were conspicuously absent on the road near my house with their new gen bikes with deafening sounds. I fervently hope that these boys sit patiently for a while at home and read some serious stuff.